The Lost Children roared their approval. The mermaids slapped their fins against the water, and the fairies chimed as loudly as they could, a hundred bells proclaiming the need for war. Of the Wendys, only the one who looked so very much like the Pan stayed silent, her eyes fixed on the surf at her feet. No one paid attention to her, or to the deep sorrow in her eyes.
“We have lost friends! Brothers and sisters! Remember them! Fly for them! Make vengeance in their names, and then do them the greatest honor that can be done in Neverland: forget them. Today, we have mourned. Today, we grew a little bit older, because you need a heart to grieve, and that which is not heartless can age. Tonight, we avenge. And tomorrow, we will be joyful and heartless once more.”
This time the roar was louder, because all the Lost Children knew that this was the way of things: when the Pan made a stirring speech, you cheered. Only the Wendys held their silence, because to be a Wendy is to be other than heartless, and so they were already on their way to being older than everyone around them.
“We fly for Neverland!” proclaimed the Pan, and this roar was the loudest of them all.
They left the shore by air and by sea, those who could not fly—either because they feared falling or because they had never quite caught the knack—clustered in coracle boats towed by mermaids as they made their way unerringly toward the distant pirate ships.
Most Wendys could fly, although Neverland etiquette dictated that as mothers, they should keep their feet on the ground as much as possible, to show that they provided the stable center for the chaos of the Lost Children. Cecily had been in Neverland for more than a hundred and fifty years, and still her flight path was shaky and uncertain as she tried to keep pace with her sister, the Pan. As she flew, she stole sidelong glances at the Pan’s face, looking for traces of her twin. Sheila had all but disappeared as the decades slipped by, blurring away into the features of a legend. They still looked exactly alike if you measured only in hair color and eye shape and height, but those were just fripperies—they didn’t matter. Cecily looked like warm fires and hot milk and bedtime stories. Sheila looked like cold winds and wild forests and stolen children coaxed out of nursery windows by the promise of something bigger and better than what they had. They didn’t look anything alike.
But they had, once. Before Neverland, before the old Pan died and the new Pan seized his sword.
Who will the new Pan be when you fall, Sheila? Cecily wondered, and shivered.
Until that moment, she hadn’t been sure that she would really do it.
“Pans aren’t like the rest of us,” said Edith, her eyes never leaving Cecily. “We live in Neverland, we play the parts Neverland asks us to play, but we’re just residents. The Pan is Neverland. The Pan is every leaf that falls and every flower that blooms. The Pan is every one of us, from the youngest Lost Child to the oldest Wendy, and without the Pan, everything would fall to pieces and be forgotten. But when the king is the land, sacrifices must be made. There are costs to keeping things in balance. Do you understand?”
“No,” said Cecily, and yes, said Cecily’s heart, and she knew what she was going to do. Not because she loved the Pan, and not because she loved Neverland, but because she loved her sister. It had been a long, long time since two little girls followed a boy clad in skeleton leaves out their bedroom window, fleeing from adults who raised their hands too quickly and hit too hard. They had flown to Neverland, both of them expecting nothing more than to be welcomed. Instead, they had been torn apart, Cecily gone to the Wendys, and Sheila . . . Sheila gone to something more. Being the Pan had eaten her up, swallowing her bit by bit, like she was drowning. If she lived much longer, she wouldn’t be Sheila at all. She would just be the Pan, and Cecily would be alone.
“She needs to lose,” said Edith.
And Cecily nodded.
The pirates were ready when the Lost Children arrived, notified of the oncoming attack by Edith’s message even before their sentries spotted the oncoming line of flying children, all led by a flaxen-haired little girl whose gown of skeleton leaves gleamed pale against her tan brown skin. She crowed. The pirates thrust their swords into the air, jeering, and the battle was joined.
