“You're welcome,” she replied.
“We'll be sure to tell the Captain how competently you were handling yourself when we found you,” Madman Mulligan told her, winking. The glass eye looked even more disturbing during the second that his real eye disappeared.
“Th-thank you,” she stuttered.
“Don't mention it lass,” he told her. With that parting remark, he and his marauding partner marched off with their prisoners to check the next trap. The soldiers looked like they had several things they would like to mention, none of them pleasant.
They passed without a word, however, and Gwen gathered her wits. The shadows had returned to their soldiers. Even if some of them went back to searching for the Never Tree, they'd have to start from square one. She could trust Peter and his team were alright. Certainly that's what the radio silence on the tin can meant. Peter would know to call for help and admit it if his adversaries started to overwhelm him, right? No one would be so immature as to jeopardize their battle over a point of pride, right?
Gwen scrambled through her satchel and pulled out her tin can as fast as she could. “Peter,” she shouted into it, “what's your status?”
The can to her ear, she heard shuffling, racing feet, and a chaotic symphony of indistinguishable noises, before Peter picked up. “It's complicated,” he answered. “I'm not sure I can explain it without puppets.”
“Are you okay?”
“Of course!” he replied, cheerful and confident. “I don't know what the coast looks like nouth of the mermaid's lagoon, though. There might be more adults coming if Starkey and his crew haven't sunk them.”
“I'll head out that way and report back when I know what the situation is,” she volunteered.
“Brilliant, 'Endolyn! Watch out for shadows!”
Peter's voice vanished and all sound with it, as if the tin can had turned off at the end of their conversation. Gwen took a breath and started to figure out in what direction nouthern coast rested. Before she could make sense of her surroundings, she heard a mechanical shriek overhead and saw the shadow of a war plane pass over the island.
Chapter 24
She couldn't mistake the plane's cantankerous engine for anything else, but through the weave of branches, Gwen couldn't get a good look at the plane. Leaping into a tree, Gwen's flight ability returned the moment she forgot she couldn't fly. Too consumed with worried curiosity, she flitted up a tree to get a better view of the craft. Hurrying back to the meadow may have given her an unobstructed view, but she didn't want to risk getting caught in the open when she could hear the rattle of gunfire. Each click boomed across the sky as the plane fired off a round of ammunition.
She thanked the stars when she saw not a modern plane, but an anachronistic contraption. Its propeller spun wildly and the grey sheet metal of its body did not even have a coat of paint covering it. Gwen had seen such a plane once before, on the night she first returned to reality with Peter.
Circling back, it let loose another round of gunfire at a distant, invading ship.
Overcome with joyful relief, Gwen laughed and waved at the aviator. She knew Antoine de Saint-Exupery couldn't see her, but she didn't know how else to process her delight. She watched as he zoomed back over the island in his antique plane, and something dropped from the aircraft. At first she feared return fire had struck his plane, but the black coat navy had not come equipped with anti-aircraft guns. A parachute blossomed over the parcel, and more parcels fell out of the plane, drifting down on parachutes all over the island.
She set her sights on the nearest one. She had no way to know what was inside the small wooden crate, but she trusted she could make good use of whatever supplies Antoine dropped. Jumping down from the tree and landing with a flighty grace, Gwen began running for the place where the parachuting crate would land. If nothing else, she wanted to get before any adults did.
Twigs snapped and brush rustled under her quick feet as she plowed through the forest. Scanning the sky, she watched for the falling package and gave little attention to anything on the ground. She almost tripped over Jam.
“Whoa!” Jam yelled, darting out of Gwen's way. Raven tree eggs filled her arms. “You should watch where you are going! Don't you know this is a WAR ZONE?”
“Sorry,” she apologized. “Did you see a package fall around here?”
Jam's irritation turned to intrigue with the riveting speed that only children's emotions could switch with. “What package?”
“Can you help me look for it? The aviator just flew by and parachuted down some supplies, I think.”
