The Fowl Twins

‘I changed the spelling, and there you have it,’ the administrator had told her. ‘It’s my little game, which worked out well for you, not so much for Walter Kooler or Vishtar Restrume.’

The sprite administrator had a human streak and often made barbed remarks along the lines of: The lapis lazuli is a semi-precious stone. Semi-precious, hybrid. I think your parents must have been thinking along those lines, or you wouldn’t have ended up here.

The administrator chuckled drily at his own tasteless joke every single time he cracked it. Lazuli never even smiled.

It was exceedingly exasperating for a pixel not to possess the magical phenotypic trait, especially since her driving ambition was to achieve the rank of captain in the LEPrecon, a post where abilities such as the mesmer, invisibility and healing powers would most certainly prove to be boons. Fortunately for Heitz, her obdurate streak, sharp mind and dead eye with an oxalis pistol had so far carried her through two years of intense training in the LEP Academy and now to specialist duty in a safe zone. Lazuli did suspect that her Academy application might have been bolstered by the LEP’s minority-inclusion policy.

And Lazuli certainly was a minority. Her DNA profile breakdown was forty-two per cent elf, fifty-three per cent pixie and five per cent undeterminable. Unique.

The evening’s exercise was straightforward: fairies were secreted around the island, and it was her mission to track them down. These were not real fairies, of course. They were virtual avatars that could be tagged by passing a gloved hand through holograms projected by her helmet camera. There would be clues to follow: chromatographic reactions, tracks, faint scents, and a learned knowledge of the species’ habits. Once she punched in, Specialist Heitz would have thirty minutes to tag as many virtual fugitives as she could.

Before Lazuli could so much as repeat the mantra that had sustained her for many years and through several personal crises, which happened to be small equals motivated,a pulsating purple blob blossomed on her visor’s display.

This was most unusual. Purple was usually reserved for live trolls. Perhaps her helmet was glitching. This would not be in the least surprising, as Academy equipment was always bottom of the priority list when the budget was being carved up between departments. Lazuli’s suit was threadbare and ill-fitting, and packed with weapons that hadn’t been standard issue in decades.

She blinked at the purple blob to enlarge it and realised that there was indeed a troll on the beach, albeit a tiny one. The poor fellow was smaller than her, though he did not seem as intimidated by the human world as she was.

I must rescue him,Lazuli told herself. This was undoubtedly the correct action, unless this troll was involved somehow in a live manoeuvre. Lazuli’s angel mentor, who directed the exercise from Haven City, had explicitly and repeatedly ordered her never to poke her nose into an operation.

‘There are two types of fast track, Specialist Heitz,’ the angel had said only that morning. ‘The fast track to the top, and the fast track out the door. Poke your nose into an operation where it doesn’t belong, and guess which track you’ll be on.’

Lazuli didn’t need to guess.

A thought occurred to her: could it be that the coincidental appearance of a troll on this island was her stinkworm?

This was very possible, as LEP instructors were a sneaky bunch.

A specialist’s mettle was often stress-tested by mocking up an emergency and observing how the cadet coped. Rookies referred to this testing as beingthrown a stinkworm, because, as every fairy knew, if a person were thrown an actual stinkworm and they mishandled it, there would be an explosive, viscous and foul-smelling outcome. There was a legend in the Academy about how one specialist had been dropped into the crater of an apparently active volcano to see how he would handle the crisis. The specialist in question did not respond with the required fortitude and was now wanding registration chips in the traffic department.

Lazuli had no intention of wanding chips in traffic.

This could be my stinkworm,she thought.

In which case, she should simply observe, as her angel would be keeping a close eye.

Or it could be a genuine operation.

In which case, she should most definitely steer clear, as there would be LEP agents in play.

But there was a third option.

Option C: was it possible that the Fowls were running an operation of their own here? The human Artemis Fowl had a chequered history with the People.

If that were the case, then she should rescue the toy troll, who was perhaps three metres away from two children her facial-recognition software labelled as Myles and Beckett Fowl.

Lazuli hung in the air while she mulled over her options. Her angel had mentioned the name Artemis before the Dalkey Island exercise.

‘If you ever meet Artemis Fowl, he is to be trusted,’ she’d said literally minutes before Lazuli boarded her magma pod. ‘His instructions are to be followed without question.’

But her comrades in the locker room told a different story.

