Lost Boy

chapter 12

Peter didn’t return the next day, or the next, or the next after that. In fact, he was gone for more than a week. He’d never done this before, and I might have worried about it, except that Sal did catch a fever.

The next morning when I woke up her skin was like fire. The wound had ceased bleeding, but she moaned and tossed and turned and it was hard to get her to swallow any water or broth. She soaked through any skins we put on her but if we took them off, she would cry out piteously that she was cold.

Nod and Crow were, surprisingly, a good help to me. They took it in turns to watch her and to bully her into swallowing soup, and even washed all the dirty clothes and skins so she’d have something clean to sleep in. Charlie ran back and forth collecting water and bathing Sal’s head with a cloth.

If the pirates knew where the tree was, they could have crept up on us and killed us all, for none of us was aware of anything except Sally.

On the fourth day, her fever broke.

We all cheered, and I think I never loved those boys more than at that moment. We had saved her. We’d all done it together.

Together wasn’t something that Peter understood, not really. He liked all the boys to be in one group, but he didn’t like sharing and he certainly didn’t like it when the boys banded together to do anything without him. He liked to sow discontent, to cause fights, and this, I realized, was why he never played at Battle. It was much more fun for him to watch us run to and fro and hurt each other. If we hurt one another, even in fun, then we could never like one another best—only him.

On the sixth day, Sally sat up and scowled at me when I changed the poultice.

“Must you put that foul-smelling stuff on there?” she said.

“If you enjoy living, then yes,” I said. “That foul stuff probably saved your life.”

“I thought Crow said it was your magic broth that saved me,” Sally said, her eyes twinkling. It was nice to see that twinkle again, to know that Sal was almost back to normal.

Nod, who was good at sewing, had made her a fresh pair of deerskin pants that stopped at the knee, and a matching shirt with silver wolf fur trimmed all around the edges. It was one of the finest things he had ever made, and he’d presented it to her with a blushing face that morning.

Sal had thanked him very prettily, her own cheeks pink, and then asked for some privacy so she could change into Nod’s gift.

She’d washed and changed while the four of us stood outside the tree, looking up at the sky and trying not to be curious about what was going on inside.

When she called out that it was all right to come back in, she was wearing her new clothes and sitting up against the cave wall. There was something different about her, something I noticed after a few minutes. She’d stopped binding her chest, and now it was desperately obvious that she was, in fact, a girl.

Crow and Charlie didn’t seem to notice, but Nod looked everywhere except directly at Sal, and I tried to keep my eyes right on her face.

“Something saved you, the broth or the leaves or just plain luck,” I said, feeling the blood rise in my face as I glanced at her chest.

I had to stop being so foolish. It was only Sal, my friend Sal, and truthfully the curves were so small that she barely looked different from a boy.

But they were there. She was most definitely not a boy.

Nod and Crow and Charlie were outside, and I heard them laughing as they played some game. It was good to hear Nod laugh, though it never quite reached his eyes—the ghost of Fog lingered there.

“Jamie, do you remember your mother?” Sal asked.

I gave her a startled glance. “My mother? No.”

“Sometimes you sing a little song to yourself when you’re at some task, like you were doing just now,” Sal said. “I thought you might have learned it from your mother.”

I hadn’t even known I was singing, and wondered if this happened often and the other boys just never thought to mention it to me.

“I told you I came here a long time ago, Sal,” I said, feeling unaccountably angry. “I don’t remember my life before the island.”

“Certain of that?” she asked.

“Yes, I told you so. Do you think I’m a liar?”

She didn’t flinch. She didn’t seem even a little bit intimidated by my temper. “I just wondered if you remembered really, but didn’t want to say because it would make Peter angry.”

I started to say that I didn’t care what Peter thought about it, that I did as I pleased.

But that wasn’t really true, was it? I didn’t do as I pleased. I did what I thought was best and tried to keep Peter happy so he wouldn’t destroy everything.

I’d made myself a hostage to him for three weeks just so he wouldn’t drag any more boys here to his island, and to keep Charlie and Sal safe from his jealousy.

And I did remember some things from the Other Place.

The song.

Wide blue eyes staring, and a red mouth carved in a smile where there should be none.

“I don’t like to talk about it,” I said.

I finished up changing the bandage and collected the dirty things to take outside to wash.

“You’re a good father to these boys,” Sal said. “I thought maybe you learned from someone who cared about you.”

“I’m not their father,” I said, my voice harsh. “I don’t think of myself that way. We’re not playing families here on the island. We just work together.”

“You look out for them. You take care of them. That’s what a father does—or at least, what he’s supposed to do. Mine only beat me and my mother until I ran away. After that he only had my mother to hit,” Sal said.

She didn’t sound sad about this, or like she wanted me to feel sorry for her. It was just a statement of fact, but it arrested my anger.

“Did you love your mother?” I asked curiously.

“When I was small I did,” she said. “When I was older I hated her for letting him hurt me.”

“Maybe she was scared to try to make him stop.” I had a strange impulse to defend Sal’s mother.

“I wasn’t scared,” she said. “I shouted at him. I stood up to him. I hit him with a broken bottle once, made him bleed all over. If a little child can do that, then why couldn’t my mother stand between us?”

I didn’t know what to say to this. I could see it, little Sal with her dark curls and blue eyes, fierce and small with a bruise on her face and a jagged bottle in her hand.

“That’s what you do for the boys,” Sal continued. “You stand between them and Peter. You keep them safe. Because it isn’t safe, this island. It isn’t at all what Peter promised it would be, what I thought it would be.”

“What did you think it would be?”

She shrugged, and her hands moved restlessly in her lap. “Like a paradise, I suppose. A happy place that was clean and bright and where everyone was lovely to each other and there was lots and lots of food to eat. I’ve spent three years eating rats, or moldy bread that I stole off the end of a cart. If ever I had anything—a penny earned from shining shoes, or an apple that wasn’t half rotten—some bigger boy would come along and try to take it from me. I always had to fight, every day, just to stay alive. I was fighting when Peter found me, beating an older boy who wanted my cap.”

“That’s why he wanted you,” I said. “If he saw you fighting and thought you were good at it, he would want you here.”

“I thought,” she said, and she took a deep breath. “I thought that Peter respected me because I wouldn’t let the other boy bully me. He said I looked like a boy that deserved an adventure. I didn’t believe him at first, about the island, though.”

“I didn’t either,” I said. “I don’t know that anyone does. It sounds like a fantastic lie.”

“It is a fantastic lie,” Sal said, and her face was very earnest. “This isn’t a wonderful place for boys to play and have adventures and stay young for always. It’s a killing place, and we’re all just soldiers in Peter’s war.”

I shuffled my feet, not sure what to say to this. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought all of these things before, or even said some of them to Peter. I had. But I was his first choice, his best, his right hand.

And I couldn’t, not yet anyway, say out loud to the other boys that Peter was a monster.

“It wasn’t always like this,” I said. “With the pirates, I mean. We used to just raid them but they never came looking for us after.”

“And what changed?” Sal said, her eyes narrow and sharp. She knew the answer as well I did.

“Isn’t this place better than eating rats and getting beaten every day?” I shouted, suddenly angry again. “Do you want to go back to that? Because Peter will send you there. I was going to look out for you, and say that he should let you stay, but if you don’t like it here, then I should let you go back to that life.”

I stomped out of the tree, not waiting to hear what she answered. What did she know about the island or Peter, anyway? She hadn’t been here that long, and she wasn’t even a boy, even if she pretended to be one. Peter said there weren’t to be any girls on the island. He made the rules and I ought to take her back to the Other Place myself.

And while I was at it, I should take Charlie too. He was learning to like it on the island—too much. He’d never seemed so happy as when it was just the five of us, no Peter to growl at him, no Nip to scowl at him. His mother would be missing him. She would be crying every night. I ought to bring him home.

Except that he was part of my heart now, and I didn’t want to let him go. And I didn’t want to let Sal go either.

Did that make me selfish? Did that make me like Peter?

Maybe it did, just a little.

But I had to believe that I was better than Peter. I wouldn’t sacrifice the others for my own amusement. I wouldn’t forget about them the moment they were gone.

That made me better, didn’t it? I only wanted them near me because I loved them.

Though, of course, it was because I loved them that Peter had to take them from me.

• • •

Nine days after the pirate assault on the mountain, Peter reappeared in camp. Nobody jumped up and surrounded him when he strode in like a returning hero. We were playing a game with sticks that Sal had thought up and we didn’t notice him at first.

Sal made some boxes on the ground with the sticks, and set them apart at different lengths, some closer and some farther apart. Each boy would take it in turns to try to jump through all the boxes without missing one or breaking the sticks apart. I was the tallest and had the longest legs, so I was winning easily, though Crow seemed to take it personally that he was shorter and was trying to make up for it by jumping higher.

Charlie struggled the most, being the smallest, and we all cheered when he managed to jump through two boxes in a row.

There were three rabbits on the fire for lunch and the smell of meat cooking mingled with everyone’s happy laughter and it felt like home.

And then Peter came, and it was like a cloud settled over the clearing, and that home feeling went away. Smiles faded, even from Nod, who used to worship Peter.

But that was when Fog was still alive, and Peter hadn’t helped Nod bury his brother. He hadn’t seemed to care at all that Nod’s twin was dead, though they’d been on the island the second longest. That took a lot of the shine off Peter for Nod, and Crow did what Nod did, more or less.

The shine had come off Peter for Sal and Charlie long before then.

So when he looked all around and said, “What’s the matter with all of you? Don’t you want to know where I’ve been?” everyone just stared back at him in silence.

“I’ve been scouting out a new home,” Peter said. “I’ve found a much better tree closer to the plains.”

“There’s nothing wrong with this tree,” I said. I didn’t like to contradict him so sharply, but moving closer to the plains and the Many-Eyed did not seem like an excellent notion to me. “We’ve lived in this tree ever since we came here.”

“But there are so few of us now,” Peter said. “And I’m not allowed to get any more boys because you’re so boring, Jamie.”

The other four gave me curious looks at this. I hadn’t mentioned to anyone, of course, that I’d argued with Peter about bringing in new boys. I kept my disagreements with Peter to myself if I could.

The truth was that Peter could have gone off and collected new boys while he was missing for so many days. There was nothing I could have done about it if I didn’t like it. But he hadn’t, and then he’d come straight in and complained that I was stopping him from gathering new playmates, and I wondered why.

I didn’t like the way my thoughts tended. It seemed to me that maybe Peter wanted a clean slate, and that he’d rid himself of all the boys (and that troublesome girl too) by feeding them to the Many-Eyed. Then he would tell me he had to go off and find new boys because all the others were eaten.

“We’re not moving closer to the plains,” I said. “It’s too close to the Many-Eyed and too close to the pirates.”

“Well, the pirates have shown they’re willing to go anywhere on the island to get at us, so I don’t see that counting. I’ve been surprised at their spirit, you know, Jamie? I didn’t think they had it in them, but I guess that old fat Captain was holding them back. When they attacked on the mountain I was really shocked. Though once the shock was over it was sort of nice to have a fight that wasn’t planned by us. Those raids were getting so predictable.”

Nod moved before I had a chance to do a single thing. One second he was next to me, and the next he wasn’t, and Peter had no chance to defend himself, none at all.

I always thought of Peter as a smart and capable fighter, but watching Nod pound him I wondered why I thought this. He always beat the pirates, but then, he almost always fought pirates who were older and slower than he. It was me that fought the young ones, the dangerous ones.

Peter never scrapped with the other boys at all. He watched at Battle, and none of them would dare pick a fight with him because they all adored him.

Or rather, they used to. Now most of them were gone and those who were left didn’t adore him anymore.

Nod had knocked Peter down and was pummeling his face over and over. This was Nod’s way—to get on top of the other boy and hit him until he didn’t know which way was up. Peter was too astonished to fight back, I think.

I dragged Nod off Peter, his fists flailing, his legs kicking out.

“Don’t, Jamie! Don’t! I’m going to kill him! I’m going to kill him!”

Peter’s nose was bloody. He touched it gingerly, like he couldn’t believe he was hurt.

I don’t think I’d ever seen Peter hurt before. Somehow he never got a scrape, even when we fought the pirates. I might have a list of scars to remember all our battles by, but he didn’t.

