Chapter 10: Here We Go Again

Artemis went back to working on his little toy in which he wasn't going to get any of the glory for making. After he had returned, Travis was a big help, considering that Artemis's fingers were still shaky for some time and he needed a steady hand for a lot of the work.

It only took an hour or two before he finished his creation.

The small thing took on an intelligence of its own. Artemis had actually created life—something he had no pleasure in doing on this occasion. The only purpose of this life form, which wasn't even fully a life form, was to entertain his captor until he could find a moment to escape.

"Oh wow." Travis reached forward, making Artemis wince as the man picked up the creation that looked much like a cockroach. It hadn't been tested, and from being in the elements, it had a high chance of dying off soon. He had stabilized its makeup but he hadn't done more than that.

"I can't believe you actually made this. I mean, I had the idea myself, but all I could achieve was the thinking capacity of it. I couldn't get it to actually take on shape, at least, not its own. It always had to be attached to something. Does it eat?"

"Yes and no. It has to consume a special formula every twelve hours or so. If it doesn't it won't function right." It wasn't that it wouldn't function—it would die. The poor thing was living yet he had no idea what kind of life it was. He would have felt worse if it hadn't been him that would have to pay the price for not creating anything. It was a small attack against nature. Compared to his other offenses, he hoped it would be overlooked.

Artemis went to the computer screen and merged the program with the signal that was coming from the bug now seated in the man's hand. In seconds he had Travis's own makeup on the screen, his heart rate, blood pressure, and everything else. The readings came from the sensors in the "bug's" feet. The rest of the room he controlled through the black head that was set on the insect-like body. It was not truly its head, more like one giant eye as the brain was placed in the protective covering of the body. Not that the bug needed much brainpower to think for itself either way. Artemis had to do a lot of rearranging to get the invention to actually work. An image of the room around them came up on the screen as well.

"Good." Artemis minimized the screen. "It seems to be working."

Travis was all but jumping up and down. "This is amazing! I've never seen anything like it! Think of what we can do with a walking thermal camera! If we can even make them more stable, we could even send them into space! Scatter them out like stars and explore who knows how many planets!"

"Calm yourself. They are barely advanced enough to survive on the Earth, let alone leave the atmosphere." Artemis walked over and retrieved the creature from Travis, who he was afraid would squish it in his elation.

While the work had kept his attention—which it had done countless times in his life since he was first able to rationally think out an equation and put it into a real life situation—he found himself fatigued, but not from being in need of sleep. His body hurt and he was hungry. He wanted rest.

Artemis took a scan of his own body with the bug, though it wasn't obvious to the cameras around him. He also kept the page on the computer screen small after he saw it flash. He placed the synthesized insect—for lack of a better appellation—inside a glass jar and turned to the scientist with him.

The man had helped a great deal. Artemis, however, needed more help then he could be given. There was something really wrong with him even if he couldn't identify it, but he could feel it. He needed to be conscious in order to plan and to explain so this little wonder, even as a misrepresentation of his true abilities, would not be destroyed or harmed by accident.

He also knew that he was having sudden difficulty seeing. His vision swayed, as did his body, and he elbowed the keyboard of the computer he was sitting in front of, knocking it off the counter as he fell to the floor. He may have protected himself or may not have—he wasn't sure. His head had already been causing him discomfort, and most of his thought processes had come to a standstill. His body was numb but the coldness of floor registered in his mind.

Travis ran over once he noticed the kid had passed out. Or he thought the kid had.

"Hey, boy." The man lifted the teen's head up and saw him wince behind closed eyelids. His head hung to the side and the rest of him lied limp. Artemis let out a breath but didn't answer him.

The kid was way too heavy for him to pick up. He was tiny, sure, and weighed next to nothing, but Travis was a small guy himself. If he tried, he might just drop the kid right back on the ground.

So he stayed there and tapped the side of the kid's face, trying to get him to come to.

"Hey. Come on. You there? You okay?"

Artemis's headache spiked and he closed his eyes more tightly, instinctively trying to escape the pain. It didn't work. He could think, but just barely. He had no ability to move even a finger. He faintly had a thought that he was getting this clothes dirty lying on the floor even though they were cheap and lightly worn already.

