Gwen started thinking through the ramifications of that. That was simple in her instance, but she doubted it would be as easy for the younger children.
“Bard, what’s a memory you have from before Neverland?”
She had to think for a moment. “Once, my papa took me to the five and dime and let me pick out a doll. He had them wrap it, too, with a pretty pink ribbon.”
“I had a cap gun I used to shoot all the other kids with!” Newt chimed in, momentarily oblivious to everything else.
These answers visibly perturbed the engineer.
“It isn’t going to be that easy,” Gwen told him, and he understood. In all likelihood, Bard and Newt did not have families to return to.
“I’m sure the Magic Relocation Program will figure something out,” he grumbled.
“Not before the others return for us.”
He cast her a mean glare. “What do you mean?”
Newt caught the gist of her remark, even if he didn’t understand the psychologically manipulative motives behind it. “Peter will come for us! He’ll rescue us just like we rescued Hollyhock.”
Their adult guard groaned. “Haven’t you all caused enough trouble here?”
“Not by a long shot,” Bard told him, still petting Newt’s head. “We’ll get out of here, when the others come. They won’t stop until we’re rescued.”
“Which is a real shame,” Gwen continued. “Since we already got everything we needed from here, and there wouldn’t have ever been a reason to return, if you weren’t detaining the three of us.”
“Look here…” He marched over to Gwen as he spoke. “I won’t stand for threats, and I know what you’re trying to do. I’m not on your side, girl. Kids like you—you’re the root of the problem, and I’ve got no sympathy for you.”
“Why don’t you like kids that go to Neverland?” Bard asked.
“I wouldn’t mind you if you went to Neverland and stayed there. But you always come back, and bring all this magic hullabaloo with you… dragging anomalies and nonsense into a perfectly functional reality.”
He was getting visibly frustrated in a way that suggested he would lose control if pushed further. Gwen didn’t take him for a violent man though, and aside from physical injury, there didn’t seem to be any way in which their situation could worsen. She kept prodding him. “If you’re so opposed to anomalies and nonsense, why do you work with them?”
“You think this is my idea of fun?” he bit back. “You think I spent six years studying physics and engineering so I could get some sort of degree in magic? You think when I was learning about the great feats of innovation man was capable of, I dreamt of pulling enchanted spiderwebs off boxes made of imaginary metals?”
“Then how did you end up here?” Bard asked. It had been a long time since any of them encountered someone so staunchly opposed to fantasy and whimsy. He was bitter, even for a grown-up.
“I climbed the ladder and couldn’t get back down,” he grumbled. He stuck a finger in Gwen’s face and leaned down to bark at her. “You’ll know the feeling when you get home. That sense that whatever you do is going to be an absurd waste of time because somewhere out there, someone’s going to be doing the same thing with magic. We’ve opened a door we can’t close. I came here as a researcher, initially. I didn’t know when I took the job. They told me I was joining a team of experimental scientists who were trying to engineer next-level drones.”
“Did you build the drones that come to Neverland?” Newt exclaimed, terrified.
He shook his head, but didn’t verbally acknowledge the question. His focus remained fixed on Gwen. He vented to her, perhaps because she was the exact amalgamation of sympathetic parts he would never encounter in anyone else. She was caught at a crossroads of fiction and fact herself; and she understood his. “I spent my whole life learning to be an engineer, wanting to invent something. I had a few jobs like that, but that just isn’t how the world works now. They don’t want engineers anymore, they want reverse engineers. Men aren’t making things—they’re just pulling apart the pieces to a puzzle someone else has already put together.”
“That doesn’t sound like it would be nearly as much fun,” Bard remarked.
“No. It isn’t.” He cast his glance back over at the door out of the laboratory. When Newt shifted in his seat, he whipped his head back around at the noise. He wasn’t going to let them out of his sight. For all his adult failings, he knew better than to turn his back on children any longer than it took to blink. “This information revolution… it isn’t a real revolution. We’re bringing to life the dreams of a few men, with means they wouldn’t have wanted us to use, realizing technologies we’re not ready to deal with. And what’s the result? Kids growing up sick on social media, toddlers staring at tablets, and people thinking a search engine replaces an education. Citizens who believe their cell phones are going to make a difference in a revolution, and governments that want to listen to what we say in front of our smart TVs like some Orwellian state. It’s all progress… but it’s faster than we can keep pace with. Man shouldn’t move faster than his own mind can carry him.”
“Hasn’t he always?” Gwen asked. Bard and Newt weren’t following a word of this. The events and technologies were as beyond them as the language he was using to describe them. They were following his sense of discontent however, and Bard was emotionally intelligent enough to realize she didn’t need to understand all of what was being said. She could see that some sort of plan was guiding Gwen through the conversation, and for the sake of that, she did her best to keep Newt quiet.
“We’ve always moved a little faster than we could reasonably manage, but never like this. The industrial revolution—that was a technological breakthrough. That was man’s mind at work. Railroads, electricity, steel… everything from iron production to rubber tires and bicycles came out of that. We managed that ourselves, with no help from mad hatters or magic little boys.”
“And then Peter showed up.”
