The Grown Ups' Crusade

by Audrey Greathouse

  The thin glass of the windows offered a more viable option for escape. Gwen could smash them with anything. The stained glass lamp or globe on Starkey desk could break through the windows, but the windows on the back of the boat offered no escape except down into the water. She couldn't risk drawing attention to herself by breaking a window until she could fly again.

  She knew better than to depend on her ability to fly while feeling frustrated, anxious, and betrayed. She didn't imagine that even a slight concussion would impair her ability to fly, but everything else weighing on her kept her grounded.

  Walking over to the window, she glimpsed the adults' ship under heavy cannon fire before the Grammarian changed course to navigate around the besieged ship. Starkey's pirate ship seemed to breeze over the water in a way the Anomalous Activity's ship couldn't hope to imitate. A vicious sense of justice filled Gwen. If they had trusted Lasiandra when she said the pirates had fled Neverland, there was no need to prepare for naval warfare, then at least they got a little of what they deserved for making a deal with a mermaid. Approaching from the other side of the island—responding to distress calls from its suffering flank ships—the towering flagship lumbered toward the conflict. As much confidence as she had in Starkey, Gwen didn't want to be stuck aboard the Grammarian when the black coat's modern monolith arrived.

  She closed her eyes and tried to lift into the air again. For several minutes, she focused on willing herself off her feet. Jumping, as often as not, proved counter-productive. Most times when Gwen jumped, she came right back down, too prepared to fail. So she took a deep breath, cleared her mind, and waited to transport herself off her toes and into the air.

  As the boat rocked and swayed on the tumultuous waves, Gwen felt her feet leave the ground. “See, easy as pie,” she told herself. Talking helped boost her, so she kept it up. “I've flown in worse circumstances than this. I've flown all the way to Neverland and back before—twice! I've flown in storms and from drones, up Mount Neverest, and during a suburban invasion…”

  As she remembered the many victories that dotted her time in Neverland, Gwen's flight steadied and stabilized. For whatever reason, she often forgot how successful and happy she had been during her adventures. The first night she met Peter, that first night she flew, now seemed distant and strange. Rosemary had brimmed with so much confidence in her sister, it even outweighed Gwen's own confliction, pulling her into a world she didn't think would ever quite fit her. She'd tailored and darted and mended this world—and more often, herself—to make it fit, and she had made good use of every magical opportunity she found.

  She turned around and saw an unattached shadow on the floor.

  Gwen screamed, and the shadow panicked. She stayed in the air where it could not touch her. She had nothing to fear from it as long as she stayed afloat, so the shadow seemed more perturbed than her.

  It turned profile so that Gwen could see it was holding a finger to the outline of its lips. It waved frantically at her, but when she called for help, it signed to shush her again. Its frantic waving was familiar though. The first shadow that had attacked her, back in the meadow, had made the same gesture. Was this the same shadow?

  The shadow began moving its hands back and forth, gesturing to Gwen, gesturing to itself. It continued, until Gwen noticed the shape of the shadow—smaller and more feminine than any of the uniformed soldiers.

  Gwen lifted her left hand, timorous and slow, and waved at the shadow. She watched as it lifted its right hand and copied the motion.

  “Are you… you're my shadow?” Gwen exclaimed in a whisper.

  The shadow facepalmed in exasperation, and then nodded furiously.

  “Oh—oh!” Gwens announced. Their encounter earlier made so much more sense. Her shadow had wanted to get her attention. The shadow, now standoffish, seemed to hold a grudge against Gwen for not recognizing it. “I'm sorry,” she apologized, “I haven't seen you in a while. How did you get here?”

  The shadow went to the wall, slunk halfway up it, and it contorted its hands into a shadow puppet. Gwen might not have recognized the shape, but the rocking of the sail boat communicated the concept.

  “You came with the adults?”

  The shadow nodded.

  “Do they know you're here?”

  The shadow shook its head.

  “You stowed away?”

  Again, it nodded.

  “Which boat were you on?”

