The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5

by Jonathan Strahan

“I see,” said Ivana.

  The spies in Her Majesty’s Secret Service have long been renowned for their discretion. To protect their country, some have been known to spin a deft tale. Some have died rather than speak. Some, even under torture, have preserved a perfect British silence.

  No spy but Pan has ever confessed to everything.

  Ivana the Russian was getting a bit of a migraine. She rather wished Peter would take a breath between highly incriminating confessions.

  “The Taj Mahal,” she began.

  “I killed him,” Peter said. “He was a tyrant.”

  “It is a building,” Ivana informed him with a certain amount of hauteur.

  Peter, occupied with relating the details of the epic battle he had fought, chose to ignore her. They were sitting at a small table in low light, away from the bar. Ivana had quite a row of martini glasses lined up before her. Peter was working on his seventeenth glass of warm milk.

  “And what about the documents regarding that invention the Americans were making such a fuss about last week?” said Ivana, who had abandoned diplomacy and cunning around the time of martini number nine.

  “I have those,” Peter told her complacently, and Ivana was heaving another irritated sigh when Peter added, “Upstairs in my room. I have them hidden in the nightstand. I’m meant to hand them over to the Queen tonight, but my helpers needed to rest, so here I am at this boring party.”

  Ivana hesitated. “I should very much like to see them.” She paused and then smiled a coaxing smile. “It would be so thrilling to see proof of how clever you are, Peter!”

  “It would be very thrilling for you,” Peter agreed.

  “And I would be terribly grateful.”

  “How grateful?” Peter asked.

  Ivana looked slightly startled. “Very grateful indeed.”

  Peter’s eyes brightened. “Do you know any bedtime stories?”

  “My dear boy,” said Ivana, not missing a beat. “Hundreds.”

  Since Ivana really was very clever, and Peter could be extremely heedless, she might very well have got her hands on the American documents that night. Except that Peter, careless as always, had forgotten to mention one small detail.

  His helpers were indeed resting. Pan’s elite team of killer fairies was having a little nap in the nightstand, right on top of the documents.

  “Troops, troops!” Peter bawled over all the yelling. “Attention! Attention! That means you, Ninja Star! Stop kicking her in the earlobe right now!”

  Ninja Star was his best fairy and was the captain whenever Peter was on a solo mission or got bored and wandered off. There was no denying zie had a temper.

  “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” said Peter severely, because he knew that discipline was vital. Then he became bored with his role as stern commander, spun and levitated three feet in the air.

  It was probably for the best. It hadn’t seemed to him like Ivana knew any bedtime stories at all.

  Ivana made the discreet decision not to try and get up. She watched with wide eyes as the boy rocketed out of the window, a silhouette in the moonlight, with the fairies following him like a host of tiny stars.

  Given the new evidence, Ivana was going to have to reevaluate some of Peter’s claims. With his ability to fly and his tiny helpers, a good many more of the missions he boasted about might be true.

  And many of his stories were true, especially the wildest ones, because Peter often had strange and terrible adventures.

  Which ones, we will never know. Peter does not even know himself.

  Still, I think we—and Ivana—may be reasonably sure that Peter never fought a duel to the death with the Taj Mahal.

  Her Majesty, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her Other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, was quite vexed.

  She had been forced by abject pleading, several resignations, and (in one unfortunate case) an incarceration in a secure mental facility to receive Pan’s reports herself.

  It was, however, growing extremely late. She had been up all day meeting with tedious ministers and an enormously dreary duchess, and she found her eyes traveling too often to the sack that lay at her butler’s feet.

  I hesitate to tell a lady’s secrets, but she was wearing a dressing gown. It was sky blue and patterned with tiny silver crowns.

  She was also wearing fluffy bunny slippers. The bunnies had crowns too.

  “If I might be so bold, Your Majesty,” said her butler, who was called both Dawson and Night Shadow. He was a judo master and weapons expert, and his butlering was exceptional. “The boy is late.”

