back into the chaos Wendy had gratefully left earlier.
There were fewer police, but there was much more activity: The train station doors had orange cones around them and signs about redirection were posted to the door. All the station attendees had left the area, and there were only police now. Wendy couldn’t tell exactly what was going on, but she did see a few people lying on the ground with their arms behind their backs as an officer stood over them, barking questions. There were a few other people being detained, and the whole thing seemed like it was escalating terribly. Wendy assumed Peter would turn at the sight of the police and take them all in another direction. She was surprised to hear him swear and start jogging toward the scene. She was just about to ask what was going on when Tinkerbelle made a noise that sounded like a cross between a gasp and a scream.
She pushed past Peter and started running at a full sprint toward a car at the edge of the commotion. Curly and Nibs started running, too, so Wendy followed their lead. Peter wasn’t far ahead of them, and she watched him pull his scarf up over his face and take what looked like a firework out of his messenger bag.
“Omi! Omi!” Tinkerbelle shrieked, smacking at a police car window. Immediately the nearest police officer shouted at her to get away from the car, but she refused to stop screaming and banging on the window. Behind the glass was a dark-skinned girl with long black hair. She looked exhausted and significantly less hysterical than Tinkerbelle, but she had her palms pressed against the window from the inside.
Peter whooped, so high and loud that Wendy flinched and almost stopped running entirely. Peter twisted, deadly fast, and snatched something else out of his bag and chucked it at Nibs. The metal pinwheeled through the air like a boomerang, but Nibs leaped up and caught it squarely. It looked like the mixture of a crowbar and doorstop, with a wedge on one end.
Peter whistled sharply and with a rhythm that made Wendy realize he was communicating with the boys wordlessly. At the noise, everyone looked up—cops and people being arrested, alike. The other kids on the ground began curling their legs underneath them as if preparing to get up and run, despite the angry shouting from the officer who had been handling them. The officer dealing with Tinkerbelle gave up on talking her away from the car and decided to bodily haul her off. He had barely lifted her up from the ground when his head snapped back violently, and he fell like a stone. Wendy looked over, terrified, and saw sweet baker Curly with a bandanna over his face and what looked like a military grade slingshot in his hand.
Peter whistled again, and Nibs tossed the metal bar to Curly and picked up speed, leaving Curly and Wendy behind, following Peter in the opposite direction of the police car.
“There he is!” one of the officers shouted.
Immediately all their attention was on Peter and Nibs. Peter had duct-taped the firework, which was now lit, to what looked to Wendy like a crudely constructed Molotov cocktail—if the war films she’d watched had any accuracy to them. Peter threw it directly into a car window.
A lot of things happened at once.
Curly pushed Wendy violently forward, hard enough that she ran even faster, stumbling into Tinkerbelle, who was still clawing at the police car door. Then Curly yanked both girls down to the ground at once and covered them with his body.
Wendy made eye contact with the girl in the police car, Tinkerbelle’s “Omi,” and saw her brown eyes widen with terror as she turned in slow motion to what Curly was protecting Tinkerbelle and Wendy from.
The car exploded in the brightest red Wendy had ever seen. The Molotov cocktail provided ten times the incendiary a firework needed, so what should have been a slowly burning display in the sky instead filled the area with a light so bright that it looked almost like dawn as it went off all at once. As well as a noise so loud, it made her eardrums ache. Thousands of brilliant sparkles went in every direction, and burned significantly longer than Wendy assumed they would.
Curly leaped off Wendy and Tinkerbelle the instant the noise faded, then spun the crowbar-type thing in his hand expertly, jammed it in the crack between the cop car and