It was strange that I never noticed this, in all those years. In my defense I was usually patching up another boy, or myself, and had no time to consider Peter’s injuries nor the lack of them.

“Nod,” Peter said, and he sounded so hurt that Nod stopped shouting and kicking. “Why did you do that?”

Nod seemed to wither under Peter’s sad look, as if he was remembering all the fun they’d once had together. I didn’t dare put him down yet, though. If Peter said something thoughtless, he might set Nod off again.

“You didn’t . . . You said . . . the pirates,” Nod said.

“What about the pirates?” Peter asked. I didn’t know if he cared so little that he was genuinely puzzled or if he did the best innocent act in the world.

“The pirates killed Fog, and you were talking about it like it was fun,” Nod said. His body drooped more after he said this. It seemed to take a lot out of him to admit out loud that Peter wasn’t wonderful and perfect.

I knew how he felt. It was why I always found myself making excuses for him, defending Peter even when he was awful.

That was the power he had over us.

“Well, it is fun, isn’t it? Killing the pirates is some of the best fun in the world,” Peter said.

“Not when my brother dies!” Nod screamed.

It was a good thing that I had a tight grip on Nod, else he would have launched at Peter again. My arm was around his waist and his limbs flailed in front of him, trying to reach Peter.

Peter lifted his shoulders. “Lots of boys die, Nod. It never troubled you before.”

“It wasn’t my brother!” Nod said, and he let out a long and terrible howl.

The storm burst then, all at once. He stopped kicking and punching and suddenly slumped over my arm. I felt his chest heaving and his tears splashing on my skin.

Sal was up in an instant, prying me away from Nod and putting her arms around him. Nod collapsed on her, weeping into her shoulder.

Peter sniffed at this behavior. He never cried himself, so he didn’t see why anyone else should.

“I’m going to the mermaid lagoon, since none of you want to see the marvelous tree I’ve chosen for us,” he said.

“Nobody’s moving to that tree, Peter,” I said.

“Oh, I see,” Peter said, his eyes narrowing at me. “I’ve been gone too long, is it? Now they’re Jamie’s boys on Jamie’s island.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not that way. There’s no reason to leave this tree, and it’s safer here.”

“Well,” Peter said, his voice silky and dangerous. “It seems that way. It seems that they’re all following you now. What’s to stop me from collecting a new band of boys from the Other Place so I’ll have some boys to follow me?”

“You promised, Peter,” I said. “We made a bargain.”

“The bargain was that you would play with me,” Peter said.

“And I have. For many days I have been only with you, just the two of us as you wanted, roaming the island,” I said. “I kept my word. So you must keep yours.”

“If you don’t go with me to the mermaid lagoon, then you’re not keeping your word,” Peter said. “I want to play and I want somebody to play with. If you won’t do it, then I’ll have to find another boy.”

My eyes met Sal’s over Nod’s shoulder. She gave a tiny nod, to show that she understood.

“Watch out for Charlie,” I told Crow.

Crow nodded. He’d been taking in all of this with wide eyes. I wondered what he thought of Peter at that moment. I wondered if Peter realized that he was losing them all because of what he did, not because of what I did.

Peter clapped his hands when I joined him. The blood around his nose had dried already. He was lucky, as his nose hadn’t swelled at all. He didn’t seem to notice that I had no enthusiasm for his game. He was simply happy that I was going with him, and that he’d gotten his way.

I trudged beside him through the clearing, hearing him chatter happily about this and that and all the things he’d been doing while he was away—how he’d found this new tree, and also how he’d played some tricks on the pirates who were back at camp so they would think the island was haunted, the way they used to long ago.

“I don’t think you should bother the pirates anymore, Peter,” I said. “Haven’t you made them angry enough?”

“I only made them angry in the first place because of you, Jamie. Don’t you remember? You killed the Many-Eyed when you weren’t supposed to, and then you wanted to make it seem as though the pirates did it. You asked me to draw the pirates out of their camp and I did, and now you’re blaming me because the pirates are mad about it. That’s not very fair of you.”

“I told you to draw them out, not to burn everything down.”

I was ready to take the blame for the Many-Eyed, but not anything else. It was Peter who’d made that choice.

But it was the boys who paid for it. Like they always did.

“None of it would have happened except for you. So if all those boys are dead, it’s because of you, Jamie.”

All those boys. Billy and Slightly and Kit and Jonathan and Ed and Terry and Sam and Harry and Del and Fog and Jack and Nip, and all the ones before them that I’d buried in the field, so many that their faces swam together and their names were one name. They all watched me, and accused me, but it wasn’t because it was my fault that they were dead.

It was because I didn’t stop Peter, because I let Peter live, because I let Peter lie to them and promise them things that could never be. All children grow up, or they die, or both.

All children, except one.

chapter 13

Peter spent more time away from us after that, coming and going as he pleased, and nobody really minded. Things were more comfortable when Peter wasn’t around, especially as he was inclined to stare resentfully at Sally when he was in camp.

He didn’t say anything more about making her go back to the Other Place. I didn’t fool myself that this meant she was allowed to stay. It simply meant that he was trying to come up with a good accident for her, so that he could pretend to boo-hoo when she was gone.

When he wanted a companion he always made me go with him, and every hour I spent with him was a misery. There was nothing on the island that we hadn’t done a thousand-thousand-thousand times before, and Peter was unaware or didn’t care that I didn’t want to do it anymore.

What I wanted was to play quiet games with the others, or tell stories, or just laze about the tree and eat fruit if that was all we wanted. I wanted, finally, for there to be some measure of peace, to not face another day where one of the boys would die just because Peter couldn’t stand to be still.

One day when Peter had gone off on some mission of his own, I asked Crow and Nod to keep an eye on Charlie, and then I asked Sally to take a walk with me.

She was drawing pictures in the dirt with a stick, and after I asked her to walk, her face reddened.

“I just want to show you something important,” I said. Her blush made me respond in kind. It was like this with Sally. Everything would be fine, with all of us treating her like one of the boys, and then she would say or do something that had me feeling like a fool.

Nod watched us curiously as we left. He hadn’t been the same since Fog died, not as quick to anger nor as quick to laugh. I’d noticed something else too.

Nod had gotten taller. I noticed it because he and Crow had been more or less the same size, and then one day they just weren’t anymore. He had grown.

And so had I.

In fact, it had gotten so that I woke up in the morning and didn’t recognize my body most days. All my limbs were longer, and my hands and feet seemed like foreign things.

When I walked, my ankles got tangled up, and I felt big and slow, though in truth I wasn’t that much bigger than I’d been before Battle. It was perhaps a thumb length, maybe more, but that length felt like miles when Peter was around, who seemed smaller than ever to me. Had I never really seen how young he was until then?

Sal didn’t speak as I led her away from the tree. After several minutes where we both determinedly tried not to look right at each other she said, “Where are we going?”

“To the tunnel that leads to the Other Place,” I said.

She tilted her head to one side, like she was disappointed in me. “Sending me back, then? No girls allowed on Peter’s island?”

“No, no,” I said hastily. “Not a bit of it. I just remembered what you said on Battle day—about not knowing the way back. And I want you to know it.”

Sal was silent for a minute. “So I can escape, if I need to.”

I nodded. “Yes.”

She stopped then, and hit me hard in the shoulder. “And what about you, you fool? Do you think I’ll run off and save myself and leave you here with him?”

I stared at her, rubbing my shoulder. “You hit hard,” I said.

“For a girl, you mean?” she said angrily. “I told you, Jamie, I lived on the streets with boys for three years. I can look after myself. I’m not helpless just because I’m a girl. I won’t have you treating me like I am. And I don’t think you should ask me to run away while you stand and fight. I’m here now, and I’ll stand beside you. I won’t run.”

Nobody had said this to me before. Nobody.

If I told the others to run, they ran. If I said I would be a shield between them and the world, then I was. None of them volunteered to stand with me, to take the knocks that I thought were my duty to take.

“Well?” she said.

“All right,” I said slowly. “All right. You won’t run, and I won’t ask you to. But I still want you to know how to get back to the Other Place. It’s not just about you.”

She wilted a little then. “Of course. Charlie.”

“I know he doesn’t mean as much to you as he does to me . . .” I started.

“Don’t think you can decide for me what’s in my heart,” she snapped. “I love Charlie as much as you do.”

“All right,” I said again, not knowing what else to say.

I felt as though I were navigating some strange and undiscovered country, one where perils lurked around every bend.

Girls might not be trouble the way Peter thought, but they certainly were confusing.

I took Sally off the main path and into a patch of forest tucked in the border between the swamp and the mountains. It wasn’t that far from the tree, but the course was confusing if you didn’t know where you were going. I showed her all the things I used to stay on track—a tree marked with an “X” in the bark, a knife mark scratched on a boulder, a little stream that bubbled near the entry to the tunnel to the Other Place.

It looked just like a rabbit hole, as it did on the other side. It was tucked underneath a tree between two knotted tree roots. There was nothing to show that it was magic, or that it would take you away from the island entirely.

For the first time I wondered what would happen if the tunnel was blocked. Would you be able to dig out all the way to the Other Place at the end, or would the magic be broken forever? Strange that we had never thought of this, or worried about it. We could have been trapped in the Other Place if that happened.

There was something about Peter, his complete surety that things would always work the way he wanted them to. When he said we could go to the Other Place and return to the island, we believed him. I’d never troubled myself thinking that the magic might go away.

Now I worried about exactly such a thing. What if I told Sally and Charlie to run for the tunnel, and when they got there the tunnel wouldn’t take them back because it was blocked or broken?

Worse, what if the tunnel only took you to the Other Place if Peter was with you? I’d never tried to go through on my own, and I was certain none of the boys ever had either.

What if it was Peter who made the magic?

She shook her head. “I never would have found this again. It was dark and I was so excited, and also the tunnel seemed so long.”

“It does, that first time,” I said. “After that it goes quicker.”

Peter’s head popped out like a jack-in-the-box, telling me to come on, come on, there were adventures to be had. He disappeared again, and I was afraid to stand out in the dark on my own, out under this tree. I didn’t know how to get back home, and the tree seemed huge and frightening, like a dangerous thing that would reach down with its branches and grab me and hold me too tight.

I ran to the hole and peered in, and didn’t see Peter. So I called his name and heard him answer, “Come on, Jamie!” though the answer seemed far away.

He was going away from me, and then I would be all alone.

I put my feet into the opening, and after a second I pushed off and followed Peter down into the hole. There was a long drop that I didn’t expect and I tumbled to the bottom, getting dirt in my eyes and mouth and nose.

Peter laughed, but it wasn’t a mean laugh, and he picked me up and dusted me off and his eyes seemed to glow in the darkness.

“It’s not far now,” he said, and he took my hand.

It was farther than I thought it would be, so long in the dark, and I would have been afraid except that Peter never let go of my hand.

“Did you ever wonder, Jamie, how Peter found this island in the first place?”

Sal’s words startled me out of the memory. I shrugged. “I never asked. I suppose I always thought that he found the hole by accident, when he was just exploring in the Other Place.”

I didn’t mention my worry that the path only worked because of Peter. I decided that I would explore on my own another day, when Peter was away somewhere, and make sure that you could cross to the Other Place if he wasn’t with you.

“I wonder,” Sal said, and she looked thoughtful.

“Wonder what?” I asked.

“I wonder if he’s not actually from the Other Place,” Sal said. “If he’s from the island, and he found the path to the Other Place from here.”

“How could he be from the island?” I asked. “Did he sprout out of the ground like a mushroom? Where are his parents?”

Sal shook her head. “I don’t know. But he’s not like other boys. There’s something different about him.”

I didn’t say anything to this. There was something different about Peter—the way he knew things about the island, the way that he sometimes seemed like he was of the island.

And he could fly. None of the rest of us could fly.

I thought that this was because he’d been there for so long, but maybe Sal was right. Maybe the reason why Peter was so dismissive of mothers was because he’d never had one. Maybe he just appeared on the island one day, unfolding out of the grass just as he was, an eleven-year-old boy forever.

But no. That was silly. Even Peter couldn’t have come from nothing. He had to have been born somewhere.

I asked Sal to point out all the markers to me on the way back to the tree, so I could be sure that she understood where she was to go.