Even as he tried to speak, no words escaped him. It was hard to get his mind to remember which sounds formed what words. The cumbersome weight of what he was doing by giving more technology to Jon was obviously affecting him, considering there was nothing he could do now to hinder the research. Hopefully it would not go on without him, as he could not see himself functioning in any productive way for the near future if he could not even verbalize.

Despite the dark world around him, at least he was breathing, and with the more oxygen he took in from his few remaining sparks of consciousness, the more his already weary mind and body took drew in power..He could feel Travis trying to wake him, since Artemis had no idea who else would be in the area. However, it didn't do much more than create another spark of selflessness while five more vanished. It was a losing battle.

Artemis reached out with one of his hands and touched the man, grabbing onto his coat before he could lose even those few strands of reality to pain and darkness.

Travis didn't know what to do with the boy—not Artemis, no names, he didn't want names or… or anything that would make him seem human. The kid had obviously not only failed to come to but went completely unresponsive.

He wasn't going to let the jar break though. He didn't know how the teen had held onto it in his fall, but it lay in his lap with a hand holding it unmoving and open at his side. Travis picked it up, studying the insect inside.

It would be incredible if he could get it out to the world, to the scientists who would, like himself, use it to improve and study this world and who knows how many others.

But that could only happen if he were free, which he wasn't—not anymore than the technology in the jar was. If anything, he was maybe even less free.

He stood, taking the jar with him and leaving the boy. Travis wasn't a doctor. He'd probably be able to identify some abnormalities if he saw them on a screen, but most, if not all, of his research concerned the brain and technology like this.

Walking through the lab and up to the door—which was where he had to call Mr. Spiro from when he found something or needed anything—he hit the button and waited for the static to end and a voice to take its place.

"Yes?" Travis could swear there was annoyance in that static.

"Um… something here you should see and… the boy… there's something wrong with him. He should probably… He's not conscious." Travis almost made the mistake of telling Jon Spiro what he should do. That would have been his last mistake.

Spiro sighed, pressing the button down and putting the speaker to his mouth so that he was heard clearly. "Stay where you are and do not move. If Arty made something you're bound to screw it up some way or another and I don't need that."

Spiro put the transmitter back into his pocket and looked around the room as if he were evaluating a dozen or so invisible people. So Arty was sick again. He wasn't going to waste resources on a broken toy. Something was in the lab right now that needed his attention more than the boy did, and he really wanted to know what it was.

His silent bodyguard needed no call as he followed him into the other, less comfortable, area of his underground hideaway.

Pushing open the door to the lab after a retinal and finger scan along with a weight sensor test, he was met with the scrawny man who was going to assist with his new rise to power.

"You had something to show me?"

Travis held the jar out but his eyes darted behind the counter, towards the back of the room where the boy was unconscious, and also where the computer that contained all the data from this life form was located.

"Life. Kind of. Come with me and let me explain."

Spiro did. Life. Now that wasn't at all exciting. Life had already been created and could be manipulated far more easily than it could be made, reproducing it was even more simple to do.

Arty had better have made something worth his time otherwise the toy he had now would be dealt with the way all other broken toys were.

….

….

?

6:21PM

It was dark. But that wasn't the problem. The little annoying voice at his side was the problem. He was tempted to let the first stages of the plan fall apart because of it.

He never liked dealing with a Fowl.

…

….

Holly had no idea what they were doing sitting on the ground, still a good ways off from the site of the explosion. Foaly, unlike Holly and Butler, had nothing better to do with his time than to scan the area.

There was the inkling in the back of the centaur's mind that maybe he had missed something. He certainly wasn't going to be shown up by a three year old.

All his scans were coming up negative though. He'd even scanned the area to see if he could find anymore explosives. Sure, mudmen were crude and their plastic explosives wouldn't have come up on his scans anyway, even if he had tried to search for them specifically… but still. That was an amateur's mistake and he was no amateur.

