She does not understand, he thought.
“Butler!” he called. “Stop her.”
The bodyguard reached out his massive arms and folded Holly in a bear hug. She used every escape maneuver in the manual, but there was no slipping such a grip.
“Butler, please. This is not right. It was supposed to be me.”
“Wait,” said Butler. “Just wait, Holly. Artemis has a plan.” He squinted through the green dome. “What is your plan, Artemis?”
All Artemis could do was smile and shrug.
Holly stopped struggling. “The magic shouldn’t affect a human, Artemis. Why hasn’t it released you yet?”
Artemis felt the magic scanning his person, looking for something. It found that something in his eye socket.
“I have a fairy eye—one of yours, remember?” said Artemis, pointing to the brown iris. “I thought my human genes could overcome that, but this is perceptive magic. Smart power.”
“I’ll get the defibrillator,” said Butler. “Perhaps there will be a spark left.”
“No,” said Artemis. “It will be too late.”
Holly’s eyes were slits now, and a pallor spread across her skin like white paint. She felt sick and broken.
“You knew. Why, Artemis? Why did you do this?”
Artemis did not answer this question. Holly knew him well enough by now to unravel his motives later. He had seconds left, and there were more urgent things to be said.
“Butler, you did not fail me. I tricked you. After all, I am a tactical genius and you were unconscious. I want you to remember that, just in case…”
“Just in case of what?” Butler shouted through the viscous light.
Again, Artemis did not answer the question. One way or another, Butler would find out.
“Do you remember what I said to you?” said Artemis, touching his own forehead.
“I remember,” said Holly. “But…”
There was no more time for questions. The green mist was sucked backward into the Berserker Gate as though drawn by a vacuum. For a moment Artemis was left standing, unharmed, and Butler dropped Holly to rush to his charge’s side. Then Artemis’s fairy eye glowed green, and by the time Butler caught the falling boy in his arms, Artemis Fowl’s body was already dead.
Holly dropped to her knees and saw Opal Koboi’s twisted body by the lock. The remnants of black magic had eaten through her skin in several places, exposing the ivory gleam of skull.
The sight affected her not one bit at that moment, though the pixie’s staring eyes would haunt Holly’s dreams for the rest of her life.
Six Months Later
The world was resilient and so slowly fixed itself. Once the initial thunder strike of devastation had passed, there was a wave of opportunism as a certain type of people, that is, the majority, tried to take advantage of what had happened.
People who had been sneered at as New Age ecohippies were now hailed as saviors of humanity, as it dawned on people that their traditional methods of hunting and farming could keep families fed through the winter. Faith healers, evangelists, and witch doctors shook their fists around campfires and their following blossomed.
A million and one other things happened that would change the way humanity lived on the earth, but possibly the two most important events following the Great Techno-Crash were the realization that things could be fixed, and the detection of fairies.
After the initial months of panic, a Green Lantern fanatic in Sydney got the Internet up and going again, discovering that even though most of the parts in his antenna had exploded, he still knew how to fix it. Slowly the modern age began to reassert itself, as cell phone networks were rigged by amateurs and kids took over the TV stations. Radio made a huge comeback, and some of the old velvet-voiced guys from the seventies were wheeled out of retirement to slot actual CDs into disk drives. Water became the new gold, and oil dropped to third on the fuel list after solar and wind.
Across the globe there had been hundreds of sightings of strange creatures who might have been fairies or aliens. One moment these creatures were not there, and the next there was a crackle or a bang and suddenly there were observation posts with little people in them, all over the world. Small flying craft fell from the sky, and powerless submarines bobbed to the surface offshore of a hundred major cities.
The trouble was that all of the machinery self-destructed, and any of the fairies/aliens taken into custody inexplicably vanished in the following weeks. Humanity knew that it was not alone on the planet, but it didn’t know where to find these strange creatures. And considering mankind had not even managed to explore the planet’s oceans, it would be several hundred years before they developed the capacity to probe beneath the earth’s crust.
