by Eoin Colfer
A sentence of this length would take a jumbo pixie several minutes to digest; luckily, they were spared the embarrassment of being pressed for an explanation when Kolin’s phone rang.
“Just a sec,” he said, checking caller ID. “It’s the warden.”
Kolin answered the phone with a flourish. “Y’ello. Engineer Ozkopy here.”
Ozkopy listened for a long moment, interjecting three uh-huhs and two D’Arvits before pocketing the phone.
“Wow,” he said, prodding the radiation suit with his toe. “I guess you’d better put her in the tube.”
Police Plaza, Haven City, the Lower Elements
Pip waggled his phone at the camera.
“You hear anything? Because I don’t. No one is calling this number, and I’ve got five bars. One hundred percent planetary coverage. Hell, I once took a call on a spaceship.”
Holly swiped the mike sensor. “We’re moving as fast as we can. Opal Koboi is in the shuttle bay right now. We just need ten more minutes.”
Pip adopted a singsong voice.
“Never tell a lie, just to get you by.
Never tell a tale, lest you go to jail.”
Foaly found himself humming along. It was the Pip and Kip theme song. Holly glared at him.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
Artemis grew impatient with the fruitless wrangling. “This is futile and, frankly, embarrassing. They have no intention of releasing Opal. We should evacuate now, at least to the shuttle bays. They are built to withstand magma flares.”
Foaly disagreed. “We’re secure here. The real danger is in Atlantis. That’s where the other Opal is. You said, and I concur, that the serious explosions, theoretical explosions, only occur with living beings.”
“Theoretical explosions are only theoretical until the theory is proven,” countered Artemis. “And with so many—” He stopped mid-sentence, which was very unlike him, as Artemis detested both poor grammar and poor manners. His skin tone faded from pale to porcelain, and he actually rapped his own forehead.
“Stupid. Stupid. Foaly, we are both imbeciles. I don’t expect lateral thinking from the LEP, but from you . . .”
Holly recognized this tone. She had heard it during previous adventures, generally before things went catastrophically wrong.
“What is it?” she asked, afraid of the answer, which must surely be terrible.
“Yeah,” agreed Foaly, who always had time to feel insulted. “Why am I an imbecile?”
Artemis pointed an index finger diagonally down and southwest in the approximate direction they had come from the J. Argon Clinic.
“The oxygen booth has addled my senses,” he said. “The clone. Nopal. She’s a living being. If she explodes, it could go nuclear.”
Foaly accessed the clone’s file on Argon’s Web site, navigating with blurred speed to the patient details.
“No. I think we should be okay there. Opal harvested her own DNA before the time line split.”
Artemis was angry with himself all the same for momentarily forgetting the clone.
“We were minutes into this crisis before the clone’s relevance occurred to me,” he said. “If Nopal had been created at a later date, my slow thinking could have cost lives.”
“There are still plenty of lives at stake,” said Foaly. “We need to save as many as we can.”
The centaur popped a Plexiglas cover on the wall and pressed the red button underneath. Instantly a series of Evac sirens began to wail throughout the city. The eerie sound spread like the keening of mothers receiving the bad news of their nightmares.
Foaly chewed a nail. “There’s no time to wait for Council approval,” he said to Trouble Kelp. “Most should make it to the shuttle bays. But we need to ready the emergency resuscitation teams.”
Butler was less than happy with the idea of losing Artemis. “Nobody’s death is impending.”
His Principal didn’t seem overly concerned. “Well, technically, everybody’s death is impending.”
“Shut up, Artemis!” snapped Butler, which was a major breach of his own professional ethics. “I promised your mother that I would look after you, and yet again you have put me in a position where my brawn and skills count for nothing.”
“That is hardly fair,” said Artemis. “I hardly think that I can be blamed for Opal’s latest stunt.”
Butler’s face blazed a few shades redder than Artemis could remember having seen it. “I do think you can be blamed, and I do blame you. We’re barely clear of the consequences of your last misadventure, and here we are neck deep in another one.”