  “The boy is always late. I gave him a watch once.”

  “How did he lose it?” asked Dawson.

  “He claimed,” the Queen said in the magnificently noncommittal voice that made statesmen blush and prime ministers recall other engagements, “to have choked a mutant shark to death with it.”

  Dawson bowed his head.

  Hurtling through the purple sky of London, streamers of light thrown across it by the city, through the wide windows of Buckingham Palace, came a boy. Fairies danced around him, wreathing his wild hair like a crown made of lightning.

  Peter touched down lightly on the carpet, presented a roll of documents to Her Majesty, and swept her a superb bow.

  The Queen graciously inclined her head and unrolled the documents on her tea tray.

  “The device illustrated in these documents actually expands mass,” she said absently. “Which would be most useful in the right hands—curing world hunger and the like—but since it seems to have been invented by the wrong hands—”

  Since this was boring adult stuff, Peter wandered about the room and danced up and down the velvet curtains, from the floor to the curtain rungs and back again. The Queen glanced up from an intricate plan of weaponry.

  “Exemplary work as always, Mr.Pan.” The Queen glanced up from the diagrams Peter had brought her.

  “Yes, I am exemplary,” Peter crowed.

  He went pinwheeling across the solemn crenellated dome of the Queen’s bedroom ceiling. The Queen cleared her throat to indicate that aerodynamic acrobatics in the presence of royalty were frowned on.

  Peter plummeted neatly onto the hearthrug and bowed again, as if he took the royal throat-clearing for applause.

  “You must know,” said the Queen, “I would be happier with a more traditional means of payment for your services.”

  Peter tilted his head to one side. There was a cold watchful light in his eyes now, like the glint children imagine they see after bedtime, when the night-light has been turned off and shadows and shivers start creeping into bed with them.

  Peter has been peeping through windows for a very long time.

  “Do you mean ‘money’?” he asked, pronouncing the word as if it was in a foreign language. “What use do I have for money, grown-up? If I want something on Neverland, I kill for it. If I want something here, I steal it. There is only one thing I want that you can give me. I want my mother!”

  The Queen inclined her head again, this time less graciously.

  She had made many terrible decisions in her time. Her Majesty always, always pays her debts.

  “There she is.”

  The eyes of the Queen, Peter, and Night Shadow aka Dawson the butler, all turned to the sack at Dawson’s feet. We can see now that there is a slight shifting of the rough material, as if something is breathing beneath.

  Peter looked uncertain. “They never used to come in sacks,” he said. “They used to be happy to see me.”

  The Queen, who had had a lot of ruling to do that day, and for the last sixty years, lost patience. She turned away from the boy and the moving sack, back to her own plans.

  “As I am certain you’ve noticed, Mr. Pan,” she said. “Times have changed.”

  “Second to the right, and straight on till morning,” are not real directions, though Peter thought
they were. The truth was that by now the path to Neverland knew Peter by heart and was always drawing him home, like a compass point to true north or a ghost to the place he was murdered.

  Peter flew with an easy grace, even with the sack in his hand.

  Sometimes he tossed it about with the fairies, just for sport, but Peter thought he was being most responsible. He made clear that any fairy who dropped the sack would have to answer to Ninja Star.

  It was a piece of great good luck that the bag only started squirming and making loud, distressed sounds as they were flying over Neverland. The sack had been quiet so long, Peter had forgotten what was in it, and was startled enough that he dropped it.

  Ninja Star and the team flew very quickly to catch it, but only succeeded in slowing it down, so the sack fairly tumbled to the stones and bones below.

  Ashley Horowitz, daughter of Karen, daughter of Tracy, daughter of Margaret, daughter of Jane, daughter of Wendy, came out of the sack rolling, and pepper-sprayed Peter in the face.

  For a moment she thought she must have made a terrible mistake. There she was on the island of nightmares—even worse than Grandma had described it—but the boy before her could not possibly be Pan the destroyer, Pan the thief in the night. He was sitting on the blackened shore and weeping in bewildered pain, as if he was terribly young and crying for the very first time.

