“They want to play with magic, eh?” the Admiral asked. He turned to Rinstien and told him, “Unleash Chemical W.”
“Uh, sir, no,” the white coat objected. “As the presiding science officer, I must advise against that course of action. Chemical W is a highly unstable gas and is impossible to dilute. It is the consensus of my team that in the presence of the Essential Capital it may feed on the anomalous matter and multiply.”
“Good!” the Admiral announced, banging his hand again on the war table. “I want one of those gas clouds for every child and creature on the island, and I want a new ground team ready for deployment to bring back whatever that thing catches for us.”
“Sir, releasing Chemical W threatens to confuse and disorient our troops, too. They have not had sufficient training in deflecting the effects of gaseous anomalies. Furthermore it might escape our control. In such an anomaly dense environment, it may re-learn its ability to capture and transport individuals beyond our capacity to retrieve them.”
“They're already confused and disoriented!” the Admiral roared. “I'm sick of my men falling prey to the will of the island. I say we send in the will-o-the-wisp and see what those juvenile delinquents make of that!”
“But sir—”
“That's an order!”
The science officer fell silent, and the room with him. While they hashed out the technical practicalities of this untested weapon, Gwen held a hand over her mouth for fear her shaking breaths would give away her hiding place. Her heart rattled inside her chest, but she didn't rattle so much as a single raincoat inside the locker.
Once everyone had their orders, Rinstien timidly suggested, “Don't you think we should consult the Captain?”
The Admiral snapped at the woman, “Commander Locke, you're in charge of consulting the Captain. Go inform him he's been consulted—and give him something to do to keep him out of our way. Have him triangulate our position until the CAO is ready to discuss the next phase with him.”
“That's absurd,” the white coat announced. “Our best men can't make sense of the island's cardinal directions. It is as if it warps space-time such that we're a point moving along a line, not a two-dimensional geographic space.”
The Admiral had no interest in the technical explanations for what kept Neverland in such an usual location, unchanged by time. “Then it'll keep the Captain busy, won't it? Go to it, Commander.”
Commander Locke had no issue with her orders, so she marched out the door and the rest followed, flashing by the slats Gwen peered out from. Short, shouted-down Rinstien and the bitter, bald-head Admiral both looked more confident than the terrified science officer in his submissive silence.
Once the heavy naval door slammed shut behind them, Gwen's shadow glided out of the locker. It waited for her, but Gwen held her hand over her mouth and continued to shake in terror.
Chapter 32
Gwen stepped out of the locker, but felt as though she was crawling. It didn't help that the locker's metal door had locked her in and she needed her shadow to help her open it.
She didn't know what to do with the information she'd overheard. Still clutching the blue token she now knew represented her, she saw how white her knuckles had become. She stole the piece, stashing it in her purse. They weren't going to decide what happened to her. They didn't get that power over her—nobody did.
Her shadow's head peeked out the door and signaled to Gwen that the hall had emptied out. She fled the operations room, and ran to keep up with her shadow.
“Where are we going?” she hissed. The shadow didn't break pace, but emphatically waved her on. She stayed several steps behind, always making sure she knew what hall she might dart down or what door she might slip into if the shadow spotted oncoming crew members.
The ship creaked and heaved with the sound of metal and steam—nothing at all like Starkey's antique wooden ship. This was a monster that had no place in Neverland. The tight corridors and industrial pipes had no romance, or any hint of adventurous charm.
Neverland knew that even villains needed charisma and even antagonists could be noble and exciting in their own nefarious way. Reality stripped enemies of this sole redeeming value, reducing them to vile, almost mechanical cogs in the order of things. Reality was not a story. It had no poetry to its evils.
Her shadow motioned her to stay put while it popped its head into a room. It popped right back out and jolted up to the ceiling, miming to Gwen to follow. She flew up in the nick of time; the door below swung back and Commander Locke strode out with two new crew members in tow. They didn't notice the girl hovering overhead.
