The Fowl Twins Deny All Charges

by Eoin Colfer

  The question needed to be modified.

  What would Beckett do if marshaling rats were not an option?

  Beckett would use whatever was on hand to cobble together an outrageous save-the-day solution.

  So, what is at hand?

  Earthmovers, dwarves safe in their indestructible blue tunnel pod, not to mention glowing hands. And perhaps less than a minute to combine these elements.

  Lazuli got to her feet.

  Think big, she told herself. Think Beckett. Be Beckett.

  Just as a really bad idea was forming in Lazuli’s head, her five minutes ran out. Some floors overhead, Gundred pressed the red button, sending the detonation signal to the first spit bomb in the chain. The first column blew, and Lazuli knew that a bad idea would have to suffice. So, like a runner from the blocks, she was off sprinting across the chamber, leaving scorch marks wherever her magic-infused knuckles made contact with the earth.

  Dwarves pride themselves on the discretion of their demolition skills. The point being, if no one knew a dwarf had demolished a building, then they would never guess a dwarf had ever even been in the vicinity. In the case of the convention center, they had planted spit bombs deep in the heart of each cable cluster, all linked by a wireless signal networked to organic chips. Myles had guessed that the Reclaimers would remain on sentry duty until the last minute, but for once Myles had been wrong—the dwarves intended to stay on-site until after the job was done, safe inside their blue pod, and then pack up and chew their way out.

  Lazuli ran, dust rasping in her throat, the explosion shock wave knocking her a few degrees off course, but she tucked her chin and persevered, ignoring the ringing in her ears and the swirling clouds of debris that were obscuring her vision. She could make out the bulk of the massive excavator maybe twenty feet away.

  The dwarf. Don’t think about the dwarf.

  The dwarf entangled in the pilings of the pillar who had been squashed by the chomp of a concrete mouth.

  The dwarf you put in that position.

  Don’t think about it.

  On she ran while the pillars were truncated neatly by shaped and focused charges. It was almost surgical. The entire structure would not collapse until the central support came down.

  That support cannot come down.

  Lazuli reached the giant yellow excavator, hauled herself onto the top of its caterpillar tracks, and from there leaped into the cab, which, of course, had been built for a full-sized human and not a small blue pixel.

  Though the color of her skin was not important right now. What was slightly more pertinent was the fact she was without an ignition key.

  “But I have magic hands!” Lazuli shouted at the machine. “Magic hands, do you hear me?”

  And she wrapped the fingers of those magic hands around the wire cluster below the dash and sent whatever residue lingered in there scurrying into the belly of the engine. She could not contain a hysterical laugh as she thought, Are magic and electricity even compatible?

  The excavator roared into enthusiastic life, confirming that combustion engines could indeed run on magic.

  All I have to do now is find the drive gear.

  Outside the cab, two more columns collapsed, one with a little less finesse than its comrades, spraying steel spears across the space, one thunking into the seat over Lazuli’s head. The basement’s ceiling of rock and concrete sagged dangerously with an operatic shriek. The section of the floor that had already been slabbed with concrete cracked as though struck by the hammer of Thor, and a jagged wave spread across it.

  “D’Arvit!” Lazuli shouted and immediately regretted the expletive, as dust coated her throat.

  After a brief spell of hawking up dust and blood, Lazuli saw through a miraculously clear square inch of windscreen that both Reclaimers were enjoying the spectacle.

  Lazuli got very angry very fast.

  Those worms are cheering!

  Perhaps she could change their tune.

  Lazuli dragged a gear lever the size of her torso into drive, checked that the excavator was pointing roughly the right way, and then climbed under the seat and jammed both feet on the accelerator.

  One in a million chance of this working, she thought. One in a billion.

  The excavator jolted forward, made a little jumpy by magic, its gigantic shovel gouging troughs in the mud.

  Lazuli realized what was happening.

  I should have raised the shovel, she thought.

  But she needn’t have worried. Magic trumped friction, and the vehicle lurched forward. The Reclaimers stopped high-fiving each other pretty quick when they saw what was bearing down on them.

