“Goodbye, Peter!” Twill shouted, forgetting for a moment that they had become enemies.
Peter, never one for goodbyes or sentimental partings, zipped back off, still leaning on Gwen. They shot so fast into the sky, she almost didn't hear Starkey tell her, “Godspeed, Gwendolyn. The offer always stands.”
The wind favored them and Gwen and Peter made it to shore in record time. The breeze seemed to blow them back to the island, calling them home in this moment of distress. Peter doubled over as soon as he touched ground. The flight had caused greater strain than he had let on, and he needed a moment to recover from the exertion.
Gwen saw, half a mile down the beach and almost out of sight, the melted and dilapidated remains of their sandcastle defense. A team of pirates had already gathered the prisoners out of its dungeon and loaded them aboard the Grammarian. Like an abandoned and maybe haunted house, the sand castle slumped toward the ground, now uninhabited.
Closer, and more troubling, a new boat sat docked on the shore. The Admiral's Special Lawyers and Tactics team had already landed. Peter, noticing it also, assured her, “They might have made it ashore before us, but there's no way they'll make it to the Never Tree before we catch them.” Diving into the jungle, Peter lost no time in pursuing them and Gwen followed after, confident she could have no better guide or partner in these perilous woods.
Every plant they passed seemed trampled or tread upon. The underbrush of the forest all felt whacked away and assaulted. Neverland was starting to feel the effects of this invasion and buckling under the pressure to survive it. The land knew something wanted to kill it.
She wished she could whisper to the island that it was only misled intentions assaulting it, that boy captaining this attacking ship wanted nothing more than to rescue her from an imagined captor. She wished she could hand herself over, sating the stars and ending the island's nightmarish dissolution. It wouldn't have been a horrible fate to go home with Jay—she'd often considered it of her own free will—but under these circumstances, she knew she had to work to save something bigger than herself, bigger than the heart that felt torn in two every time she thought about anyone or any world where she wanted to belong.
Peter charged forward without qualms or caution. He felt as invincible as ever, so he was lucky that Gwen was paying attention to their surroundings.
“Shadow!” she shouted. “Peter, look out!”
She sprung into the air as she made the announcement, but the shadow solider caught Peter off his guard, and it sprung at him before he could get off the ground. Grabbing both his ankles, it pulled him down. By that time, Gwen already had a light shining on it. The contract with reality flopped to the ground as she fumbled the flashlight out of her purse, but as soon as she turned it on, the shadow began convulsing.
It let go of Peter and tried to escape Gwen's beam without abandoning the battle. She swung the light all over, losing track of the sentient darkness. She kept it a bay long enough to dig her spare flashlight out of her purse.
“Catch!” she told Peter, tossing him the second weapon.
“What's this!” he exclaimed, full of curious joy.
“It's a weapon of mass illumination,” she told him. “Turn it on and keep watch for that thing.”
Peter found the switch and flicked the light on. “Ah, an electric torch! Very clever.”
Distracted by this novelty, Peter had forgotten to start flying. The shadow made another attempt to bring him down, but didn't get a hold of more than Peter's left foot before it met with the paralyzing glow of both lights. The creature's resilience surprised Gwen, until another shadow swooped down and she realized they were not confronting a single shadow.
The first had jumped at them with the element of surprise, but now that the shadows had compromised that, they all began flooding out of the trees. Peter couldn't break out of their holds fast enough to get off the ground—every time he eluded one grip, another of the dozen black hands grabbed at him and kept him tripping over his feet. Gwen's shadow broke from her side again, lashing out at the offending shadows and battling them back to help Peter gain his footing off ground.
Gwen helped him from where she could in the air, until she heard a rustling noise underneath her and saw a shadow stealing the contract with reality.
“Hey, no!” She flipped her light on the sneaky shadow and burned it back. Dropping down, she tried to sweep the thick packet up before a shadow could charge her, but failed in this effort. Her hands full as it attacked from behind, Gwen swung her flashlight around randomly. She fried the shadow well enough to force it off her, but another continued the assault.
