Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Artemis regained consciousness slowly, in stages.

The first thing that he noticed through the hazy half-stupor was that he was uncomfortable. His mouth felt dry and swollen and his head was throbbing in the same way it had the morning after he had decided to conduct some scientific research into the effects of intoxication via single-malt Irish whiskey. And while his notes had been extensive, and his conclusions had been groundbreaking, it was not an experiment he had been intending to repeat any time soon.

Strangely what felt worst were his arms – a tingling kind of ache that did not so much throb in time with his head as fade in and out as his other pains made themselves more or less difficult to ignore.

As he shook off the after-effects of the sedative a little more, he realised that the reason his arms were hurting was that they were supporting his entire body-weight, his body dangling limply by his bound wrists from the ceiling. Groggily remembering why he should be in such a situation, he came to himself enough to twist his head slightly, relief flooding him as he felt the ghostly remnant of pain, like a tiny bruise on the back of his neck, just above the hairline. Butler, acting under his instructions, had inserted a prototype of Artemis' latest invention under the skin there, where it would remain hidden. As long as that had been real, Artemis thought, he could put up with nearly anything.

Artemis' next realisation, although he hadn't yet opened his eyes, was that the room was apparently flooded with light. The light was clearly artificial, as it was so bright that his eyes stung painfully from exposure even through his closed lids. The ringing in his ears, too, appeared to be an externally generated noise – a constant mechanical whine designed to fill the room and his brain with white noise.

The light flicked off, for barely a fraction of a second, leaving a bright green afterimage on the insides of his eyelids, then it came back on again.

Just as Artemis became convinced the momentary loss of power had been his imagination, the light flicked off again for the briefest of instants, before returning to its original steady glow.

Barely a moment later it flicked again, then waited for almost eight seconds before flickering once more.

Off. On. Five seconds.

Off. On. Three seconds.

Designed to flicker at random intervals, then, he decided, to aggravate the prisoner and prevent him from concentrating or sleeping. Very efficient. If Artemis ever came up with a plan so crude as to require keeping a genius captive, he would have to remember this tactic – although, he was forced to admit to himself, by the time this was over he may well count himself lucky if he was able to forget.

Artemis cracked his eyes open a fraction, trying to catch a glimpse of something from beneath the shelter of his lashes. The light was coming from a spotlight shining directly in his eyes and he almost groaned – he should have known better than to tempt fate during his interrogation. The only thing bright enough for him to see was his own pale, naked chest, illuminated by the same light that stabbed at his eyes. The floor he could vaguely feel beneath his bare feet might as well have not been there; he could have been swimming in an ocean of darkness for all he could see beyond the brilliance of the spotlight.

It didn't really bother him that they had taken his clothes. His body was simply a shell to house his mind and, while an immaculate suit gave him an air of power he certainly lacked naked, whatever his captor did to him could only affect him if he let it. He did not intend to do so.

"Awake, I see."

The light flickered off, and then on again.

Artemis remained still, hoping that his captor was simply fishing for a response and resisting the almost unendurable urge to look around for the source of the voice. Besides the fact that his ability to see past the brilliance of the spotlight was almost nonexistent, there was an ever so slight metallic cast to the voice which informed him that the person speaking was not physically present in the room.

He knew exactly what his captor was trying to do, of course. Artemis had been intrigued by psychology from a very early age, and had extensively researched its particular application to captivity in preparation for his first contact with the fairies. His knowledge of the Book, however, had meant that he had not needed to go to too much trouble to extract either information or compliance. He had used some very basic tricks – time dilation and inducing guilt – in order to lower Captain Short's morale and hide the source of his –

The light flickered again, breaking his train of thought, and Artemis felt the beginnings of anxiety bubble in his chest.

"Well, Mud Boy?" said his captor impatiently.

That confirmed that he had given away his wakeful state. Artemis took the opportunity to shift his weight onto his feet, taking the strain off his shoulders, which burst into sudden agony as the blood began flowing a little more normally.

"This really isn't necessary," he said thickly, his tongue feeling twice its usual size in his mouth. "My loyalties are flexible."

"I'll bet they are," said the voice with a chuckle. "Tell me – how did you resist the mesmer?"

"Certain meditation exercises increase the resistance of the mind to outside influences," Artemis lied smoothly. If they weren't already, his lenses would soon be corroded beyond use, so he would have to avoid being mesmerised at all costs. "I started studying them as soon as I –"

The light flickered again and Artemis broke off, annoyingly disconcerted by it. "When I read about the mesmer in the Book," he finished, barely restraining a flinch when the light flicked again almost as soon as he'd fallen silent.

It was just so bright! It seemed to penetrate right through to the back of his skull and he couldn't possibly ignore the momentary relief of darkness when it came.

"Plausible, I suppose," agreed the voice. "Unfortunately for you, it means that I'm going to need you to swear a slave oath before I can trust you. I assume you know what that means."

He did. Holding humans in slavery was one of the fairy powers fully explained in the Book, although most modern-day fairies considered it barbaric. Human rights activists were pushing to have it illegalised in civil law, whether or not it was technically allowed by the Book.

The slave oath was much more ethically dubious than the mesmer because, while a mesmerised human could not be forced to do something entirely against their character, the enslavement of an oath was more complete. A human sworn into the service of a fairy could be asked to kill their own mother, or to stop breathing, and would be magically compelled to obey. It was also essentially permanent, dissolving only upon the death of one of the parties.

It did require a human's willing participation to be formed, but the definition of 'willing' seemed to be somewhat loose – while actions under the mesmer did not count, deception, bribery, and coercion all seemed to be quite valid methods of influencing a human to cooperate. Fortunately, according to rule fifty-six of the Book, physical torture was out of the question, unless his captor wanted to lose his magic. Artemis was exceedingly glad – he was certain he could not have withstood much pain for long.

There was an advantage, of course, to entering a fairy's service, making bribery a close second to deception as a method of encouraging cooperation. The human's natural life was indefinitely extended, the aging process entirely halted. Of course, upon the fairy's death, the human generally had less than twenty-four hours before their advanced age caught up with them, but more than one human had been lured into slavery by the promise of eternal youth. Reading the Book's version of the story of Tan Kabelle, the pixie who had collected dozens of human children for her amusement, had cast the cheery fairytale of boys who refused to grow up into quite another light.

Unfortunately, Artemis was yet to find a workaround, should he be forced to agree. To be realistic, he didn't even know where to start – he couldn't see any weak points to work on. No eye-contact was necessary, no exceptions were made, there were no convenient consciousness side notes, the power of the fairy over the human's mind seemed to be complete. As far as Artemis could tell, once an oath was sworn, its effects were inexorable and permanent. His first order would almost certainly be not to attempt escape. That would make his second order completely unavoidable – which was completely unacceptable – and there was still that twinge of hope at the back of his neck…

The light flashed again but, since his decision had never really been in question, it didn't bother him. It might have been more comfortable if he could feign compliance while he waited, but not at that cost.

"I won't do it," he croaked.

"Obviously not flexible enough, then," said the voice, and then there was silence except for the constant buzzing whine that seemed to fill up the entire room, setting Artemis' teeth on edge.

He controlled his breathing, taking and releasing deep breaths as he tried to meditate, tried to push his situation out of mind and focus on his way out, but he couldn't manage it. The constant white noise was impossible to block out and light burned into his retinas, random flickers distracting him and derailing each train of thought before it could really start.

Aware that, although he could see nothing, his captor would almost certainly have a camera trained on him at all times, Artemis tried to stretch his shoulders a little, smothering a rueful smile with a wince of pain.

All things being equal, he really did have to admire this set up.

Some Time Earlier…

Passing my son's room, I frowned as heard an unfamiliar buzzing. Arty's mobile phone ring tone was unmistakable. The fractally generated waterfall of sound had won him the Dublin Electronic Music award for the past three years running under a pseudonym, moving several of the judges to tears with the dual beauty of the code and the sound it produced.

This harsh vibrating buzz, however, did not sound like Arty. Either he had not yet reprogrammed the device to a more pleasing sound – which was unlikely, unless it was very new – or it was something beyond his ability to manipulate – which sounded even more unlikely. Most curious. The sound cut off with a soft beep and Arty spoke.

"I've got some ideas," he said. "The thief must have been a…"

"No time for that," snapped a woman's voice and I jumped. It sounded almost as clear as though she was in the room with him. "Sool's sent a team to pick you up. You're to be interrogated on suspicion of involvement in the theft."

"I wasn't involved. I have nothing to fear," said Arty, his voice completely even. My stomach sank – it was the complete lack of inflection in the tone that gave it away to those who knew him best. My son was definitely not as calm as he was pretending to be.

"Yes, you do," said the woman grimly. "They've kept it very quiet – only the Council ever knew – but apparently some ancient phlegm pot cleaner prophesied that you would open the box. Even if they find out you're not involved, Sool's pushing to have you executed to ensure you don't get involved. At the very least you'll be mind-wiped, and Retrieval's been ordered to pick up your parents too, so I suspect they're going to eliminate the whole family to be sure no one else can fit the prophecy either."

My stomach sank even deeper. Either this conversation was in code, or the situation was more alarmingly bizarre than I had imagined – and it sounded a little too coherent to be in code.

Arty was silent for a moment, obviously thinking. "This is madness," he said finally. "Bringing me in just doesn't make sense at this stage. At least they won't kill me until they find out for certain whether I know where the box is. How long do I have?"

"Not long. Sool's been hanging over Foaly's shoulder, so he couldn't get word to me – Retrieval One's already on the surface at Tara."

"I need to know this prophecy. Word for word."

"Hang on – Foaly sent it over. Here: 'Further Prophecies of Ohm, phlegm pot cleaner to –'"

"Skip ahead to the relevant part," Arty interrupted her. "We don't have time for this."

"Right. Blah, blah, blah… Ah! 'In these dark days I have seen another vision of the one, fowl by name and fowl by nature, who comes among us. Guard well the box of the king's beloved for only in his hands will it be opened once more, and from his hands, death and devastation will be unleashed on those fairies who oppose him.'"

There was a pause and then the woman's voice continued. "That's all that's about you, I think – the rest seems to be just gibberish about how to read the future in the phlegm."

"Thank you. I need to get moving."

"You do," she agreed. "Good luck."

There was a period of a few seconds silence, as though Arty wanted to say something else, but couldn't think what, before a soft beep signalled that he had simply closed the connection without another word.

Before I could decide whether to reveal myself or not, Arty turned the corner out of his room and caught sight of me. I've never been able to work out for certain whether my son actually doesknow everything, or whether he simply has the best poker face I've ever seen, but he didn't reveal the slightest hint of surprise, as though he had known I was there all along.

"I need you and Mother to stay inside, well away from the windows," Arty said, meeting my eyes seriously. "I can't explain. Intruders will be here shortly, you may not be able to see them, but you will be safe if you stay well inside the house."

He turned without waiting for a response and strode off down the corridor towards the security centre. I caught up with him within a few paces – at only a month and a half away from his fifteenth birthday, the boy had recently hit a growth spurt, but he was still eleven inches shorter than me, a fact in which I took great pride. I may not have been able to beat my son at crime, business, or chess, but by God I could still outrun him, even with a false leg and a cane.

"Tell me what's going on," I said, falling into step beside him. "It sounds to me as though whatever this scheme of yours is has endangered your mother and me, as well."

I kept my tone light; there would be time for recriminations later, when my son had explained himself.

"It's not that I don't want to tell you, Father," insisted Arty, "it is simply not my secret to tell. The main reason I am in trouble is that I know something that I shouldn't and the people involved are concerned that I will exploit their secrets – it won't help your case or mother's if you actually do know anything."

I was silent for a few moments as I mulled that over. As usual, my son's reasoning made a lot of sense – but there was no way I could stand by and let him face whatever this was on his own. "That's as may be, Arty," I said finally, "but I might be able to help if I know what's going on. Some of it, I've worked out already. Work with me here and we'll have a better chance!"

Arty bowed his head in thought as he walked and when he looked up again, his bright blue eyes were shining with something I couldn't quite recognise. "Would you believe me," he said, "if I told you I had discovered the existence of a magical and technologically advanced hidden civilisation – a people known as the fairies?"

I didn't flinch, but on the inside I was suddenly gibbering in terror. My son would not lie to me, not about something like this. And unfortunately, it seemed all too plausible, given some of the information I had managed to gather on Arty's antics while I was missing or incapacitated – he had executed an impossible rescue, filled vast vaults with untraceable gold, and one of his targets even swore he'd disappeared in front of the his very eyes!

The one thing I had been trying to teach my son since he was only a small boy was not to overreach himself. I had never succeeded, mostly because Arty had never actually managed to overreach himself – his abilities in whatever he approached seemed limitless. If the boy had indeed discovered the existence of such a race he would not have considered it something that was clearly best left alone – as every other rational person on earth would have. He would have considered it a challenge.

"Yes," I said eventually.

"Excellent," said Arty, looking relieved not to have to prove his claim. "I began my association with the fairies by kidnapping a police officer to extort gold."

I knew it!

"But," Arty continued, "I then went on to save their race three times – admittedly one of those times was my fault, but only one. Now someone's stolen a weapon of mass destruction that can only be used by a human and only against fairies – and some long-dead fairy prophesied that it would be me who used it. The most worrying thing is that his last prophecies about me came true. They're going to interrogate me and then execute me to ensure that I can never use it.

"I can't begin to explain how completely out of character this is for their race," he continued. "They are a gentle people who abandoned the surface to avoid war with us, despite the fact that they could have crushed us without even trying – they probably still could, for that matter. However, their police force – the LEP – has recently been taken over by a vindictive gnome without a conscience or any instinct for his work. Sool plays everything precisely by the rule book or according to his own personal agendas, which makes him completely ineffectual as either an investigator or an enforcer and prevents his subordinates from doing their jobs. Somehow he's decided that the safest way to play this situation is to eliminate me – along with every other Fowl."

We reached the security room then and pushed our way through the double-doors into the windowless chamber. Arty's bodyguard, and mine, were instantly paged with the instructions to make their way to our position. Angeline, however, presented more of a problem. She considered it vulgar to carry a pager or phone inside her own house and, while her bodyguard would have been able to tell us her exact location, Juliet Butler had left the Fowls' employ to tour the world wrestling scene and my wife was yet to find a suitable replacement. We would have to search for her the long way.

I went to one of the monitors and began scrolling through the closed circuit television feeds from cameras scattered around the manor, starting with the places where she was most likely to be.

"What are their strengths?" I asked as I searched, trying to reduce this situation to another game, another textbook situation against a known opponent.

"Invisibility. Flight. Mind control. Healing, of themselves and others. Long lives. Technology far beyond anything humans have ever seen, including weapons, surveillance, hacking, memory wiping, and time manipulation." Arty's tone was absent, the majority of his attention focussed on the monitor in front of him as he cycled through cameras searching for his mother.

I closed my eyes for a moment in horror, my heart beating loud and fast in my ears. When my son made enemies, he really made enemies. The urgency of the situation reasserting itself, I sped up my search and croaked, "Weaknesses?"

"Usually, an overwhelming compassion, especially for innocents, and they can be overly reliant on their own superiority. A slight shimmer in the air gives away the position of a shielded fairy. They cannot enter a human dwelling uninvited. They must obey our instructions once inside. They have a limited amount of magic and, when it runs out, must restore it in a ritual involving a full moon and an acorn. They are mostly of small physical size. We can resist mesmerisation through the use of mirrored sunglasses or contact lenses. We can escape their time field by drugging ourselves to sleep. Where IS she?" he demanded finally and I jumped.

Arty never raised his voice, any more than he called me 'Dad'. Things must be worse, even, than he was letting on.

I froze as my screen finally found a camera with Angeline in its view and swore out loud. Less than a second later, I knew that Arty had seen her too, because he let the tiniest sigh of air escape through his nose and then sank cross-legged to the floor to meditate. I didn't disturb him with questions or suggestions; whatever plan Arty came up with in the few minutes we had would be many times better than anything of mine.

I could only fix my eyes on the figure of my wife, where she conversed with a tiny figure in the garden, and hope that, whatever it was, it would be enough.

Chapter Text

Without meaning to, Artemis found himself waiting for the flickers of the light, counting seconds.

One, one thousand, two, one thousand – off, on.

One, one thousand – off, on.

One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand – off, on.

It felt like he had been here for days. Actually, it had felt like he had been here for days what felt like days ago. He tried to focus on something – anything – other than the growing suspicion that he was on his own, but he couldn't marshal his thoughts into any semblance of order. He was worried, he had to admit. How long had it been? How long could it possibly take them to get here?

Off, on. Four seconds.

The flicker somehow managed to catch him by surprise each time, jolting him out of whatever meagre thoughts he had managed to assemble. Trying to hold all the variables of a plan in his head at once was simply impossible with the flashes of light knocking them out every few seconds.

Off, on. Two seconds.

He had not, however, Artemis reminded himself, lost all control over his situation. He could still assert some level of influence over his captor whenever he chose.

Now that the majority of the pain he had woken up with had died away to a dull ache, numerous itches had sprung up all over his body in an effort to provide him with sensory input. It really was the least of his worries – he often experienced the same sensation of all-over itching when meditating, it was a common distraction in the early stages and Artemis had grown accustomed to ignoring it – but he allowed himself to twist against his bonds, visibly succumbing to the urge to attempt to scratch.

"Uncomfortable, are we?" asked the disembodied voice and Artemis resisted the urge to smile triumphantly at the minor victory, keeping his game face firmly in place. He must be being watched very carefully for such an immediate response to a display of discomfort. "Perhaps you'd like to swear me an oath?"

