The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5

by Jonathan Strahan

  Upon further study of Ninja Star, who was a violent blue color and covered in scars, Ashley decided she probably wouldn’t dare.

  “Zie wants to know if you would like to train with zir team,” Peter translated in gentlemanly fashion.

  Ashley’s brow furrowed. “She—”

  “Zie,” Peter said. “Ninja Star is intersex. That’s what zie prefers.”

  A line from the book floated through Ashley’s head: the mauve ones are boys and the white ones are girls, and the blue ones are just little sillies who are not sure what they are.

  Ashley wondered why she’d never noticed that line before.

  She also noted that Ninja Star looked pretty sure of what she was.

  She was right. Fairies, as you and I both know, only ever feel one feeling at a time. Ninja Star spent 99 percent of zir time feeling fierce.

  “Why is—um, zie—called Ninja Star?”

  Peter looked rather shocked at Ashley’s ignorance. “Because zie is the best ninja, of course.”

  Ashley chose her next words with care. “Are… all your fairies ninjas, Peter?”

  “Naturally,” said Peter with a lofty air.

  Ashley was left with a dilemma. On one hand, these were the survivors of Neverland, the battle-scarred companions of Peter Pan, fierce and deadly warriors. On the other, they were about three inches high and glittery.

  “I’d be very honored to train with you,” she told the blue blur that was Ninja Star.

  From then on Ashley trained most mornings with the ninja fairies on the shore. She tried her best, but I confess sometimes Ninja Star despaired: she was so big and clumsy, it was hard to teach her to be stealthy like the ninja. And, of course, not being able to fly, Ashley could not perform the ninjas’ very best trick— aggressive skydiving at the enemy’s eyeballs.

  Nevertheless, it cheered Ashley up. She was a girl who liked to keep busy.

  She was also growing more used to Peter. He has a way about him, it must be admitted. If Peter awake fails to charm, Peter asleep is a heartbreaker.

  On the third night in the tree house he woke Ashley, crying and shaking in his sleep. Ashley remembered his dreams—the sore shaking dreams of a boy who had lived through a hundred childhoods and a thousand lost, dark memories—not from her grandmother’s stories but from Wendy’s book. Wendy had loved him.

  He had more dark memories now than in Wendy’s day, and he was older, at last. Ashley could not hold him, but she did her best. She stroked his wild curling hair until he was quiet.

  “What did you dream last night?” she asked the next day.

  “Dream?” said Peter, and laughed a blithe sweet laugh. “I have so many adventures when I’m awake, I never have to dream!”

  “You dreamed something last night,” Ashley persisted, following him. He was playing a game of leapfrog from one toadstool to the other. You would think they might break under Peter’s weight, but they never did.

  Peter spun on his toadstool, and Ashley found herself staring down the length of his blade.

  “No, Ashley lady,” he said. “I never dream.”

  Ashley stepped back. Peter sheathed his sword and performed a cartwheel in midair.

  “What adventure shall we have today? Do you want to—”

  “No, I don’t,” said Ashley. “I’ve told you. I don’t want to be your mother, and I don’t care for Neverland!”

  She turned on her heel and then found Peter hovering before her. He was very irritating that way.

  “Oh well,” he said. “Why didn’t you say so? Would you like to go on one of my missions for the Queen?”

  I am afraid to tell you that Ashley was not what you might call a trusting soul. She did not believe a word of Peter’s tale about being a spy for Her Majesty’s government.

  In her defense, Peter did tell the Taj Mahal story.

  Of course she did not believe him, but she did see an opportunity.

  “If I go with you on this adventure,” she said, with great cunning. “Shall we play a game? Shall we have a bet, between us?”

  Peter’s eyes lit. “Yes!”

  “Great,” said Ashley. “If I don’t like this adventure, and if, after it, I still want to go home—you have to take me.”

  Meeting the Queen of England is an important event in a girl’s life. The social niceties should be observed. Little things like using the correct fork, dropping a deep enough curtsy, and not breaking into the royal boudoir while wearing pink pajamas.

