The Piper's Price

by Audrey Greathouse

  Their first move was to take out the cameras. Sal and Newt dug some raven tree fruits out of Gwen’s satchel and pitched them straight into the cameras monitoring the entrance. Their twinkling eggshells cracked on impact and covered the camera lenses with a thick and goopy cream, leaving them nonfunctional.

  “Let’s get down to the cells and find Hollyhock,” Peter announced. “After that, we’ll figure out which lab the pipe is in.”

  So they descended, following Peter’s cocky confidence down the concrete stairs in unnerving florescent lighting. They tried to stay quiet, shuffling down the stairs until they got to the heavy locked door at the bottom. Peter swiped it open and it took all Gwen’s strength to pull the door open for everyone. The children swarmed in, much to the surprise of the security guard.

  “What the—you kids can’t be here!” she exclaimed, almost as frustrated as she was surprised.

  The door closed behind them though, and in the concrete basement, the children knew they no longer had need to be quiet. They ran screaming down the hallway, too many for the guard to apprehend. She grabbed a hold of Newt, but let go of him with a yelp when he bit her. In response, she grabbed the Taser at her hip as he ran off.

  Only, it wasn’t a Taser. Gwen didn’t recognize the device, but she suspected it was an experimental product of magic and technology. “Stop! Stop!” the guard yelled, backing up toward a cell door before firing the weapon and shooting a streak of visible current—whether electrical or magical, they couldn’t know—at Newt. He dodged her erratic fire the first time, but the lightning-like product hit him when she fired again.

  The shock shot Newt’s body up into the air, but when he fell, it was as if he were in slow motion. The boy’s body had seized up, but drifted back to the ground in gentle paralysis. The guard began firing at other targets, and everyone dashed in a mad attempt to avoid her fire

  Gwen met eyes with Blink, who pulled Leroy out of her cargo pants’ pocket and cradled him in her hands. While the screaming, flailing children zigzagged all through the hall, Gwen snuck to the cell behind the guard woman with the key card. Foxglove maliciously tied the woman’s shoestrings together, and Dillweed and Hawkbit worked together to lift her walkie-talkie off her belt. Once Gwen was in position, Blink then ran up to the guard woman and chucked brave Leroy right at her.

  The guard screamed as she attempted to bat Leroy off her, but the friendly rat made a horrible show of snarling and snapping while he clawed at her uniform and held on. Gwen wrenched open the cell door and watched as the guard stumbled backward and fell into it in her attempt to get the rat off her chest.

  Leroy sprung off her and dashed out as soon as she was securely inside, allowing Gwen to slam the cell door shut. The guard pounded on the thick glass of the door’s slender window, but the sound was muted and signified her helplessness. “Sorry!” Gwen apologized before running off to see what condition Newt was in.

  Lying on the floor, his body was all locked up, even his jaw. He could only manage mumbled “Uh-huhs,” and “nuh-uhs,” in response to questions.

  Bard held onto his head and patted it as she reassured him, “I’m sure it’s nothing a little fairy dust won’t fix.” All three fairies danced over him, dusting him from head to toe.

  “Sal, I’m designating you medic,” Peter announced. “See what you and the fairies can do for him while the girls and I search for Hollyhock. I need Newt up and in action when we storm the labs.”

  “Yes sir!” Sal exclaimed. He began doing chest compressions on Newt, but fortunately, he didn’t know how, so no damage was done.

  Peter swiped the key card from Gwen and opened the nearest cell door. Blink stole the key card from him right before he plunged in to investigate, and she opened the next. Bard and Gwen joined in this effort. There were only nine cells all total, and most of them were empty, including the one they’d locked the guard in.

  Gwen opened a cell door, and a yowling cat came screeching out of the cell. It scampered off as fast as it could, not so different from her own beloved Tootles at home, except it wore a stately hat and a pair of black leather boots on its hind legs. It seemed almost completely ordinary, and Gwen suspected that what magic the sharply dressed cat had once possessed had been drained away in this institution.