Even in Neverland, even in a place where bedtime stories can go on forever and no one is ever told to go to bed or wash behind their ears, there are some things that are not pretty: were not meant to be pretty, because prettiness would steal their essential power, rendering them impotent and useless. So swords clashed against swords, and steel bit into exposed flesh, and children fell out of the sky like raindrops. Pirates fired arrows up at the Lost Boys and Girls who soared overhead, or down at the mermaids who flashed through the waves, trying to break the rudders and snare the anchor lines.
The Wendy who had been forced into the war by the Pan took a knife in the chest. He died choking on his own blood and was kicked overboard into the surf. Two of the mermaids seized his body and dragged it under, the fight forgotten in favor of a ready meal. Still the battle went on, the smell of gunpowder and blood wiping everything else away.
Cecily hung at the edges of the battle, waiting for the sign that Edith had promised her. A hand grasped her wrist, spinning her around, and she found herself looking into the tired, bearded face of a man she almost knew, if she looked at him just right.
“You . . . you were Franklin’s Wendy,” she said, her words tumbling into the space between the cannon fire. “I remember you.”
“Yes,” he said. “Are you here to pay the cost of war?”
No, cried her heart, and “Yes,” said her mouth, and he nodded and pulled her close, flipping her around so that her back was against his broad pirate’s chest. He pressed his sword to her throat.
“Do not be afraid,” he murmured, and bellowed, “Pan! Come and face me, girl!”
The Pan jerked toward the sound of her name, eyes going wide as she saw her sister captive in a pirate’s arms. “Let my Wendy go!” she shouted, darting across the battlefield toward the pirate who held Cecily. “Fight me like a man!”
“Ah, but lass, it’s never a man as kills a Pan,” said the pirate. His hand did something clever at his belt, and suddenly Cecily was holding a knife, small and sharp and wicked.
She remembered this, remembered Franklin shouting and diving for the pirate who held his Wendy. But the pirate had stabbed him in the stomach like a coward, and Franklin had died. Wasn’t that what had happened?
The knife’s hilt was patterned with the whispery bones of skeleton leaves. Cecily felt it with her fingers, and felt the story shift around her, finally coming clear.
“I love you, Sheila,” she whispered, and the battle still raging all around them took her words away as her sister dove closer and closer, shouting all the while.
In the end, Cecily didn’t even have to stab her.
All she had to do was hold the knife.
Sometimes a war isn’t about how many casualties can be piled up on both sides; sometimes it’s about one. One body falling as gravity suddenly remembers that it has a claim here. One body striking the deck of a pirate ship. One little girl overwhelmed with grief and rage, turning to bury a knife in the throat of a pirate captain who doesn’t resist, because he’s been where she’s standing, he’s felt what she feels, and he knows that in the moment that the knife slid home, she grew a heart so big and so broken that Neverland can no longer hold her. She’ll grow up, this girl, until her feet fit perfectly in his boots and she steers the armada away from land, a pirate leading pirates, to wait for the day that Neverland needs to make a sacrifice once more. She doesn’t need to know what a Fisher King is. Neverland knows for her.
Sometimes a war isn’t about an army. Sometimes it’s all about one person. But which one?
Does Neverland go to war for Wendy, or the Pan?
The death of the Pan filled the Lost Children with rage, and seeing the Pan’s Wendy kill the pirate that had killed the Pan filled them with strength. They could win this, and they would win it, f
or Neverland. For the Pan.
Bit by bit they beat the pirates back, until the horizon was free of those foul sails, and the Lost Children—the ones who survived—turned their eyes toward home.
“Where’s the Pan’s Wendy?” asked a little boy.
No one knew the answer.
“She must have died,” said Gantry. He’d been one of the Pan’s lieutenants, and so his words carried a certain weight; what’s more, there was a wild new light in his eye, one that spoke of flying, and lying, and never, never growing old. He was not yet dressed in skeleton leaves, but he may as well have been. “Poor Wendy.”
“Poor Wendy,” murmured the other children.