  Ashley found herself rather embarrassed before she realized that the Queen was responsible for her kidnap.

  “Doesn’t that strike you as a bit of a terrible thing to do?” she demanded, cutting her off as the Queen briefed Peter about a new mission.

  The Queen had taken the break-in with great aplomb, sitting up in bed and reaching for her spectacles with one hand while waving away her killer butler with the other. A little thing like being accused of a criminal act was hardly going to faze her.

  “My dear child, I do a hundred terrible things before breakfast, that is the role of the monarchy.” She directed her spectacles toward Peter again. “Do you understand the situation, Mr. Pan? I would like you to apprehend the person who has invented this device to multiply the mass of objects by ten.”

  “You can rely on me with absolute confidence!” said Peter, who was perched on the edge of a priceless Ming vase.

  The Queen rubbed her royal brow. “May I stress that ‘apprehend’ means ‘bring to me,’ Mr. Pan? We need this person’s brain in her head, rather than—I pick this example purely at random—impaled on one of the clock hands of Big Ben.”

  Peter rolled his eyes in protest at this senseless rule.

  “I am forced to trust in your discretion, Mr. Pan,” the Queen said. “Remember that the fate of the free world rests in your hands.”

  It was very unfortunate that at that precise moment Peter aimed an idle kick and shattered the Ming vase into a thousand pieces.

  “Oh my God, you—you… Your Majesty,” exclaimed Ashley, not quite outraged enough to insult royalty. “I beg your pardon. But are you insane? The fate of a boiled egg shouldn’t rest in his hands! Isn’t there some other agent you can send?”

  “Another agent with the power of flight and little helper ninjas?” the Queen asked, her brows lifting above the frames of her spectacles. “I regret to say, no. Please close the window on your way out, Mr. Pan: last time there was a shocking draught.”

  “So will we have to stake out the town?” asked Ashley, who was beginning to get enthusiastic about being a spy. Being personally given a mission by the Queen of England is very motivating. “To see which house is the crazed inventor’s—oh!”

  Do not be alarmed. Peter has not dropped Ashley out of the sky, only to catch her at the last minute. Ashley had made it clear she did not think that was a hilarious game.

  She had merely spotted the small picturesque village of Litford by the Sea, which had thatched cottages and rambling manors, cobbled byways and streams under wood bridges. And on top of a hill near the town was a gaunt black structure with fiery windows. It looked like a castle of nightmares, a place an old pirate went to retire and gnaw on booty and bones.

  It looked like something out of Neverland.

  “Seems to me we’ve tracked the varlet to his lair!” Peter crowed.

  “Peter, doesn’t this seem a little weird to you?”

  Peter stared at her, all guileless eyes and crazy smile curling around those little pearl teeth, his dead leaf bowtie fluttering in the wind.

  “Weird?”

  “Ah,” said Ashley. “Never mind.”

  It struck Ashley that this was something Peter and the ninjas just accepted: the macabre and fantastical, all the trappings of Neverland. Ashley was the only one who could see the difference between what should be real and what should not be: she had some power here.

  It pains me to confess Ashley had little poetry in her soul.

  She would have prefer
red titanium body armor.

  The castle floors were largely made of big flagstones. Ashley’s bare feet ached for the carpets of home, or even the forest floors of Neverland.

  The castle echoed with the creak of machinery, the pop and sizzle of flames, and the sound of screams. This place reeked of pure, storybook evil.

  Ashley kept thinking of a particular name in the story.

  Hook.

  “The villain never really dies,” she murmured as she crept after Peter. Her ninja training made her light on her feet, so it was really a shame that Peter and the fairies showed her up by gliding silently a few inches off the ground.

  She was distracted from these dark musings by three mad scientists. Ashley could tell they were scientists by the lab coats, and that they were mad by the maniacal laughter.

  Peter drew his sword and killed two of them. Ashley gave the other a kick in the kneecap, and then he went down. The fairies finished him off.

  “Now we put on these evil lab coats and make our way into the heart of the evil fortress,” Peter commanded.

