The Fowl Twins

‘One minute to detonation,’ said NANNI. ‘And I cannot crack this timer.’

Beckett went into Zen pilot mode, which involved a thrust of the lower jaw and a growl in Trollish, and Myles knew better than to interrupt his brother at this critical juncture. It would probably result in an even greater catastrophe than what already loomed on the horizon.

Beckett ignored the various plottings and projections on the windscreen and growled his orders in Trollish, and Myles surmised that NANNI understood that particular fairy language now, because the AI ordered the SCARABs to send a magnetic charge crackling through the missile’s fuselage, dislodging the be-blobbed creature. NANNI also forced the Tachyon’s door pistons to fight the fifty-five kilopascals per square centimetre in order to open the rear hatch, which was not a cargo door but simply a passenger access point. There was a momentary deafening scream of pressure equalising, and the escaping newtons attempted to drag the twins into the sky with them. Fortunately, the Tachyon was pressure-sensitive and automatically restrained the boys with servo-cable arms and dropped oxygen globes over their heads to prevent hypoxia.

Beckett ignored the chaos and expertly coordinated a gentle descent with a deceleration that matched the figure’s slowing trajectory and loss of altitude until in the rear-camera view it looked as though the missile’s erstwhile passenger were actually tailing the jet. Myles had to admit, albeit silently, that he was a teeny bit proud of the fact that his brother’s instincts were proving more accurate than a quantum computer. Myles began unclenching his jaw and even started to believe that they might actually be in good shape to continue with their original mission … But of course, as even nursery-school children know, pride comes before a fall, or in this case …

Pride comes before a duck.

To explain: the airborne individual was within seconds of slotting through the rear door when a mallard, or Anas platyrhynchos, that was miles off course and months off its migration schedule flapped into the scenario, clipping the shrouded figure with a single primary flight feather. This mid-air collision caused absolutely zero harm to either party, merely eliciting a surprised squawk from the emerald-headed mallard and a minor alteration in the course of the shrouded figure, but it was immediately apparent that this minor alteration would send the figure under the jet rather than into the inviting portal.

‘Hmm,’ said Beckett and NANNI in unison, which was the equivalent of tagging Myles back into the game.

And, while Myles usually frowned on non-word discourse particles, he permitted himself a triumphant, ‘Aha!’

He had perhaps a second to act, but a second inside the head of Myles Fowl was the equivalent of several lifetimes in the minds of most people. He analysed the information displayed on the eco-jet’s smart screen: air pressure and wind speed, altitude, attitude, rate of descent and so forth, and then took the only course of action that had any chance of working at such late notice.

Myles used his phone to activate the inflatable evacuation slide at the rear of the plane. The slide unfolded like an enormous tongue and accepted delivery of a life form that otherwise would most definitely have passed under the fuselage. The creature inside the blob, whatever it was, bounced along the slide like a stone skipping over a lake and seemed to float in the main cabin as Beckett matched its deceleration and descent. NANNI cut the slide free and closed the door without being told to do so. In seconds, a cabin pressure of eleven kPa had been restored.

Myles swivelled half a revolution to face their guest, who had up to this point been obscured and protected from the elements by some kind of semi-transparent gel. But now, as the gel fell from her person in gloopy blobs, it was easy to see who it was.

‘My dear Specialist Heitz,’ said Myles formally. ‘Welcome aboard.’

‘Laz!’ Beckett called over his shoulder. ‘What are the chances of bumping into you strapped to a rocket?’

Myles answered for the pixel. ‘The chances are, frankly, too astronomical to calculate.’

Lazuli was half awake now and a heartbeat away from panic. ‘Myles, are you wearing a fishbowl on your head?’ she rasped. ‘What is happening?’

Myles removed the globe. ‘It’s an oxygen supply,’ he explained. ‘And to answer your second question: you may find this surprising, but I am not one hundred per cent sure what exactly is happening, however I do feel we are being, to use the vernacular of common criminals, set up.’

Beckett tipped the flaps slightly so that the floating Lazuli was cradled by a seat and instantly secured by servo cables. Myles noticed that what they had mistaken for a hairy foot was actually a slipper.