“Now come on—let’s race back to shore,” said Gantry, and took off like a shot, laughing as he flew. The others flew after him, the war and its costs already beginning to fade from memory. The blood on the water would take longer to disperse, but given a little time that, too, would be gone.
It was a beautiful morning in Neverland, and it would be long and long before anyone thought that it might be fun to go to war.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.
THE WAY HOME
Linda Nagata
The demon, like all the others before it, appeared first in the form of a horizontal plume of rust-red grit and vapor. Almost a kilometer away, it moved low to the ground, camouflaged by the waves of hot, shimmering air that rose from the desert hardpan. Lieutenant Matt Whitebird watched it for many seconds before he was sure it was more than a mirage. Then he announced to his squad, “Incoming. Ten o’clock from my position. Only one this time.”
But even one was deadly.
Sergeant Carson Cabuto, some six meters to Whitebird’s right, huddled against a jut of rock, black as obsidian, a stark contrast to the gray-brown camo of his helmet and combat uniform. “Okay, I see it,” Cabuto said. “That’s fifty-six minutes since the last one. I was starting to get worried.”
“Just starting?”
White teeth flashed in a round face tanned dark by the sun as Cabuto glanced at the lieutenant, his eyes invisible behind black sunglasses. “Now we know the rules, bring it on.”
The squad—what was left of it—had taken refuge atop a low plateau, one of several that punched up through the desert plain. Ten meters high and maybe twenty at its widest point, the plateau’s black rock was cracked and fissured, skirted by sharp-edged fragments that had fallen from the walls. The squad had spread out around it, so they could watch the desert in all directions.
Their combat training had neglected to cover a situation in which they were alone in an unmapped desert with no GPS, no air traffic, no vehicles, no goats, no sheep; where the radios worked, but there was no one to talk to; where the enemy emerged from churning dust wielding glittering, lethal swords—but they were learning.
There was no sun above this desert, and no real sky, just a dust-colored glare so bright it was impossible to squint against it for more than a second or two, but though there was no sun, there was heat. One hundred twenty-one degrees Fahrenheit according to Whitebird’s weather meter. He sucked in the heat with every breath. Belly-down on the black rock, he soaked it in, an exhausting, brutal heat that seeped past his chest armor and the heavy fabric of his combat uniform, heat that got inside his brain, making him think thoughts that never would have entered his mind if he was still in the world. Thoughts like, If Goodfellow breaks down one more time I’m going to shoot him and I’m more than halfway sure we’re already dead.
Whitebird knew that in all likelihood he had simply gone mad.
“This one’s coming fast,” Sergeant Cabuto warned.
“Roger that.”
Madness was not an assumption he could work with. It offered no way out. It demanded that he give up the fight, retreat from the battle, wail at a soulless sky, and pray for a rescue that would never come.
Fuck that.
This was real, for whatever value of real might get defined along the way.
He licked at the salt tang of blood seeping from his cracked lips, wondering if the demons smelled it, or just felt the presence of their souls like an invisible lure, undetectable by any human measure.
Whitebird turned his head, projecting his voice across the rock. “Estimated forty-five seconds until the next dust bunny gets here. Foltz, any more showing up on your side?”
“Not so far, sir!” the specialist shouted back. “But if I spot one, is it mine?”
“This isn’t a game, Foltz. Alameri, how about you?”
“Negative, Lieutenant!”
Assurances came back from Fong, Keller, and Cobb that no other demons were in sight.
Last of all, Whitebird turned to Private Goodfellow, down on his belly five meters to the left. The eighteen-year-old was not watching the horizon as he’d been assigned to do. Instead his worried gaze was fixed on the thing of sand and vapor, his gloved fingers clinging so tightly to his assault rifle Whitebird wondered if he intended to use it as a club. “Goodfellow.”
The private flinched. He turned to Whitebird. Dust coated the dark skin of his cheeks; behind his protective glasses his eyes were red-rimmed. All the warrior accoutrements—combat uniform, helmet, boots, safety glasses, body armor, backpack, assault rifle, grenades—could not make Goodfellow look like anything but what he was: a scared kid, overwhelmed by the unknown and the unexpected.