  “Boy,” began Ashley. “Why are you—”

  Then she remembered: that was how he got you. She took a step back and lifted her pepper spray in steady hands.

  “Stay back,” she said. “Or I’ll make you cry harder.”

  When he rose to his feet, she knew it was him. Pan. He was not exactly as her grandmother had described him either: he was worse. He was as beautiful as her grandmother had said—as fascinating as a snake’s golden eyes to a bird—but he was that thing he never was, never could be. He was… older.

  She was older, too. She was past the age when he was meant to be exactly her size, and now here he was looking down at her.

  The bones of his wild, lovely face had stronger, sterner angles than in the pictures. His body had more muscle and was more easily weighted to the earth. He was not a little boy anymore.

  It was horrible to see those curling, crowing lips part, to show he still had all his baby teeth.

  “Pan,” said Ashley.

  Peter smiled more widely, his tiny teeth like little pearls gleaming in his changing face. “Mother.”

  He advanced and Ashley backed up, wielding her pepper spray like a weapon.

  “My name is Ashley. And I’m not your mother!”

  “There was a bargain made,” said Peter.

  Quick as a flash, he drew and thrust. At the touch of his blade, the pepper spray flew out of Ashley’s grasp and into the dark seas beyond.

  “My great-grandmother,” said Ashley, starting a little uncertainly and then gaining strength as she spoke. Margaret had been nothing but old family history to her, a story in a book. But so had he. “Margaret. She went mad.”

  Peter tilted his head, his eyes blank. “Margaret?”

  “She used to scream your name,” said Ashley. “My grandma used to hear her through the walls screaming for you. And you don’t remember her?”

  “Well, if you’re going to get all sniffy about it, I’ll say that I’m sorry,” said Peter, with the air of one making a great concession.

  “Tracy,” said Ashley. “Margaret. Jane. Wendy!”

  Peter drew in his lip a little, startled and hurt, as if it was the very first time he had ever been hurt, although the tears from his last bout of misery were still wet on his cheeks.

  “Wendy.”

  It made sense that he would remember her. She had been the first.

  Ashley drew in a deep breath.

  “I don’t want to be here,” she said flatly. “I demand to go home.”

  She turned and walked away into the forests of Neverland.

  Neverland was both like and unlike her grandmother’s stories, and the pictures in the book. It was unmistakably the same place, but it was changed like Peter himself: the trees naked as skeletons, no ships on the horizon. There was a quality about the silent darkness that Ashley recognized from being a little girl, too scared even to get out of bed and reach the light switch. The whole island was like a huge bedroom for a scared child, in which morning would not come again.

  The silence was broken by some terrible rustles and slithers.

  Ashley turned fast at the sound and found Peter gliding beside her, a few feet off the ground.

  “Those are the wild beasts,” he said. “Don’t go too far away from me. They’ll kill you if they can. They’re starving.”

  “Where are the—the Native Americans?” Ashley asked.

  Peter gave her a blank look.

  “Tiger Lily, I mean, and the others,” Ashley said, summoning up the name from the book.

  “Most of them died,” Peter replied. “The others went away.”

  Her grandmother had made sure she always had pepper spray under her pillow. Ashley wished now that Grandma Tracy had told her to always dress for an abduction. Bare feet and glittery pink pajamas were not exactly ideal for a trek through Neverland.

  She kept walking, though, until they came to Marooners’ Rock. The rock was just the same. The lagoon stretched around it, black and viscous, like tar with ghosts moving in it.

  It took Ashley a moment to realize that the gray shapes, their ragged fins dragging the surface, their hair like clogged seaweed, were the mermaids who used to toss bubbles to each other and sing. Peter flew over to hover above the lagoon like a huge dragonfly.

  “What—” Ashley said, and stood rubbing the goose flesh out of her own arms. “What happened here?”

