A red disc from the horizon and the island is green again. A wooden lookout juts up from camp and patrols walk the treeline. Two drop into it, one named Vaya, a slim thing, once counted injun.
Slants of light cut the canopy through and a radius of stillness follows their way, void of birdsong and life. Insects dive underground and animals clear out, or else hide among branches. At the approach of their boots, flowers fold shut their petals, blooming in reverse as if sentient, as if privy to the men and to spurn their errand.
They reach a clearing, silent but for the ribboning of water on stone. Across the stream, a sapling, under which two boys wait, the shorter pelted grey after rabbits ensnared and slain.
"Throw down whatever ye've got," Pan warns them. They set rifle and bow in the dirt and walk forward, squinting now in the sunlight, palms shown in accord. Once across the stream, Pan draws a dagger and leaps at the injun, steel set to throat and falling down on him. "Let's see if his blood's yellow, too."
The grey boy puts a spear to the other man's chest, holding him there, yet the pirate speaks past him, an enormous man, a russet stubble his face. "Ye din't want to be durin that, lad."
"Bet." He is bent down, forehead pressed to the injun's and shoulders heaving with syrupy breath, poured forth to the man's face like nectar.
The white man says, "I bet it's a mistake."
"Yea? I'm all in."
The white man winces. "Hear us out first. We've come to ye, showed our hands and dropped our arms. What's done is done, there. It's just that."
Pan eases knife from neck and up from the injun. "Keep on yer back, snake, but I'll hear out yer mate." He is a tall boy, clad in green leafage as if plucked from the forest itself. Hair spun in tangles like vines and brushed with dew. Wet bangs onto a copper face set with waveblue eyes, flecked amber the color of morning.
"Simon," he says, "if he moves, if he opens his mouth, open him up." The boy Simon puts his spear to the injun and Pan turns on the other man. "What's yer name."
"It's Roderick."
Pan spits. "Go on, then."
"Aye. We're here fer to strike a deal with ye." He pauses. "The Captain's not right. He's banned us from the ship. Keeps only the fat one and the bell, howling in the dust and he's worsenin'. Ye've heard the cannons at night?"
"Get to yer point or I'll put you to mine."
"Some of the men are gone mutinous, and right for it. Forgotten us, 'e has. Left at camp without word for days, and there's them that look to take back the ship. Though we'll need you to do it."
Pan laughs. "Start talkin' sense."
"I'm talkin' gettin' yer girl back. Aid us with the ship and the bell's to you."
Pan plucks a leaf from limb and studies the green vein of it, bloodless lines spurting out from stem. "The bell's to me and your ship to you." He looks on Vaya, back-flat on the ground. "And then whhat fer the snake?"
Roderick answers. "We can't do it without him, lad. Honest we can't. We need their numbers."
Vaya meets Pan's gaze over the shoulder of the spear trained to his throat. Pan speaks to him. "You need the injuns, alright. What'll they need, then?"
"Dust," Vaya hisses through the spear-head.
The boy cries out and stabs into his shoulder, shallow in warning. The dark that red spills forth, it softens the soil it touches.
Pan says, "Ya see? Simon says shut and you better." He spits. "So. Ya set my girl on a hook and he snatched it away. Did ye think he'd throw her back to ya? Think I will?"
"They ask fer only a shake a day," says Roderick. "An' as far 's I can see it's a stretch better'n the deal 's ye've got."
"Only a shake, eh?" Pan is still watching Vaya.
He blinks back, bleeding.
"Shucks, he's red through, blood with his face. And I had 'im figured yellow." Pan turns back to Roderick. "No dust for the pirates?"
"Lad, I don't ask it. Only once it's done she set us loose from this place." He waves a hand, meaning the island and the waters round it. "That she show us the way out, we'll take it."
Pan's eyes soften. He looks to a clear cut of sky and the sun climbing. Among the tree-ring perches a single sparrow, a silent black spot amidst green, the only living thing to brave the men's presence. "Okay, pirate. Out with it, then."
"We can take the camp, but it's for nothing if Hook's still the run of the ship. He'd only throw cannonballs if we tried takin' it outright. He fires on all boats. But if we can get aboard, first, before the fight breaks out we can have it. It's only 'im and the fat one out there. Lend us a prisoner. A lead to you 's the only way he'll suffer a boat to the ship, the only way to lower 'is arms."
"And raise his hook over one of my boys."
"He'll not a chance. Soon as he lets us aboard we'll take it." Roderick speaks surely, set with what he believes must happen because it couldn't afford otherwise.
"Who 's we?"
"I, another, and one of yer own."
Pan looks to the leaves, green-bright and never to yellow. The only boy who knows it, flown through snow in places remembered, impossibly far. "Take me aboard."
Roderick shakes his head. "Ye haven't known him lately. He'd set his cannons ablaze soon as you was in sight. He's not right, I tell ye. We oughtn't chance you exciting 'im."
Pan considers the boy Simon, spear trained at his captive, and perhaps counts him capable. Perhaps he fears what's to befall him, were they to fail, what scorpions lay within the Hook. Perhaps he puts that away, or else considers only the bell.
"Two of my boys," he says. "Ye won't get one lonesome." He waves a hand and a rustling comes from the brambles flanking them round. Boys shake loose from leaf, a dozen in number, bearing spear and sling and silent the lot. "Who goes with Simon?"
Several boys step forward. Pan has them draw straws, let fate have its say, and the shortest goes to the boy hooded crimson. The fox sitting his head is fit down its fangs to his brow as if to swallow him whole. Pan spits.
He calls the two close and whispers their counsel. "Michael, if you want out, say so now."
The boy says nothing, courage for something yet.
"Alright, then. Simon, you're point as you're older," though age reckons nothing in Neverland and he knows it. "Take them straight away, and don't you let your eyes off the pirate, whatever his promise. Take the ship and I'll meet you after." He speaks hurriedly, betrays nothing of a gnawing within. "And keep Tink to yourselves. Don't let 'em touch her."
Now he looks to the others. "The rest with me. To take the camp." A roaring among the boys and he turns back to Roderick. "I don't want that injun aboard with my boys. He fights at camp with the rest of us."
Roderick nods and does not regard Vaya, who watches Pan, regains his footing. He steps to the stream and cleans his wound, blood splashing down cold with the water, eddying and thinning to nothing its way seaward. Roderick cuffs the boys and their chinking fades into the forest.
Pan eyes the sparrow above. It swings down and alights on his given finger, and he whispers to it in nothing of speech but a tongue forgotten, born with the island itself. The sparrow darts away and a boy claps his hand on Pan's shoulder.
"You get the hook, sure, but looks as like we'll have some hands fer ourselves."
Another crowing of boys. "More'n just hands," one says, and another, "The croc'll fatten up tonight." And another, "I'm makin' a new outfit of one of them fancy tattooed skins."
Pan turns from the boyish excitement, lust-like, and up to the blue jewel of sky, criss-crossed with branches. Sun sitting its zenith like some great golden crown keeping watch of them, and a breath, something goes out of him.
"How long till we sets out for camp?" A boy. "Can we paint our faces like the injuns?"
Pan squints. "Yer not going and me neither."
He sets off alone and, as the sun is swung from sky, reaches a bluff overlooking the sea. Red rags of cloud like ribs across the sky, underneath which sits the ship's black shape, leviathan-like on the sound. A dark dart falls and bounds and grows closer, forms wings, clutches a finger and tells of failure, of Hook below deck and peril to the boys. Pan flits the bird away and steps to the precipice. Water below, green in the shadow of the scarp and tossing and shivering and crested white like a sea of blades and he dives to it.
