Page 137 of Losing Wendy

“He said it was a plague. I assumed…” But that couldn’t be right. “He had to have been talking about the plague. Neverland—it was made to keep you safe. It was made to protect you. All of you, from dying of the illness.”

Simon squints, squeezing tears from his eyes as he rests his forehead in his hand. “No, Winds. No, it wasn’t.”

I turn slowly to Nettle, to Nettle, who remembers everything. He cranes his head at me, sympathy dousing his expression. “Think, Wendy. Did he tell you what the symptoms of this plague were?”

My mind goes wild, frantic, sure Peter told me of rotting limbs and rattling lungs and slow death. But there’s nowhere for my flitting mind to perch. Victor said he’d woken in Neverland deathly ill, that all of them had.

I’m about to mention as much when Nettle interrupts my racing thoughts. “Neverland wasn’t made for keeping our fates out, Wendy. It was made to keep us in. Neverland isn’t a haven. It’s a prison.”

My mind goes blank,whirring.

“A prison. You’re just…” Children is what I mean to say, though they’re not much younger than I am. And when I look at Simon, I don’t see a child. I see a young man carrying a secret heavy enough to crush him.

But then it hits me—the story of the three Sisters. The Middle Sister’s job had been to dispose of evildoers before they could reap great harm in their realms. “The Sister who came to kill you…it wasn’t the Youngest Sister, taking pity on you. It was the Middle Sister,” I say, my words croaking in my throat. “She didn’t come to spare you from an awful death. She came to stop you before…” I whip my head to Simon. “But she made a mistake. She was only supposed to take the worst of murderers. You didn’t mean to kill Thomas.”

“I didn’t,” says Simon. “But afterward.” He won’t look at me. Instead, he just stares at Michael. “I liked it. I was horrified, yes. But after it happened, I kept reliving how it felt when that last breath escaped his lungs. Kept wishing I’d known what was happening then, so I could have known to relish that moment.”

My heart goes cold.

“I hate myself for it. I promise I do, Winds.”

“Simon. Simon, you need help. There’s help…” I want to tell him of the doctors back home who assisted the ill with things like this. “You’re sick. You didn’t mean to.”

But even as the words come out, they sound less and less convincing.

“The shadows will tell you, you know. If you listen. If you don’t block them out,” says Nettle.

“You’re a shadow-soother, too?” I ask.

“Must not be as good of a one as you,” he says. “Peter never dosed me half as much as he did you. Never dosed any of us like he did you.”

My heart goes cold in my chest. “The shadows were torturing me.”

“Yeah, the truth has a tendency of doing that sometimes,” he says, then looks casually out into the distance. “I couldn’t sleep that night—the night the Sister visited us. I heard the whole thing, you know. Didn’t remember, of course, once I got to Neverland. The Sister wiped our memories once we got here—the spell made us sick for weeks.” I think back to the illness Victor recounted upon his arrival. Nettle continues, “But one day I stopped eating the onions. You know, I never did like onions. Not even before. Too bitter. Started giving my portion to Simon when Peter wasn’t looking. I adored Peter as much as the next Lost Boy, but the texture made me gag. That’s when the shadows started whispering to me. That’s why Peter gave us the onions—there’s something wrong with them,something that makes it so that we can’t hear the shadows when they’re in our system.”

I rifle through memories, trying to reconcile Nettle’s claim about the onions with my encounters with the shadows. I’ve been eating the onions throughout my time in Neverland, yet they’ve still been able to reach me, except for when I’ve taken the faerie dust. And the second time Tink attacked me.

Peter made it seem like my ability to see the shadows was unique, but if Nettle can see them too…

I don’t get the chance to finish that thought, because Nettle’s not done. “But even though my mind didn’t remember what happened before Neverland, my shadow did. I was so upset the night the Fate came to visit the orphanage, so terrified, my shadow drank the memory, drank up my pain. It remembered it so that I didn’t have to. Then it told me the truth.”

I blink back tears. “What’s the truth, Nettle?”

“She was going to kill all of us that night. You see, that orphanage was the special sort. The kind for boys who demonstrated abnormal behaviors, according to the alienists. There were doctors there who were supposed to help us, but most of the time they either beat us when the lights were on or crawled into our beds when the lights were off. The warden was the worst of them. Always said the human touch had healing properties. That it was medicine all in itself.

“We went into that orphanage as freaks, every last one of us, but by the time they were done with us, we were killers. Not technically. None of us had any blood on our hands, but it was in our hearts. One night, I told Thomas what the warden did to me after the lights were off. After everyone else went to sleep. He said the warden did the same to him. So we decided just how we’d kill him. How we’d chop off his privates first, while he was awake, then we’d hack off the rest of him bit by bit, just like he’d done to our souls over the years.

“Except the night the Fate came, I realized that wasn’t all Thomas had planned. He was angry, you see, that none of the otherstaff had come to save him in the night. I understood, of course. I hated the staff as much as him, but there were those who I don’t think had a clue what was going on. But he wasn’t just angry with them. He was angry with the other boys, too. For not waking up in the night and hearing what was being done to him. For waking up, and being too scared to do anything. Thomas was angry at the world, angry at our parents for letting the shrinks convince them to take us away. He hated everyone, everyone except Victor. And his father, who hadn’t consented to the boys’ being committed to the orphanage. You see, Thomas didn’t just want the warden. He wanted everyone. Everyone who had ever made a decision that led us into danger, whether they knew what they were doing or not. Whether they’d been tricked and lied to or not.”

My heart shivers. I remember asking Peter if Thomas had been the first boy the Sister intended to kill.

“Do you know what would have happened, Wendy, had the Sister not intervened that night?”

I open my mouth; the only sound I can manage is hardly audible over the howling wind that pierces the night.

“Do you know what would have happened?” Nettle is yelling now, his voice breaking over the wind.

“No. I don’t—” I don’t want to know, but I stop myself, seeing the desperation in Simon’s eyes. I’m afraid if I shield myself from anything at this point, he’ll see it as a sign that I’m shielding myself from him. “I don’t know.”

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