The Fowl Twins

by Eoin Colfer

  The amphibious ACRONYM vehicles were powering across the harbor, and it would only be a matter of half a minute before they reached dry land, at which point it seemed fairly certain that the agents’ longer legs would ensure that the subsequent chase would be brief and humiliating.

  Myles hefted the battering ram, carefully lining up its rim with the inscribed circle, and he was about to press the red button on the hilt when Beckett asked:

  “Brother, you know I don’t usually worry about stuff like danger, but should we be standing under this ginormous building?”

  Myles smiled. “Do not fret, Beck. This is the safest place to be.”

  Specialist Heitz giggled.

  She couldn’t help it. This entire scenario was so outlandish that it couldn’t possibly be happening. She had heard tales about Artemis Fowl and his exploits with the LEP, but no one in the Academy actually believed them. Not word for word. The People loved to embellish, and Lazuli always thought the Fowl stories were simply not very convincing exaggerations. But now she was standing under a building with a child who was determined to demolish it with a tube of metal.

  Myles arched one of the eyebrows that, for some reason, Clippers had neglected to shave. “Is there a problem, Specialist?” he asked.

  “Oh no,” said Lazuli. “Go ahead and knock down a huge solid building with a metal pipe.”

  Myles scowled, one of his default expressions. Most people scowl perhaps twice a week, but he spent a large proportion of his day with his features twisted in displeasure. This was his lot as a misunderstood genius.

  “I am not going to knock down the building,” he said. “I am going to disassemble it.”

  And with the kind of flair he always claimed to despise, Myles Fowl pressed the red button and activated the charge in the battering ram’s base, which sent a metal column thumping into the institute’s undercarriage with a force of two thousand newtons, which is a piddling amount in the grand scheme of things.

  And nothing happened.

  “Hmm,” said NANNI. “It seems as though I have learned how to be self-satisfied. So, Myles, can I say I told you so?”

  “Wait,” said Myles, unperturbed by the seemingly abject failure of his experiment. “These things take time.”

  Not too much time, was the general hope, as time was not a luxury they possessed at that moment.

  “I should have done it,” said Beckett, sulking now. “You know I break things better than you.”

  “Not breaking, brother,” said Myles. “Deconstructing.”

  And, as if to punctuate his claim, there came a crack from deep inside the building like a single nervous peal of thunder, and the enormous top section of the EYE Film Museum, with hardly any ado, separated from the plinth, and megatons of concrete, steel, and glass slid into the harbor. It took perhaps twelve seconds from start to finish, and it made about as much noise as a semitruck driving along a gravel driveway. The Regrettables were showered with a fine dust but otherwise completely unaffected. The museum, because of its streamlined shape, cleaved the water, raising not enough of a wake to capsize a child’s dinghy. It was, as a DeVries shipyard worker witness later observed, reminiscent of a controlled launch, as though the EYE Film Museum was always meant to be a super-yacht, albeit one that sank almost immediately, forming a new dam that blocked the harbor, effectively cutting off the ACRONYM agents’ pursuit.

  “There,” said Myles with some satisfaction, as if he had just managed to open a stubborn jar. “That should do the trick for the moment.”

  Beckett stood in slack-jawed wonder at the destruction his brother had wrought. Destruction that was at once devastating and precise, on a scale he could only dream of, and all without hurting a single soul.

  “Myles,” he said, “I am prepared to admit now that sometimes brains are good.”

  “It’s about time,” said Myles, and they bumped wrists.

  SHORTLY our heroes will squabble over who exactly is in charge; make some eye-opening discoveries about the toy troll, who will actually open his eyes; and embark on the next leg of their quest, which will involve a white-tip shark, unexpected ejections, and a train journey. But let us for a moment return to the ACRONYM black site and witness the unlikely bonding of our tale’s less inspiring examples of humankind.

