Neverland

thirty

I barely slept that night. By barely I mean that I would have been lucky to get a collective 70 minutes of rest. It was not like I expected to have a glorious night sleep or anything, but three hours would have been nice. I woke up feeling sore, sore from the rock beneath me, sore from crying too hard, and sore from thinking too much. Everything hurt, from my toes to my head.

It would be easy to say that the reason I couldn't sleep was because of how uncomfortable the cave was, but that wasn't it. My thoughts were what really kept me awake. So many secrets had been spilled, it was hard to keep track of them all, and so I wrote them in my journal. I retraced each step, recording everything detrimental detail I could have mistakenly revealed to Zayn on my stay there. The biggest slip-up I remembered was the instance I vaguely told him the location of the Lost Boy's site. Yeah, that was a real bad one.

I still couldn't believe it was Zayn betraying the Lost Boys the entire time. He appeared so trustworthy. He spoke to me like he was on my side. But I guess by playing his role, he had become an expert at deception. He even had Harry fooled.

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Zayn was the only one, besides Barbara the jewelry shop owner, or any of the Lost Boys themselves, to know of my existence, name, and relation to Harry before anyone else in Neverland. Hart knew my name in Mable's shop because Zayn had told him it. Zayn had told him everything.

Words of his came rushing back, subtle things he had said about Harry laced with resentment, things I foolishly brushed off as minor jealousy.

I called myself stupid for not seeing it, but just as Leo said, I wasn't looking hard enough. I never looked for the bad in people, only the good. That was slowly starting to change.

It didn't take long for the cave to fill with green morning sunlight. I knew we had to get going before it got too hot and bright.

"M," I whispered, "Wake up."

Her thin eyelids twitched. She sucked in her drooling lip before sitting up.

"Eat this," I said after she finished her yawn and offered her half of the last strawberry Pop-Tart I brought from home. She nibbled at it in silence. I ate my half as well, neither of a speaking a single word. It was almost as if the size of the day ahead of us was so daunting we didn't know what to say.

After refilling our canteens and taking a few sips of water from the clear stream outside our temporary home, we set off to complete our mission just as before. Only this time, we had another task to complete, a more unnerving one.

I tried not to wonder too much about what Leo had been put through because of me. I threw those thoughts to the back of my head for the time being, in order to stay focused. My plan for the hike was to head eastward. Harry had told me once that Hart's fleets usually patrolled the eastern seas because there were more tiny and helpless islands for him and his crew to raid. According to my map, there was a small mountain range we would have to pass over, but I figured I could use the elevation to get a good vantage point of the ocean.

"I'm tired," M said after we had been walking for a couple hours. I turned around to look at her. Her face was red and glinting with sweat.

"We can take a break here," I said. We walked over to a large fallen log to sit. I took out my map and looked at my compass. We were halfway up the biggest mountain we would have to climb that day and were making excellent time.

The sun rested only halfway up in the sky, but its apparent proximity to us made the temperature intolerable. Mid-morning always felt like the hottest part of the day. Something about the angle of the sun made it look as though it were an incandescent desk lamp, baking down relentlessly on us.