  The shadow held its arms as far and wide as it could.

  “Okay. The big one… but why?”

  The shadow pointed to her.

  Gwen glanced around the room, trying to figure out why the shadow had come for her. She could communicate with the mute shadow, but their conversation depended on Gwen's ability to ask relevant questions. From the shadow's antsy body language, she felt she wasn't asking the right questions. “Do you know what the adults are planning?”

  The shadow nodded vigorously.

  Another question occurred to Gwen, one she was almost afraid to ask. “Do you know where Peter is?” As soon as the shadow began nodding, Gwen demanded, “Where? Is he okay?”

  The shadow nodded—but with much less certainty—and wiggled two fingers like legs walking.

  “He's going…?”

  The shadow nodded, and held its hands far and wide again.

  Gwen looked out Starkey's windows at the huge ship approaching. A ship that large and ominous begged to be infiltrated, and she knew a boy who would be fool enough to try it. In Peter's eyes, the vessel might have seemed like just another simple pirate ship.

  “He's on the adults' ship,” she announced.

  Her shadow nodded.

  So that was why he went out to the beach. He wasn't patrolling the shoreline, and he hadn't been looking for her. He was charging off it to attack his enemies head-on. A dangerous prospect for anyone, Peter didn't even have the faintest conception of the technology the adults had developed since he flew off. He still regarded Gwen's cell phone as an over-complicated compass. He didn't know what he was up against.

  “What do we do?” Gwen asked.

  Her shadow called her over with a wave of its hand, demanding follow me, as it slipped back under the crack in the door and unlocked it from the other side.

  Chapter 30

  Gwen cracked open Starkey's cabin door as soon as she heard the lock click. Remembering her traumatic encounter with the shadow and Anomalous Activity officer at Jay's party, she felt grateful to have a lock-picking shadow on her side now.

  The shadow stood beside the door, pressed flat against the cabin's exterior wall. It waved her out, cautioned her to stay put, and then slipped up to the quarter deck to survey the scene. On the quarter deck above, and across the ship on the maindeck, Gwen could hear the celebratory cheers of pirates who had sunk an enemy ship.

  “Eh, you lousy dogs!” Madman Mulligan bellowed. “You think a few little life rafts will save you from drowning? The sharks will chew through those faster than you can say salt-spat-sea!”

  “We're throwing a ladder down,” Lacroix announced in his thick French accent. “You got two options—you either get taken prisoner and ransomed home, or Jimmy gets to shoot the lot of you like fish in a barrel. C'est compris?”

  Jimmy fired another one of the warning shots he was so fond of. “Allow me to speed up your delicate decision-makin' process by puttin' a hole in yer boat.”

  Gwen's shadow slumped down and waved her up. She didn't understand why they didn't leave straight for the approaching boat. Why linger on the pirate ship? Trusting her shadow had their mutual interests at heart, Gwen followed it to the quarterdeck where stocky and scar-striped Hangnail stood stationed at the wheel. The muscles of his arms and legs bulged like over-stuffed sandbags.

  His attention stayed on the wheel, only ever straying down to his fellow buccaneers as they terrorized the black coat captives. Sneaking behind him, Gwen followed her shadow to the back of the quarterdeck unnoticed.

  “Snack t
ime!” Twill yelled below. “Everybody eat a lime. Limes for everyone!”

  “Atta boy, Twill,” his father commended him. “Nothing better than limes to ward off scurvy. Eat your lime, Fishface.”

  “But Captain,” Fishface Flesher objected in his hoarse, constricted voice. “I'm allergic to limes! They make my face swell up.”

  “No excuses,” Starkey demanded. “No one on my ship is getting scurvy.”

  “Eat yer lime!” Twill yelled.

  Her shadow seemed to stare off, surveying the ship before it dove off. Gwen flew off the boat, hoping she could trust her dark counterpart. It became harder to track her shadow on the choppy waters of the open ocean, but she stayed near the surface and her shadow made sure not to lose her. She didn't need much direction. They both soared toward the massive battleship.