  If we travel as Specialist Heitz might elect to if her circuits were fully regenerated, it takes mere minutes to soar over the harbor, skimming the roof of the EYE Film Museum, which has already been boarded by enthusiastic swimmers, who are utilizing its jutting planes as makeshift diving boards. Slightly farther on, we pass over the morning crowds congregating in irate swells at the main station, and it is but a skip of a stone from there to a tavern that closed its doors hours ago. But that is of no matter to us, as we can pass through the stone walls and descend into the ancient subterranean cathedral below. There we find several incapacitated ACRONYM agents, who will shortly shrug off the paralyzing effects of Beckett Fowl’s cluster-punch binge, or the elastic restraint of Lord Bleedham-Drye’s CV slugs.

  In addition, there are two figures who are relatively mobile: Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye, the Duke of Scilly, and Sister Jeronima Gonzalez-Ramos de Zárate of Bilbao, chief of the Amsterdam headquarters for ACRONYM. Colorful characters both, and with a common goal: Find the Fowl Twins by any means necessary or possible. Normally these two would never consider a joint venture, especially since Lord Teddy had actually infiltrated ACRONYM, but needs and fate were about to make these two unsavory characters indispensable to each other.

  When Lord Teddy came upon Sister Jeronima, the nun was screaming in Spanish at her wristwatch, which was linked to her agents’ body cams. Initially, Lord Teddy could have sworn she was howling some lyrics from Verdi’s Rigoletto, which happened to be one of his favorite modern operas, mainly because it featured a duke in a leading role.

  Sister Jeronima calmed a little and switched to English. “Catch them, can’t you?” she said. “They are little children!”

  “But most impressive little children,” interjected Lord Teddy, sliding into the room along one wall, his face ashen, his arm dangling oddly, the way the arm of a loosely stringed puppet might, the fingers of one hand spasming uncontrollably.

  Jeronima looked up to see a magnificently bearded, glaring man displaying none of the usual deference to her rank.

  “But who are you, señor? Not one of mine.”

  “Certainly not one of yours,” snapped Teddy, displaying his customary lack of interpersonal skills. “The very idea. Yours are idiots. Because of yours, my prize has escaped with those boys.”

  Perhaps it was pain that caused Teddy to leak this extra nugget of information to a trained interrogator.

  “With those boys?” said Jeronima. “So the twins themselves do not interest you?”

  “No more than they interest you, madam,” said Teddy. “They are a means to an end.”

  “To what end?” asked Jeronima.

  The duke’s expression was equal parts smile and grimace. “I do apologize, Sister, but your interrogating days are over, as we are both on the same trail and I cannot tolerate a rival. In these situations, a hunter takes off the head of the snake, and you are most definitely the Medusa of this particular clandestine serpent.”

  Jeronima was not just an interrogator, but a skilled negotiator, which is another branch of the same talent. “Why would you kill me when I have so much to offer?”

  Teddy was in too much pain for strategies. “One way or the other, Sister,” he said, plucking Jeronima’s own knife from the door with his functioning hand, “you will come to the point.”

  “We have eyes on the fugitives, señor,” said Jeronima hurriedly.

  “Show me these alleged eyes,” Teddy demanded.

  Jeronima tapped the screen on her watch, which opened a dozen displays on the smartwall nearby. Each monitor showed the feed from an ACRONYM agent’s body cam. Most of the screens were black, and the rest displayed a view of the harbor that seemed to be
blocked by a huge building.

  Both villains took a moment to let this enormity and its implications sink in. Neither doubted that the twins had somehow been responsible for this natural-disaster-level development.

  “Well, I never,” said Lord Teddy finally. “Those Fowls are not to be underestimated, make no mistake. It would seem as though your eyes on have been neutralized. In fact, it would seem that there are no eyes on. And so, without further ado…”

  Sister Jeronima saw the light flash on her own blade as Lord Teddy stepped closer, but she had been in tight spots before and so turned another card. “Those niños are bugged. There is nowhere on this planet they can go where I cannot track them.”

  This gave Lord Teddy pause. After all, his own tracker had a range of only five hundred miles.