Nothing. A whole lot of nothing. And from the conversation he had listened in on—though Foaly wasn't making himself a part of, since no Fowl needed to know more about the magical community under their feet than they already did—he knew Myles wasn't revealing how he got his information or how the boy had even arrived there.

Foaly hadn't been paying much attention to the little ones with Artemis being the larger hazard. Maybe he should have been watching after all.

…

Myles wasn't sitting in the grass anymore; he was standing and looking at the ruins of the building with intensity.

Holly and Butler were on watch in order to keep the little guy from running over to them. Who knew if there were more explosives somewhere, meant to be set off if there were any survivors.

They may have risked looking over Myles's little hint about where Artemis was if it wasn't for that fear. Foaly was their only link yet he had remained silent.

"Can you at least tell us how you got here?" Butler asked for a third time.

"I don't know." Myles agitatedly stomped one of his tiny, finely dressed feet on the ground. "It was dark. I think maybe by car but maybe not."

"Do you remember anything?"

Myles's eyes leveled into something that looked far too much like it was coming from Artemis. "It was dark."

"Right, Myles, but you were at the airport with us. Start from the beginning and tell us what happened."

"I ran away from you stupid head. Some weird homeless guy found me. There was water or something. I think I fell asleep. Then it was just dark, and I heard talking and I knew where Artemis was. I had to find him but then you went and blew it up!"

Someone kidnapped him? And just let him go? Like that? There had to be a reason and Butler wasn't seeing one unless there was a bug or something on the boy.

"Come here." He picked Myles back up, much to the boy's displeasure, and inspected the lining, stitching and every inch of clothing he had on him before checking through the strands of his hair.

"Hey!" Myles tried to bat him away but the boy was no match for the bodyguard.

Butler's search came up with nothing. The boy didn't even have a scratch on him that might have signified where he had been or how he had been treated.

"So you don't remember anything else? What about this man you saw? What did he look like?" That might be helpful. If it was one of Spiro's men though, why let him go? If it was a friend, why not come with the boy? Myles was intelligent, but he couldn't have gotten all this way on his own.

"Big. Dark hair." Myles shrugged. "It got dark after that and when he talked with me, I couldn't see."

"Were you blindfolded?"

Myles let out a sigh, also reminiscent of his brother's. "I'd have said if I was. It was just dark. The man wasn't scary though."

That didn't really narrow things down but Butler had no other questions that someone Myles's age would understand. He picked the boy up and went to the car. He wasn't going to let him be taken a third time. He couldn't find Artemis, and he couldn't go back to the building, but he could at least protect the one in front of him.

"Hey, wait! What about Artemis?" Myles was beyond astounded that he was telling them where his brother was and they were taking him away.

"He's not there Myles. Artemis has some really smart friends and they know there's nothing there. If there is, and we find him, then you're going to be staying in the car. We don't need you getting into anymore trouble."

"Trouble? I wasn't in trouble. I was the smart one who found out everything. You were the stupid heads! Now let… me… go."

The small hands batting at Butler didn't bother him in the least and he got in the car with the boy with Holly following close behind.

The twins didn't know about fairies but with their age, the odds that they would remember them were slim. It was chancy, but to a child's eyes he could pass her off as a delusion made from seeing another, strange child, that he never had before. Worry did that to a person sometimes. While he'd hate to use that excuse, there wasn't much else he could do since parting with Holly right now would cut him off from all the resources he could use to find Artemis.

Myles wasn't much happier in the car than he had been outside but at least he wasn't complaining about his shorts now.

"So, Foaly, anything?"

"Not a thing," came Foaly's voice over the communicator. There was absolutely nothing registering down there. "Which means you better go have a look. Be careful though, Holly. You do need to come back in one piece to get fired."

Holly was confused. "I thought you said there was nothing there?"

"There isn't," Foaly agreed. "Which is the problem. It looks like someone was trying to send a repeat signal of the foundation under the building, making it seem as if nothing was there but that's just what it is. All my scans can pick up the signal and nothing else so, really, it could be anything. It took me a few minutes to realize that the signal was being sent to me more than once of the exact same minerals, but whoever did it didn't think that anyone would look past that. I can't offer you any heat scans or anything until you get an Omnisensor on one of their cables. Until then, the mystery is all yours."

