The Fowl Twins, Page 3

  NANNI’s face appeared in a free-floating liquid speaker ball, which was held in shape by an electric charge. “Perhaps this would be a good time to activate the EMP? I know you’ve been dying to try it.”

  Myles considered this as he unclipped the servo cable. Villa Éco was outfitted with a localized electromagnetic-pulse generator, which would knock out any electronic systems in the island’s airspace. The Fowls’ main electronics would not be affected, as the entire villa had a Faraday cage embedded in its walls, and the Fowl systems had backups that ran on optical cable. A little old-school, but should the cage fail, the cable would keep systems ticking until the danger was past.

  “Hmm,” said Myles. “That seems a bit drastic. What is the nature of the emergency?”

  “Sonic boom detected,” said NANNI. “I would guess from a high-powered rifle.”

  NANNI is guessing now, thought Myles. She really is developing.

  “Guessing is of little use to me, madam,” said Myles. “Scientists do not guess.”

  “Oh yes, that’s right. Scientists hypothesize,” said NANNI. “In that case, I hypothesize that the sonic boom was caused by a rifle shot.”

  “That’s better,” said Myles. “How certain are you?”

  “Reasonably,” replied NANNI. “If I had to offer a percentage, I would say seventy percent.”

  A sonic boom could be caused by many things, and the majority of those things were harmless. Still, Myles now had a valid excuse to employ the EMP, something he had been forbidden to do unless absolutely necessary.

  It was, in fact, a judgment call.

  Beckett, who had somehow become inverted in the delivery chute, tumbled onto the floor and asked, “Will the EMP hurt my insects?”

  Beckett kept his extensive bug collection in the safe room so it would be safe.

  “No,” said Myles. “Unless some of them are robot insects.”

  Beckett pressed his nose to the terrarium’s glass and made some chittering noises.

  “No robots,” he pronounced. “So activate the EMP.”

  For once Myles found himself in agreement with his brother. While the sonic boom could possibly be the by-product of a harmless event, it also might herald the arrival of an attack force hell-bent on wreaking vengeance on one Artemis or the other. Better to press the button and survive than regret not pressing it just before you died.

  So, thought Myles, I should activate the EMP. But before I do…

  Myles rooted in the steel trash can until he found some aluminum foil that he had been using for target practice with one of his many lasers. He used it to quickly wrap his spectacles, then stuffed them down to the bottom of the trash can. This would protect the lite version of NANNI that lived in the eyeglasses in the event that both his safeguards failed.

  “I concur,” said Myles. “Activate the EMP, NANNI. Tight radius, low intensity. No need to knock out the mainland.”

  “Activating EMP,” said NANNI, and promptly collapsed in a puddle on the floor, as her own electronics had not yet been converted to optical cable.

  “See, Beck?” said Myles, lifting one black loafer from a glistening wet patch. “That is what we scientists call a design flaw.”

  * * *

  Lord Bleedham-Drye was doubly miffed and thrice surprised by the developments on Dalkey Island.

  Surprise number one: Brother Colman spoke the truth, and trolls did indeed walk the earth.

  Surprise the second: The troll was tiny. Who ever heard of a tiny troll?

  Surprise the last (for the moment): Flying boys had sequestered his prey.

  “What on earth is going on?” he asked no one in particular.

  The duke muttered to himself, “These Fowl people seem prepared for full-scale invasion. They have flare counter-measures. Drones flying off with children. Who knows what else? Antitank guns and trained bears, I shouldn’t wonder. Even Churchill couldn’t take that beach.”

  It occurred to Lord Teddy that he could blow up the entire island for spite. He was partial to a spot of spite, after all. But after a moment’s consideration, he dismissed the idea. It was a cheery notion, but the person he would ultimately be spiting was none other than the Duke of Scilly, i.e., his noble self. He would hold his fire for now, but when those boys reemerged from their fortified house, he would be ready with his trusty rifle. After all, he was quite excellent with a gun, as his last shot had proven. Off the battlefield, it was unseemly to shoot anything except pheasant, unless one were engaged in a duel. Pistols at dawn, that sort of thing. But he would make an exception for a troll, and for those blooming Fowl boys.