“Still with us, Private?”
“Yes, sir,” he whispered, not sounding too sure of himself.
“This one is yours.”
His brows knit together in abject worry. “Sir, please no, I—”
“You’re going.” Whitebird didn’t want to send Goodfellow. He had more worthy soldiers, but Goodfellow was the weak link and Whitebird didn’t want him around. “Stay down,” he instructed. “Don’t move until I tell you and do not use your weapon.”
With Goodfellow, the worst-case scenario was all too likely: at some point the kid would panic, and then his friendly fire would be more dangerous than the demons that hunted them. “When I say go, you jump down that ravine. You’re only going to have seconds to get to the bottom, so move fast. You got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Lieutenant,” Cabuto warned, “it’s here.”
Whitebird looked down in time to see the train of dust boil up to the base of the plateau. He could hear the burr of unknown forces swirling within it . . . or maybe that was just the sound of sand rubbing against sand, and maybe the sparks of electricity flaring and dying within the cloud were caused by friction, too, or maybe they were generated by magic—he didn’t know. He only knew it was a waste of ammo to shoot at the demon while it was in its sand and vapor form. The squad had learned that early. So Whitebird leaned over the edge of the shallow precipice, his M4 carbine aimed at the demon’s churning mass, and waited. Sergeant Cabuto did the same.
Seconds passed, and then the skein of sand drew itself upright, a snake raising its head.
“Here we go,” Cabuto whispered. “Show yourself, dust bunny.”
To Whitebird’s shock, the demon’s sand form shot up the cliff face. It burst over the top between him and Cabuto, showering them in a storm of grit that crackled and pinged against their helmets and eyewear. Whitebird rolled onto his side, his weapon aimed up as the demon congealed from the cloud.
It came dressed in a gray-brown desert combat uniform, with an M4 carbine clutched in its long, black-clawed fingers.
<
br /> That was new.
For eight weeks, ever since his unit had transferred to their combat outpost, Whitebird had been haunted by a sense of disaster lurking just out of sight in some unknowable direction. Every night he’d awakened in a rush of panic, sticky with sweat in the aftermath of some monstrous dream. He had told himself it was the altitude, the unrelenting aridity of the high-desert air that made it hard to breathe hemmed in as he was by the bare plywood walls of his little bunkroom.
On most nights he had wound up outside under a blazing firmament of stars, the soft purr of the outpost’s generator the only sound in the world—and when the generator cut out, silence enfolded him, silence so deep his brain hallucinated noises and he would imagine he heard a susurration of sand-on-sand, a crackle of electricity, and a haunting, hungry wail that made his hair stand on end—and his heart pound with fear.
He imagined other worlds brushing up against the one he knew.
He never spoke of these imaginings—who would?—and when the generator kicked on again he would go back inside and prepare for the day’s assignment.
That day the squad had been patrolling on foot, chasing down numerous reports of insurgents in the district. At the end of a brutally hot afternoon they were returning to the shelter of the outpost—a haphazard collection of plywood buildings surrounded by sand-filled barriers and barbwire situated at the crown of a low hill. They were five-hundred meters out and Whitebird was looking forward to food and e-mail when a missile came screaming out of the north.
“Get down!” he yelled and dropped to his belly.
He watched the missile hit. It missed the outpost, striking instead the hill beneath it. That hill proved to be made of ancient, weathered, rotten stone. Afterward, Whitebird would conjecture that the slow pressure of a cosmological intrusion had seared and heated and cracked the stone within that hill until it was shot through with dimensional faults and fractures. A blistering weakness, it shattered at the missile’s impact, collapsing into roiling clouds of dust and fire . . . and the demons slipped loose—boiling, vaporous plumes sweeping toward the squad with all the deliberate speed and inherent purpose of charging predators.
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