The Fowl Twins

by Eoin Colfer

  And so surprised was Myles by Beckett’s use of the verb work that he actually obeyed the order.

  Whistle Blower, on the other hand, was only getting started on the verbalizing. The diminutive troll threw a growling tantrum that would put a group of sugar-blitzed toddlers to shame. He roared and howled, stomping his feet as though crushing invisible ants, and when he was finished with the earthen floor, he started in on the walls, punching dents in the plaster.

  This ought to be funny, thought Myles. There’s a real live action figure having a rage fit inside an old windmill.

  But it wasn’t funny or even mildly amusing; in fact, it was downright worrying, because when the toy troll was finished punching the walls, he began scoring long gouges in them with his claws.

  “Ha!” said Beckett. “Whistle Blower is playing tic-tac-toe.”

  While Beckett found this funny, Myles was worried about the building’s structural integrity.

  Could this tiny troll actually collapse the windmill with all of us still inside it?

  “Specialist Heitz,” he whispered with some urgency in his tone, “I do hate to second-guess your expertise in this area, but is it possible that freeing the troll in this confined space was the wrong move?”

  Lazuli had to admit that she might have underestimated the tiny troll’s sheer destructive power.

  “It is possible,” she said. “But we’re safe up here. I can’t believe such a tiny creature could bring down an entire building. In all the simulations I’ve seen—”

  “Simulations?” Myles felt compelled to interrupt. “Don’t you have actual experience with toy trolls?”

  Lazuli wondered if perhaps she should have mentioned this before endangering everyone.

  “No one has actual experience with toy trolls. They are extremely rare. Many fairies don’t even believe they exist.”

  And as all this whispered conversation was going on, Beckett had decided that he’d heard enough from Whistle Blower and it was time to make his move. His move being to unlock his ankles and swing himself to the floor below, landing with a small thump.

  Lazuli was speechless, but Myles was not.

  “Beck,” he said with only the slightest tremor in his voice, “I cannot believe you did that.”

  “I know, brother,” said Beckett spreading his arms. “Perfect landing. Gold medal for sure, maybe even platinum.”

  Myles was equal parts incensed and terrified. “Not the landing—going down there! Come back up this instant, Beckett C. Fowl!”

  In fact, neither Myles nor Beckett had a middle initial, but inserting one in his twin’s name was a device Myles sometimes used to pique Beckett’s interest, as his brother would often stop whatever he was doing to make a list of possible names the fake initial might stand for. The more outlandish the name, the better. Beckett’s favorite invented middle initial for this game was C, which he once decided stood for Counterclockwise, and at the time Myles had to admit that Beckett Counterclockwise Fowl did have a certain ring to it and summed up his personality quite succinctly. Beckett had also declared that Myles should be henceforth known as Myles B. Fowl, with the B standing for Blah-Blah-Blah, which surprised Myles, who could not believe that Beck had used the term henceforth.

  The middle-initial trick did not work on this occasion.

  “Can’t hear you, Myles,” said Beckett, “because I’m not listening.”

  Incredibly, the troll did not seem to notice the human behaving irresponsibly behind him, and he continued slashing at the walls until daylight peeked through from outside.

  Beckett was impatient to be noticed, and so he performed a lengthy throat clearing, or at least that’s what it sounded like to the beam-bound Myles.

  The toy troll froze in mid-slash and turned slowly to face his human tormentor.

  “D’Arvit,” whispered Lazuli, wondering if she was about to be responsible for the dismemberment of a human boy.

  “D’Arvit indeed,” said Myles, setting his mind to work. “NANNI, can you laser the creature?”

  NANNI vibrated through his cranium. “Negative, Myles. I am totally pooped.”

  Totally pooped? thought Myles. That’s hardly scientific. And far too casual. We will need to have a serious chat about boundaries and parameters once I save Beckett.

  “Can you at least project some autonomous sensory meridian response videos on the wall?” he asked the AI.

  ASMR videos were short clips that were so pleasant to watch they caused what the internet termed brain tingle. Myles reasoned that perhaps they would distract the toy troll.

