And just like that, Lasiandra disappeared into the depths of her oceanic territory. A distant roll of thunder startled Gwen. When she looked back up at the sky, which no longer matched the cheerful blue color of the water, the grey clouds ushered her to the conclusion that it was time to go.
Gwen left the lagoon slowly, climbing up the stony stairs embedded in the cliff face with no great relish. Her encounter with Lasiandra had left her feeling unnerved. An ominous doubt followed her, even once she was back to the top of the cliff. Catching her breath, Gwen stared down at the lagoon, too clear and transparent for comfort.
The woods had seemed bright and welcoming on her way to the lagoon, but returning, Gwen found that the jungle’s canopy dimmed what little light was left in the cloudy sky. Strange creatures cackled and cooed. Impossible birds with trailing plumage flitted between high branches, and furry creatures darted between rustling plants. Everything seemed to be scurrying for safety or warning of some impending trouble.
Her pace quickened, and quickened still, until Gwen found herself outright running. Dashing through the forest, she ran, more afraid because she did not know what she was trying to outrun. Everything in Neverland had gone perfectly for nearly a week and a half, and Gwen tried to dismiss her paranoia as the over-worrying impulse of grown-ups. There was no reason for her to suspect anything was wrong, but in Neverland, it was funny how the less it made sense for something to happen, the more likely it was to occur.
Tromping past overgrown roots and thrashing through bushes, Gwen realized she was not returning on the same course that she had come from. This was an unfamiliar stretch of jungle, and she was still a long ways from the underground home. She was turned around and confused, and another crack of thunder sounded before she finally ran into Bramble.
More accurately, Bramble flew into her. In a confused haze, his flying was erratic at best. He was combing through the forest though, frantically flitting. Bramble was the only fairy Gwen ever recognized, aside from Dillweed and Hollyhock. “Bramble!” Gwen held out her hands and let the unsteady fairy land in them. He stood in her palm, putting a hand against her thumb to support himself. His stomach churned, full of mango and unhappy about the exertion of his panicked flying. “What are you doing out here?”
The question seemed to go over his foggy head. His little form heaved up and down as he took in winded breaths, tired from coming so far so fast. His eyes made a faint jingling noise every time he blinked. “Bramble?”
He looked up at her, finally, and a look of shocked understanding seemed to register on his face. He exclaimed something, but the only word of it Gwen recognized was the whizzing-noise-word that fairies used to refer to Peter. The rest of it just sounded like an underwater bee-buzz. Much to her dismay, Bramble picked up and flew back in the direction he had come. “Wait, Bramble! I don’t know how to get back!”
Having lost her confidence, Gwen had lost her ability to navigate the magical jungles of Neverland. Lifting off her own feet, she resolved to keep pace with Bramble, but lost sight of the tiny creature almost immediately. She flew in the direction he had vanished in, but her confidence was rapidly diminishing. She could have flown up above the tree line and searched for the meadow, but her nerves kept her pinned close to the ground. Faltering as she flew, she tried not to doubt what she had come to believe was an innate ability. Should she have gotten more fairy dust from Bramble before he took off? Would that have helped? She didn’t dare fly any higher than she was prepared to fall, but such a precaution did not aid her in the whimsical endeavor of flying.
A flash of lightning electrified the sky, shooting light through the forest with a jarring pang. The boom of thunder followed immediately after. The sky was grey and the clouds shifted like a swarm of dark fish in a pond. Gwen feared she would be caught in a storm, but not a drop of rain had fallen yet.
All at once, Gwen found herself in a meadow. She had never been here before; she knew that. Wildflowers cropped up in sporadic clumps, and the long, green grasses were uncut at her calves. The tree line had suddenly broken. One minute, she was racing through the forest, the next, she was floating here. Pausing to catch her breath, she ironically felt safer in this open area than in the claustrophobic security of the forest. She landed gently, unthinkingly. Turning her head to the sky, she saw the faint grey clouds blowing and rolling away. Darker clouds seemed to be coming to take their place.
