The Fowl Twins

‘Father,’ he said, ‘for that neck massage to have any effect, you must really target the trigger points. At the moment, you are simply rolling neck fat.’

Artemis Senior sat bolt upright. ‘I know that, Myles. And I do not have neck fat.’

‘We all have neck fat, Pater. Honestly,’ Myles said and then flushed in shame that his father should be so ill-informed on the subject.

‘Is that why you think we’re here, Myles?’ asked Artemis Senior. ‘To discuss neck fat?’

‘No,’ said Myles. ‘I assume we are here to discuss the missile crisis.’

‘Exactly,’ said Artemis Senior, somewhat self-consciously removing his hands from his neck and straightening the collar of his beige, stretch-cotton leisure jacket, which was emblazoned with a golden AF symbol, as it came from his wife’s fashion line. ‘I simply need a moment to get my ducks in a row.’

Beckett stopped jittering. ‘Do you mean to tell me we have ducks you can order to swim in formation?’

Artemis Senior sighed once more. Sometimes it seemed to the Fowl patriarch that sighing was his main mode of exhalation when dealing with his sons, either singly or as a team.

‘Of course not. That’s preposterous, Beckett.’

Beckett was in full agreement. ‘I know. Ducks never do what you ask. They’re worse than badgers, which are frankly –’ Beckett screwed up his face to deliver the next clause – ‘scritch-scritch-arrrrr.’

Artemis Senior knew he shouldn’t ask but couldn’t help himself. ‘And what language might scritch-scritch-arrrrr be in?’

Myles jumped in. ‘I am no expert, Father, but I would wager Beck is speaking in the language of badgers to avoid swearing in English.’

‘Myles is right,’ said Beckett. ‘He is no expert. We should have recorded him saying that, as he’ll probably never say it again. But I was speaking Brockish, which is what badgers speak, by the way. And it was a bit sweary.’

Artemis Senior dropped his head to the desk once more and rolled his forehead along the cool aluminium surface. When he spoke, it was towards his own feet, but the tower had excellent acoustics, so the twins heard his words nevertheless. ‘Some years ago, I was held captive by the Russian Mafia.’

Myles raised a finger. ‘They refer to themselves as Bratva these days, Father.’

‘Thank you, Myles. Well, I would refer to the ones who held me, Vassikin and Kamar, as scritch-scritch-arrrrr, if you take my meaning?’

Myles nodded, appreciating the segue, while Beckett smiled, appreciating the rude joke and his father’s excellent Brockish pronunciation.

‘And I can honestly say,’ continued Artemis Senior, ‘that the two of you scare me more than they ever did.’

This statement shocked Myles so much that he stopped mentally puzzling over the second of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (magic, he believed, was the missing factor) and focused on his father.

The statement shocked Beckett so much that he could no longer be confined to a chair and jumped to his feet. ‘We scare you, Dad? That’s terrible. We would never hurt you.’

‘Not physically, perhaps,’ said Artemis Senior. ‘But the emotional toll of parenting such extraordinary children has been so very heavy.’

Myles scrambled to justify the twins’ shenanigans. ‘Yes, but, Father, in our defence, the Fowl DNA is positively littered with epigenetic markers passed down by generations of masterminds, so in many ways we have no option but to act as we do. I would go so far as to say that we are the victims in this—’

Artemis Senior cut his son off with a slice of his hand. ‘Spare me your verbal gymnastics, Myles. We both know you would win any argument you care to engage in, but let me tell you something: winning an argument doesn’t make you right.’

This might seem like a typical platitude, but Myles immediately realised that his father had delivered a masterstroke, for any further squabbling on the twins’ part would only strengthen Artemis Senior’s position, ironically winning the argument that their father claimed he could not win.

‘Well played, Father,’ he said.

‘No!’ said Artemis Senior, standing but keeping the weight off his bio-hybrid leg, which pained him in low-pressure areas or when he was anxious, as he was now. ‘I am not playing. No more playing. Things must change absolutely. A change that will permeate every stratum of your existence.’

‘We’re getting perms?’ said Beckett. ‘But my hair is already curly.’

Artemis Senior gave Beckett the full laser blast of his glacier-blue eyes, and Myles felt a shiver trip along his spine. He could not help but wonder if this were the glare Artemis Senior treated his lieutenants to back in the criminal-empire days.