Peter and Gwen struggled together for a minute, neither gaining nor losing ground with their two-dimensional adversaries. This exercise exhausted shadows much faster than people, however, and eventually forced them to retreat. Peter and Gwen chased them a few paces, vindictively giving them a few last slashes of light.
“They'll be back,” Peter predicted, “and with grown-ups, I'd bet. I think one of them already ran off to report us. We need to get away from here.”
“Then let's go.” Gwen shoved the mud-stained contract back in her purse, but she and Peter kept their flashlights drawn as they started leaping through the jungle, half-running and half-flying.
“Do you think those were the lawyer's shadows?” Gwen asked.
“I doubt it,” Peter replied. “I'd bet some of Starkey's prisoners are heading back to the mainland shadow-less.”
“They might be from the team releasing the will-o-the-wisp,” Gwen added, thinking through possibilities. The more she thought about it, the less likely it seemed that legal professionals enforcing a contract with reality would send shadows to do their supernatural bidding. She wondered what else they had to fear in the labyrinthine woods of Neverland. Somewhere, she knew, the will-o-the-wisp crawled through the trees, and Lasiandra had to be lurking somewhere in the jungle.
The route to the Never Tree demanded they follow very particular directions. More than once, Gwen failed to follow Peter exactly and found him insisting that she fly straight between the fork in a tree's trunk, or duck under a specific juniper bush hedge. The special team, Lasiandra, and whatever other invasive forces looked for the Never Tree would surely find a way to bypass these requirements, but every step would take them time. If Peter and Gwen could catch up and stop them, they still stood a chance of saving the Never Tree.
The battle had moved closer to the perimeter the lost children had established around the Never Tree. As they neared it, Gwen and Peter crept past a solider under a merciless attack from the Never Bird. Squawking up a storm, the stunning blue-grey bird beat him senseless with her heavy, feathered wings and pecked at his head with relentless fury. The solider, out of ammo, wielded his gun as a blunt instrument, never quite managing to hit the Never Bird as he cursed it.
Further along, they heard a man and woman shouting to each other. Neither Peter nor Gwen could pinpoint what direction the voices came from, even as they drew nearer. Playing it safe, they buried themselves in the heavy foliage of the closest tree and waited for the adults to pass by.
The man came stumbling by, sweating through his uniform. His frenzied eyes searched everywhere but the treetops where Peter and Gwen were hidden. “Stacey? Where are you, Stacey?”
“I'm over here! Is it really you, Thomas?” the woman called.
The man jerked his head around, as if he suspected her voice came from somewhere behind him now. “Yes, it's me! Stay put, Stacey, I'm coming for you!”
He tromped off, almost retracing his footsteps. Gwen and Peter watched, and saw a flash of glitter pass by before they heard a tiny voice in their ears, “Were it sport, t'would be too easy a game,” Puck chuckled, his laughter almost human.
The hobgoblin ducked back down and, affecting a feminine American voice, called to the man, “I'm over here! Please don't leave me here, Thomas.”
The man, already half-crazy from chasing the illusion of his swee
theart, allowed Puck to lead him even further away. Peter and Gwen leapt out of the tree as soon as he vanished deeper into the woods, and hurried even faster to make up for lost time. They didn't run much farther before they began to hear the staunch, flat sound of a legal team in humorless discussion.
“Peter,” Gwen whispered, “how are we going to fight them? What's the plan?”
“What plan?” Peter asked.
“What are we going to do?” Gwen asked. “We can't just charge in and hope we get lucky.”
“Of course we can,” Peter replied. “Luck is just what happens when you're clever and magic.”
Gwen wanted to argue the point, but Peter crept forward and didn't seem to mind whether she came with him. Rolling her eyes at his unbounded confidence, her eyes fell on something else altogether.