On the other side of the meadow, Peter burst into the clearing. Bramble was leading him, guiding the boy to poor, lost Gwen. If Gwen had understood the fairy language, she would have already known that.
“Gwenny!”
“Peter?” Gwen shouted. She ran to him, and between her bounding strides and his quick flight, they met in the middle of the meadow, cornflowers and lilacs growing up around them. Perhaps if he had been on the ground initially, she would have hugged him. Peter lingered in the air for just a moment though, and by the time he landed, the impulse to hug each other had melted away into urgent discussion. “What are you doing out here?” His voice carried the sort of anger that only accompanied concern.
“I got lost in the woods; I was trying to come back. Is something wrong, Peter?”
Bramble flitted back and forth, pacing in the air, objecting to Peter and Gwen having this conversation now, rather than when they were safely underground.
“The opposition, they’ve launched an attack. We’ve got to get to cover.”
“What? No, it’s just a storm.” Gwen didn’t understand what Peter was telling her, but she had already made up her mind that she didn’t believe it.
“Gwen-dollie, we’ve got to go. There’s—”
The sky was suddenly drained of light. The thin, grey clouds that had blocked the sun were eclipsed by darker, brooding storm clouds, and as the daylight faded, small, grey flecks began to rain down. As they drifted softly, Gwen knew it wasn’t rain. Her attention was as captivated as Peter’s was, but she did not understand what it was the way he did. “Snow?” she asked quizzically, looking at the grey and dirty powder as it started to fall around her.
Peter held out his hand and caught a flake of it, crushing it in his hand. It left a smoky residue on his palm. “Ash.”
The winds picked up, and more of the ash furiously fluttered down. It became larger, and Gwen could hardly comprehend the charred flecks of paper that were plummeting down. Peter zipped up into the air, jumping more than flying, to grab a large square of it. He came back down immediately, a look of horror on his face.
“Peter, what is it?” Gwen pled, hoping that her fear was born of her unknowing, that if she only had answers she wouldn’t be afraid, but from the look on his face, she knew that answers would only bring more fear.
The invisible hand of the wind grabbed the paper from out of Peter’s hold. It blew straight to Gwen. Catching it, she realized it was a page from out of a newspaper; the title read—ISIS ATTACK ON ERBIL; HUNDREDS DEAD.
She had seen newspaper headlines before, but this news did not belong here. Not in Neverland. It was too dark, too terrifying of a thing to read amid the lilacs and cornflowers. Again, she begged, “What is this, Peter?”
The page was torn out of her hand by the vindictive wind. Peter answered her, with a word she had never feared so greatly. “Reality.”
“We’ve got to go. Now.” Peter’s voice, usually so carefree even in its demands, genuinely scared Gwen by sounding so authoritarian now. She didn’t fear Peter—she couldn’t fear Peter—but whatever instilled this sort of militant disposition in him was certainly to be feared.
He grabbed her hand and yanked her with him. Gwen stumbled as she adjusted to his run. “It’ll be faster to fly,” she announced, leaping into the air.
Gwen knew that they had to get to safety as quickly as possible, and her first thought was to take to the air. In that moment, the idea was so instantaneous she couldn’t doubt it at all. She found herself lifting into the air, before she could even process Peter’s screaming, “No!
”
Instantly, she knew why he hadn’t taken to the air. Flying had always given her a totality of control over her motion. Ungrounded by gravity, she became capable of any kind of movement she could imagine. Gwen had never attempted to fly in a reality storm.
A hurricane-grade force immediately began sweeping her away, spinning her in all directions as if some invisible monster was whirling her around. The ash, newspaper scraps, and whatever else reality was blowing in began circling around her, as if latching onto the magic of her flight and making it the center of its swirling vortex. “Peter!” she screamed.
“Gwenny!” Peter grabbed her by her foot. “Come down!”
Her motion was totally out of her control. The storm had claimed her and hijacked her flying. “I can’t! It’s impossible!”
“That’s irrelevant; just do it!”