She huffed out a sigh. “I told you I’m not stupid, Jamie. There’s no need to test me.”

“I just want to make sure you won’t get lost,” I said. “It’s easy to get lost here.”

If she and Charlie were on their own and got turned around in the dark, they could very easily end up near the crocodile pond. Sal might think I was being ridiculous, but then, she hadn’t been on the island when Peter told the story of the crocodile and the duckling.

She didn’t worry about Charlie being dragged underneath the water of the pond by sharp, sharp teeth.

Still, she passed my “test,” as she called it, and found the way back to the main path without any prompting from me. When we reached it she crossed her arms and looked up at me.

“Happy now?” Then she frowned. “Are you taller? I thought I was nearly as tall as you.”

“You did well,” I said, avoiding her question. I glanced back over my shoulder in the direction of the tunnel. “Perhaps we should practice again from this side, just to make sure—”

“I’m not doing it again. You’ll simply have to trust me,” she said impatiently. “Jamie, you didn’t answer me. Are you taller?”

This was the other quality that made Sal different from all the boys. She couldn’t be distracted by anything. If she asked you a question and you didn’t answer, then she would ask that question again and again until you did.

“Yes,” I said, and hoped that would be enough.

Sal would never take a one-word answer.

“Are you—” she began.

Then she swallowed before going on, her voice hushed like she was afraid the island itself would hear, and tell Peter.

“Are you growing up?”

Her words seemed to hang between us on the shimmering air, insects flying between them without any notion of how dangerous that question could be.

“I—”

It crashed over me all at once, the truth I’d been pretending wasn’t there. I was growing up.

I was growing up, and I was so afraid.

I turned away from Sally, choking on the answer.

She wouldn’t let me turn, wouldn’t let me cry alone in shame, wouldn’t leave me.

Sally would never leave me alone.

She put her arms around me and I covered my face in my hands and sobbed, because I was afraid.

For so long I’d run free with the knowledge that I would never grow up, that I would only die if I got on the wrong end of a pirate’s sword.

Even then that sort of death had seemed another adventure at first, when everything on the island was new. It was heroic and also somehow not real, that I might be slashed by a pirate and fall to the ground but Peter would find me and wake me up later.

There were many years when the death of the other boys that we brought here didn’t trouble me, because I knew that at least I would always go on. Peter had promised me, and so I would live forever. It was a very long time before I stopped believing in Peter’s promises.

Now the island was fading for me, losing its magic, and I would grow old, and one day I would die for certain.

And I thought it wasn’t just because Peter didn’t care about the boys, or that he kept secrets. It was because I didn’t love him anymore the way that I used to do, when we were both small and he was my best friend in all the world.

“I’m glad,” she said fiercely. “I’m glad, because I’m going to grow up and I want you to grow up with me.”

I scrubbed at my eyes then and looked at her. Her face was so close to mine. I could smell her hair, flowery and sweet, because Sal took baths even when the rest of us did not. Her eyes were bluer than they’d ever been, dark and full of some promise that I didn’t really understand.

“Only, Jamie, you have to not grow up too fast,” she said primly. “Because I’m thirteen and I think right now you’re about the size of a fourteen-year-old, and that’s happened very fast. So you can’t get much bigger now, for if you do, then you’ll be too far ahead of me.”

I knew then that when I stopped loving Peter my heart looked for other things, and Sal was filling up all the space that Peter used to take there.

She pressed her lips against my cheek, something I’d seen now and then in the Other Place. It was called a kiss, I remembered.

A kiss can be made of magic too. I’d never known that.

She blushed again when I stared as she pulled back, but she didn’t look away. Sal didn’t hide. She always looked at you directly, and made you meet her.

“I’ll grow up with you,” I said, and took her hand.

It was different from holding Charlie’s hand, or Peter pulling me along to a new adventure. Her fingers twined into mine and I held it over my heart, so I could show her all the things that I didn’t know how to say.

Then I kissed her cheek very fast and let go of her hand and ran away, and she ran after me, laughing, and all of the world seemed to rise up laughing with her. She had the most wonderful laugh you’ve ever heard, like silver music that coursed through your blood.

We were still children, for all that we thought we weren’t. We were in that in-between place, the twilight between childish things and grown-up things.

Childhood still held out a friendly hand to us, if we wanted to go back to it, while the unexplored country was ahead, beckoning us to come there and see what new pleasures were to be found.

I didn’t really understand what that country meant, not really. It had been so long since I’d been near a grown-up who wasn’t a pirate. To me pirates were not unlike children themselves, only in bigger bodies. They did as they pleased (or so it seemed to me) and they spent as much time on the island as we boys did. And their lives had just as much blood and adventuring as ours.

The country that called to me now was one I barely remembered, one in which well-dressed husbands and wives talked quietly over supper tables. I remembered, suddenly, seeing just such a pair when I pressed my face against the window of a public house.

I didn’t remember why I was there, or how old I might have been, or where my own parents were. I only remembered being cold and hungry and seeing them there, warm and clean and well-fed.

“Sal,” I said. “When we grow up we will have a very large house.”

“Of course,” she said. “For all the boys.”

I nodded, pleased that she understood. For when Sal and I left the island to grow up, of course we would take Charlie and Nod and Crow with us. I could never leave them behind with Peter.

The thought of Peter all alone on the island, with no companions to play with, didn’t make me as sad as it ought to. I felt a little thrill of pleasure that he would have no one to push or pull or feed to the maw of the island when he was bored.

“When will we leave?” Sal asked.

I explained to her that I wanted to test the tunnel before we tried to cross it without Peter. She agreed that it was a possibility that the crossing might only be there if he was.

She pursed her lips. “I don’t like the idea of you trying on your own.”

“It will be safer and quicker with just one,” I said. “And once I’m sure we can make it through to the Other Place, then we can leave as soon as Peter’s gone off on one of his trips.”

“Why not just leave when he’s there?” she asked. “You should look him in the eye and tell him that you’re going, not sneak away like a coward.”

That stung. I wasn’t a coward. I’d never been a coward.

“It’s not about cowardice,” I said. “It’s about safety. You don’t know Peter. You think that you know him, but I’ve been his companion for longer than you can understand. Peter might let all of you go, though I can’t be certain of that. But he won’t let me go. I think Peter would rather kill me himself than see me leave.”

More than that, he’d try to kill the others if he thought it would make me stay. In his Peter-boy-logic he would think that if only he got rid of what distracted me, then I would be happy to be with him instead.

But if I said that out loud, Sal would only tell me that I was trying to protect her when she didn’t need protecting.

“You’re afraid to fight him?” she asked, peering at me closely. “I can’t believe that.”

“Of course not,” I said.

“Then this is about me or Charlie or some other such thing,” Sal said.

It cut me, it really did, the way she just seemed to know everything.

“Can’t you let me look after you?” I said. “If we’re together, then that means we take care of each other.”

“Yes, that means I look after you, too, and not allow you to act foolish.”

“It’s not foolish to keep you away from Peter’s anger,” I said. “You’ve never seen it.”

“I saw him at the Battle arena,” she said.

“That’s not anger,” I said. Why would she not comprehend? Everything about this plan was much more dangerous than she thought it was.

If Peter caught us . . .

“Please,” I said. “Please, don’t make me put you or Charlie or Nod or Crow at risk just because it offends your sense of honesty. You can be as honest and forthright as you like, Sal, but you should know that Peter won’t be. This is his island. He’ll do anything to keep it exactly as he wants it.”

There must have, finally, been something in my face or voice that convinced her, for she gave a reluctant nod.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll do it your way.”

“And don’t mention anything to the others yet,” I said. “Not until it’s time to go.”

“Yes,” she said, and then her hand came up suddenly, blocking her eyes.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“Something bright,” she said, lowering her hand and pointing behind me. “Like a flash.”

I twisted around, looking for what had startled her, but I didn’t see anything. I thought I heard a faint tinkling sound on the wind.

“Where did it come from?” I asked, suddenly worried that pirates might be roaming the forest searching for us. The flash might have been the sun off a blade, and the tinkling the sound of buckles jingling as they walked.

She showed me, and we carefully explored all around checking for any sign of pirates—footprints, broken brush, the smell of rum that they left behind them in a cloud.

After I assured myself that there was nothing to find, we agreed to go back.

“It must have been a bird,” I said.

“What sort of bird flashes in the sun?” she asked.

“You’d be surprised,” I said. “Some of the birds here have feathers so white that they shine. You haven’t seen all of the island, Sal. I have.”

She would have liked to argue about this, I thought, except there was no denying that on this one subject alone I was more knowledgeable than she. The only person in the world who knew the island better was Peter.

• • •

I returned to camp feeling more lighthearted and hopeful than I’d felt in a long time. I even smiled at Peter when I saw him sitting at the fire with the other three. Peter took that grin in stride, but Nod looked sharply from Sally to me and back again, which made my smile fade. I wondered how much he could see there, and how much he understood.

Charlie was sitting beside Peter, which surprised me very much. He was holding a little piece of carved wood in his hand, and I recognized the thing Peter had been whittling the day I killed the Many-Eyed. That day seemed so long ago, a lifetime ago.

So very many boys ago, when they were all still alive.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Charlie’s eyes shone as he held up the wood. “Peter made me a toy! Look, he said it’s a little fairy to keep me safe.”

He handed the toy to me and I inspected it. The carving was that of a very tiny girl with wings. Somehow Peter had managed to make the wings appear gossamer and light, carving little lace patterns there. Her hair was long and curled past her shoulders and she wore a dress made out of leaves. Her feet were small and bare. The face was full of mischief and delight, a face that drew you, invited you.

It was very finely done, so fine that it seemed that the girl might suddenly fly away from my hand.

“A fairy, eh?” I asked, looking at Peter.

“Oh, yes,” Peter said. “I know all about fairies. I met them in the gardens in the Other Place.”

This was the first I’d heard of such a thing. The most I knew of fairies were the stories that other boys told when they came to the island, stories about creatures that granted wishes or stole a child away from its parents and left a changeling in its place.

“When did you ever meet the fairies?” I asked.

“Oh, it was long before I met you, Jamie,” Peter said.

I could always tell when he was lying. His eyes went from one side to another, looking everywhere but directly at me.

“Peter told me that if you find a fairy and make a wish, it will give you whatever you want!” Charlie said excitedly. “I wish I might find a fairy.”

“And what would you wish for?” Peter asked.

Charlie fingered the fairy toy’s delicate wings. “I’d wish I could fly just like them. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to soar on the air above everything?”

Peter smiled, and it was the smile of a crocodile.

“Yes,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be.”

chapter 14

Peter stayed in the camp for eight days in a row after that. I would have snuck off to check the tunnel during that time except that he was suddenly showing an unnerving interest in Charlie.

Wherever Peter went and whatever he did, suddenly it just wouldn’t do unless Charlie was by his side. Charlie might have been reluctant except that Peter had softened him with the gift of the toy. Now the smaller boy was convinced that Peter liked him best in all the world.

Charlie began to copy Peter’s walk, a little rooster swagger, and stopped wearing his shoes from the Other Place because Peter went barefoot. If Peter thought that sunshine was wonderful, then Charlie did too. If Peter thought that hunting was boring, then Charlie did too. He would no longer help around camp because Peter never would. More than once I caught the two of them whispering to each other and laughing at the rest of us.

Peter was making Charlie a smaller version of himself, full of fun and heartless with it.

I knew that Peter was up to something, that he wasn’t really interested in Charlie at all. Because of this I was afraid to leave Charlie alone with Peter for even a few minutes.

That meant that when Peter took Charlie off to swim or climb or what-have-you, I always followed along, and the others went because I did.

Peter was happy because he had all his boys (and one girl) around him all the time and everyone was doing exactly as he wished without arguing about it.

Sometimes Sally would look at me, and that look would say that I needed to go and scout out the tunnel so that we could leave. I knew, and she knew, that leaving was the only possible way we could save Charlie.

But I was afraid that the moment I left, Peter would see his chance. If I looked away for even a breath, then Peter would put a knife in Charlie’s heart, and that would be as good as putting one in mine.

So I stayed in that in-between place, between the future with Sally and the past with Peter, because I didn’t know how to set us all free without losing Charlie.