“What kind of supplies?” Jam asked, already scanning her surroundings for the package. “Here, hold these.” She thrust the eggs into Gwen's hands and the older girl shuffled them into her satchel without breaking any of the sticky fruits' shells. “When we find it, can I have it?”
“I don't know. We'll have to see what it is,” Gwen told her. “I think it's this way.”
So the girls took off together, scanning the trees in case the parachute tangled in the branches. Luckily, they did not to run into any black coats as they wandered, and Jam's eager eyes spotted the crate awkwardly nestled underneath its white parachute. Having crashed through the tree branches, it sat lopsided in a pool of sunlight.
Jam squealed with excitement and ran over to it. Crawling under the billowing parachute collapsed over the box, she tried to pull it off from underneath. Gwen kept her eyes peeled for enemy soldiers.
Uncovering the crate, Jam clapped and giggled in anticipation. The wooden box came up to her waist, so she threw herself over it as if hugging it. “Open it!” she demanded.
Gwen brushed Jam away and began working at unknotting the thick twine that strapped the crate's lid on. She ignored Jam's impatient pestering and eventually loosened the knots. Pulling the wooden lid off, she set it down beside some of the fallen branches the crate had broken on its way down.
Jam, bent over the side of the box, sifted through the packing straw to find out what the mysterious box contained. “What?” she asked. “What are all these?”
Gwen returned to find the girl holding two flashlights in her hands and studying them with slight contempt. Flashlights filled the box, and Gwen unearthed one from the straw and showed Jam. “It's a flashlight.”
“A what?” Jam asked. Gwen turned hers on, and Jam cooed as it prompted a memory. “Oh, I remember now! Daddy had one he'd use when he worked on the auto in the evening… But why did the aviator give us flashlights?”
Gwen gripped the flashlight and waved it, watching the beam of light cut through the shade of the jungle like a knife, or a sword. Realizing it's utility, she muttered, “So we can fight.”
“Fight what?” Jam whined.
Gwen smiled. “The darkness.”
Remembering the urgency of the situation, Gwen started digging all the flashlights out of the box and instructed Jam, “You need to take as many of these as you can and give them to everyone you can find. If you see any shadows that don't have people attached, shine the light on them. Force them back.”
The sound of rattling gunfire shot across the sky, and Gwen imagined the aviator sinking one of the naval ships, and the pirates taking the shipwrecked invaders back home. Not all grown-ups were bad.
Jam comprehended these instructions with ease, and seemed to derive a special significance from the task. Gwen tucked several flashlights into her satchel and tried to make a mental note of the crate's location so she could to direct others toward it. She knew three soldiers who wouldn't dare let their shadows loose on the island, but she doubted the rest of the black coats would keep theirs under control.
Jam stuffed a flashlight in both pockets of her pink dress and carried as many as she could in her arms, much as she had carried the raven tree fruit before Gwen all but tripped over her. She had taken no more than four steps away from the crate when Gwen heard a horrible creaking overhead.
She lifted her head in time to see the tree bough falling,
tumbling down almost in slow motion. It looked, for a second, like it only waved in a strong wind. But Gwen had heard the deafening snap of the branch, weakened from the crate crashing into it. She screamed to Jam, “Look out!” and fell over backward as she scrambled to get away from the collapsing branch.
Jam was not so quick.
The little girl dropped the flashlights and covered her head with both her hands, as if that would stop the bough from crushing her. The heavy branch fell on top of her with a hideous thud.
“Jam!” Gwen cried. “Jam!” She fought her way back onto her feet—no easy task when every inch of her body shook. Gwen's first thought was to call for the girl's parents, but that impulse had no merit in Neverland. Jam's parents? What parents? This little girl had run away so long ago, who knew what had even become of the man who used to work on his auto by flashlight?
As she approached, she felt her stomach shrinking to the size and hardness of a peach pit inside her. The bough, as thick as little Jam's waist, had the girl trapped under it, face down in the dirt. Gingerly, Gwen picked it up off the little girl. As she did, she heard Jam groan. Amazingly, the girl was conscious and well enough to complain, “That was heavy!”
