She writhed under the shadow's hold, furious that she could not lift the weightless thing off her. It pinned her down as well as a live person would have. She heard Peter straining under the constraint of the other shadow, and watched as the third slipped off and fled the meadow, like a scout returning to its commander.
“Peter,” she wheezed, “are you okay?”
“I'm okay, are you?”
“I—don't know.”
“Do you still have your flashlight?”
“No.” The shadow had pried it out of her hand once it got her on the ground.
“It's okay. We'll figure something out.”
Gwen managed to crank her head to look at Peter when she heard him exerting himself against the shadow. He forced it off his arm, but only for a second. In that second, he reached out and grabbed Gwen's hand. He held tight to it, and did not let go.
Lying in the meadow together, they watched as the aviator's message began to dissolve into the blue of the sky, and listened as his plane finally took off for a distant place that held the promise of magic and sanctuary, paradise and youth. Under the dark blanket of the shadows' shade, they stayed quiet. From time to time, they squeezed each other's hands. It was all they could do.
They were still hand in hand when the scout shadow returned with black coats to take Peter and Gwen into custody.
Chapter 41
Gwen sat facing the concrete wall of her unpainted cell. She rolled her acorn in her hand. The Anomalous Activity officers had confiscated much as either evidence or contraband—her phone, the sketchpad, the tin can phone, and her emergency stash of pixie dust—but everything else they had deemed unimportant and left with her. Of course, they didn't find everything. Some things were good at hiding.
They had found and ignored the acorn. It wasn't magical in the least. It never had been. It had only been a token, a symbol, of something great and wonderful Peter wanted to give her. All its magic lived in the what it meant... and now, that was all the magic that Gwen had. Fidgeting with the tiny nut gave her comfort. She took it out and played with it in her restless hands whenever she started to worry about Peter. She had not seen him in eight days.
It had been easy for the black coats to round up the last of the lost children by the time Neverland finished disintegrating. The barren island offered nowhere to hide. Most of the children had made it off, pursuing the aviator and taking the seed-bearing sprig of the Never Tree with them, but not all.
It had taken two days to sail back to reality, and Gwen had spent those two days in the ship's brig with the other captured children. She told stories until she was hoarse, reassuring them with more conventional fairytales than the story of Margaret May. She told fairytales where the good guys always won, and everyone went home in the end. The black coats had isolated Peter, though. They wouldn't let Gwen see him. They wouldn't let her see Jay either. She almost asked about Lasiandra, but she didn't want to see her.
Gwen overheard only bits and pieces of news from those that guarded them. The lawyers had made it to the very center of the island with Lasiandra's aide, but when they found the tree and had their soldiers cut it down, it turned out to be nothing more magical than an ordinary old willow tree.
The ships docked on the shores of reality, as near to Lake Agana as the ocean came. The black coats loaded them into the police cars of their under-cover officers. It took an hour's drive before they reached the research facility where they then isolated Gwen.
On the first day in her cell, they sent a motherly white coat in to talk with her. The woman talked to all the children individually, but only Gwen understood that she was undergoing a psychological evaluation. Gwen said nothing inflammatory and nothing radical. She must have passed the evaluation, because on the second day they sent in one of the lawyers.
While he walked her through a short contract and explained exactly what she needed to sign and agree to before she could be released, Gwen imagined one of Peter's man eating trees mashing him up into plant food. As pleasant as the therapist, he explained her new anomaly reduction device and the infrequent parole meetings she would need to attend. None of this made Gwen feel better about him. She shocked him, at the end of their meeting, when she didn't sign the paperwork for her own release.
“You can't leave the facility until you sign this document!” he told her.
“You've made that clear,” she answered, inexpressive. “I'm not ready to leave. Set them on the table. I'll sign them when I'm ready.” She continued asking to see Peter. The officers never yielded on the issue.
On the third day, they offered to bring in her parents so she could talk to them. She declined the offer. She didn't want to have this conversation with her parents while in custody—they would have plenty of time to talk when she got home.
She didn't want to go back home, not like this. The inevitability of it made even the purgatory of the research facility seem preferable, at least for a while. Back to reality, time had started passing again. Her age was progressing again, day by day. Every morning she woke up a little older. The Anomalous Activity officers informed her of the date when she returned. Reality made it easy to count the days and keep track of them again—even though as the monotony of the research cell blurred days the together. Gwen sat through the mid-May days as they