Gwen heard him, and cleared her mind quickly of her precept that she was incapable of the impossible. It was impossible to break away from the storm, but that was no excuse. She focused on Peter’s hands, wrapped around her ankles, and gave herself over to that force and that force alone. She tumbled down before she could gasp at the sensation of falling. Picking herself up off the ground, she let Peter grab her hand again. This time, they ran.
The wind was still whipping at them, and Gwen could hardly see with all the hair blowing in her face. What she wouldn’t have given for a hair clip to keep it out of her eyes! Fortunately, she did not have to watch where she was going when Peter dragged her along. He became her eyes, and she trusted him more than she ever had her own sight. So much motion and chaos surrounded her that she became blind in a way she didn’t know she could be, not from a lack of vision but by an excess of it. There was no time to make sense of any given color or shape. The forest floor that they ran over was not made of dirt, sticks, leaves, and shrubs, but rather splotches of green and blurs of a color formerly known as brown.
“Where are the others?” Gwen cried, realizing with a guilty pang that she was not the only one she needed to be concerned for. What about Rosemary, the little sister she had purportedly followed here to look after?
“They’re where we’re going.”
Despite how loud he spoke in order to be heard over the shrill howl of wind, Peter was not yelling. He was not calm, but he was competent, and if he felt any fear, he did not manifest it in his features. Gwen saw how confidently he navigated these woods… as if running through them was a game he had played before and would play again, unerring even when he played for great stakes. In anyone else, she would have taken this bold fearlessness as maturity, but in Peter, it was something else entirely. It was as if, in times of great danger, he could totally disengage, reminding himself, It’s only a game and I want to win. When Gwen saw the faint smile that had crept onto his lips, she did not trust her eyes, but that sight told her that Peter had pushed consequences out of his mind, that he was running not for the fear of danger… but for the desire to do what he aimed to do.
All the while that they ran, Bramble clung to Gwen, clutching the collar of her dress with his hands and crouching on her shoulder. He whispered sweet reassurances to her, but Gwen neither heard nor understood the fairy language he was spilling into her ear.
It was dark beneath the canopy of trees and the sky beyond shrouded-in clouds. Gwen felt as though night was setting in, but it never got any darker. As they ran, the perpetual grey kept them caught in a daylight-darkness they could not escape.
A different kind of howl began offsetting the noise of the wind—a sound like static and a painful ringing in her ears. She wanted to believe it was some auditory hallucination, induced by the stress of the moment and the desire to hear something else—anything else—besides the violent wind. It grew louder though, coming closer and approaching with unrelenting speed. Gwen felt, perhaps rightfully, that if that noise touched her, it would surely kill her. The tone of it changed, and there was nothing to compare it to but the sound of a radio out of range, trying desperately to pull AM commentary down when the signals source was a world away.
With a shrieking crash, the noise stopped and the Earth shook. As they ran over the uneven ground, this earthquake was all it took to throw Gwen off her feet. With a disoriented scream, she sprawled out and tried to brace herself for the fall as Peter’s hand slipped out of hers. He had only stumbled, but as soon as his fingers had disappeared from hers, Gwen cried, “Peter!”
Bramble was tugging at her collar now, trying to pull her up himself, or at least suggest to her the importance of getting back up. “They haven’t got us yet, Gwenny,” Peter told her, giving her a hand and helping her onto her feet.
Sure enough, they were all still in one piece. They took off running again, but could not outrun the fury of the falling ash. More paper began to rain down, no longer drifting but flinging itself through the air. Entire sheets of newsprint blew at them, and Peter batted them away as they rampaged toward him on the wind. Some of them were still on fire, burning as they whirled down. Gwen stayed close to Peter, investing all of her confidence in him and his ability to keep her safe through this onslaught of unwanted reality.
As they broke the tree line and finally reached the grove their underground home was built beneath, the fairy broke away and took off in another direction. Gwen called out after Bramble, but Peter assured her, “Don’t worry. He’ll be safer once he’s with his own.”
They stomped through the grove, which was now covered in a singed layer of newsprint. The paper was caught in the branches of trees and littered the grove. Peter gazed at their oak tree and looked almost delighted by the challenge it presented. “Follow me,” he demanded. “Don’t fly any more than you have to, just one branch to the next.”