“How did he even get on this ship?” one muttered, his voice sounding as starched as his uniform. Gwen still wasn't used to these black, naval suits the invading soldiers wore. Even the brass buttons seemed darker than they should have been.
“Nevermind that—unless you want to ask the CAO, lieutenant.”
“No, commander.”
“Good—then you can get to your launch station and prepare to accompany SLAT team.”
The lieutenants took off in one direction, the commander in the other, but neither looked back at the door they'd left behind, or the girl above it. The shadow egged her on, all but shoving her through the door. Gwen reluctantly watched it, but did nothing. Something felt wrong. The shadow gave up on her, and dove into the room alone. Uncertain what she would find, Gwen dropped down and opened the door. The room was not empty. Her shadow had betrayed her.
But in the same moment she realized the treason, she forgave it.
It was strange to arrive in a room where everything was metal. The pipes, the chairs, the machinery, the floor… although very different from a classroom, it lacked as much warmth and comfort as a high school math class. So maybe it wasn't so strange after all to find a young man bent over trigonometric equations.
The door latched shut behind her, but it felt a mile away. She stared at Jay, and he stared back. A legless metal desk protruded from the wall, but Jay took his attention off of his longhand equations as soon as he heard the door open—expecting, no doubt, more officers and more orders. At the head of the room, the sunlight rushed in from the windows behind him, reflected off the glittering sea.
The shock melted off his face into a smile. Gwen couldn't manage the same. “Gwen!” he called. He rushed over to her, and although she headed toward him, too, she moved much slower. She felt like she was trying to walk on the bottom of a pool. She couldn't breathe, and she wanted to just float away. She didn't drift anywhere. Jay enveloped her in a hug she was too stunned to reciprocate. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Lasiandra told me everything,” he replied, assuring her of nothing. He seemed under the impression that his presence would be a comfort to Gwen; that somehow she should have expected and delighted in his arrival.
“What—”
“How you've been trapped here,” Jay continued. “We came up with a plan to rescue as soon as I found out Peter Pan wasn't letting you come back. Lasiandra said—”
“Lasiandra hasn't been here,” Gwen erupted. “She went missing that night at the lake. I haven't seen her since I've seen you.” Gwen didn't know what her own words meant. How long had it been since that night in reality? Jay looked older now, but anyone would, in a stiff, mature uniform and stance of a military officer.
Jay's faltering smile fell at this remark. “I thought you said I could trust her—what happened?”
Gwen pursed her lips and simply shook her head no, trying to ward off tears. It didn't work, and when she felt them rolling down her face just the same, she told him, “I was an idiot. I never should have trusted her.”
Jay looked like Gwen was warping his reality beyond comfort. “You mean, you haven't been trying to come home?”
“No,” Gwen exclaimed, “Lasiandra's lied. She's lied to all of us.”
“If Peter Pan hasn't been keeping you here,” Jay asked, his voice losing confidence, “why haven't you com
e home?”
She wanted to explain that Peter was keeping her here—just not against her will. Her sister, the lost children, Peter... she loved them all and she would leave them all behind the moment she left paradise. Her mouth couldn't move as fast as her thoughts, and when she opened it, all she managed to say was, “I just wasn't ready yet.”
Jay, alarmed and confused, still pulled Gwen back into his arms. He tried to instill some security in her, but with his own sense of security fast diminishing, the gesture could not console Gwen.
“What's going on?” Jay asked. “What do we need to do?”
“I don't know,” she answered. “What are you doing here?”
Jay pulled back and looked her in the eyes. “I came to save you. Lasiandra said that you gave her a mirror so that she would always be able to find a way in the stars to help you, but she needed my help, too. She said we could find the Anomalous Activity Department and make a deal with them to help us beat Peter Pan and rescue you. They're helping us; they just want one tree off the island.”
