She shook her head, her mouth agape at the absurdity of this proposal. “I need to get out of here, I'm the enemy, Jay. I'll be taken prisoner if I'm found here,” Gwen looked for an alternate exit. Fortunately, the room led straight out to the upper deck and she knew she could make her escape there. Fleeing to the deck gave her the quickest route to safety. No one aboard could chase her down if she leapt off the side of the ship and flew back to shore.
Before she could leave, Jay grabbed her arm. He didn't notice that her own shadow also made a grabbing motion at her arm. Only Gwen saw the flailing shadow and knew it wanted her to stay put. She didn't trust it anymore. It had promised to take her to Peter, and had led her to Jay. Even her shadow had other ideas about what Gwen needed.
“No, you have immunity,” Jay exclaimed. “Lasiandra made them promise that you wouldn't be in trouble as part of the deal.”
“I can't go home, not like this,” Gwen cried. “I have to get back out there and defend Neverland!”
“If you think Lasiandra is betraying us, you need to talk to the CAO,” Jay told her. “He's not a bad guy. He's a lot better than the Admiral, at least. Tell him what you told me. If this is true, we have to call off the attack!”
The simplicity of this solution proved to Gwen that her friend still had no conception of this battle's stakes or whose motivations could ever align. “You don't understand,” she told him. “They know. They know they're going to kill Neverland. They want every last drop of magic they can squeeze out of this place. Nothing will be left once they get a hold of the Never Tree, and they know it.”
A sudden squeak sounded like a metal caw as the ship shifted again, changing course. The noise startled Gwen. Braced to bolt for the door, she didn't know how many more minutes or seconds she might have here before any one of the puppeteers running this ship might storm in and find her. She had no desire to confront any of the black coats—she had no resources to contend against them.
She ransacked her mind, shifting through an impossible stack of questions. She wanted to ask Jay so many things, but so many of them were trivial in this eleventh hour of the battle. The most important and volatile variable in this equation remained Lasiandra, however, and Gwen needed one more detail. “Did you make a deal with Lasiandra?”
“What do you mean?”
“I know the CAO made a deal with her, but did you ever promise her anything? Did she ever agree to help you with anything in exchange for a favor?”
He still seemed confused, but gave a slight nod. “Yeah… at sunrise, one morning after we'd first met at the lake. She came and found me again there. She'd said a lot of stuff about how much trouble you were in, but said she couldn't explain it… she told me that she could help me save you and bring you home from Neverland. She just needed to be human to do it.”
She just needed to be human to lie, Gwen thought.
“The stars were still out, but the sun was coming up, and she had that mirror you gave her… I don't understand how she did it, but as soon as I promised to help her, she sank underwater. She thrashed for a long time and I started to worry about her, but when she surfaced gasping, she, you know, had legs, and the mirror crumbled into dust in her palm.”
So Lasiandra had woven Jay into her web of star magic, too. She tried not to let her expression reflect how this wrung the hope out of her heart. “So you welcomed her into humanity in exchange for—”
“Your safe return home.”
Her safe return home. The words shattered like porcelain as they hit her. If they had made that pact with the stars, Gwen could not elude the destiny they'd written for her. Whether the lost children won or lost the war, the stars themselves would command Gwen back to reality.
She clenched her fists. She thought about everything she had sacrificed for this chance to run away and be free. She thought about Peter, about the fairies, about everyone here that she had fought to stay beside. It was all ending for her. But that didn't mean she would stop fighting.
“I have to go,” she declared. She scanned the room for her shadow, and saw it shaking its head with furious persistence. Sitting with its arms crossed, it made it clear it would not accompany her. Fine, thought Gwen, who needs a little dark splotch following them around anyway?
Jay grabbed her shoulders, and forced her darting gaze back to his steady but uncertain eyes. “I came here to help you,” he told her. “How can I help you? How can I help fix this? They're getting ready to unleash some crazy stuff, Gwen.”
“I overheard the Admiral,” she told him, hoping to skip another explanation of the SLAT team and will-o-the-wisp. “If you can do anything to slow them down, bog down their plans, confuse their communications… I don't know what to tell you.”
“Wait, Gwen—” Jay insisted, only to be interrupted. The metal door into the cabin flew open, startling both of them. Gwen almost shot out of the door in order to avoid getting apprehended, but Jay had a firm hold of her shoulders and she lacked the strength to tear herself away as she saw who entered. It wasn't the admiral, or any crew member, or even an adult. It was Peter Pan.
Chapter 33
Peter seemed just as surprised to encounter Gwen as she was to see him burst into the cabin. The difference between their reactions was that Peter's
