“I don't think I care for the way you tell that story, Peter.”
Gwen and Peter turned to face the sloshy sound of footsteps as Lasiandra approached from the forest's edge. Still in the black diving suit the Anomalous Activity Department had outfitted her with, she looked just as unnatural to Gwen as she had when she arrived on the shore. Her usually silky hair had dried, leaving her blond locks as frizzy and starchy as straw.
Gazing up at the tree, Lasiandra's eyes brimmed with satisfaction and grim delight. “What marvelous land fruit. I've never seen any like it. How come you never brought us fruit from this tree, Peter?”
He gave her an unhappy glare. “You've done a horrible thing, Lasiandra,” he told her. “You shouldn't have led the grown-ups here.”
“By that logic you shouldn't have led me here,” she announced, too pleased with herself. “But here we all are. I knew I was close, but I was just starting to think I'd never find this place when I found two sets of silly bare footprints heading right here.”
Footprints. If only the lawyers had not stripped them of their flight, they could have flown to the Never Tree without a trace and arrived with the same secrecy that the flying lost children had guarded it with. With grim horror, Gwen realized the lawyers would no doubt catch on to their route as well.
“How could you betray Neverland?” Gwen asked her.
“How could you consider Neverland an ideal?” Lasiandra asked her. “How could you think that this is somehow better than life? You have no idea what it is to live as a myth. You might have runaway and donned imaginary vestiges, but you have a life waiting for you, Gwen. You promised Jay you would go back. You had plans to abandon this place, you had plans to abandon me, and you have the gall to tell everyone through your teeth that Neverland is superior? If I've become a liar, I gleaned the art of it from you.”
Too wounded to muster any other question, Gwen simply asked, “Why would you say that?” She had made no secret of her confused heart to Lasiandra. That somehow made her a liar?
“Because you would have flown home to grow and live. You would have gone home to learn, and make a family, and create a life around you. You would have done all this, and left me to turn into sea foam on the shore. You would have forgotten about me and left me to die without a trace, while you lived out all the potential that is the birthright of every human.”
“No, Lasiandra, I—”
The girl strode forward, cutting her off as she replied, “It doesn't matter, Gwen. I don't hold it against you, and you won't hold this against me either. I'm going to bring the officers here, we're going to cut down this silly tree and end this war, and then we are all going on to fantastic things, the sort of things that can only be contained by a place that has a future. If this is paradise, then paradise is madness. We deserve so much more. All of us do.”
“We won't let them take the Never Tree,” Peter swore. “You've made a terrible mistake, Lasiandra. You've made a deal you can't fulfill.”
She smiled at the challenge embedded in his declaration. “Do you want to bet? I know the way now, and these legs may be new, but they're fast.” Lasiandra took off running, sprinting back into the woods to find her nefarious allies and bring them to harvest the Never Tree. “You've no options left,” Lasiandra cried, “I'll tell them where the tree is and this war will be over, once and for all!”
Peter did not pursue her, but as Gwen started to run after her he called, “Gwen, no, don't.”
She stopped, and watched as Lasiandra's legs carried her off into the thick of the jungle. “Why not!” Gwen demanded.
“We don't need to stop her,” Peter answered, setting down the bucket with the Never Tree cutting. “Let her go.” She watched as he rooted around the mud and kicked around, attempting to unearth something.
“But she's going to tell them where the tree is! They're going to win!”
“No, they're not going to win, and they're not going to find the tree,” Peter answered, bending down and pulling a long handled tool out of the swamp and wiped it off. The sharp stone blade lashed to its wooden handle, the hatchet looked like a weapon crafted by redskins. “If she wants to be a liar, we'll make her a liar,” he announced.
With all his strength, he swung the blade into the Never Tree.
Chapter 38
“Peter! What are you doing?” Gwen screamed. She watched in horror as he swung the ax again and again, each time deepening his cut in the Never Tree. White splinters sprung out of the tree as Peter chopped.
