“Evasive maneuvers, Miss Darling! Now!” Hook shouted.
“Hang on!” she yelled, and then they dove. It was reckless, she knew, but it was better than cannon fire raining down on them from above. Several of the men screamed in terror, clutching at masts and ropes and anything solid they could find, clinging desperately to the ship as it plummeted toward the sea. Wendy used their descent to her advantage, gaining speed and increasing the distance between the two ships, but it wasn’t long before Blackheart followed.
No matter what Wendy did, the everlost ship matched her, slowly closing the distance, until the ships were almost within cannon range again.
“Prepare to fire!” Hook shouted, and Smee echoed the order by whistle. “Miss Darling, Mr. Hawke, on my mark, turn her broadside to the enemy as quickly as you can and then climb again.”
“Aye, sir!” Wendy answered. “Hard to port. Ready.”
“Ready,” Charlie echoed.
“Three … two … now!”
Wendy spun the ship as quickly as she dared, the wood of the masts and even the deck creaking in protest with the strain of it, and then they rose hard and fast. Wendy felt her knees threaten to buckle beneath her, and more than one sailor lost his feet, slamming to the deck.
“Fire!” Hook roared.
Smee whistled the order, and the cannons exploded beneath their feet.
Without the weight of the sea against the ship’s keel, the force of her own cannon fire knocked The Pegasus hard to the side. At first, Wendy fought to bring the vessel back under control. The feel of the ship slipping sideways went against every instinct in her bones—like a storm wave threatening to capsize her broadside.
But then the everlost fired back, and Wendy reacted on pure instinct. She moved into the slip instead of against it, edging sideways on purpose. The hull and the keel and the sails all resisted the air, but Wendy ignored the bucking and the protest of the wood and pushed, desperately, broadside and up, as hard as she could.
With mere feet to spare, the everlost cannon fire fell short, dropping harmlessly into the sea.
“Well done, Miss Darling.” Hook’s voice was low and surprisingly calm, but it held a respect Wendy had never heard from him before. “Very well done.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Wendy replied. Her heart was pounding from the exertion, and her words stuttered out between heavy breaths, her lungs demanding air. “But I can’t do this forever. We need to lose them. In the fog maybe, if we can reach it.”
“The fog’s too far,” Hook countered. “They’d sink us before we got there.”
“Not if we can put some distance between us first. Hang on!”
Between their rise to the heavens and their sudden, harrowing descent, they had ended up not far from where they had started. The mountain was close—Wendy only hoped it was close enough.
She pushed the ship in that direction, spinning her as she went, until they were sailing forward again.
“Full speed, Captain,” Wendy muttered.
“Full speed ahead!” Hook shouted.
Smee whistled sharply, and the men scrambled to catch the wind. The ship bucked and surged forward. Soon the everlost were gaining on them again, but Wendy thought they had a big enough lead.
Or, at least, she hoped they did.
“Prepare the men for a sudden break to starboard, Captain,” she told Hook. “And I do mean sudden. I don’t want to lose anyone overboard.”
“Hard to starboard, on my mark, Mr. Smee!” Hook shouted.
More whistles, and all eyes turned to the captain, who held his hook up high, waiting.
Wendy glanced over her shoulder, steering around the mountain and watching as the massive peak began to hide Blackheart’s ship from view.
“Not yet,” she said quietly. Blackheart’s ship disappeared altogether behind the towering rock, but she needed more distance. So she waited. And waited.
“Five,” she finally said, and Charlie’s hands tensed upon the wheel. “Four … three … two … now!”
Hook dropped his arm, and Wendy turned the ship as hard to starboard as the ship itself would allow—heading straight for the mountain. The hull creaked and groaned in protest, and the men hung on for dear life, doing their best to change the set of the sail without flying overboard.
