“I want to remember every bit of it,” he’d told her. “But the harder I try to hold on, the more things slip away. I forget faces, names, and it’s like I’m killing them all over again. They’re dying, and there’s nothing I can do to save them. Then there are other times when all I can do is remember and it’s too much. I don’t want it.”

Michael raised the hand holding the dishrag, pressing it to his head, and Wendy could only imagine what horrors unfurled within the private theater of his mind. The world gone orange and black and red in an explosion, shrapnel and flame blooming like some great, terrible flower, men screaming and bleeding and dying.

“I survived. It’s my duty to remember. I owe it to the men who died, but they run through my hands and I can’t hold on.”

He’d lowered his hand; tears stood out in his eyes, hovering on his lashes without falling. Wendy had never seen him look so old and so young all at the same time.

“How do you remember, Wendy? How do you hold on?” It was the closest he’d ever come to asking her about Neverland, the only hint she’d ever seen that part of him might remember. He’d looked at her, heartbroken, breaking her heart in turn; he’d been her brother again, reaching out to her, and she’d had no answers. All she could do was put her arms around him, resting her hands against his back and leaving damp patches on his shirt.

He’d shuddered in her embrace, then gone stiff. When they stepped apart, it was as though they were strangers again. He’d retreated, closing himself off, and they’d gone back to silently washing dishes. Only Wendy had done it with tears running down to the point of her chin.

Wendy pushes herself away from the wall, feeling worn-through and thin, even more wrung out than before. She wants to be done with the onslaught of memories. They’re of all the wrong things, not the thing putting her, putting Jane, in danger here and now.

The sword bumps at her hip as she climbs back into the sunlight. The bowl of the sky is pale blue, like the shell of a robin’s egg. She imagines Hook and his pirates falling upward into that infinite blue. Soaring. Vanishing.

A new fear grips her. At her bedroom window, she was able to hold off doubt, but now with all the grief weighing her down, she feels utterly rooted in Neverland’s soil. There isn’t even a sliver of room for happy thoughts in her mind. If she tried now, could she fly? And if not, when she finds Jane, how on earth will she get them home?

8: The Hunt

THE HUNT