  It would have been nice if Lazuli could have seen their faces, but she was wedged in the excavator’s footwell, keeping her boots pressed down on the accelerator.

  One of the Reclaimers turned to his comrade, his hands held up in a pacifying manner, and he may have said something along the lines of It’s fine, buddy. This pod is indestructible. A mountain could fall on us, and we’d be okay.

  But this guy didn’t know Specialist Heitz. She wasn’t trying to destroy anything—she was trying to preserve something. In this case, the building and everyone in it.

  The excavator’s shovel scooped up the indestructible tunnel pod at the exact time the last charge blew. A wedge of concrete and steel vaporized, leaving a grinning hole. Heitz promptly—and conveniently—filled that void by tossing in the pod, leaving the two dwarves inside to wonder what exactly had just happened. The immediate result of all this unlikely activity was that, though the building sagged quite alarmingly, it did not collapse.

  And there we have the bones of the ACRONYM Convergence. But there was even more to come….

  The Convention Center’s Central Elevator Shafts

  The occupants of the Convention Centre Dublin were experiencing quite drastic mood swings. The ACRONYM agents trapped in the locked multidirectional elevators had gone from irritated to terrified. The agents who had until recently been determined to save their comrades had abandoned that effort entirely and fled the building. And the Horteknut leader was wondering why the entire structure had not collapsed into the dust.

  Beckett Fowl was atypically still, crouching in the corner of the elevator, teeth chattering as though the boy were stuck in a loop. And as for Myles Fowl, he was alive when he’d fully expected to be deceased, which made him happy, but he was also puzzled as to how exactly the building remained relatively intact when detonation had obviously taken place. So, on the whole, and given Myles’s nature, it would be safe to assume that he was slightly more annoyed to be puzzled than happy to be alive.

  “NANNI,” he said to his smart glasses, “scan the basement area for humanoid life-forms.”

  “Umm,” said NANNI, “I see three.”

  Three? thought Myles, letting the umm go for now. There should be four.

  There were many explanations for the missing heartbeat, including spontaneous molecular relocation, but the most likely reason was that someone was dead.

  Someone like his pixel friend Specialist Heitz, perhaps.

  He had a thought. “NANNI, what are the groupings?”

  “Two and one,” replied the eyeglasses promptly.

  “Good,” said Myles. And then to the chattering Beckett: “Best-case scenario, Specialist Heitz is alive.”

  He took a quick look down at the floor, which had sagged and cracked drastically around the sides but not in the middle, leading him to conclude that the central column was the sole intact support. “That is, until the building collapses,” he added, for it was obvious to Myles, a student of architecture and anarchitecture (the architecture of anarchy), that the convention center was destined to crumple in the very near future. Myles was put in mind of a beleaguered circus tent with only its central pole to hold the canvas aloft.

  “How are we on the building’s systems, NANNI?”

  “We still have half the elevators and thirty percent of the shafts, including t
he top two floors and some communications,” said the smart glasses. “And the main power is out, so the center is running on backup systems. Should I open as many elevators as I can?”

  Myles considered this. Opening the elevators would certainly be the humane thing to do in the short term, but if Gveld had one more trick up the sleeve of her Sharkgirl suit, then that humaneness would be short-lived, as would the humans who embodied it.

  “Not just yet, NANNI,” he said. “Let’s keep those horrid ACRONYM agents where they might be able to do some good for a change.”

  Myles thought he might as well try to intimidate the Horteknuts one car over. Perhaps they would simply surrender now, though he doubted it.

  “Do you see what happens when you go against the Fowl Twins?” he shouted into the handset, which, amazingly, was still operational. “When will people learn?”

  Gveld and Gundred had been tossed about somewhat by the shuddering foundations, but they were sturdy warriors and soon in command of their rattled marbles. Gveld climbed Gundred’s frame to get to a standing position, glowering all the way up.

  “Human!” Gveld said accusingly to her, as though being involuntarily born into that particular species was in itself a crime.

  “I pressed your button!” said Gundred. “I proved myself.”

  Gveld added another accusation to the mix: “Liar!”