It was a desperate ploy, but Wendy hoped that by changing direction and going straight over the mountain while they were out of sight, they might confuse the enemy just long enough to gain the lead they needed. And then they could make a run for the fog. If they could reach the fog before their enemies, they could turn and fire on the everlost from the relative safety of cover.
But that wasn’t what happened at all.
Instead, they reached the very top of the mountain peak, and the entire island disappeared.
or one terrifying moment, they were nowhere at all. But, of course, they must be somewhere, Wendy thought. Wherever they were, it was dark. And very, very cold. But that was all the time she had before everything changed and they were definitely somewhere again.
The air was warm. The sun was bright. And a new landscape spread out beneath them, stretching as far as the eye could see. There were green patchwork fields and meandering rivers. Mountains with cruel, snow-capped peaks scraped the heavens in the distance, with hints of jungle nestled below, glistening in the moonlight.
Wait. Moonlight?
Wendy turned to her right, where the sun shone brightly over the land, and then she turned back to the left, where the moon hung low over the mountains, the sky dark and full of stars. But how could it be day and night at the same time?
She spun around in wonder, only to discover that a vast desert lay behind her. As she watched, a giant ripple shuddered through the sands—as though some tremendous beast was about to crest through the surface before changing its mind. The ripple sank and settled, leaving only a ridge of dunes behind.
Another hint of movement caught her eye, and she watched as a flock of birds rose from the mountainside. Only, they couldn’t be birds, Wendy realized. She never could have seen anything as small as a bird from so far away. But they were white, like seagulls, and they soared through the air, lifting and turning as one, heading toward The Pegasus.
They moved in perfect unison, like a flock, Wendy thought. Or like a flotilla. Were those … sails?
Wendy was about to raise a warning, but when she turned to Hook, he had already lifted his spyglass to his eye, watching them. He stood on the deck of his flying ship, his thick mane of hair tied loosely behind his neck, and he stared through the instrument without comment. When he finally lowered the glass, he turned to Wendy and locked eyes with her, saying nothing.
“Captain?” she asked.
By way of reply, he merely handed her the spyglass.
Confused, she raised it to her eye.
The sails were in clear view, but Wendy still could not make sense of them. Then they shifted again—and she realized with a sharp intake of breath that they were not sails at all. They were creatures. Tremendous creatures, easily as large as ships and yet elegantly simple in design. Wendy saw no heads or arms or feet. They seemed to be hardly more than thin, stretched membranes riding the wind, with long tendrils trailing beneath them.
But then the tendrils, which had appeared almost translucent, suddenly sparked into life.
Pulses of luminescence—first red, then blue, then green, then violet—raced along the length of every tendril in a coordinated rhythm. Wendy wondered if they were trying to communicate with this distant flying creature that had appeared over their lands, echoing her own thoughts.
Who are you? What are you?
Without any warning, they changed the tilt of their sail-like bodies again, all of them at once, and they caught the wind to turn around, heading back toward the mountains.
Wendy lowered the spyglass and returned it to Hook, their eyes meeting in that special, shared intensity that says I know what you’re thinking.
But Wendy sai
d it first.
“Neverland,” she breathed.
“Are you certain?” Hook asked. “Absolutely certain?” He spoke quietly, but his voice held an edge of excitement that she wasn’t sure she liked.
There was not an ounce of doubt in her mind, but she didn’t expect Hook to take her word for it. So she pulled out the compass, which she kept with her always, and she opened it. For the first time ever, the outline of the island within the compass had changed, and the needle spun around and around, refusing to land anywhere.
Because Pan’s magic was all around them.
Where, before, she could smell the taste of it, or perhaps taste the feel of it, now she could feel the very life of it flowing through her veins. It pulsed in her chest. In her neck. In her wrists. In her fingertips. She felt it the way you might feel your own heartbeat after you have run as hard and as fast as you can—so hard that your heart pounds, and your lungs ache, and you can think of nothing else.
That was how Neverland felt, at first. But, already, she was learning to adjust to it. At least a little.
