“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 time!” 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