Finally, one evening Sally pulled me aside while the others were distracted by Peter capering and tumbling about the clearing. Charlie was laughing like he’d never seen anything so funny in all his life. Peter would turn on his hands and then spring to his feet again, pulling faces and making ridiculous noises that had Charlie howling. Crow was laughing too, and even Nod was smiling as though he wanted to scowl but couldn’t quite do it.

“You have to go tomorrow,” she whispered.

I looked from her to Charlie, who had fallen under Peter’s spell.

“We’ve got to leave before Charlie’s in love with him any more than he already is,” Sally said. “He won’t even look at you anymore.”

It was true. Far from being my trailing little duckling, Charlie now disdained me as boring, the way that Peter often did.

“If you don’t go in the morning, then I will,” Sally said.

I thought this was unfair in the extreme. She was asking me to choose between keeping Charlie safe and letting her do something potentially dangerous.

“I’ll watch out for Charlie,” she said. “You have to trust me.”

Peter picked Charlie up, turning him upside down and making him laugh even harder. Charlie was so happy, but Peter—I could see Peter’s eyes, and he was not.

He was plotting.

That night I stayed awake while the others dropped off to sleep. Even Peter closed his eyes and slept, his arm thrown over Charlie like the smaller boy was a possession that he wouldn’t share.

I knew I wouldn’t have a better chance than that.

Out into the night I went, shivering in the cool air. We never got a proper winter on the island, of course, but it was that time of year when the wind blew a little colder and the sun lowered just a little earlier.

The unchanging moon was hidden by clouds. I thought I smelled the scent of rain. All around me the brush rustled as small animals darted away from my footsteps. I ran fast and quiet, wanting to reach the tunnel quickly. I’d know as soon as I entered it whether the passage to the Other Place was even possible without Peter.

If passage was possible, I would only go as far as the tree at the opposite end. From the tree you could see the lights of the city—the city Peter had taken me from all those years ago, the city that seemed to grow and stretch, reaching its fingers out to the tree that had once been miles from its center.

If I saw the city I would know, and I’d be able to return to our tree just as quickly. I was terrified that Peter would wake up and find me gone, and come looking for me. He seemed to be able to sniff you out like an animal if he wanted to find you. I didn’t know what lie I might tell him if he did follow me. He would never believe that I was going to the Other Place to find new boys to play with.

I turned off the path, finding my way despite the lack of moonlight. I’d walked that stretch so many times I was certain I could find it in my sleep.

And yet when I reached the place where the tree was supposed to be, I thought I’d made a mistake. Because the tree wasn’t there.

It was dark, but even with the dark I should have been able to see the shape of the tree against the sky. The stream that was supposed to bubble nearby was silent, and the ground underfoot was strangely squashy, like the land near the marsh.

I must have walked the wrong way in the dark, and I imagined how Sal would laugh at this after my insistence that she test her memory of the path. Feeling foolish, I started back to retrace my steps when the clouds parted and the moon revealed what had been hidden a moment before.

The tree had been cut down.

In truth, it looked as though it had somehow been torn down. The break in the trunk was less like an axe-chopping and more like it was ripped away by an angry giant.

If I had walked even a few steps farther, I would have bumped into it, for it blocked the way completely. It partially dammed up the flow of the little stream, which had caused the water to seep around it and soak the grass.

My heart pounded as I approached the broken trunk. Just because the tree was gone didn’t mean that the tunnel was gone. Why should the tree falling affect it? The roots were still in place . . .

The roots were there, but these had definitely been cut by something that bit sharp and deep. And every place the roots were sliced, there was something filling those cuts, something dark and sticky that looked like blood.

I touched it, and it clung to my fingers, and when I sniffed it the stuff smelled like blood too.

The hole between the roots was gone.

It wasn’t just filled in. It was entirely gone, as if it had never been. There was grass growing over the place where it used to be.

“Peter,” I breathed, and fell to my knees.

Somehow, Peter had discovered our plan, mine and Sal’s. Had he been in the woods that day? Had he seen Sal kiss me, heard us talk about leaving the island?

It would explain the flash that Sal saw, and why there had been no sign of anyone nearby. Peter knew how to cover his tracks.

Peter had snuck away from the tree, probably in the night when we all slept, and destroyed the gate back to the Other Place so that we could never, ever leave.

It was Peter’s island, and we were now his prisoners.

“No,” I said, and stood up again.

I was not going to stay there. The island was surrounded by water. We could make a boat and sail away. We could steal a boat from the pirates. They had those rowboats that they used to come ashore. It would be hard going on the ocean in a boat that small, but we might find a ship of friendly folk who would take us aboard.

And if we didn’t, well—anything, even dying at sea, was preferable to staying there one more moment in the company of a mad child who would jail us on his island paradise.

If Peter tried to stop us, tried to hurt any of the others, I would kill him.

I knew then that I could do it. For a long time the memory of our former happiness had stopped me, but no more.

Peter wasn’t my brother. He was my enemy.

I knew what to do with an enemy.

My dagger was in my hand, and I ran.

• • •

I wasn’t away from the tree that long, but it was long enough.

When I reached the clearing I don’t know what I intended to do—to wake Peter and make him fight me or to slit his throat in his sleep. I just knew that I wanted to know his blood, to see his green eyes dull, to end his power over me forever.

I could hardly remember why his smile had once meant so much to me. There was only one smile I wanted from him then, a long thin red one where a smile should not be.

(a flash of silver in the darkness)

(what have you done?)

(small hands covered in blood)

The dream-memories were in my way. I shook them off, entered the tree, ready to confront Peter and end it all forever.

He was gone, and so was Charlie.

“No,” I said, and kicked the skins they’d been sleeping on. “No, no, no, no, no!”

Sal and Crow and Nod sat up, all three still bedazzled by sleep.

“Where’s Peter and Charlie?” I shouted.

Crow and Nod looked like they didn’t understand what I was saying, but Sal was on her feet right away.

“They must have gone while we slept,” she said, and her face was white and scared.

She reached for my arm, and I shook her off. “I thought I could trust you.”

“Jamie, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Why are you yelling just because Peter and Charlie are gone?” Crow said.

“Because Peter hates Charlie,” Nod said. So he understood, too, what Peter’s game was about. Before Fog died, he wouldn’t have even noticed. “We could track him.”

I shook my head. “No, it’s hard to track Peter in the day. It’s impossible in the night.”

“Where would he take him?” Sal asked.

I immediately thought of the crocodile pond, and then realized Peter would never take Charlie anywhere so obvious. He would know that I would think of the story, and run to save Charlie there.

There was only one place where he’d go, because he would think we’d never guess.

“The Many-Eyed,” I said. “He’s taking Charlie to the nest.”

“Would Charlie follow him there?” Nod asked, and now his face was white too. Nod never went near the plains, or even the border of them, if he could avoid it. “He’s scared of the Many-Eyed.”

While we were talking I was gathering anything that might be useful—bows and arrows, knives, rocks, slingshot, sharp sticks, the special stones that we used to start fires. I thrust all of these things in my sling-bag.

“Peter’s got Charlie now,” I said. “He’ll believe anything Peter says, do anything Peter does. If Peter said it was a wonderful lark to cross the plains at night, then Charlie would do it.”

I started out of the tree and the others followed, though Crow still looked like he didn’t really understand what was happening.

Instead of taking the trail that led in the direction of Bear Cave, I went toward the forest on the opposite side. From there we could cut through the trees to the central plains, which was where the Many-Eyed nested.

Before we entered the trees, I stopped. I couldn’t take a chance that I was wrong.

I would lose Charlie forever if I was wrong. That story—always that damned story, chasing Charlie and me.

“Go to the crocodile pond and make sure they aren’t there,” I told Nod and Crow.

Nod’s face hardened. “You don’t have to keep me from the Many-Eyed just because I’m afraid.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I just don’t want Charlie to die if I’m wrong about where Peter took him.”

He looked into my eyes hard and believed me. Nod grabbed Crow and took off running in the other direction.

Then I started to run too, toward the plains of the Many-Eyed.

Sal ran beside me. She never stumbled; she never slowed; she never hesitated. She just stayed right beside me, driven by the same fear that was riding me.

My little duckling, wrapped in a Many-Eyed’s silk, nothing but food for their babies.

The branches lashed me but I didn’t feel them. Bears and wolves and cats ran from us, for we didn’t slow when we saw them and that meant we were something to be feared.

The moon went down. The sky turned purple-orange, and we broke out of the trees and into the plains.

Charlie and Peter were just before us. Peter was whispering into his cupped hand, and Charlie’s hand was wrapped around it.

Then Charlie caught sight of us, wild-eyed and sweaty, and his face lit up.

“Jamie! Jamie! Peter’s showing me how to fly!”

“No!” I said, but I couldn’t run fast enough.

Peter grinned down at me as the two of them floated up into the air, high above, and he pulled Charlie over the long yellow grass. Charlie laughed in delight, and Peter laughed too—laughed because he’d won. I watched, chest heaving in despair, as they flew toward the center of the plains.

I couldn’t outrun Peter in the air. He would carry Charlie to the Many-Eyed nest and drop him there, and that would be the end of my trusting duckling.

No. There had to be something I could do. I couldn’t just let it happen. I couldn’t let Peter win.

I threw down the sling-bag in frustration. All my weapons, all my plans—they were useless against a boy who could fly.

The fire-stones rolled out of the bag. The breeze went through my hair. The wind was blowing from the south, almost directly from the south.

“Burn them,” I said, and grabbed the stones. “Burn them all out.”

Sally understood immediately. She always knew precisely what I was thinking. She ran to collect wood that would be useful for torches.

If we burned the plains, then the Many-Eyed would have nowhere to go but the sea—if they survived the flames. The wind would help send the fire where I wanted it to go—toward the nest and away from our forest.

Peter might still try to drop Charlie in the middle of the plains and hope the little boy cooked to death. I was going to run ahead of the fire for just that reason.

Nod and Crow shot out of the forest just as I lit the first torch.

“Good, this is better,” I said when I saw them. “Nod, you take this torch and go west. Light all the plains grass all the way to the sea on that side.”

I touched the tip of the torch to another piece of wood, and when it caught I handed it to Crow.

“You do the same going east, all the way to the mountains.”

They didn’t even ask why. They just took the torches and ran, lighting the grass as they went.

I pulled some cloth out of my pocket to wrap around my face. Sal took it from my hand and tore it so she could do the same.

“I’m not staying behind,” she said. “Don’t ask me to. It’s down to me that Peter got away with him.”

There was no time to disagree, no time to talk about what she ought to do or who was at fault. Maybe it was Sal, for sleeping when she ought to be watching. Maybe it was me, for underestimating Peter.

Or maybe it was Peter, because he was a monster.

We ran, and we set fire to everything.

Soon the smoke billowed and surrounded us, and the flames were curling at our heels, trying to catch us, to drag us down, to eat us alive. Sweat poured off my face and over my body, soaking my clothes. My throat was parched, scorched by the smoke despite the cloth I’d tied to prevent that.

The fire roared all around, a hungry, mad thing that swallowed everything before it, and I realized that we needed to run for our own lives, not just Charlie’s.

Then I heard, just above the howl of the flames, the terrified screeching of the Many-Eyed, and I smelled them burning.

We ran straight into the nest. The egg sacs were all aflame, and any adults that were in their silks had caught fire as well. Most of them were running ahead—I heard their mad buzzing as they tried to escape the fire.

There was so much smoke, so much heat.

I didn’t know it would be like that.

I didn’t understand fire was that kind of monster.

We kept running. The nest was enormous, a series of spun silk caves connected by longer threads, one after another. If Peter dropped Charlie, it would be here.

But if he was here, how would I find him? I hadn’t reckoned on the smoke, a black billowing cloud that was drowning everything.

And the noise. The fire was so noisy, a roaring, howling thing. Calling out for Charlie was pointless.

Then Sal grabbed my shoulder. Her eyes were streaming from the smoke and so were mine, but she pointed to the ground ahead of us.

There was my Charlie, half wrapped in Many-Eyed’s silk, his arms and head exposed.

“Not dead,” I moaned. “No, not dead.”

I ran to him, and picked him up, and held his little body to mine.

And felt his heart beat.

Sal tugged me up. The fire was already there, hunting us, relentless.

We ran and ran and ran toward the sea, and I held Charlie close to me and promised that I would keep him safe. Over and over I promised that, if only he would live.