"I know what you're planning," said Artemis thickly. The light flickered, but he pressed on. "It won't just kill the ones you're after, though; don't you care about the collateral damage? Doesn't it bother you that thousands of innocent fairies could die?"

"Innocent?" scoffed the voice. "Nobody's innocent, human, not even among the fairies."

"What about the LEP?" he tried. "They'll be the worst hit and they're only trying to help the People. The ones guarding Howler's Peak will be absolutely slaughtered!"

"The LEP? Don't make me laugh! Corrupt, out-of-control egotists - there's not a fairy who isn't in it solely for power, bribes, or surface privileges!"

Artemis had to actually bite his tongue through two flickers of the light to prevent himself from speaking and he tasted blood before he managed to completely restrain the urge. Anything he could say now would only count as 'antagonising his captor' and, however satisfying it would be, was not a good idea.

"Hmmm," said his captor as Artemis remained silent for long enough to make it clear there would be no response forthcoming. "I'll leave you to think for another few days, then, shall I?"

Artemis' stomach churned. Had he really been standing there for as long as it seemed? It felt like an eternity and, if there was one thing Artemis could be absolutely certain of, it was that he had never gone anywhere near this long without the material comforts of food, water, or sleep. If it really had been as long as it had seemed, his plan must have failed; there would be no-one coming to rescue him.

He pushed the thought forcibly out of his mind, gladly letting another flicker of the light distract him. Time dilation was the most basic of psychological manipulations – the single most effective way of establishing a state of confusion and dependence in the victim. Even he had used it on Holly when he had held her captive. Nothing his captor said was trustworthy. Nothing.

"Such a pity," said the voice, brimming with false concern, "that humans don't respond well to the higher settings on neutrino weapons – this would go so much faster if your parents had survived."

Off, on. Seven seconds.

Nothing his captor said was trustworthy. He had to believe it. He had to. But he couldn't be sure. His parents would have been vulnerable – to capture or murder. They obviously hadn't been captured, or they would have been used earlier. It would have been easy. It would even have been prudent, since his captor was attempting to force his own interpretation of that prophecy.

Still, whether his parents were alive or not, he would probably have been told they were dead. Depriving the subject of hope was standard technique to establishing psychological vulnerability. Even –

Off, on. Four seconds.

His parents were alive. He hadn't seen their bodies, so they –

Off, on. One second.

He must have shown something of his thoughts on his face despite his best efforts, as they were answered by a chuckle from the speaker that brought him back to his senses.

Ameteur. He's an amateur, he can't hurt me, Artemis told himself disdainfully. I am Artemis Fowl the Second, and I can think my way out of anywhere and anything.

Then the light flickered again and he lost his train of thought.

Earlier…

We were almost ready by the time we received our ultimatum – an amplified voice informing us to come out of the front door within five minutes, alone and unarmed, if we wanted Angeline to live. We arrived in the vaulted foyer of Fowl Manor with a minute to spare.

As we paused to collect our thoughts, Arty's Butler took a step forward, his fingers tightening around the grip of his Sig Sauer, a seemingly unconscious move on his part to place himself between his employer and the risky path on which he was embarking.

"Thank you, old friend," said Arty, a wry smile touching his lips. "If I don't see you again, don't blame yourself."

"I do not think that is an order that I will be able to obey," replied Butler bleakly.

My Butler, a relatively new employee, shot his cousin a scornful glance. I smiled ruefully. Whatever Madame Ko's theories were on not getting attached to one's principal, I for one was very glad that my son had found a friend as well as an employee in his Butler. My first Butler, the Major, had been my closest friend and confidant, having been with me from the cradle until he perished in the sinking of the Fowl Star. I still felt the gruff man's absence more keenly than that of my leg.

"Then we must hope for the best," said Arty firmly, his game face settling back into place. "It may not be the best plan I've ever made, but it's all we have."

Butler patted the slim bulge of the fairy communicator in the breast-pocket of his suit, his bleak face twisting into a slight grimace of acknowledgement.

"Father?" Arty asked, checking his watch. "It's time."

As one, we turned and headed out the front door of the mansion together, leaving the Butlers behind us. The walk down the front steps and out onto the immaculately groomed lawn seemed to take hours longer than it usually did, moving steadily towards the small man aiming what looked like a child-sized water pistol at my wife. I suspected, looks aside, that the gun would dispense significantly more than a jet of water if he fired.

Despite the fact that we were surrendering, I couldn't resist giving the fairy my fiercest glare before turning to examine my wife's expression. She looked peaceful, relaxed, as though there was nothing on earth that could harm her, least of all the gun pointed so casually at her.

I considered how easy it would be to simply knock the tiny gun out of this irritating halfling's hand and return to the house, but a closer look at the air behind the pair made me realise that the visible fairy was the least of our problems. The whole area was shimmering slightly, the way Arty had described the giveaway for a shielded fairy. Sizing up the visible fairy, I tried to make an estimate of the number of hidden team members in the shimmering area – ten or more, I was certain. All, probably, with invisible weapons pointed at us. Unpromising odds, to say the least.

"Hello, Major Kelp," said Arty conversationally. "I'm sorry it had to be under these circumstances that we meet again."

The visible fairy pressed a button on the side of his helmet, raising his visor with a faint hiss to reveal a face that was almost human looking, save for the size. His tiny, hooked nose was wrinkled in an expression of distaste as he mouthed, "Sool's orders. He's gone mad!"

I darted a sidelong look at Arty, but he hadn't given the slightest flicker of recognition that Kelp had said anything, so I kept quiet.

"Don't try to talk your way out of this, Fowl," Kelp continued aloud, then raised his eyebrows as though he had asked a question.

"I wouldn't dream of it," said Arty sardonically. "I don't suppose I could convince you to leave my parents in peace, though?"

The small man's face twisted regretfully. "Not without…" he mouthed.

"I didn't think so," Arty continued as though it had been a rhetorical question, rolling his eyes in resignation. "Lead on, then. I suppose I must be under suspicion every time anything remotely unpleasant happens to the People, mustn't I?"

"Just follow me peacefully," ordered Kelp, although this time his voice sounded different – melodious and layered with multiple tones, like a choir all on its own.

I let my face slacken and my eyes dull in an imitation of Angeline's expression, as Arty had instructed, trailing placidly behind the fairy towards the Manor's gates. My eyes itched from the unfamiliar contact lenses, but it seems that my acting passed muster, because I remained unchallenged. So far, so good. We could only hope that the rest of this hastily-constructed plan worked as well.

As we came closer to the cloaked transport Arty had warned me would be waiting, its disguise became less effective. The main giveaway was the open door, which was completely visible along with the steps leading up to it, although on closer examination I decided there was a flat, slightly distorted quality to the ostensibly empty air around it. I didn't get the chance to examine it in more detail, however, because Kelp was leading us up the stairs into the shuttle. The three of us meekly allowed ourselves to be manacled to a rail at the back and sat, unmoving, as the craft took off.

When the fairies with us unshielded, I could see that Arty had been right when he said that this move was out of character; my eyes were automatically seeking out each of my opponents, memorising their features, assessing their personal weaknesses. Those in the shuttle with us looked nervous and conflicted – and I assumed they would have sent the closest they had on the police force to killers. They darted guilty looks at the three of us throughout the flight and worriedly eyed the cameras watching over the interior of the shuttle, as though their commanding officer might be watching them at any time.

If Arty hadn't described Sool to me, I would have thought they were being paranoid, but I knew the type. If he was half as obsessively rule-bound as he sounded, he would spend twice as much time policing his own police-force for minor infractions as he did chasing real criminals – and four times that amount on assembling structures and procedures which were wasteful of everyone else's time as well. In most cases, he would have been a criminal's dream come true.

We didn't break from our rigid imitation of a hypnotic state until we were miles underground, seated in a conference room absolutely packed with green-suited fairies, and Major Kelp verbally released the three of us from his mesmerisation. With at least a basic understanding of what was going on, and having been feigning susceptibility to the mind control anyway, Arty and I remained calm. Angeline, understandably, panicked.

"Where am I?" she shrieked, leaping to her feet and striking her head on the low ceiling. I made a mental note to hunch if I had to stand up. "What did you do to me? What are you creatures?"

Arty shot me a look and I hurriedly grabbed her hand, trying to pull her back down into her seat. "It's all right, Angeline," I tried to soothe her, keeping a watchful eye on a fairy at the back of the room, who was filling a small syringe with what was presumably a sedative. "I'll explain later."

She looked at me with an edge of terror in her eyes, not helped, I'm sure, by the fact that Angeline has always been able to see right through my masks and would know just how frightened I truly was. She subsided, however, her lips moving in a silent prayer as she realised the delicacy of the situation. The fairy with the syringe gave her a suspicious look before retiring back to stand against the wall.

"No interrogation room this time?" asked Arty, smoothly drawing the attention away his mother. "No bad cop, worse cop routine with the light shining in my eyes? I must say I'm disappointed. I guess it's too much to hope that you'll also restrain yourself from quoting threateningly from The Wizard of Oz?"

There was a snigger from somewhere in the room. The creature at the head of the table, presumably Ark Sool, the gnome in charge, scanned the room darkly for the source before he turned back to face my son. He and the fairy with the syringe seemed to be the only ones in the room who were completely unsympathetic to our situation – that, at least, was a very good sign.

"We're not here for chit-chat, Fowl," he growled. "You're here to give us information."

Arty and I exchanged a glance, made an impromptu adjustment to the plan, and then turned back to him. "Yes?" we asked in innocent unison.

It was immature, I had to admit it. It served no real purpose in the overall plan. But it could push a dangerous enemy off balance, make him angry, make him more likely to make a mistake – a mistake which we might well be able to use against him.

Sool's smile slipped a little bit as he looked from my son to me and back again.

"I see," he said flatly. "Very amusing. Artemis, then, you're going to answer some questions."

"Of course," we answered again, in cheery unison. Several of the guilty looking police-fairies around the table looked as though they were barely restraining themselves from laughing out loud.

"Boys," said Angeline reprovingly, right on schedule.

We hadn't played his game since Arty was only a small boy, but she still knew her lines flawlessly from the number of times we had used the technique for putting my prospective targets off-balance. I could hardly restrain a grin at the fond memory, but a poker-face was far more effective at this stage.

"I do hope you'll forgive them," Angeline told the now-scowling creature on the other side of the table in a motherly tone, "I sometimes wonder which one is the younger, myself."

"Angeline!" we protested. "How can you say such a thing?"

A loud guffaw burst from a bizarre looking creature with the upper body of a half-size man and the four legs and tail of a fairly small Shetland pony. It could only be a centaur, really, but for some reason my mind was refusing to accept the possibility, focussing instead on trying to decide whether the incongruous tinfoil hat he was wearing was a fashion statement or a symptom of paranoia.

Sool shot the unrepentant creature a glare and turned back to us, visibly fuming now. "YOU!" he snarled, pointing at Arty. "Where is Pandora's box?"

His voice was layered with deep notes that seemed to resonate over and over again in the conference room. The opening gambit was over; now it was time for Arty's desperate plan to be put into motion.

"Hidden," Arty replied. "I have set it to target each and every living fairy and arranged for it to be opened. If my parents and I are not returned unharmed by sunset tonight, the fairies will be no more."

The silence in the room was immediate and absolute. The creature across from us seemed to have been completely floored by Arty's pronouncement and, although the centaur appeared to be taking it all in his stride, we had suddenly lost all sympathy from the other fairies around the room. I hadn't really expected otherwise – most sentient beings would probably respond badly if you told them you were about to exterminate their entire civilisation.

"TELL ME WHERE IT IS!" Sool roared, pouring so much of the layered sounds into his voice that several of the fairies cringed, although whether it was at the volume or a judgment on the amount of magic in his speech, I couldn't tell.

Sitting in his chair like it was a throne, Arty didn't even twitch. "No," he said coolly. "No, I don't think I will."

The silence was, if it was possible, even more complete than before. It was as though time had frozen for an instant, as though the whole universe was doing a double-take at seeing something that just couldn't be true.

"No human is immune to the mesmer," breathed Sool in disbelief.

Arty raised an eyebrow, but said nothing more.

"NO HUMAN IS IMMUNE TO THE MESMER!" repeated the gnome, as though saying it again, louder, would make it true.

"I threw off a mind wipe," said Arty dismissively. "I escaped the time field. I separated the People from half a tonne of their gold. What makes you think the mesmer – or any of your other little toys, for that matter – would be any more effective against me? I know all your secrets – and I know how to work around them."

"Well, if you can resist the mesmer, we can't trust what you said earlier!" Sool sneered, and a few of the fairies in the room began to regain their equilibrium. "Have you really arranged for Pandora's box to open?"

"You obviously believe I would do it, otherwise you wouldn't have brought me here," Arty returned, raising his eyebrow again. "Can you really afford to take the chance?"

Some of the fairies looked sceptical – until a smirk that showed far too many teeth and far too little kindness for most people's comfort began to spread across Arty's face. Unable to resist, I gave an identical smile. My son had learned from the best, after all.

The entire room shuddered under the force of our combined malevolence and not one of them doubted any longer.

Chapter Text

Artemis could tell that he was very close to giving in.

He knew precisely how to diagnose the condition in someone else and he remained aware enough to be able to admit it to himself; he was in enormous trouble.

He had tried every technique he knew to keep himself sane, but somehow he always fell back to counting the seconds between each flash. And somehow, when each flash caught him by surprise, he would lose a little more of his mind, get a little closer to screaming out loud for it to stop, please, he'd do any –

Off, on. Three seconds.

He sneered at himself in disgust. His brain had never yet failed him, never yet failed to come up with a brilliant plan to extract him from any situation. But intellectually, he knew exactly how to resist psychological torture. Intellectually, he knew exactly what was happening as his psychological defences crumbled away bit by tiny bit. Despite his understanding, however, he found that he could do very little to actually stop it happening. He felt raw and exposed, and the absence of his clothes was bothering him more than he cared to –

Off, on. Four seconds.

It had been too long, that much was plain. His plan had clearly failed. There must have been something he had failed to take into account, some variable he hadn't predicted.

Perhaps, if his parents truly had been killed when he was captured… Artemis tried to push away the flash of despair that accompanied that thought and focus. Like all of the half-baked theories he had managed to concoct in between flashes, it just didn't feel right. It was true, some parts of the plan would have been more effective with his father's support, but there was nothing that would have been impossible without him, and he couldn't imagine Butler or Holly simply giving up.

If he could only identify what had gone wrong, perhaps he could work, even now, on fixing it, but there was no way he could reach that state of clarity in which he made his plans now, not with –

Off, on. Seven seconds.

His wrists and shoulders were largely numb now, but the headache and the thirst were overwhelming, and he felt as though someone had packed his eye sockets with sand. Even closed, his eyes burned and itched from the combination of the searing light, the dehydration, the persistent lack of sleep, and the now-useless mirrored lenses he had worn to resist the mesmer. He suspected those might actually be beginning to fuse to his eyeballs.

The dehydration, he was sure, would be what got to him first. The pounding of his head was getting worse, the dryness of his throat like a knife each time he swallowed, and his saliva was quickly moving past the point of being thick and moving onto the stage of actually being solid. Did his captor know how easy it was to kill a human by denying him water? Would he really –

Off, on. Five seconds.

There were whole moments when the idea of submitting to permanent slavery – the idea of being intrinsically unable to disobey the orders of someone he could never respect; the idea of being imprisoned, not with shackles, but within his own body and mind – appeared more bearable than remaining in his current situation. But the idea of being responsible for the extermination of an entire race (for he was sure that his captor would not be able to stop once he had started) remained so abhorrent as to keep him standing there, disoriented in space and time and nearly –

Off, on. Two seconds.

Artemis gritted his teeth. I am Artemis Fowl the Second, he told himself sternly, and I can think my way out of anywhere and anything.

Sool seemed to derive some sort of pleasure from ordering us to be knocked out for the transport back to the surface with 'the new drug'. When I awoke again I found out why – my head felt as though Butler was bashing it repeatedly into a wall and my mouth tasted like my tongue was at least three days dead.

It took me a few moments to realise that something must have gone wrong. We were back in the same large conference room where we had been interrogated earlier and, although Angeline was sleeping uncomfortably in a chair beside me, I couldn't see Arty or Sool anywhere. The room was packed with confused and worried fairies, but the only conversation I could make out was Kelp apparently reaming out one of his subordinates in low tones.

"What do you mean on holiday?" he demanded. "What did you say to him?"

"Don't yell at me, Trubs," whined a high-pitched voice. "I'll tell Mummy, I will!"

There was a frustrated silence and then Kelp spoke again in a voice that was more forcibly restrained than calm. "Tell me what happened, Grub."

"Well, I went around to his house, like you said, but he wasn't there. So I called his mobile phone and he took a really long time to answer. I told him about Fowl, but he got really angry with me for ringing and said that he'd deal with it when he got back to work. Then he said he's got some leave saved up and he might not be in for a few days, and not to bother him at home again."

Kelp audibly ground his teeth and then sighed. "Maybe it's better if Sool's not here, anyway," he said finally. "He'd only slow things down with his political –"

He broke off as he suddenly noticed I was awake and strode over to me, looking absolutely furious. "What do you know about all this, Fowl?" he demanded. "You'd better start talking, because I'm running out of patience with your son's little games!"

I sat up, cradling my aching head in my hands and groaned, making it implicitly clear that this would be quid pro quo; no matter what the situation was, I wouldn't be saying anything without aspirin and a long drink of water.