  “Nope,” said NANNI. “There’s no network in here, and I don’t have anything locally. Also, we need to talk about my hours. Don’t I get a lunch hour? Or a bathroom break?”

  “Why would you need a bathroom break?” Myles whispered. “And even if you did, this is hardly the time to negotiate it.”

  “Agreed,” said NANNI. “Let’s put a pin in that and come back to it.”

  While NANNI was speaking, Myles realized there was only one way to handle the developing situation at ground level.

  I have to go down there.

  Lazuli, it seemed, had come to the same conclusion, and from her boot she drew a small knife, which she would use only as a last resort.

  “Stay right there,” she ordered Myles. “I will try to subdue your brother.”

  As it happened, no intervention was necessary, for the troll seemed intrigued by Beckett’s growling. More than intrigued, in fact. The creature was stunned and issued a series of short to mid-length barks.

  Beckett responded with some barks of his own, and what could be described as an extended yodel. The toy troll seemed amazed, and he wasn’t the only one.

  Lazuli and Myles looked at each other.

  “Are they…?” began Myles.

  “Can he…?” rejoined Lazuli.

  Two unfinished questions.

  It sounded like the beginning of a country music duet.

  Neither answered the other’s unfinished question, because of the spectacle on the ground below. It was undeniable now that boy and beast were communicating. The grunts, yodels, and whoops grew ever more elaborate, and everything seemed to be going just fine until, in the blink of an eye, the troll’s relaxed stance stiffened and he launched himself at Beckett, who fell back screaming.

  Myles had never experienced a panic like the one he felt at that moment. It seemed as though an icy hand had reached deep inside him and was twisting his stomach…. But then he realized that Beckett was not screaming.

  He was laughing.

  There was a lot of dust in the air, so it was possible he was mistaken, but it seemed to Myles as though his brother was wrestling with the toy troll. The beast had retracted its claws and was playfully butting Beckett’s stomach and landing soft punches. For his part, Beckett tried to catch hold of Whistle Blower, but the little fellow wriggled easily from his grasp. After several minutes of tussling, both play-fighters fell back, exhausted, on the floor. The toy troll pointed at Myles and growled something from the corner of his mouth. Beckett cracked up.

  “Yes,” he said. “That human’s head does look like an egg.”

  Myles was astounded by this latest development, but not so stunned that he was speechless.

  “Beck, did that toy troll really say my head looked like an egg?”

  “No,” admitted Beckett. “He said something much worse, but I would never use language like that.”

  Lazuli couldn’t figure it out. “What’s going on here, Fowl boy? Is your twin actually conversing with a toy troll? Even fairies with the gift of tongues haven’t been able to speak with trolls. Not anymore really. Nothing more than basic commands.”

  Myles took a second to think and then announced, “It’s like Beck said: He’s a superhero.”

  “Explain, boy,” ordered Lazuli, and even though Myles did not appreciate her tone, he did, because his love of Fowlsplaining trumped his authority issues.

  “Dr. Fowl
—that is, Artemis—reminded us that Beckett and I had once been possessed by ancient fairies. And I’m inferring from what you said that ancient fairies could converse with trolls. I would suggest that the subject—that is to say Beckett Fowl—has been imbued with that fairy’s ability to communicate with all developed species. He is, in effect, a trans-species polyglot.”

  Lazuli’s English was good, but not Myles-level good, so Beckett helped out.

  “He means that I can talk to anyone and anything. I’ve been doing it for years, right under his nose. I’ve told him a million times.”

  “I admit that I was aware of Beckett’s proficiency with languages,” continued Myles, “but I never thought his various yippings and cawings with the island wildlife were anything more than Beckett being Beckett.”

  “It was Beckett being Beckett,” said Beckett. “And I know, because I am Beckett.”

  “You can’t argue with that,” noted Lazuli.

  Beckett tickled Whistle Blower’s tummy, which obviously annoyed the troll, because he slapped away the boy’s hands and growled.