And then somehow we were out of the grass and falling on the dry sand of the beach. Before us were the Many-Eyed that had outrun the fire.

There were so many of them. So many I couldn’t count. I’d never really understood.

They filled the space between the plains and the water, and they didn’t seem to notice us at all. The ones that were closest to the sea were screeching in terror, as were the ones that were being burned by flame. All the Many-Eyed in between were pushing and buzzing and trying to find a way out when there was none.

I scrambled, exhausted, toward some jumbled rocks on the west end, and Sal followed me. We stayed low, crawling, avoiding the Many-Eyed’s teeth and legs and stingers. I clutched at Charlie with one arm and pulled myself along with the other.

We reached the rocks and I made Sal go up first, so I could pass Charlie to her. Then I followed, taking Charlie again, and we climbed until we were well above the sand. Sal collapsed at the top, pulling the cloth off her face and coughing. There was no flat space to rest on—all those rocks were jumbled and sharp—but the sea air was fresh and we were away from the madness of the Many-Eyed.

I took the cloth off my own face and then cut the silk off Charlie’s body with my dagger. I pressed my ear against his chest and listened. His heart still beat, but slowly, and his breath wasn’t easy.

Sal watched me with frightened eyes. “Is he . . . ?”

“He’s still alive,” I said.

My voice was strange and croaking and my lungs burned. I felt like I was still inside the smoke, even though it was billowing away from us, up above the island. I wondered what the pirates made of all this.

I wondered where Peter was now.

I propped my back against one of the rocks and pulled Charlie into my lap, his head on my shoulder.

Below us the Many-Eyed were now in a frenzy. At first I was too exhausted to realize why. Then I saw about a dozen of them knocked off their feet and swept into the ocean.

The tide was coming in.

The tide was coming in and the fire in the plains had reached its peak fury, the flames twice as high as the grass that burned. As the Many-Eyed in front ran from the seeking ocean, the Many-Eyed in the rear caught fire. Some in the middle were trampled as others panicked and tried to run.

There was nowhere for them to run.

We stayed on the rocks for a long, long time, watching the destruction of the Many-Eyed. It should have given me more satisfaction than it did. I’d always wanted to rid the island of that vermin. I’d finally succeeded.

Soon the beach was littered with the bloated, stacked corpses of the Many-Eyed as far as my eye could see. Some of the dead ones closest to the fire caught and burned, and the air filled with the acrid smoke from their flesh.

Charlie’s eyes did not open. And I didn’t know how to tell Sally about the tree.

We’d thwarted Peter. He hadn’t been able to kill Charlie, and he wouldn’t have another chance. The smaller boy wouldn’t believe in him a second time.

But we were still trapped on the island. The tunnel to the Other Place was gone.

Sally didn’t speak for a long time. She stared dully out at the slow massacre of the Many-Eyed. Then she said, “Did you know he could fly?”

“I saw him once,” I said, and the words seemed thick and heavy in my mouth. I was so tired. “I never could catch him at it again.”

“How?” she said.

“If I knew, I would have flown after him,” I said.

“Maybe Charlie will tell us,” Sally said, and stroked his yellow hair.

It seemed so overwhelming then, so impossible. How could I defeat a boy who could fly, a boy who had destroyed our best means of escape?

I wanted to tell Sally—so she could understand, so she could help me. She would be angry with me if I tried to solve it all on my own, if I didn’t let her stand by me as she said she would.

But I was tired. So tired.

I closed my eyes, and I remembered.

chapter 15

Mama? Mama?”

She wasn’t in the kitchen. She liked to be there by the fire, in her chair, mending clothes or polishing cook pots or just rocking while she stared into the flames. She liked it because it was far away from Him, the He who stalked through our house like an angry shadow, the He who staggered home from the pubs stinking of ale and searching for a reason to be angry at us.

He would never hit me if she was there, because she would stand in front of me and tell him to leave off her boy, her blue eyes sparking fury.

My eyes were not blue. They were black like His, dark and pupilless, like the eyes of the sharks that swam in the sea. But my hair was like hers, soft and dark, and I would put my head on her knee while she stroked my head and we would both cry and pretend that we hadn’t. She would sing a little song, a song that went into my heart and stayed there, a song that I would sing all the long years of my life.

He had gone out as He always did every evening, before I came home from the bookbinders’. Mama hoped I would apprentice there when I was older, but for now I fetched and carried and cleaned up after the older men, and at the end of the day they would give me a coin or two to bring home to her.

She was saving all those coins in a secret place, a place He didn’t know about, and no matter how hard He hit her she wouldn’t tell. I wouldn’t tell, either, because I didn’t know where it was. But she was saving them, so that one day we could run away to a place where there were no fists and no fear, just me and Mama, happy for always.

I went into the cottage and called for her, but she didn’t come to the door with a smile the way she always did.

He wasn’t home, I knew for certain, for when He was in the house He filled up all the empty space. Even when He slept He did this, the sound of His drunken snores echoing through the cottage, the smell of drink and sick overwhelming any fresh air that might come in the open window.

“Mama?” I called, and when I went through to the kitchen she wasn’t there, and I started to worry.

Our cottage was only four rooms, and when I went through all of them I didn’t know what to do. She might have gone to the market, except that it was late and the market was closed. She would never have gone out with Him, for she said that drink made Him disgusting, and He didn’t want her with Him anyhow.

I stood in the kitchen and wondered if I should look for her, or if I should stay exactly where I was so she wouldn’t worry if she came back. I hated to make her worry, for she already had so many cares and I didn’t like to add to them.

Then I noticed that the back door of the cottage was open, just a little.

Mama would never go out and leave the door open like that. There were rats that lived in the narrow way behind our home, and Mama hated rats, and an open door was an invitation to them—she always said so.

And the candles were lit and so was the fire. Candles were dear, and Mama wouldn’t waste them. She wouldn’t go out and leave the fire untended.

I went to the door, and pushed it all the way open. I trembled all over as I peered in the dark, the flickering light of the kitchen behind me. I couldn’t see anything except the shifting shadows, but I heard the scurrying of the rats and I shuddered. I didn’t like rats either, though I wouldn’t tell Mama that. I wanted Mama to think I was brave.

I didn’t want to let the rats in the cottage, but I didn’t want to go out into the dark either, so I stood there and called, “Mama?”

She didn’t answer.

I wasn’t certain what to do. The door was open, so Mama must have come this way. And the candles were lit, so she must have meant to return soon. But she didn’t answer.

She might be hurt, I decided. And if Mama was hurt I would have to be brave, so that she would be proud of me.

I took a candle from the kitchen, and walked out into the night, closing the door behind me. The sound of the door closing made me jump. Candle wax dripped on my hand with a hiss.

It smelled funny, not like the smell of rotting and rats like it usually did. There was something else, something that made my nose itch.

I walked out carefully, the stones ringing under my boot heels. They were so loud in the darkness, though from out on the street in front of the cottage came the noise of people laughing and talking and shouting at one another. Those people seemed very far away from me.

The circle of light cast by the candle was small, so that the dark pressed all around it. I thought I saw, just for a moment, a wink of silver ahead of me, a flash that reflected the faint light and then disappeared.

First my foot trod on something, something soft. Then the glow from the candle found it, and she was there.

Her eyes were blue and empty and her dark hair was all around her head in a tangle. She lay on her side and her arms were thrown out in the direction of the cottage, like she was reaching for something, like she was reaching for me.

Her mouth was open and so was her throat and the blood was all over her blue dress, seeping from the smile where no smile should be.

“Mama?” I said, and my voice was very, very small.

I reached for her then because it couldn’t be, it couldn’t be that my mama, my mama who kissed me and hugged me and held me so tight, was there on the stones with her throat cut and blood on her dress.

I tried to pick her up, to make her wake up, to make her stop pretending to be gone forever. The candle fell from my hand and went out.

“What have you done?” A voice ringing through the darkness.

“My mama,” I sobbed.

A boy appeared from nowhere, a boy I thought at first I’d never seen before and then realized I had. He was a little older than me and had green eyes and ginger hair, and more than once I’d seen him on the street near our cottage. He didn’t seem to belong to anyone and sometimes I thought he was watching me when I went home at the end of the day but when I tried to get a good look at him he would be gone.

Now he stood over Mama and me and looked sternly down at me.

“What have you done?” he said again.

“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “I found her.”

“There’s blood all over your hands and when the constable comes he’ll think you killed her and then they’ll hang you,” he said.

“But—” I said.

“You have a very bad temper, don’t you?” he said. “Don’t you sometimes run at your father and hit him with your fists? Don’t you sometimes get so angry that you break the crockery in the kitchen?”

I did, but I didn’t see how this boy could know that. I sometimes ran at Him and punched Him as hard as I could, when I couldn’t bear letting my mama stand between us any longer, and it would make me angrier because He seemed to like me better then. He would say that I had spirit and that at least I wasn’t hiding behind Mama’s skirts. I hated to do anything that made Him happy but I hated it when my mama was hurt too, and sometimes all these feelings would push and pull inside me until I wouldn’t know what to do and I would smash and break things until they went away. Then when it was all over Mama would put her arms around me and hold me until I was better.

“Everyone around these parts knows you have a bad temper, and when they find her”—here the boy jerked his chin at the thing that used to be my mama—“they’ll know it was you because you get so angry all the time and because your hands are covered in blood.”

I looked at my hands then, and though it was dark I could see the stains on them, and I was terrified that what this boy said would be true.

“But I didn’t hurt her,” I said. “I would never hurt her. I love her so much.”

Tears rolled out then, and the other boy smacked me hard.

“Stop crying,” he said. “Boys don’t cry like that. Now listen—you have to come with me. I know a place where you’ll be safe and they’ll never catch you.”

He had me all confused now, tangled up and turned around. I believed that when the constable came they would arrest me and they would throw me in a dark, dark place full of rats until it was time for me to hang.

“If you come with me we’ll go to my island. It’s a special place, only for boys like you and me. And there you can run and play and no one will hit you and you’ll never, never grow up.”

“How can you never grow up?”

“The island is magic,” he said, and he smiled. “And I live all alone there, and I want you to come there and play with me and be my friend for always.”

He tugged me up, tugged me away, and I was confused and scared and already forgetting my mama and her empty blue eyes and her arms thrown out, reaching for me. Peter pulled me away and told me all about the wonderful place that we were to go to, a place that was only for us.

We walked all night and reached the tree and tunnel and then I was so tired, and Mama seemed like she was a story from a far-off time.

We went through the tunnel and I smelled the island for the first time, smelled the trees and the sea and the sweet fruit, and the scent of the city was washed away. And later Peter and I were picking fruit from a meadow and he showed me how to take the skin off with his knife. There were red stains on the knife but I didn’t wonder about them at all, for all I could see was Peter smiling at me.

• • •

Jamie, you’re squashing me.”

“Jamie, let go of him. He can’t breathe.”

I opened my eyes, and found Charlie awake in my lap. Sal leaned over me, tugging at my arms.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You’re squashing me!” Charlie said, and he pushed at my chest.

“You were dreaming,” Sal said.

I let Charlie go and he scrambled free. I scrubbed at my face with my hands. My face was wet, though I couldn’t tell whether it was from sweat or tears.

“What were you dreaming of?” Sal asked.

“The same thing I always dream. A woman with blue eyes and black hair with her throat cut,” I said. “I didn’t know until today that it was my mother.”

“And?” Sal said, for she knew there was more.

“And it was Peter who killed her.”

I don’t know how I could have forgotten her, forgotten the mama who loved me so much, forgotten how she stood between my father and me and kept me safe. I felt a wrench of shame, that she would be lost to me so easily, that I would run away with a strange boy and leave her there.

I’d left her alone. Alone with the rats who would gnaw at her until someone found her—maybe my father, maybe a neighbor, maybe a happy drunk stumbling into the alley to take a piss.

But Peter had confused me. He had. He’d told me that it would be my fault, that I would be blamed. I was scared and confused and the only person who ever mattered to me was staring up at me with blank blue eyes and his hand offered an escape from the hanging I was sure would come. Who would believe a little boy, especially a boy covered in his mother’s blood?

So when he took my hand it was easy to leave her there, easier to run away from the horror, easier to forget that she loved me, especially with Peter telling me all the time to forget, that nothing from the Other Place mattered, that it was just him and me now.