Kelp grunted in annoyance as he caught my meaning, then placed a tiny hand on the crown of my head and said, "Heal!"

A strange tingling sensation crawled across my scalp, making my hair stand on end. I caught sight, out of the corner of my eye, of a single shining spark of blue light, which was soon joined by others. They whirled and danced around the corners of my vision and then suddenly dived towards my skin as one. My muscles convulsed in a sort of short seizure as they made contact, but the sensation swiftly passed and, with it, the pain.

"Extraordinary!" I said, shaking my head in disbelief. I felt ten years younger – like I could run (or limp quickly, at least) for miles. "If you could bottle that for a hangover cure, you could makebillions!"

Kelp was unimpressed, his miniature scowl deepening dangerously.

"All right," I said, spreading my hands in resignation. "Tell me what happened."

"Your transport was attacked," the fairy spat. "When the retrieval team assigned to escort you woke up, a fairy was missing and your son had escaped. Is this some part of his scheme, or do we have less than three hours to find the box? Or was he bluffing about the whole D'Arvited thing?"

I shook my head as though trying to clear the last of the cobwebs to give myself some time to think, but it took only a moment to decide – with the abrasive Sool absent, this was a perfect time for the truth.

"Yes," I said, projecting my voice to reach the furthest corners of the room and waiting until I had everyone's attention. "Of course he was bluffing. Arty had no idea where the box was, but it was the best way he could come up with to save our lives."

"How can you expect us to believe that, Fowl?" demanded one of the shorter fairies with an enormous head and a fearsome scowl on his face. "The two of you seemed pretty convincing earlier."

"I expect you to believe it," I drawled derisively, "because if Arty's intention had been to extort gold from you, don't you think he would have demanded gold, not just our lives, in exchange for keeping the box closed? What did you expect him to do – admit to knowing nothing and let you murder all three of us in cold blood because we hadn't tried to extort you?"

The fairies' faces flushed slowly. Behind me, Angeline stirred and let out a piteous moan as she began to wake up. Remembering what Arty had said about the fairies' weaknesses, I moved over to her side to publicly display some affection for my clearly innocent and suffering wife. Kelp blushingly rushed over and provided her with a shot of blue sparks to counteract the unpleasant after-effects of the sedative, and she fell into a more natural state of early morning bleariness.

"I'll submit to a mesmer, if you want me to prove my intentions," I told him, carefully pronouncing the unfamiliar word. I didn't allow the gratefulness I felt towards him for healing my wife to touch my voice. "But why don't you just ask Foaly? He's been in on all this from the beginning."

All eyes turned to face the centaur, who hurriedly swallowed the carrot he'd been munching on. "What?" he asked, unrepentantly. "We couldn't do anything until Fowl woke up, anyway, and I was enjoying the show. All right, I can confirm at least some of what he's saying. I don't know Mud Boy's intentions – I do know that he only had a few minutes warning to concoct some sort of plan to save his life and that of his family. Butler informed Captain – sorry, Miss – Short and I of the details of what he planned to do while he was being taken underground. I have no hard evidence, but I was prepared to doctor his Retimager results if it had been needed to convince Sool to let him go because I, for one, will stand by Captain – sorry, Miss – Short's recommendation on the matter."

His mistakes in Short's title were clearly deliberate. Admittedly, I did have the benefit of having heard Arty's sketchy plan and was thus forewarned of what was about to happen, but still, I thought they were a little overdone. I would have gone for a more subtle approach – but, after all, the centaur didn't have the same experience in manipulation as Arty and I did. From the nods around the room, he was doing well enough. It appeared that Short was as respected and well liked by her comrades as Arty had suspected, and the issue of her absence from the police force was a sore point with many of the fairies in the room.

"We've all been wishing," continued Foaly, "that we could get rid of that vindictive, micromanaging stinkworm who's running the LEP into the ground. He's crazier than he's ever been right now. What comes next? Authorising lethal force on fairies? The LEP's not about murdering defenceless Mud People! The LEP's about saving lives – fairy and human. It's about keeping the peace, about making the world a better place for everyone in it. At least that's what I thought it was about when I first signed on as a civilian assistant four hundred years ago!"

I blinked in sudden comprehension of my own mortality; Arty had said the fairies had long lives, but this was incredible! I didn't know how one judged the age of a centaur – perhaps you checked his teeth – but I wouldn't have placed him much past his early thirties.

Foaly's equine eyes were bright with determination as he looked around the room. "Haven has never had a bigger crime wave than these last four months that Sool has been in charge – not even including the cleanup after the goblin revolution. Because of his obsession with triple-checking everyone's work and political manoeuvring, the guilty are going free and the innocent are being harassed and imprisoned. Sool is just one fairy, not the law itself. We've put up with him for too long. I say no longer!"

Almost all the fairies in the room were on their feet now – all but Kelp. I knew why, of course. If Sool was deposed, there was one obvious choice for his replacement and, while Major Kelp's eyes were bright with agreement with everything the centaur said, his face was composed. This was not an appointment he sought and, in waiting until it was irreversibly thrust upon him by his comrades, he was proving that he would be the best kind of leader any organisation could get.

"Hear, hear!" came a voice from the door. It took a moment – but only one moment – to determine that the new arrival was female, as her auburn hair was cropped in a standard military crew cut. The figure inside her green jumpsuit, however, was perfectly formed in miniature, in a way that made my now-conscious wife give me a knowing look as she caught me admiring it. This could only be Captain Short.

I hadn't seen Foaly send Short a signal to arrive – perhaps she had been eavesdropping in the corridor for the entire speech – but her timing was everything Arty could have hoped for when he had outlined his plan to induce a mutiny in the LEP. That was, if she didn't ruin it by overacting.

"Commander Kelp," said Short crisply, snapping to attention and saluting the major. "Captain Holly Short, reporting for duty, sir!"

Perhaps that had been too much to hope for. But obviously her performance was sufficient for her audience, because it took only a moment before a ragged cheer went around the room. Other fairies began saluting in imitation of her, the momentum of the coup building with each new addition.

The last to stand, apart from Major Kelp, was the whining corporal he had called Grub. There was a kind of horror in his voice as he spoke. "This is insane!" he said, shaking his head. "You can't expect me to… to take on Sool… and the Council! Butler was one thing, but I don't want to lead the LEP!"

Absolute silence fell over the room, broken only by the sound of fairies shuffling their feet as they exchanged worried glances with one another. I hardly dared breathe, fearing it would disturb the atmosphere, but Foaly cleared his throat meaningfully and gave Kelp a pleading glance.

"Grub," Kelp told his brother gently, "I think they mean me."

"Oh!" cried Grub, real relief evident in his voice. "Really? Well then, I guess, er… sure," he said, giving a half-hearted salute and, despite the informality, this clearly meant even more to Kelp than all of the rest of the support combined.

"Take the job, Trouble," advised Foaly, when he still seemed undecided. "It's what Julius would have wanted."

"I suppose I have no choice," agreed Kelp finally, standing up and waiting for the cheers to subside. "You do realise, of course, that this means I'll never see the sky again?" He looked around the room at the shining faces of his troops and then rolled his eyes. "Oh, at ease, for Frond's sake! And as for you, centaur…" he said threateningly, but a grin had crossed his face. "DON'T CALL ME TROUBLE!" he roared, his face turning slightly red from the exertion.

This was evidently a joke, as the entire room collapsed into the slightly hysteria-edged laughter of those who knew they had just passed the point of no return – this was mutiny, and if they couldn't get approval for their little coup from the higher-ups, things could get ugly very quickly. Perhaps it had been an unnecessary precaution, given that Sool appeared to have taken a voluntary leave of absence in any case. Still, the chain of command had now been irrevocably altered and Sool's ability to interfere with Arty's plans would be severely curtailed even he did get reinstated by the higher-ups.

As the fairies crowded around Kelp to offer their personal congratulations, Short made her way across the room to greet us. "Nice to see you again," she said with a grin wide enough to encompass both of us. "Although I don't think I ever officially met you, Angeline, even if I did manage to retrieve half my ransom for curing your depression."

I made sure my face didn't twitch with surprise, even though my heart felt as though it was about to burst with pride for my son. From what I had managed to piece together, that would have beenhalf a tonne of gold – something that any Fowl would have had trouble giving up. To do have done so for his mother's mental health... Any last vestiges of doubt I had harboured as to the veracity of Arty's moral turnaround were swept away. My boy's heart was purer gold than the ransom he raised.

"A pleasure," said my wife, with admirable poise given that the only information she was running on was a hissed 'I'll explain later'. I resolved to bring her up to speed as soon as I possibly could. "And thank you, I suppose."

"Most welcome," the fairy returned with equanimity. "Artemis has saved my life a few times now, so helping out the two of you was the least I could do."

"Excuse me," I interjected, "but I can't seem to recall meeting you either, Captain Short."

She looked momentarily surprised and then a look of understanding crossed her face. "Of course, your memory was wiped, wasn't it? I was the one who pulled you out of the Arctic Ocean and healed what I could of your wounds – after Artemis had you shot."

I nodded blandly, trying to suppress the horror that ran through me at the thought of someone tampering with my mind. That Arty had apparently shot and killed me, prompting my captors to throw me overboard, was one of the few facts I had managed to get straight once I had regained contact with my information network. The conflicting reports from the two men representing the Mafiya in the exchange, in combination with the fact that I was unquestionably alive, had made it clear that the whole thing had been some sort of elaborate – and very convincing – fraud orchestrated by my son. I had never understood why he felt the need to keep his own role a secret from me, but I had long suspected that something unusual had happened to me. My memories of that time were mostly blurred, as though I was viewing them through a pane of distorted glass. I added it to my mental list of things I needed to have a long talk to my son about; my memories were what made me who I was, and I did not appreciate having the very makeup of my personality altered without my consent. Still, I had to admit, it was better to be alive than dead, and perhaps it had simply been the standard procedure of his allies.

The newly elected Commander Kelp interrupted my musings and the general joyful atmosphere in the room with a reality check. "I hate to say it," he said, "but has this actually helped us start tracking down Pandora's box? Or Fowl and Corporal Rheeson? If they're being held by the thief, we have to assume we're on a time limit before the box is opened. Fowl may be able to resist themesmer, but that doesn't mean he can hold out against coercion indefinitely."

Angeline clutched at my hand and I remembered that, without having heard Kelp's quick briefing, this was probably the first she had heard that her son was missing. I squeezed her hand reassuringly and then brought it up to rub a spot at the back of my neck in a memory of pain – this was my last planned move in Arty's scheme. Hopefully, it would be enough, because from here on in, I was on my own; a stranger in a very strange land.

"Actually," I said, "everything is still all going according to Arty's plan. He guessed that the thief would believe in that prophecy, and would attempt to kidnap him and force him to cooperate. Butler injected us both with a prototype of Arty's latest project in nano-technology – a microscopic tracking device that he said Foaly should be able to locate. If we can find Arty, we can presumably find the thief and the box, too."

Hope resurfaced around the room as everyone turned to Foaly. The centaur, however, was not looking as confident as everyone else. "About that," he said sheepishly. "I'm afraid I've got some bad news."

Chapter Text

And then, Artemis found the pattern.

That he hadn't found it earlier was a testament to how effective the measures in place to prevent him from thinking were. After what seemed an eternity of automatically counting the seconds between each flash, however, with his brain sitting on idle, the progression had suddenly clicked.

Of course the light was flickering according to a predictable pattern; it was being deliberately controlled. Most likely by a computer somewhere.

Computers were, by definition, exactly predictable, meaning that true random numbers were impossible to come by even with the most powerful computers. For many applications a pseudo-random number generator gave an adequately random output. The sequences generated by a good algorithm would never repeat in practical terms, seemed entirely unpredictable without knowledge of the seed values, and appeared statistically random. No algorithm, however, had ever been built that could compete with the sheer unpredictability of a simple coin-toss.

When random numbers were needed for gambling, or other purposes relying on truly random input, a computer could seed input from another source, such as the decay times of a collection of radioactive isotopes. But such systems were probably no more standard among the fairies than among humans – whoever did Artemis' captor's technical work had obviously not seen the need to acquire true randomness.

More the fool him.

The system controlling the light wasn't even particularly complex as far as pseudo-random number sequences went; it was a recognisable variant of an algorithm that had been outdated years ago, even in the human world. The very idea of using such an algorithm was anathema to Artemis. If something was worth doing, then it was worth doing properly – cutting corners on something important only ever ended up creating more problems down the track, as his captor was about to find out.

It still wasn't simple. Most people would still have said it was impossible to predict, impossible to mentally compute at speed, and certainly impossible to derive on the fly from the sequence of numbers it produced.

Most people were not Artemis Fowl the Second.

Artemis took in a deep breath and let it out again in something that he hoped sounded more like a sob than the grunt of triumph it was. The flashes were still annoying without the element of surprise, that was undeniable, but without the tension of wondering when the momentary darkness was going to come they simply didn't have the same effect.

With a part of his mind almost subconsciously predicting and counting off the flashes, and the constant buzzing whine having by now receded to little more than an irritating triviality, Artemis was finally able to relax, letting himself hang from his bonds and fall into a deep state of meditation.

"What do you mean, bad news?" I demanded, my heart sinking. This whole overly-complicated plot hung by a thread and bad news was the last thing I wanted to hear now that we were already committed to the most dangerous part of the plan.

"I can't say exactly what the problem is," said Foaly, looking supremely embarrassed. "I couldn't isolate the frequency until he'd already been captured, because Sool's planted one of his cronies into my department, and Rheeson reports back to him on everything I do."

The centaur's hands flew up to pat his foil hat nervously, as though to make sure it was still there and, reassured, he went on. "I couldn't risk doing any unauthorised work with him watching, so I didn't start until he left with your convoy. And I may be the best there is, but even with the specifications Mud Boy sent down via Butler, it's non-trivial to tap into an encrypted passive transmitter that he seems to have designed specifically to evade my technology. At least he seems to have learned from his mistakes and didn't make it entirely impossible, like he did the C Cube."

"So?" I prompted him impatiently.

"My part's definitely working now," he said. "I can track you anywhere, but I still can't get a lock on the Mud Boy's transmitter. It could be malfunctioning – or maybe he's in some kind of shielded location? I can't be certain."

I nodded hopelessly and then closed my eyes, letting the babble of useless suggestions from various fairies wash over me without paying much attention.

It was hard not to feel some irritation with the paranoid centaur but, really, it wasn't his fault. Arty hadn't counted on there being any issues with finding him once he had been captured, otherwise he would have mentioned it to Butler to pass on. I had managed to get into the habit of not thinking for myself over the past few hours – of trusting too much in Arty's hasty plan. The main reason that Arty's plans always worked, though, was that there was always a contingency plan for every possible problem. Always. But there had been no time to conceive a Plan B; there had barely been time for Plan A.

The idea that everything was going according to plan had been the one thing holding me up throughout all this madness and I now felt somehow adrift. Fairies? Magic? Prophecies? Pandora's box of all things? I would have been pinching myself to make sure I was awake if the whole thing wasn't so completely beyond the realm of my imagination that it simply had to be real. Now my son was alone and in danger, still trusting in his plan, still trusting that we would rescue him, there was no way we could communicate with him, and it was up to me to represent him to his allies in this unfamiliar world.

I felt the Major's absence more strongly than ever; there was something about having a seven foot tower of highly trained muscle at your shoulder that made any situation feel a little less dangerous.

Butler. That was at least something I could do.

"Can you get the Butlers down here?" I interrupted a pointless argument about whether Foaly should have revealed his information sooner. "Your technology may be centuries beyond ours, but a Butler can be an asset in any situation. Besides, Arty's Butler is likely to be upset if he gets left out of the rescue mission, and then I won't be able to vouch for anyone's safety."

Kelp winced in a way that made me wonder if he had previously found himself on the wrong end of Butler's professional labours. He did seem like a nice enough fellow, despite my initial reservations at seeing him holding my wife at gunpoint, but I supposed that only made it more likely that Arty's less-than-legal enterprises had placed them on opposite sides of the fence.

"We'll need someone to fly up to meet them," he said finally, in agreement. "Not you, Holly," he continued, "we might need you down here – you know Fowl the best out of anyone in the LEP. Volunteers?"

The silence was deafening. The fairies around the room exchanged loaded glances, shuffled their feet, but generally made no sound or gesture that could possibly be interpreted as volunteering. One little fellow with green skin actually covered his face with his leathery wings to reduce the risk of accidentally making eye-contact with the newly elected commander.

"No one?" asked Kelp, looking a little desperate. Then suddenly, his face transformed as an idea struck him. "Corporal Kelp," he asked, "why don't you go?"

Grub's coffee-coloured skin paled to the colour of milky tea and he began to shake. "B-b-butler?" he stammered. "The Mud Monster? You can't make me go! I'll tell Mummy you're sending me on dangerous assignments!"

But a wicked grin had spread across Kelp's face. "It wouldn't be dangerous for you, would it?" he asked in an innocent tone. "You're always telling Mummy all about how you defeated the great Butler after he'd beaten the rest of Retrieval One, after all…"

This was a story I had to hear some day. From the delighted expressions of the other fairies in the room, it was one they had heard far too many times, and from that point on, Kelp was swamped with volunteers, all wanting to see Grub's reunion with 'the Mud Monster'. Apparently having been caught in his own trap, Grub offered little further resistance and left with the rest of the small team, trailing betrayed-sounding grumbles about minor household chores in his wake.

