Deep marks cross the sand as though something heavy was recently dragged across it. Jane’s stomach sinks, the unshakable feeling that something terrible has happened, is about to happen, is happening right now. She shouldn’t have left her uncle behind. She shouldn’t have run off chasing Timothy’s ghost. And she wouldn’t take her actions back for the world.
She touches the satchel at her side, taking comfort from the outline of bone beneath canvas as she follows the marks along the beach. She’s bruised, scraped, exhausted from finding her way back out of the cave. She wandered for what felt like hours in the dark, but it might have been no time at all, until she finally found another way out. Then, not knowing where else to go, she returned to the beach. The place she first woke in Neverland.
She pauses to take a breath, to take in the sweep of the landscape before her. She’s almost grown used to the red-black light flickering across the sky so it’s a moment before Jane realizes something is different. Wrong.
She draws to a halt. The marks in the sand lead back to the ruined pirate ship, her time in Neverland come full circle again. And all around the ship, the air is strange. Dark. Thickening. It’s like looking at a storm, but not one that’s happening now. One that did happen. One that will happen. She’s seeing it and not seeing it, like looking at the Lost Boys flickering between states of being, past and present, and it makes her head hurt.
Jane has a terrible sense of being too late. She has to get to the ship, and it’s the last place she wants to be.
Electricity dances across her skin, raising the tiny hairs on her arms. Merely walking forward is like pushing against a gale force wind, her steps sliding backward, grit blowing into her face. She raises an arm to shield her eyes, tightening her grip with her other hand on the satchel.
All at once, the wind stops. The ship blinks from existence. The ship falls from the sky.
Jane chokes on a startled shout, scrambling backward. It’s impossible, but the ship plummets, smashing onto the sand, wood and debris flying everywhere. She trips over her heels, lands hard on her backside. She stares. The ship falls again. She feels the impact, thudding, shaking the ground. The ship falls and falls and falls again, an endless loop. Pushing down fear, Jane climbs to her feet, and against all reason, she runs toward the ship instead of away.
Overhead, a storm rages. Overhead, the sky is clear, crystal blue. And it is burnt red-black. It’s like she’s seeing three overlapping pieces of time, or more. She catches sight of someone else on the ship. She expects Hook, or her uncle, but it’s a woman, and Jane’s pulse trips so she almost misses a step and falls.
She knows, even without getting a clear look that the woman is her mother. Her mother is here. It doesn’t even occur to her until she’s at the ship, falling breathless against its side, hauling herself through the broken hole, that the woman who crawled into the ship just ahead of Jane is her mother as she looked eight years ago. The day she rescued Jane from Neverland.
She almost laughs, a wild, uncontrollable thing. Time is broken here, more than ever. Why shouldn’t she see an echo of her mother along with all of Neverland’s other ghosts?
Her mother moves deeper into the wreck of the pirate ship and Jane scrambles to follow. Loose strands of hair escape the braid trailing down her mother’s back. She wears wide trousers, her shawl tied around her waist. The shadow of her mother ducks and vanishes through a doorway, and for a moment, Jane can’t breathe.
Her mother isn’t here, but she was. Jane remembers the story, how her mother raided the pirate ship and found Hook’s old sword before setting out to face Peter. Before finding Jane. A fragment of that time has slipped into the now, and seeing it is like being struck a blow, surprising her with how much it hurts. Jane pulls herself forward, climbing, sliding—a game of follow the leader. She almost shouts, but she knows her mother wouldn’t hear her.
And then her mother is there again, striding straight toward her, climbing back out of the ship. She doesn’t see Jane. She doesn’t exist in the same place and time, and she passes right through Jane. Jane clutches at herself, as if she could catch the trailing wisps of her mother. But when she turns, her mother is already gone. She’s been gone for eight years. The slanted corridor of the ship is empty.
Jane’s heart pounds. She’s alone, but she sees again the determination etched on her mother’s face as she strode from the ship with Hook’s sword at her side. The fierceness, the anger. And all at once, Jane sees her mother at a remove—a woman hurting, afraid, and taking all that hurt and fear and turning it outward. A woman prepared to fight for her daughter, for herself, and do whatever it takes to bring them both home.
Jane presses a hand to her chest again, to the ache there. It’s like a bruise, and she pushes against it, hard. She wants to feel that pain. And she wants to push it through and out of herself and have it gone.
