Tiger Lily tilts her head, a gesture for Wendy to follow. As she does, Wendy glances at the trees, wondering suddenly whether there are eyes and ears listening. The birds could be spies for Peter, even the leaves themselves, for all she knows. The creeping feeling of being haunted returns, even though the source is different this time.

Tiger Lily leads her between narrow-trunked trees, ducking beneath branches and looped vines like massive snakes. Her footsteps barely make a sound. When she first saw the trees shake their branches, Wendy had thought of ghosts. Looking at Tiger Lily now, she wonders whether she was truly wrong.

Tiger Lily bends to lift a heavy section of ropy vines, revealing the entrance to a cave. Just one of the many cracks and fissures and secret tunnels riddling Neverland. Wendy remembers Tiger Lily telling her once it was possible to travel all the way across the island and never see the sun, like a whole second Neverland buried underground.

Wendy ducks through the entrance, and as she does, the ground shudders, a distant rumble of thunder. Glancing over her shoulder, she sees a faint smudge rising above the trees, a claw mark in smoke dragged across the sky at the center of the island.

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.