Everything is the same and everything is different. As they walk, Jane tries to pick out familiar landmarks. But she was here such a relatively short time, with Peter always pushing her or dragging her about, and it’s been eight years since then besides. The murky light makes it even harder to discern whether anything they’ve passed might be familiar. She can barely see her hand in front of her face in the red-tinted light, and the pirate captain—she can’t think of him any other way—is setting an increasingly ridiculous pace.
“Would you slow down?” Jane calls after him, but either Hook doesn’t hear, or chooses to ignore her.
When she first met him, he was an old man, and needed a cane to walk. Here, he’s something else entirely.
“I said wait, will y—” Jane’s words cut off as a root catches her foot.
She loses her grip on the rope, and a moment of panic takes her, then a hand at her elbow, steadying her.
“Why are you following him? Coming here was your idea. Who decided he should be in charge?” The voice at her ear carries just enough kindness and concern that for a moment she can convince herself it is her Uncle Michael and not something—several somethings—wearing his skin.
But the sly smile and the weird light in his eyes, picking up the red of the sky now even though they are under the trees, betray him immediately. She jerks her arm away.
“Do you even trust him?” Michael asks.
“I don’t trust either of you.” Jane frowns, annoyed at the question, and more annoyed at herself because it didn’t occur to her until Michael asked that she doesn’t have to follow Hook.
He doesn’t have any more idea of what he’s doing than she does. He said as much himself. For all she knows, he’ll decide suddenly he wants to kill her and add another skull to his collection. She could be searching the island to see if some remnant of Peg really was carried here by the beast. She could be looking for a while to cure her uncle. She bends down to snatch up the trailing end of rope. Michael’s smile only widens.
“I won’t try to run.”
It’s unsettling, seeing the smile on her uncle’s lips, any smile at all. She allows a little slack into the rope, but doesn’t let go. Michael holds up his hands, a shrug.
“You see? I’m still here.”
“What do you want?”
“To kill him.” Michael tilts his head toward Hook, his voice eerily cheerful. Like the smile, it doesn’t belong to him, all wrong, like an ill-fitting suit hanging from his shoulders.
“Why haven’t you, then?” If she can understand the thing inside her uncle, maybe she can find a way to get rid of it without hurting anyone.
“I want him to suffer.” Michael lowers his hands, peering around as though they were merely tourists on holiday, intrigued by the local flora.
Jane realizes she’s lost sight of Hook. A spike of fear goes through her, resentment close on its heels. She doesn’t want to care what happens to him. She doesn’t want to follow him. All she wants is to find a way to fix what’s wrong with her uncle and get them both back home. And she has no idea how to do that.
She pushes aside a heavy branch, ducking under its trailing leaves. A clearing opens up before her, and her pulse trips. There’s no mistaking it, even fallen half to ruin without Peter’s magic sustaining it. A tangle of rotting platforms and walkways winding through the trees; a wall of timber surrounding a cleared patch of ground. It’s Peter’s camp, where the Lost Boys slept, where she ate soup made from stones, and told Timothy a story when he couldn’t sleep.
Jane lets the rope slide from her hand. It makes a soft sound as it drops. Scattered stones and smudges of ash mark a long-ago extinguished fire. Jane counts the remaining platforms, trying to guess which one she sat on with Timothy, all those years ago.
She can almost conjure the sound of his crying, soft and muffled, trying not to let any of the other boys hear. She pictures his eyes, wide in the moonlight. His gentleness. His trust in her when she promised to keep him safe. His body, lifeless on the cavern floor.
She turns back toward her uncle whose hands are in his pockets now as he studies the trees. She peers at him more closely. She saw Peg’s ghost on the lawn, didn’t she, right before the beast attacked. She could still be in there somewhere, carried along with the pirates, and if so, could Jane set her free? Hope makes Jane catch her breath. What would Peg think of this place? Would she find it beautiful, even ruined?
As if feeling her studying him, her Uncle Michael turns slowly, hands still in his pockets, uncanny smile spreading on his lips. He cocks his head to one side.
“Are you looking for her, your little friend? What was her name? Meg?”
Jane takes a lurching step forward, fingers curling. Her uncle makes a tsking sound, brown-gold eyes stopping her motion and pinning her in place. The expression in them is the most terrible thing she’s ever seen—heartless and cold. Beyond anger, beyond a desire for revenge. Cruel, simply for the sake of cruelty, with it meaning nothing.
“I’m so sorry, little Jane.” His voice is anything but. “But we ate her all up. You see, we were so hungry when we arrived, and she was delicious. We are of this place, and she is not. The only thing she was good for is fuel.”