‘Oh no, Beckett Fowl,’ said the boys’ father, wagging a finger at the blond twin. ‘Don’t do that.’

‘Don’t do what, Dad?’ said Beckett, but he knew what. It was in his father’s eyes.

‘Use a silly comment as a coping mechanism to deal with stress. Your distracting remarks are calculated to put me on the back foot. Well, in case you haven’t noticed, I don’t have a back foot.’

Beckett was stunned. No one had ever called him out on this trick before, and he’d been using it for years.

‘“Are we getting perms?”’ continued Artemis Senior. ‘Or “Can I order ducks to swim in formation?” And a thousand other asinine questions you pull out of the bag whenever you don’t feel like being responsible for your actions.’

Myles was almost giving the situation his full attention now. Father was playing hardball. Perhaps this time they had actually pushed him over the emotional edge. Myles thought he might try one more avenue.

‘Father, if I might gently protest. You are in no position to lecture us about taking responsibility. After all, you evaded taking responsibility for your actions over the decades.’

This indeed was a bold challenge, but Myles reasoned that shock tactics might be the only way to halt Artemis Senior’s verbal barrage.

He was completely incorrect. Artemis Senior’s response to his son’s gentle protest was as follows:

‘You are making a mistake here, Myles. And your mistake is to believe that we are engaged in a civilised discussion like intelligent equals, whereas, in fact, you have behaved appallingly and are about to be soundly disciplined.’

‘How have we behaved appallingly, exactly? I feel our crimes should be listed, in the interests of fairness.’

Artemis Senior shrugged in an exaggerated and, Myles thought, semi-unhinged manner. ‘How would I know, exactly? It goes without saying that you haven’t told me everything, Myles.’

Myles was taken aback. ‘Of course I haven’t told you everything. That is at the very core of what it means to be a mastermind. I never tell anybody everything.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said the Fowl patriarch. ‘What matters is that your mother and I are upset.’

Myles clasped his hands behind his back. ‘It is not now, nor has it ever been our intention to cause distress to either Mother or yourself. In fact, we deny all charges. It was not our actions that led to this alleged upset, but rather the actions of those who would do us harm.’

‘Save it for the judge, son,’ said Artemis Senior. ‘Because I don’t care about your denials. What I do care about is this family and its wellbeing. Physically and emotionally. So, rule number one: no more fairy-related antics.’

‘We’re related to fairies?’ cried Beckett, forgetting the embargo on his silly questions tactic.

His father shot Beckett a warning glare, but otherwise gave him a pass on that offence.

‘That’s right,’ continued Artemis Senior. ‘I know all about the fairies. Our family have been friends to the People for centuries, and it has cost us dearly. Your own brother Artemis died. He died.’

Myles interrupted. ‘Perhaps, but it is a testament to Dr Fowl’s ingenuity and foresight that he engineered a revolutionary way back.’

‘Artemis died!’ shouted the twins’ father, pounding the desk. ‘Not Dr Fowl. Artemis, your flesh and blood. Only he isn’t your flesh and blood, not the current version anyway. He’s a clone possessed by Artemis’s spirit. Do you even hear what I’m saying, Myles? Do you even know how those months crushed your mother and me when we thought we’d lost one of you?’

‘I can hypothesise,’ said Myles. ‘Common side-effects of grief are lack of appetite, insomnia and depression, due to elevated levels of certain neurotransmitters.’

Beckett helped out his twin. ‘You were heartbroken, Dad. Mum too.’

‘Precisely,’ said Artemis Senior. ‘And Artemis is not even the first Fowl to be lost in the war to protect fairies. Do you remember the hall of portraits in Fowl Manor?’

Myles presumed this was rhetorical and did not answer.

‘Everyone on the left side of that hall died because of the fairies. Fowl and fairy, friends forever. That’s our secret motto, right? Well, it cost us. My own brother. My grandmother. Two uncles. My stepsister gave her own life for a squadron of LEP paratroopers. My mother lost an eye. I lost a leg.’

‘Technically, the fairies saved you,’ said Myles. ‘Blaming them for the loss of your leg is not logical.’

Artemis Senior was on the point of exploding, but he calmed himself with a breathing exercise that, ironically, he’d picked up from Myles.