Jam stood up. Her face smudged with dirt, she spat with a demonstrative, “Phewy!” noise, and brushed off her dress.
Gwen stared in awe as the small child gathered the flashlights and took off running again, no worse for wear. After she had disappeared from Gwen's sight, Jam's laughter rang and wove through the forest.
Stunned, Gwen tried to make sense of what she had witnessed. She knew the impact should have killed Jam. But Jam lived in Neverland, as invincible and full of super powers as her mind would allow her to be. How could she die? She didn't give Neverland the power to kill her, and Neverland bended, as always, to the will of its inhabitants. Perhaps she could be killed by pirates or meet some such heroic fate, but to die in a simple accident would be no adventure at all.
A subtle horror snuck into Gwen's mind and unfolded into something that terrified her: she did not share Jam's childish invincibility. Gwen knew that accidents, disasters, and mishaps could kill her, and she knew also that accidents, disasters, and mishaps abounded in battlefields. Had she stood under the tree when the branch descended, the bough would have killed her, because her last thought as it fell would have been of certain doom.
Jam's laughter receded as she submerged herself again in the game of war she played alongside the other indestructible children. Gwen took off running, fearing for more than herself. She had grown old enough to know all the myriad things that could kill her, and she suspected that despite all his efforts to avoid that knowledge, Peter knew too.
Chapter 25
Gwen ran through the woods, flying as much as her nervous heart would allow. She oscillated between sprinting on her feet and zooming on the air, holding tight to her satchel so it wouldn't bang against her hips—those awful hips she had never needed, never wanted, and never had as a child. She did not want to break the raven tree fruit's fragile shells in her panicked hurry. In the palm of her clenched fist, she held onto Peter's acorn, hoping it would reveal some much-needed charm. Until it did, she would hold it for comfort during chaos.
She needed to survey the coast and report back to Peter. She hoped the aviator's intervention would improve the situation, but she didn't know what to expect. She couldn't have felt more out of touch with the world around her. Neverland was still surprising her in ways she didn't expect to be surprised by the island, and she suspected the grown-ups still had aces hidden up their sleeves. Her role in all this left her with an amorphous assignment that made her a messenger, lookout, and decoy. She knew why she jumped in and out of all these various responsibilities—she needed to solve whatever needed to be solved by a more mature mind. Peter had allotted her no specific station in this battle because she was more useful as a free agent. Still, this came with its own challenges.
The jungle all started to look the same to Gwen. She would have given anything to break up the trees with something more familiar, more human. She froze when she heard the sound of someone pushing past the yellow blossoms of the scotch broom bush ahead. While trying to mentally retrace her steps and plan a course to the nearest trap, she realized she wouldn't need to start sprinting. Tiger Lily emerged.
“Gwen!” She exclaimed, her smile proving she was fine. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah—you?”
Tiger Lily shook her head and cast her smile at the woods around her. “Yes, I am.”
Everything about Tiger Lily signaled that she felt at home, at last. When Gwen had met her on the reservation by Lake Agana, Tiger Lily had moved with the graceful fluidity of someone perfectly comfortable in her own skin. Here, that grace manifested tenfold, as comfortable in her environment as in her skin. The sun caught the sheen of her dark hair and her breath moved through her with a joyful motion.
Gwen noticed Tiger Lily held something in her hand. The blond hair, no longer attached to any head, had hardly lost its combing.
“Is, is that… a scalp?” Gwen asked, more than a little horrified.
Tiger Lily followed her mortified gaze to her hand, and then laughed. “Oh no,” she chuckled, “one of those nimrods had a toupee—I stole it before Storm Sounds dragged him off to the pirates.”
She seemed pleased with herself. Tiger Lily had a grand command of whimsy and impishness here, Gwen could see girl she had been before pirates had kidnapped her from the island. She could imagine this woman as a girl, one who had lived and breathed beside Peter Pan from the moment he first set foot in Neverland. While various lost children had cycled through their feverish fascination with Neverland and generations of fairies had come and gone, Tiger Lily had been an unwavering constant in Peter's world.