  Gwen hoped Starkey and his crew gathered their prisoners and got moving again quickly. The Grammarian could easily outrun the black coats' leviathan, but she suspected it could out power Starkey's old cannons.

  Still damp from her near-drowning and sea-spraying ride to the Grammarian, Gwen didn't count it as any great loss when she decided to plunge into the water to avoid detection. Using the momentum of her flight, she dove underwater and held her breath as she hurried through a breaststroke in the cold ocean water. She surfaced only as often as she had to, ensuring no one would see her. She was lucky she had a shadow and not a fairy with her—in the magical-dense environment of Neverland, a girl and her dislocated shadow wouldn't be enough to register on anomaly detection radars.

  Nearing the ship, Gwen came up out of the water and jetted over to it. Pressed against its steely metal side, she knew no one on the deck could spot her.

  The shape of the ship reminded her of the tiny tokens she played battleship board games with. In that moment, she forgot that the game pieces were modeled after the real thing, and felt instead that the adults must have modeled their ship after the game. As always, Neverland felt like a beautiful game, no matter how high the stakes.

  Her shadow caught up and clung to the ship's side, so close to her it might as well have been attached again. After just a minute of flying alongside the ship, the tropical sea wind had whipped Gwen mostly dry. Her blue dress no longer looked like a calico print; the fabric had crinkled so much, the wrinkles were more noticeable than the pattern. Her leggings stuck to her legs uncomfortably, but Gwen had other things on her mind.

  As she slunk after her shadow, she wondered if this was how the shadow usually felt, trailing after her. She kept her eyes on the shadow's hands, waiting for its stop, stay there or follow me gestures.

  The shadow glided onto the deck, then came back to wave Gwen up. No one noticed a simple shadow. The adults did not share the children's paranoia since shadows never did anything except the black coats' bidding. Where did Gwen fall in this unnatural hierarchy of magic and age that she had a shadow she could send off, but not control? She couldn't deny her shadow had a mind of its own.

  Leaping over the minimal metal rail, Gwen landed on the boat's back deck—colder and harder than the gleaming wood of Starkey's pirate ship. Textured for traction, the silvery sheet metal made a hollow, dead sound as she walked on it. She needed to dash a few yards to the door at the rear of the ship, so Gwen hovered to it while her shadow slid under and confirmed the coast was clear. Heaving open the oblong metal door, Gwen slipped in before the heavy slab of metal blew shut behind her. She pushed back on it, making sure it didn't slam loud enough to catch anyone's attention.

  Her shadow, already far ahead, glided over the floor of the naval corridor. The slender hall felt claustrophobic, and the long stretch of oblong doorways made Gwen feel trapped between two mirrors, staring down an infinite reflection of the same five yards of abrasive lights and off-white floors. Electrical circuit breaker boxes and red emergency lights sat dormant on the pale walls while pipes and wires wound like industrial snakes overhead. Half-flying, Gwen stayed light on her feet as her shadow led her down the corridor and forced her to hurtle the steps through the maritime doorways.

  A door slammed down the hall, echoing insidiously. Gwen heard, and then saw, several crisp black uniforms descending a narrow stairwell. She sprung to the ceiling to hide, but that would only block her out of sight until they came through the oblong doorway that led into this particular stretch of naval corridor. Her shadow, thinking of a more productive strategy, dipped into the nearest room. Gwen heard the door unlock, and then saw as her shadow came only halfway out to wave her in. Dropping down quickly and stowing herself in the room, Gwen locked the door behind her.

  Her problem would have been solved, but she had ducked into the operations room. The admiral and his executive officers all had keys to the operations room, and happened to be heading for it at that precise moment.

  Chapter 31

  The shadow—which had already spent a bit of time aboard this ship—knew what trouble lay ahead. With frantic motions, it gestured to the officers' locker beside the control panel. With increasing anxiety, the shadow struggled to communicate the importance of Gwen getting into the grey-green locker.