In the distance, a faint, green spark floated above the brush. At first, she thought a fairy had strayed from one of their bunkers, but fairies' lights did not have such a fluid look. Like liquid mercury, the light seemed to sway and pool with life of its own. She wanted to get a better look at it, and took a single step closer. She heard a branch snap behind her and a hand come down on her shoulder.
Peter had backtracked in a flash, and held her back. “Don't take a step toward that. It's the will-o-the-wisp, and it'll turn you around worse than a hobgoblin.” The lights danced off, guiling Gwen in a direction she would not go. Peter's voice stayed somber. “People who chase Will don't ever come back.”
She nodded, and when she glanced back, the eerie green light had moved on altogether.
They stalked through the woods, light on their feet and as quiet as their breath. As they neared, Peter handed her his flashlight. “You be backup. When we get there, stay out of sight and watch for shadows.”
Gwen didn't know how they could confront the special unit with any hope of victory. This instruction to hang back from the fray almost relieved her. “What do I do if they capture you?”
Peter cast her an incredulous and endearing smile. “Will you ever stop asking absurd questions, Gwenny?”
With little alternative, Gwen slipped into the trees, flying after Peter. Above the natural line of sight, they trekked closer to the team and started to overhear their discussion.
“We should invoke Clause Ten of Cardinal Direction. If we establish where magnetic north is from here, we'll be able to make use of compasses.”
“I disagree. Trying to establish magnetic north would create more loopholes than it closes. Clause Fourteen is more applicable—we should establish directions by the sun's position. The sun is already present and relevant to the case. We can argue directions onto it with less trouble.”
“Solar orientation is less accurate than electromagnetic positioning.”
“It will serve our purposes.”
“That plant shouldn't exist,” another remarked, watching the mythical flower wither away into nothing as soon as he passed judgment on it.
The men and women's monotone voices all bled together, each sounding like the other. Gwen imagined it would take an especially dull and pedantic lawyer to agree to unravel the magical paradise of Neverland.
Peter waved Gwen back, signaling her to stay put a few yards away from the collection of lawyers below. She pulled the contract with reality out of her purse and started scrambling to find the sections they were discussing. She looked back up and saw as Peter took a big, happy breath and a screaming leap out of the tree, down into the thick of a dozen lawyers in heated discussion.
* * *
35
* * *
Peter must have startled the lawyers, but they didn't show it. The unimpressed men and women didn't so much as flinch in their stiff suits and slender ties.
“You've wandered too deep into Neverland, you ruddy old grown-ups,” Peter told them, his dagger drawn. No one ventured near him while he had the weapon in hand. “Your noses in your stupid contract… you haven't even noticed you've wandered into a grove of MAN-EATING TREES!”
As Peter bellowed this, the thick gray trunks of the surrounding trees began to croak and groan. The sluggish, thick vines of their branches animated with predatory immediacy. As if awoken by Peter's cry, the calm trees transformed into fearsome, carnivorous creatures, each reaching out for one of the lawyers. The slick vines threw themselves around the limbs of whatever lawyer they could reach, and began to pull them toward their trunks. As the massive trees shifted in the ground, small and cavernous holes appeared underneath their exposed roots, like an earthy mouth leading beneath the tree.
The most immediate reaction to this came from the man who screamed and fainted as soon as the vines began dragging him to the claustrophobic opening.
“There are no known carnivorous plants larger than the Malaysian pitcher plant!” one of the women yelled, her hair coming undone as she tried to thrash out of the vines' hold.
“Neverland is full of things never known before!” Peter exclaimed.
“The cryptozoological myth of the Madagascar man-eating tree was disproved in 1955!” another lawyer yelled. “There is no such thing!”
This statement elicited a sad groan from the smooth grey trees, and resulted in the instant release of the lawyers. The tentacle-like vines went slack and dropped their prey—most of whom stumbled to their feet—but the quickest trees had already shoved lawyers under their trunks and trapped them below. Two lawyers railed against the roots that caged them in the pits beneath the trees, but now that they'd stripped the trees of their animation, they couldn't move the trees to free themselves. The lawyer who had fainted didn't do anything at all, and remained unconscious in his trap.