  “There was a Lost Boy who came back,” Peter said distantly. “He had—he was a—”

  Peter choked trying to say the word “grown-up” with the same trouble other people had talking about death.

  “He thought there was a profit to be made of the Neverland,” Peter said. “He learned too late that he was wrong.”

  Peter twisted in midair until he was floating on his back, kicking at a breeze. A mermaid reached up out of the waters to touch his heel: her fingers were withered and gray.

  “But the island changed before that,” Peter admitted. “Children’s dreams were changing.”

  That was what Grandma Tracy had seen, the spring Peter had come for her. That was what had scared her so badly. The beginning of this.

  “I knew that I wasn’t wanted,” said Peter. “Windows have been barred against me before. I didn’t come for the next girl, did I?”

  “Yep, thanks for not kidnapping my mom,” said Ashley. “Big of you.”

  Peter came to settle on Marooners’ Rock, sitting near where Ashley stood. The mermaids swarmed in the waters about his feet like goldfish wanting to be fed.

  “I knew I wasn’t wanted,” he said. “But… I still need a mother.”

  He leaned trustingly against Ashley’s legs. Ashley, who was a kind-hearted girl, resisted the impulse to push him into the lagoon.

  “Times have changed, Peter. A lot fewer girls dream of being mothers. Some of them want adventures of their own.”

  You will have to forgive Ashley. She did not know Peter very well yet.

  She began to know him better when he tilted his head back to grin up at her. His curly hair was against her knee, and his smile was a devil’s.

  If Satan had all his baby teeth, that is.

  “You want an adventure?”

  “Peter,” said Ashley, with commendable, but much belated, caution. “Peter, noooooo!”

  I would not have you think Ashley screamed out of fear. In fact, she screamed because Peter had seized her up and was flying with her through the trees.

  Hang gliding is a bit alarming at the best of times. When your hang glider is a flying boy criminal, it is most unnerving indeed.

  They zoomed over the trees of Neverland, wind rush
ing in their ears. Ashley soon ran out of breath to scream.

  “Fly!” Peter yelled encouragingly. “Fly, fly! All you have to do is think happy thoughts!”

  He began to let her go when a furious tinkle from Ninja Star, like a dinner bell in a panic, gave him pause.

  “What’s the fairy saying?”

  “Oh,” Peter said airily, “zie says that if I don’t blow fairy dust on you, you will plummet to your death.”

  “Plummet to my death!”

  “I think you’re being most unfair,” Peter said to Ashley sternly. “I cannot be expected to remember every little thing.”

  He detached an arm from around her—I confess she screamed again—and reached out for Ninja Star, who he shook expertly over Ashley’s head like a top chef with a saltshaker.

  “Suspended in midair with a boy pouring glitter on me,” Ashley muttered. “I was really looking forward to being old enough to get into nightclubs. Now? Not so much.”

  “Nonsense, being old isn’t any fun, everyone knows that,” said Peter briskly. “Quick, happy thoughts!”

  “Peter Pan in jail for kidnap and assault!” Ashley yelled. “Peter Pan gets a twenty-year sentence! No! Ever so much more than twenty!”

  Peter dropped her.

  He managed to catch her before she dashed out her brains and broke every bone in her body on the rocks below, but it was a very near thing.

  “You idiot!” Ashley screamed, grabbing hold of his shoulders and shaking him. “I nearly died!”

  Peter made play with his eyebrows. “Well, yes,” he said. “That happens with adventures.”

  The tree house was very cold at night, and Ashley could hear the mermaids howling like wolves in the moonlight. Peter seemed to drop off instantly to sleep, but Ashley had no plans to escape her captor. For one thing, she had no idea how to get back from Neverland, and for another, she had no desire to have her head bitten off by a wild beast. She huddled under a blanket of flowers and leaves, and tried to sleep.

  In the morning Ninja Star woke her by tinkling about her head like a glittery mobile alarm clock. Ashley thought longingly of home, and flyswatters.