"Now," I said, feeling better now that I had made a decision for myself. "I need more information if I'm going to help find Arty – he didn't have time to tell me much at all. What exactly isPandora's box? Where did it come from? How does it work? I get the feeling we're not talking about the legend I know of the woman who released evil on the world…"

Kelp looked quite relieved to have someone else directing the discussion. "Not quite," he agreed. "But it is where the human legend originated, I would assume. Our story is straight from the Book – but assuming your son hasn't taught you to read Gnommish, I'll see if I can paraphrase for you."

His eyes went distant as he recalled the story.

"The last great king of the Frond dynasty married a Mud Woman named Pandora. The king's views on what many considered the growing human threat made him unpopular with the more traditionalist fairies, and a treasonous coalition of ten powerful warlocks formed, seeking to overthrow him. The Book forbade any fairy to move directly against the king, but they had found a loophole; the queen was not a fairy.

"Pandora was known for her quick mind, at least for a Mud Woman, so they constructed a tribute for her, knowing that she would be delighted by it. It was a puzzle-box, engraved with the royal family's coat of arms on its golden lid and enchanted to be touchable only by human hands. It's unclear whether the coalition truly intended to build such a heinous thing as they did, but it seems unlikely they intended to kill any more than their targets. Either way they were out of the castle by the time Pandora worked out how to open the box and were thus spared the resultant devastation as each member of the royal family and every fairy in their immediate vicinity was killed by the horror inside. Realising she had been deceived, Pandora quickly closed the box again, but only some distant cousins of the royal family, who lived far away, were spared. She was the only survivor inside the royal castle and most of the surrounding area – and she herself had gone from the prime of her life to an old woman in a moment.

"The coalition had not counted on Pandora herself living to tell the tale at all, because they were largely unprepared when the police of the time tracked them down. In a desperate bid to avoid facing the consequences for their actions, they stopped time around their own headquarters, working in shifts to keep the impenetrable barrier always up, while the police waited them out.

"On the third day, however, the outcome of the siege was decided, because Pandora worked out how to control the box herself. She decided that it would be poetic justice to use it against those who had used her as the instrument of her own husband's destruction. She scratched the Gnommish script for 'those who betrayed their king' into the gold lid and, when she opened the box once again, its magic targeted the warlocks of the coalition. Whatever was inside the box passed through the time-stop as though it wasn't even there, eliminating all inside without costing a single additional police-fairy's life.

"Despite the swift eradication of the rebellion, however, the damage was done. The king and all his closest heirs were dead, along with all their advisers and thousands of civilians. Those next in line for the throne were untrained and incompetent, and power-struggles immediately broke out between all of those who had an interest in gaining power. Our civilisation took hundreds of years to rebuild from the lost lives and the resultant near-civil war, and since no one could work out how Pandora had managed to survive, she ended up being attributed much of the blame. She was forced to undergo a complete memory wipe and returned to her own people, although she died of old age only a few months later."

"Happy story," I said dryly. "What happened to the box after that?"

"It was considered too dangerous to risk trying to permanently destroy it," explained Kelp, "perhaps releasing the restraints on whatever the warlocks had created. It's been under the direct protection of the Council ever since Pandora was mind wiped – at least until it was stolen yesterday."

"And Arty would know the whole story?" I confirmed.

"I would assume so," shrugged Short. "He seems to have memorised most of the Book – and I'd called to bring in his help on figuring out how the box was stolen at least half an hour before I heard that Retrieval One were coming. He almost certainly spent that time refreshing his memory – I know I did."

I thought hard for a few moments, trying to predict what my son would do – the story had explained a lot, slotting into place with the rest of what I knew. Was there any possibility that Arty would cooperate and allow such a dangerous weapon fall into the hands of a madman? Then again, he had warned me that the reflective contacts deteriorated quite quickly out of their protective fluid. By now, they may well be ineffective. Would he be able to help himself?

And then there was that prophecy. I was reluctant to believe in anything that compromised my control over my own destiny, but Arty seemed to have been taking it very seriously. That was not a good sign.

"All right," I said finally. "Since it seems we are otherwise at a dead end, I'll lay my last card on the table. Arty didn't want to say anything because he couldn't be sure who the thief was – but he had a fairly good idea."

Short actually jumped to her feet. "That's right!" she said. "He told me he had some ideas, but I cut him off! Did he tell you?"

"He did," I admitted. "But you're not going to like it. He told me that the thief had to either be a member of the Council – or more likely, Sool himself."

Snorts of incredulity echoed around the office and Kelp shook his head firmly. "That's impossible. Sool may be a appalling leader, but he's a stickler for the rules. He's not about to go on a killing spree."

"Yes," I persevered, "but what if he's not intending to use it on upstanding citizens – what if he wants to wipe out crime for good? Foaly said it earlier – the next inevitable step was to authorise lethal force on fairies. This is just the next step after that. He could surely set the device to destroy 'criminals who have escaped justice' or even just 'criminals'. If the crime wave you have been experiencing was serious enough, the collateral damage might be acceptable to him."

"That's barbaric!" cried Short. "'Collateral damage' is a human concept – no fairy could stoop so low, not intentionally!"

There was a tense sort of silence for a moment as the fairies in the room considered, and then reconsidered. Suddenly, Foaly reared onto his hind legs and spun back towards his computer, tapping at his keyboard. He squinted at the lines of incomprehensible pictograms that turned up as a result, finally shaking his head grimly.

"I can't believe I didn't think of this earlier," he said. "I knew I couldn't trust Rheeson, he reported everything I did straight back to Sool, but I never thought he'd sink so low! He wasn't captured – it looks like he was the one who orchestrated the whole thing."

"WHAT?" demanded Kelp, skidding over to where he could look over Foaly's shoulder at his terminal.

"Look," said Foaly. "Look at his life-signs – heart rate and blood pressure slightly elevated in comparison to the rest of the team, but steady, until this point – then the connection is completely lost, nothing but noise from that moment on. Now, the only way I can think that that helmet could have been so thoroughly deactivated without the point-of-view camera seeing anything or causing any kind of life-sign spikes, would be by a sharp-shot to the battery to pop it out of its groove. But look at this last frame of video the helmet took …"

The image he brought up on the screen showed a wall hung with an array of fairy-sized weapons.

"He was alone in the weapons locker," Foaly explained angrily. "There's no way anyone could have a line of sight on the battery – he must have disabled the helmet himself. He could hardly help but know how to do it, no matter how useless a he was as a tech-fairy. The rest of the crew were incapacitated by a masked fairy, who gained entry to the shuttle by unknown means – well, I think we know who that fairy was now, and exactly how he got in there."

The room swelled with confused babble as the fairies tried to comprehend the possible betrayal of not one, but two of their own.

"So, does this confirm that the thief is Sool?" I interjected ruthlessly. Every moment spent debating was another moment my son spent in the dubious care of a madman bent on destroying his own society. "It sounds as though the missing fairy was particularly enamoured of Sool's view of the world."

"Confirm? No," growled Kelp. "If we start leaping to conclusions without proof, based on circumstantial evidence, personal dislike, and political convenience, we'll be no better than him. But does it give us enough information to officially suspend both of them while the investigation takes place – and bring Sool in for questioning, whether he's on holiday or not? Yes, I believe it does.

"Foaly – put out the wanted for questioning announcements on all networks and make us a prioritised list of any properties owned by Sool – and you'd better include properties of Council members as well. Also anywhere that might have a shielded location, abandoned buildings, and anywhere else you can think of and we'll begin making house checks. If we can't find anything there, we'll start going door to door. We need to find that box before it gets opened. I'll take Retrieval One. Vein, you've got Retrieval Two, as usual. Short, you'll take Retrieval Three. Is everyone clear?"

Everyone was. And so the hunt began.

Chapter Text

It was exactly three hours, forty minutes and twenty-one seconds later – keeping track of the flashes of light had turned out to be useful as a timekeeping device – when Artemis broke.

"ALL RIGHT!" he yelled, his voice cracking halfway through, "I'll swear your hideous oath, I'll swear it, but I need some water and please just stop that light from flashing! PLEASE, STOP IT!"

He gave a dry sob, trying to twist his face away from the light and running his parched tongue over cracked and bleeding lips. In a corner of his mind, however, he was counting off the seven seconds until the next flash was due. He very nearly smiled when it didn't come.

Forty-six seconds later, he was released from his bonds and, his legs incapable of truly supporting him any longer, he found himself in a trembling heap to the floor. Once his eyes adjusted to no longer having the light shining directly into them, he got his first glimpse of the room in which he was being held, keeping his head down as he surreptitiously glanced around from beneath his lashes.

His cell actually did seem to have been specifically designed to hold a prisoner, which was somewhat of a surprise. This entire operation must have been planned out from the very beginning. He suspected, however, that the prisoner in mind when the room was built had been a troll, since, unlike any other fairy building he'd seen, it was of such a size that Butler would have been barely able to reach the ceiling.

His hypothesis was borne out by the rest of the construction. The door and walls were thick, solid metal, and there were heavy rings sunk into the floor, walls, and ceiling to enable a prisoner of any size to be restrained.

The room was well lit by a spotlight, which seemed to give off a much more reasonable level of light now that it was not shining directly into his eyes. A small camera sat high up in one corner, a tiny red light winking at him from just to the left of the lens. It was recording, of course, sending its images back to some central security system from whence he could be watched over with a minimum of effort.

On the far side of the cell, near the door, was a small table which held a fairy-sized glass and a pitcher of water. Artemis felt quite certain he would have cried at the sight if there had been a drop of moisture left in his body.

Standing beside the table, with one hand resting on the water jug and a triumphant smirk on his face, stood Ark Sool. Another fairy in an LEP corporal's uniform stood directly behind him, covering Artemis with his weapon.

Artemis had a moment of panic that the world had gone mad and this was an officially sanctioned LEP operation – that would be a complication he hadn't expected! – before he realised with relief that it was the same Sool-supporting fairy who had almost drugged his mother at the start of interrogation. So, even if Sool had help, it was still quite likely a rogue operation.

The adrenaline level in his blood didn't fall too far, though, rogue operation or not. He was about to do the unthinkable.

"The light and the freedom," said Sool, walking over to Artemis as the boy finally raised his head to meet his captor's eyes, "are on faith. To get water, you'll need to swear. I assume you know the words."

This was it. After this, there would no turning back. Was it really worth it? He was gambling the entire fairy civilisation on his conjecture about an artefact he had never seen, on his own ability to manipulate his enemy even under a crippling compulsion. Was it really his decision to make?

And that wasn't even taking into account the sharp terror that gripped him at the very idea of submitting to this compulsion. Artemis, as he had found out during the incident with Spiro, was not very good at 'humble'. He wasn't very good at following orders, either. But this was likely to be his only chance to enter the situation with some control over his actions, his only chance to get out of this cell without being party to an atrocity, perhaps even alive. At any moment, Sool could discover that he was no longer resistant to the mesmer, or could find another way to open the box, and then…

Artemis dragged himself up onto his knees, his eyes level with the gnome before him, and restrained a flinch as Sool's hand came to rest over his heart, gathering a cloud of blue sparks that would do anything but heal him.

"I swear to obey your commands as your loyal s–" Artemis stuttered involuntarily over the words with which he would give up ultimate control over his own mind. It was several seconds before he could force himself to continue. "Slave," he completed, "from this moment henceforth, until your death or my own release me."

The blue sparks sank in as he finished speaking, permanently sealing the oath between them. Air left Artemis' lungs in a great whoosh, his spine arching back as the magic took up residence in his body, settling itself into his central nervous system, from whence it could control his every thought and action.

When it was over, he was left panting for breath, desperately sucking in oxygen as though its return to his brain could release him from the magical compulsion. But there were only two things that could do that, and one of them would be much more difficult to achieve than the other.

Sool gestured to the fairy behind him, who left the room swiftly, not bothering to lock the door behind him. "Now, human –"

"I know, I know," interrupted Artemis in a tone of resignation, shooting a hopeless look at the open door. "I won't make any plans to escape, or lie to you, or do anything stupid."

"No, don't," said Sool, smirking as he made it an order. "You will also address me respectfully, as 'sir'."

"Yes, sir," agreed Artemis meekly, fighting the urge to shiver. He wasn't sure whether it was caused by the honorific or the strange sensation of the instructions settling magically over his brain, enforcing them at such a level that he would be physically incapable of disobeying.

"Good Mud Boy," grinned Sool, handing over a glass of water as a reward.

As he drained the glass, Artemis briefly considered asking for his clothes back, but quashed the urge as frivolous. It could only decrease his enemy's tendency to underestimate him and he would have a limited amount of goodwill to work with. At this stage, he needed every ounce of advantage he could get.

Still – so far, so good. As an initial list of instructions, those were quite acceptable. That his own suggestions for restrictions had been taken so easily was almost laughable; he had absolutely no intention of doing anything stupid and, since he already had a plan to escape, the injunction not to make such a plan was a little obsolete. Being unable to lie would certainly complicate his efforts, but was much preferable to an alternative which might restrict him from any deception at all – and despite the way the word stuck in his throat, he had no real objections to Sool's additional demand. It was almost impossible to stop yourself from underestimating anyone who called you 'sir', as he had found to his detriment in his own relationship with Butler. When combined with the fact that Sool would be taking anything he said as absolute truth… He was in with a fighting chance.

By the time he had drunk the rest of the water from the jug, Artemis felt much better. The water had vastly improved the state of his headache and the paranoid feeling that his thought processes were being slowed down by the thickening of his cerebrospinal fluid. The water was also an essential element of his plan; even in his dehydrated state, there was only so much he could drink before the execution of the first stage of his plan became biologically inevitable.

The LEP corporal shuffled back into the room carrying a heavy iron casket, which he placed on the table before leaving again.

"Pandora's box is in there," Sool informed Artemis, gesturing to the casket. "Work out how to open the box as fast as you can, but do not actually open it until I instruct you to do so."

Artemis' feet had already carried him all the way to the table and his hands were lifting the lid before he even realised he was there. He didn't have long to muse over the terrifying reality of being no longer ultimately responsible for his own actions, because he was reaching inside and lifting out the box. He turned it in his hands to examine the exquisitely crafted puzzle-box from every angle.

It was exactly as it had been described in the Book; a cylinder with tightly fitted alternating black and white tiles curving across its surface, perfectly symmetrical around its central axis. That was only a façade, of course – the internal mechanism would be manifestly asymmetrical, requiring exactly one set of movements to open it, but the symmetrical surface would make it more difficult to keep the box's orientation in mind. The solid gold top was engraved with the Gnommish death sentence for the royal family and the coalition of warlocks who had created it.

Aurum potestas est, thought Artemis irreverently. In this case, it was undeniably true.

He quickly found the key – a loose piece which could be removed, allowing the rest of the pieces to be shuffled around almost like a child's picture puzzle. Within moments, he was lost in the puzzle.

The first step was to create a mental map of the internal workings, based on how the external components moved. The tracks on which the panels slid had corners and junctions, which all needed to be found and memorised. Some of the pieces had irregular anchors which limited their movements compared to other pieces. Then there were the gravity-based pins which meant that the orientation of the box changed the behaviour of the panels…

"So?" demanded Sool, breaking his concentration.

"This will take some time, sir," Artemis replied, trying in vain to make his tone sound humble, although the instruction to be respectful effectively quashed his urge to sneer at the other's ignorance. "The sheer number of visible combinations this thing has is incredible, even without taking the internal mechanics into account – which are by far the most complex I've ever seen."

He shuffled the tiles for a few more moments before looking up at Sool. "I'm not at my best at the moment, sir. I don't know how long I've been here, but I'm still dangerously dehydrated and I haven't eaten or slept the entire time. If you want this to go faster, I need something to eat and plenty to drink to get my brain back in working order."

"I'll see to it," said Sool. "For the moment – keep working."

Artemis ducked his head again, biting his lip as though nervous. "Sir?" he ventured. "I'll also need to visit the bathroom."

"I suppose that's unavoidable," agreed Sool grudgingly. "I'll send Rheeson down to escort you in a few minutes."

"Thank you, sir," said Artemis, bending his head over the puzzle and returning to systematically shifting the tiles. His half-lidded eyes barely even watched the rhythmic movements of his hands as he twisted, rotated, and slid the tiles in a half-trance, scrupulously recording every detail in his mind.

A day passed. Then another. Forty-eight hours of agony, not knowing whether my child was dead or alive, or in pain, or thought we had abandoned him. The only reason I slept at all was that Arty's Butler had bluntly informed me that I was no use to my son if I was too tired to think when he was found. After that, I tried to sleep as much as I could, obsessively snatching half-hour stretches in between reports and briefings and strategy meetings.

I never slept for long, though, because I found myself bolting awake from nightmares of my son, faced with a final choice between his own life and opening the box to 'unleash death and devastation' on innocents. In my dreams, he was the hero I'd always known he could become, the hero I knew he really would be if it came down to it. And now, I found myself actually wantinghim to be selfish.

In the hospital in Helsinki, I had told Arty that the main catalyst for my sudden realignment of priorities was the time I had been afforded in captivity to rethink my life, but it was not really the truth. While had been no lie that, with my life hanging in the balance, I had deeply regretted my lifetime of emotional absence from both Angeline and Arty, it was by no means the whole story.

It hadn't taken me long after I woke up to discover the lengths to which Arty had gone – financially, criminally, emotionally – in search of a cold and distant father who, according to all rational logic, was dead. Faced with this puzzling obsession, for one so ruled by logic as my son, I came to a realisation far more humbling than the fact that I had chosen not to spend my life sharing the company of those who mattered to me; Arty had not even had the opportunity to spend his life with those that mattered to him.