  “Very well. One more chance at life, Sister. Demonstrate, if you please.”

  Jeronima used her free hand to refresh the home screen on her watch, which had the effect, though she could not know it, of opening the malware NANNI had e-mailed to her and her contacts.

  Her regular home screen winked out and was replaced by a Tron-style Myles Fowl avatar that knocked on an invisible door and repeated a phrase from “The Three Little Pigs”: “Knock, knock, won’t you please let me in?”

  “But what is this?” wondered Sister Jeronima as Myles’s avatar took over the wall screens.

  “Knock, knock,” said laser-etched Myles, “won’t you please let me in?”

  Lord Teddy was almost amused. This Myles fellow had quite the bag of techno-tricks. “It would appear, Sister, that you have been hacked.”

  “No!” said Jeronima, jabbing the watch’s screen. “Es imposible.”

  The on-screen Myles clapped his shining hands. “Thank you,” he said. “I am in.”

  The avatar was replaced by a tiny whirlpool and the vortex sucked down every last byte of information from the ACRONYM server.

  Jeronima bashed her watch against the table, as if that could stop anything.

  “No, no, no!” she said. There was no doubt now that this facility’s cover was completely blown, at the very least. She would be the first ACRONYM chief to have lost a site, not to mention a live fairy.

  “No eyes on,” said Lord Teddy. “And now no trackers. I fear you are of little use to me.”

  Jeronima was running out of cards to play, but she was not beaten yet.

  “I have boats,” she said.

  “I will see your boats and raise you a flying machine,” said Teddy, holding the blade to Jeronima’s throat, where it cast a yellow glow under her chin like a buttercup flower might, but without the same cheery implication. Lord Bleedham-Drye grunted as he leaned in for the kill, and it was his grunt that saved Jeronima’s neck.

  “But you are having the lesión,” she said. “An injury.”

  Lord Teddy did not need to confirm this verbally—the sheen of sweat on his brow did it for him.

  Jeronima forged ahead. “I would think that your shoulder is dislocated, señor. This is no amateur diagnosis, as I am also a nurse. I can fix that in un minuto. And there are keys to these cuffs in the locker.”

  Lord Teddy considered this proposal. He was holding most of the cards, but he would be holding them one-handed, and while a man with only a single working hand could fly the Myishi Skyblade, it would certainly restrict his efficiency. Even with his arm back in place, he would be in serious discomfort.

  Jeronima rubber-stamped the deal with “And, naturalamente, I can fly a plane.”

  “Very well,” said the duke, removing the blade from the vicinity of Jeronima’s jugular vein and sticking it into the tabletop with some considerable force. “We shall cooperate, but I will be claiming the boy’s toy troll as my prize.”

  “Agreed,” said Jeronima, wondering what on earth this man could want with a toy. Perhaps it was a rare collectible. “And I’ll take the fairy creature to do with as I wish.”

  They shook—Teddy’s good hand to Sister Jeronima’s untethered one.

  And so was born an unholy alliance that would indeed ultimately succeed in the capture of both fairies, though that particular operation would cost one of them dearly.

  From the Overhoeks side of the harbor, Myles Fowl gazed upon the devastation he had wrought and was of two minds about it. There was no denying that it was satisfying to have his theory of anarchitecture proven beyond any reasonable doubt, but it was also true he was experiencing destroyer’s remorse and regretted the necessity of deconstructing such a beautiful building. Surely there must have been another way to both buy the group some breathing space and satisfy his scientific curiosity, but right at this moment Myles couldn’t think of anything that would have been more effective in the time frame, and he was grateful that they were still alive. All three of them.

  Beckett stood at his shoulder. “Was that the moral thing to do?” he said, which surprised Myles, as Beckett usually operated on the same moral level as a wild animal.

  A dog does what it has to do, Beckett often said. And sometimes what a dog has to do is doo-doo.

  Which Myles suspected was deeper than it sounded. The sentiment, not the doo-doo.

  “What did you say, brother?” Myles asked, taken aback.

