“Gwen!” Jay cried. “Oh my god, are you okay?” He hadn't anticipated she would go down with Peter, but raced over to her and helped her up—much against her will. She batted him away and knelled back down beside her moaning friend.
Peter opened his eyes when he felt Gwen's hand on his head, and looked at her with wordless questions.
Gathering her breath and wits, Gwen elaborated, “He made a deal with a mermaid—Lasiandra. She misled him. He thought I was in danger. He wants to help. Please, Peter, get up. You need to get up. We need to figure out what on earth we're going to do.”
He looked up over her shoulder, at the confounded boy trying, almost as immaturely as Peter, to defend what he loved. “This is a friend of yours?”
“Yes, from before I came to Neverland,” Gwen answered. Peter reached up and took her hand. As bad as he'd fallen, Gwen had hurt herself more than she should have trying to save him from it. He could see how bad state she was in, and even he could worry for a friend. She held his hand tight, and when his grip strengthened, she helped pull him to his feet.
Peter gave Jay a surly look and told him, “State your business.”
Jay, to his credit, seemed repentant now that the fight had subsided. Still concerned for Gwen, he now comprehended that for better or worse, she had tethered herself to Peter and his mission. Overcoming his disorientation and defensiveness, Jay told him, “I'm here to help Gwen and protect her.”
Peter's stony face didn't change, but he was too weak from his fall to manifest his resentment into conflict Gwen propped him up and kept his arm slung around her shoulder as he spoke. “She's trying to save Neverland. You're no help to her if you're set against that.”
“I understand that, and I'll help—so long as I know she's not in danger from you.”
“Furthermore,” Peter boomed, outrage building in his voice, “Gwendolyn Lucinda Hoffman does not need protecting—from any danger. She is one of the most think-full and brave girls ever to take to the air, and easily worth twenty stupid fellows in boats.”
Jay nodded a little, and did not defend himself against the accusation that he was a stupid fellow in a boat.
“But as long as your here,” Peter told him, calmer, “you might as well make yourself useful.”
With a glance, a little timid and slightly frustrated, to Gwen, Jay answered, “I think I can help.” Hurrying to a set of metal drawers inlaid in the wall. He had a key on his belt that unlocked the middle drawer, and from out of it he pulled a thick packet of paper, bound with industrial strength staples. Peter fetched his knife from the cork-board and stuck it in the sheath at his hips.
“You're going to want to get out of here fast,” Jay told him. “The Chief Anomalous Officer is heading over to speak me and will be here any minute.”
“Aha!” Peter announced. “That's who's in charge of this evil little escapade? I don't need to run—I'll slit him open and hoist him overboard!” This news breathed a bit of life back into Peter. Anything that took his mind off the blue residue of the paralyzing shot Jay had sent to his gut was a welcome distraction. He didn't need Gwen to support him anymore, but although his confidence had returned, she doubted his command of magic had.
“It won't do any good,” Gwen told him. “This isn't a renegade pirate ship, this is a small fleet of ships run by a bureaucracy. Even if you got rid of the CAO, the Admiral would take over.”
“So we feed both of them to the crocodile, and have the Captain here order the ship home.”
“You're forgetting the Vice Admiral, the Rear Admiral, and everyone else in the chain of command before me,” Jay told him. “By the time I assumed command, they'd already have the tree they came for.”
“No chance of it!” Peter exclaimed. “We've sealed every route to the Never Tree except for my personal secret passage. Nobody nonmagical will ever find it.”
“But they've got Lasiandra,” Gwen told him. “She's going to lead them to the tree.”
“And they've got this as well,” Jay said, heaving the thick document into his hands. Peter paged through it with a listless lack of attention as Jay explained, “This is the CAO's contract with reality. It's all the laws of physics and nature that they want to enforce. They've just sent ashore a team of experts to argue it into existence.”
Since Peter wasn't making any use of the contract, Gwen took it out of his hands and paged through it for herself.
Section 6, Subsection A, Article D: Flight shall be a physical impossibility on the grounds that gravity is a superseding force.
Section 18, Subsection C, Clause A: All three-dimensional surfaces are mappable, including every and all islands of this world.
Every page had a dozen different requirements of reality, many too bogged down by the style of legal prose for Gwen to comprehend. It only took a moment of flipping through the document before she realized how it would work to the adults' advantage.
The entire contract represented an extensive permutation of I don't believe in fairies. It was all things adults said, but more importantly, it was all things adults believed. Neverland bended to the will of its believers, and if the Anomalous Activity officers had sent some arrogant, rule-entrenched lawyers ashore, they would have the capacity to overwrite the rules of magical reality that the creatures and children of Neverland lived by.
“Now you really need to get out of here before the CAO shows up, dude,” Jay told him. “There are a few unlaunched boats left, if you can get