“Exactly.” He pulled up a stool of his own and got off his feet, facing Gwen. His arms still crossed, he did not look comfortable in his coveralls. “So, of course, the first thing we did was figure out flight for ourselves.”
“You mean airplanes?” Bard asked.
“Yeah.” He glanced over his shoulder at the door again.
Gwen drew his attention back. “Has everything invented in the past hundred years just been reverse engineered from some kind of magic?”
“No… people tend to get wary of it when they realize that things like planes are going to be used to bomb civilians, and nuclear power is going to kill people a lot faster than we can think to save them.”
Newt whispered to Bard, “What’s nuclear?” She didn’t have any better of an idea than he did.
“If there’s magic out there, it ought to stay out there,” he lectured. “If children want to run off with that, fine. But don’t come creeping back here and guiling the rest of humanity into playing with it too.”
He kicked the remains of the broken bell jar with his foot and watched it skitter across the speckled tile as the sound echoed in the quiet laboratory. He continued to fume without another word.
Gwen took as deep a breath as she could without attracting any attention. “Then let us go, and we’ll take our magic with us. “
“You’re not getting out of here,” he told her. “You’ve caused too much trouble for me and everyone else. You’ve stolen God knows what, ruined research, and destroyed this poor lab. You’ve caused too much trouble to get to just walk away.” He picked up a heavy book from where it lay on the floor, its broken spine turning it into a lethargic bundle of paper. “Besides,” he continued, “there’s nothing I could do to help you get out of here.”
“You could just let us go!” Newt exclaimed, pushing out of Bard’s protective hold.
“Think again. The building is crawling with black coats and researchers. You wouldn’t make it back out the front door before someone
caught you.”
“We could go out the windows,” Bard proposed, swinging her feet as she sat on the stool, her back now to Newt.
“You can’t fly here—and you never will, now that the officers have your silver sheet. You’re trapped.”
Bard pouted, Newt scowled. Gwen, however, felt there was something more to this line of thought than was getting said. Was he really just bringing up this moot point to further devastate children? Or was he dodging some thought in his own mind, protesting verbally what he wouldn’t say aloud?
“There’s another way out of here.” She didn’t know where her confidence came from.
He eyed her, and she fought the urge to flinch. “If you kids didn’t manage to destroy it during your rampage. And from the looks of this place, that’s a pretty big if.”
“Oh boy!” Newt exclaimed.
“Where is it?” Bard was shaking in her seat. “What is it?”
“It’s none of your business—this is all top secret research. And do you know how much trouble I’d be in if I let you get away? You’re. Not. Going. Anywhere.” His sharp words matched his remorseless face. If he was sad, it was for the state of human technology, not their plight. He was no friend… but Gwen knew their only hope rested with convincing him he was an ally.
“I don’t know,” she told him. “It sounds like you’re already in trouble, and if we escaped after the black coats left us with you instead of letting you patch up security… wouldn’t that be more their fault than yours?”
“What, am I going to get overpowered by a teenager and two kids?” That prospect was unbelievable; they could all admit that. He was tall, and if he was half as strong as he looked in his coveralls, they wouldn’t stand a chance. “And they’d know I told you how to get out anyways.”
Thinking as fast as her neurons could fire, Gwen tried to imagine a strategy that would have the engineer believably compromised. There was no way to reasonably threaten or coerce him. She knew she had seen him before—that suspicion had turned to certainty over the course of the time she’d been trapped here—but it was still too vague a recollection to figure out what kind of leverage she might have over him. Peter and the others were gone, and could not be depended on… but the officers didn’t know that. The lost children out in the woods somewhere could slip past their guard and aid in escape now. The fairies, the skeleton key, Leroy…
As soon as she thought of the means of their escape, the mechanics of it became perfectly clear.
“We could hypnotize you.” She didn’t mean to yell so loud. “The pipe—we stole the Pied Piper’s pipe—it hypnotizes people. It would be the perfect alibi. Get us out of here, we never come back, and all you have to tell them is you heard a song and blacked out.”
The engineer looked, for the first time, like he was on the verge of seeing their side of the argument. “You stole the pipe?”
“It was in the big cell. Behind the vault,” Bard told him, corroborating Gwen’s story.
“So you came here for more than just a fairy, huh?”
“Yeah, we stole it ourselves!” Newt exclaimed.
The engineer was quiet.
“Plus, we’ll give you this back,” Gwen announced, digging into her pocket and pulling out the key card the fairies had stolen from him.
She held it up and watched his eyes go wide with hatred as he realized where his keycard had gone. “Give me that!”
He lunged at her, but Gwen hopped off her seat and backed away, telling him as she did, “We’ll give it back if you help us get out.”
“Oh, they’ll be real mad at you for losing that!” Newt exclaimed.
Gwen nodded, confidence filling her little by little. “So what do you say? Are we going to give you your card and help you get the black coats in trouble, or do you want us to stay here and cause more trouble for you?
The engineer was livid, but as a few rational thoughts trickled past his rage, he could see how well he was compromised. The stolen pipe gave him a perfect alibi, the keycard would mitigate his responsibility for the incident, and now that the Anomalous Activity officers were on the scene, they would be party to the fault, too. In a measured but angry voice, he asked, “You kids swear you’ll never come back?”
