Chapter Text
Holly used to like routine.
Though she broke the rules of protocol when it suited her, she’d always been disciplined with herself; getting up on time to alarms, exercising on a consistent basis, and keeping a strict budget. She preferred the reliable yet crowded public transit over her hover bike and the fickleness of Haven traffic, and she even found paperwork calming, after Lili showed her how to fill it out without being overwhelmed by jargon.
Recently, however, the schedule felt like stagnation. Outside of work she only frequented five different locations, three of which were take-out places. She still had a social life, technically: she had friends, at least, though their schedules rarely aligned. Not that she was complaining. She spent most of her life at work— a job she still loved, by the way— but even the tasks of the LEP commander had become constant and predictable. Review cases, debrief officers, attend Council meetings, go over funding, repeat.
For the first few years she skyrocketed, her high-priority victories gaining her allies in the Council and, more importantly, the support of the public. Just by making some noise, Commodore Short pushed through gender reforms in the LEP, set up community-minded neighborhood watches, and funded a convict reformation and forgiveness program. But as her new-celebrity smell faded, the Council started to dismiss Holly’s proposals with the excuses she’d heard Root grumble about: “not enough personnel”, “not enough gold.” She knew it was bound to happen: she’d seen it with her mentor after all. But she didn’t anticipate how frustrated the federal handicap would make her.
When a greenhorn Council aide challenged her understanding of Haven’s economy at a meeting, she considered having Foaly peek at the aide’s own finances and see what he and his superiors were doing off the books.
The more her annoyance mounted, the more she found herself wondering, “What would Artemis do?” and she couldn’t call him and ask. She’d made a promise.
But she was still restless, and her discontent grew by the day. In an attempt to work off some of the tension, she donned her LEP Recon uniform for the first time in five years and put herself in charge of a sting operation.
Holly hopped over the gap from the clean, but somehow still smelly tube car to the Haven Square platform, a bounce in her step and a hot-cold buzz in her veins she hadn’t felt since her rookie years. She made it worse by accepting the coffee Lili Frond handed her upon entering the precinct: Holly justified the temporary comfort would make her more alert, not jittery.
“Are the jocks ready for take off?” the commodore asked, throwing her overcoat into her office before heading to the locker room.
“The officers are waiting for you in hangar bay six,” Lili said, her breathing labored as she tried to keep up.
Holly slowed her pace. The officers could wait an extra minute. “How’s the baby?” Her gaze flitted to her friend’s stomach.
Lili smiled. “The same as when you asked yesterday. She’s doing great, Commodore.”
“Well, tell her to stay that way. That’s an order.” Holly handed her the now-empty coffee mug and skipped ahead of her. “As you were, Lieutenant.”
She waited for Lili to mock-salute before entering the locker room.
After gearing up at the ops center run by their new tech director, a gnome named Bertha Groman (who wasn’t as good as Foaly, obviously, but competent and actually easier to work with), Holly herded her team into the shuttle. They were on a deadline, after all.
As she gave her team the rundown of the operation, all the debriefs she’d attended flooded her mind, the golden years of Root yelling at the sprites goofing in the back and giving her an approving grunt when she did something right. She swallowed down the nostalgia as she looked into her team’s faces. Two gnomes, a pixie, four sprites, and three of them were female. The past was golden, but the future was bright.
“Alright airheads, listen up.” She used holo-gloves to bring up their mission file on a floating sphere in the center of the cabin. “Two months ago, the surface intelligence division picked up chatter about a new narcotic in the human crime underworld. It’s a new kind of hallucinogenic drug called Illusion. Its effects include, predictably, hallucinations, but also make the users abnormally susceptible to suggestion. One who survived the experience described it as, quote ‘Musical. Like, everyone’s voices sound like music and stuff.’”
Varied levels of surprise erupted from Holly’s audience.
The pixie raised his hand. “Commander, are you insinuating humans have found a way to duplicate mesmer ?”
“Not duplicate, Captain O’Cavin,” Holly pulled up a breakdown of the drug’s composition. “It is mesmer . Or at least some magical equivalent. A dwarf operative managed to procure—“ the officers sniggered, as they knew she meant ‘steal’ “— a sample, which Groman and her techs analyzed. A few of you may know our warlocks have been experimenting with transferring magic into physical forms.” She enlarged a piece of the chemical schematic, revealing a glittering portion which could be only one thing. “It seems the humans have succeeded. Or worse, are working with a fairy who has.”
She minimized the chemical analysis and brought up a map of Amsterdam. “Our sources tell us a sale of the drug is going down at a warehouse in the East Docklands.
“O’Cavin, Runkol, and I will do recon. If the drug contact is fairy, we’ll call in you Retrieval fairies to take out the trash. If the contact is human, we’ll put a tracker on them and regroup. Clean and simple. Clear?”
“Yes, commander,” the group replied.
It was sunset when they surfaced in Noorddorp, and the fairies enjoyed the rare pleasure of watching the sky transition from vibrant orange, to pink, to violet and finally to a velvety dark blue before the three recon officers engaged their wings and flew the twenty-odd kilometers to the East Docklands.