My son still needed me. No matter how advanced he was on an intellectual level, Arty still craved not only my respect and approval, which I had always given him in abundance, but my affection and guidance, which I had not. Even before I had been kidnapped I had been failing to provide for him in the ways that mattered most.

Now, rather than finding it hard to remember that he had ever been a child, I found it harder to remember he wasn't still five years old, his already flawless poker-face at odds with his piping voice. He may never have shown his emotional immaturity in traditional ways, but now that I knew to look for it, it was visible in every move he made.

It was to be the most audacious scheme I had ever pulled off – and for the highest stakes. I had the initial advantage of Arty's emotional vulnerability, but my son was a master of manipulation himself. Once he grew accustomed to my presence again, one false move would have irretrievably shattered the fragile trust we had built up. But, despite a confusing setback around the time I was released from hospital, I largely succeeded in convincing him that he could trust my judgement; that it was worthwhile to take the opportunity to reclaim his childhood; that he could safely leave the family business to me because I loved him with every fibre in my body and would never let him come to harm while I still had breath.

That it was the truth had not make the task any easier. It didn't make the current situation any easier, either.

I don't know where Angeline found her strength over those days – although from the wan smiles she gave me from time to time, I suspected that she was only an inch away from losing it as badly as she had during my imprisonment. She had been keeping busy in the past month or so by organising a surprise party for Arty's fifteenth birthday; of course, my son had known about the party even longer than I had, and the party was still six weeks away. But even if Angeline had been able to contact the various caterers and decorators she was working with from underground, such a thing was hardly a helpful distraction from her missing son. Unable to feel useful in any other way, she spent hours praying, and the rest of the time staring into the stunning blue diamond that Arty had given her while I was missing, as though it held the answer to the whereabouts of our son.

Dear, sweet Angeline; she had never even suspected the jewel she had sworn never to take off was stolen, although I had recognised it the moment she explained its significance in Helsinki. The Fei-Fei diamond was the only one in the world of its colour and was absolutely priceless. I had never managed to discover how Arty had obtained it for her – it was still ostensibly on display in a museum, so his reproduction must have been very good indeed. At least I knew where he got the idea; Arty and I had worked together once, in Prague, to retrieve a pair of exquisite ruby earrings that Angeline still wore on special occasions.

Arty's innocent assertion that we had shopped for the jewellery together had completely disarmed her suspicions then, too. Perhaps I was onto something here…

I did find the time to finally explain to Angeline what was going on, Short helpfully filling in some of the details I was hazy about. It had turned out that there was a fair bit more that I was hazy about than I had originally thought.

"You wiped his memory?" I demanded, feeling a chill all over at the thought. "No wonder he suddenly relapsed on all the progress I thought I'd made with him while I was in hospital! Giving up half a tonne of gold for his mother's sanity, shooting me to save my life – those would have formed critical parts of his psychological make-up! You can't just remove them and expect his choices to be stable!"

"Well, he did agree," defended Short, looking suitably embarrassed on behalf of her species. "And I was personally opposed to the decision. I didn't mind him calling me to bring Butler back from the dead, so much, but he did black out Haven for over three hours with his little scheme to extort money from Spiro!"

"You do realise," I said coldly, my mind veering away from the implications of her indirect statement about Arty's Butler, "that when he bankrupted Spiro, there was only a comparatively small deposit in the Fowl bank accounts – and a suspiciously similar sum of money to what was missing made its way to Amnesty International? He'd already made his choice and you changed it!"

"He bankrupted Spiro?" asked Short, just as coldly. "That wasn't a part of the deal."

"Of course he –"

"Calm down, darling," interrupted Angeline softly, before I could begin to wax lyrical on the utter absurdity of leaving Spiro with enough money to hire either a decent lawyer or a hit man – or both. Especially if Arty had known he would soon remember nothing about the incident! "Debating ancient history won't help Arty. Besides, you haven't tracked him doing anything truly unethical for months – they obviously realised their mistake and gave him back his memory soon enough."

There was no way it had been that simple.

Short flushed a dark auburn colour that matched her hair and eyed me nervously but, although I gave her superior look to let her know that I could tell there was a story there that she didn't want to tell, I didn't press the matter. Angeline was right; this wasn't helping Arty.

I hit it off a little better with Foaly than I had with Short, although there was admittedly some initial tension over the difficulties with Arty's tracking device. But it didn't take long before I was spending most of my time with him, in his Operations booth – mainly because it was the first place any news of Arty would reach, but also because the sheer marvel of technological gadgetry served as an excellent distraction from my anxiety.

While I don't come close to approaching my son's technical genius or, it seemed, the centaur's, it became clear very quickly that both my interest in how things worked and my ability to understand the explanations far surpassed that of most of his acquaintance. Since Foaly didn't seem to get the chance to expound upon his own brilliance quite as often as he felt he deserved, he was quite happy to explain the principles behind many of his inventions. Once you got past the constant stream of Mud Man insults, he really was quite good company – and I was going to make an absolute fortune on the patents.

Or not. Sometimes it was hard, in the face of temptation, to remember that I had officially turned over a new leaf. I also had a suspicion, given the fairies' seemingly casual attitude to the violation of human memories, the only reason they were being so open with me was that if I started to cause any trouble, they could simply wipe my mind clean of the past few days. We would have to see about that. In any case, when it got down to the details, it became clear that many of Foaly's inventions were far from entirely technological – there was an element of magic woven into nearly everything, if not in final form then at least in the production process. Still, some of his ideas were truly intriguing, and served as a welcome distraction from my all-consuming worry for my son.

Nearly forty-nine hours after Arty was captured, the two of us were in the middle of a deeply technical discussion on matter-antimatter engines. Intriguingly, the device Foaly had designed was inherently safe, since he could use a kind of localised time manipulation to contain the destructive energy blast that would be released if the fuel cell was breached and the antimatter allowed to come into contact with matter. Unfortunately, he had still not completely solved the problem of reliably containing the antimatter itself using technology, magic, time, or any combination of the thereof, and so the device was still purely theoretical.

Before I could get into the reason for why the antimatter could so easily pass from one time-stream to another, we were interrupted by the sound of Foaly's amplified voice emanating from a computer; it had found something.

"It's Fowl," Foaly explained tersely, as the Butlers, Kelp, and several other fairies from Retrieval One joined us. After the first six hours of searching had passed with no results, the teams had been searching in shifts – two teams out on the field at any one time, one bunked back at LEP headquarters. No one, it seemed, was sleeping very heavily, at least not heavily enough to miss the sound of Foaly's alarms. "He must have escaped – it'll just take me a moment to pinpoint his location, then we can pick him up…"

Kelp pressed a button on Foaly's dashboard and spoke. "All units, we have a fix on Fowl's location. Stand by for coordinate transmission."

"Standing by," echoed the twin voices of Short and Vein, the leaders of Retrieval Two and Three.

There was a tense silence as Foaly painstakingly performed a grid search of the on-screen map of Haven.

"Paranoid little Mud Whelp," he muttered, as one of the grid squares finally scored a hit. His hairy fingers blurred over the keyboard and the onscreen map enlarged to show a few suburbs on the east edge of the city. "Couldn't have designed something easy to track, could he?"

Considering the tinfoil hat he wore, the centaur's remark was perhaps a little hypocritical, but I didn't want to risk distracting him at this critical moment by remarking upon the irony.

A grid-square flashed and enlarged as Arty was found again and this time I could see the individual buildings. A small dot blinked just outside one for a moment, and then vanished.

Foaly typed furiously for a few moments, then let out his breath through closed lips in a very horse-like sound. "We've lost the signal again," he said, reaching up to rub his temples with a hairy hand.

"Has he been recaptured?" asked Kelp.

"It looks like it," nodded Foaly. "Nonetheless, we've found him. I've sent the coordinates of the warehouse through to Holly and Vein's helmets. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much good it'll do Fowl."

"What do you mean?" I prompted.

"It may be LEP property now," said Foaly, shaking his head, "but before it was confiscated, that warehouse was one of Opal Koboi's. We disabled all of her security features when she went to prison, of course, but they're still functional. Sool – or any Council member, for that matter – would have the passwords to reactivate them, so we could well be talking about an absolute fortress here."

For some reason, several faces turned towards the tiny, hairy fairy whose role I hadn't quite managed to work out. He didn't seem to be a member of the LEP and the only contributions he had made over the past few days had been eating constantly and insulting everybody else.

"Sorry folks," he said, and there was real regret in his gravely voice. "I wish I could help, but I had nothing to do with the construction of this one; it was built after I broke into Koboi's laboratory the first time. She never found out how I got in, but I hear that she bedded the footings of every subsequent warehouse in six metres of asphalt, all based on an impenetrable dwarf-proof mesh. I don't exactly fancy death by asphalt. I might be able to rattle the windows a bit with some heavy explosives, but that mesh couldn't be scratched by the kind of blast that would leave anyone alive inside. If you're going in to rescue the Mud Boy, it'll have to be through the front door."

"I'm afraid that's just not an option," Foaly shook his head. "Not if those defences have been activated. Koboi warehouses have DNA cannons guarding every inch of the perimeter and, even if you could get inside, they're scattered all through the interior too. I could deactivate them if we could get some tech equipment on site, but the entire place is disconnected from Haven's networks – except for the mains power. I could cut that, but the targeting on the cannons is battery-powered and the plasma would carry enough residual charge to blast a small army to pieces. There's simply no way to get around active DNA cannons – DNA doesn't lie."

Then they all turned to look at me, much as they had previously looked at the dwarf, and I was horrified to realise that they were expecting me to come up with a plan. They had obviously been around my son for long enough to learn that when the situation is without a solution and all hope seems lost, it is time to turn to Artemis Fowl.

But I wasn't my son. I didn't have the sheer brainpower to think my way ten moves ahead of my opponent. I didn't have the audacity to find and extort an entirely new species. I didn't have the creativity to pull solutions to seemingly impossible situations out of thin air. I didn't know enough about fairy technology to even begin to think of how to circumvent a security system that their resident genius had labelled impenetrable. And as for the enemy – well, he already had everything he needed to establish his new world order, so even if we could establish contact I wouldn't know where to start negotiating Arty free.

"I can't see any way in right now," I said finally. "We need to give it more time – Arty seems to have escaped once, he might be able to do it again – or the thief could make a mistake – and at least we know where they are now."

"The Council won't like it," Kelp said dubiously. "Giving him more time to work on Fowl – or to work out another way of cracking Pandora's box open… It's risky – and the Council doesn't like to gamble."

"Do you have an alternative?" I demanded, suddenly realising that the knowledge of Arty's location was a two-edged sword and not liking the direction this was headed.

Kelp exchanged a guilty look with Foaly. "Just one," he said finally, "and I'm afraid, given the way I got into office, that I won't have a great deal of influence with the Council. I am truly sorry."

He spoke as though my son was already dead.

Chapter Text

Artemis was beginning to make some headway – both on the box and with the execution of his plan.

He had also taken the opportunity in the bathroom to wash his face at the tiny knee-level sink, surreptitiously brushing the aggravating contact lenses out of his eyes and down the drain. That annoyance disposed of and the first phase of his plan having been successfully completed, he was now ready to initiate the second phase. And although phase two was not so critical to the future of the fairies, it was looking as though it could be substantially more important to his own survival.

Originally, Artemis had postulated two theories as to why he had not yet been rescued. His first glimpse of the walls of his cell had confirmed the first; the thick, metal from which they were constructed was definitely capable of blocking his transmitter signal. His first priority, therefore, presuming the LEP were still looking for him, was to be found.

As he had learned during his week-long stay in Haven, waiting to be cleared of wrongdoing in his last encounter with Opal Koboi, fairies considered the indoor toilet to be the most disgusting of human inventions – with the possible exception of dirty nuclear weapons, but that was still a debatable point. No fairy building was complete without a tiny garden and, hidden at the back, an outhouse. Once Artemis was outside, there would be nothing to shield his tracking device from Foaly's search.

His trip through the warehouse and garden, however, had also confirmed his second theory; the place he was being held was a veritable fortress. Thick pipes he recognised as the plasma conduits for DNA cannons lined the corridors, the guns themselves sitting in every corner, watching his passage with gleaming red sensors. The windows may have been a weak point, for all he could see them through the thick curtains designed to block out snipers and reconnaissance, but were more likely to be magically reinforced and as impenetrable as the rock walls. Even the garden was covered by a battery of cannons and appeared to be built up over thick asphalt, which he knew to be deadly to dwarves. The LEP may well not be able to enter even if they did manage to obtain some unorthodox help and their efforts would be no use at all unless Foaly could somehow disable the security.

Given the amount of time that had now elapsed, it was clear that there was little hope for Artemis' original naïve plan that the LEP could simply enter the house, disable the guards, and take him away. Given the seriousness of the current situation, Artemis knew that it wouldn't take very long at all before the simple solution of blue-rinsing everything occurred to the fairies, which meant he had only a small window of opportunity in which to act if he was to secure his own safety.

Fortunately, his new plan had included a second phase to deal with this very possibility. Artemis was confident that, if the LEP could not extract him, they would at least provide him with the opportunity he needed to convince Sool to move. They were not, after all, an organisation primarily famed for their stealth.

But he was having second thoughts... His plan was risky. If his deductions were wrong, fairies would die. Innocent fairies. Perhaps a blue-rinse really was the cleanest solution. Artemis didn't want to die, but could he really justify risking so many lives in an effort to save his own?

He had been debating with himself as he worked, for about almost hour, when Sool returned, looking extremely irritated and carrying a steaming ceramic bowl of food.

"Have you worked out how to open it yet?" he demanded, placing his burden on the table.

"No, sir," said Artemis. The smell of the stew was wafting across to him – slightly spicy, but not overly so – a rich, hearty smell that reminded him of Butler's best steak. His stomach rumbled loudly as his long-forgotten hunger was reawakened. "May I eat?" He gestured to the bowl of soup with the box he had been ordered to work on still in his hand.

"Yes, of course," said Sool impatiently. "That's why I brought it. How much longer is it going to take you?"

"I don't know, sir," said Artemis, carefully setting the box down and pulling the bowl towards him. "Pandora spent days figuring it out."

He smiled around his first spoonful of the thick stew. The marvellous thing about the truth, really, was that there was just so much of it to tell. The trick was to choose the parts that suited you and to frame them in such a way that the real meaning was entirely lost – and Artemis had mastered that art before he had learned to speak in full sentences. He had narrowed the solution to Pandora's box down to only half a dozen possibilities, but he couldn't know for certain which one would open it without risking the box popping open – which he had been explicitly ordered not to do. It would only take him a few minutes more at the most, if he hadn't been ordered not to open the box – but that wasn't the question he'd been asked, was it?

Sool looked even more irritated. "You need to work faster!" he ordered. "The LEP's already found us; they've got two retrieval teams sniffing around outside and I'm expecting that blasted centaur's tech shuttle to turn up at the gates any moment. Rheeson made certain little – changes – to their bio-bombs before we left, so they will detonate in the technician's face as soon as they're armed, but that might not buy us much time if the centaur survives the first bomb."

Artemis nearly choked on his stew, furious with himself for not realising that Sool would have anticipated this. And just like that, his mind was suddenly made up. It may not have been just his own life he was risking – but it wasn't just his own life that would be saved either.

Carefully, Artemis chewed and swallowed, pushing down the emotion. As he had expected, the LEP had given him the perfect opening, making Sool this worried, but he couldn't afford to make a mistake here. After a few moments, he felt ready.

"They're probably having trouble believing you're serious about using it," he shrugged casually. Then, in a bitter undertone almost smothered in his stew, he added, "I wish I could have trouble believing it. If they could see what you're willing to put me through, they'd take you seriously."

Sool frowned and then slowly an ugly smile spread across his face. No one liked to be underestimated, least of all those who truly believed in their cause. "I'll show them who's serious," he growled, and then he swept out of the room. "Get back to work as soon as you're finished eating," he called back over his shoulder. "And eat quickly!"

Artemis didn't need to be told to eat quickly, he was quite happy to do that even without orders, suppressing an pleased smile at how easy that had been. Not even a minute had passed before he reached the bottom of the bowl and pushed it away. He picked up Pandora's box carefully, beginning to rotate it slowly and evenly in his hands while his thumbs methodically rearranged the black and white tiles, rehearsing for the gnome's return.

I managed to convince Kelp to allow us to accompany him as he presented the situation to the Council. As he had predicted, they did not like the idea of simply waiting for the next move of a terrorist who held the means to destroy their entire world, piece by piece.

If it hadn't been my son's life at stake, I wouldn't have blamed them. As it was... The order for tactical bombing with a light-based biological weapon, in fact, had almost been signed without any acknowledgement of our presence, when I stepped forward, absolutely livid with rage.

"My son," I fumed, "is innocent, here. This situation is not his fault. You dragged him into this. You failed to protect the most dangerous artefact in your society. Arty's been abducted by yourmegalomaniac – and he's the one is going to suffer for it!"

I made deliberate eye contact with each member of the Council in turn as I spoke, not allowing them to hide behind the group mentality, forcing them to admit their personal responsibility. Now came the delicate part because, with my contact lenses long corroded past usability, I had absolutely no recourse if they called my bluff. If I didn't get this right, my son would die.

"I'm no more susceptible to the mesmer or a mind wipe than Arty," I lied, raising my chin defiantly and pushing every ounce of sincerity I could muster into my voice. "You'll have to kill me too, because I will have absolutely no regrets about exposing my son's murderers to the human world."

A low murmur ran around the Council chamber. Angeline came to stand by my side and gripped my hand. "That makes two of us," she said. "Kill us if you must, but we will not be silent while you murder our son."