  Lord Teddy loaded the rifle with traditional bullets and set it on the balcony floor, muzzle pointed toward the island.

  You can’t stay in that blasted house forever, my boys, he thought. And the moment you poke your noses from cover, Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye shall be prepared.

  He could wait.

  He was prepared to put in the hours. As the duke often said to himself: One must spend time to make time.

  Teddy lay sandwiched between a yoga mat and a veil of camouflage that had served as a hide of sorts for almost a month now, and ran a sweep of the island through his night-vision monocular. The whole place was lit up like a fairground with roaming spotlights and massive halogen lamps. There was not a square inch of space for an intruder to hide.

  Clever chappies, these Fowls, thought the duke. The father must have a lot of enemies.

  Teddy sat up, fished a boar-bristle brush from his duffel bag, and began his evening ritual of one hundred brushes of his beard. The beard rippled and glistened as he brushed, like the pelt of an otter, and Teddy could not help but congratulate himself. A beard required a lot of maintenance, but, by heaven, it was worth it.

  He had only reached stroke seven when the duke’s peripheral vision registered that something had changed. It was suddenly darker. He looked up, expecting to find that the lights had been shut off on Dalkey Island, but the truth was more drastic.

  The island itself had disappeared.

  Lord Teddy checked all the way to the horizon with his trusty monocular. In the blink of an eye the entirety of Dalkey Island had vanished with only an abandoned stretch of wooden jetty to hint that the Fowl residence might ever have existed at the end of it.

  Lord Bleedham-Drye was surprised to the point of stupefaction, but his manners and breeding would not allow him to show it.

  “I say,” he said mildly. “That’s hardly cricket, is it? What has the world come to when a chap can’t bag himself a troll without entire land masses disappearing?”

  Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye’s bottom lip drooped. Quite the sulky expression for a hundred-and-fifty-year-old. But the duke did not allow himself to wallow for long. Instead, he set his mind to the puzzle of the disappearing island.

  “One can’t help but wonder, Teddy old boy,” mused the duke to the mirror on the flat side of his brush, “if all this troll malarkey is indeed true, then is the rest also true? What Brother Colman said vis-à-vis elves, pixies, and gnomes all hanging around for centuries? Is there, in fact, magic in the world?”

  He would, Lord Teddy decided, proceed under the assumption that magic did exist, and therefore, by logical extension, magical creatures.

  “And so it is only reasonable to assume,” Teddy said, “that these fairy chaps will wish to protect their own, and perhaps send their version of the cavalry to rescue the little troll. Perhaps the cavalry has already arrived, and this disappearing-island trick is actually some class of a magical spell cast by a wizard.”

  The duke was right about the cavalry. The fairy cavalry had already arrived.

  One fairy, at least.

  But he was dead wrong about a wizard casting a spell. The fairy responsible for the disappearing-island trick was a far cry indeed from being a wizard, and could no more cast a spell than a frog could turn itself into a prince. She had made a split-second decision to use the only piece of equipment available to her, and was now pre
tty certain that her decision was absolutely the wrong one.

  THE gnome professor Dr. Jerbal Argon once presented a theory, dubbed the Law of Diminishing Probabilities, to the fairy Psych Brotherhood. Argon’s law states that the more unusual the subjects involved in a conflict, the more improbable the resolution to that conflict will be. It is possibly the vaguest behavioral theory ever to make it into a journal, and it is really more of a notion than a law. But in the case of the Fowl Twins’ first magical adventure, it would certainly prove to be accurate, as we will see from the hugely improbable finale to this tale.

  The law’s requirements were certainly fulfilled, as this day was, without doubt, one for unusual individuals:

  An immortalist duke…

  A miniature troll…

  And a set of fraternal human twins: the first a certified genius with a criminal leaning lurking in his prefrontal cortex, and the second possessed of a singular talent that has been hinted at but not fully explored as yet.