  Instead, she wandered around, fascinated by the operations room—the blinking radars, the humming navigational equipment, and the plotting table. A map of Neverland and its surrounding waters, covered in miniatures, reminded Gwen of a board game. She picked up one of the pieces next to the wooden tree in the center of the painted island. The blue totem, like a chess piece, seemed weighted with more meaning and power than its plastic could convey.

  Her shadow rushed onto the table to grab her and push her away, toward the locker, but the shadow had no substance or strength with which to push.

  Was this just a game to the adults, too?

  The thought occurred to Gwen, This seems like an important room. I wonder why nobody is in it, just a second before she heard angry, gruff voices approaching. The surly debate served as her cue to heed her shadow. The sound of a key jammed into the room's lock sent her flying for the officers' locker, where she closed herself inside and hid behind a row of standard-issue rain ponchos hanging inside.

  The officers barged in with a powerful sense of indignation. Gwen peeked from behind the raincoats and through the slats of the locker, catching sight of the uniformed officers as they entered.

  A tall, bald man led them in, exclaiming, “That doesn't explain why we got faulty intelligence!”

  A white coat and two other black coats followed, the man in the white coat volunteering, “The anomalous capacities of our informer may have been significantly diminished, sir.”

  “Admiral,” the smaller solider began, “shouldn't the Captain be here for this?”

  His timid tone seemed justified when the bald Admiral snapped back, “That inexperienced little oaf? He shouldn't even be on this ship. If the CAO hadn't stuck him on here, he'd be playing toy boats at the academy right now.”

  “But certainly he's—”

  “All he's done is give us a bad informant. No pirates in Neverland my ass! What's the status with our ground troops?

  “Sir!” The black coat woman announced. “We've lost contact with three-quarters of the men we've sent ashore, including those taken at the preliminary landing on the eastern shore.”

  “But commander,” the small man corrected the woman, “we are currently on the eastern side of the island.”

  “Damn this island and its impossible directions!” the Admiral declared, pounding his fist on the table. A brief silence followed as he shuffled talismans on the war table. “Where's the piece for the girl?”

  “What girl?” the small man asked, his nerves escaping through his voice.

  “Damnit, Rinstien, the Hoffman girl!”

  Gwen's mouth fell open. She almost stumbled back, but her panic petrified her. In her hurry to hide, she hadn't put back the blue piece on the board by the Never Tree model.

  The nasal-voiced white coat reminded him, “Her safe return is a condition of our alliance.”

>   “By the time we have the Never Tree, I can't imagine Hoffman will matter,” the small man dismissed him.

  “That is highly inadvisable attitude. Our studies have confirmed witness reports—sentient aquatic lifeforms have an innate ability to manipulate anomalous matter.”

  The Admiral cut to the chase, “They make miracles, got it, Rinstien?”

  “But sir,” the confident woman interjected. “Our informant is no longer an aquatic life form, and no longer anomalous at all, as far as our researchers can tell.”

  “Yes, but—” the white coat began.

  She ignored him. “Does she even have the capacity to uphold the terms of the alliance and deliver us to the Essential Capital? Do her governing anomalies even still require her to uphold her promises?”

  “The Chief Anomalous Officer thinks so,” the Admiral answered. “We're not here to think, we're here to act, so let's act.”

  “What are your orders, sir?”

  “We need that Essential Capital and we need it now. I want a SLAT team on shore now.

  “Special Lawyers and Tactics?”

  “Unless you know a better way to reduce anomalies, Rinstien. Forget the Captain's order—we'll dissolve whatever we have to in order to get to the Essential Capital. What's happening with the enemy ship?”

  “It appears to be retreating, sir,”

  “Good. What's on the anomaly radar, Locke?”

  “Nothing waterborne,” the woman replied, “but the anomalies on land are too densely packed to decipher on screen. It's overpowering our anomaly reduction devices, even. Aside from the concentrated and weaponized anomolium ammo, we have no means of suppressing anomalies.”