  Ashley put on her lab coat doubtfully. It was really quite evil-looking. The name tag read DR STRANGE FEELINGS OF CONFUSION AND RAGE.

  She was also extremely uncertain about two barefoot kids trying to pass themselves off as scientists, no matter how mad said scientists happened to be. It would never work.

  When she heard steps barging down an appropriately echoing stairwell, she thought frantically of how the spies on TV would act to distract attention from what they were doing.

  So as the next set of mad scientists approached, she whirled, pushed Peter up against the wall, and kissed him on the mouth.

  She had her eyes shut, but she could feel his mouth open in amazement. For a moment the world was still and peaceful, the hard angle of his jaw against her fingers, her senses flooded with the taste of berries and the smell of leaves.

  When the scientists had passed, Ashley leaned back. The world remained peaceful for a moment, the wild lights in Peter’s eyes gone golden and a little hazy.

  “Peter,” Ashley asked softly, “Do you know what that was?”

  “Of course,” Peter said, much affronted. “A thimble.”

  “No,” said Ashley, staring. “That was a kiss.”

  “It was a thimble!”

  “Didn’t it strike you as a little different from other thimbles you’ve had in the past?”

  Peter looked shifty.

  “Well, yes.”

  “Ha!”

  “It was my first thimble with tongue,” Peter told her with dignity.

  Ashley fixed him with a look of unutterable despair and then stalked down the stairs toward the grim creaking of dread machines, her evil lab coat trailing in her wake.

  The fairies and Peter followed her, Ninja Star making a belligerent ringing sound as they went.

  “Ninja Star, please, how can you be so inappropriate!” said Peter, deeply shocked.

  “What’d she say?”

  “I refuse to tell you!”

  “Heh,” said Ashley, making the wise decision that being amused was better than being driven to madness. “You’re a bit old-fashioned, aren’t you?”

  “I am not old anything,” Peter snapped.

  And so bickering at the top of their lungs, our spies stumbled into the evil at the heart of the fortress.

  There was a large chair, of course, looming almost like a throne. It stood on a dais, shrouded in shadow.

  There was someone sitting in it.

  Ashley’s voice died in her throat, and her heart beat like a child’s fists on a door, begging to get out. All the fears of her nursery got together and whispered.

  Hook.

  The figure in the chair leaned forward. “Peter?”

  It was a golden-haired girl, plump and beautifully dressed.

  Even taking into account the natural distortion of legends over time, Ashley felt this could not possibly be Captain Hook.

  She looked to Peter for help, but Peter was looking perfectly blank.

  “It’s me, Peter,” said the girl. “Only—I’m bigger now.”

  Ashley’s world tilted a little, the story changing beyond all recognition. The Queen’s documents showed a machine that increased an object’s size ten times.

  Not just an object. Anything.

  The machine had not been created for an evil purpose, not at first. But who knew what terrible mixture of science and magic had worked together to enlarge a creature who could only feel one thing at a time—and fix her like that forever, full of rage and hate.

  Creating a villain out of a fairy. Ashley whispered, “Tinker Bell.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell,” said Peter. “Sorry.”

  Tinker Bell went purple with rage. Under the circumstances, Ashley felt she could hardly blame her.

  “Perhaps you’re thinking of a different Peter,” Peter continued helpfully. “Though it would be hard to mistake me for another boy. There is nobody quite like me!”

  “This is no time for crowing,” Ashley said out of the corner of her mouth.

  “He’d have to be really amazingly wonderful,” Peter went on and then Ashley kicked him in the ankle.

  Peter looked surprised and annoyed. “Peter,” Ashley said firmly. “We’re on a mission. Now I don’t think she’ll attack you” —though looking at Tinker Bell’s enraged face, she was not altogether certain about that—“so I’ll get her to attack me.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Peter said. “I am the spy here. I’ll run her through.”

  “The Queen said she was to be brought back for questioning! And if we can change her back, make her less inclined to be, well, you know, evil—”

  Peter looked around at the high Gothic windows and the white cat in Tinker Bell’s lap.

  “I do see your point.”

