And the pirate had referenced “the Boys.”
Was this…?
They burst into a clearing.
The older pirate dropped her wrist to pull his sword. Letting out a battle cry, he ran forward. Sasha could only stand there, staring, agog, at what was before her.
It was a battle. A straight upsword fightbetween pirates and…teenage boys who were dressed like they had been raised by wolves.
They were dirty, their hair long and unkempt, each style seemingly worn in a slightly unique fashion, like they belonged to some strange tribe and that was their personal marker. They fought with improvised weapons or what they had clearly stolen from the pirates.
Suddenly, she laughed. She couldn’t help it.
This was Neverland.
She was in Neverland!
And she was watching Hook’s pirates fight Peter Pan’sLost Boys!
“If this is all a drug trip, this is—this is pretty good. Damn.” Letting out a rush of air, she smiled. It was a front-row seat to one of her favorite childhood stories. She wondered when Peter Pan himself might show up! Or?—
One of the Lost Boys screamed as one of Hook’s pirates cut his stomach open. He staggered backwards, trying to hold his guts in place. But there wasn’t anything he could do.
Long ago as a little kid, Sasha had been reading a comic book—she couldn’t even remember which one—and had read the phrase “like holding back the tide with a teacup.” It'd stuck with her all her life.
And that’s what the teenage boy, maybe no older than thirteen, was trying to do to his body as he clutched his stomach. He collapsed to his knees, weeping in pain, as the gore spilled onto the sand and dried grass at his feet with a wetsplorp.
Sasha covered her mouth with her hands.
That hadn’t been in her picture book.
She expected the pirate to stop. He’d just killed a child! But instead, the pirate laughed. With a lift of a boot, he kicked the dyingteenager onto his back. Crouching, he picked up the boy by the hair a few inches, raised his saber high, and…
Sasha knew that it was possible to cut off a human head with a sword in one swing.
But she also knew it took a very specific kind of sword, and a very clean swing to do it. This was…not that. This was a meat cleaver. This was a man hacking at a teenager who wasstill alive. His body jerked at first from pain, then went limp in shock, and then finally the mercy of death set in as the pirate removed the teenager’s head from his shoulders.
The pirate looked up and locked eyes with her. “One for the display, Mr. Smee! Make sure the Captain knows who got it for ‘em.” He threw the head at her.
It rolled to a stop at her feet, still oozing blood from the bloody stump of a neck.
Sasha turned, made it three feet, and threw up in a bush, leaning heavily on a palm tree to keep from collapsing. Breaking out in a cold sweat, she struggled to breathe for a moment.
“None of this is real,” she murmured to herself. “You’re okay. You’re all right. None of this isreal.”It was either a drug-induced hallucination or just…part of a weird, magical fictional world. That kid wasn’t real. That didn’t just happen. Words on a page. Fake emotions, brought on by a story, nothing more.
There was no head. Nobody wasreallydead.
“Good point. Whydohumans get so upset over stories?”?*
Vile.
She whirled, but he wasn’t there. She’d heard his voice, that British accent and the sharp, deadly tone.
“Enough!” Someone called from the fight. The Lost Boys had been losing, but the pirates hadn’t been spared, either. While she had been busy retching in the shrub and trying totalk herself out of an existential crisis, a few more maybe-probably-not-real people had died.
A man strode onto the field. And there was no doubt in her mind that it was Peter Pan himself. He was older than the others—maybe eighteen or nineteen. He was taller, broad-shouldered, had a jawline that could cut glass, and yet he hadn’t lost the boyish innocence in his face. His hair was a mop of roughly-cut blond hair that dangled in front of his eyes.
He was wearing more formal clothes than his Lost Boys. Or, rather, items that would have been more formally considered tobeclothes, and not just “whatever washed ashore.” He looked more like one of the pirates than one of his peers, though what set him apart was that he lacked any of the gaudy adornments or any of the baubles that the pirates obviously prized.