He trailed off as he watched Gwen shake her head, contradicting everything that came out of his mouth. “Everything she said after she got her legs was a lie, Jay, and anything before that was duplicitous at best. I never should have given her that mirror. Mermaids are honest, it's people that aren't.”
“Everything?” Jay asked softly.
“As far as I can tell,” she replied, exasperated with this web of lies, and furious with herself for giving the deceitful mermaid everything she needed to spin it. She didn't understand why Jay seemed more wounded than aghast at this.
“She said you missed me,” he told her. “She said you loved me.”
Gwen stammered, trying to address that issue in a speedy and truthful manner. In her hesitation, Jay kissed her.They weren't basking in some late night rendezvous, though. Gwen couldn't put the rest of the world out of mind just because Jay had arrived here. She broke away. Too much stood at stake; she didn't have time to waste on her heart, or the people in it. “Jay, they're getting ready to destroy Neverland. I have to stop them.”
“No, Lasiandra said they just want a tree or something.”
“That tree is Neverland. If they chop it down, everything magical about this place will die with it.”
“But Lasiandra—”
“She lied, Jay.”
“No,” he insisted, unwilling to come to terms with what she told him. “We made a deal with CAO. Lasiandra could get them to Neverland and give them the tree they wanted, but they wouldn't destroy anything else. I gave that order.”
“No, the Admiral is sending some kind of team ashore with clearance to destroy anything in order to reach the tree—he's overriding your order,” Gwen told him.
Jay shook his head, wanting to refute her. “This is a rescue mission—isn't Peter Pan fighting to keep you and those kids trapped here? The CAO wants to preserve all the magic he can, just get it away from Peter Pan.”
This delusion hardened Gwen's insides as quick as a punch to the gut. “He's protecting the Never Tree. We're protecting the Never Tree,” she told him. “The only reason the CAO doesn't want to destroy the magic is because he wants to take control of it. If he takes the Never Tree and its magic, Neverland will die.”
“That's not possible.” Jay put a hand to his head and tried to think back through everything through the lens of this new information. “Lasiandra said you wanted to come home. Once we saved you, they were going to set her up with a human life and give me a full ride scholarship to the Naval Academy in Maryland and…”
Everything everyone wanted. Lasiandra had set out with that aim, and drawn pretty promises out of the Anomalous Activity Department in order to achieve her ends. “Didn't you ever stop to think it might be too good to be true?” Gwen asked.
“You flew off to Neverland!” Jay's confusion had become its own wounding emotion. “What was I supposed to do when your best friend told me that was too good to be true, that you were stuck out here and she needed my help to rescue you?”
She didn't have an answer. The quiet blips of the radar almost aligned with the uneasy feeling of the sea far below the metal floor. Through the windows and beyond the blinding glare of the sea, she could see Neverland's shores. It looked like an ordinary island, from the vantage point of the adults' ship.
Her silence drained the passion from Jay. His down-turned gaze didn't even lift up to meet her eyes as he announced, “So you don't want to come home after all.”
The pain in his voice hurt Gwen worse than his rising tone had a moment ago. She couldn't bare to imagine how betrayed Jay must have felt as she stripped him of the illusion of heroism Lasiandra and the black coats had sold him. She tried to defend herself and mend his injured spirit, but she tripped over her words and feelings worse than ever. “I do, Jay, just—” Feeling flustered she looked everywhere but at him. “I don't want this to be over, not yet, and I don't want to leave until I know its safe. My sister is here. There are so many children here. Don't you understand how I can want this to exist for them, even if I come home?”
Her eyes turned back to heartbroken Jay. She hated how handsome he looked in that awful uniform. He seemed so professional in the crisp black suit, golden patches all but glowing on his shoulders and sleeves. She reached out and touched the tidy insignia. “They made you an officer?” The more she talked with him, the more boyish he seemed. Jay hadn't aged much—he was just trying to grow and begin behaving like the admirable adult he expected to grow into.