  There are two additional unusual individuals still to join the tale. The nunterrogator, to whom we have already alluded, will presently make one of her trademark theatrical entrances. But the next unusual individual to join our cast of protagonists is more than simply unusual—she is biologically unique. And she made her appearance from above, hovering thirty feet over Dalkey Island.

  This unusual individual was Lower Elements Police Specialist Lazuli Heitz, who, Five Minutes Earlier, entered the island’s airspace to complete a training maneuver in the Fowl safe zone. Usually such safe zones were in remote areas, but in rare cases where there was a special arrangement with the human occupants, a zone could be closer to civilization and provide more of a challenge for the specialists. A case in point being Dalkey Island, where Artemis Fowl the Second, friend to the LEP, had guaranteed safe passage for fairies.

  From a human perspective, Lazuli was unusual simply by virtue of being an invisible flying fairy, but from a fairy perspective, LEP Specialist Heitz was unusual because she was a hybrid, that is to say a crossbreed. Hybrids are common enough among the fairy folk, especially since the families were forced into close quarters underground, but even so, they are each and every one idiosyncratic, for all hybrids are as unique as snowflakes and the manifestation of their magical abilities is unpredictable.

  In Lazuli Heitz’s case, her magic had resolutely refused to manifest itself in any shape or form. Lazuli’s particular category of hybrid was known as a pixel, that being a pixie-elf cross. There were other species in the ancestral DNA mix, too, but pixie and elf accounted for over ninety-five percent of her total number of nucleotides. And even though both pixies and elves are magical creatures, not a single spark of power seemed to have survived the crossbreeding. In height, Specialist Heitz followed the pixie type at barely thirty-two inches tall, but her head adhered to the elfin model and was smaller than one might expect to see on a pixie’s shoulders, with the customary elfin sharp planes of cheekbone, jaw, and pointed ear. This was enough to give her away as a hybrid to any fairy who cared to look. And just in case there was any lingering doubt, Lazuli’s skin and eyes were the aquamarine blue of Atlantean pixies, but her hair was the fine flaxen blond associated with Amazonian elves. Scattered across her neck and shoulders was a mottling of yellow arrowhead markings, which, according to paleofatumologists, had once made Amazonian elves look like sunflowers to airborne predators.

  Unless that elf is a hybrid with blue skin, Lazuli often thought, which ruins the effect.

  All this paleofatumological knowledge only meant one thing to Lazuli, and that was that her parents had probably met on vacation, which was about the sum total of her knowledge on that subject, aside from the fact that one or both of them had deserted her on the north corner of a public square, after which the orphanage administrator had named her Lazuli Heights.

  “I changed the spelling, and there you have it,” the administrator had told her. “It’s my little game, which worked out well for you, not so much for Walter Kooler or Vishtar Restrume.”

  The sprite administrator had a human streak and often made barbed remarks along the lines of The lapis lazuli is a semiprecious stone. Semiprecious, hybrid. I think your parents must have been thinking along those lines, or you wouldn’t have ended up here.

  The administrator chuckled dryly at his own tasteless joke every single time he cracked it. Lazuli never even smiled.

  It was exceedingly exasperating for a pixel not to possess the magical phenotypic trait, especially since her driving ambition was to achieve the rank of captain in the LEPrecon, a post where abilities such as the mesmer, invisibility, and healing powers would most certainly prove to be boons. Fortunately for Heitz, her obdurate streak, sharp mind, and dead eye with an oxalis pistol had so far carried her through two years of intense training in the LEP Academy and now to specialist duty in a safe zone. Lazuli did suspect that her Academy application might have been bolstered by the LEP’s minority-inclusion policy.

  And Lazuli certainly was a minority. Her DNA profile breakdown was forty-two percent elf, fifty-three percent pixie, and five percent undeterminable. Unique.