‘An easy mistake to make,’ he said, nodding towards the footwear. ‘Were you at a spa, perhaps?’

Lazuli wiped gunk from her face. ‘I was in the hospital,’ she mumbled, further confused by this untimely small talk. ‘Getting a magic-suppressor injected by Foaly. Oh, by the way, under no circumstances am I to get electrocuted.’

‘I imagine that would short out the suppressor,’ said Myles.

NANNI interrupted the reunion. ‘Myles, we have a situation.’

‘Now we have a situation?’ said Myles. ‘I would have thought that we were already quite immersed in one.’

He swivelled to face the smart screen and saw that the missile had not blown itself apart but had jettisoned its rear section, which tumbled towards the ocean far below. The nose cone was streaking their way under its own power.

‘NANNI,’ he said tersely, ‘I assume the small concussive device was simply a separation collar and there is a secondary weapon concealed in the nose cone?’

‘I would assume the same thing, though I cannot confirm,’ said NANNI. ‘I am embarrassed to say that I did not, in fact, wrangle that ole steer as comprehensively as I believed. The SCARABs have been ditched, and the original programming has reasserted itself. In short, I no longer have my electronic hooks in that missile.’

‘Dwarves,’ said Lazuli, shivering now from a combination of shock, gel cooling on her skin and the after-effects of the gas she’d inhaled. ‘I remember now. There were dwarves.’

Myles decided that this information, while intriguing, was for filing away rather than dissecting at the moment. It behooved him to act on the approaching warhead.

‘NANNI, please transport Specialist Heitz to the cockpit,’ he ordered. ‘And, Beckett, the time has come.’

Beckett’s face lit up. ‘Not that time? The time I’ve been waiting for?’

‘Yes,’ confirmed Myles. ‘Exactly that time.’

Even in her dazed state, Lazuli did not like the sound of that.

‘What time?’ she asked in her accented, hard-learned English, as the servo arms passed her forward like a crowd surfer, gel slopping in sheets to the floor.

Beckett bounced in his seat. ‘Myles made me wrist-bump promise that I wouldn’t do it, but now I can!’ He held out his wrist. ‘Take back the promise.’

Myles held up his own hand, aligning the scar on the side of his palm with the almost identical one on the side of his twin’s palm.

‘You are released from the sacred vow,’ he said solemnly.

There was a tear in the corner of Beckett’s eye. ‘Thank you, brother.’

And he flicked the best switch in the world. The switch that taunted him every time they took the Tachyon out for a spin. A switch that was thumbprint-coded and lurked under a Plexiglas box on the dashboard.

The ejector switch.

THE ACORN CLUB

COVENT GARDEN, LONDON

THERE IS A PRIVATE CLUB IN LONDON TOWN that presents an austere granite facade to the never-ending procession of passers-by in Covent Garden. This extremely old and forbidding building with its brow of a drooping ledge almost seems to discourage any pause or investigation, if indeed a building can actively discourage or encourage anything. In point of fact, it is not the building that puts tourists off the notion of trying the brass door handles, but the infrasound speakers tucked under the olive-green awning that broadcast noise at the precise low frequency necessary to make gawkers a little queasy. Unless, of course, a person has an acorn-shaped key fob for that front door. When one uses that fob, a single beep renders that patron immune from infrasound-induced nausea.

There is no sign over the door to indicate the establishment’s name, but those in possession of the fob know it: the Acorn. And some of those members also know that the Acorn is the oldest private club in London and has been open continuously since the fifteenth century. Three of the fairy regulars are very sure of this, because they attended the opening soirée.

Once inside the lobby, things take a decidedly more hospitable turn. The staff, who are of various shapes, sizes, colours, genders and species, are courteous, but do not insinuate themselves. They smile but never grin, as it were. The furniture is minimalist, but perfectly comfortable, and the elevator doors are a lurid shade of gold that would be horrific anywhere else, but not in the Acorn, because here it is understood that this uncharacteristic garishness is an ironic dig at some of London’s flashier establishments.