Jay shook his head. “I'm handling everything with Lasiandra, so they had to put me at a rank that had clearance for top secret communications. It doesn't mean anything, really. The Admiral is running the show. I'm just here because Lasiandra needs me to be a captain.”
“Why does she need you to be a captain?” Gwen asked.
Jay glanced back out the window, a small man aboard a big ship that he commanded in name only. “Lasiandra said,” Jay began, “that this would only work if it felt like a fairytale.”
Gwen nodded, knowing too well how stars and magic and mermaids all worked. Lasiandra wanted to script the universe, using her magic to sew all the loose ends of the world together and give Gwen the ending she thought she needed. Jay was right there to help her, to listen and trust in Lasiandra's vision of events. Gwen could only imagine the twisted truths and spurious secrets she spilled as a mermaid, and the bald-faced lies that had come once she had legs to propel her into the treacheries of humanity.
“It's not going to work at all,” Gwen told him. “Everything has gone wrong. We need to get every adult off the island right now.”
Jay still struggled with this sudden shift in narrative. “I thought you needed to come home. I thought you wanted me to come help you,” he replied.
His words cut with undue strength into her heart. “I am tired of everyone making decisions for what they think I want!” She didn't mean to yell, but Jay's startled expression told her she'd communicated her frustrated rage too well. Lasiandra, Starkey, now Jay… it seemed no one would leave her to make her own decisions. True, she rarely knew how to act on the hazy desires of her heart, but how did her confusion give anyone else the right to usurp her autonomy? If she didn't even know what she needed within herself, how could anyone else know by looking at her from the outside?
Jay, made frantic by the intensity of Gwen's exasperation, looked to the clock embedded among many other gauges on the room's console. “I can call for the CAO. You can talk to him. Do you think you can negotiate with him?”
She shook her head, her mouth agape at the absurdity of this proposal. “I need to get out of here, I'm the enemy, Jay. I'll be taken prisoner if I'm found here,” Gwen looked for an alternate exit. Fortunately, the room led straight out to the upper deck and she knew she could make her escape there. Fleeing to the deck gave her the quickest route to safety. No one aboard could chase her down if she leapt off the side of the ship and flew back to shore.
Befo
re she could leave, Jay grabbed her arm. He didn't notice that her own shadow also made a grabbing motion at her arm. Only Gwen saw the flailing shadow and knew it wanted her to stay put. She didn't trust it anymore. It had promised to take her to Peter, and had led her to Jay. Even her shadow had other ideas about what Gwen needed.
“No, you have immunity,” Jay exclaimed. “Lasiandra made them promise that you wouldn't be in trouble as part of the deal.”
“I can't go home, not like this,” Gwen cried. “I have to get back out there and defend Neverland!”
“If you think Lasiandra is betraying us, you need to talk to the CAO,” Jay told her. “He's not a bad guy. He's a lot better than the Admiral, at least. Tell him what you told me. If this is true, we have to call off the attack!”
The simplicity of this solution proved to Gwen that her friend still had no conception of this battle's stakes or whose motivations could ever align. “You don't understand,” she told him. “They know. They know they're going to kill Neverland. They want every last drop of magic they can squeeze out of this place. Nothing will be left once they get a hold of the Never Tree, and they know it.”
A sudden squeak sounded like a metal caw as the ship shifted again, changing course. The noise startled Gwen. Braced to bolt for the door, she didn't know how many more minutes or seconds she might have here before any one of the puppeteers running this ship might storm in and find her. She had no desire to confront any of the black coats—she had no resources to contend against them.
She ransacked her mind, shifting through an impossible stack of questions. She wanted to ask Jay so many things, but so many of them were trivial in this eleventh hour of the battle. The most important and volatile variable in this equation remained Lasiandra, however, and Gwen needed one more detail. “Did you make a deal with Lasiandra?”
“What do you mean?”
“I know the CAO made a deal with her, but did you ever promise her anything? Did she ever agree to help you with anything in exchange for a favor?”
The Grown Ups' Crusade Page 18