Perhaps she’s been too full of her own anger to even try to see things from her mother’s point of view. Yes, her mother had a choice in coming to Neverland—a choice Jane herself had never had. But Jane does have a choice in what she does going forward. Deep down, she knows what happened to Timothy wasn’t her mother’s fault. It was easier to blame her, to blame herself even, than simply accepting that life is big and unfair and no matter what either of them did back then, nothing would change. Jane had promised herself once not to forget Neverland, but not to live in the past either. Perhaps it’s time to live up to that promise, to find a way back to her mother, and move on.
She’s always known her mother is not simply one thing, but a bundle, a contradiction, like any other person. The thought strikes her like lightning—her mother is human. At the same time the absurdity of the thought hits her. Of course her mother is human. She is flawed. And she is a being separate from Jane, but linked to her inexorably. Not just her mother, but her own person as well, and that is precisely what makes them capable of hurting each other. The love between them, binding them together, clashing against the simple fact of living in two separate skins, each trying to discover who they are.
Jane braces herself against the ship’s wall, dizzy with the realization. When she gets home, she will try. She swears, she will try to see her mother on her own terms, and hope that her mother can see her on hers. They will find a way back to each other, and maybe their relationship will never be perfect, but it won’t be for lack of trying. Jane won’t let them simply drift apart, closed off from each other, each lost in their own separate worlds.
She pushes away from the wall. Moves down the tilted corridor, and steps through the doorway and into the room her mother exited. It’s as her mother described it—the remains of broken furniture, and shattered mirror glass. And then it’s even emptier still, and the scant light seeping through the yellowed window glass is a baleful red again. And then the sky is blue, and the room is whole, and Jane feels waves swell beneath the deck, lifting it.
The room, the ship, flickers between states so fast they blur together. In one of the realities, perhaps more than one, there’s a sword beneath the bed. Neverland is a place of impossibilities, even, or especially, when broken. And if she believes hard enough, it means the sword will be there for Jane to find.
She presses herself flat to the floor, stretches her arm out as long as she can. Her fingers grope. There is nothing, nothing, then all at once, a hilt beneath her hand, and Jane grips it tight, yanks it free before it can vanish again. She straightens, holding the sword in wonder. She sweeps it through the air once, imagining her mother doing the same, and giddy laughter takes over her.
Jane turns, ready to leave the ship when something catches her eye. Half buried in the torn remains of linens covering the bed, something metallic glitters. She moves the torn covers aside to reveal the hook nestled there.
As she reaches for it, the room tilts. She throws out a hand to steady herself and the hook’s sharp tip catches her skin, tearing a line of red down her arm. Jane sucks in a breath, snatching her arm back and automatically covering the wound. It isn’t deep, but sticky blood seeps between her fingers. She wipes her hand on her trousers, digging one-handed in her satchel, careful not to touch Timothy’s skull, until she finds the rolls of bandages again.
It’s a clumsy job, but she manages to wrap her arm before turning her attention back to the hook. She should leave it alone. The air buzzes around it, an almost magnetic pull drawing her, leaving her reaching for it again without meaning to. Gingerly, she lifts the weapon by its leather cuff.
Because that’s what it is—not just an appendage to replace the hand of a wounded man, not here. That’s not how Neverland works. It’s a thing made for violence, and even now, Jane imagines the metal rust-stained with blood. Like the ship, it flickers—clean and bright, and then gory in the next instant, and she almost flings it away from herself, but she finds she can’t let it go.
The ship tilts again, nearly knocking her off her feet, shaking her from her reverie. Wind batters it, and the timbers groan. What happens if the ship falls from the sky again while she’s on board? Or has that already happened? She has no time to lose.
She retrieves the sword, holding it tightly in one hand, holding the hook in the other—pinched between two fingers by the leather cuff and held as far away from her body as possible. The ship sways as Jane returns the way she came, struggling to keep her balance with her hands full.
Her foot strikes something, and it rattles across the deck. Shock travels through her as she looks down and sees a skull. She almost drops the sword to reach for her satchel, but it’s much too big to be Timothy’s skull. She recognizes the silver chasing; it’s the skull Hook carried here with him, the one he claimed belonged to someone he loved. He wouldn’t be parted from it willingly, so if the skull is here, then Hook must be here somewhere as well. And possibly not of his own accord.
Setting the sword aside, she lifts the skull gingerly, holding it a moment before tucking it into her bag alongside Timothy’s. The canvas bulges as she resecures the strap and regains the sword and the hook. She takes a deep breath, and climbs up onto the deck.
