The Piper's Price

by Audrey Greathouse

  The lab was well trashed by this point, especially since Foxglove had summoned all her vengeful strength to balance scissors on the counter tops and cut wires connecting the internal machinery of devices plugged into the wall outlets. Peter grabbed a tablet computer from the lab table and warned Hollyhock, “Watch out,” before he bashed the base of the bell jar. It took several whacks to not only crack and break the glass, but also smash open a hole big enough for his friend to escape through.

  Blink hurtled a brutalized book at the car frame, then loaded Leroy back into her pocket. Newt went to Peter’s side, waiting to be of assistance in this final task. Bard thrust Piper’s pipe into Gwen’s hands as she flew up alongside Sal and began pushing open the wide windows. It took both of them to thrust the windows open far enough to escape.

  They heard pounding at the door, but Gwen’s barricade wasn’t budging—yet.

  Hollyhock exploded out of the bell jar, her fairy dust flinging everywhere in a cloud of joyful freedom as she bolted for the window.

  “Foxglove, come on,” Bard called from the window. Peter chucked the tablet against the scale for good measure, but everyone else was on their way up. When the over-eager fairy refused to leave her malicious pursuit, Bard zipped down to drag her away. Gwen took to the air, but stayed low to the ground as she went to the opposite side of the room. There was still yelling and chaos coming from the halls, and the lights continued to flicker even now that the children were done with their destruction spree.

  She flew carefully with the pipe in hand. Newt was having a hard time getting through the window, so Sal was helping pull him through. Bard grabbed Foxglove and contained her between the cage of her ginger fingers. Blink was already out and gone with Hollyhock—back to their rendezvous point to fetch Princess Charlotte’s crown and the Never Tree root—but Peter waited at the top of the window for the rest of his band.

  Gwen saw Newt start to stagger before she felt the disorienting feeling hit her too. Fearing for the pipe, she landed as fast as she could. Her motion was more graceful than Newt, who all but fell to the floor, or Bard’s awkward somersault as she was forced to release Foxglove and break her fall. Peter wobbled at the top of the window, but retained his ability to defy all laws—adult and physical.

  As Newt slipped out of his hands, Sal fell to the ground also, but landed outside. Somewhere in the forest nearby, Blink’s flight shorted out and she continued on foot.

  “What happened?” Newt shouted.

  “I can’t fly!” Bard announced, startled by this paralyzing development.

  Foxglove went to the children and powdered them in her fairy dust, but to no avail. Their flight was taken from them, and they were as grounded as any child who had never met a fairy.

  Someone pounded on the door. The noise reverberated with an eerie metallic sound as it went through the file cabinets stacked against it. Someone was trying to shove their way in, and they were getting more forceful about it.

  “Come on!” Peter yelled, but to no avail. They were stranded, far below the windows. Hollyhock, seeing that something was going terribly wrong for the children, flitted up to the window and came back in… her curiosity blending with her compassion for them.

  The door edged open, just a crack. It was only enough to let the man’s furious voice in. “You kids open this door! Come here!”

  Gwen knew she had little time. “Hollyhock, Foxglove, come here, fast!”

  The fairies answered to the confidence in her voice—they could hear she had a plan. They were heartbroken when they heard it.

  She handed the pipe over to them—that all-important antique flute was just barely within their capacity to carry when they both held onto it. “Take this up. Now.”

  Their initial shock and frustration—they wanted to save the children, not some musical artifact—was dissipated by the sheer force with which Gwen commanded them.

  The man at the door yelled again, and budged it another inch. “The police are coming! You’re in a lot of trouble. Now start cooperating.”

  The fairies were slow to heft up such a weight with them, but there was no doubt they would make it.

  “Gwenny,” Peter shouted down. “We’re going to get you out of there!”

  “There isn’t time,” Gwen told him. The man at the door was yelling again. “The officers are going to be here any minute—you need to make sure you’re gone by then.”

  “What about all of you?” he yelled.

  “Just go!” Gwen yelled. She could feel fearful tears sneaking up on her eyes, but she ignored them. “We’ll live.”

  “Oh no,” Bard muttered quietly. “Oh no.” Newt called out for Sal, well knowing the futility of his cry. The fairies reached Peter and heaved the pipe into his hands so they could catch their breath. “Take the pipe,” Gwen demanded. “Use Leroy to find Piper.” Biting her lip, she focused on the pain of her teeth digging into her skin instead of the horrible desire to cry. She wrestled her voice into forcing her last words out with conviction. “Get Rosemary back.”

  Peter stared at her. Was he awed by her compassion, or disgusted with her maturity? She would never know. Bard was curled up and sitting on the floor now. Newt climbed cabinets and pressed himself against the wall, hoping to move through it.

  Gwen held Peter’s gaze, their eyes all fear and sadness.

  The door finally gave, and she could hear the man storming in. With no other option, Peter slipped away from the window. Gwen turned to see the man. She put a comforting hand on Bard’s shoulder as she faced the adult, their spider-silk net clenched in his furious fist.