‘Everyone. On. That. Wall. Died,’ he enunciated quietly. ‘Because of a promise Red Peg Fowl made to the People centuries ago. I didn’t remember any of this, because they mind-wiped me years ago, but Artemis stimulated my hippocampus before he left. And I realised that the fairies were attracted to us because of the residual magic in the Fowl estate.’

‘Which was the real reason you sold it,’ Myles deduced.

‘Exactly. The only things on those grounds now are organic vegetables. Not a single prospective Fowl mastermind in sight.’

‘Magic carrots!’ said Beckett, who still didn’t quite grasp how deep in the organic manure he and his brother were.

‘That’s right, Beckett,’ said Artemis Senior. ‘That’s about as much as I’m prepared to give the fairies from now on: magic carrots. This family will not spill one more drop of blood for the People.’

Myles decided to make what he thought was an important point. ‘If all Artemis’s stories are indeed true, and they do appear to be, then, if I recall correctly, it was the fairies who saved your life when a, quite frankly, ill-advised scheme of yours went disastrously wrong in Murmansk.’

Artemis Senior had reached his tolerance level for Myles’s interruptions.

‘Stand up straight, boy!’ he barked. ‘Both of you. Up straight and no fidgeting.’

This was perhaps the first time in their lives the twins had been spoken to in this manner by Artemis Senior, and some instinct snapped them both to attention before their conscious minds could fully digest the order.

Artemis Senior circled them like a sergeant major.

‘I do not want to be the person I was in my previous job,’ he said, ‘but it seems that reason does not work with sons of mine. So, if reason won’t work, we’re going to have some rules, and you two are going to abide by them. Is that understood?’

‘Yes, Dad,’ said Beckett, and he meant it at the time.

‘Of course, father mine,’ said Myles smoothly, not meaning it for a second. His plan was to press on with his quest for knowledge, but be a little sneakier about it.

‘So, rule number one: no contact with the fairies whatsoever. Commodore Short and I have had several video chats in the week since you returned home from your last adventure, and the LEP have agreed to lift their surveillance in exchange for me reining in my sons. They wanted to mind-wipe the pair of you, but Holly managed to talk them out of it. So, no fairy-related antics. Say, “Yes, Father.”’

This was a hard pill to swallow for both boys. Beckett would miss his friend Lazuli Heitz, while Myles would sorely miss the access to fairy technology, so neither spoke until Artemis Senior repeated in a more insistent tone, ‘Say, “Yes, Father!” Like you mean it.’

‘Yes, Father!’ shouted both boys.

‘Good. Next: you no longer have access to NANNI.’

Myles actually shrieked. ‘You propose to deprive me of NANNI? But she’s superintelligent.’

‘It’s no proposal, my boy. I’m simply doing you the courtesy of letting you know. And anyway you are more than adequately superintelligent without her,’ said Artemis Senior, holding out his hand. ‘Now give.’

Myles made no move to hand over his eyeglasses, and so his father plucked them right off his face.

‘I feel better already,’ said the twins’ father, folding the spectacles with decisive double clicks. ‘From now on, your eyeglasses will be just that. Glasses.’

Artemis Senior waved a hand over his desk to activate the smart surface and allowed the camera to scan his iris. Then he ordered NANNI to deactivate herself until further notice.

Once Myles had recovered from the initial shock of losing NANNI, he realised that the AI was loyal to him, and it would only take a few minutes to work round Father’s security and reactivate her. Also, Myles had hidden some NANNI lites in the area. They wouldn’t be superintelligent, but they would be smart enough.

‘When I reboot the island’s systems, NANNI won’t be a part of them,’ Artemis Senior announced. ‘You’re probably thinking, So what? I can hack in any time I want.’

Myles didn’t bother denying it.

‘And undoubtedly you can,’ continued his father. ‘But you will choose not to.’

Myles did not like the sound of this prediction.

Artemis Senior continued to roll out the new Fowl order.

‘Third, there will be no more excursions off the island. You will not so much as take a swim in the channel without parental supervision.’

‘The dolphins will be worried,’ said Beckett, which was not as outlandish a statement as one might think. As a side-effect of being possessed by a fairy ghost some years previously (see LEP file: The Last Guardian), Beckett had become a trans-species polyglot or, simply put, he could communicate with any human and most animals with a few exceptions, one being cats, which probably understood him, but didn’t care to answer.