  “I said, I never want to quarrel with you.”

  “Oh,” said Myles. “My remorse twisted your words.”

  Beckett also felt remorse, but only because he had missed the opportunity to surf the harbor using the sliding EYE Film Museum as a board.

  “Remorse? That was awesome and radical!” he said to Myles in surfing lingo, as that was where his mind was.

  “You are correct, brother mine,” said Myles. “Though not in the way you think. My actions were indeed awesome and radical in the true senses of those terms, not their popular interpretations.”

  Beckett patted his brother’s shoulder. “You should have stopped talking sooner. Just after you said I was correct.”

  Lazuli interrupted their EYE postmortem. “Fowl Twins, we must leave this place.”

  “Of course, Princess,” said Beckett, bowing.

  “Do not call me Princess,” said Lazuli. “It is most patronizing.”

  “Specialist Heitz is right,” said Myles, compartmentalizing his remorse. “The new dam will delay ACRONYM for perhaps thirty minutes, presuming they do not have aerial support. NANNI?”

  The Nano Artificial Neural Network Intelligence system used the official Amsterdam Radar site to check local airspace.

  “Several helicopters are converging on the harbor. None have filed flight plans.”

  “News choppers, I would suspect,” said Myles. “But one never knows, as I doubt ACRONYM ever submits flight plans. We must leave immediately.”

  “This is what I have been telling you,” said Lazuli, who was feeling exposed and jumpy. “Before you began conversing with your spectacles.”

  “Please remain calm, Specialist,” said Myles. “NANNI informs me that your heart rate is elevated.” He paused. “In fact, both of your heart rates are elevated.”

  And lo, like a bolt of white lightning from a clear Alpine sky, the truth struck Myles.

  “Oh, my goodness!” he said, striking a melodramatic Peter Pan pose. “This is all about Whistle Blower.”

  “My toy?” said Beckett doubtfully. “All this for a toy?”

  Myles tapped his spectacles to run a thermal scan and could plainly see the second heartbeat beside Lazuli’s own.

  “But Whistle Blower is no toy,” said Myles. “I am correct, am I not, Specialist Heitz?”

  Lazuli’s only response was to clasp a protective hand over the toy-troll-shaped bulge in her tunic.

  Beckett actually jumped for joy. “Whistle Blower is real! I knew it, then I forgot it, and now I know it again. Thank you, Princess Blue Fairy.”

  Specialist Heitz, not being familiar with humans, wondered if they were all so extreme in their behaviors. Lazuli recalled a computer game that had been popular in the Academy in which a robot and
a monkey collected diamonds that were converted into laser eye-blasts when the two creatures battled one another. The humorless robot and plucky monkey were named Mr. Circuits and Whoop respectively. Lazuli could not help but be reminded of those characters now, looking at the Fowl double act, and would only have been mildly surprised if laser blasts had started shooting from their eyeballs.

  “My name,” she said, “is not Princess Blue Fairy. It is Lazuli. Like the precious stone.”

  “Semiprecious,” corrected Myles before he could stop himself, and so he added, “I refer to the metamorphic rock, of course, not yourself. Your own worth is beyond doubt.”

  He had no wish to antagonize the fairy. The fact that Specialist Heitz had revealed her first name was a major step forward in the trust process, and Myles had an inkling that Beckett had teased the information from her on purpose.

  Fortunately, Beckett distracted Lazuli from the “semiprecious” comment with a question. “Can I call you Laser?”

  “No,” said the pixel firmly. “Unless I can call you Whoop.”

  “Would you?” asked Beckett.

  “Not a chance,” replied the pixel. “Now I am leaving. You may accompany me if you wish.”

  Myles looked across the harbor, his spectacles enhancing his view. One of the amphibious ACRONYM craft had docked at the EYE Film Museum and two agents were scaling the structure, undoubtedly planning to swim to them.

  “We should depart,” said Myles, “for time is precious and seconds are fleeting.”

  Lazuli thought that the human boy was wasting a lot of time telling her how precious time was.