I’d loved her, and I’d forgotten her. That was partly Peter’s fault, but it was also mine. I’d wanted to forget.

My anger at Peter burned brighter than it ever had, but my grief and my shame were almost worse. I’d remembered my mother only to remember what I’d done.

I’d left her there, her arms thrown out, reaching for me. The last thing she thought of was me and I left her.

To run away with the monster who’d killed her.

Sal gasped and covered her mouth at my words, though I don’t think she was surprised—not really. It seemed precisely the sort of thing that Peter would do, if he wanted someone and there was somebody else in his way.

Peter didn’t care about obstacles, even if they were shaped like people. They were only things to be jumped over, to be knocked down. You didn’t care about them.

He’d done it all so well, really. He’d looked for me—not just any boy would do for Peter—and found a boy who had the potential he wanted. Then watched me, and waited for his chance. And when he had it, he’d killed her, and then twisted me up so I was afraid. Once I was afraid, he could make me do anything he liked, and he made himself my savior, and he made me feel special and loved and then he pushed all the memories of my mother out of me.

Peter had chosen me first. He’d cut me away from the herd and taken me to the island, and I was too much of a boy to remember what I had lost. I could only remember all the days when it was just Peter and me, and we were happy then.

But the song had stayed, the song that my mother sang to me. No wonder he hated it when he heard it. He wanted me to shed all my life in the Other Place like an old skin, but he couldn’t stop bits of it clinging to me.

Everything I lost swelled up inside me then, the life that I might have had without Peter. Yes, my father was a drunken ass who beat us. But we were saving, my mama and me. We were going to leave him and find a quiet place away from the city where we would be safe.

And I would have grown up and my mama would have grown old but there would have been grandchildren for her to kiss and hug and hold so tight. There would have been a life, a boring, ordinary life to Peter but a full life, one that followed the natural order of things.

It was not natural for boys to stay boys forever. We were supposed to grow up, and have boys of our own, and teach them how to be men.

I felt a sharp stabbing pain in my side, and then in my hands and legs and feet, and something scratchy and prickly at my chin.

Charlie’s eyes widened. “Jamie, you’ve got a beard!”

I rubbed my face, and it wasn’t quite a beard, but there was fuzzy hair that hadn’t been there before.

Sal hit my shoulder then. “I told you not to grow up too fast! We’re supposed to grow up together!”

“I don’t think I have a choice, Sal,” I said, and there was a little grief there too. What if I kept growing and I was too old for Sal? What then? “It’s not something I can stop.”

I stood, and stretched, and realized everything hurt—my lungs and eyes, burned by smoke; my legs from trying to outrun the fire; my arms, from clinging to Charlie so tight.

The smaller boy was avoiding my eyes, staring at the mass of dead Many-Eyed on the beach. Behind them the plains smoked still, though all the grass and flowers were gone now and there was nothing except a blackened field as far as the eye could see.

“Peter,” Charlie said, and a sob caught in his throat.

Sal reached for him but I shook my head at her. He didn’t need to be comforted yet. He needed to say what was in his heart first.

“Peter didn’t like me,” Charlie said. “He tricked me, and I believed him.”

He did look at me then, and his eyes would never be those innocent little duckling eyes again. That was what happened when you were betrayed.

“I believed him, and then he tried to kill me,” Charlie said. “You never hurt me, Jamie. You always watched out for me. I shouldn’t have believed him.”

“We all believe him, at first,” I said. “Even me. That’s how he lures us here with his promises.”

“And then he rips us all to pieces,” Sally said.

“He won’t bring any more here,” I said, and took a deep breath, for now I had to tell her the thing I didn’t want to say. “The path to the Other Place is gone.”

“Gone?” she said.

I explained what I’d found, that the tree was cut down and the hole to the tunnel covered in grass.

She wilted as I spoke, and for a moment I was afraid she would faint, for she’d gone very pale.

“How did he know? We’ll never escape him,” she whispered. “Oh, why, oh, why did I ever come here?”

“Because you thought it would be better than what you had,” I said. “You thought that you would be happier here.”

“I would be happy here,” she said fiercely. “If not for him. If it was just us, you and me and Charlie and Nod and Crow, and we could grow up as we should, then I would be happy here.”

“But he is here,” I said. “And I don’t want to stay on the island any longer. I’ve been here for too many seasons already.”

“What do we do?” Charlie asked.

He came to my side then, and wound his fist in my coat the way he used to do, but he didn’t put his thumb in his mouth. He wasn’t a baby anymore.

“We’ll have to sail away,” I said. “It’s our only hope.”

“Not with the pirates?” Sal asked. “Because I don’t think they’ll be very welcoming to us, not after all that’s happened between us.”

“That’s all Peter’s doing, and Nip’s,” I said sharply. “If Peter hadn’t burned down their camp, and Nip hadn’t told them where to find us, then we wouldn’t have had to kill any of them. Or at least not so many of them. There might have been a raid, but it wouldn’t have been the same.”

Everything was Peter’s fault. My mother was killed by Peter. The boys he brought here died because of Peter. The pirates came looking for a war because of Peter, and were massacred by us because of Peter. Charlie had nearly been fed to the Many-Eyed because of Peter. It was all down to Peter.

“It doesn’t matter now if it’s our doing or Peter’s,” Sally said, and she shook her head at the look on my face. “It doesn’t. The pirates think all of us are the same now. If we go to them for help, if we ask them to take us away in their ship, then they’ll hurt us.”

She added then, in a small voice, “They’ll hurt me more than you if they know I’m a girl.”

I didn’t really understand this then, but I remembered that the pirates sometimes brought girls back to camp with them after they’d been away from the island, and that the girls spent all their time screaming and crying.

So I took Sal’s word. After all, she’d found it so unsafe to be a girl that she’d pretended to be a boy, which was how she’d ended up on the island in the first place.

“We’ll have to build a boat,” I said. “Build it in a secret place, where Peter won’t find it.”

“He can find everything,” Charlie said. “Because he can fly. He told me how he flies all over the island and he sees everything. It was nice to fly, even if it did end when Peter threw me on the ground. It was scary then. This big Many-Eyed made all this noise and then Peter told the fairy what to say and the fairy told the Many-Eyed that Peter brought me as a present for them to eat.”

His eyes welled up then. “I thought he was my friend and he tried to feed me to monsters.”

Again, Sally wanted to pick him up and comfort him, but I stopped her.

“Charlie,” I said. “What fairy are you talking about? The toy that Peter gave you?”

Charlie shook his head. “No, silly, a toy’s a toy. This is a real fairy, a fairy that lives on the island. She can talk to the Many-Eyed and she showed Peter how to fly.”

“There are no fairies here,” I said. “I’ve never seen one.”

“There are,” Charlie said. “But they only like Peter and not the other boys, so they don’t come out where we can see them. Only Tink does because she’s Peter’s special friend.”

“Tink?”

“That’s what he calls her, because she makes a kind of tinkling noise when she talks.”

I gave Sally a significant look. “I heard a tinkling noise that day when we were on the path talking about leaving for the Other Place.”

“Do you think she was spying on us for Peter?” Sally said.

“She always spies for Peter,” Charlie said. “And it’s easy for her, because she seems just like a firefly unless you get a close look.”

“And she taught Peter how to fly?” I said.

“Well,” Charlie said. “She didn’t really teach him. She shakes her dust on him and the dust makes him fly.”

“So if we had some of that fairy dust, then we would be able to fly away from the island,” I said slowly.

“It doesn’t last very long,” Charlie said. “That’s what Peter said. You have to keep a fairy with you so she can keep dusting you. I don’t think Tink would do it anyway. She doesn’t like anyone except Peter, and I don’t think it would be very nice to catch her.”

“What about the other fairies? Where do they live?” I asked.

“In the fields,” Charlie said, and pointed at the desolation.

“Oh,” I said.

“If any of them survived, then they won’t want to help the ones that burned their homes down,” Sally said sadly.

“Then we’ve got to go back to the idea of sailing away,” I said.

“But Peter flies everywhere and knows everything,” Sally pointed out. “And if he doesn’t, then this fairy will spy us out.”

“We’ve got to do something,” I said. “We can’t stay here. What about taking a rowboat from the pirates? There are only five of us.”

“How would we do that?” asked Sally. “We’d have to swim out to the pirate ship, and I can’t swim.”

“Me either,” Charlie said.

“That’s all right,” I said, warming to my plan. “Nod and me can swim out at night and get the boat, and then take it around to the mermaid lagoon and meet you there.”

Sally looked doubtful. “Won’t the mermaids tell Peter what we’re about?”

“They won’t know until it’s happening,” I said. “I don’t share secrets with mermaids. And anyway, the mermaids don’t have any special love for Peter. They love themselves best.”

“And when will we do all this?” Sally said.

“Tonight,” I said. “We’ll go back and find Nod and Crow; then we’ll collect all the things we’ll need.”

“Then Crow and Charlie and me will go to the lagoon,” Sally said. “And you and Nod will go for the rowboat.”

“Yes,” I said.

“What if Peter tries to stop us?” Charlie asked.

I didn’t answer. I think we all knew that it was down to him or us.

If Peter tried to stop us, I would be ready for him.

chapter 16

None of us wanted to climb over the corpses of the Many-Eyed or cross the smoking fields. We clambered over the rocks for several minutes until we came to the lagoon side, then skirted around the edge of the lagoon until we reached the main part of the forest.

Three or four mermaids were sunning on a flat rock in the center of the lagoon, their fish tails lolling in the water. They didn’t give any sign that they noticed us but I was sure they did—mermaids noticed everything. It was the only way for them to stay alive in the ocean, with sharks and sea monsters all around.

We stayed on the border where the forest met the plains. Crow had done a good job of it—all the grass had been burned here too, right up to where the plains, the forest and the lagoon met. Smoke curled from the ground, and there was a lingering heat in the air.

By unspoken agreement Sally and I took it in turns to watch both the air and the forest. Now that we’d made our plans I felt a lingering unease, sure that Peter would somehow discover the plot.

If he did find out, it didn’t mean that he would face us and fight us. No, it meant that he would try something crafty—like removing the rowboats from the pirate ship so we couldn’t get at them, or even burning the whole ship itself.

Peter had killed my mother so I would stay with him for always. He’d destroyed the tunnel to the Other Place so I couldn’t get away. I was sure he’d do anything he thought he must to keep me there with him.

I was first for Peter, and it didn’t matter whether I wanted to stay or not. Peter always got what he wanted.

Then I saw him just ahead of us, kneeling on the ground over something. I let out a cry, and he stood and looked back at us, and I saw the bloody knife in his hand.

“This is your fault, Jamie!” he shouted at me. “Your fault! None of this would have happened if not for you!”

My dagger was out and I ran at him, Charlie and Sally forgotten. All I saw was Peter and the red haze that covered my eyes.

He killed my mother.

Peter killed my mother because he wanted me to play with him.

“It’s your fault!” I roared. “You took Charlie! You burned the pirate camp!”

You killed my mother, I thought, but I couldn’t say the words because the rage was choking me, consuming me.

“I did everything because of you!” Peter shouted. “All for you!”

I should have known he wouldn’t fight fair. Before I was within throwing distance of him he rose into the air, high above where I couldn’t reach him. Blood dripped from his hand and his knife and onto my face as he flew above me, and away.

“That’s not fair play, Peter!” I shouted after him. “Not fair play at all!”

Sally screamed then, and her scream shocked me away from Peter. Then I saw what he’d been kneeling over.

It was Crow. Peter had arranged him so all his limbs were pointed out like an “X.” Crow’s throat was sliced from ear to ear, and then Peter had done the final thing to hurt me.

He’d cut Crow’s right hand off.

That was my mark, the thing that I did to pirates. Peter wanted me to know that this was about me, not about Crow. Crow had died because of me.

Sally covered Charlie’s eyes, pulled him to her, but it was too late. The little boy had seen. He didn’t cry, though. He only said, “There’s so much blood.”

“Yes,” I said.

Yes, there was so much blood. That was what Peter brought. He didn’t bring magic and fun and eternal youth. He brought fear and madness and death, trailing blood behind him, trailing all the corpses of all the boys behind him.

And yet it didn’t weigh him to the earth at all. Every drop of spilled blood only made him lighter, gave him the freedom to fly.

