It’s clearer than when she first glimpsed it from the beach, and darker too. Now, it makes her think less of a flock of birds and more of a living shadow streaming across the sky.
Wendy’s muscles lock up, her legs refusing to carry her inside. Peter holding her hand, leading her into the dark. In here, Wendy, it’s the best secret ever. A struck-match smell, but so much bigger. Rain-drenched fur, meat left out to spoil.
There’s something there. Something she should remember.
Her fingers skim the wood of the door in her mind and it trembles, like a vast breath rattling it from the other side. Splinters catch at the pads of her fingers. Cracks craze the door’s surface. Panic tells her to run, run, run, and never stop.
Tiger Lily touches her hand, and Wendy starts, biting back a cry of surprise. She pushes the fear away, willing the tightness clenching at her to let go, and steps into the cave.
The struck-match smell recedes. The only scent in this cave is the memory of smoke, ghost-faint, but nothing more. No blood and heat and iron.
Wendy’s eyes adjust, showing her a circle of smoothed logs surrounding a cold fire pit. Above them, a natural chimney leads up through the rock, letting in a shaft of pale, rain-washed light—the color of the sky right after a storm. Soot from old fires darkens the cave walls, but there are deliberate markings too, made in red and black paint.
Wendy moves closer, studying them. She thinks of the days she and Mary had spent hidden away in forgotten corners of St. Bernadette’s halls, Mary trading Wendy story for story. Wendy had told stories of Neverland, and in exchange, Mary had told Wendy the Kainai legends her mother passed on to her as a child.
She remembers Jane, standing at the counter in their kitchen, barely tall enough to see its surface, watching Mary knead bread. Mary had told Jane those same stories, sketching pictures in the flour scattering the countertop. Blood Clot Boy, and Napi, the Old Man who first made people, and who tried to steal the Sun’s pants.
A sob catches in Wendy’s throat. The memory is so close, she can feel the heat of the kitchen, smell the baking bread. She’d told her own stories to Jane, stories of the Little White Bird and the Clever Tailor, but she should have told them truer.
She’d told the stories to protect herself, not Jane, reclaiming fragments of Neverland and stitching them into toothless fairy tales to help her daughter sleep at night. The Tailor had sewn stolen feathers into a fabulous coat for the Little White Bird to help him fly faster and higher than all the other birds and win a race. And all the while in Wendy’s mind, she’d held a picture of herself as a child, sewing Peter’s shadow back onto his body.
Wendy breathes out, forcing the ache from her lungs. She blinks back tears, resting her fingers on the painted images on the wall. A ship with full, billowing sails, the mermaids in their lagoon, a boy surrounded by a group of other boys—the only one not casting a shadow. She moves her hand back to the pirate ship, and turns to look at Tiger Lily over her shoulder.
“What happened to them?” Wendy asks.
“They left.” Tiger Lily moves closer.
“What?” The answer startles her, driving all other thoughts from her mind. “How? Where did they go?”
Tiger Lily lifts her shoulders; her body makes a dry cracking sound like logs settling in a fire.
“There was a storm and a tear in the sky. Hook and his ship sailed through.”
“But I saw the shipwreck on the beach. I climbed inside.” Wendy touches the sword at her hip.
The hilt seems almost to shiver beneath her touch. She felt it herself, the haunted air of the ship, the sense of the pirates still there, and yet gone. Hadn’t she even pictured them falling into the sky?
She tries to remember what happened to Hook when Peter rescued them. The memory is there in fragments, like two contradictory truths overlapping each other. That monstrous beast with its terrible teeth and snapping jaws—she’d seen Hook devoured by it, torn apart, hadn’t she? She’d been horrified. He’d been a villain, but surely he didn’t deserve to be eaten alive? Did she beg Peter to help him? She can’t remember anything but Peter’s trilling laughter ringing in her head, his voice innocent and dismissive, almost cruel.
No one ever dies in Neverland, silly.
Had she seen him devoured, only to have him resurrected again, brought back from seeming-death to continue to serve as Peter’s eternal enemy? And even if Hook couldn’t die, surely he would still feel pain? The thought leaves Wendy chilled. Does Peter really have that kind of power over life and death?
She thinks of the mermaids in the lagoon. She looks at Tiger Lily, her corpse-like face, her sunken eyes, and she knows the answer.
Tiger Lily shakes her head.
“I hid and watched from the trees. I can only tell you what I saw, not what it means. There were two ships, and they were the same ship. One fell, and one flew through the sky. There was a hole, and through it I could see different stars.”
Wendy’s breath catches, fear momentarily forgotten. Different stars. Her stars? London? Tiger Lily continues.
“Some of the pirates fell screaming out of the sky and they drowned. Not Hook though. Hook survived.”
“How do you know?”
Tiger Lily’s lips finally shape a smile. Her voice still rasps, but for a moment it sounds less pained.
“Stubborn. He would never accept defeat or let Peter beat him one last time. So he must have lived somehow.”
Despite herself, Wendy finds herself smiling too. The expression feels strange, and she calls to mind again the picture of Hook she built for herself on the ship—a broken man,