‘The dolphins will get over it,’ said Artemis Senior. ‘They’ll moon about for a while, but then move on. That’s how dolphins are.’

‘It’s true,’ said Beckett. ‘Everyone thinks dolphins are all smiles, but that’s just the shape of their faces. They can be fickle friends.’

Myles felt exposed without his glasses on. ‘How long do you intend to maintain this cruel regime, Pater?’

His father barked a short, humourless laugh. ‘Oh, you poor boy. You think that’s all of it?’

‘There’s more?!’ squeaked Myles, who would have committed quite grievous bodily harm on someone for a few red gummy worms just about then.

‘There’s more.’ Artemis Senior counted off the rules on his fingers. ‘No internet. No access to any vehicles. No field trips. No plots. No plans. No “accidentally” leaving the island. No devising any linguistic or theoretical workarounds to get out of following my orders. No firearms. No weapons of any kind. No using common household objects as weapons. No cluster-punching – that one is specifically for you, Beckett. No climbing of any structures. Both of you must read a book every day.’

‘One book?’ said Myles, stamping a foot, which he for some reason thought might weaken his father’s resolve. ‘I refuse to be limited to one book.’

Beckett raised a hand, but Artemis Senior anticipated his question.

‘No, Beckett. It can’t be the same book every day.’ And then he went on with his list, which apparently was memorised. ‘No phones. No fraternising with known criminals besides myself, no consorting with unknown criminals, no tempting people to the dark side. Timetabled chores starting at seven a.m. You will report in to me or your mother five times a day, in person. Beckett, no more sugar or fast food. Myles, fast food for you every day.’

‘That is monstrous!’ protested Myles.

‘And also bad,’ said Beckett.

‘This is a punishment, after all,’ said their father. ‘Not a visit to the soda fountain.’

Myles frowned. ‘Amazingly, I don’t get that reference.’

‘Good,’ snapped his father. ‘And let me tell you, my boy, no one even listens to your references, they’re so obscure.’

This was a rare demeaning comment from the Fowl patriarch, but perhaps he could be forgiven, considering the circumstances.

‘Some people listen to my references,’ said Myles, edging close to a sulk. ‘It’s not as though I’m a Moravian friar expounding on DNA theories in an Augustinian monastery.’

Artemis Senior waited a moment to see if Myles was being sarcastic, but apparently he was not.

‘I rest my case,’ he said. ‘So, that’s almost it. Your new life starts immediately.’

Artemis Senior sat down at his desk and massaged both temples, which did little to alleviate the stress he was under. It is, in fact, astounding to think that, were Artemis Fowl Senior’s stress levels to be graphed, it would be apparent that they had not spiked to this extent since Artemis Junior was involved in basically shutting down the world some years previously, during what the media now referred to as the Big Dark.

‘In spite of your monumental lack of regard for your parents’ feelings, we continue to love you both. Your mother, in fact, adores you, though I myself find the shine wearing off a little. Nevertheless, I will keep you alive if it kills me, and I would rather have you alive in a virtual prison than killed during some fabulous adventure.’

‘May I ask …’ began Myles.

‘No,’ said his father. ‘You may not. What you may do is report to your mother in the main house. She has a list of chores for you.’

Myles bowed. ‘Very well, Father,’ he said, already plotting how to circumvent these new rules, most especially the ones about not circumventing the rules.

‘Ha,’ said Artemis Senior. ‘I see what you’re doing. I know that face.’

‘What face?’ asked Myles.

His father waggled a finger towards Myles’s general feature area. ‘That one. The eager-to-please one. We all know that face, Myles.’

‘We do,’ agreed Beckett. ‘He’s planning. It’s as plain as the face on his … face.’

‘I know what you’re thinking, son,’ said Artemis Senior. ‘You’re thinking, How can Father stop me from breaking his rules? If the entire LEP couldn’t stop me, then how can he?’

Myles nodded, even though he had actually been miles away, wondering whether Lazuli would allow him to take a patch of her blue skin for testing. A fifteen-centimetre square should be more than sufficient, and he should make sure to include some of the yellow markings when excising the sample. Myles wasn’t really thinking about breaking his father’s rules, because Myles felt, in all humility, that this goal would be well within his intellectual means.

