“I need the demon,” he bellowed, spittle spraying from his lips. “Turn him over, or we all die.”
“Too late for hollow threats, my friend. You have been outfoxed. Now, sit still while my compadre, the noble steed, binds your hands.”
Turnball took a whooping breath and stood erect. “No. I have one card left to play. The ambulance is rigged to explode. The autopilot is smashed and the generator has been exposed—there is no turning back. Give me the demon and I will pilot the shuttle deep into the trench, then escape in the belly of an amorphobot. There is room for one more besides Leonor. I can take you instead of No1.”
Foaly sucked his lips. “Ah. Okay. Little problem with that plan. I dissolved the bots.”
“So that was your plot,” said Orion fiercely, brandishing the gun like a cutlass. “You would take what you wanted and then bury the evidence in the explosion.”
Turnball shrugged, suddenly calm. He had always known a day like this would come. “It has worked for me before.” He consulted a timer on his wrist computer. “In five minutes the shuttle explodes and we all die. If you will excuse me, I must go to my wife’s bedside.”
He turned to find his wife a little closer than expected. Leonor stood framed by the umbilical’s curtain, leaning heavily on her walking stick, face pale in the glow from the light orbs.
“Turnball, what’s happening?” she said, her breath labored, but both eyes were open and they were clear. Clearer than they had been since they’d first met.
Turnball rushed to her side, supporting her with one arm.
“Yes, my dear. You should lie down. Things will be better soon.”
Leonor snapped as she had not for a long time. “You just said the ship will explode.”
Turnball’s eyes were wide with surprise—his beloved wife had never snapped at him before—but he kept a gentle smile on his lips. “What does it matter, so long as we are together? Even death will not separate us.”
From somewhere, Leonor found the strength to stand straight. “I am ready for my long sleep, Turnball. But you are young, these people are young, and is that not a hospital ship we are moored to?”
“Yes, yes it is. But these people are my enemies. They have persecuted me.” Turnball licked the rune on his thumb, but Leonor was beyond his power now.
“I think that perhaps you were far from blameless, my dear, but I was blinded by love. I have always loved you, Turnball. I always will.”
Orion was getting anxious. The seconds were ticking away, and he had no wish to see his beloved Holly at the heart of an explosion.
“Step aside, madam,” he said to Leonor. “I must pilot this ship deep into the trench.”
Leonor raised her stick shakily. “No. I will take this journey alone. I have outstayed my welcome on this earth, and shut my eyes to what was happening around me. Now at last I will fly where I never thought possible.” She stroked Turnball’s wet cheek and kissed him. “At last I can finally fly again, Turnball.”
Turnball clasped his wife’s shoulders tenderly. “You can fly, you will. But not now. This flight is death, and I cannot be without you. Don’t you want what we had?”
“Those times are gone,” said Leonor simply. “Perhaps they should never have been. Now, you must let me go, or else you must try to stop me.”
This was an ultimatum that Turnball had been dreading since first applying the rune to Leonor’s neck. He was about to lose his wife, and there was nothing he could do about it. His emotions played across his face, and a network of lines appeared around his eyes as though drawn by an invisible pen.
“I must go, Turnball,” said Leonor softly.
“Fly, my love,” said Turnball, and he seemed in that moment as old as his wife.
“Let me do this for you, my love. Let me save you, as you saved me all those years ago.” Leonor kissed him again and withdrew through the curtain.
Turnball stood for a moment, shoulders shuddering, chin down, then he pulled himself together.
He faced Orion and jerked a thumb toward the ambulance. “I should go. Leonor will never make it back up the steps on her own.”
And with such an ordinary statement, he was gone, the hatch sealing behind him.
“Understated but graceful,” said Orion. “A nice exit.”
The Butlers were both unconscious, which would be a source of some ribbing and embarrassment later, so they did not see the stolen ambulance shuttle detach itself from the umbilical conduit and peel away from the Nostremius, Leonor and Turnball clearly visible at the cockpit controls. And they completely missed the shuttle diving deep into the Atlantis Trench in a long graceful arc.
“That woman is quite a pilot,” said Orion. “I imagine they are holding hands now and smiling bravely.”
Moments later a hellfire blossom grew from the depths of the trench, but the explosion was quickly extinguished by the millions of tons of water bearing down on it. The shock currents, however, raced along the raised ridge, dislodging centuries-old coral and rippling the untethered end of the umbilical conduit like a child would a skipping rope, sending the squid scurrying for safety.
The tube’s occupants were jumbled together, heroes and villains alike, and swept to the Nostremius’s door, which moments later was opened from the inside by a confused technical officer, a hardened sea gnome, who, to his eternal shame, squealed like a baby sprite when he came face-to-face with a gigantic human covered in white dust.