  Gundred pinned Gveld to the side of the elevator with her forearm. “Once, perhaps. But I am a dwarf in my heart.”

  “Words,” said Gveld. “You infiltrated my group to spy on us. You are a liar.”

  “As are you!” said Gundred. “There is something you are not telling me!”

  Myles grew weary of both the bickering and the fact that he was not the center of attention. “If I may interject,” he said, “you are both, in point of fact, liars. And if I might elaborate on that: Gundred is in reality a human little person who grew to identify with her undercover role—her legend, if you will. And Gveld is lying through omission. That omission being that she intends to kill many more humans than are in this building.”

  “What’s the Fowl boy talking about?” Gundred asked, pressing Gveld harder into the wall.

  Gveld barked a laugh. “Why do you need to know? So you can report back to ACRONYM?”

  In Myles’s opinion, Gveld was dodging the question, so he felt he had no choice but to answer it himself.

  “If this building collapses into the river, it will bring half the docklands with it, including the toll bridge, and the theater, which I believe is hosting an eclipse viewing on their IMAX screen. Thousands will die, including the teens I mobilized, and I cannot allow that to happen.”

  Gundred was visibly shocked. “Is the Mud Boy right?”

  “Mud Boy?” said Gveld. “You are a Mud Person. The one I trusted. The one I loved most dearly is everything I despise.”

  These words lashed Gundred and she relaxed her hold. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t remember who I am, but I would never harm you or the band. Believe me, I’ve had my chances.”

  “And perhaps you took them,” retorted Gveld. “Perhaps you are the reason we lost so many soldiers.”

  “No!” said Gundred. “You are the reason. You lost your way. You are cruel, and this plan was reckless. You involved humans in it.”

  “Apparently that is a weakness of mine.”

  Myles had a theory about Gveld’s recklessness, but he thought he might resist sharing for once so the dwarves could talk themselves out of time. Already a scintilla of sun was poking itself around the full moon’s curve, the light creeping across the river like a slow bleed of yellow watercolor.

  Keep talking, thought Myles. Your time is almost up.

  But then, somewhat belatedly, due perhaps to the drastic nature of the subsidence, the ACRONYM treasure was shunted into a compartment above the dwarf section of the elevator, announcing its arrival with a loud thunk and the illumination of a green roof light.

  Gveld moaned, reaching toward the treasure. “It is so close. So very close.”

  Gundred grasped her leader’s shoulders tightly. “Gveld. This day is not lost. There is a way.”

  Gveld opened her gold teeth just wide enough to spit out an insult, then reconsidered. What if there was still a way? After all, she had nothing to lose and immortality to gain.

  Gveld nodded once. Tell me, the nod said.

  Very well, thought Myles, who had, of course, already considered how the building might be utterly collapsed if a person had control of the elevators. We’re about to play a game and I am excellent at games. Just ask the Komodo 13 chess computer.

  While the Horteknuts huddled, whispering their plans, Myles had NANNI bring up the elevator schematics on his lenses and also set up some shortcuts so he could move things with finger gestures.

  To onlookers it will seem as though I am using psychokinesis, thought the Fowl twin. And I most probably will have mastered that skill by the time I’m fifteen.

  In this, Myles was being optimistic. He would, in fact, be seventeen before he managed to move an object with his mind. (That object being a large rock, about which he would comment with uncharacteristic levity: It was not as heavy as Artemis’s ego.)

  But back to the present.

  Myles glanced over at Beckett, who remained huddled in the corner. “You would enjoy the game that I am reasonably certain is about to take place,” he said to his catatonic brother. “There promises to be plenty of action and perhaps an explosion or two should I lose, which is, frankly, unlikely.”

  Beckett did not react. But then again, Myles had not expected him to.

  Traditionally with games of this type—chess, checkers, tic-tac-toe, and so on—players offer each other a courteous handshake or, at the very least, some verbal salutation before the game begins. But in this case a handshake was neither likely nor possible. Gveld simply turned to face her opponent and hissed the following sentence:

  “You humans will all die!”

  Which impressed Myles, because it is difficult to hiss a sentence containing so few sibilants. It was not, in any form, a salutation, but Myles took it to mean the game was afoot.

