Wendy was falling.

  But falling didn’t feel like it should.

  Gravity fractured. It pulled and released, twisted in on itself, flinging her sideways, backward, everywhere and nowhere at once. The wind wasn’t a single force howling past her ears, but a thousand warring currents, colliding, redirecting, dragging at her limbs like unseen hands, as if even the sky itself was uncertain where she belonged.

  Her stomach lurched violently, flipping over itself as the world fractured around her.

  She tried to scream, but the air ripped the sound from her throat, swallowing it whole before she could even hear it.

  The wreckage of her home tumbled with her, but it did not fall, it scattered. A chair spun lazily, then snapped sideways, sucked into an unseen force. Torn wallpaper curled like dead leaves, drifting against gravity. Glass shards froze midair, gleaming like trapped stars, before something unseen flung them apart, scattering them like fireflies into the abyss.

  And the worst part—it wasn’t silent.

  It was alive.

  The void around her hummed, a deep, thrumming vibration that wasn’t heard but felt, sinking into her bones like a pulse beneath her skin. And beneath that—the whispers.

  The same whispers she had heard before.

  The same ones that had slithered from the static on the television, coiling through the room like smoke, curling beneath her skull. But here, they weren’t faint. They weren’t distant.

  They were everywhere.

  A sound like wind threading through cracks in stone, like voices trapped between worlds. Too many at once, layered and overlapping, their words just beyond reach—almost understandable, almost real, almost clawing their way inside her mind.

  Something brushed against her ankle.

  She flinched violently, twisting midair—only to see a stray piece of her bookshelf drifting past, its wood warping, splintering as it was pulled in two directions at once. The shape of it stretched, like reality itself was trying to decide what to do with it.

  She was going to die. The thought clawed at her, cold and absolute. No. No, this was impossible. This was something out of a fever dream, out of a story that never should have been real.

  Wendy tried to breathe, but the air was wrong. It clung to her lungs, thick and heavy, neither solid nor liquid but something in between, something unnatural. It slid down her throat, pooling inside her, pressing against her ribs like the weight of a thousand whispers crammed into a space too small to hold them.

  Her chest hitched, panic clawing up her throat. She squeezed her eyes shut, willing it all to stop, willing herself to wake up in her bed, willing this nightmare to fade like fog in the morning.

  It didn’t.

  The moment her eyes snapped open, her stomach lurched.

  The sky—if that was even the right word—was shattered, split into pieces, an illusion peeled back to reveal something far worse beneath.

  Above. Below. The world had lost direction, and her body had lost any sense of where it was meant to fall.

  The clouds churned, thick and restless, their colors contorting in impossible shades of deep purple and slick, oil-black. They did not drift. They did not float. They writhed, unfurling like ink spilled into water, expanding, consuming, moving with a will of their own.

  Beyond them, where the world should have ended, there was nothing but a void.

  A vast, yawning nothingness.

  The stars did not sit still. They writhed like bioluminescent creatures in an endless deep, shifting and reshaping into constellations that never held their form.

  Her breath caught in her throat.

  This was wrong.

  This was not Earth.

  This was not real.

  And yet, she was still falling.

  And then she saw it.

  A shape emerged from the mist, a silhouette cutting through the storm. A ship, impossibly large, impossibly wrong, sailing upside down on the underbelly of the sky.

  A vessel where no vessel should be, a blackened silhouette against the rolling dark, a corpse of a ship that still moved.

  No ship had ever been this vast. It was the size of a floating city, stretching endlessly across the storm, its vast hull shifting with the slow, undulating motion of something alive. Its ribs, gleaming bone-white, wrapped around its exterior, as though the ship itself had been built inside a colossal beast’s ribcage, or worse, as if it were a thing meant to be caged rather than constructed.

  The masts were blackened spires, charred and jagged, clawing at the sky. And the sails—God, the sails—were not cloth.

  They were flesh.

  Pale and stretched too thin, they billowed and rippled in the wind, not flapping, but breathing, the faint shimmer of veins visible beneath their surface, pumping something dark through their living fabric. The hull, slick with damp and black as rot, moved as though it were shifting, curving and flexing like something swimming rather than sailing.

  Wendy twisted midair, struggling to orient herself, but the force pulling her toward the galleon only intensified. The storm clouds curled around it like a shroud, as though the ship were part of the storm itself, an entity that had always existed here, on the threshold between the sky and the abyss.

