“No, Lasiandra said they just want a tree or something.”
“That tree is Neverland. If they chop it down, everything magical about this place will die with it.”
“But Lasiandra—”
“She lied, Jay.”
“No,” he insisted, unwilling to come to terms with what she told him. “We made a deal with CAO. Lasiandra could get them to Neverland and give them the tree they wanted, but they wouldn't destroy anything else. I gave that order.”
“No, the Admiral is sending some kind of team ashore with clearance to destroy anything in order to reach the tree—he's overriding your order,” Gwen told him.
Jay shook his head, wanting to refute her. “This is a rescue mission—isn't Peter Pan fighting to keep you and those kids trapped here? The CAO wants to preserve all the magic he can, just get it away from Peter Pan.”
This delusion hardened Gwen's insides as quick as a punch to the gut. “He's protecting the Never Tree. We're protecting the Never Tree,” she told him. “The only reason the CAO doesn't want to destroy the magic is because he wants to take control of it. If he takes the Never Tree and its magic, Neverland will die.”
“That's not possible.” Jay put a hand to his head and tried to think back through everything through the lens of this new information. “Lasiandra said you wanted to come home. Once we saved you, they were going to set her up with a human life and give me a full ride scholarship to the Naval Academy in Maryland and…”
Everything everyone wanted. Lasiandra had set out with that aim, and drawn pretty promises out of the Anomalous Activity Department in order to achieve her ends. “Didn't you ever stop to think it might be too good to be true?” Gwen asked.
“You flew off to Neverland!” Jay's confusion had become its own wounding emotion. “What was I supposed to do when your best friend told me that was too good to be true, that you were stuck out here and she needed my help to rescue you?”
She didn't have an answer. The quiet blips of the radar almost aligned with the uneasy feeling of the sea far below the metal floor. Through the windows and beyond the blinding glare of the sea, she could see Neverland's shores. It looked like an ordinary island, from the vantage point of the adults' ship.
Her silence drained the passion from Jay. His down-turned gaze didn't even lift up to meet her eyes as he announced, “So you don't want to come home after all.”
The pain in his voice hurt Gwen worse than his rising tone had a moment ago. She couldn't bare to imagine how betrayed Jay must have felt as she stripped him of the illusion of heroism Lasiandra and the black coats had sold him. She tried to defend herself and mend his injured spirit, but she tripped over her words and feelings worse than ever. “I do, Jay, just—” Feeling flustered she looked everywhere but at him. “I don't want this to be over, not yet, and I don't want to leave until I know its safe. My sister is here. There are so many children here. Don't you understand how I can want this to exist for them, even if I come home?”
Her eyes turned back to heartbroken Jay. She hated how handsome he looked in that awful uniform. He seemed so professional in the crisp black suit, golden patches all but glowing on his shoulders and sleeves. She reached out and touched the tidy insignia. “They made you an officer?” The more she talked with him, the more boyish he seemed. Jay hadn't aged much—he was just trying to grow and begin behaving like the admirable adult he expected to grow into.
Jay shook his head. “I'm handling everything with Lasiandra, so they had to put me at a rank that had clearance for top secret communications. It doesn't mean anything, really. The Admiral is running the show. I'm just here because Lasiandra needs me to be a captain.”
“Why does she need you to be a captain?” Gwen asked.
Jay glanced back out the window, a small man aboard a big ship that he commanded in name only. “Lasiandra said,” Jay began, “that this would only work if it felt like a fairytale.”
Gwen nodded, knowing too well how stars and magic and mermaids all worked. Lasiandra wanted to script the universe, using her magic to sew all the loose ends of the world together and give Gwen the ending she thought she needed. Jay was right there to help her, to listen and trust in Lasiandra's vision of events. Gwen could only imagine the twisted truths and spurious secrets she spilled as a mermaid, and the bald-faced lies that had come once she had legs to propel her into the treacheries of humanity.
“It's not going to work at all,” Gwen told him. “Everything has gone wrong. We need to get every adult off the island right now.”
Jay still struggled with this sudden shift in narrative. “I thought you needed to come home. I thought you wanted me to come help you,” he replied.
His words cut with undue strength into her heart. “I am tired of everyone making decisions for what they think I want!” She didn't mean to yell, but Jay's startled expression told her she'd communicated her frustrated rage too well. Lasiandra, Starkey, now Jay… it seemed no one would leave her to make her own decisions. True, she rarely knew how to act on the hazy desires of her heart, but how did her confusion give anyone else the right to usurp her autonomy? If she didn't even know what she needed within herself, how could anyone else know by looking at her from the outside?
Jay, made frantic by the intensity of Gwen's exasperation, looked to the clock embedded among many other gauges on the room's console. “I can call
