Maddie tried not to listen in as Jazz spoke with Danielle. It wasn't hard, most of the time—they spoke quietly, so most of their words were murky when mixed with the gentle rumble of the plane around her, and she was focusing on making sure everything was ready to go before they took off—but when she heard Danielle laugh….
Laughter was a joyful thing. It should buoy her.
So why did hearing it make her chest ache?
"Are you ready? Mom?"
Maddie blinked.
How long had she been staring at the control panel without touching anything?
"Just about, sweetie," she murmured to her son as she finished double checking the last of the settings. It was more out of habit than anything else—better to be safe rather than sorry; she had enough of that in her life right now and didn't need to add more regrets to her list if she could avoid it—but it was something to do, and she'd needed something to do.
She'd had Auto-Jack deflated and repacked, ready for his next deployment, but part of her was still surprised when Danny dropped into the seat next to her. "I'm serious."
She gave him a small smile. "I know. I'm finished."
"Okay, good." He blew out a breath, and she belatedly realized it wasn't the first time she'd seen Phantom do that. Knowing the truth, it seems ridiculous to think she'd ever believed it to be mere mimicry. "Look, I talked to Dani, and I talked to Cujo. Things have changed now that we're going with you."
"Cujo's coming?" Maddie didn't have anything against the ghost dog anymore, exactly, but that didn't mean the Fenton Jet couldn't be damaged if Cujo grew. The anti-ecto coating she and Jack had added last month in the hopes of stopping that electronic ghost from taking over their systems or any other ghost from phasing through and risking the lives of their passengers—be it by overshadowing, phasing humans through the plane, or any other means—would not negate critical damage anywhere outside of the containment unit.
Danny shot her an annoyed look. "I mean me and Dani. Cujo'll be fine on his own. But I think…." Danny chewed on his lip for a moment before saying, "Getting Cujo to dig us a portal instead of going home first is definitely riskier, but if he gets it right, it's a lot faster. And if he doesn't get it right, Dani and I will be able to figure out where we are and get us to the right place."
"So—?"
"So I talked to Cujo and I think he understands where we need to be." Danny nodded towards the windshield, and she looked outside to see a growing patch of unearthly green. "And he's already digging us a portal."
"Sweetie," she said slowly, without looking away from Cujo and his portal, "we've never tested how well the Fenton Jet will fly in the Ghost Zone. The principles are different than the flight of the Spectre Speeder. I don't know—"
"It'll be fine. We can stick it on blimp mode if we have to. And we probably will if we can't get back through our portal, assuming I can't find Cujo or Wulf to just make us one, because I have not got the portal thing down."
"I'm not sure—"
"Worst case scenario, I fly us. Or steer, rather. Stuff floats in the Ghost Zone. It's not like taking a plane there is going to make it plummet. It will get Walker on my back again, but I'm hoping prisoner delivery will mean this whole trip falls under special circumstances."
This time, Maddie turned back to face her son. "I was under the impression that saying you aren't on the best of terms with this Walker would be putting it mildly."
He shrugged. "Yeah, but I want to get Vlad into jail as soon as possible."
"And find your father."
"Well, yeah, but if we can make sure Vlad isn't pulling any strings behind the scenes, then it means he won't have us running in circles anymore. Which he might be. Because you know I'm not on great terms with every ghost you've ever seen in Amity Park, and some of those ghosts are on Vlad's payroll." Danny pursed his lips. "Sam and Tucker aren't stupid. They'll know that. But it's a lot harder to figure out Vlad's game when we don't know who all the players are."
She supposed he had a point.
It wasn't like she was used to trusting ghosts.
Suspecting one of claiming to help when they were doing the opposite was exactly what she'd have expected of any of them a week ago.
Now….
"And if Vlad isn't jailed? If you are instead? If Walker finds us all in violation of one of his laws—"
"Rules."
"—and he captures us? Meaning Sam and Tucker will be the only ones looking for your father?"
"Trust me."
"It's not that I don't trust you." She reached out for his hand but let hers drop back when he pulled away from her. "Sweetie, I do trust you, and I trust your judgement, but I don't know enough to improvise well. You'll have to walk me through some hypotheticals."
