by Jenn Polish
But the figure that filled the ethereal opening of the tunnel was too tall to be Mir; too lithe, and his hair too stringy, too straight. Peter flipped himself upward, not bothering to wipe the gritty sand from his hands as he shuffled closer, in a crouch, toward the portal.
A gasp tore through him as a flash of silver caught his eye, and he was crawling backward again as the emerging figure seemed to cast an anchor of some kind onto the nebulous rim of the portal.
“What the—”
For it wasn’t a hand pulling the first newcomer into Neverland.
It was a hook.
The hook was attached to an arm draped in what looked like a hospital gown, and the hospital-clad arm was attached to a boy. The boy crumpled into a heap on the sand unceremoniously after hurling his body out and over the mouth of the closing portal. With a sound somewhere between the sucking roar of a commuter’s speeder and the crash of unregulated thunder, the portal shuddered closed.
And the boys stayed there in the sand, both breathing heavily, both regarding the other with deep curiosity, with deep wariness. Until a gentle wave crashed a unit or two out in front of them and foamed up to soak their pants, their arms.
Peter took relief from the coolness, the spray, the rhythmic reminder that this boy was not Mir, but that the portal worked. So he could still find them.
Peter’s relief was short-lived, though, because without warning, a scream rent the air between them. Because the boy with a hook for a hand was now sparking magnificently from his arm, hips, and torso, writhing at each of the crackling, lightning-producing joints. His scream stopped abruptly as he collapsed into a heap, twitching as parts of his body continued to pop, smoke, and spark wildly.
The silence following the boy’s piercing screams was shattered by Peter’s fearful shouts as he jumped up, looking around frantically. The other boy continued to spark, to twitch, to squeak, to steam.
“Help! Someone help me! Interface! Activate! Anyone!”
But his shout echoed on the empty beach, and he heard Interface’s warning about overload in his head, about being patient, about letting the island adjust to his presence there before trying to rend open the barrier around it again so soon.
Of course, he’d mainly ignored Interface: he loved Mir, not the island, and he knew what was best for them. What they needed. And that was to get out of the Hub as soon as possible, before they reached whatever ship was going to house them until they died in a fiery explosion. Fast as time might go there compared with the outside world, a few hours could be the difference between life and death for Mir.
Peter grimaced in shame before gritting his teeth. “Right. Alone.”
He bent down to drag the unconscious boy away from the surf, but the jolting shock he received from touching him tossed Peter again, spread-eagle on the ground, right into an oncoming wave.
Pain echoed through his body and spread beyond just his hands, the impact of the wave on his lower back magnifying the shock through him. His skin became an echo chamber for the thrumming agony, and he splashed his way out of the surf clumsily.
“Water and…electricity?” he muttered as the faint scent of his singed hair mingled with the salty breeze.
The newcomer was twitching now, even in his unconsciousness, and fear jolted through Peter.
If I can’t save him, I’ll have killed him.
“I didn’t create this island so we could die someplace scenic,” he muttered as he swiped his badly dyed hair out of his face, smearing sand across his forehead. He stared at the twitching, mechanical boy, his mind searching, searching.
“Help me,” the boy croaked, only semiconscious, trying to drag himself off the wet sand, away from the soft onslaught of continued waves. Comprehension dawned in his eyes as Peter looked helplessly at his own hands.
“Aah,” the boy rasped. “You can’t touch me.” He whispered this, pain lacing each syllable.
“I don’t know what to do,” Peter called out in agony, as though beseeching the island itself to help them.
And so the island did.
A breeze stirred up from nowhere, scented with salt and kelp and just a hint of a tang Peter remembered vaguely but couldn’t quite identify. Instead of whistling, like the air spinners sending artificial wind between the buildings back home, this wind chimed, tinkled, like tiny pieces of glass greeting each other on a morning programmed to look bright and promising.
“Interface?” It sounded like the communication tones Interface had originally chosen—that Peter had rejected—but Interface still looked cast aside in the sand, in sleep mode.
But the chiming grew louder, as though in response to his whispered query, entering Peter through his ears and surging through his body—like the electricity from the boy’s body—until it reached his fingertips, the chip in his palm.
Do you believe, Peter? the chiming seemed to ask him. Though he heard no words, he understood the question clearly.
“Believe what?” he shouted, and the other boy furrowed his half-mechanical, half-pale skinned brow with confusion matching his pain.
The flailing, electrocuting boy’s mechanical parts continued to spark, and he raised his night-brown eyes to Peter’s. The look made Peter’s breath catch, and he licked his full lips, salty from the ocean air.