Jane flies at her uncle, no longer caring that he is her uncle, wanting only to get at the thing burrowed under his skin. She wants to tear through muscle and bone to rip the creature out by the root. She can’t bear its words—the idea that Peg was only fuel, that it might burn her uncle up as well—a convenient vessel to allow it to carry out its purpose.
Her hands are outstretched, but Michael neatly sidesteps her and Jane overbalances, crashing to her knees. Her body heaves, a sob shuddering through her. It isn’t fair. Peg had so much life left in her to live and she’s gone. And stupidly, childishly, Jane had held on to the hope of saving her, because Neverland had primed her to believe the impossible—that a person could die and come back, that they could be dealt a sword wound and not bleed. But that isn’t how things work in the real world. And it isn’t even how things work in Neverland anymore.
Jane tilts her head back, letting out a raw-throated sound of frustration and sorrow. The sound empties her, but brings no relief, only leaving a space inside her that is at once too empty and too full.
Slowly, her eyes focus and the white shape looming above her that she’s been looking at without seeing suddenly clarifies. A skull, set atop a sharpened stick, driven into the ground. Jane lets out a startled yell and scrambles backward, colliding with her Uncle Michael behind her.
Amusement plays across his features. He holds up a hand, still bound, to help her up and Jane stares at it in disgust. Anger and fear roil together with nowhere to go. She wants to slap his hand away, but just then, figures—a dozen, more, she can’t tell—rush out of the dark between the trees. Jane scrambles to her feet and finds herself pressed against her uncle’s side.
Jane tries to face every direction at once, assessing the new threat. Restless motion boils through the clearing, making it impossible to tell how many surround them. The thunder of footsteps is everywhere—a sound like bare feet, but also like hooves. The figures shift and blur. It isn’t just the motion, it’s something else. Even as Jane tries to fix one of the figures in her sight, it blinks between forms.
Recognition strikes Jane breathless. These are Peter’s Lost Boys, the ones who played hide and seek through the woods with her and killed a boar to give her a welcome feast. Except they’re not boys anymore, they’re men, or they’re something else altogether. Not ghosts—they’re as real as they ever were, except broken, like the sky, like Neverland itself. It’s as though they’re experiencing every possible moment in their lives at once, every iteration of their being, constantly pulled and stretched so thin she can almost see through them, yet held together by whatever twisted power still remains in this place.
Jane fixes on a tall, lanky boy with the skin of an animal draped over his shoulders. Even as she looks at the boy, she sees a man with tangled hair and a matted beard. She sees a child, streaked in blood and crying. And she sees a body that is neither animal nor human. She sees all the ways that Peter changed the boys around her over time, bending them out of true, hurting them, breaking them and putting them back together to suit his whims.
When her breath catches again, it’s on something like pity. This boy. She knows him. Before she can speak, though, the boy’s face twists in rage. In the next instant, he’s upon her, knocking her down.
There’s a stone in his raised fist, and Jane manages to jerk her head to the side just as he brings it smashing down. He lifts it again, lips peeled back from his teeth. There’s barely any breath left in her body where he holds her down, but Jane wheezes out a name.
“Arthur?”
It’s enough to make the boy pause. It’s enough for Jane to wiggle free, to scramble backward. His gaunt face is dirt-streaked, but she knows those eyes, they haven’t changed. Hard and mean.
Another of the men—the boys—reaches for her. He shifts between forms too fast for her to guess who it might be, if it’s someone she used to know. Jane crawls on hands and knees, avoiding his grasp, but getting tangled in the strap of her satchel instead. She bangs her chin and fresh tears sting her eyes, pain now, not fear. She rolls away, desperately avoiding a heavy object hurled in her direction. The rock Arthur used to try to bash her face in. At least he doesn’t have it in his grip anymore.
“Do something! Won’t you help me?” Jane shouts to her uncle who stands watching in amusement.
“Uncle Michael! I know you’re in there. Please!”
Before she can get beyond his reach, Arthur is on her again. He flips her, getting a hand around her throat and squeezing until starbursts of gray pop before her eyes. His hands are small, blood-slick, a mere child. Is this the way Arthur looked before he came to Neverland? He’s slight enough for a moment that Jane is able to get a knee up, to shove him back. Her vision clears momentarily, but then he is the Arthur she knew again, the tallest of the Lost Boys, wiry and strong enough to hold her down.
“It’s me, Jane.” Her voice is strangled.
No flicker of recognition in Arthur’s eyes.
