by Eoin Colfer
Holly did. The light winked green, and the cuffs pop-ped open.
“Good. Excellent. Now let me do yours.”
Artemis’s fingers paused over the keyboard. “I don’t read the fairy language or numerals.”
“You do. In fact, you are the only human who does,” said Holly. “You just don’t remember. The pad is standard layout. Zero to nine. Left to right.”
“Nine zero nine,” muttered Artemis, pressing the appropriate keys. Holly’s cuffs popped on the first try, which was fortunate because there would be no time for a second.
The trolls were coming, loping from the temple’s steps with frightening speed and coordination. They used the weight of their shaggy arms to swing forward, while simultaneously straightening muscular legs. This launch method could take them up to twenty feet in a single bound. The animals landed on their knuckles, swinging their legs underneath for the next jump.
It was an almost petrifying sight. A score of crazed carnivores, jostling their way down a shallow sandy incline. The larger males took the easy way down, charging right through the ravine. Adolescents and older males stuck to the slopes, wary of casual bites and scything tusks. The trolls crashed through mannequins and scenery, heading straight for the tent. Ropes of hair swung with every step, and eyes glowed red in the half light. They held their heads back so their highest point was their nose. Noses that were leading them directly to Holly and Artemis. And what was worse, Holly and Artemis could smell the trolls, too.
Holly stuck both pairs of cuffs into her belt. They had charge packs and could be adapted for heat or even weapons, if Holly lived long enough to use them.
“Okay, Mud Boy. Into the water.”
Artemis did not argue or question; there was no time for that. He could only assume that, like many animals, trolls were not water lovers. He ran toward the river, feeling the ground below his feet vibrate with a hundred feet and fists. The howling had started again too, but it had a more reckless tone, mindless and brutal, as if whatever self-control the trolls had was now gone.
Artemis hustled to catch up to Holly. She was ahead of him, lithe and limber, bending low to scoop up one of the fake plastic logs from a campfire. Artemis did the same, tucking it under his arm. They could be in the water for a long time.
Holly dived in, gracefully arcing through the air before entering the water with barely a splash. Artemis stumbled after her. All this running for one’s life was not what he was built for. His brain was big, but his limbs were slight, which was exactly the opposite of what you needed when trolls were at your heels.
The water was lukewarm, yet the mouthful Artemis inadvertently swallowed tasted remarkably sweet. No pollutants, he supposed, with that small portion of his brain that was still thinking rationally. Something tagged his ankle, slicing through sock and flesh. Then he kicked into the river, and he was clear. A trail of hot blood lingered for a moment, before being whipped away by the current.
Holly was treading water in the center of the river. Her auburn hair stood up in slick spikes, and her suit crackled to match the background where the mud had been washed off.
“Are you hurt?” she asked.
Artemis shook his head. No breath for words.
Holly noticed his ankle, which was trailing behind him.
“Blood, and I don’t have a drop of magic left to heal you. That blood is almost as bad as pheromones. We have to get out of here.”
On the bank the trolls were literally hopping mad. They head-butted the earth repeatedly, drumming their fists in complex rhythms.
“Mating ritual,” explained Holly. “I think they like us.”
The current was strong out in the center of the river, and drew the pair quickly downstream. The trolls followed along, some hurling small missiles into the water. One clipped Holly’s plastic log, almost dislodging her.
She spat out a mouthful of water. “We need a plan, Artemis. That’s your department. I got us this far.”
“Oh yes, well done, you,” said Artemis, having apparently recovered his sense of sarcasm. He raked wet strands of hair from his eyes and cast around, beyond the melee on the waterline. The temple was huge, throwing an elongated multipronged shadow across the desert area. The interior was wide open, with no obvious shelter from the trolls. The only deserted spot was the temple roof.
“Can trolls climb?” he spluttered.
Holly followed his gaze. “Yes, if they have to, like big monkeys. But only if they have to.”
Artemis frowned. “If only I could remember,” he said. “If only I knew what I know.”