"Fine." Danny held up one finger. "If Vlad isn't jailed, then we go to plan B, or whatever letter we're actually on, but don't ask me what it is because I will have to figure that out on the fly. So just trust that I'll come up with something if I have to." He raised a second finger. "If I'm jailed, then I'll break out. Obviously. If we're all jailed, then we might need Sam and Tucker to break us out, at least if we all get thrown into the room meant to contain halfas. If you guys are just thrown into a normal cell, you can walk through the walls. Humans are basically ghosts over there." He hesitated. "Is that point three or still point two?"
"It hardly matters when Sam and Tucker won't even know what's happened if we are captured."
"Except they will. They'll know something's up if the Fenton Phones go dark without warning, and it won't take a genius to figure out what because we'll fill them in on the plan. It's not like we'll need to figure out how to get out some super secret signal. Plus, if there's any doubt about what happened, someone'll bribe someone else. Walker's goons are loyal to him but less so to each other. Wulf's been keeping an ear to the ground when it comes to that whole situation, and he's kept me posted. I'll know who to talk to given half a chance, and I'll tell Sam and Tuck before we head inside."
The more Maddie heard about this plan, the less she liked it. There were too few details where she thought there ought to be details, too much improvisation where they should have contingency plans, too much left to—
"Trust me," Danny repeated, giving her a tired look that she suspected meant he could read the doubt on her face. "We've done this a lot. Not, like, this exact thing. Well, we have done the jail break thing before. Sam even technically did it solo when Aragon kidnapped her. I mean, we helped, sorta, but we were late, and she didn't really need our help. She already had Dora's."
Maddie stared.
She'd accepted, more or less, that Danny being Phantom meant that Danny had been in all the situations she'd known Phantom had been in, but somehow, she hadn't thought his friends to have been in quite so much danger. No more than anyone was when venturing into a battle with ghosts unprotected by a HAZMAT suit, anyway.
Clearly, she'd been very wrong.
"Never mind," Danny said quickly, waving one hand as if to brush away both his words and all her not-at-all-unwarranted concerns. "Point is, we work together well. Maybe even better than you and Dad do."
She wasn't entirely sure he meant it as a slight. She and Jack did work well together, knowing each other's patterns and covering one another even in a shifting battleground that went from sky to street level and back again. They often relied on verbal communication, but if they needed silence for a surprise attack, a few traded looks and gestures got the message across without any confusion. They might not capture a ghost every time they went out, but their success rate was nothing to sneeze at.
But Phantom's—Danny's—success rate was higher, and clearly he attributed a not insignificant portion of that success to his friends.
"I'm sure you do." Her words were quiet, but they hardly had the desired effect; instead of accepting them at face value, Danny pulled a face.
"You know that if you keep doing this, it's not going to help, right?"
"Keep doing what?"
"Doubting me."
"I'm not—"
"Then humouring me. Or sounding like it."
"Sweetie—"
He shifted away from her again before she'd even realized she'd reached for him. "I know what I'm doing. I've been in the Ghost Zone more times than I can count, and I've definitely dealt with these ghosts more often than you have. And if we want this to work, you've got to follow my lead. Okay?"
It was hard not to feel like he was scolding her. "Okay."
He studied her for a long moment before finally glancing out the window and yelling back to the others, "You guys ready?"
Cujo's portal was larger than she'd have thought it possible to grow in so short a period of time, despite seeing how quickly he could work earlier.
She really did need to stop underestimating ghosts, Danny included.
"You bet," called out Danielle, and Maddie could hear Alicia's more muffled response beneath it.
She didn't have time to question anything else, not really, so she reached out to guide the plane into the swirling green of Cujo's portal.
The Ghost Zone wasn't anything like Maddie had anticipated.
No, that wasn't quite true. She and Jack had adjusted their expectations after Amity Park's impromptu displacement. Given what they'd glimpsed of it through the Fenton Ghost Shield, some of what she could see was very much expected—an endless expanse of green punctuated by eddies in the ectoplasm that made up the fabric of this realm, its horizon studded not with stars but with meteors or the lairs of the ghosts themselves, with the otherwise empty stillness broken by the occasional flash of a ghost flitting by.
Some of it was not.