“Zombie!” he shrieked, and, unfortunately for him, two of his shift buddies were in the air lock behind him, and it cost him three weeks’ pudding rations to buy their silence.
EPILOGUE
ARTEMIS woke to find Holly and Foaly leaning over him. Holly seemed concerned, whereas Foaly was scrutinizing him, as one would a lab experiment.
I am not in pain, thought Artemis. They must have given me something.
And then: I should lighten the mood.
“Ah, my princess. Noble steed. How does the morning find you both?”
“D’Arvit,” said Holly. “It’s the knight in shining armor.”
“Hmm,” said Foaly. “That’s how Atlantis goes. As it progresses, you can never predict what will set it off. I thought the cocktail of drugs would bring back Artemis, but at least Orion will tell us what Artemis is up to.” He leaned in closer. “Orion, you noble youth. Do you happen to know the password for Artemis’s firewall?”
“Of course I do,” said Artemis. “It’s D-O-N-K-E-Y space B-O-Y.”
Foaly was halfway through writing this down when the penny dropped.
“Oh, ha-ha, Artemis. Most hilarious. I knew it was you all the time.”
Holly did not laugh. “That wasn’t funny, Artemis. Atlantis Complex is no joke.”
At the mere mention of the disease, Artemis felt the nest of malignant fours stir at the back of his head.
Not again, he thought.
“It would really help if you two swapped places,” he said, trying to sound calm and in control. “Also, could you close those two porthole blinds all the way? Or open all the way, but not in the middle like that? That makes no sense.”
Holly wanted to shake Artemis until he snapped out of it, but she had talked to Dr. Argon of the Psych Brotherhood, and he had told them to humor the human until they could get him checked into the clinic.
Opal Koboi’s old room is still free, the doctor had said brightly, and Holly suspected he was already thinking of titles for the inevitable book.
So she said, “Okay, Artemis. I’ll get the blinds.”
As Holly tapped the little sun icon beside the blind, lightening the glass, she noticed the shoals of exotic fish basking in the pod light from the Nostremius’s stern fins.
We are all swimming toward the light, she realized, and then wondered when she’d become so philosophical. Too much thinking is one of the things that put Artemis where he is now. We need to deal with this problem.
“Artemis,” she said, forcing a note of positivity into her voi
ce, “Dr. Argon wondered if you had any kind of record of . . .”
“My descent into madness?” completed Artemis.
“Well, he actually said, the Complex’s progression. He said keeping a journal of some kind is common among sufferers. They feel a great need to be understood after . ..”
Again Artemis completed the sentence. “After we die. I know. I feel that compulsion still.” He tugged off the ring from his middle finger. “It’s my fairy communicator, remember? I kept a video diary. Should make terrifying viewing.”
Foaly took the ring. “Let me zap that down to Argon. It will give him a little insight before he gets you strapped into the crazy chair.” The centaur realized what he had said. “Sorry. Cabelline is always saying how insensitive I am. There’s no crazy chair, it’s more like a couch or a futon.”
“We get it, Foaly,” said Holly. “Thanks so much.”
The centaur clopped to the hospital room’s automatic door. “Okay. I’ll send this off. See you later, and watch out for those evil fours.”
Artemis winced. Holly was right: the Atlantis Complex was not funny.
Holly sat on the chair beside his bed. It was a very high-tech bed with stabilizers and impact cushions, but unfortunately a little short.
“You’re growing, Artemis,” she said.
Artemis smiled weakly. “I know. Not fast enough in some ways.”
Holly took his hand. “You can try to upset yourself if you want, but you won’t be able to. Foaly pumped enough sedative into you to put a horse to sleep.”
They both smiled at that for a moment, but Artemis was in a melancholy mood.
“This adventure was different, Holly. Usually someone wins, and we are better off at the end. But this time so many people died—innocents—and no one has benefited. And all for love. I can’t even think of Turnball as a villain—all he wanted was his wife back.”
Holly squeezed Artemis’s fingers. “Things would have been a lot worse without us around. No1 is alive, thanks to you, not to mention everyone on this hospital ship. And as soon as we have you back to your old self, we can get working on saving the world with your Ice Cube.”
“Good. That’s still my priority, though I might want to renegotiate my terms a little.”
“Hmm. I thought you might.”
Artemis took a sip of water from a cup on his locker. “I don’t want to go back to being me completely. My old self is what brought on Atlantis Complex in the first place.”
“You did some bad things, Artemis. But you wouldn’t do them again. Let them go.”
“Really? You can just let things go?”
“It’s not that easy, but you can do it with our help, if it’s what you really want.”
Artemis rolled his eyes. “Potions and therapy, heaven help me.”