The hair on the back of my neck rose as I felt the sudden threatening presence of the Butlers behind us. One of them, presumably my less experienced Butler, began wordlessly cracking his knuckles. The sound was like tiny fairy bones breaking and, although it was a little overdone, I had to admit it was effective. The message was clear: actually, little fairies, that makes four of us – and don't think we'll be going quietly.

"Mr. Fowl," said the Council chairman wearily. "Mrs. Fowl. Messrs Butler. We are heartily ashamed that we have allowed this situation to arise. Loss of life – any life – is abhorrent to us. The death of your son, especially given some of the services he has provided to our people in the last several years, would be deeply regrettable. You cannot, however, seriously expect us to allow our entire civilisation to be destroyed to save one life – or even five lives."

"I don't," I said, my tongue feeling like it was made of ash as I verbally signed what I knew could be my son's death warrant. "All I ask is that you wait until there are no other options. Arty's a smart boy. If you give him some time, he'll think of something and then you won't have to live with any of our deaths on your consciences."

The chairman exchanged loaded glances with the other seven Council members, then gave a defeated shake of his head. "You have eight hours," he said. "That's all we can risk. I hope you're right, Fowl."

I hoped I was too, but I was saved the trouble of replying because at that moment, Foaly burst into the room, carrying a laptop computer, followed closely by Short.

"We've received a message," said Foaly tersely. "It's definitely Sool who has the box and Fowl, he contacted me directly and showed me both. I've got the video here to play for you."

Angeline leapt forward hopefully, but I was suddenly even more worried than I had been a few minutes ago. Foaly wasn't looking at me as he connected the computer into the wall-screen in the council chamber, but it wasn't simply a symptom of concentrating on his work. He was avoiding my eyes like the plague, the body language of his human torso simply screaming 'bad news'.

When the image was finally thrown up on the screen, I hardly even noticed the gnome who looked directly at the camera. My eyes were fixed on the sight of Arty, who was seated at a small table in a bare-looking cell.

He was naked, or at least it appeared so from what we could see of him, and it would not have been an unusual move to relieve a captive of his clothes to establish a level of psychological vulnerability. There were more effective ways, of course, but those required a level of experience and subtlety I suspected Sool did not possess.

Arty's usually clear blue eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed from lack of sleep, dark smears staining the white skin underneath them. Until this moment, I had never appreciated quite how pale my son was; his skin seemed almost translucent. It was not impossible that he had become slightly anaemic if he had not been adequately fed over the past two days, but the boy had no tan marks whatsoever, no colour graduation at all between his chest and his face. His thin wrists, however, were a much darker colour, mottled with blue and red bruises from pulling against restraints. They were unbound now and in his hands lay an intricate cylindrical puzzle-box, which he steadily rotated clockwise as his thumbs manipulated the black and white tiles on its surface with militaristic precision.

Angeline gave a strangled sob and buried her head in my shoulder after only the briefest of glances. Arty's Butler stared at the screen with an utterly blank face, his knuckles white on his Sig Sauer. My Butler remained unmoved, coolly continuing to scan the room for any immediate threat to my person. At that moment, I despised him for his complete indifference to my son's plight.

"…I will open the box and bring Haven to justice," the gnome was saying, when I finally pulled myself together enough to start listening.

"Why are you doing this?" pleaded the centaur's recorded voice.

"Why?" the gnome scoffed. "What I want to know is why nobody has had the gumption to do it before! Crime is spiralling out of control and the LEP is disorganised, ineffectual, and corrupt – as is the Council. This is the only way to truly enforce order – immediate, permanent consequences for anyone who dares to break the rules."

"Establish order?" demanded Foaly. "Don't you realise you could completely destroy Haven?"

"Sacrifices must be made," returned Sool loftily. "If Haven truly does go down in flames then, like Sodom and Gomorrah, it was hardly worth saving. But since you bleeding-hearted fools can't seem to see what must be done, and will likely try to stop me, I will warn you that we are well protected, here. The DNA cannons are all in operation and they have been programmed to reject anyone but myself, my assistant, … and my new slave, of course," he added nonchalantly, reaching up to ruffle Arty's hair in a hideous parody of paternal affection.

My fists clenched by my sides and, although Arty didn't flinch, keeping his eyes fixed firmly the slowly rotating box, the tension in his jaw didn't loosen until Sool's hand was well away. It took my fists substantially longer to relax as I took deep, calming breaths to dispel the tightness that had settled over my chest.

"You – " Short's recorded voice was stammering. "You made him swear a slave oath? That's monstrous!"

"Ah, Miss Short," sneered Sool. "I might have guessed you'd be involved with the efforts to rescue your little pet human, but I'm afraid you're too late – he's mine now."

"Artemis is my friend," spat Short in response. "Not that you'd know anything about that! And it's Captain Short – since your suspension, I've been reinstated by Commander Kelp."

Sool's face twisted with rage and I spared the real Short a quick glare. If Sool had to hurt Arty now to prove a point, I was going to have to ask my Butler to have rather pointed discussion with her.

I decided it was easier if I pretended that it was someone else's son on the screen, not my Arty. It wasn't my bruised and sleep deprived son pictured there, under the control of an unstable psychopath, it was someone else's son. It wasn't my son who, after the briefest of pauses that conveyed volumes to me about his opinion of Short's abysmal hostage negotiation technique, began working a little faster on Pandora's box.

At that moment, I was glad I had managed to garner some emotional distance, as I came to a sudden realisation. No – this wasn't someone else's son. This was my son. My brilliant, scheming Arty who, as usual, had the situation completely under control…

"You'll get what you deserve, Short," sneered Sool finally. "And so will that trumped-up excuse for a commander who let you back into the LEP. Soon, I will have the ultimate weapon in law enforcement – the power to crush all who oppose me. And don't think I'll hesitate to use it against the LEP. I assure you, it will be a pleasure."

With that, he cut the connection.

I couldn't hold my joy and relief in any longer and the fairies turned, one by one, to stare at me as my laugh cut through the confused and worried babble of voices in the Council-room. Suddenly, I was in my element again. My son was alive and well – or well enough, at least, to be playing his captor like a piano. I may not have been able to pull solutions to insoluble problems out of thin air – but now I had something to work with.

"Masterful, Arty!" I finally managed, gasping for breath to explain myself to the incredulous fairies. "I don't know what his plan is, but I do know that he's got one. It doesn't make the least bit of sense for Sool to show us this; why would he show us that he can't open the box yet? He should be avoiding all contact so that he doesn't give us any concrete knowledge of his plans, or at worsttrying to convince us that he can destroy your civilisation at any time he chooses. For some reason, though, Arty's manipulated him into thinking that showing us what's really happening is a good idea – we just have to work out what he wants us to get from it."

I already knew one thing Arty wanted us to get from this. He would certainly be aware of what a pathetic figure he cut at the moment. He would also be aware that the simplest solution, as far as the fairies were concerned, would be a strategic bombing to annihilate both Sool and his captive. Seeing Arty bruised and naked, clearly acting under duress, confirmed his helplessness and innocence in everyone's minds, striking directly at what he considered to be the fairies' most exploitable trait. After seeing this tape, the fairies' imaginations would do the rest, and it would now be very difficult any remotely kind-hearted Council member to order the whole place to be bombed.

Elements in Arty's plans, however, rarely served a single purpose and, without communicating any explicit reason for hope, this would do nothing more than delay their inevitable decision. There must have been something else that he wanted us to see – something that would make this worth what had surely been a delicate effort, especially if he had needed to work around some sort of compulsion.

"Replay it without the sound, Foaly," I instructed and moved over to the screen. "See here – he's not attempting any moves that don't succeed. That means he's already solved the puzzle, at least theoretically. So what's he doing? You'll also notice he speeds up when he realises he's running out of time – there's something he wanted us to see, to do with the box. Something that took all the time he had."

Foaly placed the video on a loop and we all stared at it, examining the rotating box intensely. It was Arty's Butler who saw the pattern first.

"SOS – it's Morse code!" he cried. "Watch the top row of tiles."

I looked closer at the tiles and, after a few moments, I recognised the pattern Butler was talking about just before it rotated out of view. Dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot. It was a code every child knew but, having never learned anything other than those two letters, I couldn't make sense of any more than that.

Foaly galloped over to the computer and typed frantically, muttering something about "primitive Mud Men" under his breath. Moments later, he restarted the video from the beginning, this time on fast forward, and a set of clear-text captions began scrolling along the screen.

…OS SOS TME STP ASAP SOS KP OUT SOS SGNL AF1 PRGUE MLCH SOS DNT BLU …

Then the transmission cut. There were a few moments silence as we all puzzled it out, before one of the Council members gave up. "That's all very well," he huffed, "but what does it mean?"

The question was directed at Foaly, who immediately took the floor. "As I understand it," he said "he wants us to execute a time stop as soon as possible, and for us to keep out of the time field. I don't know what use a time stop will be to him – he must know that it won't stop the power inside Pandora's box – but if the Mud Whelp thinks it's a good idea, then I'm all for it. The last bit's probably telling us not to blue-rinse him – well, I guess he knows how we think. The other bit – well, I suspect I'm not the best person to answer."

He gestured to me, and I exchanged a knowing glance with Arty's Butler before I spoke. "It's a message for Artemis Fowl the First," I explained. "Me. The only job we ever did together was in Prague – he was six and I needed an innocent-looking decoy at a chess tournament."

"Timmy!" cried Angline in outrage and I winced. I was going to suffer for that later, I could tell – I could only hope that she didn't start putting dates together and realise that the earrings she had been presented with after our victorious return from the tournament had been a part of our haul.

My wife wasn't stupid; she just trusted me a little more than I deserved sometimes. It was part of what I loved about her, but it did mean I had to be particularly careful not to arouse her suspicions. If she worked out that her earrings were stolen, she would probably insist on sending the priceless rubies back to the Sultan of Brunei with a note of apology – and if there was one thing I really didn't need to contemplate at the moment, it was how I could intercept that package and forge a believable reply.

"He was perfectly safe, dearest," I soothed, hoping more than believing that this would be the end of the matter. "His Butler was with him the whole time. For the moment, be glad that Arty could communicate what he needed to us."

I turned back to face the fairies. "I know what Arty wants me to do. I just don't know how expects me to be able to do it – the team I hired spent months digging tunnels for the Prague operation."

"That, I think," said the round little fairy who had previously claimed to be unable to help us rescue Arty, "is where I come in. Mulch Diggums, tunnel-digger extraordinaire, at your service," he said, emerging from a rather overdone bow with a grin that exposed a disturbingly large number of spade-like teeth.

I hadn't even realised I was smiling back until several of the Council members flinched.

Diggums' grin faded by several molars.

"Er – I recognise that look. I'm going to regret this, aren't I?" he asked nervously. "What exactly is it that you need me to do?"

Chapter Text

Artemis was beginning to wonder if his message had made it through at all. His plan had relied rather heavily on either his father or Butler understanding the Prague reference, after all. He had to admit there was a strong possibility that Sool had been telling the truth and his parents were dead - and depending on how well the fairies had improvised, under the circumstances, Butler may have never even seen the footage. There may have been no one capable of understanding his message at all.

He had been concentrating rather hard on considering the situation in a solely academic light, when the light in his cell blacked out, plunging the small room into near-darkness. Even the tiny red LED on the video camera which kept a constant watch on him had blackened, although the corridor outside was clearly lit with greenish emergency lights.

Artemis reigned in a predatory smile as he put the box down on the table and steepled his fingers together. It was time.

A blackout, of course, was not all that he had asked the LEP to provide him. It was merely a precursor to the main event; in Prague, the blackout had served to disable the CCTV cameras. The alarms on the safe, however, had not run off the mains power and his father had been unable to find a way to disable them. He had done the next best thing – set off every alarm within an area of twelve city blocks, stretching the guaranteed three minute police response time to twenty-seven. That had been plenty of time to get in, get the jewels, and get out again.

In this case, however, there was no safe. No alarms. And the LEP would wait until he was ready before they arrived. The only purpose of these events was to manipulate Sool's actions – to channel him along the path Artemis wanted him to follow – and just as Artemis had predicted, it didn't take very long at all after the beginning of the blackout for his captors to arrive in his cell to check on him.

Sool stood silhouetted in the door frame for several moments, glaring around at the darkened prison cell, then he chanted a few short sentences in Gnommish and a lit candle appeared in his hand. The magical blue flame flooded the furthest corners of the room with light in an instant and Artemis had to work for a second to keep the intrigued expression off his face. He'd never actually seen a fairy cast a spell before, although he had heard that gnomes were meant to be the most proficient warlocks.

"Do you know why the power's been cut?" Sool demanded, stepping into the room, closely followed by Rheeson.

"It's a sign that there's a time stop up, sir," replied Artemis, truthfully enough. He neglected to mention, however, that the time stop was one he had specifically requested, or that the sign was more for his benefit than an unavoidable side-effect of disconnection from the power grid.

"WHAT?" roared Sool.

"The blackout. It's the LEP. There's a time stop," said Artemis coolly. "Sir."

"Those incompetent fools!" Sool spat. "The Book already tells us that a time-stop won't contain the power of Pandora's box! And what have you stopped for? You can see now, keep working!"

"I've got as far as I can without risking opening it," Artemis informed him. "It should only take me a few minutes to work out the last little bits, but it could fall open at any moment during that time. You did tell me not to actually open it."

Sool stared down at the box, as though he scarcely dared believe that he had actually reached the moment of truth – the moment where his plan to impose order on Haven by force would be realised.

It was then that the earthquake started. The first tremor rattled the furniture and rocked the foundations of the building, making the candle-flame gutter.

"What was that?" demanded Sool.

A second, larger tremor followed moments later, knocking them all to the floor, and then a third sent the fairies back there when they tried to get up again. After that, there was silence.

"Probably more of Foaly's work," Artemis shrugged as he pulled himself back into his chair. At least, the explosive charges Mulch was using probably were, and fundamentally that was what was causing the disturbance. "If you don't do something soon, he'll doubtless try to eliminate us all." That was also true, he was sure. He really had no idea how much time this would buy him with the Council.

"Let him," scoffed Rheeson. "He'll only blue rinse himself."

"Foaly's paranoid," countered Artemis. "He might check the bio-bomb before he launches it and find what you've done to it."

"Impossible!" scoffed the other fairy again. Internally, Artemis had to agree it was unlikely. However paranoid Foaly was, Artemis doubted that even he had reached the stage where he would open up a piece of standard LEP weaponry to check that each of the internals circuits was in working order before he used it. But he hadn't really expected that argument to work; he had a much better one prepared.

"Can you be sure Foaly hasn't got some new invention he's intending to use instead?" he demanded. "If he's just going to use a blue-rinse, what was the earthquake about?"

"What would you know anyway, Mud Boy?" Rheeson sneered

"I certainly know I don't want to die," said Artemis. "I may not have been eager to swear a slave oath, but if this place gets blue rinsed, or worse, we'll all die. Why would I want that?"

"You're long past the point where you have a choice in what you want," growled Sool as he fished a laser engraving tool out of his pocket and slid it across the table towards Artemis. "But, you are right," he conceded, "it's a risk we don't need to take. That too-smug centaur has just chosen our first test subject – himself. Engrave the box with his name, human."

Artemis' stomach churned as, without any particular direction from him, his fingers picked up the engraver and went to work, quickly and efficiently. Somewhere, despite his best efforts, he'd gone wrong. The letters his uncaring fingers were etching into the golden lid of Pandora's box could well end the life of a fellow genius and, depending how much intrinsic magic the centaur really did have, possibly destroy a large chunk of Haven as well.

It was close to what he had been aiming for, but it wasn't close enough. Not nearly close enough.

The biggest problem with Arty's plan, I soon realised, was that there was absolutely no role in it for me.

We held the main briefing in the shuttle on the way to the warehouse where my son was being held and I explained the details of what Arty had asked us to do. The explosives we needed, it appeared, were easy for Foaly to arrange, and just as easy to set up to begin their count-down as soon as the time-stop cut off their signals from the shuttle.

Despite his initial reservations, Diggums had required little convincing to agree to bury them underneath the building. Acting Commander Kelp's promise of a medal if Arty's plan actually worked had been plenty and the dwarf had begun polishing the spot on his chest where he had decided to pin it almost immediately.

I was starting to feel vaguely claustrophobic. The idea of staying safely trapped in the shuttle while the dwarf buried the explosives and the rest of the fairies helped Foaly set up the time-stop was almost unbearable. But when I tried to suggest that I could accompany Mulch, perhaps assist him, things began to go quickly downhill.

"You can't go," Arty's Butler said, his voice polite, but firm. "I'm sorry, sir, I know you need to feel involved, but Mulch will work much faster on his own – dwarf tunnels are self-sealing. Besides, you're not going to be able to crawl through almost a kilometre of tunnel with your leg."

"Mr. Butler," I said warningly. "I don't think you quite understand…"

I trailed off as he mutely raised his eyebrows at me, a mannerism I suddenly recognised as having rubbed off on him from nearly fifteen years of safeguarding Arty's life.

"All right," I conceded, "maybe you do understand. But he's my son! I have to do something."

"You've done plenty already, Mr. Fowl," said the huge bodyguard, watching me with steely blue sympathy. "I'm afraid I must insist."

I tried to stand firm, folding my arms stubbornly across my chest, but deep down, I knew he was right. I had not really expected any other result. This was a task best left to a professional and my presence would only slow the dwarf down even if I had been in top physical form.

I was, in fact, about to concede the point when the trouble arose.

