Gwen felt the strain of a headache punishing her for her grief. “Pull yourself together,” she ordered, sounding stronger than she felt as she still cried. Talking out loud gave her words a weight she couldn't achieve in her head. “We're still in the middle of a war, and if you don't pull yourself together and start fighting, all this might be for nothing.” She stood up, but her feet felt like trees with shallow roots. How was she supposed to balance, how was she supposed to walk?
She turned her back on Tiger Lily. She would have plenty of time for sorrow and ceremony after they had won this war. She left the woman looking peaceful on the ground, a tiger lily blooming up out of her bloody belly.
She could hear mumbled cries for help several yards off, from the black coat she'd pelted down with eggs. He deserved to stay glued to the ground until pirates found him and chained him up for a long, queasy voyage back to reality. He deserved so much worse, Gwen thought, but that would suffice.
Too harrowed to fly, she tromped through the woods. She needed to tell Peter. She brought the tin can telephone out of her purse. She couldn't give him the news over their tinny communication line, but she would need to find out where he was. The last they had spoken, Peter needed her to survey the nouthern shore. She reoriented herself and headed in the direction of the mermaid's lagoon. She would be able to see everything from the cliff side that led down to the lagoon, so she set off again on a course again for the shore and called Peter.
“Peter?” Gwen asked the can. “Peter, are you there?”
She hoped her voice didn't sound as uneasy as it felt.
“Hello, Gwen!”
She was taken aback by the chipper voice, the feminine voice… the voice calling her by her actual name. “Rosemary?” she asked. “Where's Peter?”
“Oh! He'll be real glad you're okay!” Rosemary answered. “He kept yelling your name in this can but nothing happened.” Gwen slapped a hand against her face in shame—she'd completely ignored her satchel and had the can buried in it while crying. “He gave it to me and told me to listen for you,” Rosemary added.
This didn't answer her question. “But where is Peter, Rosemary? Can you give the can back to him?”
“Oh no,” her little sister replied. “He said you went to the shore and would report back. You didn't report back, though, so he went there himself.”
Her feet quickened and she tried to unearth the logic driving Peter's decisions—an always impossible task. Did he head out to the beach and abandon the Never Tree because the intelligence information Gwen had failed to provide was that crucial to his strategy?
Or was he looking for her?
“I'm heading that way now,” Gwen told her little sister. “If you see Peter again, have him talk to me, and if you get into any trouble, you call me right away, okay?”
“Yep!” Rosemary chirped.
She stuffed her can into her purse and put her jellied feet to ambitious use, sprinting through the forest toward the shore. More aware of her busy mind than her surroundings, Gwen didn't see herself tripping until she fell flat on the ground. She got back to her feet in a flash, and looked to see what had sent her flying over her own feet.
There was nothing on the ground. She kicked around for a second, looking for some nefarious root or troublesome rock lurking beneath the soft bed of grass and ivy vines. She found nothing. Something had tripped her, and it wasn't there anymore. She hadn't heard a sound, not so much as a blade of grass rustling, when it moved. Gwen pulled out her flashlight.
She stayed put, but slowly spun around. Natural shadows abounded in the jungle. She didn't know how to identify a rogue shadow camouflaged against everything else blocking the afternoon sunlight. Gwen tested her feet to see if she could lift off the ground, but her grief and fear still weighed her down. She would have to fight while grounded. She counted to three in her head to ready herself, and turned on the flashlight. She whipped it around as fast as she could, throwing the light beam onto every inch of shadow she deemed dangerous. In two seconds' time, she outed the devious shadow.
Nothing else moved in the jungle, only the splotch of darkness that recoiled from the light. Fleeing over the surface of tree trunks, shrub branches, and ground covers, the black coat's shadow could almost outrun the penetrating light, but not quite. Gwen kept it on the shadow, and saw how the flashlight's ray began to eat at the dark of the shadow. Where the light assaulted it, the shadow's hue became grayer—its darkness wounded.
The shadow only dodged the light until it found an opportunity to go on the offensive again. Running circles around Gwen, darting and zigzagging, it forced her to follow until it made a sudden shift in direction and pounced for her.
Gwen saw it coming and jumped into the air, but her flight did not catch her. She came back down, and into the shadow's grip. It yanked her off her feet, but Gwen resisted the urge to break her fall. She held tight to her flashlight as she went down, despite the creature's efforts to knock it away. Her head spun, dizzy and hurt, but she turned the beam on the shadow and fried it at close range.