No one yet suspected Gwen perched above them. Their focus remained on Peter. “Section 6, Subsection A, Article G,” another lawyer cited. “Flying is prohibited by conventionally understood laws of gravity as they apply to terrestrial physics.”
As soon as he said it, Peter dropped from the air and bounced to his feet. A look of shock preceded his look of utter contempt. Even in the Lake Agana research facility where the anomolium had stripped every other child of flight, Peter had retained his ability. Nothing had ever grounded Peter before, and his flight was a sacred thing he would not forfeit without a fight.
“I might not be able to fly, but you can't stand!” he taunted. “You're all standing in deadly nightshade!”
Sure enough, the grove's underbrush was a minefield of dark purple flowers. Several of the lawyers began to sway, woozy expressions overcoming their faces. One even passed out, collapsing into the poisonous flowers, before a woman could point out, “The Atropa Belladonna plant is only toxic when consumed. That isn't how it works, and it's no danger to us.”
Those nauseous few who struggled with reality enough to feel compromised by the flower came back to their senses. Peter seemed surprised they could so quickly counter his dire defenses. The lawyers had no problem dispelling his reality and replacing it with theirs. Part legal counsel, part physicist, and part mythologist, the team seemed to know everything they needed to strip Neverland of its magic.
But Gwen had a copy of their all-important contract, as well as the patience and industriousness to research the clause that kept Peter from flying. Finding the section they'd referenced, she scanned through it and yelled down, “It doesn't say anything about jumping! He can jump as high as he wants!”
While the lawyers began searching the trees for the source of this voice, Peter laughed and started bounding into the air, leaping with such strength he might as well have been flying.
He sprung away and the lawyers pursued. “Jumping is constrained by—”
“What?” Peter yelled, “I can't hear you! You're too far away!”
They trailed after him, bushwhacking through thorny bushes and tall ferns. Another lawyer, with a stronger voice, boomed, “Hooke's law dictates that the extension of a spring is in direct proportion with the load applied to it. You can only jump as far as your legs physically allow for.”
Pe
ter, in the middle of a fantastic leap, started to fall as soon as they referenced and enforced this law. His sprawling arms hit their target however, and he grabbed a hold of a branch before he could fall down. The tree shuddered at this sudden weight and a few leaves shook loose, but Peter clung to the monkey-bar branch and stayed out of reach as the lawyers approached and surrounded him.
“You're outnumbered, and your imagination holds no water here,” one of them announced. “Surrender, Pan, and come down.”
Peter didn't seem troubled in the least. His cheeky smile spread ear to ear as he told them, “And fall into that quicksand you're all stuck in? I don't think so.”
Gwen watched as the lawyers' heads all bobbed down in unison, discovering that they had wandered into a slick pit of quick sand.
One panicky lawyer tried to hop back away from the sand, but only managed to sink deeper into it.
“Who knows how quicksand works?”
“Nobody move or you'll sink faster!”
“But quicksand is real!”
While liquid sand muck began seeping into their shiny dress shoes and slowly burying them, Peter shouted to Gwen, “Does that contract says anything about swinging?”
“Not that I can see,” she answered.
Rocking back and forth on the branch to build momentum, he flung himself farther than reality should have allowed him to. The lawyers, too preoccupied by their pressing predicament, didn't object as Peter landed back in the grove.
The lawyers trapped beneath the man-eating trees still shouted and pounded, but nobody gave them any heed. “Come on, 'Endolyn!” Petter called, standing under her tree.
“Give me a minute,” she said, climbing down out of the treacherously thin tree she'd settled in. “I can't fly.”
“We don't have a minute,” Peter told her. Even as they spoke, the lawyers debated whether the island's climate could feasibly support the formation of quicksand. One way or another, they would weasel their way out of that trap, too. Holding out his arms, he suggested, “Just jump. I'll catch you.”
The Grown Ups' Crusade Page 21