"I don't think you should be speaking to Mr. Fowl like that," said my Butler in a menacing tone. "If Mr. Fowl wants to go, then Mr. Fowl is going to go!"

Arty's Butler didn't speak, simply shooting mine a withering look before turning back to continue waiting for me to respond.

My Butler bristled at the dismissal, attempting to draw himself up to his full height, although in the fairy-sized shuttle it was more like a slightly fuller crouch. That action did catch Arty's Butler's attention. He turned back to face his cousin with narrowed eyes.

"I don't think," he said, in a deceptively quiet voice, and although he didn't appear to have moved a muscle from his relaxed crouch, he suddenly gave the impression of a jungle cat, tightly coiled to spring, "that you have any idea what you're doing."

My Butler seemed to swell, his face going red with some combination of embarrassment and rage, and he swept a miniature chair out from between himself and his cousin with an arm. It rolled to a halt several paces away, and the fairies started surreptitiously backing away as it began looking more and more likely that there would actually be a fight – something that would seem very much like a clash of the titans to their tiny eyes.

There was no question of who would win, of course.

My Butler was twenty years younger, stronger, had an inch of height on his cousin, and had never had to be raised from the dead – but to him, it was just a job. He would stand by my shoulder and menace my enemies and even take a bullet for me, because it was what he was trained to do, and there would be no time to think once a shot had been fired. But he didn't care if Arty lived or died, he didn't even care if I lived or died, as long as I didn't die on his watch.

Arty's Butler, on the other hand…

With a pang of grief, I thought of the Major. He had warned me of the danger of Mafiya intervention in my shipment to Russia and it had been his – and many others' – lives that had been lost in the icy waters of the Bay of Kola when I, who had ignored his good advice, survived. He would not have let me go on this fool's errand either.

While my new Butler may have had his father's looks, it appeared his resemblance to the Major ended there. All the sense, all the dedication, all the intuition that had made Major Butler the best bodyguard in the business had been passed straight on to his nephew.

"Stand down!"

I injected that note of command into my voice that all Butlers were programmed to obey without question and they both turned to look at me, keeping a wary eye on their opponent. "Arty's Butler is right," I said, levelling a disapproving look at my Butler. "I'm being selfish. Mr. Diggums will work faster alone."

My bodyguard looked confused at my change of position, but almost immediately seemed to shrug it off as the capriciousness of the principal and settled back to watching the shuttle for any signs of immediate physical threat.

I shook my head in resignation. Perhaps I was expecting too much of him, considering his youth and inexperience. Perhaps I would always expect too much of him, considering who his father had been. But perhaps it was time to start some discreet enquiries into a different body-guard.

From that point on, although the fairies kept darting nervous looks at both of the Butlers, the briefing went reasonably well. I made no further attempts to suggest that any of the humans would leave the shuttle; being unable to shield and almost double the average fairy's height, we were simply too conspicuous to be useful.

As soon as the shuttle landed, the fairies departed; Mulch, to bury the explosives, the rest of the fairies to help Foaly set up the time-stop in record time. Left alone in the shuttle empty of all but the humans and complicated, incomprehensible pieces of fairy hardware, with the moment where everything would be decided one way or the other approaching fast, my feeling of claustrophobia returned with a vengeance.

It wouldn't have been so bad if I was doing something. I had been all right while I was explaining, debating, decoding, persuading, planning – helping in any way whatsoever. But when my thoughts were allowed to drift, I would find them making their way of their own accord to Arty's situation.

I had convinced Short to explain the details of a slave oath to us on the way out, and her words kept running through my mind – words about how invasive and pervasive its effects were, words about the only way it would end…

In general, I hated to kill, to be responsible for a death, and I usually even avoided wishing death upon anything. Now, however, I could hardly suppress the rage that seized up my chest at the memory of Sool ruffling my son's hair as though he was a possession – and at Arty's obvious discomfort as he did so – or the revulsion at Short's quiet affirmation that it was effectively the truth.

Arty's Butler, I suspected, felt similarly – he had, after all, disassembled, cleaned, checked and reassembled his Sig Sauer more times in the last half hour than in the last two days put together. Given the stress he had been under in the last two days, that was saying a great deal.

I had no regrets about what I was about to say, as I moved across the shuttle and sat beside Arty's Butler. I was nearly certain that the bodyguard was thinking exactly what I was. Nearly. But this was too important to leave to 'nearly' certain. I had to be sure, and so it had to be said out loud.

"We can't leave Sool alive," I said, so quietly that only the huge bodyguard would hear. I let the incontrovertible truth of it hang in the air for a few moments before continuing. "You heard what Short said about this magical oath…"

"It dissolves on the death of one of the participants," he nodded. "Yes, I noticed that. I'm sure Master Artemis' plan will take it into account."

"Probably, yes," I agreed. "But Arty's under a lot of restrictions. If he hasn't been able to arrange it…"

I let my words trail off meaningfully.

"If he hasn't been able to arrange it," finished the huge bodyguard, reassembling his Sig Sauer with an ominous sounding series of metallic clicks, "I'll gladly do it for him. I don't think even magic can fix a bullet through the temple. If it can, then I'll use the whole clip."

"Good man," I said, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes in the vain hope that I could block out my own thoughts. "Good man."

An enormous hand squeezed my shoulder for a moment and then disappeared as Arty's Butler began the process of cleaning his weapon once again, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

Reflecting on how desperate Arty must have been to risk submitting to slavery was hardly a productive train of thought. Each mental image of what he could have been going through was worse than the last – but dwelling on the factual image of those sleepless and shadowed blue eyes that had been hardly recognisable as my son's was scarcely better. Nor was considering the bruises on his pale wrists, or the reasons he might have been pulling against his restraints in such a way as to produce them. Even worse was remembering the tense set of his jaw as his captor had so deliberately and insultingly patted him on the head. Perhaps the worst of all was the bone-deep fear that, even if Arty made it out of this alive and physically unharmed, he would be unable to avoid lasting psychological scars.

The time did not pass quickly, for me, although with plenty of fairies helping out, it took Foaly less than an hour to set up the five telescopic time-stop towers around the building. They were curious devices, each with a curved dish attached to the top and a reservoir of roiling blue sparks at the base. The fairies worked behind huge sheets of camouflage foil to prevent Sool from seeing exactly what was going on until they removed them – although he could hardly have avoided noticing the heat-shimmer in the air that was so thick with shielded fairies. I neglected to mention it, given how proudly Foaly had announced that the latest improvements on his camouflage foil had made it suitable for use with cameras. Arty had not specifically mentioned secrecy, even though it had been implied, so hopefully our efforts at subterfuge would be enough.

Foaly examined every inch of each tower personally, giving each the seal of approval one by one and plugging in long cables which snaked to the shuttle, where they connected into his laptop. From there, he could make minor adjustments from the comfort of the shuttle.

By the time he climbed back into the shuttle to make his final adjustments, my nerves had reached the point that I had to have a distraction from my own thoughts or I was certain I would go mad.

Back in the first days of Arty's captivity, I had been quite reluctant to distract Foaly while he was working. I had since come to understand, however, that the centaur was quite capable of continuing his work even as he expounded upon his own genius; in fact, he seemed to work even more efficiently with an appreciative audience.

I moved awkwardly through the shuttle to sit next to him. "So this it how you stop time, is it?" I asked.

"My greatest invention," he informed me with affected modesty, adjusting the inclination of one of the dishes with the push of a button. "The original form of the concept I was telling you about with the antimatter engine – although it doesn't so much stop time as push a particular region of space out of the same time-phase as the rest of the universe. Missing that distinction was what kept technicians from automating the procedure for millennia – they used to be performed by five warlocks chanting in time. My time-stop, however, is stable, reproducible, and lasts for up to eight hours at a time. Unless I open up a time-portal in the dome – which is harder than it sounds, just so you know – it's completely inescapable, at least for anyone except your son. I still don't know how he did that."

"You shouldn't have told me that," I said, mildly amused. "I know how he escaped the time field, because he gave me a summary of your weaknesses in case I needed to start improvising. You might have tricked it out of me if I'd thought you already knew."

Foaly glanced at me, looking chagrined, and then scoffed as he turned back to his screen, talking and typing with simultaneous fluency. "You wouldn't have fallen for that, would you?"

I laughed, the release of emotional tension making me feel a bit better. "You're right, I wouldn't. But it's the principle of the thing, you see."

"And this is you on the straight and narrow?" Foaly demanded, not taking his eyes off the screen where he was adjusting the time-stop dishes for a moment. "No wonder Mud Boy's so good at what he does – you probably taught him to manipulate in his cradle."

"I suppose I did, at that," I conceded, "but he didn't need much instruction. By the time he was eight, I was having to run to keep up, and he knew it."

I smiled faintly at the memory of waking up one morning when Arty was nine to find that all the Fowl bank accounts had been transferred into his name, except for a small savings account into which he was paying me the same miserly allowance that I provided him. That had taken me a week, several bribed bank officials, and every ounce of my political clout to set right again; a week of meeting Arty's smug little face across the breakfast table, hiding the warring pride in my son's genius and embarrassment at my own limitations behind the genial face we both presented to Angeline. I had taken Arty's point, though, and added an extra couple of zeros to the end of his pocket money when I finally managed to return things to normal – or as normal as they ever were in the Fowl household.

The door buzzed open, making me jump, and the hairy form of Mulch Diggums clambered into the shuttle.

"All done," he said, dusting off his hands and shuffling over to the locker where the foil-packed crew rations were kept. He tore open three packets at once and tossed them to the back of his cavernous mouth, spraying crumbs everywhere as he spoke. "I put the charges as close as I dared go to the asphalt, so they should definitely shake things up a bit for Mud Boy – but the LEP had better not wriggle out of giving me that medal this time!"

"Or out of rectifying those budget cuts Sool imposed on my department," added Foaly in the most serious voice I had heard him use yet. He let a final flurry of keystrokes flow from his fingertips before turning to face the gathered humans and fairies in the shuttle. "Now, I'm sure that no one here appreciates how quite complicated it was to arrange this so that we can see what's going on and I can control the time-stop from outside the stop zone – but it's ready whenever you are, Trouble."

Kelp gave Foaly a sour look, then drew in a deep breath and looked around the shuttle, doing a quick head count. "Is everything in order, then?" he asked. "All fairies present and accounted for? All tasks completed?"

There was a moment of silence and then Kelp gave a firm nod. "All right, Foaly. Let's give Fowl what he asked for."

"Let's," agreed Foaly, wriggling his fingers in the air in an exaggerated gesture to loosen them up.

"Lights…" With the press of a button, the warehouse was cut off from the main power grid and the lights blacked out, all at once.

"Time-stop," he continued and pressed another button. A shimmering blue dome formed around the outside of the dishes, distorting and tinting our view of the towers, the batteries at their bases – of everything, really, but the long cables which emerged from the barrier and led out to the shuttle.

Beneath the ground, three explosive charges were cut off from their signals, beginning a countdown. Not knowing exactly what Arty's plan was, I had insisted that we follow the exact schedule we had in Prague, so there were two full minutes of blacked out silence before the explosives detonated, one by one, shaking the ground inside the stop zone.

"And action…" finished Foaly expectantly.

Nothing happened. No one had really expected it to; we would simply have to wait for whatever Arty had planned to play out.

Almost five minutes later, I saw something moving. At first I dismissed it as paranoia – a dark shadow moving in a dark shadowed corner, but after a few more moments, the shadows began to build up and it grew clear that they were not merely figments of my imagination. There were definitely tendrils of black – something – and they were making their way out of the building, straight through the solid walls. The questing strands twisted and turned in the air, tapping along the ground like a thousand blind men's canes, searching for something.

"Is this Fowl's idea of a plan?" breathed Foaly, obviously recognising what was happening. "Surely he wasn't stupid enough to open the box!"

I bristled instinctively at the disparaging remark. My son may have been many things, but 'stupid' was hardly one of them.

"I'm sure he's got a –" I started, but never finished as first one, then more of the questing tendrils seemingly found what they were looking for.

As the strange substance made contact with the magical batteries of the time-stop, it seemed to lock on, the network of filaments condensing in an instant to just five strands, and shockwaves burst out from each of the magical reservoirs at their tips, battering the warehouse with wave after wave of pure magical force. The magically reinforced windows shattered like the finest Waterford crystal, the DNA cannons set around the perimeter of the warehouse exploded in a spectacular display of orange fireworks, and the pipes supplying them split open, spilling fizzing orange gel over the ground.

The blue dome of the time-stop, however, seemed to be protecting us from the force of the explosions inside the demolition zone; the shockwaves striking the barrier with an impact that seemed all the greater for the lack of noise.

"That's –" gasped Foaly, lost for words and not seeming to like the sensation too much. "That's impossible! The Book says it can't hold it in!"

But, as the shockwaves battering the barrier kept coming, two things became obvious. First, that whatever the Book said, the time-stop was most definitely protecting us from the destructive force within the stop zone. And second, that the pure blue magic in the batteries was being slowly but surely consumed by the malevolent tendrils; already, the brightness of the battery had faded to nearly half what it had been, as had the colour of the dome that was all that stood between us and the devastation beyond.

Still, I thought, for a moment, that the magic might prevail against the choking tendrils of blackness – then I realised with horror that the ropes of blackness had not been diminished in the same way as the batteries. Instead, the tendrils were growing thicker and blacker than they had been to start with as more and more of the smoke-like substance rushed out of the building to reinforce it.

Angeline mutely crossed herself beside me.

"Frond save us," breathed Kelp, obviously coming to the same conclusions as I had. "How long can it hold?"

Foaly shook his head despairingly as he typed, bringing up statistics on his view. "It shouldn't be holding at all – but it's at sixty percent… fifty-four percent… forty-eight – at the rate it's being sucked dry, it can't last more than half a minute. Whatever Fowl's plan is, it's not working."

And only then did I pull myself together enough to remember that, while the time-stop was protecting us, my Arty didn't have any protection at all – and the only hope I had for him scared me even more. Pandora had managed to survive at ground zero when the box had been opened the first time, but it had not been unscathed.

My wife seemed to have come to the same realisation as I, because she clutched her diamond and began to pray out loud, the familiar Hail Mary tumbling from her lips without deliberation or pause.

I couldn't speak. Even if I could have, I wouldn't have prayed to the God I hadn't believed in since I had learned the art of crime at my father's knee. If Arty was to get out of there, it would not be because God had interceded for him – it would be because my son had crafted and carried out another brilliant plan.

I may not have believed in God – but I certainly believed in Arty. His plan would work it. It had to.

Chapter Text

Artemis's brain was working overtime as he carefully engraved Foaly's name on the lid of Pandora's box. His plan relied rather heavily on this point; he could predict exactly what would happen if he couldn't convince Sool to change his mind and it wouldn't be good for either the fairies or himself.

"Killing Foaly won't stop anything he's set in motion, sir," he said with entirely unfeigned nervousness as he formed the last letter, "and he's got technical assistants who can operate his inventions without much trouble. Why don't you set the box to destroy his inventions instead?"

Artemis winced inwardly at the unsubtlety of directly stating what he wanted. This called for a delicate touch, but he had run out of time.

Sool gave him another suspicious glare. "Would that work?" he demanded.

"Almost certainly, sir," said Artemis.

"Of course it wouldn't!" snapped Rheeson, at exactly the same time. He glared at Artemis, then continued, "What makes you think we'd trust you anyway, Mud Boy?"

"I can't lie!" protested Artemis. He turned to Sool with the wide-eyed innocent expression that he had practiced for Spiro, pouring every ounce of sincerity he owned into his tone. "You know I can't be lying, sir, you gave the order yourself. I've studied Foaly's technology and the Book, and I'm ninety-three percent certain that Pandora's Box can destroy anything the LEP can send at us, even if it's already on its way here."

"Ninety-three percent?" scoffed Rheeson.

"Quiet, Corporal," snapped Sool. "He's telling the truth. All right, human, set the box to destroy Foaly's inventions. Then open it."

Artemis didn't need the order – he had already picked up the engraving tool and was carefully adding 's inventions after Foaly's name. He took a deep breath as he put the tool down and picked up the box again.

The two fairies leaned closer in anticipation as Artemis' fingers moved over the box with practiced ease, manipulating it to the first of the possible permutations, then the second, then the third.

"How long will this –"

Sool trailed off as he realised the answer to his question. Artemis had managed to slide three black panels almost out of their groves, each protruding a centimetre or two above the top of the box. He held them there with his left hand as, on the other side, he used his right hand to slide two white ones up to match.

Glancing up at Sool briefly, he levered his thumbs underneath the golden top and pulled. With the locking tiles out of the way, it came off easily, the five barbed spikes that had held it in place sliding perfectly through the tracks his efforts had arranged for them.

For a moment, it seemed like nothing would happen as Artemis carefully placed the box on the table. Then purposeful black tendrils of something that looked like sentient smoke began to drift out from beneath the lid of the box, fanning out to explore the room. One shot out of the box at Artemis and he froze at the eerie feeling of it probing him, brushing against his forehead and his chest for a bare instant before it moved on.

Finished with him, the inquisitive smoke examined Sool and his guard, and then moved on again.

"What's it doing?" asked Sool in a hushed voice as the tips of the tendrils sank into the walls and moved on to explore outside.

"It's searching for anything that fits the destruction parameters," explained Artemis. "Anything magical that Foaly's had a hand in, like LEP equipment. The more magical – the bigger the area where fairies die."

"Wait a minute," said Rheeson slowly. "What if there'd been anything of Foaly's here?"