  He looked around further and espied a machine that looked a little bit like the offspring of a telescope and a giant spider. “I say, Ashley. I think I’ve come up with a brilliant plan!”

  “Have you indeed,” said Ashley, very dry.

  “You’ll never guess.”

  “I’m not so sure of that, Peter.”

  Peter began to sidle with rather obvious stealth toward the contraption.

  “What are you doing?” Tinker Bell asked sharply.

  Ashley took a hasty step forward. “Why did you want to be big, Tinker Bell?”

  Tinker Bell blushed under the fading purple of her rage. “I forget.”

  Ashley took another step. Tinker Bell’s gaze followed her. “I don’t think you do.”

  “Well,” said Tinker Bell, and shrugged. “It just didn’t seem important afterward, you know. I mean—I realized, Peter is quite ridiculous.”

  “I quite agree,” said Ashley. “Of course, so is world domination.”

  The white cat was rather abruptly tipped out of Tinker Bell’s lap as she stood up. “You take that back!” she exclaimed, and in her fury, her voice was like the ringing of bells.

  “I will not,” said Ashley. “Jealous other woman, doing it all for love, evil overlord bent on world domination? Don’t you ever get tired of being a cliché, Tinker Bell? Don’t you ever just—

  “Now, Peter, now!”

  For Ashley had broken off in the middle of her sentence and delivered a roundhouse kick to Tinker Bell’s stomach. Tinker Bell fell directly into the path of the machine Peter had just turned on.

  In some ways it was a pity. It had been shaping up to be rather a good speech.

  Ninja Star approved very much, however. Ashley even received some compliments from the other fairies about her style.

  Tinker Bell, the evil genius; Tinker Bell, the fairy transformed, was captured in a ray of light and diminished once more, her stolen inches glowing and falling away. It was terrible at first,

  Tinker Bell’s face locked in a snarl. But then it was different suddenly: like a snake shedding a skin, or a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis.

  Whe
n the light of the machine faded, Tinker Bell was small and shining once again.

  Ashley stood staring, fascinated. Ninja Star took the initiative and imprisoned Tinker Bell in an empty crisp packet.

  “I did it!” Peter crowed, and very nearly hit his head on the ceiling of the evil lair, soaring in triumph.

  The Queen took being presented with the tiniest evil genius in the world very well. She commended both Peter and Ashley, which left Ashley rather dazed for a while until Peter’s crowing annoyed her again.

  “Oh Peter, do be quiet,” she said crossly, as they flew over Big Ben, badly startling a family of pigeons. “I think it’s rather sad. She did it for love, after all.”

  “Did she?” asked Peter, rather bored. “Who did she love, then?”

  Ashley gave him a withering glance.

  “Well, it’s no use looking at me like that,” Peter told her, injured. “How am I supposed to know? I’ve never seen the fairy before in my life!”

  And no matter how she argued, he stuck to that.

  Ashley finally sighed in exasperation and gave up. “You know, considering her, and Tiger Lily, and Wendy… for someone determined never to grow up, you’re a bit of a playboy.”

  Peter frowned, and then his brow smoothed. “It’s true that I am a boy,” he said. “And I love to play!”

  Ashley forbore from slapping him upside the head. He might have dropped her.

  “What game shall we play next?” Peter inquired eagerly. “I’m sure that with a bit of perseverance, we can get you flying.”

  “Peter.”

  “A little bit of falling hundreds of feet onto bare rock never hurt anybody.”

  “Peter.”

  “You just need to think some absolutely scrumptious thoughts.”

  “Peter,” Ashley said. “I prefer to keep my feet on the ground.”

  She looked at the city of London, sprawled huge and glittering far beyond her dangling toes.

  “And,” she continued. “I know you haven’t forgotten our bargain. I want to go home.”

  Peter is many things: one of them, when reminded, is a boy of his word. He is too proud not to be.

  He flew Ashley back to her window. It was lucky that Ashley, as a rather spoiled only child, had a balcony where he could deposit her. Had he flown her into her bedroom, he would have woken her parents, who were, of course, in there waiting for her.