She watched the shade convulse as she held the light on the center of its chest. Debilitated by the beam, the shadow couldn't escape, and Gwen watched as the light burned a hole through the magical entity. It looked like a normal shadow now—one that disappeared when light shined on it.
Breaking free, it fled from Gwen as fast and far as it could go. She didn't even need to chase it off with the light beam. It escaped with a hole over its heart, and she almost pitied the little shadow. She wondered if the adults had any means of mending shadows, or if some black coat would go through the rest of his life with a hole in his shadow.
Her heart pounding from the encounter, Gwen kept it beating fast as she began sprinting for the shore. That diversion had taken more time than she wanted to waste. Where was Peter, and was he as worried about her as she was about him? Had he found and raided one of the aviator's packages for flashlights, or would he be susceptible to shadow attacks until Gwen gave him her spare? Fortunately, beating a shadow had given her a sense of confidence and fantastical capacity, so Gwen rode more than an adrenaline rush as she lifted into the air and zipped through the jungle, fast enough to make any fairy proud.
She hurried along, only stopping when she saw something small and white bounding through the underbrush and heard a heavy-footed black coat in pursuit. Rising into the tree branches, Gwen hid above the officer's line of sight. From her static position in the trees, she identified the the tiny white creature as a simple rabbit—albeit dressed in a tartan waistcoat.
“Oh dear! Oh dear! I'm late, I'm late!” the rabbit's shrill voice exclaimed. “This is quite the wrong time to be arriving!”
“Come back here!” the officer barked, failing to catch up with the rabbit. The small animal seemed spring-loaded. “Stop!” He fired several shots at the furry white rabbit, but could not hit such a tiny and fast target.
“Oh my ears and whiskers—this is not good!”
Gwen stayed perched on her bough and watched as they both passed underneath her, neither catching sight of her.
The white rabbit dodged several more bullets, competently avoiding trouble, despite the black coat's persistence.
“Freeze!” the solider yelled.
With a deep shudder, the rabbit declared, “Mackerels and mercy, it's cold!” but kept running. The officer was not amused, and continued to waste his ammo chasing a rabbit that could not be caught.
Once they had passed, Gwen dove out of the tree and resumed her course, nearly to the shore. Soon enough she saw the glow of yellow sand peaking through the jungle. Her course had been off only slightly. She did not arrive at the cliffside, but further nouth. She passed the last of the trees and felt as soft dirt transitioned into gritty, loose sand under her feet. Climbing over fallen trees and ancient driftwood that had washed up to the forest's edge in long ago monsoons, Gwen scanned the shoreline to make sense of where she was along it. This side of the island had ample landing places, and a naval raft on the shore proved that at least some of the soldiers and shadows in the jungle had come from this beach.
In the distance, she saw one of the two smaller ships in battle with the Grammarian. The pirate ship, smaller than adult's naval forces, still held its ground with mighty capability. Starkey knew Neverland's waters and tides better than any do-gooder adult could, and what his ship lacked in size it compensated for with swiftness and cannons. The adults' other small ship, half-submerged in the sea, was already as good as sunk.
A cannon exploded, its boom dizzying even from half a mile away. Gwen saw no sign of Peter anywhere along the beach, but the coastline here wove and wound in such a way that she couldn't see a thousand feet further nouth. She wished she had emerged on the cliffside and gotten a better view, but did not dwell on this thought.
Forming a revised plan as she began to fly along the rocky shore, she decided she would run the length of the serpentine beach for a few minutes before she called Rosemary again. If Peter wasn't on the beach, she had to assume he would return to the Never Tree with whatever information his reconnaissance mission had provided. She flew where the rocks made running impractical, but as the sharp, hard shore gave way to wet sand she started running. Her flight felt shakier every moment that passed without sight of Peter. As she ran the length of the beach searching for him, something else entered her sight.
Someone was lying in the water.
Afraid for the wave-battered body, Gwen ran faster and tried to determine whether it was a shipwrecked adult or or tuckered out child. She couldn't tell if it was a friend or enemy. As she neared, she realized the body was not face down in the sand, but propped up on its elbows, keeping its face out of the water that lapped at the rest of it. As soon as Gwen realized the half-surfaced body was conscious and alive she called out, “Hey! Are you okay?”
With a sudden, almost frightened jerk, the mermaid lifted her head higher and threw her long hair out of her face. Panting and barely supported on her arms, she laid in the water, stripped of her breath, maybe even stripped of her strength. Gwen stopped and stared, too overcome to believe her eyes.
Her wet, blond locks streaming with water, Lasiandra saw her and called out, “Gwen?”