Before she can decide which way to go, movement among the trees catches her eye. It’s the same flickering she saw as she looked out over the trees from the lagoon, leaves rattling, branches swaying without any wind, and her breath catches. A shape darts from one slender trunk to the next. Fear presses a hand to her chest, but in the next instant, anger overwhelms it.

“It’s no use skulking about. I can see you.” It’s a lie, but miraculously her voice doesn’t shake.

Between two of the trunks, a shadowy figure resolves. Human, or at least she thinks so. Suddenly, the trees don’t allow enough light. Wendy squints. The shape resembles a woman, but her skin is like a wasp’s nest, papery grayish-brown. She’s like a dead thing, lain ages in the ground, and yet there’s something familiar, like Hook’s ship, like the lagoon. The thought fills her with revulsion, familiar yet utterly wrong, the Neverland she knew perverted, unraveled and poorly stitched together again. She knows the woman; she can’t possibly know her.

“Are you…?” Her voice breaks. She takes a step, then stops.

She isn’t a child to be frightened by ghosts. She’s a grown woman, and she’s faced real monsters, the kind who wear uniforms and wield needles and restraints. She drops her hand to the hilt of Hook’s sword, ready to draw.

Leaves crunch under a light step as the woman moves closer. Wendy gasps. This close, she can’t pretend. If the laws of Neverland hold true, the woman before her should be a girl still, just as Wendy last saw her. She isn’t though, she’s older, but not as old as Wendy, not as old as she should be if Neverland were a rational place. Not a girl, not quite a woman either. Perhaps not even living, but something else, something caught in between.

“Tiger Lily.” The name cracks in Wendy’s throat and lodges there.

The woman flinches, as if the name were a blow. Thin, her skin like dried mud, baked and cracking. Her hair, which should be dark, framing her face in thick, glossy braids, hangs lank, wispy and brittle. Her eyes are worst of all, sunken above cheeks that protrude like blades, and full of pain.

Wendy knows those eyes like she knows Peter’s call. Tiger Lily, trapped inside the husk standing before her, swaying slightly as if the next breeze might knock her down. Tiger Lily, a ghost haunting herself.

“No.” The word is a husk too, a dried, blown leaf scraping across the ground.

Is it a denial of the name, or Wendy herself? Both, or neither? But Wendy knows for the ache inside, heavy and bruised. This is her friend.

“Tiger Lily.” Wendy repeats the name, more firmly, reaching out her hand.