  Wendy wanted to scream.

  The boy was still laughing.

  She turned, heart hammering, and there he was, twisting midair as if the howling void meant nothing, his dark hair snapping in the wind, his teeth too sharp, his eyes too wide, golden-bright and hungry.

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  He wasn’t falling.

  He was flying.

  And before Wendy could comprehend how—

  She was too.

  The wind caught her, no longer hurling her downward but lifting her up, the air turning thick and solid, buoyant as water, catching at her limbs, holding her aloft.

  She gasped, twisting midair, her arms flailing for balance, and the world lurched again, her body no longer bound to the simple, predictable pull of gravity. She wasn’t falling toward the ship.

  The ship was pulling her in.

  He released her wrist, and for a breathless moment—she floated.

  Weightless.

  Drifting, hair fanning out around her like ink in the tide, her limbs suspended in an ocean of sky.

  The boy grinned, tilting his head as he folded into a dive, his body arcing with inhuman ease as he raced toward the waiting deck.

  Wendy had no choice but to follow.

  The great ship yawned wide before them.

  The closer she got, the more wrong it became.

  The deck stretched unnaturally long, the wooden planks swollen and damp, slick with something that wasn’t just water, rotting wood bound together by something too thick to be rope. Sinew. Tendon. The railings jutted at odd angles, sharpened and broken like cracked ribs, and from between the gaps in the planks, something throbbed beneath the surface, something alive.

  Lanterns lined the edges, but they did not burn with any light Wendy had ever known.

  They glowed sickly green, their flames flickering without heat, their glow throwing twisted shadows across the figures waiting below.

  And they were waiting.

  Not men.

  Not anymore.

  They stood in silence, half-shadow, half-flesh, their forms shifting like mist caught between shapes. Their bodies flickered, translucent in places, solid in others, their eyes the milky pale of drowned things. Some still wore the remnants of old naval coats, ribbons of decay clinging to hollowed forms, while others had become little more than silhouettes, stretched and flickering, like a candle flame guttering in the dark.

  One stepped forward, dragging a rusted cutlass behind him, metal grinding against the damp deck, leaving a deep scar in the wood. His jaw hung slack, a blackened tongue flicking between broken teeth as he spoke.

  "Come back to die, have you?"

  His voice was wrong—it came not from his mouth but from the air itself, a low, garbled echo of a sound that had been spoken long ago.

  The boy landed lightly on the railing, crouching, fingers curled over the bone-white ribs of the ship as he grinned down at the wraith.

  "Miss me, boys?"

  The crew did not answer.

  Then—tap. A single step. Deliberate. Measured.

  Then another.

  Slow. Unhurried. A patient rhythm.

  And from the shadows, the Captain emerged.

  He was tall, wrapped in a velvet coat the color of drowned roses, his frame lean but corded with strength, his movements sharp as a blade drawn slow from its sheath. His dark hair fell past his shoulders, the flickering green lanterns catching on the silver glint of his hook, the only part of him that truly gleamed.

  But it was his face that made Wendy’s blood turn to ice.

  Pale as bone, his features sharp enough to cut, his good eye a piercing thing beneath the shadow of his tricorn hat, the other hidden beneath an intricate leather patch, its edges stitched with something too dark to be thread.

  He was beautiful in a way that wasn’t human.

  A slow, deliberate smile curled across his lips.

  "Well, well," he murmured, his voice rich as oil. "Look what the storm dragged in."

  The boy didn’t move.

  The Captain's gaze slid to Wendy.

  He looked at her like a man who had been expecting something.

  Like she was something more than what she was.

  "Alive," he mused, almost to himself. His hook traced absently along the railing. "Good."

  Wendy’s stomach clenched. She didn’t know why, but those words made something deep inside her lurch in terror.

  The Captain’s fingers tapped the pommel of his cutlass.

  "Take the boy," he said.

  And the crew attacked.

  The crew moved as one, a tide of flickering shadow and half-rotted flesh, their bodies warping between the solid and the spectral. Blades slid from rusted sheaths, some jagged and corroded, others still gleaming as if they had never stopped tasting blood.

  The boy was already moving.