Jane gropes at the satchel, the edges of her vision threatening dark again. What does one bring to a magical, impossible land? She’d thought to supply herself with practical things, items she was certain would be useful anywhere. A roll of bandages. Small scissors to cut them. A bottle of iodine. A hooked needle and thread for stitching wounds.
Her arm tingles like its falling asleep. Her fingers are clumsy, refusing to obey her. Spots dance before her eyes. Faces blur above her as the other boys loom close. From what seems like a great distance, she hears cheering. They’re hunting the boar. They’re bringing it down. Soon enough they will roast her and dine on her meat.
Jane’s fingers close. She grasps the handle of her scissors and yanks them free. With whatever strength she has left, she swings her arm and buries the small points of the blades in Arthur’s face.
He howls, reeling back from her, blood welling from between his fingers as he claws at his cheek where the scissor handles protrude. He’s bearded and stinking, caked in dirt. He’s a boy, scarcely half her height. He’s the boy she remembers, bleeding and furious.
Jane scrambles up just as Arthur yanks the scissors free, tossing them away. He lets the blood flow, and she thinks of the cave, ages ago, how she punched him in the nose and made him bleed then too. How he ran Timothy through with his sword. How Timothy died.
Jane’s vision washes red. She rushes at Arthur—the boy, the man—ready to tear him apart the way she’d been ready to tear her uncle apart minutes ago. She’s meant to be a doctor. She’s meant to save people. And right now, she doesn’t care about any of that. It’s what Neverland does to her. Makes her want to hurt and hunt and destroy and forget everything else. The other boys fall back; without Arthur’s direction, they’re lost.
“Run! Run, you scurvy rats, or feel the wrath of my blade!” The voice booms through the clearing, and Jane skids to a halt.
One of the boys—a boy in truth now, one she almost recognizes – lets out a whimper. It is a pure sound of fear, a child confronted with a nightmare vision, the monster from under the bed, the shadow lurking in the dark. Jane looks where he’s looking, and her own breath catches.
Hook—sword brandished, eyes the red of a demon’s, hair the black of a raven’s wing, and coat flaring about him. His hand is not the wooden one she knows him to wear, but a hook, wickedly sharp and wickedly bright. The boys scatter, feet pounding the earth, vanishing among the trees.
Jane’s heart goes with them, the instinct to run, to flee the demon almost overpowering until the captain takes another step forward, resolving only into an aged man, holding a cane, breathing hard. Except he isn’t only one thing. Two versions of Hook stand before her overlapping, both equally true.
“You’re the only one they ever feared.” She remembers her mother’s stories—an enemy fierce enough to terrify the boys, but one Peter could always defeat.
“Captain Hook?” The voice trembles, and Jane turns.
Her uncle’s eyes are wide and stricken, a grown man still in shape, but his expression a little boy’s. This is how he must have looked in Neverland, Jane thinks, when he and her mother were children, a lifetime ago.
She takes a step toward her uncle, reaching out for him. And it is her uncle, if only for a moment, if only for now, Jane is certain of it. He’s terrified, just as the Lost Boys were, fleeing their enemy of old.
Hook was her uncle’s enemy once upon a time too. He kidnapped Jane’s mother and her uncles, held them captive on his pirate ship as bait for Peter to rescue. Only her uncle doesn’t remember any of it. Or didn’t, until now.
Confusion floods Michael’s eyes. His lip trembles. The ghosts are gone, stepped aside to let him see the world around him—an act of pure cruelty. Michael’s features twist, like he’s trying to escape himself.
“Jane?” The look in his eyes pleads with her to make everything make sense—as if he were the child, and she the adult.
“It’s okay.” Jane steps forward, taking her uncle’s arm.
“Don’t,” Hook says just as Michael’s body goes rigid and boneless all at once, his head slumping forward.
His breath rasps, a sound that turns into a wet, bloody-sounding chuckle. When he raises his head again, the sick-gold light is in his eyes, the blade of a grin across his mouth.
“Soft-hearted child.” Michael brings his bound hands up, catching Jane on the chin just where she struck it against the ground.
Her head snaps back, ringing with the blow, and she tastes blood. She staggers, then she spits on the ground, wiping red from her mouth with the back of her hand. The fractured multitude inside her uncle chuckles again, but Michael is still visible, a ghost trapped inside his own skin. He’s still terribly afraid.
“Come along.” Hook takes her arm, drawing her back. Jane resists a moment. Even bleeding, she wants to go to her uncle, help him.
Hook’s grip is insistent though, and Jane allows herself to be led. It’s a moment before she realizes she’s left Michael’s rope behind. When she turns back, her uncle is behind her, holding the rope out to her with a mocking bow.