All at once, the question seemed at once clearer and more nebulous to Peter; but crystal clear or foggy and thick, clarity swarmed through him.
“Yes,” he whispered aloud. “I believe.”
And he knew what to do.
“Friend,” he called to the boy, surprising himself with his use of the term. “You have to fly up and out of the water.”
The boy barked a pained laugh. “They gave me a hook, not a jet-pack!”
Attention never leaving the other boy’s agonized face, Peter inhaled deeply just as another wave began crashing way down the beach. Soon, it would sacrifice itself into smaller waves, approaching relentlessly until the surf again reached the boy.
Believe.
Peter’s feet rose, and though the boy’s flesh limbs remained stock-still, his deep set eyes widened, his jaw slackened. Green eyes never left deep brown as the chiming inside Peter grew stronger, and he rose higher, higher. His breathing shallow and fast, Peter marveled at how his chest could contain his swollen heart.
“You’re not wherever you were before,” Peter called. “This is Neverland. And in Neverland, you can fly.” He extended his hands. “Just believe it. Hurry. Before that wave comes. Just believe.”
The mechanical boy didn’t even close his eyes, didn’t even tense his body in effort. He didn’t take his gaze from Peter’s, not for one second. He asked no questions and he did not move a muscle.
Until, then, his entire body—otherwise still horizontally sprawled, still as rigid as it had been on the ground—shot up, hovering above the sand, shooting above the crashing wave, straight up like he’d been catapulted, faster and faster the higher he rose, so fast and high that Peter yelped and willed himself up to the other boy’s rapidly ascending level.
The sand on the boy’s body twinkled in the moonlight like stars, like the butterflies Peter had seen in his first dream about Neverland. Somehow, he knew the tiny grains were also glistening on his body.
Magic sand. Or at least, highly programmable sand… This would have been a lot easier if Interface had just told me about this stuff.
But he had other, more pressing things on his mind. The boy was still rising higher, his flight seemingly uncontrollable.
“You can stop now!” Peter called, cupping his hands to his mouth. “Come down!”
Immediately, the boy’s ascent stopped. He hovered, still for what seemed like a long moment, until—as though an invisible ground had been swept out from underneath him, as though night-blending hands had let him go—he fell.
Straight down, fast, faster. Peter didn’t think; he just moved, shifting and extending his arms, bracing himself to bear the newcomer’s weight.
He
caught him in his arms, Peter’s stillness and the boy’s speed forcing them both down. Peter strained to fly upward to slow their descent, to make sure he could control their flight and land them away from the surf.
The boy’s arms looped around Peter’s neck as Peter shifted to cradle him more comfortably, with less burning in his biceps. The newcomer’s hook scraped into the side of Peter’s neck, but Peter didn’t notice the pain. He was too busy taking in the sudden nearness of the boy, the way his skin smelled of burned flesh and sizzling metal, but somehow, it was all Peter wanted to breathe.
The boy’s hair, jet black, now stiff and frazzled, blew behind him and into Peter’s open, panting mouth. Peter shifted his face and the boy apologized wearily, his eyes wide but unfocused, like he was fighting for consciousness. Fighting to take in everything around him, the feeling of Peter’s arms and his deliberate, diagonal descent back to the beach.
Peter held his breath as they approached the ground, straining to set the other boy down lightly, gently. He bent his legs before landing so he met the ground with his knees rather than his feet, the easier to cradle the boy’s head in his lap so it didn’t just hit into the ground as he settled him into the sand.
It wasn’t until they were both safely grounded that Peter noticed the destruction the water had wreaked on the other boy’s face. Under his right eye, along the curve of his cheekbone, the boy’s tan skin had melted away, all the way across to the base of his narrow nose and down to his chapped but soft-looking lips, revealing not flesh and blood, but a layer of wires, red and blue and yellow, interlaced with steel pockets of command circuits and fried linkages.
The boy’s eyes were blinking open, and Peter realized abruptly that he, too, was being watched.
“Pretty messed up, huh?” the boy asked. “Sorry ’bout that.” His voice sounded like he hadn’t used it for anything but screaming in rotations; and for all Peter knew, before he came through the portal, he hadn’t.
Peter just shook his head and extended his fingers toward the boy’s face. He paused and sought permission with his eyes. The boy squinted as though mystified but nodded stiffly, wetting his lips with his tongue as Peter’s fingers shook with an effort to be as gentle as possible, as light as possible. Carefully, he stroked the parts of the boy’s face where flesh descended into metal.