“I'm cutting it down,” he answered between blows. The thought that one boy with a tiny hatchet could cut down such a huge and regal tree was almost as absurd as the thought that he would want to cut it down.
A line of sweat had formed on his forehead by the time he broke from his rhythmic cutting. Gwen approached once he set the ax down, and listened to his heavy, distressed breathing. The tree, though far from toppled, understood Peter's intention to kill it. Groaning and creaking—much as Peter's man-eating trees had while attempting to swallow the lawyers—the tree began to recess into the earth. Shrinking and coiling away from the vicious stimulus of the ax blade, the Never Tree started to shrivel as if it were not a towering, woody tree but a simple leaf, browned and dried by the autumn. Gwen reached out to touch the beautiful, crumbling tree, but Peter had compromised its sturdy nature. She no sooner laid her hand on the trunk than a bit of bark flaked off into her hand. She stood holding it, and watched as the tree continued to wither away.
“Come on,” Peter told her, picking up the bucket that held the tree's precious cutting. “We need to get the seed fruit out of here.”
As they fled, the swamp began to dry. The tree continued to shrink and sink into the mud. By the end, little more than a hunk of petrified wood remained, buried under earth, as hard and dry as stone. Gwen shoved her chunk of bark into her satchel.
The tree did not die in isolation. Everything around it began to wither and fade. As Peter and Gwen passed through the vines back into the jungle's heart, the foliage felt like paper and had turned an uninspired brown. As they pushed aside the shriveled vines, some even dropped from the trees and decayed on the ground.
Peter and Gwen ran much faster than the Never Tree's decay spread, but the colorful flowers and verdant underbrush of the woods had already begun to droop and sag. Their lethargy hinted at the lifelessness destined for them. Neverland was dying.
“Whatever happens now, Gwenny, head to the weastern shore,” Peter told her. “The fairies are corralling everyone else out there, waiting for the Aviator's instructions. We shouldn't have anyone left in the jungle.”
Gwen hoped Antoine would be able to help, but she didn't know what he could airdrop that would save them now. She worried for Rosemary, and could not wait until she made it to the beach herself to know if her little sister was alright. “I'm going to check in with Rosemary,” she told Peter.
“If she's not on the weastern shore, tell her to hurry there!”
Plucking the can out of her purse, she didn't bother to pick up the contract with reality when it flopped out. Leaving it behind, she continued to run as she shouted into her can, “Rosemary, are you there? Where are you?”
The young girl answered as if she'd been waiting for the call. “I'm running the big loop around the Never Tree with Hollyhock, making sure nobody's left out here. That would be sad. Everything is getting kind of dead.”
“You need to head out to the weastern shore now, Rose,” Gwen told her. “It'll be really sad if you're left out by the Never Tree, okay?”
Peter interrupted, “Wait, where is she?”
Gwen, who didn't even understand how Neverland's binary cardinal directions worked, opted to hand the can to Peter. He asked Rosemary himself, quickly discussing her position and pinpointing where they were in relation to each other. It amazed Gwen that her sister could understand Neverland as innately as Peter Pan himself, but her younger sister appeared to have more magic in her than she had ever suspect
ed.
“Okay, stay put then. We'll see you in a few minutes,” Peter told her. With only the slightest change of course, Peter explained, they would be able to intercept Rosemary and Hollyhock.
As they ran through the forest, they picked up enough speed and confidence to begin flying. In proximity of the dying Never Tree, Gwen couldn't lift off, and even Peter's flight faltered. Further away, where the horrible fate of the island had not yet rippled out, residual magic kept the air alive and ripe for flight. They soared and did not stop for anything. The fairy dust and confidence they flew with meant that flight, not governed by the Never Tree, would be the last magic to vanish on the island.
They passed the last of the black coats in jungle snare traps, the ones overlooked by the pirates, still clamoring for their compatriots to come save them. Peter and Gwen helped each other ignore the tempting, tantalizing lights of the will-o-the-wisp in the distance. They both passed by the bleeding corpse of the grizzly bear that had, some short ages ago, carried Gwen to Tiger Lily.