  The evening’s exercise was straightforward: Fairies were secreted around the island, and it was her mission to track them down. These were not real fairies, of course. They were virtual avatars that could be tagged by passing a gloved hand through holograms projected by her helmet camera. There would be clues to follow: chromatographic reactions, tracks, faint scents, and a learned knowledge of the species’ habits. Once she punched in, Specialist Heitz would have thirty minutes to tag as many virtual fugitives as she could.

  Before Lazuli could so much as repeat the mantra that had sustained her for many years and through several personal crises, which happened to be Small equals motivated, a pulsating purple blob blossomed on her visor’s display.

  This was most unusual. Purple was usually reserved for live trolls. Perhaps her helmet was glitching. This would not be in the least surprising, as Academy equipment was always bottom of the priority list when the budget was being carved up between departments. Lazuli’s suit was threadbare and ill-fitting, and packed with weapons that hadn’t been standard issue in decades.

  She blinked at the purple blob to enlarge it and realized that there was indeed a troll on the beach, albeit a tiny one. The poor fellow was smaller than her, though he did not seem as intimidated by the human world as she was.

  I must rescue him, Lazuli told herself. This was undoubtedly the correct action, unless this troll was involved somehow in a live maneuver. Lazuli’s angel mentor, who directed the exercise from Haven City, had explicitly and repeatedly ordered her never to poke her nose into an operation.

  “There are two types of fast track, Specialist Heitz,” the angel had said only this morning. “The fast track to the top, and the fast track out the door. Poke your nose into an operation where it doesn’t belong, and guess which track you’ll be on.”

  Lazuli didn’t need to guess.

  A thought occurred to her: Could it be that the coincidental appearance of a troll on this island was her stinkworm?

  This was very possible, as LEP instructors were a sneaky bunch.

  A specialist’s mettle was often stress-tested by mocking up an emergency and observing how the cadet coped. Rookies referred to this testing as being thrown a stinkworm, because, as every fairy knew, if a person was thrown an actual stinkworm and they mishandled it, there would be an explosive, viscous, and foul-smelling outcome. There was a legend in the Academy about how one specialist had been dropped into the crater of an apparently active volcano to see how he would handle the crisis. The specialist in question did not respond with the required fortitude and was now wanding registration chips in the traffic department.

  Lazuli had no intention of wanding chips in traffic.

  This could be my stinkworm, she thought.

  In which case she should simply observe, as her angel would be keeping a close eye.

  Or it could be a g
enuine operation.

  In which case she should most definitely steer clear, as there would be LEP agents in play.

  But there was a third option.

  Option C: Was it possible that the Fowls were running an operation of their own here? The human Artemis Fowl had a checkered history with the People.

  If that were the case, then she should rescue the toy troll, who was perhaps six feet away from two children her facial-recognition software labeled as Myles and Beckett Fowl.

  Lazuli hung in the air while she mulled over her options. Her angel had mentioned the name Artemis before the Dalkey Island exercise.

  “If you ever meet Artemis Fowl, he is to be trusted,” she’d said literally minutes before Lazuli boarded her magma pod. “His instructions are to be followed without question.”

  But her comrades in the locker room told a different story.

  “That entire family is poison,” one Recon sprite had told her. “I saw some of the sealed files before a mission. That Fowl guy kidnapped one of our captains and made off with the ransom fund. Take it from me, once a human family gets a taste of fairy gold, it’s only a matter of time before they come back for more, so watch out up there.”

  Lazuli had no option but to trust her angel, but maybe she would keep a close eye on the twins. Should she do more than that?

  Observe, steer clear, or engage?

  How was a specialist supposed to tell a convincingly staged emergency from an actual one?

  All this speculation took Lazuli perhaps three seconds, thanks to her sharp mind. After the third second, the emergency graduated to a full-blown crisis when a shot echoed across the sound and the little troll was sent tumbling with the force of the impact, landing squarely at the rowdy child’s feet. Beckett Fowl immediately grabbed and restrained the toy troll.

  This effectively removed Specialist Heitz’s dilemma. It was just as her comrades had foretold: