The Time Paradox (Disney)

by Eoin Colfer

  Complete honesty, he thought.

  Artemis Fowl shuddered.

  Some hours later, the master bedroom had been transformed by the whirlwind known as Beckett Fowl. There were pizza boxes on the night table and tomato-sauce finger paintings on the wall. Beckett had stripped off his own clothes and dressed himself in one of his father’s T-shirts, which he had belted around his waist. He had applied a mascara mustache and lipstick scars to his face and was currently fencing with an invisible enemy, using one of his father’s old prosthetic legs as a sword.

  Artemis was finishing his explanation of Angeline’s miraculous recovery. “And so I realized that Mother had somehow contracted Glover’s Fever, which is usually confined to Madagascar, so I synthesized the natural cure preferred by the locals and administered it. Relief was immediate.”

  Beckett noticed that Artemis had stopped talking, and heaved a dramatic sigh of relief. He rode an imaginary horse across the room and poked Myles with the prosthetic leg.

  “Good story?” he asked his twin.

  Myles climbed down from the bed and placed his mouth beside Beckett’s ear.

  “Artemis simple-toon,” he confided.

  EPILOGUE

  Hook Head

  Commander Trouble Kelp himself led the Retrieval team to dig Opal Koboi out of the rubble. They inflated a distortion bubble over the work zone, so they could fire up the shuttle’s lasers without fear of discovery.

  “Hurry up, Furty,” Trouble called over an open channel. “We have one hour until sunrise. Let’s get that megalomaniacal pixie out of there and back into her own time.”

  They were lucky to have a dwarf on the team. Normally dwarfs were extremely reluctant to work with the authorities, but this one had agreed so long as he didn’t have to work any of the hundred-and-ninety-odd dwarf holy days, and if the LEP paid his exorbitant consultant fees.

  In a situation like this one, dwarfs were invaluable. They could work rubble like no other species. If you needed to dig something out alive, then dwarfs were the ones to do it. All they needed to do was let their beard hairs play over a surface, and they could tell you more about what was going on under that surface than any amount of seismic or geological equipment.

  Currently, Trouble was monitoring Furty Pullchain’s progress through the kraken debris on the feed from his helmet cam. The dwarf’s limbs were a shade paler than usual in the night-vision filter. One hand directed a nozzle of support foam that coated the tunnel wall at stress points, and the other reached in under his beard to rehinge his jaw.

  “Okay, Commander,” he said, managing to make the rank sound like an insult. “I made it to the spot. It’s a miracle I’m alive. This thing is as steady as a house of cards in a hurricane.”

  “Yeah, whatever, Furty. You’re a marvel. Now, pull her out and let’s get belowground. I have a captain I need to discipline.”

  “Keep yer acorns on, Commander. I’m readin’ the beacon loud and clear.”

  Trouble fumed silently. Maybe Holly Short was not the only one who would have to be disciplined.

  He followed the live feed, watching Furty scoop aside the rock, weed, and shell fragments covering Holly’s suit. Except there was no suit. Just a helmet with its flashing tracer beacon.

  “I come all this way for a helmet?” said Furty, aggrieved. “Ain’t no pixie here, just the smell of one.”

  Trouble sat up straight. “Are you sure? Could you be in the wrong spot?”

  Furty snorted. “Yep. I’m at the other buried LEP helmet. ’Course I’m sure.”

  She was gone. Opal had disappeared.

  “Impossible. How could she escape?”

  “Beats me,” said Furty. “Maybe she squeezed through a natural tunnel. Them pixies are slippery little creatures. I remember one time when I was a sprog. Me and Kherb, my cousin, broke into a—”

  Trouble cut him off. This was serious. Opal Koboi was loose in the world. He put a video call in to Foaly at Police Plaza.

  “Don’t tell me,” said the centaur, running a hand down his long face.

  “She’s gone. She left the helmet so the beacon would draw us in. Any vitals from her suit?”

  Foaly checked his monitor. “Nothing. It was loud and clear until five minutes ago. I thought it was a suit mal-function.”

  Trouble took a breath. “Put out an alert. Priority one. I want the guards tripled on our Koboi in Atlantis. It would be just like Opal to bust herself out.”