“We have to find Nod,” I said. “And get away as soon as we can.”

“What if he’s already killed Nod?” Sally said.

“We still need to know,” I said.

“There might not be time for the rowboat,” she said. “You have to go all the way across the island for it.”

“What about the other one?” Charlie said.

“What other one?”

“The one you left on the beach the day you killed all those pirates,” Charlie said.

“That boat is probably gone now,” I said. “I didn’t anchor it, and the tide would have taken it out to sea.”

“Isn’t it worth finding out?” Sally asked. “The Skull Rock beach is much closer than the pirate camp. Me and Charlie will go and see while you find Nod. It will be faster if you go on your own anyway.”

She was right; the pirate camp was much farther away, though getting there was safer now that the Many-Eyed were gone. But there would be the difficulty of crossing the camp under cover of dark, as well, and then swimming out to the ship. If by some lucky chance the other rowboat was still there . . .

“I can’t believe it wouldn’t have drifted away,” I said. “I think you’d be safer just going to the mermaid lagoon like we planned.”

There was at least a small chance that the mermaids’ watchful eyes would stop any mischief Peter might try on Sally or Charlie. The mermaids had their own set of rules, and I hoped that they wouldn’t let Peter kill anyone right in front of them.

“Stop talking to me about what’s safer,” Sally said. “Nobody is safe here. It’s not safe as long as Peter is alive. Whether I’m with you or at the mermaid lagoon or at Skull Rock, I’m not safe. Peter took Charlie right from under our noses while we slept. There is no safe.”

She made me all knotted up inside, because she was right, but I didn’t want her to be. I only wanted to be sure she was still alive when I returned, but there was no way to be sure anymore.

“All right,” I said.

I wanted to hug her again, or touch her hair, or just stand close and breathe her in. I didn’t do any of those things. I didn’t know how. I was only a boy, for all that I was beginning to look like a man.

And there was no time.

Sally and Charlie went south, to cut through the forest and then the dunes and down to the beach. I went toward the tree, which was where I thought Nod would go if he couldn’t find us. That was what we always did. We always went back to the tree.

I ran, because I wanted to find Nod before Peter did, because I wanted to get back to Sally and Charlie before Peter did. I ran because everything I loved had been taken from me again and again and I was tired of Peter taking more.

I didn’t know what day it was anymore, or how long the sun had been up. It seemed I’d been running since Peter took Charlie away, but I wasn’t tired. Fear and anger drove me on, made my legs stretch longer, made my feet barely touch the ground. Somewhere I’d lost my moccasins, though I couldn’t remember when that might have been. Perhaps my feet had grown out of them and I hadn’t noticed.

My red coat caught and snagged on branches and I tore it off and threw it away in the woods. It didn’t matter anymore. Peter had always wanted the coat. He could have it now.

I ran, bare-chested and barefooted, wearing only my deerskin trousers and my knife. I looked, finally, like the wild boy that Peter always wanted me to be, but I would never be so much of a boy again.

Peter wanted me to stay a boy, but it was Peter, finally, who made me a man.

Then I was at the tree, and there was Nod, sitting on the ground with his back against the trunk, holding his left hand over the bleeding wrist of his right.

Nod gave me a weary smile as I ran to him. It was a very grown-up smile, not the smile of the boy he’d once been at all. “I was a little harder to kill than Peter thought I’d be.”

“You’d think he’d know that, having watched you at Battle all these years.”

I inspected the wound. Peter had done a bad job of it. He’d cut into the inside of Nod’s wrist but not come close to taking the whole hand off. There were a few other nicks and cuts on his chest and arms but the wrist was the worst thing.

I went for the bandages and water, and wrapped Nod’s wrist up tight so that the bleeding would stop.

“Where are Sally and Charlie?” he asked; then he looked at me closely. “Jamie, you have a beard.”

“So do you,” I said, scraping my hand down the side of his cheek.

He seemed surprised by this, and touched his face. It was only a few stringy hairs, but they hadn’t been there before.

Nod laughed, and I was struck by how different that laugh was, how much older it sounded.

“We’re growing up, Jamie,” he said. “I wonder why, after all this time.”

“It’s because we don’t love Peter anymore,” I said. I’d only just figured this out when I saw Nod’s face. “Because we don’t want to be boys and do boy things for always. The island will keep you young if you want it, and Peter never wants to be a man. But we don’t want it anymore.”

“No,” Nod said. “I had enough of being a boy when Fog died.”

I finished patching Nod up and then ran to collect all that I thought we would need on the boat—water, food, rope, weapons. I made certain to pack one of the pirate swords as well as an axe and several small daggers.

There was a great deal to carry, but there was no sense in pushing a rowboat into the sea without supplies. All we would be doing was trading Peter’s death for the slow death of starvation.

I let Nod rest until I was ready. He wanted to carry some of the supplies, but I wouldn’t let him. He’d lost too much blood and I was worried he wouldn’t be able to make it to Skull Rock as it was.

Somehow night had fallen again. How did the days pass so quickly then? I felt as though I’d just left to find Charlie, to save him from the Many-Eyed. I felt like I’d been on the island forever, running in circles, trying to escape Peter’s trap.

Once, a long time before, I’d found a wolf’s paw inside one of our rope traps. Just the paw, not the rest of the wolf. It was mangled and torn and horrible-looking, for the wolf had chewed off its own foot rather than be caught.

I should have chewed off my foot long ago, but I didn’t know that I was in a trap. Peter smiled and made me think there was only joy. Even when there was blood he made me think it was only play, until there was so much of it even Peter couldn’t pretend anymore.

Fireflies lit the night in the forest. I used to love to watch them light up, sparkling like stars close enough to touch, but I swatted any that came near me. I wasn’t certain anymore that they were fireflies. They might be fairies in disguise, spying for Peter and telling tales back to him.

And if they were fairies, they would have no love for me, for I’d burned all the plains where they’d lived.

Would I have still burned the plains if it meant getting rid of the Many-Eyed and saving Charlie? Yes. I would have. But I would have warned the fairies, if I’d known they were there. This was another fault to lay at Peter’s door.

If he hadn’t kept the fairies secret, then they might have been saved. Peter had wanted them all to himself, to keep their magic just for him.

Peter wanted to fly, but he wanted the rest of us bound to earth.

I tried to hurry Nod along, but he was tired and bloodless and not driven by the same fear that I was. He cared about Sally and Charlie, but it wasn’t the same.

Or so I thought.

We’d hardly spoken since leaving the tree. I could think only of Sally and Charlie and Peter and what might happen while I was gone.

Sally wanted me to trust her, to believe that she could look after herself because she had done so for years before she met me. But Sally didn’t know Peter, not really. Peter wasn’t like the boys that Sally fought for food on the streets of the city.

We’d crossed into the dunes, and the sky opened up above us. So many stars wheeled overhead it was hard to imagine them all. They were brighter that night than they’d ever been and they seemed to cry out to me, “Hurry, hurry, hurry.”

“I know she loves you,” Nod said.

He startled me. I wasn’t thinking about love. I was thinking about getting Sally and Charlie off the island and away from Peter. “What?”

“Sally,” Nod said.

I thought he might be blushing.

“So?” I said. I wasn’t certain why we were talking about this now.

“I was hoping it would be me, but it’s you. And I just wanted you to know that’s all right.”

It felt strangely like he was giving us a blessing, and it made me feel awkward in a way that I’d never been with Nod before.

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“You’ve always been the best of us, Jamie,” Nod said, and his voice cracked. “Me and Fog, we always looked up to you. We always wanted to be just like you, only we never were.”

If he was crying I didn’t want to see. I only wanted to get to the beach. The night was spinning on and Peter could have found them by now.

“I wasn’t as good as you think,” I said.

“You kept us alive. You looked after us. We all knew it, even if we didn’t say so. We knew it made Peter jealous.”

“Peter’s not jealous of me,” I said. “Only of anyone that takes me away from him.”

“He is,” Nod insisted. “He knows no one will ever love him the way we all loved you.”

My throat felt clogged suddenly. I cleared it noisily, but found I couldn’t say anything. What could I possibly say?

“We all loved you, and so we loved Peter too, because you did. But when you stopped, so did the rest of us. You always made us see him through your eyes.”

If I’d known I had that kind of power over the boys . . . I might have left sooner. I might have saved more of them.

It took such a long time for me to see Peter as he truly was. He blinded me, and shame wriggled in my stomach.

Was this, too, part of growing up? Was it facing the bad things you’d done as well as the good, and knowing all your mistakes had consequences?

Peter made mistakes all the time—he was thoughtless; he hurt people. But it never troubled him, not for a moment. He forgot all about it in an instant. That was being a boy.

I wasn’t a boy anymore.

Then she screamed, and screamed again. It echoed over the dunes, high and shrill.

Peter. Peter had found them.

I dropped everything I was carrying and ran for my life, for Sally’s life, for Charlie’s life.

One more time, I ran.

chapter 17

Nod ran with me, or tried to, but he soon fell behind. I heard him panting and coughing, trying to keep up. Sally’s scream went on and on.

I don’t know how long I ran, listening to that scream hovering in the air, and then it stopped.

When it stopped, I ran faster, though I didn’t know that I could. My body already felt like it was pushed far past the point of pain or exhaustion. I didn’t feel anything except fear, except the pounding of my heart driving me along.

In my mind I saw Sally on the beach, her arms spread out in an “X” like Crow, a big red smile at her throat where there shouldn’t be one at all.

Her blue eyes empty and open, a cloud of dark hair around her head. Just like my mother.

Because that was what Peter did. If I loved someone he took them away. I should never have loved her in the first place. Or Charlie. Or Nod.

Or Fog or Crow or Del or anybody.

Not even my mother. I’d loved her, and so Peter had cut her away from me, just as quick as the pirate he was. He took what he wanted and left what he didn’t behind.

The moon was full, like it always was on the island, watching with its cold, cold eye. The seasons changed but the moon never did. The moon was Peter’s brother, never changing.

It lit up the sand and the ocean like daylight, but at first I didn’t see them. I did see the rowboat, though—Charlie had been right about that. But what good was the boat if Charlie and Sally were dead?

Then I did see them. And everything was worse, much worse than I’d imagined. Peter hadn’t slit Sally’s throat and left her for me to weep over.

He’d brought a crocodile to the beach.

I knew Peter must have done it on purpose, for the crocodiles always stayed near the pond. None of them would have roamed the forest or cruised as far as the place where the marsh met the sea. In all the years I’d been there, I had never seen such a thing.

A huge crocodile, its belly round and dragging in the sand, sprinted after Charlie with surprising speed.

Peter was high above the sand, laughing in the air as Charlie ran, trying to reach the safety of the rocks at the other end. The little boy was so scared he was zigzagging this way and that, always just out of reach of the crocodile’s snapping jaws. I heard his thin cry of terror streaming behind him.

I was sure that if Charlie managed to reach the rocks, Peter would grab him and drop him into the crocodile’s open mouth. Peter was well past the point of pretending to care anymore. No one remained to pretend for—almost all the boys were gone, and the ones who were left no longer believed in him.

I ran, not knowing how I could do it again, knowing only that if I didn’t reach him in time, Charlie would be eaten for certain. And I wished I’d thought to bring some arrows, for nothing would have pleased me more than to shoot Peter out of the sky and watch him fall like a burning star to earth.

There were trails of dark blood in the sand. I caught a glimpse, just from the corner of my eye, something that looked like Sally.

Or something that used to be Sally.

If Sally was dead, I couldn’t help her. Charlie was what mattered now.

Peter didn’t appear to have noticed me yet, for he was too busy laughing himself silly at Charlie’s struggle to reach and climb the rocks.

The last time I was at those rocks I’d had to scrape off what was left of six boys and bury them all. I didn’t want to do that again. I didn’t think I could bear it, to put Charlie in the ground.

The crocodile snapped and this time it caught Charlie’s leg. He screamed in terror as the croc ripped away his pants and teeth grazed his leg, but he wasn’t caught, not yet.

I put on a burst of speed, my dagger out in my left hand, and leapt onto the back of the crocodile. Its scaly back scratched my bare chest and I felt all the muscles of the creature bunching. The animal bucked, trying to roll over and throw me off, but I dug in my knees hard and wrapped my right arm under its jaw to hold it in place and then I slashed as hard as I could across its neck with my other hand.