He leapt up to a low branch himself, but before Gwen could pursue him, a scrap of flaming newspaper blew into her. The wind wrapped it around her left forearm, and she began yelling, trying to fling it off. The paper clung to her skin, burning and searing her arm as she tried desperately to peel it away. At last, she managed to tear it away, but the pain did not go with it.
“Gwen!” Peter called.
“I’m coming!” Gwen knew she would have to ignore the pain for a moment. She would have to pass it off to herself as the burning strain of exercise, not the wound that it was. Following after Peter, she flew from one branch to the next, climbing whenever she could. The wind still struck her, as if punishing her for disregarding gravity, but by the time it hit her, she always had a firm hold of her next branch. Pulling herself up in these increments, she watched Peter and chased after the boy, knowing this was one of the last places he would ever lead her.
He waited for her at the top of the tree where they would be able to slide down into the security of their underground home. When she climbed up to that final branch, Peter helped pull her up. He didn’t say anything—he wouldn’t, not until they were safely underground—but Gwen followed his somber-curious eyes and, for the first time, looked at her arm.
It was red and slightly enflamed, but it did not look like a burn… not with the printed black letters singed on her skin. Her left forearm seemed covered in a wordy tattoo, somehow transferred to her flesh from the burning newsprint. Gwen did not consciously read it, but absorbed words like obesity, heart disease, and epidemic, as she stared in horror and awe at the invasive wound reality had left her with.
There was no time to contemplate it. Peter shepherded her to the hole in the tree and gave her a little push. Gwen was guided by his gestures, her body still hers to move but only with the intention and direction of Peter’s hands. She slipped down into the tree and fell as she exhaled one long breath that slowly became a panicked scream.
They remained in the underground home, some cowering, some curious, for the duration of the bombing. The place transformed in Gwen’s eyes; it was no longer a playfully hidden fort that housed them, but a wartime bunker. Shelter, protection… Gwen had never stopped to think that Neverland would need to be outfitted with defenses, but t
hen she had never stopped to believe anyone when they spoke of this conflict as a war.
There was no disguising the noise. It didn’t sound like anything other than the explosive assault that it was. The little tree that grew in the middle of the room shook violently with every impact above them. Even underground, the children could feel the earth shake with restless tremors.
In reality, a bombing would have inspired nothing but fear. However, among the lost children of Neverland, it brought the entire spectrum of human emotion.
Sal and Newt were demonstrative in their excitement. The two of them had climbed up onto the big bed, trying to gauge and guess when each new strike would hit. Perfectly confident in Peter and his ability to provide them a safe haven underground, they feared nothing from the bombs. They leapt up and fell back down onto the bed with every strike, laughing and making moaning, dying noises. Gwen found this alternately macabre and relieving.
Blink quietly watched the ceiling, her neck tilted back and eyes fixated on the earthy roof of their home. She stared as if the rest of the world was visible to her, and she really could see beyond the dirt ceiling to what was happening on the surface level. Quiet and thoughtful, either she could not be disturbed or she already was, deeply.
Spurt’s usual energy became jittery anxiety. He was uncomfortable, almost claustrophobic, within the room when he knew that he could not leave it for reasons he could not comprehend. Surprisingly, his feeling of entrapment subsided once Bard took him in her arms. Sitting in his little dog bed, she sat him on her lap and wrapped her arms around him, explaining everything that was happening as well as she could manage, remaining calm and collected. She was the eldest of the children, but the way that she took hold of her smallest comrade suggested a maternal instinct well beyond her years.
Jam mirrored Sal and Newt’s animated sense of energy, but it was a whining, inpatient guise for her worry. She asked questions of everyone. She paced around, dragging her feet and making faces, complaining that the fairies were gone, and always wondering aloud, “Is it over yet?” even though she was well aware it wasn’t. Rosemary stayed with her, trying to glean confidence from the one child who didn’t seem to have any at the moment.
The Neverland Wars Page 18