Jane emerges into chaos. A storm rages, wind whipping and stealing her breath, leaving her lungs empty and burning. She gasps, squinting through rain that isn’t there. The deck is crowded with shapes. Most of them aren’t solid. There’s a sense of absence, like the absence she felt in Peg’s room, and for a moment Jane is rooted. Her boots have fused with the deck, and she can’t move.
The brief thought flashes through her again that she will find Peg here, and just as quickly she tamps it down. Peg is gone. And Jane would not wish her, any part of her, here in this chaos even if it meant the chance to say that she’s sorry and say goodbye.
After a moment, her mind assembles the jagged, broken pieces to make sense of what she’s seeing. As much sense as can be made, at least. Her uncle and Captain Hook, fighting, surrounded by a maelstrom of ghosts. The shout is at her lips before she can stop herself.
“Captain!”
Everything pauses and seems to hang still. She sees the world in individual, disconnected moments. Hook lifts his head to look at her. He’s wounded. Her uncle looms over him, holding a knife. Her uncle is not her uncle, and something terrible will happen if she doesn’t stop it.
Jane doesn’t think. She drops the hook and charges forward. Brings the sword down hilt first, striking her uncle in the shoulder as hard as she can. It’s just enough to hurt him, to make him drop the blade he’s holding. Then she’s grabbing at Hook, pulling at him. They need to run.
The air swirls thick around them, not just a storm, or at least not a normal one. The deck swarms with shadows, faces that are almost human rising to the surface and sinking again. Hook pulls free of her grasp, taking her arm in turn and steering her toward the rail. Now it’s Jane’s turn to shake him free.
“What are you doing? I can’t leave my uncle.”
Jane looks back to Uncle Michael’s crumpled form. He groans, already pushing himself upright, filled with unnatural strength. Even so, she moves toward him before Hook catches her, pulls her back.
“I promise you, no harm will come to him. I will set things right.” Hook’s eyes are wild in the swarming dark.
Is he still under the influence of the flowers? Does he have any idea what he’s saying? Jane feels unsteady, filled with the sense that this moment is taking place in more than one time, bits slipping free, looping over themselves, happening and not happening all at once. If they could stand outside this moment and recount it to each other, would their stories match?
Jane shakes herself, tries to pull free, but Hook’s grip is iron. He doesn’t look like the old man she first saw standing behind her mother at the door of her flat. Jane sees the outline, the ghost of someone else laid atop his skin—black hair flowing over his shoulders, a red coat, flaring at the hem.
Behind the wildness in his eyes, there is something else—bloody rage, bloody determination. The eyes of a pirate. But maybe in this place that Peter built for endless games of war, that isn’t such a terrible thing. Jane stares at the sword in her hand. She used it to hurt her uncle, even if he isn’t her uncle right now. At the thought, revulsion fills her. She isn’t a pirate, she’s a doctor, or she will be one day, and in order to do that, she needs to leave this place behind. She can’t do what needs to be done to fix Peter’s violent world, but Hook can. She turns the sword in her hand and holds both it and the hook out to him.
“These belong to you.”
Hook stares for a moment as if seeing the weapons for the first time, as if he will refuse them. Then he nods, taking the sword and the hook awkwardly in one hand, the arm with his wooden hand hanging uselessly at his side.
When his eyes meet hers again, she doesn’t see the pirate—or rather she sees the pirate and the old man both—eyes the color of the sea in a storm, filled with violence and filled with sorrow.
“Promise me you’ll bury me with him.”
Jane’s hand goes to the satchel at her side. The skulls.
“I will.”
“Good.” The smile Hook, James, gives her is as wicked and sharp as the blade in his hand. “Get the hell off my ship. Now!”
He’s an old man, bleeding from more than one wound. And he’s a pirate captain, hair black, eyes flashing. He is terrifying, and Jane runs almost without meaning to, scrambling for the ship’s rail.
There’s a roaring like the wind in a storm and a thousand tormented voices screaming all at once. She wants to look back, to see what’s happening, to make sure Uncle Michael is safe. But there’s a percussive blast, like a hand set between her shoulder blades, shoving.
An explosion rocks the deck, like a strike of lightning, like the world folding in on itself. Jane flings herself over the rail or she is thrown, the land and the red-black sky trading place, stars showing through that belong to a world other than this one, while the lightning shatters everything over and over again.
She hits the sand, hard, the breath knocked out of her, grit in her eyes and her mouth, coughing, choking. She’s on dry land, but she’s drowning.