Chapter 21 #5
I stood in the clearing, the dagger dripping gold in my hand, and I felt nothing.
Just empty. Just done.
Behind me, I heard movement. Groaning. The wet sound of someone dragging himself upright.
John. His face was gray with pain, his shoulder soaked red, but he was standing.
Michael was beside him, and Agnes was tucked under his arm. Her eyes were fixed on the scorch mark where Peter had been. On the ash still swirling in the air.
“We saw the light,” Michael said. His voice came out hoarse. “The green light. It shot up through the trees like a flare. And we knew that meant you’d won.”
He couldn’t finish.
Agnes pulled free from Michael. She took one step toward me. Then another. Her gray-ringed eyes searched my face, the blood, the wounds, the tears still drying on my cheeks.
Her chin quivered. “Miss Wendy …” She wrapped her arms around my waist.
“He’s gone,” I said. “He’s never coming back.”
Agnes nodded. Once. Twice. Then she cried.
John’s eyes met mine over her head. He didn’t smile. Didn’t speak. Just nodded once, as if to say, job well done.
Then Michael’s voice, thin and strange: “Wendy. Your shadow.”
The ground beneath me was empty. Bare. No dark shape stretched from my feet. No silhouette traced my form against the ash-covered earth.
“Wait.” John pointed. “It’s right there.”
Then we all saw it.
It drifted at the edge of the scorch mark. My shadow. Loose. Unattached. Floating just above the ground like a dark silk scarf caught in a breeze that touched nothing else. It rippled and folded, tattered at the edges, thin as old paper, but whole. Still shaped like me.
Still mine.
“Don’t let it get away,” John breathed. “If it drifts too far …”
The shadow trembled. Lifted higher. Started to float toward the jungle, toward the darkness between the dying trees.
Michael moved.
He lunged forward, wincing, stumbling. His hands closed around the shadow’s edge. It writhed in his grip, trying to pull free.
“I’ve got it,” he said through gritted teeth. “God, it’s cold. Wendy, I’ve got it, but I can’t … it keeps trying to …”
The shadow twisted. Fought. It didn’t recognize him. Didn’t want to be held by hands that weren’t mine.
Agnes stepped forward. “Let me,” she said.
He handed her my shadow.
It went still in her hands. Quieting. Almost like it knew her, remembered. Or maybe just that it recognized the hands of a child, someone who knew how to hold fragile things.
Agnes looked at me. Her eyes were serious. “I can sew it back on,” she said. “When we get home. I’m good at sewing. Mum taught me before—” Her voice caught. “Before.”
I knelt in front of her.
“You would do that for me?” I asked.
She nodded. Fierce. Determined.
I blinked back tears. “Hold on to it tight,” I said. “Don’t let go. No matter what happens.”
Agnes clutched the shadow to her chest. It curled around her arms, settled against her, as if it knew it had found safekeeping.
“I won’t,” she said. “I promise.”
I looked at my brothers. At this brave little girl. At the shadow that would be carried home in a child’s arms, to be sewn back into place.
We had come here to save Agnes.
But she wound up saving me too.
The treehouse groaned behind us. A crack split the air, wood splintering, supports giving way.
“We have to go,” John rasped. “Now. The whole island is coming down.”
It sounded like a dying animal. The screeching. Without Peter that meant this land would no longer exist.
Trees toppled over.
“Let’s go,” Michael said.
We ran.
John grabbed my arm and pulled me forward. Michael scooped Agnes up, shadow and all, and we plunged into the jungle as the world behind us ruptured.
The ground heaved. Split. A fissure opened three feet to our left, and I watched a tree disappear into its hole, roots and all.
The air filled with the sound of cracking, groaning, dying—the island was dying.
“Don’t stop!” John shouted. “Whatever you do, don’t stop!”
I couldn’t have stopped if I wanted to. My legs moved on their own. Moving. That’s all I could think. I needed to move. We needed to get home. Before we were trapped here.
A palm crashed down behind us. I felt the spray of dirt and leaves. Michael stumbled, nearly falling but finding his balance.
“The hollow!” I gasped. “We have to reach the hollow tree!”
The jungle fought us every step. Vines lashed at our legs. Roots erupted from the ground and tried tugging at our feet. The trees themselves seemed to lean inward, trying to trap us, hold us, keep us here to die with the rest of it.
Then up ahead. Movement.
A boy between two ferns. Pale. Translucent. Watching us with hollow eyes.
Then another. And another. Peeking between trees and bushes.
Children. Everywhere. Stepping out of the dying jungle like dreams surfacing from deep water. They lined the path ahead of us, dozens of them, hundreds, their small bodies dressed in animal skins, crowns made of leaves, necklaces fashioned out of vines.
I knew their faces. So many of them. The twins, holding hands. Nibs with his crooked grin. Tootles, so small, holding his wooden sword high.
And Curly. Standing at the front. Smiling that gap-toothed smile.
I slowed.
“Wendy, we can’t stop—” John started.
I couldn’t help it. I wanted to say something, wanted to say sorry, that I was just so very sorry that they would remain here, lost boys forever.
The ghosts of the children weren’t blocking our path. They were clearing it. They were bidding us all farewell.
Curly reached out his hand and I reached out mine. Our fingers brushed against one another. I felt him. He was real. When I looked over my shoulder, he had moved to the middle of the path, waving goodbye.
The jungle parted before us. Vines pulled back. Roots flattened. Trees that had been falling seemed to pause, to wait, to hold themselves upright just long enough for us to pass.
The path widened into a clearing. And there it was, the hollow tree. The fork in the road. Go right, and we did.
The children kept step on either side of us, following.
“Goodbye, Wendy!” One shouted, and then another.
“Bye, Wendy Darling!”
I brushed tears from my face and continued running, faster and faster.
The island continued to moan, scream, suffering as it died.
I turned around once more.
The jungle was folding in on itself. Trees collapsing inward, pulled toward some invisible center. The mountains in the distance, those jagged peaks I remembered from childhood, were crumbling, sliding, disappearing. Somewhere beyond the trees, the Black Rock split with a crack like thunder.
“They’re not coming with us,” Agnes shouted.
“No,” I said. And I saw it in her face, the questions she couldn’t ask. Why weren’t they coming? What would become of them? Would they be alone forever?
We reached the ash ring, and I stopped, bent double, gasping for air.
Michael set Agnes down but kept hold of her hand. She held my shadow with her free arm, clutching it tight like a precious item.
“I don’t know if I can,” I said. My voice came out in rasps. “I don’t have my shadow attached. I don’t know if I’m whole enough to …”
“You can. You’re still here,” she held up my shadow. “A little broken. But you’re still you. You just have to believe.”
Believe.
“I don’t even know how to anymore.”
Agnes shrugged. To her, the answer was so simple. “Just let go.”
I looked at my brothers. Their bruised faces. Their clothes covered in dirt and blood and mud and leaves.
“Let go,” I whispered.
I reached for John’s hand. He took Michael’s. Michael took Agnes’s, and Agnes took my other hand.
I closed my eyes and repeated. “Just let go.”
I thought of this chain of broken people, and how we had come together to protect one another, and I repeated those words in my head over and over again: Believe. Let go. And the noises of this dying world, trees crashing, mountains imploding, all of it, began to fade away.
The darkness swallowed us whole. Cold. Complete. For a moment there was nothing, no ground beneath my feet, no air in my lungs, no sense of up or down.
Light. Faint at first. A pinprick in the sheet of black. Growing.
Agnes gasped. Michael swore. John’s grip tightened.
Then silence, past space, leaving behind the second star toward home, and whatever would come next.