TINKER BELL WAS NOT a city girl. She’d come into being on a tropical island that she could see in its entirety from aloft, which meant that navigation was a simple matter of looking down and finding a familiar cove, rock, hill, or jungle clearing.
But now, having escaped the birdcage man and the horrid collector with the sweaty palms, Tink found herself flying over a different, and far more confusing, kind of jungle. Below her lay a vast clutter of soot-blackened rooftops, hundreds and thousands of them, stretching into the gray formless murk in every direction. Peter was somewhere down there, but Tink had no idea where.
She decided it would be best to fly toward the ship, since that was where she and Peter had started; her hope was that, in retracing their route, her path might cross with Peter’s. The problem was that she didn’t know which way the ship was, or where she was, as she’d been carried to the collector’s house in a canvas-shrouded cage.
She flew randomly for a while, seeing no change in the rooftop terrain. Finally, growing weary, she landed on the apex of a steeply peaked roof, next to a smoking chimney. Seconds later, a pigeon alit next to her.
Food? said the pigeon.
No, said Tink. No food. Do you know where the ships are?
Food? said the pigeon. Food?
No, said Tink. Ship?
Food? said the pigeon. Food? Food? Food? Food?
NO! snapped Tink, and the startled pigeon, in an explosion of feathers, flapped off.
Stupid bird, thought Tink, as she wearily launched herself into the dank London air, on a hopeless quest to find one smallish boy in a city of four million people.