Not in the way that your heart slows down after running—the feeling that washed over her would never lose its power, Wendy already knew that—but more in the way that one adjusts, eventually, to being in love. The feeling is still there, all the time, and you still count on it every single moment of your life. But you come to accept the miracle as something you can depend on, so that you can get on with the daily business of breathing and making sandwiches without feeling so much like your soul might burst into flames and fly away at any moment.
Which is how Wendy managed to show Hook the compass without any change in her expression, and with only the tiniest tremor of her hand to reveal the enormity of what she was feeling.
“But … how?” he asked.
“I don’t know. We were above that other island, and the moment we reached the top of the mountain, we were here.” But then Wendy remembered the brief pause between the two. She remembered the dark, and feeling very, very cold. “No, wait. That isn’t exactly true. There was a pause first. Did you feel it?”
But Hook was lost in his own thoughts. “And what are those … I don’t even know what to call them. Those giant flying jellyfish. Are they aggressive?”
“Why, how would I know, Captain? I only just arrived here, exactly when you did. I don’t know anything about this place.”
She said it almost breathlessly, as though it were the greatest sentence she had ever uttered. And, to Wendy, it was. This was her childhood dream wrapped up in a bow. Just being here, in this magnificent new land, was already a strange and surprising adventure, and they had not even begun to explore. She could hardly wait to see what grand mysteries and magnificent new creatures they might discover.
As it happened, Hook was having similar thoughts, but his were much darker and more foreboding than hers. Who knew what nightmares might lurk below? The everlost were enough of a threat on their own. Suddenly, Hook was imagining an army of everlost descending upon English shores with a host of mythical beasts. Like Hannibal with his elephants. Except they would be wyverns. Or dragons.
Or flying jellyfish.
Hook scowled. “What pause, Miss Darling?”
“I’m sorry?” She was staring down at the farmland, wondering what crops might be growing there. She hoped it was something more interesting than the usual grains and vegetables.
“You asked whether I felt a pause. What pause?”
“Oh! Yes. I felt a pause between the two places. It wasn’t just now-you’re-here and then-you’re-there. There was a pause first. Someplace dark and cold. Like a tunnel perhaps.”
“A tunnel,” Hook echoed.
“Yes, a tunnel between the two places.” Now she was staring at the desert again, hoping to see another sign of whatever was burrowing beneath the sands.
“If it was a tunnel, Miss Darling, then what is to prevent Blackheart’s ship from using it to follow us?”
“Why, nothing, I suppose,” she admitted.
Which is why they were both staring into the empty air behind them when Blackheart’s ship suddenly burst into it, spun broadside, and fired.
endy tried desperately to move The Pegasus out of range, but Blackheart’s crew was well trained when it came to midair battle tactics. They burst into the sky over Neverland, spun, and fired, all in a matter of moments.
There just wasn’t enough time.
A cannonball smashed through the ship somewhere below, sending a shuddering groan throughout the vessel and rocking the deck to starboard.
“Damage report, Mr. Smee! Full speed ahead!” Hook ordered, and Smee whistled the commands to the crew. “Give it everything you have, Miss Darling! We have to outrun them! Make it happen!”
Wendy knew he was right. They were outgunned, and they were in the middle of the open sky, with no hope of cover anywhere. She gritted her teeth and stared straight ahead, accelerating The Pegasus as fast as she could.
Her eyes were wide, and she had to use her free hand to grip her own fist, just to keep it from trembling. They had barely managed to get away the first time. She was already exhausted, and now the ship had taken serious damage, making it harder to stay on course. The Pegasus felt as though it were fighting her even as the coin hissed and spat against the palm of her hand.
“I … I don’t know if I can do it, Captain,” Wendy admitted softly.
Hook moved to stand directly in front of her, and his forget-me-not eyes locked onto hers with a quiet but firm intensity.
“You can, and you will,” Hook told her.
“Aye, Captain,” she mumbled.