One floor up there is a library that any literary scholar would give his tweed elbow patches to be buried in, but on this day there were only two individuals there, seated at a table overlooking Monmouth Street. Most humans might assume that neither of them had the requisite decades under their belts to be accomplished scholars, but most people would be dead wrong. For the human who sat with a cool bag between the knees of his riding breeches may have had the appearance of a Caucasian male in his late twenties, but his one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old-plus brain had been recently transplanted into this body, which he’d had 3-D printed by his longtime ally, Ishi Myishi, supplier of gadgets and gizmos to the world’s criminal elite, using a schematic provided by the second person at the table, who’d had the plans but not the equipment necessary to make them a reality. This person was not a human child, as one might assume from her size, but a lady dwarf.

They made an odd couple. The human, with his runner’s physique and flowing black beard, was dressed impeccably in a tweed suit tailored to his rather antiquated specifications with lapels just over a centimetre wider than the latest trend, and he wore a black satin beret with an embossed fleur-de-lis pattern. The dwarf was cosplaying as Shark Girl in a neon-blue jumpsuit, a shark helmet and biker boots. Odd couples were the norm in the Acorn Club, for it was one of five such clubs around the globe where humans and fairies who operated outside the bounds of their respective legal systems could safely meet. An interspecies safe space.

One of the few well-known facts about dwarves is that they are extremely photosensitive, but, if the proximity to a window caused this dwarf any anxiety, it didn’t manifest in any visible way, except for a drumming of gloved fingers on the arm of her leather chair, a sound that would have intensely irritated Myles Fowl had he been there to hear it. Having said that, even though Myles was almost four hundred miles away, he was, in a sense, present because the conversation was shortly to focus on the Fowl twin’s immediate future.

‘Nice to see you again, human,’ the dwarf said in passable but heavily accented English. Her name was Gveld Horteknut. Gveld had been all the rage as a baby name some five hundred years ago, but modern dwarf parents considered it a little on the nose, as it was the old Dwarfish word for gold. Most dwarves were tired of everyone thinking that they spent all day lusting after gold and all night dreaming about it when they were also terribly fond of silver and diamonds. Gveld, however, adored her name almost as much as she adored the precious metal she was named after.

‘Is it really?’ said the man, unconvinced. They both knew this was an arrangement born of convenience. The Horteknuts had contacted him simply because their fairy police sources knew about his dislike of all things Fowl, and his association with Ishi Myishi.

‘You look better than when we met before,’ said Gveld. Their last conversation had been on the man’s island residence some days previously, when Gveld had made her offer. She needed two brand-new bodies, and he could keep one. The one he now inhabited.

‘I wish I could say the same for you,’ said the human in a weird chomping fashion, as though he were still getting used to his teeth, which, in actuality, he was.

This was not an insult per se, as Gveld’s features were effectively hidden behind the shield of her helmet.

‘I have always thought a mind transfer would be electrical or magical,’ commented Gveld Horteknut. ‘But you decided to go the organic route. I imagine that was a harrowing few hours.’

The man nodded spasmodically. ‘You have no idea. I was conscious for the entire procedure and spent yesterday recovering in Myishi’s Kensington clinic. It was necessary – to ensure the old me made the trip across. And, let me assure you, a man hasn’t truly confronted mortality until he has listened to his own skull being cut open with a bone saw.’

‘It was a paper-thin skull, from what I hear,’ noted Gveld Horteknut. ‘You could have cracked it with a pebble.’

The man rapped on his forehead. ‘I prefer this one, madam. Guaranteed for half a century.’

‘Any memory loss or confusion?’ asked the dwarf.

‘I was warned there would be a little,’ admitted the man. ‘Is there, in fact, a place called Australia?’

‘Indeed,’ said Gveld. ‘Quite a big place.’

The man shrugged. ‘My memories of it seem fantastical. Monstrous insects, wave riding and so forth. And tell me, is there a Narnia?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Gveld, and it was possible that she smiled behind her light-filtering face shield. ‘But it’s not so glorious any more, since the human tourists happened upon it.’

‘I feel that perhaps you are toying with me, Ms Horteknut,’ said the rejuvenated human. ‘But it is of no matter. The transfer took place mere hours ago, and I was warned that there would be a period of adjustment. My limbs perform tasks that they have not been instructed to undertake, but this will improve with time.’