Holly kicked over to him, grasping his collar. They swirled in the white water, bubbles and froth squeezing between their logs.
“If only is no good, Mud Boy. We need a plan before the filter.”
“The filter?”
“This is an artificial river. It’s filtered through a cen-tral tank.”
A bulb went on in Artemis’s brain. “A central tank. That’s our way out.”
“We’ll be killed! I have no idea how long we’ll be underwater.”
Artemis took one last look around, measuring, calculating. “Given the present circumstances, there is no other option.”
Up ahead, the currents began to circle, pulling in any rubbish picked up from the banks. A small whirlpool formed in the middle of the river. The sight of it seemed to calm the trolls. They gave up on the butting and banging, and settled down to watch. Some moved along the bank; these would later prove to be the clever ones.
“We follow the current,” shouted Artemis over the hiss. “We follow it and hope.”
“That’s it? That’s your brilliant plan?” Holly’s suit crackled as the water wormed its way into the circuits.
“It’s not so much a plan as a lifesaving strategy,” retorted Artemis. He would have said more but the river interrupted him, snatching him away from his elfin companion into the whirlpool.
He felt about as significant as a twig in the face of such power. If he tried to resist the water, it would slap the air from his lungs like a bully slapping his victim. Artemis’s chest was compressed; even when his gasping mouth was above water, he could not force adequate amounts of air into his lungs. His brain was starved of oxygen. He couldn’t think straight. Everything was curved. The swirl of his body, the sweep of the water. White circles on blue ones on green ones. His feet dancing little Möbius strip patterns below his body. Riverdance. Ha-ha.
Holly was before him, pinioning the two logs between them. A makeshift raft. She shouted something, but it was lost. There was only water now. Water and confusion.
She held up three fingers. Three seconds. Then they were going under. Artemis breathed as deeply as his constricted chest would allow. Two fingers now. Then one.
Artemis and Holly let go of their logs and the current sucked them under like spiders down a drain. Artemis fought to hold on to his air, but the buffeting water squeezed it from between his lips. Bubbles spiraled behind them, racing for the surface.
The water was not so deep or dark. But it was fast and would not allow many images to stand still long enough to be identified. Holly’s face flashed past Artemis, but all he could make out were big hazel eyes.
The whirlpool’s funnel grew narrower, forcing Holly and Artemis together. They were swept diagonally down in a flurry of bumping torsos and flapping limbs. They pressed their foreheads together, finding some comfort in each other’s eyes. But it was short lived. Their progress was brutally cut short by a metal grille covering the drainage pipe. They slammed into it, feeling the sharp wire leave indents on their skin.
Holly slapped at the grille, then wormed her fingers through the holes. The grille was shiny and new. Fresh weld marks dotted its rim. This was new and everything else was old. Koboi!
Something nudged Holly’s arm. An aqua-pod. It was anchored to the grille by a plastic tie. Opal’s face filled the small screen sealed inside, and her grin filled most of her face. She was saying something again and agai
n on a short loop. The words were inaudible over the din of sluice and bubble, but the meaning was clear: I beat you again.
Holly grabbed the aqua-pod, ripping it from its tether. The effort threw her from the slipstream into the relatively calm surrounding waters. Her strength was gone, and she had no option but to go where the river led her. Artemis dragged himself from the flat face of the grille, using the last of his oxygen to kick his legs, just twice.
He was free of the whirlpool, floating along after Holly toward a dark mound farther down the river. Air, he thought with keen desperation, I need to breathe. Not soon. Now. If not now, never.
Artemis broke the surface mouth first. His throat was sucking down air before the water cleared. The first breath came back up, laced with fluid, but the second was clear, and the third. Artemis felt the strength flow back into his limbs like mercury in his veins.
Holly was safe. Lying on a dark island in the river. Her chest heaved like a bellows and the aqua-pod lay beneath her splayed fingers.
“Uh-uh,” said Opal Koboi on-screen. “Sooo predictable.” She said it over and over, until Artemis struggled from the shallow water, climbed on the mound, and found the MUTE button.