  “He says he’s not a puppy,” said Beckett. “He is a warrior troll. Whistle Blower, master of the underground world.”

  Myles cracked one of his rare jokes. “Master of the Napoleon complex is more like it.”

  Naturally, no one laughed, and Whistle Blower focused his beady eyes on Myles as though he understood.

  “He’s not going to attack anyone, is he, Beck?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Beckett while the toy troll bounced on his stomach.

  “Very well,” said Myles. “Then we need to follow Artemis’s advice and seek safe haven.”

  Lazuli had actually been thinking about that very thing now that it seemed carnage by troll had been averted for the moment. She checked the wrist readout on her suit. “My bio-circuitry is repairing itself. As soon as my equipment is operational, we can call in LEP Retrieval.”

  Myles nodded. “Then at least some of our problems will be solved, but we must assume that ACRONYM and Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye are closing in on our position even as we speak.”

  Myles closed his eyes, a little trick he’d picked up from Artemis to aid concentration. But he’d augmented it with his own invention of two tiny electrode pads in his spectacles’ arms that would generate low-level charges to stimulate his hypothalamus, which some scientists associate with higher-level thought functions.

  NANNI anticipated the request. “If you’re looking for hypothalamus stimulation, you’re out of luck, Myles. I can barely speak at this point.”

  Myles frowned. The first thing they needed to do was hide. Somewhere safe, where Sister Jeronima couldn’t find them. Somewhere that for all intents and purposes didn’t exist.

  Myles opened his eyes and smiled.

  He knew just the place.

  SISTER Jeronima was as good as her word, as one might reasonably expect from a nun, and popped Lord Teddy’s shoulder back into its socket on her first attempt. Truth be told, she was hoping the duke might be overcome by pain and pass out, which she intended to interpret as an annulment of their partnership, but Teddy gritted his square white teeth and bore the excruciating agony with no more than an exclamation of “Blimey” after the sharp blow from the flat of the nun’s hand. Once his upper arm was reunited with his shoulder blade, Teddy swallowed some Tylenol from the dispensary and had Jeronima bind his shoulder tightly. The bandaging operation took less than five minutes, and then they were out of the black site and headed for the Skyblade craft. Jeronima estimated that they had perhaps another five minutes before the authorities traced the harbor disaster back to the site and moved in to find a dozen unconscious agents in the corridor. Protocol would usually require Sister Jeronima to erase all hard drives before an evacuation, but Myles Fowl had already accomplished that for her. Myles Fowl had erased all ACRONYM files everywhere, except on his own computer.

  I must catch that niño, she realized. He knows all our secrets.

  ACRONYM was sanctioned by the governments of thirty-seven countries to operate inside their borders, but they were also mandated in twenty-eight of those countries to submit detailed reports for every operation on the books. At last count, Sister Jeronima herself was running seven unreported operations, and across all divisions of ACRONYM there were probably a hundred more, and now Myles Fowl had the details of almost every one, and he could sell those details to any network on the planet.

  And that, thought Jeronima, could be muy inconveniente, because even though ACRONYM was an intergovernmental clandestine agency, they had over the years broken more laws than the rest of the world’s secret services put together.

  In fact, if Myles Fowl were to leak the stolen files, it could spell the end of ACRONYM—and federal prison time for many of its upper echelon. Including Sister Jeronima herself.

  Lord Teddy and the nun made it to the Skyblade, but were unable to take off as the Dutch police arrived faster than anticipated. And so nun and nobleman were forced to sit inside the airplane in silence while the Amsterdam armed-response unit swarmed all over the black site. The time was not completely wasted, though, as Lord Teddy docked his phone with the Skyblade’s media system and brought up a map on the smart windshield. A red dot, which represented the troll’s cellophane-wrap signature, pulsed in the suburbs.

  “You see, madam,” he said, drumming the glass with the same fingers that had held a knife to Jeronima’s throat in the very recent past. “Less than five minutes’ flight time. Our errant band shall be trussed like turkeys before lunch.”

  Jeronima merely nodded.