‘You are in no condition to hunt the Fowl Twins,’ said Gveld, needling the human.

The man waved a hand, perhaps on purpose. ‘That too is of little import, as this story is not my story. I am content to be an anonymous facilitator, and you, in return, shall deliver Myles to me – if your plan succeeds this time.’

The dwarf ignored the dig. ‘As you know, Lord Teddy, Myles Fowl has a habit of escaping certain death. And, as it turns out, I need him alive. For the time being.’

The Englishman attempted a scowl, but his disobedient features grinned instead, which was appropriate enough in the circumstances. ‘Alive? I would kill them both a dozen times over if the cost of clones wasn’t so blasted prohibitive.’

Gveld poked the cool bag with the toe of her biker boot. ‘On the subject of clones, is the item in this … bag?’

‘The subject should be copies rather than clones, and my pal Myishi was grateful for the plans, but at any rate, yes, what you need is freshly printed in this bag,’ said Lord Teddy, and he too nudged the cool bag with the heel of his riding boot. ‘And this is not just any bag. It is a Deliveroo bag. No one will give you a second glance while you’re carrying this. It’s a tight squeeze in there for our merchandise, I grant you, but I care not a fig for the comfort of anything that even resembles the Fowl brat.’

‘I hope there’s more than a resemblance,’ said Gveld.

Lord Teddy unzipped the bag. Mist rose from the dry-ice packs and electrolyte blocks that were heaped on the pale figure inside.

‘There is,’ he said. ‘It’s an almost perfect copy.’

Gveld was surprised. In a bartering situation between two dwarves, it would be unheard of for one to admit that his or her product was less than perfect.

‘Almost?’ said Gveld. ‘As in the English lord almost survived his meeting with Gveld Horteknut of the Horteknut Seven?’

The English lord chuckled, his teeth clacking. ‘I see. You are threatening my life, but there’s really no need. I misspoke, don’t you know? The item is, in fact, perfect, but what it needs to be is imperfect.’

Rather than elaborate on this cryptic statement, Lord Teddy took from his pocket a small knife that he habitually used to skin small animals – rabbits and the like. He flicked out a blade that glittered like an icicle and dipped it into the cool bag.

Gveld tilted her head. ‘Be careful, human,’ she warned. ‘Our arrangement is more fragile than that merchandise. Don’t forget that you are in the Acorn Club, the only place in London where fairies are safer than humans.’

‘Shush, please,’ said the Englishman, not realising that shushing a dwarf was at least as dangerous as poking a troll with a stick, but Gveld was intrigued, so she let the insult go for the moment.

Nevertheless, Lord Teddy must have sensed that he had crossed a line with his shushing, so he explained himself.

‘Apologies for my rudeness, but I must concentrate for even such a simple task. It used to be that my brain would send orders scurrying down my spinal column, and my fingers would obey without complaint or deviation. But old brain, new fingers and so forth.’

He screwed one eye shut and made a single nick. From inside the bag came the mewling one might expect from a stepped-on kitten.

‘There,’ he said, satisfied. ‘You might have one of your people heal that hand a little. But not completely, mind you, for that is a most important scar.’

Gveld understood now. The famous scar. ‘Of course,’ said the dwarf, peering into the bag. ‘I find the merchandise acceptable. You will have the Fowl boy when I am finished with him.’

‘And you may have the Fowl boy in there, as per our agreement,’ said the man, sealing the cool bag. ‘Though it is little more than a sack of printed organs, and without a viable brain it will begin to disintegrate as soon as you take it out of the bag.’

‘That is completely acceptable,’ said Gveld Horteknut, smiling an eighty per cent gold smile behind her visor. ‘This thing can die whenever it pleases. In fact, the sooner the better.’

MEET THE BADDIE: GVELD HORTEKNUT OF THE

HORTEKNUT SEVEN

IN THE INTEREST OF EVEN-HANDEDNESS AND fair representation, it is only proper that the Fowls’ antagonist’s motivations be explained before we catch up with the twins. Gveld Horteknut could be fairly referred to as the master schemer or, in modern parlance, the ‘big bad’ of this story, but Gveld would not have considered herself a villain as such, since it was her opinion that everything horrible her band visited upon humankind was richly deserved, and much more besides.