Artemis seemed more shocked by this outburst than by the impending death situation.
“Butler, I had no idea you were harboring such frus-tration.”
The bodyguard rubbed his cropped head.
“Neither had I,” he admitted. “But for the past few years it’s been one thing after another. Goblins, time travel, demons. Now this place where everything is so . . . so . . . small.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Okay. I said it, it’s out there. And I am fine now. So let’s move on, shall we? What’s the plan?”
“Keep evacuating,” said Artemis. “No more empowering those hostage-taking nitwits; they have their instructions. Drop the blast doors, which should help absorb some of the shock waves.”
“We have our strategies in place, human,” said Trouble Kelp. “The entire population can be at their assembly points in five minutes.”
Artemis paced, thinking. “Tell your people to dump their weapons into the magma chutes. Leave anything that might have Koboi technology behind. Phones, games, everything.”
“All Koboi weaponry has been retired,” said Holly. “But some of the older Neutrinos might have a chip or two.”
Trouble Kelp had the grace to look guilty. “Some of the Koboi weaponry has been retired,” he said. “Budget cuts—you know how it is.”
Pip interrupted their preparations by actually rapping on the camera lens.
“Hey, LEP people. I’m getting old here. Somebody say something, anything. Tell us more lies—we don’t care.”
Artemis’s eyebrows furrowed and joined. He did not appreciate such flippant posturing when many lives were at stake. He pointed at the microphone.
“May I?”
Trouble barely looked up from his emergency calls and made a vague gesture that was open to interpretation. Artemis chose to interpret it as an affirmative.
He approached the screen. “Listen to me, you lowlife. This is Artemis Fowl. You may have heard of me.”
Pip grinned, and his mask echoed the expression.
“Oooh, Artemis Fowl. Wonder boy. We’ve heard of you all right, haven’t we, Kip?”
Kip nodded, dancing a little jig. “Artemis Fowl, the Oirish boy who chased leprechauns. Sure and begorrah everyone has heard of that smarty-pants.”
These two are stupid, thought Artemis. They are stupid and talk too much, and I should be able to exploit those weaknesses.
He tried a ruse.
“I thought I told you to read your demands and say nothing more.”
Pip’s face was literally a mask of confusion. “You told us?”
Artemis hardened his voice. “My instructions for you two idiots were to read the demands, wait until the time was up, then shoot the pixie. I don’t recall saying anything about trading insults.”
Pip’s mask frowned. How did Artemis Fowl know their instructions?
“Your instructions? We don’t take orders from you.”
“Really? Explain to me then how I know your instructions to the letter.”
Pip’s mask software was not able to cope with his rapid expression change and froze momentarily.
“I . . . ah . . . I don’t . . .”
“And tell me how I knew the exact frequency to tap into.”
“You’re not in Police Plaza?”
“Of course not, you idiot. I’m at the rendezvous point waiting for Opal.”
Artemis felt his
heart speed up, and he waited a second for his conscious mind to catch up with his subconscious and tell him what he recognized onscreen.
Something in the background.
Something familiar.
The wall behind Pip and Kip was nondescript gray, rendered with roughly finished plaster. A common finish for farm walls worldwide. There were walls like this all over the Fowl Estate.
Ba boom.
There went his heart again.
Artemis concentrated on the wall. Slate-gray, except for a network of jagged cracks that sundered the plasterwork.
A memory presented itself of six-year-old Artemis and his father walking the estate. As they passed the barn wall on the upper pasture, young Artemis pointed to the wall and commented. “See, Father? The cracks form a map of Croatia, once part of the Roman, Ottoman, and Austrian Habsburg empires. Were you aware that Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991?”
There it was. On the wall behind Pip and Kip. A map of Croatia, though fifteen-year-old Artemis saw now that the Dalmatian coastline was truncated.
They are on the Fowl Estate, he realized.