  Foaly got to it. One Opal Koboi had almost managed to take over the world. Two would probably shoot for the entire galaxy.

  “And call Holly,” continued Commander Kelp. “Inform the captain that her weekend leave is canceled.”

  Fowl Manor, Almost Eight Years Ago

  Artemis Fowl awoke in his own bed, and for a moment red sparks danced before his eyes. They sparkled and twinkled hypnotically before chasing their own tails out of existence.

  Red sparks, he thought. Unusual. I have seen stars before, but never sparks.

  The ten-year-old boy stretched, grabbing handfuls of his own duvet. For some reason he felt more content than usual.

  I feel safe and happy.

  Artemis sat bolt upright.

  Happy? I feel happy?

  He couldn’t remember feeling truly happy since his father had disappeared, but on this morning his mood was bordering on cheerful.

  Perhaps it was the deal with the Extinctionists. My first major chunk of profit.

  No. That wasn’t it. That particular transaction had left Artemis feeling sick to the pit of his stomach. So much so that he couldn’t think about it and would probably never dwell on the past few days again.

  So what could account for this feeling of optimism? Something from the dream he’d been having. A plan. A new scheme that would bring enough profit to fund a hundred Arctic expeditions.

  That was it. The dream. What had it been about?

  It was just out of reach. The images already fading.

  A crafty smile twitched at the corner of his mouth.

  Fairies. Something about fairies.

  DON’T MISS THE NEXT

  THRILLING ADVENTURE IN

  THE ARTEMIS FOWL SERIES:

  THE ATLANTIS COMPLEX

  CHAPTER 1

  COLD VIBES

  Vatnajökull, Iceland

  Vatnajökull is the biggest glacier in Europe, with an area of more than five thousand stark blue-white miles. It is, for the most part, uninhabited and desolate and, for scientific reasons, the perfect place for Artemis Fowl to demonstrate to the Fairy People how exactly he planned to save the world. Also, a little dramatic scenery never hurts a presentation.

  One part of Vatnajökull that does see human traffic is the Great Skua restaurant on the shores of the glacier lagoon, which caters to groups of ice tourists from May to August. Artemis had arranged to meet the proprietor at this closed for the season establishment very early on the morning of September first. His fifteenth birthday.

  Artemis steered his rented snowmobile along the lagoon’s rippling coastline, where the glacier sloped into a black pool dotted with a crazy-paving pattern of broken ice plates. The wind roared around his head like an excited crowd in a stadium, carrying with it arrowheads of sleet that peppered his nose and mouth. The space was vast and unforgiving, and Artemis knew that to be injured alone on this tundra would lead to a quick and painful death—or at the very least abject humiliation before the popping flashes of the tourist season’s tail end, which was slightly less painful than a painful death, but lasted longer.

  The Great Skua’s owner—a burly Icelander in proud possession of both a walrus mustache with the wingspan of a fair-sized cormorant and the unlikely name of Adam Adamsson—stood in the restaurant’s porch, popping his fingers and stamping his feet to an imaginary rhythm and also finding the time to chuckle at Artemis’s erratic progress along the lagoon’s frozen shore.

  “That was a mighty display,” said Adamsson when Artemis finally managed to ram the s
nowmobile into the restaurant’s decking. “Hell, harður maður. I haven’t laughed that hard since my dog tried to eat his reflection.”

  Artemis smiled dourly, aware that the restaurateur was poking fun at his driving skills, or lack thereof. “Hmmph,” he grunted, dismounting the Ski-Doo as stiffly as a cowboy after three days on a cattle drive, whose horse had died, forcing him to ride the broadest cow in the herd.

  The old man actually cackled. “Now you even sound like my dog.”

  It was not Artemis Fowl’s habit to make undignified entrances, but without his bodyguard Butler on hand, he had been forced to rely on his own motor skills, which were famously unsophisticated. One of the sixth-year wits at St. Bartleby’s School, the heir to a hotel fortune, had nicknamed Artemis Left Foot Fowl, as in he had two left feet and couldn’t kick a soccer ball with either of them. Artemis had tolerated this ribbing for about a week and then bought out the young heir’s hotel chain. This choked the teasing off abruptly.