Among other things, there was more life in this realm than she'd ever imagined; they'd hardly been in the Ghost Zone for two minutes before they'd passed an island full of greenery, alien flora exploding over every inch of it, including its underside. There was no sun for the plants to seek—she suspected they fed upon the ectoplasm of their atmosphere, much as she and Jack hypothesized was true of most ghosts—and no true gravity to anchor them beyond what seemed to be a little pocket contained within the rock itself. The plants grew outward, seeming to only twist where competing for space, and the microclimate alone—
"Okay, so you're going to want to hang a left at the swirling vortex," Danny said as he walked back into the cockpit, pointing ahead of them even as he sat down to buckle in again. This wasn't the first time he'd left and returned; he'd already spoken with Jazz and, through the Fenton Phones, Sam and Tucker, and he'd gone back to speak with Danielle twice. About determining their position and navigating from there, she suspected, but he seemed confident in their whereabouts now. "Give it a wide enough berth that we're not pulled into it, though. Getting out of those things isn't fun."
Maddie obeyed. She had changed modes, so she was guiding the Fenton Blimp rather than the Fenton Jet, but that was more for ease of control than anything else; for all that the jet had been borne up on phantom winds, she hadn't wanted to speed past their intended target by mistake. Danny hadn't thought they would, but with half the instrument readings on the jet suddenly nonfunctional, he hadn't argued with her, either.
Maybe he'd known how much she needed some semblance of control right now.
Maybe he'd suspected, not inaccurately, that her curiosity was bound to get the better of her now that she was finally here.
Maybe he'd thought her incapable of accepting that the Fenton Jet was not as different from the Fenton Spectre Speeder in the environment of the Ghost Zone as she'd first believed it would be, and he hadn't wanted to argue with her.
She wasn't sure he'd have been wrong if that were the case.
"Cujo actually got us pretty close," added Danny. "All things considered, I mean. Where he let us out might have been as close as he ever gets to Walker's prison." He pointed to what looked like little more than a smudge of purple amongst the green at this point. It could have been anything. "It's just up there. Can you see it?"
Maddie adjusted course anyway, aiming for the smudge. "I see it."
The Ghost Zone seemed to grow darker as they approached, and Maddie realized the smudge she'd first seen wasn't only the prison. The prison itself was swathed in shadow, blocking out much of the ambient light that was otherwise so pervasive, and she'd mistaken the darkness for the prison itself.
It likely was, in a way.
Not part of the physical building, true, but part of the warden's domain nonetheless.
They were still a fair distance off when Maddie, afraid of being caught unawares, activated stealth mode.
Danny stared at her as the refraction shield activated. "What'd you just do?"
"Blending in as best we can is prudent," she said as she pointed to the label beneath the lever she'd pulled. "We may not have intended to use this vehicle in the Ghost Zone, but we did expect to have someone up in arms about our Ops Centre. Your father and I have been working on this upgrade for months, but I'll admit this is the first time I've had a chance to test it."
"I didn't know blending in was something Dad could do," muttered Danny, and Maddie couldn't help but smile. It wasn't Jack's usual style, but that hadn't meant he hadn't seen the point of the work.
"Is it safe to assume this won't be enough to get us over the walls?" The purple brick of the prison looked sturdy, and the fierce green glow of the barbed wire atop those walls likely signified a forcefield of some sort, even if it wasn't as obvious a one as the Fenton Ghost Shield.
"We don't need to break in," Danny said. "We're coming here on business. Sort of. Anyway, we can just ask to be let in the front gate."
"So disable stealth mode?"
Danny shrugged. "Won't make a difference to Walker. He's alarmingly good at tracking down Real World Objects." There was another beat of silence between them before Danny added, "Oh, and in case things go south on us, the guards' batons shoot out ecto-energy that'll contain you. It'll eventually form into ecto-cuffs, and I'm pretty sure those would be as difficult for you to break as they are for ghosts, so. Yeah. Fair warning."
Lovely.
Maddie enabled Auto-Jack and left instructions for the blimp to be piloted in a slow circle around the prison, and then she headed back with Danny to join Jazz and Danielle. Danielle only spared her a glance before looking away, but she didn't ask Maddie to leave, so Maddie supposed that was something.
"They'll be out pretty quick," Danny started, "so we'll just—"
The wailing of police sirens cut him off.
Danielle hummed. "Faster than I expected. Then again, we're on their doorstep."
"Attention," blared a voice as if through a megaphone. "Exit the illegal Real World Vehicle in a calm and orderly manner. This will be your only warning."
Danny's eyebrows shot up. "That was nicer than I was expecting."
Maddie didn't want to ask him what he'd been expecting if that was the nice version.