  She went to open the next cell, but Bard still had the key card and was on her tiptoes staring into an unopened cell. Bard pressed her wide-eyed face against the thick window and Gwen came to see what had the girl’s attention.

  Inside, a faint and foggy presence danced, fluctuating between gold and blue-green colors. It was ephemeral and seemed to suck all the light out of the cell in order to feed its own glow. The eerie darkness of the cell made a troubling backdrop for the amorphous creature within.

  “I don’t think we should open this one,” Bard announced.

  Peter’s patience had run out with these cells; Hollyhock wasn’t in any of them. He took the key from Bard and raced down to the last cell. “She’s got to be in the last one then, right?”

  The cell at the end of the hall was the only one that did not have a window to look into. The door was heavier and vault-like. Gwen looked back at the ghostly presence in the cell, and considered what the adults might have locked up in the biggest vault. “Peter…”

  He was already pulling at the metal door, prying it open. They couldn’t see anything inside, only darkness.

  Newt and Sal came running over with the fairies. With the help of the fairies, the effects of the magical Taser had worn off fast enough. They hung back with the girls while Peter drew his dagger and stepped slowly into the dark chamber.

  Gwen poked her head in, just enough to discover a switch on the wall. Flicking it, she turned on two rows of overhead lights, which began buzzing over the vaults many racks and strange objects.

  The children were willing to wander in once there was light, and they found the storage room filled with everything from mundane household equipment to magical specimens of botany. Everything was tagged and labeled. “What is all this?” Peter asked aloud.

  Gwen looked at a shelf with a pair of glass shoes and a rose bush cutting that shouldn’t have looked nearly as bright or alive as it did. “Confiscated materials,” she announced. “Magical contraband.”

  “I bet the Piper’s pipe is in here!” Sal exclaimed. The children scattered, everyone searching the shelves for their target. Peter took to the air and scanned the topmost shelves, searching “But where’s the magic canceler they’re using? I want to destroy it!”

  Gwen found an evidence tag seemingly suspended in the air. She reached out to touch it, but bumped against an invisible ball of thread—undoubtedly the one that her small spool of thread had been taken from.

  In a matter of seconds, Sal had found the pipe—a large, purple-painted instrument that did not look anything like any flute Gwen had ever seen. Hollyhock was nowhere to be found, however, which meant she would have to be upstairs in one of the labs.

  “But what about the magic canceler?” Peter cried.

  Newt went running out of the room. “Maybe it’s in the door you guys didn’t check.”

  Gwen hated to break it to him, but said all the same, “That’s just a broom closet. It isn’t even locked or anything.”

  Still, Newt ran out to check. In absence of any other plan, the children followed after. Gwen convinced the children not to steal anything else besides the pipe. They didn’t know what kind of unfamiliar magic these objects held, or who might get in trouble and be investigated if they disappeared.

  The guard woman was still pounding on her cell door, but her walkie-talkie was going off where Dillweed and Hawkbit had dropped it on the floor. “Erica, pick up, dammit! I’m locked out! It’s Andrew, come upstairs and let me in!”

  Newt pulled open the one unlocked door in the basement. It was more than a broom closet. It contained the building’s water heater and electrical generator. The fuse box was mounted on the wall, and other mechanical and electrical co
mponents that Gwen didn’t know the function of. In the very middle, it also had a solid, black, block of metal.

  Peter untied the spider-silk at his waist where he’d worn it like a sash. Gwen saw immediately what he was about to do, but her mind was also preoccupied staring at the generator, different from any she’d ever seen before and clearly enchanted by some grown-up technology. The anomaly reduction device couldn’t simply be eliminating all the magic in the vicinity. The interplay between magical technology and this block of magic-sucking element was more complex than her present understanding of it. How were the two interacting in this room? How could the adults have laboratories in which they were experimenting with magic and also deprive the children of flight?

  “Peter…” she began, cautious and confused.