She still needed to bear that horrible news to Peter, but she knew it could wait. Tiger Lily's death was a grown-up thing, and now was no time for grown-up things.
The redskins had lost so many braves: their medicine woman, their chief's daughter, and perhaps their chief, too. Gwen did not know if the redskin tribe of Neverland would survive such heavy losses, or if they would even want to when their native soil had been ravaged by the loss of the Never Tree.
Worlds were made and unmade all the time. She tried not to let it trouble her, but it did.
Soon they ran into Rosemary. The young girl stood with the patient posture of a ballerina, waiting for Peter and her sister while Hollyhock frittered in the air around her.
“Rose!” Gwen exclaimed. They ran to each other, and Gwen dropped down to hug her sister. Rosemary began babbling into Gwen's ear, telling her everything she could think to say about the day's adventure.
“We caught so many black coats!” she remarked, her excitement radiating through her missing-tooth smile. “And I met pirates when they came to get them. One of them had a wooden leg. I asked if I could touch it, but he yelled and told me he'd skin me alive if I tried, which I don't think was very nice. I don't think he knew about manners. I saw the lights in the jungle! I didn't go near them though. Although I think Sal did, because I can't find him anywhere and there aren't that many hiding places in Neverland that I don't know about. Inch and Wax are missing too.”
“Have you been to the lagoon yet, or checked the underground home?” Peter asked as Hollyhock buzzed over him, dumping yet another coat of fairy dust on him for good luck.
“Nope,” Rosemary answered. “The grown-ups figured out where some of the tunnels were by the sand castle and then blasted them open and broke them. I don't think they got into the underground home, though. They took a bunch of kids out of the tunnels, too, which I think is cheating.”
“I agree. We need to make sure no one who retreated to the underground home and got left there—it might not be there for very much longer. I'm going out to speak with the mermaids. What the grown-ups have started, they'll be able to finish. I need you to check the underground home and, Dollie-Lyn, I need you to take the seed fruit out to the weastern shore.”
This panicked Gwen. Rosemary alone in the imploding jungle, diving into the structurally unsound underground home? Her youthful magic might serve her as protection enough, but Gwen didn't want to take that chance with her little sister's wellbeing. Besides, she had something left underground.
As Peter forced the bucket into Gwen's hands, she objected, “No, I'll go check the underground home.” She handed the bucket to Rosemary, who struggled to hold the awkward pail, until she realized she could hold it much easier if she flew. “You go out to the shore, Rose, and don't get into trouble on the way there.”
“Okay,” Rosemary agreed, happy to have simple instructions. Oblivious to her own safety, Rosemary needed direction from her big sister.
“Alright,” Peter said, “But don't let anyone else lay a hand on that Never Tree sprig. Everything depends on it now.”
“I know,” Rosemary told him, but Gwen didn't see how she could know. “You can trust me.”
“I know,” Peter answered. “Gwen and I will meet you out there in a few minutes. Hollyhock will go with you.” He shooed the little fairy after Rosemary. Hollyhock, with some reluctance, accompanied Rosemary and the precious Never Tree branch. Gwen watched her little sister fly off, the girl's hair flouncing at her shoulders and her jumper flouncing at her knees. For an eight-year-old, Rosemary remained remarkably capable.
“The nearest tunnel should still be under the ivy, fifty paces that way,” Peter told Gwen, pointing in the opposite direction as he prepared to run. “It should be a straight shot to the underground home, and afterward you can follow the tunnels out to the lagoon, which is the closest they get to our rendezvous point. If I'm not still there, just head down the shore. Got it?”
“Yes,” Gwen answered. Her uncertainty did not stem from her role in this. “Fifty paces and under the ivy. I'll make sure no one's left—but why are you going to the mermaids?”
“They will know how to thwart the will-o-the-wisp,” Peter told her. “The last of the children on the island will be wound into its labyrinth. If there's any hope of rescuing Sal and the others, the mermaids will know. Meet me out there at the lagoon once you check the underground home, okay?”