  She knew who Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye was. Most people with a smartphone would recognize the Duke of Scilly. In fact, ACRONYM had investigated him briefly a few years back, when a junior agent had suggested that Bleedham-Drye might be using some kind of sorcery to stay forever young. Seeing the man now, up close, Sister Jeronima saw that he was not, in fact, young, but neither was he old. His skin was weathered with an odd blotchy sheen to it, which reminded Jeronima of the cured sobrasada sausages that her grandfather used to hang in their cellar. However, there was no denying that his beard was magnificent and virtually impossible to resist, and Jeronima found her hand was reaching out for a stroke.

  The duke caught the movement and said, “I know. Magnificent. Look, but please don’t touch.”

  Jeronima withdrew her fingers, thinking that it was odd that such a high-profile nobleman could conduct a secret life as some kind of vigilante child catcher.

  Perhaps I should recruit him, she thought, but then she remembered the feel of her own knife on her neck and decided to focus on surviving the mission.

  As soon as the swarm of armed police had disappeared inside the building, Teddy nosed the plane out from behind a barge and into the canal. There was some police activity in the canal network, but no one had yet thought to close the locks or even set up barriers, so Teddy was able to navigate easily to the harbor. He took off using the angled plane of the EYE Museum’s roof as a runway, which made him chuckle as the swimmers dove to get out of the Skyblade’s trajectory.

  “We are coming, Myles Fowl,” he said. “You will not escape me again.”

  This sounded rather personal to Sister Jeronima and, in her experience, men with personal agendas made mistakes.

  I will disable this man at the first opportunity, she thought. And then call in reinforcements somehow.

  She felt reasonably confident that Lord Teddy was thinking along the same lines, but she was wrong. Because an Englishman’s word was his bond, Teddy would consider it very bad form to turn on Sister Jeronima without provocation. But he was quietly confident that provocation would be coming his way.

  Jeronima was impressed by the plane and took a mental note of the make and model, which was embossed on the steering wheel along with what she could swear was a line drawing of Lord Teddy himself.

  Myishi Skyblade, she thought. ACRONYM doesn’t have anything so elegante. It is always overkill wi
th our people. Helicopters and fifty-caliber guns. Perhaps I can learn something from this Lord Teddy.

  The first thing she learned was that the Fowl Twins had somehow managed to divest the troll of its radiation-infused coating. Lord Teddy’s tracker found it in the outskirts of Amsterdam, discarded in a quaint windmill that was adjacent to a canal, which made landing quite convenient.

  “Blast it!” he swore. “They have slipped through the net.”

  This was upsetting, yes, but Lord Teddy thrilled to the hunt and was already figuring how he could track this particular quarry.

  He knelt by car tracks leading away from the windmill.

  “They are mobile,” he said, “which means they have access to funding.”

  Sister Jeronima also had some experience with hunting—after all, that was a large part of her occupation. First she hunted, then she interrogated, and then came stage three: the terminal stage.

  “They will want to blend in,” she said. “Except the boy Myles. He is too much of a peacock.”

  “That is true, madam,” said Teddy. “The boy has a distinctive look, and that will be his downfall.”

  They returned to the Skyblade and Lord Teddy pressed the embossed Myishi logo on the steering wheel, which put him straight through to the Myishi 24-Hour Concierge Line.

  A cheerful voice said, “Hi, Lord Bleedham-Drye, this is Douglas on the Myishi Line. Your crime is worth our time. How may I be of assistance?”

  “Good morning to you, my boy,” said the duke. “I am going to give you a list of items, and I want you to check to see if any of them have been ordered online from my approximate location in the past fifteen minutes. Is that at all possible, do you think?”

  “It is absolutely possible, Your Grace,” said Douglas enthusiastically. “And may I say, I am a huge fan and delighted to be of any assistance.”

  “Good fellow, Douglas,” said Lord Teddy. “Shall I continue on and present my list?”

  “Fire away,” said Douglas. “Just to inform you, because this is an online service without any actual physical action required—murder or theft and so forth—your no-claims bonus as a concierge-level customer remains intact and your premium will be unaffected.”