‘That entire family is poison,’ one Recon sprite had told her. ‘I saw some of the sealed files before a mission. That Fowl guy kidnapped one of our captains and made off with the ransom fund. Take it from me, once a human family gets a taste of fairy gold, it’s only a matter of time before they come back for more, so watch out up there.’

Lazuli had no option but to trust her angel, but maybe she would keep a close eye on the twins. Should she do more than that?

Observe, steer clear or engage?

How was a specialist supposed to tell a convincingly staged emergency from an actual one?

All this speculation took Lazuli perhaps three seconds, thanks to her sharp mind. After the third second, the emergency graduated to a full-blown crisis when a shot echoed across the sound and the little troll was sent tumbling with the force of the impact, landing squarely at the rowdy child’s feet. Beckett Fowl immediately grabbed and restrained the toy troll.

This effectively removed Specialist Heitz’s dilemma. It was just as her comrades had foretold: the Fowls were kidnapping a fairy!

An LEP operative’s first responsibility was to protect life, prioritising fairy life, and so now Lazuli was duty-bound and morally obliged to rescue the toy troll.

The prospect both terrified and thrilled her.

The first thing to do was inform her angel of the developing situation, even though radio silence was protocol during exercises.

‘Specialist Heitz to Haven. Priority-one trans-mission …’

If anyone had been on the other end of that transmission, they would have been left curious, because at that moment dozens of flares were launched from the house, and Specialist Heitz was forced to take evasive action to avoid being clipped. She had barely got her rig under control when there came a rumbling series of booms and Lazuli felt a wave of crackles pass through her body. The crackles were not particularly painful, but they did have the effect of shorting out her communicator along with every circuit and sensor in her shimmer suit. Lazuli watched in horror as her own limbs speckled into view.

‘Oh …’ she said, then fell out of the sky.

Not all the way down, fortunately, as Specialist Heitz’s suit launched its back-up operational system, which ran like clockwork because it was clockwork: a complicated hub of sealed gears and cogs ingeniously interlinked in a series of planetary epicyclic mechanisms that fed directly into a motor in Lazuli’s wing mounts.

Lazuli felt the legs of her jumpsuit stiffen and instinctively began to pedal before she hit the earth like an injured bird. The gears were phenomenally efficient, with barely a joule of energy loss thanks to the sealed hub, and so Specialist Heitz was able to reclaim her previous altitude with a steady mid-air pedal. But she was still quite plainly in the visible spectrum, looking for all the world like she was riding an invisible unicycle.

Though Lazuli’s spine had not been compacted by a high-speed impact with Dalkey Island, she still had the problem of how to effectively engage a sniper when she was operating under pedal power. If Lazuli attempted to approach the sniper, he could take potshots at his leisure.

Visibility was the problem.

So become invisible, Heitz.

But how to become invisible without any magic or even an operational shimmer suit?

There was a way, but it was neither foolproof nor field-tested, though it had been tried in somewhat raucous conditions, those being the communal area of the cadets’ locker room – inside lockers 28 and 29, to be precise. Lazuli knew this because she had witnessed the bullying, and lost ten grade points for repeating the experiment on the bully.

Lazuli reached into one of the myriad pockets in her suit and drew out a pressurised pod of chromophoric camouflage filaments held together by reinforced spider silk. The Filabuster, as it was known by LEP operatives, was rarely deployed, and in fact was due to be removed from duty kits in the next few months because of the unpredictability of its range, but now it was the only weapon in Lazuli’s arsenal that was actually of any use, as it had no electronic parts and came pre-primed.

The Filabuster operated on the same system that certain plants employ to disperse their seeds. The fibres inside the dried egg pull against each other to create tension, and when the silken cowl is ruptured the reflective filaments explode with considerable force, creating a visual distortion that can provide enough cover to cause momentary confusion.

But I need more than momentary confusion, Lazuli thought. I need to be invisible.

Which was where the locker-room antics came in. When a hulking demon cadet had forced a tiny pixie into his own locker and then tossed in an armed Filabuster, the pixie had emerged coated in filaments and practically invisible, and also, it turned out later, battered and bruised.

Perhaps this is not a good idea,thought Lazuli. Then she pulled the spider-silk ripcord before she could change her mind. Now there were approximately ten seconds before the silk surrendered to the internal pressure and exploded in a dense fountain of chromophoric filaments that would adjust to the region’s dominant colour, which ought to be the blue-black of the early evening Irish Sea.