A gunshot cut through the jungle's muddled silence, its painful noise as sharp as a knife. It happened so fast, Tiger Lily seemed to double over at the exact same moment, or maybe even before the sound.
“No!” Gwen screamed. “Tiger Lily!”
She wanted to help her friend, but Gwen's attention was, out of necessity, directed toward the solider who had fired the shot from behind Tiger Lily. He fired at Gwen as she ran toward him and hurtled raven tree eggs out of her purse. His magic repellent only stung Gwen, and she hit him square in the jaw with one of her sparkling black-shelled fruits. The sticky whites within exploded and solidified like drying glue over his mouth. He mumbled objections, but the goop silenced him. When he realized the uselessness of his weapon and the devastating effect of his adversary's arsenal, he started running away. Gwen aimed for his feet though, gunking them up and tripping him to the ground. She pelted him mercilessly until he stuck flat against the forest floor. She ran back to Tiger Lily.
Tiger Lily had a hand against the nearest tree, steadying herself as her other arm wrapped around her gut. Before Gwen could arrive beside her, her balance gave out and she collapsed beside the tree.
“Tiger Lily!” Gwen flung herself down and kneeled beside the wounded woman. “You're going to be okay, okay?” She took her dark hand in hers, trying to get Tiger Lily to look at her. Tiger Lily blinked back pain, staring at the lattice of tree branches above her with sputtering, hoarse breaths. She did not answer Gwen's question, but continued to hold her stomach, covering the injury. Blood seeped out, spilling over her dress and coating her hand.
“Oh, Tiger Lily,” Gwen stammered, “I'll get a doctor—a medicine woman! Old Willow!” But even as she said it, she knew they didn't have time to hunt anyone down. “We have to get the bullet out.” If it had missed vital organs, she might recover.
Tiger Lily gasped, but the noise was tiny and meek. She took her free, unbloodied hand and put it on Gwen's arm, but Gwen was panicking too much to notice the calm gesture. She gently pushed Tiger Lily's other hand off her stomach, and steeled herself against the sight.
Gwen felt herself gag when she saw the wound. She had expected a red and leaking hole where the bullet had
tunneled into Tiger Lily's gut. The Anomalous Activity officers were not armed with metal bullets though. They fired magic repellent with the aim of dissolving whatever magic it came in contact with. The bloody abdomen looked like it had suffered a small explosion.
Dark Sun had once said that Tiger Lily had spent too long in the world of reality to ever return. Gwen understood now what he had meant this morning, and why he had been so close to tears when he told her things were rarely as they seemed. After so long in reality, Tiger Lily had become real, but only in part. She was still magical enough for the Anomalous Activity officers to dissolve her, but for all her time in reality, she was real enough to bleed, real enough to suffer.
Tiger Lily squeezed her arm and, with great effort, began taking deeper, slower breaths. When her peaceful eyes met Gwen's, the girl knew in her heart what she wouldn't dare say, or even think. She felt her throat seize up as she fought the urge to cry—because the last thing a dying person needed was panic and tears.
She could not force comforting words from her trembling lips anymore than she could find them in her screaming mind. Tiger Lily patted her arm. “It's okay, Gwen,” she whispered. “It's good that I'm here.”
Gwen nodded, but found no comfort in perspective.
Tiger Lily tensed and her hand sprung back to her stomach. She covered her wound as if the pain was an outside force, trying to fight its way into her. She grimaced and moaned. Gwen didn't know what to do for her. In her powerlessness, she leaned down and kissed Tiger Lily's forehead. The gesture should have been given to a child going to bed, not a woman going into death, but Tiger Lily's expression told Gwen that she had done right. Some comfort lurked in every gesture of love, even when it didn't fit quite right.
Gwen remembered something else Dark Sun had told her, long ago. “Perhaps,” she told Tiger Lily, “our spirits will dance together again in the world after this one.”
Her breaths shuddered, as if she were very quickly growing unbearably cold. Was death cold, Gwen wondered? Life—especially as Tiger Lily had lived it—was such a warm and sunny thing.
The Grown Ups' Crusade Page 14