“I am really starting to dislike her,” he panted. “She may come to regret little touches like the underwater television, because it’s things like this that give me the motivation to get out of here.”
Holly sat up, looking around. They were sitting on a mound of rubbish. Artemis guessed that since Opal had welded the grille across the filter pipe, the current had swept everything that the trolls discarded to this shallow spot. A small island of junk in the river bend. There were disembodied robot heads on the heap, along with battered statues and troll remains. Troll skulls with the thick wedge of forehead bone and rotting pelts.
At least those particular trolls could not eat them. The dangerous trolls that had followed them were working themselves up into a lather again along the banks on both sides. But there was at least twenty feet of six-inch-deep water separating them from the land. They were safe, for the moment.
Artemis felt memories attempting to break through to the surface. He was on the verge of remembering everything, he was certain of it. He sat completely still, willing it to happen. Unconnected images flashed behind his eyes: a mountain of gold, green scaly creatures snorting fireballs, Butler packed in ice. But the images slid from his consciousness like drops of water off a windshield.
Holly sat up. “Anything?”
“Maybe,” said Artemis. “Something. I’m not sure. Everything is happening so fast. I need time to meditate.”
“We’re out of time,” said Holly, climbing to the top of the junk pile. Skulls cracked beneath her feet. “Look.”
Artemis turned toward the left bank. One of the trolls had picked up a large rock and raised it over his head. Artemis tried to make himself small. If that rock hit, they would both be gravely injured, at the very least.
The troll grunted like a tennis pro serving, spinning the rock into the river. It barely missed the pile, landing with a huge splash in the shallow waters.
“A poor shot,” said Holly.
Artemis frowned. “I doubt it.”
A second troll grabbed a missile, and a third. Soon all the brutes were hurling rocks, robot parts, sticks, or whatever they could get their hands on toward the rubbish heap. Not one hit the shivering pair huddled on the pile.
“They keep missing,” said Holly. “Every one of them.”
Artemis’s bones ached from cold, fear, and sustained tension.
“They’re not trying to hit us,” he said. “They’re building a bridge.”
Tara, Ireland; Dawn
The fairy shuttleport in Tara was the biggest in Europe. More than eight thousand tourists a year passed through its X-ray arches. Thirty thousand cubic feet of terminal concealed beneath an overgrown hillock in the middle of the McGraney farm. It was a marvel of subterranean architecture.
Mulch Diggums, fugitive kleptomaniac dwarf, was pretty marvelous himself, in the subterranean area. Butler drove the Fowl Bentley north from the manor, and on Mulch’s instructions, slowed the luxury car down five hundred yards from the shuttleport’s camouflaged entrance. This allowed Mulch to dive from the rear door straight into the earth. He quickly submerged below a layer of rich Irish soil. The best in the world.
Mulch knew the shuttleport layout well. He had once broken his cousin Nord out of police custody here, when the LEP had arrested him on industrial pollution charges. A vein of clay ran right up to the shuttleport wall, and if you knew where to look, there was a sheet of metal casing that had been worn thin by years of Irish damp. But on this particular occasion, Mulch was not interested in evading the LEP; quite the opposite.
Mulch surfaced inside the holographic bush that hid the shuttleport’s service entrance. He climbed from his tunnel, shook the clay from his behind, got all the tunnel wind out of his system a bit more noisily than was absolutely necessary, and waited.
Five seconds later, the entrance hatch slid across, and four grabbing hands reached out, yanking Mulch into the shuttleport’s interior. Mulch did not resist, allowing himself to be bundled along a dark corridor and into an interview room. He was plonked onto an uncomfortable chair and left on his own to stew.
Mulch did not have time to stew. Every second he spent sitting here picking the insects from his beard hair was another second that Artemis and Holly had to spend running from trolls.
The dwarf rose from the chair and slapped his palms against the two-way mirror inset in the interview room wall.