‘Yes, father mine,’ said Myles, trying not to look too innocent. ‘That’s exactly the problem I was ruminating on. However, I see now that it is as unsolvable as Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.’

The first of which I have already solved, he thought.

‘The first of which you have undoubtedly already solved,’ continued Artemis Senior. ‘The missing variable in the second is magic, in case you’re interested.’

And this simple statement brought home to Myles how much he had underestimated his own father and how much trouble they were actually in.

‘So how do I intend to make you stick to the rules?’ continued Artemis Senior. ‘Allow me to enlighten you. What I’m going to do is as follows: nothing. You two are going to police each other. And I will invoke your most sacred vow to make you do it.’

Since Myles was actually listening now, he caught on immediately.

‘You wouldn’t! That is not a place you can go.’

‘Is it lollipops?’ asked Beckett, vaguely aware that Artemis Junior had always detested lollipops and everything that most demeaning of treats stood for. ‘Are you going to make us eat lollipops? Because I’m telling you right now that I love lollipops, so that will backfire big-time.’

Myles grabbed his twin by the shoulders and shook the lollipop notion right out of his brain.

‘Don’t you see, Beck?’ he said. ‘Father plans to force us to make a wrist-bump promise.’

Beckett was puzzled. ‘But that’s our thing. No one can make us do a wrist bump.’

‘Beck is correct, Father,’ said Myles, frowning quite severely. ‘Only a Fowl Twin can initiate the sacred gesture. That code is inviolate, and neither God nor mortal can force us to bump scars.’

‘Bump scars,’ said Artemis Senior. ‘Do it now.’

‘Dad!’ said Beckett, on the verge of tears. ‘I know we destroyed your jet, but this is serious.’

Artemis Senior was undeterred. ‘I said bump wrists or, heaven help me, I shall be quite cross with you both for several days. And, while your mother and I will continue to love you, we will not like you for a while.’

That was enough for Beckett. His mind could not accommodate the idea of his parents not liking him for so much as a moment.

‘Myles,’ he said, ‘we should bump.’

But Myles wasn’t there yet. Wrist-bumping went to the very core of what it meant to be a Fowl Twin.

‘I appeal to you, Father,’ said Myles. ‘Do not co-opt our ritual into your disciplinary programme. We are Fowls, and certain things are sacrosanct to us. Honour, for one.’

Artemis Senior had no trouble meeting his son’s eyes. ‘Love trumps honour,’ he said. ‘Now bump.’

‘Please, Father … Dad.’

Father/Dad laughed. ‘Dad? It’s Dad now? You must be desperate, son. Bump. Or, so help me, you’re both going down in my bad book. And my bad book does not make for good reading.’

Myles let that atrocious metaphor pass and looked to Beckett, whose left hand was already in position to receive the bump.

‘Whenever you’re ready, my boy,’ said Artemis Senior, and Myles knew the battle was lost. They were being tied into their father’s conditions by a contract of their own devising. A wrist-bump promise.

Myles raised his hand slowly, searching his mind for some way to void the promise. Perhaps if the scars were not precisely aligned?

‘Honour the bump, Myles,’ warned Artemis Senior. ‘No crossing your fingers or some such nonsense. You said it yourself: the bump is sacred.’

Myles’s vision was blurred now, perhaps from the myopia, or perhaps from the intensity of his concentration, but it seemed to him that Beckett’s pink scar glowed, and he felt his own scar twitch in response, seeking the contact.

If we freeze this moment and examine the psychology, some might say that all this palaver seems a bit much for something that amounts to little more than a pinky promise, but those people hugely underestimate the power of a connection between those born of the same pregnancy. Twins are often at a loss to describe this connection to singletons, but Myles Fowl, unsurprisingly, has tried. He hypothesised in an article for the Journal of Biological Sciences that regarding the emotional pull that exists between twins, we are permanently beyond each other’s event horizons, so to speak, and the mental fortitude necessary to escape that force could possibly have actual physical implications for the amygdala. While Beckett once wrote in rainbow pencil for his English teacher that Myles is like the other me, but boring.

Both boys were correct.

And the sacred wrist bump was a potent reminder to the Fowl Twins of their mental and physical bond. As babies in their double cradle, the twins often slept with their scars aligned, which supposedly reminded them of their time in the womb, and since those days they had used the wrist bump to seal every promise they had made to each other.