  But Peter shared none of her apprehensions. He spread the spider-silk like a fishing net and threw it high over the impossible block. The net drifted down, covering the monolithic black block in a wispy veil of silver netting. Everyone took several steps back on the speckled tile as the two enchantments—one magic canceling, the other magic hiding—came into contact with each other.

  The technologies all around them started to short out, shut down, power off, and light up… it was a jarring series of reactions from the electrical systems that were calibrated to exist beside the anomaly reduction device. They began behaving anomalously, panicking as the supernatural aspects of their programming lost touch with the one thing that was wirelessly keeping them grounded in reality. The children found they could fly again, as the lights above began to flash, and electricity was delivered throughout the building in limited, frantic bursts.

  This was no longer a stealth mission.

  Hollyhock had to be in the labs upstairs. If they had to encounter anomalous activity researchers, it probably would be to their advantage to short out all of their technology first. The children crept back upstairs, lighter than air as they flew up in the shadows of the stairwell. They heard the voices of researchers as they discussed this sudden power loss.

  “Hasn’t anyone seen Andrew?”

  “I don’t like it. I think we should call the officers.”

  “And drag the black coats out into this? That’s the last thing we need.”

  Blink carried Leroy, Bard held tight to the pipe, and Newt had picked up the kitty cat in the boots and hat. They drifted up to the top of the ceiling, where only a few emergency backup lights illuminated the dim hall. As adults came out of their labs, they were looking for each other, not flying intruders.

  “The system’s completely down?”

  “Is Richards running experiments on the anomalium again?”

  “Does anyone have access to basement? Where on earth is Andrew?”

  All the children pressed themselves flat against the ceiling. Peter waved his compatriots over and motioned for them as he inched closer to the unguarded, open door to one of the labs.

  When he gave the signal, they dropped off the ceiling and flew into the lab in a furious rush. Peter pulled his slingshot out and immediately took a threatening aim at the researchers within with such confidence they backed up and put their hands up.

  “Whoa, watch out there, kid!”

  The children scattered in the room. Newt dropped the cat; it yowled but landed fine on its feet. Everyone searched for Hollyhock, but within seconds, it was clear she was not in this lab.

  In the middle of the blue-grey laboratory and its speckled floor, however, a glassy, round object the size of the grapefruit sat on a lab table. It glowed red and blue in turn, colors dancing like weightless lava within it. So well acquainted with magic, the lost children knew an extraordinary object when they saw one. None of them knew what it did, of course, but from the shiny metal stand on which it sat, they knew it must be important.

  Peter grabbed it.

  “No, no, no, no!” a balding researcher yelled, running toward him.

  Peter no longer had his slingshot out, but the giant marble was a better deterrent. The researcher kept his hands up and stopped.

  “Be careful with that!” his lab partner yelled. Both men wore white lab coats and looked like the sad sort of adults who stayed late into the night at their work.

  “What does that thing do?” Gwen asked. The researchers’ fear seemed born of something more than concern for their creation. They were scared, and Gwen knew enough to know she should be scared too.

  The children flocked around Peter while the researchers exchanged a glance. “We’re not sure,” the bald one admitted. “But the matter within is extremely volatile and suggests a highly combustible nature.”

  “What’s that mean?” Sal asked, cocking his head.

  Gwen understood at once. “Peter, don’t drop that!” she cried.

  “Why not?” Newt demanded, floating overhead and watching the colors dance inside it like living goop.

  By this time, several other scientists had gathered at the doorway of the lab and were gawking in with the same horror.

  “It’s explosive,” Gwen told him. “It is very dangerous.”

  Peter smiled and shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Peter,” Gwen warned, terrified at the prospect of dying in a violent explosion over a matter of Peter’s confidence.

  “But,” he continued, “if you’re worried about it, you can have it back. We’re just here for our fairy.”

  The researchers both began babbling: they didn’t know where she was, they didn’t have clearance, they couldn’t—

  Peter lifted the marble over his head and got ready to smash it to the ground, and the men acquiesced. Gwen didn’t know whether to trust his confidence or the researchers’ authority. On top of that, she couldn’t tell whether Peter was even serious in his threats to smash it.