And who among us would argue that she did not have a valid point?

Truth be told, there were many in Haven City who secretly applauded Gveld and her group’s proactive strikes against humanity.

As we have already pointed out, Gveld Horteknut was not human; she was a dwarf. Not a human with dwarfism, but an actual mythological dwarf. That is, mythological from a human point of view, and, in fact, there are many so-called Underearthers in Haven who consider humans to be mythological and refuse to believe otherwise, despite skyscrapers of evidence to the contrary.

Gveld was the leader of the Horteknut Seven, the militant arm of the ancient Horteknut family, whose roots stretched back to a time when dwarves had cool and noble names like Horteknut or Bludgeheart, and not ridiculous and insulting ones like Diggums and Pullchain.

Ten thousand years ago, when the fairy families burrowed underground to escape the rapacious nature of humanity, the dwarves had already been living below the surface and were more than a little put out by the sudden influx of creatures to their territory. The richest of these dwarf families was the Horteknut clan, who had amassed an absolute fortune in dwarf gold. (Dwarf gold being twenty-four-carat, 99.9 per cent pure with just a glob of dwarf spit mixed in during the smelt to toughen it up.) Unfortunately, the fleeing fairies led humankind directly through the Horteknut tunnels and the band lost most of their fortune to looting humans, which led to ten millennia of Horteknut heists in return, as they attempted to reclaim their ingots. Under Gveld’s leadership, the Horteknut Seven became the most successful reclamation team of all time and, in fact, the most famous bullion heists in recent history can be traced back to Gveld and her band, including the Great Victorian Gold Robbery, the Wałbrzych Gold Train Job, the Kerry Packer Bullion Heist and the Brink’s-Mat Robbery, to name but a few.

And now Gveld had her eye on the biggest prize of all: the mother lode, which could account for more than eighty per cent of the remaining lost gold. But she had run into a problem and decided that, since the human boy Fowl had survived her assassination attempt, he might as well help solve this problem. And so she took her Deliveroo bag to Dalkey Island.

DALKEY ISLAND, DUBLIN, IRELAND

Artemis Fowl the First, that is to say the father of Artemis Fowl the Second and husband to Angeline Fowl, was not pleased with his younger sons. He had solid reasons for his displeasure, as the twins had borrowed the Fowl Tachyon jet without permission and ditched it in the Atlantic, barely escaping with their lives. Even more upsetting to Artemis Senior than the loss of a prototype jet that could change the world’s carbon footprint with its synthetic kerosene engine was the fact that Beckett had borrowed, and then lost, the treasured Rocket Man platform shoes from his rock legends memorabilia collection, leaving him with only Freddie Mercury’s Adidas sneakers from Live Aid and David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust boots in the footwear section.

The twins knew that their father was more unhappy than usual, because he had summoned them to his private study, which sat a little apart from the main villa in a Martello tower that had been restored by a firm of heritage architects and augmented with a few necessities such as internal walls, a suite of vintage Fritz Hansen office furniture, a dozen motion sensors disguised as rocks, wall-mounted mini-mag machine guns, bombproof glass, an escape submarine below the desk, more powerful broadband than the Pentagon had, a full-body scanner, a wall-sized live news multiscreen and the Batman suit from Tim Burton’s movies – which was not strictly speaking a necessity, but Artemis Senior found it inspiring. All in all, it was pretty standard supervillain stuff, which the twins’ father couldn’t bear to part with, even though he claimed to be a one hundred per cent legit businessman now. But once a criminal mastermind … and so on and so forth.

The twins were seated in matching Series 7 chairs that had been fabricated from recycled ocean plastics, looking on as Artemis Fowl Senior rested his head on the desktop and kneaded his neck. Beckett jittered in his seat; the blond twin had been sitting in his chair for almost a minute now, and that was an insufferably extended period as far as he was concerned. Myles was also jittering, but only with his eyeballs, as he was using blinks and pupil sweeps to select letters and solve the Guardian crossword on one lens of his graphene eyeglasses. Once Myles had finished the puzzle, shaving five seconds off his personal record, he was eager to get away and back to amassing knowledge.