But that was okay, because Eve didn’t plan to tackle Rupert head-on. She wasn’t going to denounce him to the secular authorities, or leak about him to the press.
Information wants to be free: but information also wants to cost the Earth. Eve was acutely aware of this. Eve was also aware that, over the past few years, certain strange things had crept across the threshold of possibility, slithering out of the shadows to caper in the daylight, openly mocking the age of rationality and reason that had prevailed for the past several centuries. Superheroes flying overhead, the charismatic narcissism of a reborn god in pinstripes sitting in Parliament, magic that worked—Eve was hardly an innocent, and she knew enough about the contents of Rupert’s locked and alarmed cabinet of curiosities to know that the concordance of AW-312.4 was a most desirable asset.
Rupert had complacently told her to obtain it by any means necessary, putting her in charge of the process of procurement. It hadn’t occurred to him to ask why he’d been allowed to hear about the auction in the first place, or just how broadly Eve might interpret her remit.
Eve intended to do exactly as she’d been told, and take custody of the manuscript.
And then she intended to give it to Rupert.
Give it good and hard.
Safely downstairs, once the door to Neverland on the top floor was wedged shut with wadded-up newspapers to stop the history from leaking out, Imp celebrated their deliverance by opening a half-gallon jug of Old Rosie. He sloshed generous libations into four mugs and then handed them out as Rebecca passed around a never-ending spliff provisioned from Imp’s stash.
“We need gridded paper and pencils,” said Doc.
Game Boy nodded along to a beat only he could hear through imaginary headphones. “Used to do paper-and-pencil dungeon crawls with all that stuff.”
“You won’t get the angles right.” Rebecca waved her joint around by way of punctuation. “Need to measure everything.”
“No.” Imp glared around the room, slightly red-eyed from the smoke. “That’s not necessary. We know the angles don’t add up to three hundred and sixty degrees up there! The distances don’t sum, the spaces overlap. What we need are the, the connections. Like a tube map, where the lines are nothing to do with the actual distance between stations. This way we won’t get lost even if the measurements say we’ve doubled back on ourselves.” He leaned backward precariously, sinking into the carnivorous brown sofa until he nearly toppled sideways onto Doc. “Huh. I could totally use that shit in the script—an infinite house! Somewhere.”
“If it keeps getting older the further back we go, eventually we’ll hit the Victorian period,” Game Boy said. “Could you use it for filming the set for the Darlings’ house?”
“Yes!” Imp sat up excitedly, nearly spilling the dregs of a mug of scrumpy across his lap: Doc caught it in time and gently took it away from him. “The Darling household! That totally works! We’ll need lights, which means power, but did you notice there wasn’t any traffic noise up there? It’ll work for all the indoor scenes!” Then his smile sagged. “I’ll still need to sneak into a soundstage for the motion capture bits aboard the asteroid base and pirate ship, though. Hmm.” Doc pulled him closer and rubbed his hand in small circles on the small of Imp’s back.
“So it all comes back to the great work, huh?” Rebecca blew a lazy smoke ring at the ceiling.
“Everything converges on the great work,” Imp confirmed. He took his mug back from Doc, then frowned at the lack of contents. “Top me up, boy,” he demanded, waving it languorously.
His pose was so theatrically exaggerated that for a moment Doc expected him to add something tasteless—a thoughtlessly racist chop-chop, perhaps—but Imp wasn’t quite that wasted, or was finally beginning to get a clue. Or maybe Game Boy was just in a good mood and chose to ignore it. Either way it summed to zero. Game Boy shook the jug of scrumpy, then threw it in the air, lidless: as it fell back into his hands it sprayed cloudy hard cider that somehow all ended up in Imp’s mug. Oblivious, Imp raised a toast: “Here’s to the great work!”
Mugs, or joints, or both, were raised all around as the Lost Boys drank, or toked, or both, to Imp’s projected fifteen minutes of fame.
Imp was mercurial, charismatic, and theatrical by disposition. He was also full of himself. Since the age of seven and three-quarters he had held an unshakable conviction that he was destined to be London’s twenty-first-century answer to Pittsburgh’s Andrew Warhola (if Andy Warhol had grown up with computer graphics, a Peter Pan fixation, and a willingness to fund his art by robbing toy shops rather than painting soup cans). Imp’s magnum opus, the project upon which he had lavished the majority of his creative energies for years, was to be the definitive video (and now classic, old-school, film-camera movie) experience of Peter and Wendy—the stage play by J. M. Barrie. He’d gotten hooked on it as an infant, when his father read it to him at bedtime. It was a family tradition, Dad had insisted. You read Peter and Wendy to your children when it’s your turn to have them. Imp had no intention of ever having children—in fact, he found the prospect existentially