  The adult had them all sit down on the lab stools and keep their hands on the seats with them. It was still three against one, but there was no way they would be able to mischief their way out of this predicament. Even if they made it out of the lab room—and not all three of them would—there was still the matter of getting out of the building. The security woman was probably untied by now, too.

  Unlike the scientists, this man was in a pale grey mechanic’s work suit. He had a long, angular face, but it wasn’t gaunt. His salt-and-pepper hair was more salt than pepper, but he didn’t look much older than her own father to Gwen. He paced in front of the children, his large feet hitting the floor with heavy purpose. He had rough, dark hands, and an unfortunate hatred in his eyes, but the most frightening part for Gwen was the absolute certainty that she had seen him somewhere before.

  When he was younger, maybe, with far fewer white hairs on his head, back when wrinkled creases had only started to take root in his face. Perhaps not even in person… on television or in a photo. She couldn’t place him, and not even the sight of the embroidered Andrew patch on his suit jogged her memory. She simmered inside herself with her curiosity, afraid to draw attention to whatever strange connection they might have had. While she brooded on this, on either side of her, Bard and Newt were having a much harder time of regulating their disappointment.

  “I want Sal!” Newt’s plea was a pointless one, and he seemed to know the only thing he could do was slap his seat and make a grating noise on the metal lab stool.

  “Stop fussing. This isn’t a game,” the man told him, wadding up the thin spider-silk and stashing it deep in the pocket of his work suit. “It never was—and it certainly isn’t now.”

  “Who are you?” Bard asked, fighting back her timidness enough to get the three words of the question out.

  Her reverent tone and unwillingness to make eye contact calmed him down. It was a sign she was giving up her antics. “I’m an engineer,” he told her. “I make sure things work right, and I fix them when they don’t. And right now, a lot of things aren’t working because of you kids.”

  “We just wanted Hollyhock back,” Newt mewed. His eyes were anxious and uncomfortable as they looked around the room. Gwen had never seen him like this. He’d weathered disasters before—not as severe as this, but in childhood, all disasters shared a similarity of scope. None of those had ever forced him away
from Sal.

  “Hollyh—oh. The fairy.”

  “She’s our friend,” Bard explained. “If we’d kidnapped one of your friends from here, you would have wanted to save them, too.”

  “These people aren’t my friends, they’re my coworkers.” He tried to stifle his contempt, but it leaked into his voice anyway. He was a man who, when frustrated, was frustrated with the whole world and everything in it.

  “And what are you doing here?” he demanded, facing Gwen. “You’re old enough to know better—not that you should know about any of this in the first place.”

  He paused with his attention on her. His brow twitched up slightly and his eyes narrowed, almost imperceptibly. Gwen stared back.

  Do you recognize me too?

  There was a noise at the lab’s door. “Anomalous Activity officers! Is anyone in here? Identify yourself!”

  They pushed in, past the narrow squeeze of the file cabinets as the engineer answered. “Hey, I’m Andrew, the maintenance guy. I’ve got three of the kids in here.”

  The two officers—they always came in twos—approached. They wore black trench coats that buttoned all the way up to their necks. These were not agents undercover as ordinary law enforcement… they made no pretense of normality. They looked like secret police in all black combat boots and back-slanted berets.

  The woman came forward, looking chillingly similar to every unflattering caricature of a business woman that Gwen had ever seen. Her hair was pulled into a dark knot of a bun at the nape of her neck and her face was painted with the sharpest and ugliest strokes of makeup. Her partner, a tall and stocky man with a thick neck and a thicker gut, walked slower but with just as much purpose.

  “Has Pan been here?” she demanded, locking eyes on the engineer.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see any of the kids until I got in here and found these three. Erica said—”

  “We know what Erica saw. Six of them locked her in one of the basement’s holding cells.”

  “My God, did you get her out of there?”

  She ignored him. Her partner continued to survey the room, disgusted with the destruction Peter and his comrades had left in their wake. “We have drones searching the surrounding forest for the others.”

  The fat-necked man spoke then. “You were the one who managed to get the power stabilized and detain these three?”

  “Yeah. Everyone was evacuating. I headed to the utility closet and found it was an easy fix.” He pulled the spider-silk back out of his work suit. He looked so strange, a handyman with a jumper and callused hands facing these two officers of some unmentionable law.

  “What is that?” she demanded.

  “Not sure. Some kind of fabric that cancels out the effects of our anominium. They draped it over the anomaly reduction device. All I had to do was take it off to—”

  She snatched it out of his hands. “We’ll take this.”

  “There’s nothing like that anywhere in the lab. I’m sure the researchers—”

  “It’s evidence,” she spat.

  The thick neck’s eyes moved quickly over all three children, as if that was all it took to comprehend the complexity of their characters. It was the first time either of the officers had spared a glance at them. “Did you get their names?”

  “No, but the boy’s been calling for someone named ‘Sal’ ever since I got here.”

  The woman turned to them. She spread a patronizing smile over her face as she leaned over and greeted them with shallow friendliness, “Hello, children.”

  The three of them were quiet a moment. Then Bard told her, “It’s not polite to talk about people in front of them.”

  Her phony pleasure didn’t falter. “What’s your name?”

  “It isn’t polite to ask someone’s name without introducing yourself,” Bard told her. “For a lady who is so grown up, you don’t act very ladylike.”

  The engineer snickered, and she shot him a deadly look. Her face looked natural again with the bitter frown back in place. “Well, why don’t you grow up and show me how it’s done?”

  “I miss Sal,” Newt moaned again.

  “What about you?” the man asked, the veins in his neck visibly pulsing as he spoke to Gwen.

  “Sorry,” she said, “I don’t talk to strangers.”

  “You think you’re real cute, huh?”

  The woman’s eyes turned to furious and skeptical slits in her face. “How old are you?”

  “I’m tall for my age.”

  “Is Pan finally realizing children are too inept to stand a chance against us?” Gwen’s blood heated as the lady officer spoke. “He’s smart to have you along to do his bidding for him. He doesn’t mind losing you—so long as he never gets caught red-handed in a place like this.”

  Gwen held her tongue. Newt couldn’t. “That’s not true! Peter loves us! Peter’s our friend! Peter—”

  The Bluetooth piece in the woman’s ear buzzed, and she pressed it to take a call. She listened for just a few seconds before replying, “We’re on our way.”

  Gwen’s hot blood turned to ice in her veins as she heard the chilling satisfaction in the woman’s voice.

  “They need us to do a full sweep of the building,” she told her comrade. He nodded, and then they both extended their arms and flicked their wrists.

  Nothing happened.

  Their puzzled expressions watched the ground, and they repeated the motion several times with increasing frustration. The engineer looked on in bored apathy, eventually informing them, “You’re in a controlled laboratory. Unless you have a magic more powerful than the hundred pounds of anomolium we have downstairs, you’re not going to be able to shadow-cast.”

  “What? Why not?” the man barked.

  “The only magic that works here is the experimental tech… you know, the things we’re supposed to be using magic for?”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed in contempt, and she muttered, “You white coats.”

  “Hey,” the engineer objected, holding his hands up, “I’m just maintenance.”

  The woman cast an unpleasant glance at the children before turning back to the engineer and announcing, “Officer Reyes and I will have to go after them ourselves then. Since you’re so good at maintenance, you can stay and maintain these children in custody.”

  “What?” he objected, “I was only babysitting them until you got here—I’ve got a hundred or more issues to start repairing with the electrical system after what these brats did to it. Some of them are active threats to the facility’s security!”

  “That can wait. We’ve still got fugitives on the loose. We need to track them down before they leave the premises. Until then, you’re on babysitting duty.”

  “There are serious security issues I need to deal with—our drones need to be manually rebooted after the anomolium surge and multiple cells were broken into downstairs—”

  “We are aware,” the woman officer curtly replied, cutting him off. “And once we locate the remaining fugitives, you will have time to address those issues before heading to the office of the CAO.”

  “What,” the engineer responded, the word more disbelief than question. “You want me to go downtown to see the Chief Anomalous Officer?”

  “I’m sure he’ll want to hear from you exactly how these children managed to get past your drones and into the cells downstairs.”

  The engineer scowled as the woman attempted to shift the blame for this night onto him. “Don’t you think he’ll be more interested to hear your explanation for why Peter Pan and the rest of them were not apprehended before they managed to find our research facility?”

  With patronizing confidence, the officer told him. “Everything is under control now that we’re here. You don’t need to worry about us.”

  The engineer folded his arms and watched as the two officers marched back out of the room, leaving him with his grimace and three captives.

  The engineer stared after them for a moment, and the children were qui
et with pensive apprehension. “You three and your little friends have made a real big mess of this place.”

  “What’s going to happen to us?” Newt asked, his lip quivering as he pouted.

  “They’re going to take you home, back to your families, and your parents are going to ground you—in every sense of the term.”

  Grounded. Months ago, Gwen’s mother had threatened to use that as a punishment. The word had taken so much shape since then. In the world of Neverland, being grounded was an overtly literal thing of even worse consequence. She couldn’t imagine going back to a world where she couldn’t fly. The act had come to feel like a human right and basic freedom to her. The only place she couldn’t fly was this prison… this prison that spanned an acre in the woods and all of adulthood.

  With a defeated sigh, she absorbed the reality that her story was coming to a completely unexpected and utterly unavoidable end. Her head spun in an attempt to adjust to this development and reframe her reality in such a way that she could accept what was happening. There was no denying Gwen had become ungrounded from her life and the reasonable track it had been on before Peter swooped into it.

  Newt started to cry.

  Bard bounded off her stool. “Hey,” the engineer yelled. “Sit back down!”

  She ignored him and climbed up Newt’s stool. They were small enough to sit on it together while she hugged him. The engineer made no further objection.

  “Neverland is home,” Bard moaned, her frail voice revealing how close to tears she was, too.

  The engineer turned away, averting his cold eyes to this scene and blowing his impatient breath in the other direction. “You’re not going to get any sympathy from me, not after the mess you’ve made here. You’re going back to your real homes.”