“We swear.”
“Pinky promise!”
“Cross my heart and hope to die!”
He glanced back at the door one last time, half-expecting the condescending Anomalous Activity officers to be on their way back inside. They were searching the building though, and would not be back to harass him for several minutes more.
“Let’s go,” he decided. “We’ll have to be quick. You’re lucky you ended up in the transportation lab.”
Newt and Bard sprung off their stool like synchronized divers. They followed Gwen and the engineer as he went to the scale beside the cabinets. It was pressed against the wall, as close to the outside as they could get.
Newt was smallest and nearest, so the engineer plucked him and set him on the weighing machine. There were several unusual aspects of the scale that Gwen noticed as she examined it closely. The digital display kicked on as soon as it sensed Newt’s weight. Against a blue LED background, numbers glowed and a touch pad sprung to life on the screen. The engineer examined the tiny symbols on each of the keys and began tapping away and swiping through settings, as fast as he could. “This is experimental technology… but I take it that isn’t a deterrent.”
“I’m a scientist now!” Newt exclaimed, happy to be a guinea pig.
It buzzed and chimed, almost as if its noises were the friendly reassurances of a robotic voice. The different tones seemed to signify specific settings, but there was no telling what any of it meant. “Hold still. Perfectly still,” the Engineer told him. The machine began beeping, and the beeps increased in speed and volume at an alarming rate.
Gwen saw how serious the instruction was, but doubted Newt’s ability to follow it. “Pretend you’re a statue,” she called, hoping that if she framed it in the playful terminology he usually functioned in, he would understand better.
He did his best, but being a hyper child, he drew in a deep breath with his gut less than a second before the beeping came to an abrupt stop. There was a sound like glass cracking, and then the boy was vanished.
“Newt!” she yelled.
“Wow!” His voice was faint, drifting in from the high windows.
“Relax,” the engineer told her. “He’s outside. This thing only has a range of about fifteen feet. You’re lucky they have it operational at all. Now get over here.”
Gwen grabbed Bard’s hand and dragged her along, not even realizing that she was doing so until they were standing in front of the chrome-plated scale. Bard was wide-eyed with fear. She was more than reluctant—she was petrified after watching Newt disappear before her eyes.
“Come on, Bard.” She gave the girl’s hand a squeeze and her back a push. “Newt’s waiting. He got through fine and so will we.”
She didn’t budge.
“Can we go through together?” Gwen asked.
“Not unless you’re willing to come out conjoined at the hip, no.”
She looked back at Bard. “I’ll go first, okay? If I go first, you’ll come after me, right? We’re going to be brave girls. I know how brave you are, Bard.”
Bard looked uneasy, but there wasn’t time to fully dismantle her phobia. The only reasonable solution was to go and bank on Bard’s panic reversing her decision once she realized she was left alone in this awful building. She felt awful for subjecting Bard to that, but she knew it was the best chance she had of convincing her to move quickly—and time was paramount.
Gwen stepped onto the scale and smiled at Bard. It was fortunate for her Bard was so scared—trying to convince the little girl there was nothing to fear kept her from realizing how frightened she was. She couldn’t manifest the terror of throwing herself into an experimental teleporter; she couldn’t even pause to feel it. She just kept smiling and heard her voic
e as she exclaimed, “Isn’t this exciting!”
Bard remained silent in her overwhelming apprehension, staring at Gwen and clutching her own arms as if she felt a horrible chill in the room. Gwen looked to the engineer. “Make sure she comes through after me. Promise me you’ll send her through.”
“I’ll do my best,” he responded.
Gwen couldn’t ask for anything better from him. She chucked his key card over onto a counter where he could get it after he’d finished sending them out.
As she stood on the chrome step of the scale and he leaned over the control panel, she was closer than ever to him. There was something familiar even about the way he smelled—as though he used a familiar deodorant or laundry detergent. Whatever it was, the similarity was something that felt manufactured, suburban, ordinary… and yet it ate at her as she pretended like it didn’t matter that she would never see this man again without knowing where she had seen him before.
“Hold still,” he told her. She took a deep breath and prepared to hold it as long as needed. The machine began its beeping countdown again, like a camera timer about to go off. She kept smiling, trying to communicate to Bard how simple and easy the process was. What Bard couldn’t see was the raw fear keeping her frozen and pinning her smile to her face.
The beeps were approaching a single, sustained tone. Any second she would vanish. What would it feel like? She couldn’t afford to think about it. The beeping was so incessant and loud from her position beside it, she didn’t even hear the door hit the file cabinets again as someone tried to push into the room. She only saw, as a black-coated officer slipped into the room.
“HEY!” he yelled. He started sprinting for them. The engineer backed away from the device. Gwen’s first response was to tense up—the best thing she could have done for the teleportation process.
The officer came running. He reached out. His hand extended toward Bard’s little arm. She finally animated, trying to run, and wanting to escape this trap they’d been caught in.
“Bard!” Gwen yelled, forgetting everything as she reached out her right hand in a desperate motion to save her.
The Piper's Price Page 24