It wasn’t quite enough, though blood poured over my arm, and the crocodile twisted back and forth, trying to get me off so it could bite and claw.

Peter cried, “That’s not fair of you, Jamie! That’s no fun!”

I didn’t know where Charlie was, but I hoped he was hiding from Peter. It was difficult to see anything except the heaving animal underneath me, lashing its tail and tossing its head to and fro in a desperate attempt to make me go away.

I stabbed at the croc again and again, trying to reach the soft underbelly, and finally it slowed. Hot blood gushed from its many wounds, and then it stilled.

I rolled off its back and away from its claws and teeth, not trusting that it was entirely dead yet. Blood coated my hands and arms and sand stuck to it so when I tried to swipe the sweat from my eyes I got a face full of the fine grains.

Spitting and trying to clear my eyes I called, “Charlie!”

“Jamie!” he said from somewhere in front of me, and he didn’t sound happy or relieved that I’d killed the crocodile. He sounded terrified.

I shook the sand off, my eyes still blurry, and then the world swam into focus again.

Peter was holding Charlie tucked in one arm, almost the way I did, like he cared about Charlie, except that in his other hand he held his knifepoint over Charlie’s heart.

Peter watched Charlie’s face and mine, though Charlie was looking only at me. His eyes were pleading for me to do something, do anything, to save him.

I’d told him I would protect him.

“Caught your little duckling now, haven’t I?” Peter said.

His voice was singsong and somehow very young. His eyes darted between Charlie and me, sure that I wouldn’t be able to stop him. I saw the cruel glee at this certainty, his enjoyment of our distress.

“Thought you could get away from me but you won’t. Nobody ever leaves the island, Jamie. Nobody. Especially not you. And certainly not this little duck, who went wandering from his mama. Should have stayed home like you were supposed to. Should have listened and minded. Now you’ve been naughty and you have to be punished. All the boys must follow my rules, for this is my island.”

He stroked the knifepoint down Charlie’s chest toward his belly, and the smaller boy tried to shrink away but Peter held him tight.

“It’s me you want to punish,” I said. I tried hard not to sound scared, not to sound like I would do anything if he would only let Charlie go. “Why hurt him?”

“Because it will punish you if I kill him,” Peter said. “I know you, Jamie. I know your heart, even if you think I don’t. It will hurt you more if you can’t save him than it would if I killed you outright.”

“Why not just let us go?”

“Because who would I play with if you all were gone?” Peter said. “No, you have to stay here with me, Jamie, the way you said you would always. And for you to stay here with me means the rest of them must die. They keep you from me.”

“I’m not going to stay a boy, Peter. I’m going to grow up,” I said. “I already am.”

He seemed to look at me then for the first time, really look at me. He hadn’t, not properly, since before he took Charlie to the Many-Eyed. Now he took in my taller body and my bigger hands and the hair on my face that hadn’t been there before.

His face twisted into something awful then, something monstrous and terrifying. He pulled Charlie tighter to his body and the younger boy cried out in pain.

“No,” Peter said, stalking closer to me. “No, no, no, no, no! You’re not allowed to grow up. You’re supposed to stay here with me forever, for always. Who am I to play with if you grow up, Jamie?”

His eyes, I saw, glittered with tears, but I couldn’t believe in them. Peter wasn’t really hurt. He only wanted to have his way, like always. But he was coming closer to me, closer and closer, and I waited for my chance. The dagger was still in my hand.

“It’s over, Peter,” I said. “No one wants to play with you anymore. And you destroyed the tunnel to the Other Place, so you can’t bring any more boys here. You’re going to be alone here forever unless you grow up.”

“No, I’m not growing up! I’m never growing up!” Peter screamed.

Then he screamed again, this time in surprise, and he dropped Charlie. I lunged to scoop him up as Peter flailed at the back of his thigh, reaching for something.

Nod had snuck up behind Peter while he talked to me, so quiet and careful I hadn’t even noticed Nod there, and had thrown his knife at Peter, right into his leg.

Peter pulled the knife from his thigh and howled in pain and also, I think, in shock that he was actually hurt. He rose straight up from the ground, cursing all the terrible words he’d ever heard from the pirates.

A little golden firefly light bobbed around his head as he shouted his fury at us. Then he abruptly soared away, leaving us on the beach.

Nod’s expression was fierce and proud. “I got him back. He got me but I got him back.”

“And you saved Charlie,” I said.

I sank to the ground then, the world gone all wobbly, and Charlie rolled out of my arms.

Nod ran to me, pushing me over so I didn’t collapse on my face but on my back instead. I shook all over, every muscle trembling from exertion and shock.

I’d been running and running and running for days, it seemed, trying to stop the inevitable, trying to stop Peter from slaughtering them all.

My breath came in thready gasps. Nod and Charlie leaned over me, identical expressions of worry on their faces.

“Jamie?” Charlie asked.

I flopped my hand at him. It was all I had the energy to do. “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not,” Nod said. “You’re white as bone under all that blood and sand.”

I tried to nod my head yes, to say that I was fine. I must have fainted then, for the next thing I knew the stars were gone and the sky above me the pale blue of just after dawn.

Charlie held my right hand in his smaller one. Tears streamed down his face. My left hand was still closed around my dagger.

“Charlie? Where’s Nod?”

“Burying Sally,” Charlie said, and pointed behind me.

I sat up straight then. I’d forgotten, forgotten the long trails of blood in the sand, forgotten the thing that I saw out of the corner of my eye as I sprinted down the beach to save Charlie from the crocodile.

I’d forgotten the girl who wanted to grow up with me.

Now she never would.

I managed to stand very slowly, every part of me stiff and sore. The crocodile’s blood had dried on my hands and arms and fell off in flakes.

“You don’t look good, Jamie,” Charlie said. “You look sick. Maybe you ought to sit down again.”

I shook my head, unable to speak. I walked slowly, limping because my right ankle was swollen. I had no memory of how or why this might have happened. Charlie trotted along beside me, holding out his hands toward me when he thought I might fall, as though he might be able to stop me.

Nod was at the place under the coconut tree where I had buried the others the day that the cannonball took them. He had a wide flat stick that he was using to dig a hole in the sand.

On the ground beside the hole was what was left of her.

Nod paused for a moment and saw me coming. He scrambled out of the hole and ran toward me, waving his hands and shaking his head no.

Nod had gotten taller since last night. He was almost as tall as me, though he’d always been a lot smaller when we were children. His blond beard was thicker than mine. He seemed almost completely grown-up, not in-between as I was. There was no more of the boy about him at all.

He put his hand on my chest to stop me from going any farther. That hand was big and thick-knuckled and covered with curling yellow hair.

“No,” he said. His voice was all grown-up too, deep-throated and rumbly. “I don’t want you to see her.”

“I need to see her,” I said.

“You don’t want to,” Nod said. “I wish I hadn’t.”

“The crocodile ate her,” Charlie said in a very little voice, his eyes downcast. “I’m sorry, Jamie. It only ate her because she was watching out for me like she said she would.”

I rumpled his hair, his little yellow duckling hair, and watched it stand up in the sunlight. Charlie was still a small boy, because he hadn’t been on the island long enough to stop growing the usual way and then start again like me and Nod. He was very tiny now compared to us.

“It wasn’t your fault, Charlie,” I said. “It was Peter’s.”

Charlie kicked the sand, his fists clenched. “It’s always Peter’s fault. Always, always. It’s because of him that Sally’s gone.”

Nod’s restraining hand was still on my chest. I looked at him for a long time, and he looked back, and finally he let me pass.

There wasn’t much left of her, not really. The crocodile had taken most of one leg entirely, nothing there except some ragged skin and sheared-off bone. The opposite arm was stripped of flesh, and there was a big chunk torn out of her middle. Everywhere there were claw and bite marks, on her hands and face and chest.

She’d fought. I didn’t need Charlie to tell me that she’d stood in the way of the crocodile and told him to run. It was what she would do. It was what I would do, and our hearts were the same where Charlie was concerned.

Her blue eyes were milky grey and empty. Her laughing blue eyes, the eyes that promised me we’d be together for always, the eyes that promised me things I didn’t really understand—there was no Sally in them anymore, no fierce happy girl that I loved.

I should have cried, but all my tears had been wrung from me already. My grief couldn’t overwhelm me anymore because it was a part of me forever, all the names and all the faces and all the boys that I hadn’t protected from Peter.

All the boys, and one girl.

Charlie and me, we helped Nod dig the hole and then I carefully laid her in there, and we covered her face with sand.

After, we sat on the ground near her grave, and all of us kept one hand on the freshly turned sand, as if we could keep her with us as long as we stayed there. And if we stayed there watching long enough, maybe she would push her way out of the sand, fresh and new and young again, for we knew the island could do that if it wanted.

I glanced down the beach where the rowboat was lodged so unexpectedly.

I was so tired. I hadn’t slept properly for two days and my ankle hurt from just the short walk to the coconut tree. My head lolled toward my chest.

I shook myself awake again. I couldn’t fall asleep. We needed to leave. Peter would be nursing his wound—the first he’d ever gotten, and the shock of it might keep him away longer than usual—and now was our chance. If we waited, then Peter would return, and he wouldn’t play with crocodiles this time. He’d stab Charlie and be done with it.

Looking at Nod, I thought Peter would have no luck trying to kill him. Nod was tough as a boy, and now he was almost a man. He’d already managed to score off Peter by injuring him, and Peter hadn’t been able to take Nod down when they were the same size.

I stared, startled, at Nod’s hands. I’d just remembered that Peter tried to cut Nod’s hand off, and the right wrist had been fiercely ruined the night before.

Now all the skin there was whole and pink and fresh and new.

He noticed me staring and turned his wrists this way and that in the sun.

“It happened while I was growing,” he said. “It just healed up so fast I didn’t even notice it happening. I don’t think that would happen again, though.”

“It was because you were growing so fast that all your body was making itself new,” I said, nodding in understanding. “Once you’re completely grown-up you’ll only get better the regular way.”

Nod narrowed his eyes, like he was thinking something very hard. “Do you think I’ll stop growing up soon? Or will I just keep going until I’m old and grey and hobbled, and then I’ll die?”

This hadn’t occurred to me at all. I supposed I’d thought we’d only grow to adulthood quickly and then stop. But Nod and I, we were older than even we knew. What if the island’s magic, once reversed, would unravel until it reached the end of the skein? What if Nod was right, and we would just get older and older and older every hour until we died?

“No,” I said. I had no reason for saying that. It was only a feeling. I thought it would be enough for the island if we grew up, if we felt the creep of old age on our bones the usual way. “You and me aren’t even growing up at the same time. You’re already older than me, and I’ve been here longer.”

“I think,” Nod said, “it’s because of what’s in our heart. My heart hasn’t been young since Fog died.”

“It’s not such a wonderful thing, to be young,” I said. “It’s heartless, and selfish.”

“But, oh, so free,” Nod said sadly. “So free when you have no worries or cares.”

I smiled a little then. “I always had worries and cares, mostly so the rest of you wouldn’t.”

I glanced again at the rowboat. “Do you think you could find the supplies I dropped last night?” I asked Nod.

He followed my gaze. “I’ll help you to the boat; then I’ll go see if I can find them.”

“If you can’t, then we should gather some coconuts and push off anyway. We can drink their water when we’re at sea.”

I didn’t like to think how far away the nearest land might be, or what would happen to us if there was a storm on the ocean. But even an ocean storm seemed better than staying one more day on the island, trying not to be killed by a mad child.

He helped me to my feet. My ankle was even more tender than it had been earlier. Nod put his shoulder under mine, acting like a crutch, so I could let the injured foot drag in the sand.

Charlie soon grew impatient with my slow pace but I wouldn’t let him run ahead. I wasn’t letting him go more than an arm’s length from me ever again.

If I did I was sure that Peter would swoop out of the sky and take him away and all I would be able to do was watch, for I couldn’t run and I couldn’t fly.

We reached the rowboat, and we all stared inside it.

The boat was all torn up, an enormous hole where the bottom of it used to be. It looked like it had been hacked apart with an axe.

Peter had gotten there before us, again, just as he had with the tree.

There was no way for us to leave the island.