Why?
Something Dr. Argon had said resurfaced.
Because the residual magic there is off the scale. Something happened on the Fowl Estate once. Something huge, magically speaking.
* * *
Artemis decided to act on his hunch. “I’m at the Fowl Estate, waiting for Opal,” he said.
“You’re at Fowl Manor too?” blurted Kip, prompting Pip to turn rapidly and shoot his comrade in the heart. The gnome was punched backward into the wall, knocking clouds of dust from the plaster. A narrow stream of blood oozed from the hole in his chest, pulsing gently down his breastplate, as undramatic as a paint drip running down a jar. His kitty-cat cartoon face seemed comically surprised, and when the heat from his face faded, the pixels powered down, leaving a yellow question mark.
The sudden death shocked Artemis, but the preceding sentence had shocked him more.
He had been correct on both counts: not only was Opal behind this, but the rendezvous point was Fowl Manor.
Why? What had happened there?
Pip shouted at the screen. “You see what you did, human? If you are human. If you are Artemis Fowl. It doesn’t matter what you know, it’s too late.”
Pip pressed the still smoking barrel to Opal’s head, and she jerked away as the metal burned her skin, pleading through the tape over her mouth. It was clear that Pip wished to pull the trigger, but he could not.
He has his instructions, thought Artemis. He must wait until the allotted time has run out. Otherwise he cannot be certain that Opal is secure in the nuclear reactor.
Artemis deactivated the microphone and was moving toward the door when Holly caught his arm.
“There’s no time,” she said, correctly guessing that he was headed for home.
“I must try to save my family from the next stage of Opal’s plan,” said Artemis tersely. “There are five minutes left. If I can make it to a magma vent, we might be able to outrun the explosions to the surface.”
Commander Kelp quickly weighed his options. He could order Artemis to remain underground, but it would certainly be strategically advantageous to have someone track Opal Koboi if she somehow escaped from Atlantis.
“Go,” he said. “Captain Short will pilot you and Butler to the surface. Stay in contact if . . .”
He did not finish the sentence, but everyone in the room could guess what he had been about to say.
Stay in contact if . . . there is anything left to contact.
The Deeps, Atlantis
Opal did not enjoy being forced into the depths of the tube by a flat-topped ramrod, but once she was down inside the neutron crust, she felt quite snuggly, cushioned by a fluffy layer of anti-rad foam.
One is like a caterpillar in a chrysalis, she thought, only a little irked by the rough material of her anti-rad suit. I am about to transform into the godhead. I am about to arrive at my destiny. Bow down, creatures, or bear thine own blindness.
Then she thought, Bear thine own blindness? Is that too much?
There was a niggly doubt in the back of Opal’s head that she had actually made a horrific mistake by setting this plan in motion. It was her most radical maneuver ever, and thousands of fairies and humans would die. Worse still, she herself might cease to exist, or morph into some kind of time-mutant. But Opal dealt with these worries by simply refusing to engage with them. It was childish, she knew; but Opal was ninety percent convinced that she was cosmically ordained to be the first Quantum Being.
The alternative was too abhorrent to be entertained for long: she, Opal Koboi, would be forced to live out her days as a common prisoner in the Deeps, an object of ridicule and derision. The subject of morality tales and school projects. A chimp in a zoo for the Atlantis fairies to stare at with round eyes. To kill everyone or even die herself would be infinitely preferable. Not that she would die. The tube would contain her energy; and with enough concentration, she would become a nuclear version of herself.
One feels one’s destiny at hand. Any minute now.
Haven City
Artemis, Butler, and Holly took the express elevator to Police Plaza’s own shuttleport, which was connected to a magma vent from the earth’s core that supplied much of the city’s power through geothermal rods. Artemis did not speak to the others; he simply muttered to himself and rapped the steel wall of the elevator with his knuckles. Holly was relieved to find that there was no pattern in the rappings, unless, of course, the pattern was too complicated for her to perceive it. It wouldn’t be the first time Artemis’s thought process had been beyond her grasp.