  “Take us to the fairy,” Peter demanded of the bald researcher. “And keep your hands in the air. Everybody else, stay put!”

  Peter held tight to the marble, making sure no one would be able to snatch it from him as they exited the lab. Nobody would have dared though.

  “Watch out, he’s got the ammonia noctigen and acetic solium!”

  The facility’s lab-coated staff stood back in pale-faced horror. The brave ones whispered between themselves.

  “Did the black coats get called?”

  “Where the hell is Andrew?”

  “Nobody move! This is a robbery!” Newt shouted, lifting his fingers up like a gun.

  “No, it’s not,” Bard said. “It’s just a rescue mission, and we’re very sorry for the trouble.”

  “No, we aren’t!” Newt objected.

  Peter stayed focused. “Are you taking us to our fairy?”

  “Yes, she’s in the transportation lab,” the researcher told them, not looking back at the children forcing him through the facility. “It’s at the end of the hall. You can have your fairy back. This isn’t going to work out for you though. If you leave now, you might be able to escape. We’ve already called the Anomalous Activity Department. The black coats will be here in minutes.”

  “You are the Department of Anomalous Activity,” Gwen accused.

  “We’re just research and development,” he told her. “You kids don’t understand what you’re doing. We’re trying to figure out what makes this stuff works, and how we can make it work for everyone. We’re not the bad guys.”

  “Yes, you are,” Sal insisted. He then pretended to shoot at him with his fingers too. “You’re the ones who bombed Neverland!”

  “No, we’re not. We’re just trying to help with what we have. It’s the black coats who are after you, and you’ve forced us to call them.”

  The researcher turned to a door at the end of the hall and, very slowly, as to not alarm Peter, reached to his belt to get his key card and swipe them in. No one was left in the dim transportation lab, so Peter stepped in and let his fellow children fly in with him.

  On one of the three lab tables in the center of the room, Hollyhock was trapped under a bell jar.<
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  “Step away from the door,” he told the researcher, who complied.

  He did so, but asked, “Okay. You’ve found your fairy. Can you hand me our experiment back now, nice and easy?”

  “No,” Peter answered as he chucked the blue and red marble down the hall like a bowling ball. The researchers all ran in the opposite direction, screaming. Peter slammed the lab door shut. Just a second later, the entire building shook with a violent explosion. Tendrils of purple smoke began curling in from underneath the door.

  “Serves them right for keeping pickled night and sun brine in the same jar,” Peter declared before heading straight for the glass container imprisoning Hollyhock.

  She had been railing against the bell jar with her tiny fists, but now she shook with unexpected joy and hope—Peter had come for her! Her little fairy heart swelled and beat more glittery blood through her veins than it ever had before.

  “Secure the door!” Bard cried, clutching the stolen pipe in her hands. “Gwen, help, you’re big!”

  Gwen found the closest file cabinets and poured all her energy into pushing one of them against the door, and after that, another one against the door. It didn’t matter. They didn’t need a way out; they would be going through the windows now that they were free to fly.

  Wanton destruction surrounded her. Blink and Leroy were both clawing pages out of books. Newt and Sal were shoving computers off their desks. Bard, too small to be of any help with her own idea of barricading the door, was flying up around cabinets and emptying them out onto the floor. Small prototype devices were smashed and breathed multi-colored sparks and fumes as their barely captured magic escaped them. They targeted the tiny, fragile-looking things. Had they known how to smash the strange standing scale against the wall or the prototype car frame in the center of the lab, they would have.

  Peter was still trying to figure out how to break Hollyhock free. The bell jar was screwed to a copper plate embedded on the surface of the lab table. Hollyhock yelled to warn him, but her fairy words were muffled by the glass and surrounding chaos. Peter found out for himself that touching the plate or the screws resulted in an unpleasant electric shock—a feature that forced Hollyhock to continue flying and radiating the maximum amount of magic she was capable of producing. “We’ll get you out of here Holly,” he told her, looking around for something heavy that would be easy to swing into the base of the glass.