They landed on the roof of the warehouse ten minutes before the nine o’ clock meeting, giving them time to settle into position. In her ear, she heard the gnome Runkol reciting the Danu monk calming prayer, which O’Cavin joined halfway, despite being a vocal atheist. Remembering her own first mission, Holly sympathized, and as her first active mission in years, she empathized. But she’d always had her own way of dealing with anxiety. Turning down the coms, the elf broke ranks to do a fly-over of the complex.
It was two till nine, and no criminals, human or fairy, had arrived. Was this normal? Holly had completed countless successful missions during her decades on the force, but none involved drug deals. Did drug dealers arrive late as a power play? Did they have busy schedules?
As she looked into the sky to calm her nerves, she noticed the constellation Orion. Maybe after this she could take a short leave (Frond knew, she was due) and fly over to Ireland.
How long has it been? s he wondered. I haven’t seen the moon in three years, but it can’t have been longer than that--
Her train of thought was interrupted when a Jaguar with blacked out windows pulled into the vacant car lot to the north of the warehouse. A blond man stepped out, wearing reflective sunglasses over his eyes and a bulky overcoat to hide an unknown arsenal. He laid a briefcase on the hood of the still-running car to light a cigarette. At the same time, a pair of headlights flared to life on the other side of the car park. From the other side of the lot, a beat-up old sedan Holly had previously thought abandoned rolled to face the Jaguar, keeping two aisles between them. A short figure got out of the clunker, but from her distance Holly couldn’t tell if they were a little human or a dwarf. The two talked for a minute, and another small person exited the sedan with their own briefcase.
Before she could activate her visuals, the first little person pulled out a comically large gun.
Holly reactivated coms. “Change in plans,” she said, initializing her shield as she jumped from the roof. “The deal, or whatever this is, is going down in the car park. Shield up and take positions at the east and south. If this gets violent we may have to get creative.”
Her subordinates didn’t question why they would intervene in some human squabble. Commodore Short’s affinity for the mud-dwellers was well-known: some said she was an advocate for life and didn’t discriminate, while others said she’d been brainwashed by Artemis Fowl. Whatever these officers believed, they still took their positions, though they side-eyed each other as they did.
The blond man was talking, his hands raised. Holly fiddled with some settings on her helmet until it was focused in on the man’s face, then enabled the lip-reading program.
“Because I prefer God to rafters,” he said, presumably to a question about why he didn’t rendezvous in the warehouse as planned. “In all seriousness, my friends, it’s in our benefit. I couldn’t protect you nearly as well in there.” He lifted his lapel with a thumb to show an inner coat pocket. “If you’ll permit me?”
The gunman nodded, and the blond reached into the pocket to reveal a GPS device, which he tossed across the breach. After allowing his contact to inspect it, he did something that startled Holly so badly she almost fell from the light pole she perched on. He looked directly at her.
“Retreat, now!” Holly yelled into the coms, catapulting herself into the night sky.
Before she’d finished her order, a series of explosives went off in a circumference around the two cars. Not bombs with shrapnel, but ones that threw up clouds of dust. She’d seen the Bwa’ Kel use them to ferret out shielded LEP officers.
“Get out!” she repeated, circling above the rising clouds.
“I can’t see!” Runkol replied, her voice panicked even through the fog of static on coms. “Somethin’s interfering with our equipment!”
The blond man turned to the dust clouds, his free hand now brandishing a revolver. The other gunman was aiming as well; he didn't look into the cloud, but at the GPS in his hand, using it to guide his line of fire.
D’Arvit.
“Get down and low,” she said, repeating herself a few times in case they couldn’t hear through the static. When the gunmen began firing into the fog, she could only hope they’d heard her.
D’Arvit, D’Arvit— she dive-bombed the smaller person holding the GPS.
The gunman made her when she was two meters from him and clipped her arm with a bullet, sending her wheeling off-course toward the taller man. Her shielding turned off as her healing instinct kicked in, working first on the bullet wound before moving on to the concussion she'd accrued upon hitting the pavement. She was still conscious enough to hear the blond man urge his contact to finish the deal, that “more would be on their way.”
How did this human know so much about their mode of operations? Know about them at all?
The little person looked down at the tracker and gasped--so Runkol or O’Cavin did manage to get a signal to Retrieval-- then nodded to his companion.
The humans— she could see the little peoples’ rounded ears now— seemed to forget the fairy threat for a moment as they honed in on their respective goals. The gunman aimed at the blond once again as the second little human approached with their briefcase, and the taller man with his. They swapped quickly, as if the touch of the other person’s skin would burn them.
“Check it,” the gunman told them both, though he stepped toward his comrade. The little person gasped upon lifting the lid. “Gold,” he whispered, both in awe and in question.
Her concussion now healed except for a slight case of double vision, Holly activated her wings and launched herself at the blond’s prize.
“Aurum potestas est,” the blond said.
Holly’s head snapped back as if her hair had been yanked. She was close enough to look at his face now, and ice blue eyes regarded her coldly over the rims of his glasses.
“Ar—“
Her vision filled with muzzle fire, then went black.