The elevator was spacious by LEP standards and so allowed Butler enough headroom to stand up straight, though he still knocked his crown against the capsule wall whenever they hit a bump.
Finally Artemis spoke: “If we can get into the shuttle before the deadline, then we stand a real chance of making it to the magma chutes.”
Artemis used the word deadline, but his companions knew that he meant assassination. Pip would shoot Opal when the time was up; none of them doubted that now. Then the consequences of this murder would unfold, whatever they might be; and their best chance of survival lay on the inside of a titanium craft that was built to withstand total immersion in a magma chimney.
The elevator hissed to a halt on pneumatic pistons and the doors opened to admit the assorted noises of utter bedlam. The shuttleport was jammed with frantic fairies fighting their way through the security checkpoints, ignoring the usual X-ray protocols and jumping over barriers and turnstiles. Sprites flew illegally low, their wings grazing the tube lighting. Gnomes huddled together in crunchball formations, attempting to barge their way through the line of LEP crowd-control officers in riot gear.
“People are forgetting their drills,” muttered Holly. “This panic is not going to help anyone.”
Artemis stared crestfallen at the melee. He had seen something like it once in JFK airport, when a TV reality star had turned up in Arrivals. “We won’t make it through. Not without hurting people.”
Butler picked up his comrades and slung one across each shoulder. “The heck we won’t,” he said, stepping determinedly into the multitude.
Pip’s attitude had changed since he’d shot his partner. No more chitchat or posturing; now he was following his instructions to the letter: Wait until your phone alarm beeps, then shoot the pixie.
That Fowl guy. That was bluff, right? He can’t do anything now. It probably wasn’t even Fowl.
Pip decided that he would never divulge what had happened here today. Silence was safety. Words would only bind themselves into strands and hang him.
She need never know.
But Pip knew that she would take one look in his eyes and know everything. For a second Pip thought about running, just disentangling himself from this entire convoluted master plan and being a plain old gnome again.
I
cannot do it. She would find me. She would find me and do terrible things to me. And, for some reason, I do not wish to be free of her.
There was nothing for it but to follow the orders that he had not already disobeyed.
Perhaps, if I kill her, she will forgive me.
Pip cocked the hammer on his handgun and pressed it to the back of Opal’s head.
Atlantis
In the reactor, Opal’s head was buzzing with excitement. It must be soon. Very soon. She had been counting the seconds, but the bumpy elevator ride had disoriented her.
I am ready, she thought. Ready for the next step.
Pull it! she broadcast, knowing her younger self would hear the thought and panic. Pull the trigger.
Police Plaza
Foaly felt his forelock droop under the weight of perspiration and tried to remember what his parting comment to Caballine had been that morning.
I think I told her that I loved her. I always do. But did I say it this morning? Did I?
It seemed very important to him.
Caballine is in the suburbs. She will be out of harm’s way. Fine.
The centaur did not believe his own thoughts. If Opal was behind this, there would be serpentine twists to this plan yet to be revealed.
Opal Koboi does not make plans; she writes operas.
For the first time in his life, Foaly was horrified to catch himself thinking that someone else might just be a little smarter than he was.
Police Plaza Shuttleport
Butler waded through the crowd, dropping his feet with care. His appearance in the shuttleport only served to heighten the level of panic, but that could not be helped now. Some temporary discomforts would have to be borne by certain fairies if it meant reaching their shuttle in time. Elves shoaled around his knees like cleaner-fish, several poking him with buzz batons and a couple spraying him with pheromone repellent spray, which Butler found to his great annoyance instantly shrunk his sinuses.
When they reached the security turnstile, the huge bodyguard simply stepped over it, leaving the majority of the frightened populace milling around on the other side. Butler had the presence of mind to dunk Holly in front of the retinal scanner so they could be beeped through without activating the terminal’s security measures.