Artemis actually smiled for the first time since he had woken up in this room a small eternity ago. "Then you would have died. Did I forget to remind you of that?"

The tendrils suddenly snapped tight, coalescing into just five strands that radiated out like the spokes of a wheel. They inflated like fire hoses as the blackness began to pour out of the box in earnest. Artemis looked down at them, his smile broadening.

"It's found something," he observed blandly. "Perhaps it's the time-stop towers outside. It looks like there is something of Foaly's here, after all…"

They gaped at him uncomprehendingly for a split second, and then whirled at the sound of a huge crashing noise from outside. It was getting louder by the moment, speeding towards them along the long corridor outside.

"Close the box, human!" shrieked Sool. "Close it!"

"With pleasure, sir," said Artemis, hands already balancing the golden top over the box as he lifted the locking pieces again and realigned the spikes with their holes. He pushed the top down swiftly, cutting off the thick black tendrils at their source and, in an instant, they were gone.

The sound of destruction from down the hall, however, did not stop.

Artemis looked up to meet Sool's horrified eyes again as he picked up the box and began shuffling the puzzle pieces back to their original configuration from memory. "Unfortunately, it's a little too late, now. Sir. But," he added in a cruel mockery of Sool's words, "there's probably nothing worth saving. Like Sodom and Gomorrah."

Sool didn't have time to develop an appropriately nasty retort before the shockwave reached them.

The tiny flame of the magical candle in his hand was snuffed out like a canary in a contaminated mineshaft, plunging the room into pitch darkness. The two fairies themselves dissolved like sugar-cubes dropped into hot tea, the disconnected motes of dust that was all that was left of them drifting invisibly to the floor of the dark room.

Artemis wouldn't have noticed, even if there had been light to see by. He had troubles of his own.

Magic didn't form an integral part of his biology, as it did for a fairy, but he too was caught up in the magical backlash. Over the past three years he had known about the fairies, he had been mesmerised, mind-wiped, healed, drugged, and enslaved, and each contact had left an indelible mark. His chest and head seared with pain and he was unable to stop himself from screaming as every trace of residual magic was ripped away from his body.

At an order from Kelp, the LEP fairies outside the shuttle fanned out in a defensive formation, pointing their weapons at the nearest tendril, ready for when it broke through the time-stop. Diggums and Arty's Butler slipped out of the shuttle too and, while Diggums waved a somewhat nervous farewell and disappeared into the ground, obviously not seeing the need to wait around for the black smoke to break out of its prison, Arty's Butler joined the defensive line.

What any of them expected their guns could do except draw the thing's attention, I'm not sure.

Then the tide turned. At first, I thought it was my imagination, but even after I blinked several times with mingled hope and disbelief, I could see no more waves of reinforcement emanating from the building. Cut off from their source, the black tendrils faded and, within a few seconds, had completely disappeared, leaving the inside of the time-stop area looking ravaged, but peaceful, the weak blue light of the time-stop glowing gently in the dome and the batteries looking hardly brighter.

"Ten percent," breathed Foaly. "Eight. Seven – and – it's stabilised."

In that moment there was a pause, as though the fabric of time and space itself was holding its breath, waiting to see what would happen. Then Arty's Butler turned and rapped on the shuttle door, which Foaly immediately buzzed open.

"I'm going in," said the big man in a tone that brooked no disagreement.

Without waiting for an answer, he turned and strode directly towards the building. The weakened blue dome rippled to let him in as Foaly opened the time portal for him to pass through. He crossed the short distance quickly, unflinching as he came into range of the destroyed cannons, but they didn't stir in their cradles. The door itself gave easily as he kicked it, although he had to bend almost double to get through the fairy-sized opening.

Then he disappeared out of sight.

I held Angeline close to me, but we didn't even look at one another, both staring fixedly out of the windows of the camouflaged shuttle, at the door through which Butler had disappeared. Arty would be all right. His plans always worked. He had to be all right.

Minutes passed slowly with no sign from inside and I reminded myself that the length of time didn't mean anything, that Butler had to find Arty before he could bring him back out again.

I caught my breath as the door swung open once again and Butler emerged from the building. When he straightened up, it became clear that he was cradling a small form wrapped in something that looked like it had once been a curtain – and nestled against his shoulder, I could see a head of messy black hair.

Arty had not been aged then.

I was not remotely relieved to see it. The obvious alternative, given that apparently only the elderly Pandora had survived direct contact with the contents of the box, was too horrible to think about.

My heart hiccuped over several beats, the universe seeming to move in slow motion. Arty's Butler was still too far away to read his expression; I couldn't tell whether his measured stride was the sorrowful march of one bearing his employer's body, or simply that of a man made old before his time by his near-death experience. Each of his steps seemed to be taking at least three times as long as it should. There was a roaring in my ears and it seemed as though my vision had tunnelled to display only the still form of my son in his massive bodyguard's arms.

Then the world suddenly exploded into motion again as I realised that the dark-haired head which protruded from the bundle was not lolling limply against Butler's shoulder, but was arguing fiercely with his rescuer.

"He's alive," I breathed and Angeline released her white-knuckle grip on her diamond, beginning to cry silently with relief. "He's alive!"

I had to say it again, just to be sure I hadn't somehow misspoken the first time. He was alive. It was real. He was really alive!

As the duo passed through the time portal, Arty's heated orders grew audible.

"Put me down, Butler," he was saying. "This is absurd."

"Yes, Master Artemis," said Butler, not slowing in his stride or making any move to release his small employer.

"I'm not a child; I can walk!"

"Of course, Master Artemis," agreed Butler placidly.

"Butler!"

"Yes, Master Artemis?"

"This is most undignified," huffed the boy, but he seemed to realise the futility of arguing.

"Yes, Master Artemis," agreed Butler, with the faintest hint of a smile, continuing his ground-eating stride back towards the shuttle.

"What's the situation?" demanded Kelp.

"Butler?" There was no more volume, but this time Arty's voice was ringing with an unmistakable command.

"If you insist, sir," said Butler meekly, carefully placing the boy back on his feet in front of Kelp.

"Thank you, Butler," Arty said testily.

As soon as he was released, however, Arty swayed on his feet, looking utterly mortified at the display of weakness. Butler's face didn't even twitch towards a smile as he put a massive hand under the boy's elbow to steady him, but Arty shot him an irritated look nonetheless.

Short was by his other side in an instant and healing blue sparks began to gather on Arty's skin, clustering over both bruised wrists and running up his body to collect over his bloodshot eyes. He convulsed as the sparks sank in and surely would have collapsed if not for Butler holding him up on one side and Short on the other. A moment later he stood unassisted, looking unblemished and substantially refreshed.

"Thank you, Captain Short," he said, inclining his head towards her as he produced Pandora's box from inside his curtain, where it had been clutched protectively in the crook of one arm. It was closed and had been returned to a configuration of precisely alternating white and black squares – and if I knew my son at all, it was about as far away from the open state as was physically possible.

Short jumped back from Arty as though the box he was holding was a live snake, staring at both the box and its holder with wide eyes.

"Butler," said Arty, ignoring her. "If you could take care of this for me until it can be returned to its rightful place? I should very much like to never see it again."

"Yes, sir," said Butler, taking the box gingerly and tucking it inside his suit jacket.

Arty twitched the folds of the curtain back into place around him with the careless grace of one wearing a designer suit rather than a window-dressing, tucked his oddly long hair behind his ears, and then turned back to Kelp.

"Sool and his accomplice are dead," he said tersely. "They were killed when I carried out their own orders and opened Pandora's box. I assume the time field served its purpose and contained the blast?"

"Yes," said Foaly, who was poking his mostly-human upper body out of the shuttle door. "How did it… did you know it would… that you would…" He still seemed unable to describe what we had all just witnessed. Short and Kelp exchanged amused glances at the sight.

Arty blinked tiredly. "The Book's description of the effects of Pandora's box sounded very much like matter-antimatter explosion – the targets are eliminated, along with everything in the vicinity – except that matter remained largely unaffected; it was magic that was consumed, and damaged in the backlash. Foaly's told me all about his antimatter engine – he can use a time-field to contain the explosive backlash of annihilation, but he can't prevent the antimatter itself escaping."

He spread his hands as though the rest was obvious. Perhaps it was, to him, but I could tell I wasn't the only one who wasn't completely following his explanation. At least I seemed to be doing a better job than Short or most of the fairies other than Foaly, who didn't even seem to be understanding most of the words he was using, let alone the concept of antimatter.

"Therefore," Arty continued blithely, "I concluded that the contents of the box were some form of guided antimagic missile and the collateral damage was the equivalent energy blast produced from magic-antimagic annihilation. When Pandora opened the box the second time, it was only the coalition that was destroyed; the magic explosion which should have eliminated all the police-fairies in the vicinity was held in by the time-stop, even if the antimagic passed straight through the barrier. So I convinced Sool to specify Foaly's inventions as the new destruction parameter –"

Foaly choked and Arty raised a tired looking eyebrow. "The hardest part was convincing him to target your inventions, rather than you. The idea was to give the antimagic something hugely magical to annihilate inside the time-stop, so that it wouldn't go looking for anything to destroy outside, and thus Haven's magic would be protected from the backlash. Sool and his accomplice weren't so lucky."

From Arty's Butler's satisfied expression, he hadn't needed to check pulses to be sure that Arty's captors were dead. I felt a thoroughly reprehensible wave of satisfaction at that, but didn't bother chiding myself. There were some things that I could not forgive – and hurting my son was one of them.

"As for myself, that was a little more risky, but I theorised that the antimagic kills fairies and destroys magical property because it disrupts the magic itself – and anyone who's ever seen a healing can testify that loose magic is dangerous. I theorised that, being non-magical, the only reason Pandora was affected at all was that Frond had shared his magic with her to heal her or keep her young and healthy – possibly even going as far as a slave oath to sustain her past her natural lifespan. The antimagic took it all back, using her own life force to compensate for the deficit – as happened with Butler when Holly ran out of magic to heal him."

He held out a pale hand, examining his nails, and even from a distance I could see that they were not as immaculately manicured as usual. "The only major healing I have ever received was some badly broken ribs and, while I do appear to be six weeks or so older than I was a few minutes ago, I am free and otherwise unharmed. I closed the box before it could let out enough antimagic to completely consume the magic in Foaly's time stop and move on."

"There's only seven percent of the time-stop power remaining, Fowl," said Foaly in exasperation. "Seven percent. You cut it rather fine, don't you think? And if you'd been wrong about – aboutanything!"

Arty raised that weary eyebrow once again. "But I wasn't wrong, was I? I was working with a prophecy," he said. "Ohm's been right before and it said 'those fairies who oppose him', not 'friend and foe alike'. Therefore, if the prophecy was real, those who were working with me were safe. Since anyone working with me was likely to be just outside the time stop and thus unable to survive a breach – it simply had to work."

"Fowl!" Short growled, looking as though she would have taken back her blue sparks if she'd been able.

She might even have tried to deck him despite Butler's presence at his side, if the boy hadn't suddenly closed his eyes and swayed on his feet, his magically-assisted second wind seemingly leaving him. I would have been proud of the perfect play to regain the fairies' sympathies – if I could have been certain he was faking.

"It wasn't just my life, Rheeson sabotaged Foaly's bio-bombs," Arty defended wearily, leaning on Butler's arm. "It could have been a massacre. I had to do something."

"He did what?" demanded Foaly, patting his foil hat with a horrified hand. "That treacherous, conniving –"

Foaly pulled his head into the shuttle and trotted over to his computers and, as I glanced over, he was moving from screen to screen and setting them all to running diagnostics.

"Paranoid, paranoid," he muttered under his breath. "Obviously not paranoid enough. It's the second time they've got to me!" From the expression on his face, he would be checking every single connection in every piece of fairy hardware before he let anything be used once again – and possibly also upgrading his foil hat to a more sturdy steel helmet.

When I turned back towards my Arty, Angeline was gone – somehow, she had managed to break free of the need to keep her eyes transfixed on our son for long enough to push her way out of the shuttle and run to him.

"I'm so happy you're all right, darling!" she sobbed as she wrapped her arms around him. Arty relaxed into her embrace, letting his shadowed eyes fall closed as he struggled to hold his game face.

"Mother," he said flatly. "I am pleased to see you are safe. Was Father harmed?"

His tone was deadly even once again, communicating his anxiety to me more effectively than a scream.

"He's fine, darling," said Angeline in confusion, pulling back to examine him, but keeping a firm grip on one hand. "Were you worried about us?"

I was already moving awkwardly across the shuttle, having understood his reaction instantly and kicking myself for not predicting it.

"No one's been hurt, Arty," I assured him as I began to awkwardly clamber out of the shuttle door, cursing my prosthetic leg. Arty's head snapped around to look at me, an almost imperceptible tension bleeding from his shoulders. "No one but you, that is, and presumably Sool and his friends. They told you we'd been killed, didn't they?"

Arty's mask slipped a little and he sighed. "It's an elementary manipulation, of course, but…"

He pulled the curtain more tightly around his shoulders and, though I was quite certain that no one but I would have noticed the gesture for what it was, my heart ached for the sudden insecurity he was showing.

The fairies might as well have ceased to exist for all I cared about them as I finally reached my family, discarding my cane and clasping Arty and Angeline's joined hands in my own. "It's completely understandable, Arty," I told him. "That tactic is a classic for very good reason – I can assure you that my response was rather unprofessional when the Mafiya told me that Angeline was dead and you had been left an orphan. It's not like it sounds from reading textbooks or articles, is it?"

"No," he said flatly, "it isn't."

He was blocking; suppressing his emotions, refusing to face what had happened, and shutting me out.

I frowned, raising a hand to warn Angeline not to interrupt as I considered the best course of action. Arty stared at me stubbornly, knowing what I was thinking but refusing to allow me to force the situation.

Denial was a perfectly natural psychological defence mechanism following a traumatic situation, an excellent method of propping yourself up for a few more hours while you got whatever the job was done. But it wasn't healthy to allow him to push the whole thing out of his mind, to just pretend it had never happened. It would take him time to come to terms with his ordeal, of course, but it could be weeks, or months, before he even started to heal if I couldn't get this right. And it would have to be handled delicately; he wouldn't soon forgive me if I made him lose face in front of his dubious allies.

Inspiration struck at last; there was at least one thing that I knew Arty would not forget easily, something that would seem insignificant to those who were watching, but something that had disturbed him so much that I had seen his mask nearly crack when it had been at its strongest. He would not be able to push it aside now, when he was already struggling for his composure.

I gave him an apologetic smile as I stretched out a hand to ruffle his hair, a direct mirror of Sool's actions a few hours earlier.

Arty's eyes widened infinitesimally as the memory rushed to the forefront of his mind, bringing with it the emotions he had been suppressing; the loathing for his captor, the fear, the self-doubt, the helplessness... Then his mask shattered and Arty ducked his head, averting his eyes from mine.

He drew one shuddering breath, and then another that sounded a little more even.

I waited him out, deliberately leaving my hand in place on the crown of his head as though, by its very presence, it could dilute the distressing whirl of emotions.

"Touché, Father," he said finally and, although his voice was steady, he still wouldn't look at me.

I withdrew my hand at the acknowledgement, doing a rough calculation as I let the lengthened strands of his hair fall through my fingers and settle back into place.

"Six weeks older, you think, Arty?" I asked him carefully. It seemed about right from the extra couple of centimetres on his hair.

"Approximately," he agreed in a wary tone, using the excuse of examining the growth of his fingernails to continue avoiding my eyes. "Perhaps a few days more."

"Then," I said, "I guess I should wish you a happy birthday." I left a thoughtful pause before continuing. "I think you might have grown an inch or two taller, as well."

Arty's head remained down and I checked my arithmetic; six weeks and two days away was his fifteenth birthday. Spot on – but really, it shouldn't matter if I was slightly off.

As far as anyone else was concerned, I might have been talking about his physical age, but Arty would appreciate my true meaning. I wasn't referring to anything so mundane as his height, or the number of years he had been alive; we were talking about growing up, about gaining experiences and learning from them, about how proud I was of the choices he was making and of the adult he was becoming.

The moment stretched and I began to worry. Perhaps Arty was too tired for doublespeak? But he would hardly believe I was sincere if I made it any more plain.

Then Arty raised his face again and, although there was still a measure of pain and self-doubt there, the corners of his eyes were creased slightly with amusement at the incongruous suggestion that we should shift his birthday. I relaxed minutely at the confirmation that he would be all right, after all.

"Thank you, Father," he said, his lips quirking in a smile. "Do you think it would be too much trouble to organize a decent meal, a bath, and a good night's sleep for the birthday boy?"

I smiled back at him and, finally giving in to the urge, pulled him against my chest and let my eyes fall closed in contentment.

At any moment, Arty would remember that he was 'fifteen' now and far too old to be hugged by his father. I still had to face Angeline's wrath over taking Arty on a business trip in his childhood and I was either going to have to find a new bodyguard or spend the next several years training my Butler to adequately fill his father's shoes. I also suspected that, as soon as the shock wore off, the fairies would remember that Angeline and I had not previously known about their existence and begin talking about danger to their society, about escalating risk, about the thin end of the wedge.

In a few days, I would be lucky if I remembered this moment at all, despite my scathing speech to the Council. Perhaps particularly because of it.

But right now, none of that mattered to me in the slightest. All that mattered was the awareness of the perfect now and the overwhelming sensation of my child, warm and safe in my arms.

"I'm sure that can be arranged," I told him, in as bland a voice as I could manage through the smile that seemed determined to crack my face in half with sheer, unadulterated happiness. "I'm sure that can all be arranged."