“Nothing to be sorry for.” His voice caressed the space between them, and a strange feeling swooped through his stomach. He registered it as guilt, and he pulled his fingers back shamefully. “Does it hurt?”
The boy heaved a breathy laugh. “I could ask you the same. I seem to have nearly electrocuted you, before…before you saved me.”
Peter’s face burned, and he shifted away from the boy. “You saved yourself. Or, the island did. I don’t know.” The boy’s expression was a map of confusion, and Peter backtracked.
“What’s your name, anyway? I’m Peter.”
“Peter,” the boy tried out. “Subject 5213.” A cloud swept over his face then, and he shook his head wearily. Grains of sand glistened on his exposed circuitry. “No. No. James. James. Before they took me, my name was James.”
“Took you? You mean…”
“Yeah, no, I wasn’t born like uh…like this.” He tapped his hook onto his hip, and a clinking of metal hitting something much harder than flesh resonated between them.
James scrunched his eyes closed, hard, for a moment, his face screwed up in effort, before he started sitting up.
“Whoa, whoa, no, what’re you doing?” Peter touched his shoulders and held him down lightly. “Stay. Your body needs to rest. You—”
James chuckled. “Just a little sore. The experiments they’ve been running… The flesh they string over my circuits doesn’t hurt too much. They haven’t quite figured out how to innervate me everywhere yet.” He looked up at Peter, his eyes widening before he gulped and swept his gaze over the beach, back toward the forest, toward the ocean. Up at the sky.
“Where am I, anyway? That thing, that tunnel thing. It kind of… it appeared, like where I was, and next thing I know, I’m being sucked through and I’m here…and I have no idea where here even is.”
“I told you. Neverland.”
James glared, and Peter smirked. “It’s an island. It… I programmed it to… I’m trying to find my… I’m trying to find someone. They were taken by the Hub.”
James’s eyes darkened; his face, so open a moment before, had become a mask.
“Sorry,” Peter stumbled, though he wasn’t quite sure what he was apologizing for or why he felt the need to reach out and take James’s hand and hook into his hands.
James shook his head against the sand wearily. “You know what, I think you’re right. About my body being tired. Anywhere safe to sleep here?”
Peter didn’t ask why James was so ready to sleep somewhere so completely foreign, why he wasn’t wondering how he could get back to where he came from, why he wasn’t worried about telling anyone who might miss him where he was. He didn’t ask anything.
“The island’s safe. We’re safe right here. It won’t get any colder than it is right now. I programmed it to stay comfortable. Go to sleep. I’ll…” He searched James’s expression, not knowing quite what he was looking for, nor if he found it. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”
With that assurance, he held up a finger to tell James to wait. He strode into the trees to shimmy out of his binder, glad that the green tunic he’d programmed himself was big and loose. When he returned, James offered him a sleepy smile.
They floated as they settled to try to sleep, up above the sand, above the surf, under the moonlight. “To make sure the waves don’t splash you in your sleep,” Peter had murmured, but he knew the underlying reason, much as he hated himself for it; now that he’d flown, he didn’t want to stop.
Peter’s heart ached for Mir.
“James?” he whispered into the night, after the silence—the shock of sleeping somewhere that was fully, freely oxygenated, without knocking into pod walls with every fidget—almost hoping the other boy was asleep.
But James rolled over in the air to face him with the grace of the creatures—what were they called—birds. With the grace of the birds Peter remembered seeing in a holomax room in the museum with Mir.
Neverland should have birds, too, Peter decided.
“Peter?” James’s boyishly deep voice tickled the hairs on the back of Peter’s neck as he was reminded that he’d called the other boy’s attention in the first place.
“Sorry. Um…James…you don’t have to say, you know, if you don’t want to. But…I didn’t know the Hub was experimenting on people.”
James’s eyes narrowed and he lost some height. Peter made to go catch him again.
“I’m not… I’m sorry. I mean, I believe you. I’m not interrogating you. I guess I’m just asking…why?”
James’s expression cleared slightly, and he rose back up to Peter’s eye level.
“You think they gave us a reason? Nah, they just told us that we could pay or go with them. They didn’t exactly give us a third choice. Tried to make it appealing. Said I’d be a naval captain when they were through with me. But it was years ago they took me. Still haven’t seen that promotion, you know?”
Neither boy spoke, and neither boy acknowledged that Peter still had his fingertips protectively on James’s forearm.
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