“Navigator Darling, listen to me. You can, and you will. Now, outrun that ship!”
Wendy squared her shoulders. “Aye, Captain!” she said, and her voice held more of its usual confidence this time.
Knowing that Hook believed in her did seem to help, at least a little. A new surge of energy coursed through her, and her hands steadied. The men rigged the ship for as much speed as they could muster, and Wendy pushed it even faster until they were hurtling through the sky at a breakneck pace.
But it wasn’t long before Blackheart’s ship was gaining on them again.
A sailor emerged from the hatch and raced toward them.
“Mr. Starkey,” Hook snapped, “report!”
“The hull’s intact, sir. They must have hit the rudder. I won’t know how bad it is until we can get underneath her.”
“Mr. Hawke?” Hook asked, turning to Charlie, who still held the wheel.
“Aye, sir. I can feel it. I’m not sure how much good I’m even doing anymore. Miss Darling’s doing most of the steering now. But I’ll keep doing what I can.”
“Good man. Miss Darling, report.”
“We’re losing ground, Captain. I don’t …” Wendy tried to swallow the lump in her throat. “I don’t know what else to do. I can’t go any faster.”
“What if we were lighter?” Hook asked. “Would that make a difference?”
“I don’t know, Captain. But we have to try something. I’m barely managing to keep us out of range.”
“Mr. Starkey, see to it,” Hook ordered. “We’re over land. Toss anything we can restock.”
“Aye, Captain.” Starkey turned to leave, but Hook stopped him.
“Wait. Keep half the water and half the hard rations. At least for now. There’s no telling what effect the local fare might have on the crew.”
“Aye, sir,” Starkey agreed. “But if it comes to it?”
“Get some men working on it and come back to wait for my orders. If it comes to it, we’ll take our chances. But not until we have to.”
“Aye, sir.”
Soon enough, a line of men emerged from the hatch passing crates and barrels and chests from one to the next. They emptied a few over the side but tossed most of them overboard entirely. At first, Wendy could hardly notice the difference, but eventually the gallons upon gallons of water and ale and rations being dumpe
d overboard began to add up. The ship lightened, and it became easier to maneuver.
But, still, she couldn’t help but think they were only delaying the inevitable. She felt more exhausted by the minute, so the ship getting lighter was only helping her keep pace, buying them a little more time, at best. And for what?
She kept scanning the land ahead, looking for anything she could use for cover, at least long enough to set up for a good shot. But there was only farmland ahead, as far as the eye could see, and Blackheart had made his grand appearance in between The Pegasus and the mountain range. There was no way to make it back to the night side of Neverland without being cut off by the enemy.
She was so tired. And her head was starting to throb. But worst of all, she was furious with herself. She should have thought about the possibility of a magical gateway. She should have headed for the mountains as soon as they had found themselves here—should have looked for a safe harbor instead of gawking at Neverland like a fool. Now they were going to be shot out of the sky. All of them. John and Michael and Charlie and poor Reginald and even Hook.
And it was all her fault.
She felt the weight of that thought on her heart, so heavy she hardly knew how to carry it. But she fought on anyway—fighting the coin, fighting the ship, fighting her own sense of guilt, fighting for more time. Time for something miraculous to happen.
And then something did happen. But it did not seem like a miracle. It seemed like the exact opposite of a miracle. Another ship lifted off from the ground up ahead, rising into the sky, unfurling her sails, and heading straight for them.
The admiral himself. The great Peter Pan.
Wendy recognized the ship the moment she saw it. She had flown it herself, that night beneath the stars. And now, apparently, it would be the death of her. And that was her fault, too, she suddenly thought. All of it. Befriending the enemy, taking the compass, following it blindly to Neverland. Every stupid moment of it. Trusting him.
That last thought brought her up short, and she paused in the middle of her silent tirade. She had trusted him. And she could still feel that trust, even now, no matter how stupid it seemed.
The Navigator Page 13