“Chix Verbil,” he shouted. “I know you’re watching me. We need to talk. It’s about Holly Short.”
Mulch kept right on banging on the glass, until the cell door swung open and Chix Verbil entered the room. Chix was the LEP’s fairy on the surface. Chix had been the first LEP casualty in the B’wa Kell goblin revolution a year previously, and had it not been for Holly Short, he would have been its first fatality. As it turned out, he got a medal from the Committee, a series of high-profile interviews on network television, and a cushy surface job in E1.
Chix entered suspiciously, his sprite wings folded behind him. The strap was off his Neutrino holster.
“Mulch Diggums, isn’t it? Are you surrendering?”
Mulch snorted. “What do you think? I go to all the trouble of breaking out, just to surrender to a sprite. I think not, lamebrain.”
Chix bristled, his wings fanning out behind him. “Hey, listen, dwarf. You’re in no position to be making cracks. You’re in my custody, in case you hadn’t noticed. There are six security fairies surrounding this room.”
“Security fairies. Don’t make me laugh. They couldn’t secure an apple in an orchard. I escaped from a sub-shuttle under a couple of miles of water. I can see at least six ways out of here without breaking a sweat.”
Chix hovered nervously. “I’d like to see you try. I’d have two charges in your behind before you could unhinge that jaw of yours.”
Mulch winced. Dwarfs don’t like behind jokes.
“Okay, easy there, Mister Gung Ho. Let’s talk about your wing. How’s it healing up?”
“How do you know about that?”
“It was big news. You were all over the TV for a while, even on pirate satellite. I was watching your ugly face in Chicago not so long ago.”
Chix preened. “Chicago?”
“That’s right. You were saying, if I remember properly, how Holly Short saved your life, and how sprites never forget a debt, and whenever she needed you, you were there, whatever it took.”
Chix coughed nervously. “A lot of that was scripted. And anyway, that was before…”
“Before one of the most decorated officers in the LEP decided to suddenly go crazy and shoot her own commander?”
“Yes. Before that.”
Mulch looked Verbil straight in his green face. “You don’t believe that, do you?”
Chix hovered even higher for a lo
ng moment, his wings whipping the air into currents. Then he settled back down to earth and sat in the room’s second chair. “No. I don’t believe it. Not for a second. Julius Root was like a father to Holly. To all of us.” He covered his face with his hands, afraid to hear the answer to his next question. “So, Diggums. Why are you here?”
Mulch leaned in close. “Is this being recorded?”
“Of course. Standard operating procedure.”
“Can you switch off the mike?”
“I suppose. Why should I?”
“Because I’m going to tell you something important for the People’s survival. But I’ll only tell you if the mikes are off.”
Chix’s wings began to flap once more. “This better be really good. I better really like this, dwarf.”
Mulch shrugged. “Oh, you’re not going to like it. But it is really good.”
Chix’s green fingers tapped a code into a keyboard on the table. “Okay, Diggums. We can talk freely.”
Mulch leaned forward across the desk. “The thing is, Opal Koboi is back.”
Chix did not respond verbally, but the color drained from his face. Instead of its usual robust emerald, the sprite’s complexion was now pasty lime green.
“Opal has escaped, somehow, and she has set this big revenge thing in motion. First General Scalene, then Commander Root, and now Holly and Artemis Fowl.”
“O-Opal?” stammered Chix, his wounded wing suddenly throbbing.
“She’s taking out anyone who had a hand in her imprisonment. Which, if memory serves, includes you.”
“I didn’t do anything,” squeaked Verbil, as though protesting his innocence to Mulch could help him.
Mulch sat back. “Hey, there’s no point telling me. I’m not out to get you. If I remember correctly, you were on all the chat shows spouting how you personally were the first member of the LEP to come into contact with the goblin smugglers.”
“Maybe she didn’t see that,” said Chix hopefully. “She was in a coma.”
“I’m sure someone taped it for her.”
Verbil thought about it, absently grooming his wings. “So what do you want from me?”