“Okay,” she agreed. “I'll see you on the shore soon.” She threw her arms around him, but only for a second. They didn't have time for more than a brief hug as the seconds slipped away on their dying island. She tried not to feel the painful fear in her heart that warned against letting her friend out of her sight. “Stay safe!” she told him.
“Stay lucky!” he replied, dashing off.
Once again on her own, Gwen felt a different kind of confidence than she experienced in the presence of Peter or the children. She counted her paces and tried to keep them even and natural, despite her desire to run. In the middle of a prodigious spread of ivy, she dropped to her knees and felt for a trap door. However, the children had left the tunnel entrance uncovered, and Gwen did not find it until she fell into it. With a yelp and an unflattering landing, she toppled into it. Sunlight came through the ivy, but the passage itself was dark. The luminescent flowers that should have lighted the way had dried up with the Never Tree.
Turning on her flashlight, she used it to watch ahead of her. Unable to run while hunched over in the tight tunnel, Gwen flew. Shooting like a bullet through the barrel of a gun, she raced to the underground home.
“Anyone here? It's me, Gwen!” she yelled as she flew. She hoped anyone hiding in their subterranean safe house would come forward, but once she arrived in the home she checked every room to be sure she didn't overlook anyone. “It's safe to come out. Olly, olly, oxen free!”
The lost children had deserted the home. Its ability to comfort battle-fatigued kids would have vanished as soon as the lights went out. It seemed the fairies had successfully corralled all the children out to the shore. An eerie sensation swarmed Gwen's heart as her light passed over Peter's hammock, the dress-up chest, the toadstool seats, and the painted box full of pirate gold. Everything in sight was precious, and all of it abandoned.
The Never Tree had imploded like a star that had shone for too long, and now it sucked back all the magic it had once put out into the world. All the spoils and reminders of adventures past would be swallowed up by its black hole. Gwen wanted the one real thing left underground.
Grabbing one of the tunneler's pickaxes, she ran into her room and slammed it into the wall. She didn't have her skeleton key to open the secret compartment, and it didn't need to stay a secret when it would dissolve within the hour. The drawer crumbled away, out of the sick and dying earth, allowing Gwen to reach in and pull out Jay's sketchbook. She'd promised she'd bring it back to him someday, and she feared that the infamous, nebulous someday had finally
overtaken the never-ending present of Neverland.
She heard rocks falling in other rooms, and the sound of landslides burying passageways. Dirt fell like snow from the cavernous ceiling, and Gwen realized she might not have time to make it to the lagoon before the tunnels collapsed altogether. Nothing defended the island from the grown-ups' contract with reality now, and Newt and Sal's elaborate, unfortified tunnel system had no right to exist anywhere near the laws of structural engineering. The most magic she could depend on was her own flight.
Satchel bouncing at her side and sketchbook clutched tight against her chest, she dashed to the main room, where she knew she could shoot up through the old oak tree that had given her so many safe passages in and out of this quaint home.
Entire eternal childhoods had been spent in this home, and Gwen had enjoyed countless nights of her own in it. Memories flooded her in such abundance, they morphed into a uniform nostalgia. She would never see the underground home again, no one would.
But worlds were made and unmade all the time. She drew a great breath deep into her lungs, and shot up the hollow oak tree.
Chapter 39
Gwen took her momentum and continued with it, soaring out of the oak tree and bounding into the sky. On any other occasion she would have dropped into the jungle and continued closer to ground level, but the jungle had turned treacherous and she didn't dare risk losing time. She couldn't afford to stumble onto a stray adventure. Over the treetops, she flew toward the mermaid's lagoon, hoping to find Peter and avoid trekking to the rendezvous point by herself.
The wind neither blew with nor against her course. The day had gone so still it startled Gwen. Devoid of its usual playfulness, the air seemed emptied of its magic. Still, she stayed afloat in it and managed to make it down to the lagoon just as fast as the tunnels would have served her, had they not begun to cave in. She didn't see Peter, but the mermaids were not alone.
The Grown Ups' Crusade Page 23
