Instinct screams at her to turn back, but even if she wanted to, gravity takes the choice from her hands. Her grip falters, and she slides, tumbling down the incline toward the blue eye of the lagoon below.

The breath rushes from her, and all Wendy can do is shield her face and try to slow her descent. Her foot catches on something, pain jolting up her leg, and for a moment she’s airborne—falling, not flying. Then she’s crashing through the long grasses and wild sea roses bordering the lagoon, the bruising violence of her impact driving the rest of the breath from her body. She rolls to a stop just at the edge of the water.

A whine emerges and she sucks in a breath, coughing, and for a moment she’s sure she’ll suffocate, drowning on dry land. The blue sky mocks her from above, clear and perfect and bright, but every part of her body aches. It’s a moment before she can roll over, planting her hand to lever herself up. Her palm slips in slick weed and foul mud, the source of the stench, plunging her arm into the water and bringing her eye to empty eye socket with the skull glaring up at her from the shore.

Wendy scrambles back, pain momentarily forgotten. The skeleton lies with one arm flung outward, the other tucked beneath its chin, head pillowed on sun-bleached bones. The lower half of the body trails into the water, which is still so painfully clear that below the torso she can see the bones of a powerful tail, stripped of its shimmering scales.

Wendy crawls forward, stopping just short of touching the skull. It’s impossible. She can’t be seeing what she’s seeing, despite the evidence in front of her eyes. Nothing can die in Neverland. Peter told her so.

But here is the skull, incontrovertible, her own truth against Peter’s, and she’s done taking other people’s word for how the world functions. Her fingers hover in the space above the pale curve of bone. There should be thick, shining tresses, bound with seashells, woven with coral and sea roses. She lets her hand fall. Who was this? Wendy struggles to call to mind each mermaid’s face, almost human, but at the same time strangely other—their pointed chins, their cheekbones sharp and canted, and their eyes shimmering like mother of pearl.

The memories were so clear once, but now, when she needs them the most, she finds them dulled, slipping away the harder she tries to hold on. Voices raised in song ring in her head, paired with the musical tones of their names, sung to her from the water the first time she met them—Sea Bloom, Salt Rose, Coral Bramble.