  Before the first blade could reach him, he twisted—a blur of motion, his tattered coat snapping in the damp wind, his feet barely touching the pulsing planks of the deck. A dagger flashed in his grip, black as the void between the stars, its edge catching the sickly green lantern-light.

  A wraith lunged—

  He sidestepped effortlessly, letting the blade whistle past his ribs, and in the same breath, he slashed upward, carving deep into the thing’s chest.

  But there was no blood, no muscle, no bone beneath the wound.

  Only darkness, unraveling like thread.

  The wraith shrieked, its form splintering, breaking apart into a swirl of mist and rot, before it vanished completely.

  But more were coming.

  Too many.

  Wendy barely had time to stumble backward before the battle exploded around her.

  The deck became a storm of motion, shadows howling and flickering, boots slamming against wet wood, blades clashing in sharp, metallic cries.

  The boy moved like water, shifting through them, his body curling, dodging, laughing as he weaved between clawing hands and swinging steel. His dagger sang as it cut through the next attacker, sending another wraith shriveling into mist, its scream swallowed by the crash of the distant storm.

  But Wendy—she didn’t belong here.

  She pressed herself against the railing, the bone-white ribs of the ship digging into her back, her breath shallow, her chest tight.

  She had never seen a real fight before.

  Not like this.

  This wasn’t the choreographed violence of films or the distant thrill of books—this was feral, chaotic, the air thick with the smell of salt and rot, with the sickening squelch of steel carving through things that shouldn’t exist.

  A wraith—rotting, too tall, its neck bent at an impossible angle—noticed her.

  Its head tilted sharply, as though hearing a sound just out of reach.

  Then it moved.

  Wendy barely had time to gasp before it lunged, too fast, too fluid, a knife of blackened bone clutched in one claw-like hand.

  She tried to dodge, but her foot slipped against the slick planks, her back slamming against the rail, her arms flailing for balance—

  The blade streaked toward her throat.

  At the last second, the boy collided with the wraith, knocking it aside, his dagger driving up beneath its chin in a single, fluid motion. The wraith jerked violently, its mouth stretching open in a silent wail as it melted into mist, its knife clattering to the floor.

  The boy grinned at her, breathing hard, his eyes bright with something wild and electric.

  "Try to keep up, Darling."

  Then he was gone again, vaulting over a fallen wraith, his dagger already flashing toward the next.

  Wendy pressed a hand to her chest, her heartbeat slamming against her ribs, her limbs trembling as she forced herself to move—not to fight, just to survive, just to stay out of the way.

  The ship was alive beneath her feet, the planks shifting, pulsing, like she was standing on the exposed back of some great, sleeping beast.

  A wraith lunged for the boy’s back—he ducked. Another swung a rusted cutlass—he caught the blade between his own, twisting sharply, sending the attacker sprawling.

  But the crew was relentless, and though he laughed, though he taunted, though he danced between them like a thing made of smoke and wind, Wendy could see it now—

  He was losing.

  For every wraith that fell, more crawled from the darkness, dripping from the mast, slithering from beneath the deck, their forms blurring between the half-real and the nightmare-made.

  The boy’s movements were slowing, just slightly.

  A blade caught his shoulder, cutting deep.

  For the first time—he stumbled.

  The Captain hadn’t moved.

  Not once.

  He stood at the helm, watching, waiting, his hook tapping lazily against the railing, his expression unreadable. Not concerned. Not impatient. Just waiting for something.

  Wendy felt it in her bones.

  This wasn’t a fight.

  This was a trap.

  The realization hit the boy at the same time. His grin faltered, only for a fraction of a second, but Wendy saw it—and in the same moment, the crew closed in.

  A wraith caught his arm—another grabbed his throat.

  The boy snarled, thrashed, kicked—but there were too many hands, too many shadows, clawing at his coat, at his skin, trying to drag him down, down, down—

  "Wendy!" His voice cut through the night, sharp and urgent.

  She barely had time to react before he tore free just long enough to spin—not toward the fight, but toward her.

  He grabbed her wrist.

  And pulled.

  Her feet left the deck.

  The wind ripped around them as they plunged backward over the railing, the storm swallowing them whole.

  The last thing Wendy saw before she fell into the abyss was the Captain—standing still, watching, a slow, knowing smile curling at the edges of his lips.

  Thick and shifting, curling around them like grasping hands, the storm swallowed them whole.

  And the ghastly ship disappeared from sight.