  “Everything is ready, I trust?” said Artemis, flexing fingers inside his patented Sola-Gloves. He noticed that one hand was uncomfortably warm; the thermostat must have taken a knock when he’d clipped an ice obelisk half a mile down the coast. He tugged out the power wire with his teeth; there was not much danger of hypothermia, as the autumn temperature hovered just below zero.

  “And hello to you,” said Adamsson. “Nice to finally meet you face-to-face, if not eye to eye.”

  Artemis did not rise to the forge-a-relationship lure that Adamsson had tossed out. He did not have room in his life at the moment for yet another friend that he didn’t trust.

  “I do not intend to ask you for your daughter’s hand in marriage, Mr. Adamsson, so I think we can skip over any icebreakers you may feel obliged to offer. Is everything ready?”

  Adam Adamsson’s pre-prepared icebreakers melted in his throat, and he nodded half a dozen times.

  “All ready. Your crate is around the back. I have supplied a vegetarian buffet and goody bags from the Blue Lagoon Spa. A few seats have been laid out too, as bluntly requested in your terse e-mail. None of your party turned up, though—nobody but you—after all my labors.”

  Artemis lifted an aluminium briefcase from the Ski-Doo’s luggage box. “Don’t you worry about that, Mr. Adamsson. Why don’t you head back to Reykjavík and spend some of that extortionate fee you charged me for a couple of hours’ usage of your frankly third-rate restaurant and perhaps find a friendless tree stump to listen to your woes?”

  A couple of hours. Third-rate. Two plus three equals five. Good.

  Now it was Adamsson’s turn to grunt, and the tips of his walrus mustache quivered slightly.

  “No need for the attitude, young Fowl. We are both men, are we not? Men are entitled to a little respect.”

  “Oh, really? Perhaps we should ask the whales? Or perhaps the mink?”

  Adamsson scowled, his windburned face creasing like a prune. “Okay, okay. I get the message. No need to hold me responsible for the crimes of man. You teenagers are all the same. Let’s see if your generation does any better with the planet.”

  Artemis clicked the briefcase’s lock snap precisely twenty times before striding into the restaurant.

  “Believe me, we teenagers are not all the same,” he said as he passed Adamsson. “And I intend to do quite a bit better.”

  There were more than a dozen tables inside the restaurant, all with chairs stacked on top, except for one, which had been dressed with a linen cloth and laden with bottled glacier water and spa bags for each of the five places.

  Five, thought Artemis. A good number. Solid. Predictable. Four fives are twenty.

  Artemis had decided lately that five was his number. Good things happened when five was in the mix. The logician in him knew that this was ridiculous, but he couldn’t ignore the fact that the tragedies in his life had occurred in years not divisible by five: his father had disappeared and been mutilated, his old friend Commander Julius Root of the LEP had been murdered by the notorious pixie Opal Koboi, both in years with no five. He was five feet five inches tall and weighed fifty-five kilos. If he touched something five times or a multiple of that, then that thing stayed reliable. A door would remain closed, for example, or a keepsake would protect that doorway, as it was supposed to.

  Today the signs were good. He was fifteen years old. Three times five. And his hotel room in Reykjavík had been number forty-five. Even the Ski-Doo that had got him this far unscathed had a registration that was a multiple of five, and boasted a fifty-cc engine to boot. All good. There were only four guests coming to the meeting, but including him that made five. So no need to panic.

  A part of Artemis was horrified by his newfound superstition about numbers.

  Get a grip on yourself. You are a Fowl. We do not rely on luck—abandon these ridiculous obsessions and compulsions.

  Artemis clicked the case’s latch to appease the number gods—twenty times, four fives—and felt his heart slow down.

  I will break my habits tomorrow, when this job is done.

  He loitered at the maître d’s podium until Adamsson and his snow tractor had disappeared over a curved ridge of snow that could have been a whale’s spine, then waited a further minute until the vehicle’s rumbling had faded to an old smoker’s cough.

  Very well. Time to do some business.