So the stories were exaggerated until nobody believed them anymore, and the one video that did survive was not half as convincing as any Saturday morning kids’ show.
People knew what they had seen, and those people would believe it to the day they died; but soon psychiatrists began to assign the fairy sightings to the mass traumatic hallucination scrapheap that was already piled high with dinosaurs, superheroes, and Loch Ness monsters.
The Fowl Estate
Ireland became truly an island once more. Communities retreated into themselves and began growing foodstuffs that they would actually eat rather than mechanically suck all the goodness out of, freeze all the additives into, and ship off to other continents. Many wealthy landowners voluntarily donated their idle fields to disgruntled hungry people with sharp implements.
Artemis’s parents had managed to make their way home from London, where they had been when the world broke down, and, shortly after the funeral ceremony for Artemis, the Fowl Estate was converted into over five hundred separate plots where people could grow whatever fruit and vegetables the Irish climate permitted.
The ceremony itself was simple and private, with only the Fowl and Butler families present. Artemis’s body was buried on the high meadow where he had spent so much of his time tinkering on his solar plane. Butler did not attend, because he steadfastly refused to believe the evidence presented to him by his own eyes.
Artemis is not gone, he asserted, time after time. This is not the endgame.
He would not be persuaded otherwise, no matter how many times Juliet or Angeline Fowl dropped down to his dojo for a talk.
Which was why the bodyguard showed not one whit of surprise when Captain Holly Short appeared at the door of his lodge at dawn one morning.
“Well, it’s about time,” he said, grabbing his jacket from the coatrack. “Artemis leaves instructions, and it takes you guys half a year to figure them out.”
Holly hurried after him. “Artemis’s instructions were not exactly simple to follow. And, typically, they were totally illegal.”
In the courtyard, a doorway had been cut into the orange glow of the morning sky, and in that doorway stood Foaly, looking decidedly nervous.
“Which do you think seems less suspicious?” asked Butler. “An alien-looking craft hovering in the yard of a country home, or a floating doorway with a centaur standing in it?”
Foaly clopped down the gangplank, towing a hover trolley behind him. The shuttle door closed and fizzled out of the visible spectrum.
“Can we get on with this, please?” he wondered. “Everything we’re doing here is against fairy law and possibly immoral. Caballine thinks I’m at Mulch’s ceremony. The Council is
actually giving him a medal. I hate lying to my wife. If I stop to think about this for more than ten seconds, I might just change my mind.”
Holly took control of the hover trolley. “You will not change your mind. We have come too far just to go home without a result.”
“Hey,” said Foaly. “I was just saying.”
Holly’s eyes were hard with a determination that would tolerate no argument. She had been wearing that expression every day now for six months, ever since she had returned home from the Berserker Gate incident. The first thing she had done was seek out Foaly in Police Plaza.
I have a message for you from Artemis, she’d said, once Foaly had released her from a smothering hug.
Really? What did he say?
He said something about a chrysalis. You were to power it up.
These words had a powerful effect on the centaur. He trotted to the door and locked it behind Holly. Then he ran a bug sweep with a wand he kept on his person.
Holly knew then that the word meant something to her friend.
What chrysalis, Foaly? And why is Artemis so interested in it?
Foaly took Holly’s shoulders and placed her in a lab chair. Why is Artemis interested? Our friend is dead, Holly. Maybe we should let him go?
Holly pushed Foaly away and jumped to her feet. Let him go? Artemis didn’t let me go in Limbo. He didn’t let Butler go in London. He didn’t let the entire city of Haven go during the goblin revolution. Now tell me, what is this chrysalis?
So Foaly told her, and the bones of Artemis’s idea became obvious, but more information was needed.
Was there anything else? asked the centaur. Did Artemis say or do anything else?
Holly shook her head miserably. No. He got a little sentimental, which is unusual for him, but understandable. He told me to kiss you.
She stood on tiptoes and kissed Foaly’s forehead. “Just in case, I suppose.”
Foaly was suddenly upset, and almost overwhelmed, but he coughed and swallowed it down for another time.