Jazz went to fetch Alicia as Maddie opened the hatch and looked out into the Ghost Zone. What was unmistakably a prison transport hovered nearby, GZPD emblazed on the truck's side. She couldn't help but shiver.
Even if they got through this, if things went poorly, that might not be far off in her future. A normal police cruiser should be the worst she'd see, but—
"Hey!" Danny yelled, leaning out of the hatch but not flying into the Ghost Zone. "Tell Walker I've brought him a prisoner."
The passenger door of the prison transport opened, and Maddie got her first look at one of the ghost guards—baton and all. It—he?—smiled at them, red eyes seeming to shine with malice as he pitched his voice to carry and called, "Yourself? There is an outstanding warrant for your arrest."
Maddie immediately found more reason to hate this plan than she'd already had.
Why hadn't Danny told her?
Then again, he'd told her about the prison break. She should have guessed.
"No," Danny shouted back, sounding both annoyed and resigned as another guard flew from the vehicle. "Vlad Masters. Plasmius. For a list of crimes about as long as my arm, probably, but most immediately for illegal cloning, unauthorized creation, and the intent to—" He broke off with a sigh as yet another guard joined the first two, still sliding out the passenger side as if it were a clown car. "Okay, fine. Y'know what? You can see for yourself." He stepped back and waved a hand in a clear invitation, and Maddie bit her tongue to avoid telling him off.
She had to trust him.
He knew what he was doing.
If he wasn't already making it up on the fly, at least.
"No unauthorized actions within my domain," he warned as two of the three guards flew towards them to take him up on his invitation. "You can't do anything in here any more than you can take apart Johnny 13's motorcycle piece by piece."
Maddie didn't know if that was a lie.
The guards glanced at each other, making her wonder if they knew, either, but when one shrugged, the other nodded.
For now, it seemed they'd comply.
A glance behind her at Danielle's glare made her wonder if there were other reasons for that, but Maddie was not about to ask.
"Your future inmate's back here with a clone who's going to need therapy from someone who's not Spectra," Danny said to the guards as he walked towards the back. Jazz and Alicia stood outside the room now, stepping back to allow Danny and the guards entrance. "As you can see," continued Danny, his voice drifting through the open doorway, "Madeline here is in clear violation of the rules, and she's Vlad's accomplice. He's the mastermind behind this whole crazy plan."
Silence.
"C'mon, do you seriously think I'd risk my neck if this wasn't a big deal? I'm not exactly Walker's favourite ghost."
"We can bring 'em to the boss," one guard said, though Maddie could hear the uncertainty in his voice. "See what he says."
"No guarantees he'll lighten your sentence for this," added the other.
"Not my motivation, but noted."
The next thing Maddie knew, the still-unconscious Madeline was being carried out by one guard—bound not only by FentonWorks tech but also by glowing ecto-energy—and then Vlad appeared, still bound to one of Alicia's old metal chairs, which the second guard carried with unnerving ease.
The first guard stopped to survey them as the second guard continued past, flying towards the transport truck. "You're all coming in for questioning."
Maddie's skin crawled at the words, even though she'd expected as much. Somehow, it didn't sound like a statement so much as a threat. It certainly didn't sound like a question.
"Right behind you," Danny assured them. "Just leave the gates open, will you? We're not going in in the back of that truck. We're not prisoners."
"You should be," sneered the guard, "and once you leave this place, you ain't got nothing protecting you."
"The rules protect him," Danielle said sharply, and everyone turned to her. "Section M."
The guard scowled. "You haven't read the rulebook."
Danielle lifted her chin. "Sure I have. The Ghost Writer has a copy of every book in his library if you know where to look for it—including the warden's rulebook. Unless you doubt the Ghost Writer's power?"
The guard's ghostly tail twitched. "It's not that I doubt—"
"Because I'm sure he'd be happy to give you a demonstration." Danielle's smile was all teeth. "Want me to arrange it?"
"That won't be necessary," the guard ground out. His eyes flicked to the rest of them before he said, "You and your witnesses are welcome to enter, Phantoms."
They each kept silent as he turned and flew back to the truck, and it wasn't until he was loading Vlad into the back of their vehicle that Jazz asked, "Are we sure this is the best plan we have?"
"Yup," Danny and Danielle replied in unison, not missing a beat.
Maddie really hoped they wouldn't regret this.