Artemis and Butler leaned back and allowed the safety cinches to drop over their shoulders, pulling comfortably close on tension-sensitive rollers.
Artemis’s fingers scrunched the material of his pants at the knees. Their progress down the feeder rail seemed maddeningly slow. At the end of the metal panel–clad rock tunnel they could see the vent itself, a glowing crescent yawning like the gate to hell.
“Holly,” he said without parting his teeth, “please, a little acceleration.”
Holly lifted her gloved hands from the wheel. “We’re still on the feeder rail, Artemis. It’s all automatic.”
Foaly’s face appeared in a heads-up display on the windshield. “I’m sorry, Artemis,” he said. “I really am. We’ve run out of time.”
“No!” said Artemis, straining against his belt. “There are fifteen seconds left. Twelve at least.”
Foaly’s eyes dropped to the controls before him. “We have to close the doors to ensure everyone inside the blast tunnels survives. I really am sorry, Artemis.”
The off-roader jerked, then halted as the power was cut to the rail.
“We can make it,” Artemis said, his voice close to a panicked wheeze.
Up ahead the mouth to hell began to close as the giant dwarf-forged gears rolled the meter-thick slatted shutters down over the vent.
Artemis grasped Holly’s shoulder. “Holly? Please.”
Holly rolled her eyes and flicked the controls to manual.
“D’Arvit,” she said, and pressed the accelerator to the floor.
The off-roader leaped forward, jerking free from its guide rail, setting off revolving lights and warning sirens.
Onscreen, Foaly rubbed his eyelids with index fingers. “Yeah, yeah. Here we go. Captain Short goes rogue once more. Hands up who’s surprised. Anyone?”
Holly tried to ignore the centaur and concentrate on squeezing the shuttle through the shrinking gap.
Usually I pull this sort of stunt toward the end of an adventure, she thought. Third-act climax. We’re starting early this time.
The shuttle grated along the tunnel floor, the friction sending up twin arcs of sparks that bounced off the walls. Holly slipped control goggles over her eyes and automatically adjusted her vision to the curious double focus necessary to send blink commands to the sensors in her lenses and actually look at what was in front of her.
“Close,” she said. “It’s going to be close.” And then, before they lost the link: “Good luck, Foaly. Stay safe.”
The centaur tapped his screen with two fingers. “Good luck to us all.”
Holly bought them an extra few inches by deflating the Cupid’s suspension pads, and the off-roader ducked under the descending blast doors with half a second to spare, swooping into the natural chimney. Below, the earth’s core spewed up magma columns ten miles wide, creating fiery updrafts that blasted the small shuttle’s scorched underside and set it spiraling toward the surface.
Holly set the stabilizers and allowed the headrest to cradle her neck and skull.
“Hold on,” she said. “There’s a rough ride ahead.”
Pip jumped when the alarm sounded on his phone as though he had not been expecting it, as though he had not been counting the seconds. Nevertheless he seemed surprised, now that the moment had finally arrived. Shooting Kip had drained the cockiness from him, and his body language was clearly that of a reluctant assassin.
He tried to regain some of that old cavalier spirit by waving his gun a little and leering at the camera; but it is difficult to represent the murder of a childlike pixie as anything but that.
“I warned you,” he said to the camera. “This is on you people, not me.”
In Police Plaza, Commander Kelp activated the mike.
“I will find you,” he growled. “If it takes me a thousand years, I will find you and deliver you to a lifetime’s imprisonment.”
This actually seemed to cheer Pip a little. “You? Find me? Sorry if that doesn’t worry me, cop, but I know someone who scares me a lot more than you.”
And without further discussion he shot Opal, once, in the head.
The pixie toppled forward as though struck from behind with a shovel. The bullet’s impact drove her into the ground with some force, but there was very little blood except a small trickle from her ear, almost as if young Opal had fallen from her bicycle in the schoolyard.
In Police Plaza the usually riotous operations center grew quiet as the entire force waited for the repercussions of the murder they had just witnessed. Which quantum theory would prove correct? Perhaps nothing at all would happen apart from the death of a pixie.
“Okay,” said Trouble Kelp, after a long pregnant moment. “We’re still operational. How long before we’re out of the troll’s den?”
Foaly was about to run a few calculations on the computer when the wall screen spontaneously shattered, leaking green gas into the room.
“Hold on to something,” he advised. “Chaos is coming.”
Atlantis
Opal Koboi felt herself die, and it was a curious sensation, like an anxious gnawing at her insides.
So this is what trauma feels like, she thought. I’m sure I’ll get over it.
The sour sickness was soon replaced by a fizzing excitement as she relished the notion of what she was to become.
Finally I am transforming. Emerging from my chrysalis as the most powerful creature on the planet. Nothing will stand in my way.
This was all very melodramatic, but Opal decided that, under the circumstances, her eventual biographer would understand.
It never occurred to the pixie that her theory of temporal paradox could simply be dead wrong, and she could be left down a hole in a nuclear reactor having killed her only real ally.
I feel a tingle, she thought. It’s beginning.
The tingle became an uncomfortable burning sensation in the base of her skull that quickly spread to clamp her entire head in a fiery vise. Opal could no longer nurture thoughts of future conquests as her entire being suddenly became fear and pain.
I have made a mistake, she thought desperately. No prize is worth another second of this.
Opal thrashed inside her anti-rad suit, fighting the soft constraints of the foam, which blunted her movements. The pain spread through her nervous system, increasing in intensity from merely unbearable to unimaginable. Whatever slender threads of sanity Opal had left snapped like a brig’s moorings in a hurricane.
Opal felt her magic return to conquer the pain in what remained of her nerve endings. The mad and vengeful pixie fought to contain her own energy and not be destroyed utterly by her own power, even now being released as electrons shifted orbits and nuclei spontaneously split. Her body phase-shifted to pure golden energy, vaporizing the radiation suit and burning wormhole trails through the dissolving foam, ricocheting against the walls of the neutron chamber and back into Opal’s ragged consciousness.
Now, she thought. Now the rapture begins, as I remake myself in my own image. I am my own god.
And, with only the power of her mind, Opal reassembled herself. Her appearance remained unchanged, for she was vain and believed herself to be perfect. But she opened and expanded her mind, allowing new powers to coat the bridges between her nerve cells, focusing on the ancient mantras of the dark arts so that her new magic could be used to bring her soldiers up from their resting place. Power like this was too much for one body, and she must excise it as soon as her escape was made, or her atoms would be shredded and swept away like windborne fireflies.
Nails are hard to reassemble, she thought. I might have to sacrifice my fingernails and toenails.