  Artemis descended the five wooden steps to the main restaurant floor (excellent, good omen), threading a series of columns hung with replicas of the Stóra-Borg mask until he arrived at the head of the laid table. The seats were angled to face him, and a slight shimmer, like a heat haze, flickered over the tabletop.

  “Good morning, friends,” said Artemis in Gnommish, forcing himself to pronounce the fairy words in confident, almost jovial, tones. “Today’s the day we save the world.”

  The heat haze seemed more electrical now with crackles of neon-white interference running through it, and faces swimming in its depths like ghosts from a dream. The faces solidified and grew torsos and limbs. Small figures, like children, appeared. Like children, but not the same. These were representatives of the Fairy People, and among them perhaps the only friends Artemis had.

  “Save the world?” said Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon. “Same old Artemis Fowl, and I say that sarcastically, as saving the world is not like you at all.”

  Artemis knew he should smile, but he could not, so instead he found fault, something that would not seem out of character.

  “You need a new shield amplifier, Foaly,” he said to a centaur who was balanced awkwardly on a chair designed for humans. “I could see the shimmer from the front porch. Call yourself a technical expert? How old is the one you’re using?”

  Foaly stamped a hoof, which was an irritated tic of his and the reason he never won at cards. “Nice to see you too, Mud Boy.”

  “How old?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe four years.”

  “Four. There, you see. What sort of number is that?”

  Foaly stuck out his bottom lip. “What sort of number? There are types now, Artemis? That amplifier is good for another hundred years. Maybe it could do with a little tuning, but that’s all.”

  Holly stood and walked lightly to the head of the table.

  “Do you two have to start with the sparring right away? Isn’t that getting a little clichéd after all these years? You’re like a couple of mutts marking territory.” She laid two slim fingers on Artemis’s forearm. “Lay off him, Artemis. You know how sensitive centaurs are.”

  Artemis could not meet her eyes. Inside his left snow boot, he counted off twenty toe-taps.

  “Very well. Let’s change the subject.”

  “Please do,” said the third fairy in the room. “We’ve come across from Russia for this, Fowl. So if the subject could be changed to what we came here to discuss…”

  Commander Raine Vinyáya was obviously not happy being so far from her beloved Police Plaza. She had assumed command of LEPgeneral some years p
reviously and prided herself on keeping a finger in every ongoing mission. “I have operations to get back to, Artemis. The pixies are rioting, calling for Opal Koboi’s release from prison, and the swear toad epidemic has flared up again. Please do us the courtesy of getting on with it.”

  Artemis nodded. Vinyáya was being openly antagonistic, and that was an emotion that could be trusted, unless of course it was a bluff and the commander was a secret fan of his, unless it was a double bluff and she really did feel antagonistic.

  That sounds insane, Artemis realized. Even to me.

  Though she was barely forty inches tall, Commander Vinyáya was a formidable presence and someone that Artemis never intended to underestimate. While the commander was almost four centuries old in fairy years, she was barely middle-aged, and in any terms she was a striking figure: lean and sallow, with the reactive feline pupils occasionally found in elfin eyes, but even that rarity was not her most distinctive physical characteristic. Raine Vinyáya had a mane of silver hair that seemed to trap any available light and send it rippling along her shoulders.

  Artemis cleared his throat and switched his focus from numbers to the project, or, as he liked to think of it, THE PROJECT. In the end, when it came down to it, this was the only plan that mattered.

  Holly punched his shoulder gently.

  “You look pale. Even paler than usual. You okay, birthday boy?”

  Artemis finally succeeded in meeting her eyes—one hazel, one blue—framed by a wide brow and a slash of auburn fringe, which Holly had grown out from her usual crew cut.

  “Fifteen years old today,” muttered Artemis. “Three fives. That’s a good thing.”

  Holly blinked.

  Artemis Fowl muttering? And no mention of her new hairstyle—

  usually Artemis picked up on physical changes straight away.

  “I…ah…I suppose so. Where’s Butler? Scouting the perimeter?”

  “No. No, I sent him away. Juliet needed him.”

  “Nothing too serious?”

  “Not serious but necessary. Family business. He trusts you to look after me.”