  “After you, General Horteknut,” he said gallantly.

  If Gveld was surprised that Myles had perhaps anticipated her new plan, she did not show it; she simply swiped the surface of her communicator. This might not seem like the first move in a deadly game where the consequences were multiple deaths, boxes of broken bone, the echoes of screams, and mingling of the worst body odors, but it was. Deep in the innards of the convention center, one of the elevators under Gveld’s control sped laterally to the extremity of its rails. The center’s magnetic elevators were smaller than the traditional models, but still the weight shift was considerable, since the car was carrying a burden of two thousand pounds of humanity. The elevator thunked into its new position and the building, already on tenterhooks stability-wise, actually shuddered, plaster falling from the walls and a door fluttering down from on high like an autumn leaf.

  “Ha!” said Gveld.

  “Oh, please,” said Myles, and he flicked his index finger, sending one of the elevator cars he controlled careening southward to restore balance to the center.

  “He knows!” said Gundred. “The Fowl boy knows what you’re doing.”

  Gveld was not speaking to Gundred unless she had to; she simply repositioned herself so that Myles could not possibly peek at her screen. Then she made her second move, which was to send two elevator cars to the northern wall, piling over four thousand pounds of weight onto that face of the building and causing an alarming yaw. Girders sang like fiddles, and three seagulls flapped through one of the myriad wall cracks like low-rent movie doves. Gas flooding through a broken main in the basement level caught fire, transforming the fractured floor into something resembling the gaping mouth of an active volcano.

  Myles was a little disappointed. “In most games of this nature,” he commented, “a double move would be counted
as illegal and you, Ms. Horteknut, would forfeit a turn. But I suppose this is not most games.”

  Myles’s counter was to swivel one finger, which put a single fully loaded elevator car through an L-shaped ride to the top floor overlooking the river, nicely offsetting Gveld’s illegal play and causing the building to right itself.

  “I could do this all day,” he said. “But your window of opportunity has already closed. The sun has returned, and the authorities are on their way.”

  Myles knew it was rash to taunt Gveld Horteknut, a homicidal criminal at the end of her rope, but there was a chance that enraging the dwarf would break her concentration. He also knew that he could not, in fact, do this all day as he had boasted. Half a dozen more moves in this oversized checkers/tic-tac-toe hybrid game and the convention center would shake itself to smithereens. And the people in the elevator cars, whom Myles himself had opted to leave inside, would not survive the devastation.

  I need to end this, Myles thought. Perhaps the oldest trick on the chessboard is in order.

  Now, as all chess players know, the oldest trick on the chessboard would be the sacrifice of a pawn, but what pawn could Myles Fowl have in mind? Surely not his own twin.

  In spite of Myles’s warning regarding windows and their closing, Gveld unsurprisingly opted to play on, confirming this choice by spitting a challenge over her shoulder: “To the death, Mud Boy!”

  To which Myles retorted, “Quite the opposite, General Horteknut. To the life, as it were.”

  “We shall see,” said Gveld, and then she spoke to her Number Two, because there was no other choice. “The Mud Boy broke into the building’s systems. You break into his. Show me you are a dwarf in your heart. Take control of his elevators.”

  So, I fight on two fronts, thought Myles. I’m surprised they didn’t think of this sooner.

  There followed a frankly mindboggling series of maneuvers, all caught on camera by both bystanders and broadcast media, where it almost seemed as though the convention center itself was coming alive and seeking to throw off the bonds of its foundations. The edifice shook and shuddered, reared up and listed, all accompanied by a deafening cacophony of howls and roars as the concrete and steel were stressed and compacted into shapes they were never meant to assume. Fourteen hundred panes of glass—which the manufacturers had claimed to be unbreakable—shattered, and the shards fell in tinkling showers. Water tanks ruptured, sending mini waterfalls cascading off the various balconies that fought a losing battle with the raging gas flames, and solar panels shimmered to earth, then exploded in sparkling blossoms. It was, as a Radio Nova radio host put it during his live broadcast, like the end of days.