And Foaly really didn't like that. She went in blind when she could see the building and it had nearly killed her. She was now going in blind not even knowing where the door was.

"And the likelihood that Artemis is down there?"

"The likelihood of it being one of Spiro's little hideouts is the highest. It was under the building he planted us at. That, or he purposely led us here to keep looking, find some underground gas mine, and destroy us all while we thought we were getting further. It's up to you to pick whether you go in or not. I have no advice this time other than to be careful and try not to blow anything up."

"How very reassuring."

"I try my best."

Holly looked at Butler, putting the helmet back on. She had enough magic to use for shielding but any other form of magical backup she could supply would be spent in just a short amount of time. The manservant would have to be the one to check the grounds, as her Neutrino was too dangerous to use in this situation.

"I better go and find a shovel then."

….

…

Artemis awoke in a bed, though he wasn't very comfortable and he found himself beyond hungry. He sat up, his head hurting as if someone had branded the inside with a hot iron. Despite the darkness of the room, he was able to make out the furnishings he had seen during his first awakening here. He was back in the room made just for him then.

That gave Artemis time to think, which he desperately needed to do. He had no idea how long he'd been unconscious and how long Jon had had to play with his new little toy until he wanted more.

So Artemis sat there, crossed his legs and held his hands loose, taking in a breath.

And started planning.

He didn't care about the reminiscent thought that this situation was playing out very similarly to the last time, because there was one distinct difference. He hadn't been alone last time and Jon Spiro hadn't known who he was up against.

It was little more than an hour later when a bright light burning his eyes interrupted him— his mouth stilling as his half-worded thoughts ended. Spiro walked in with all the heartiness of a lion in his gaze.

"Well, Arty, I see you're awake. You're bug has been quite fascinating. Its production was just enough for me to decide not to kill you. It's not all that impressive though. You will have to admit, my little spy cameras are much more useful."

"For spying alone. They have no means of thought processing within in them. You can see but you can't analyze with your cameras. Neither can they move to gather data. This one will."

"Will is the key word in that sentence, Arty. As of right now, it won't be useful to me at all unless I could use it within twelve hours and be done with it. That just won't do. I need its life cycle to be longer, or for it not to run on food. I'm sure you could find a way of incorporating our research to make that possible. That is, if you haven't been thinking of how to already. I know you, Arty. This… this isn't the best you can do."

"In my current state, I'm afraid that it is. This is not how you treat someone that you're trying to get information from."

"If I treated you now as well as I did back then, I'd have nothing to show for it. You're too stubborn for you own good. Your brother isn't much different. I don't think either of you would like it very much if, say, no one was allowed to enter or leave the room he is in now. Three days at the most, is how long I would think would be he able to survive. Then again, he is a child. Maybe two at the point."

"Don't! I'm trying to help you. You can clearly see that. I don't pass out of my own accord!" A part of Artemis started to panic, and he knew that was what Spiro wanted. He didn't have the option to portray his feelings though, as Jon could just use that as an excuse to get rid of his brother.

"No," Spiro had to agree. "You don't. I've had someone prepare a meal for you. I suggest you eat and then I want to see what you're really capable of. Until then, I think I'm going to put my plan into action. Three days, Artemis, just to be sure. Make me something impressive in three days or you won't have a little brother to hold you back anymore."

The door closed and Artemis felt more weight fall onto his shoulders. How could he sacrifice the life of any child, let alone his brother? But Spiro couldn't even be allowed the research he already had placed in his fingertips. There just wasn't time for this.

Rubbing his temple, Artemis tried to banish his damnable headache. He had to change his plans. While he didn't think he himself would last much longer like this, he had been willing to try something more likely to succeed. However, that would take too much time now.

Nero, Spiro's new bodyguard, came in soon afterwards. With him was a tray of meat and some carrots along with a glass of what Artemis was certain was fruit punch. It was a child's meal really, and for a second Artemis didn't know if it was being used to demean him or if they were giving him the food that was supposed to go to his brother.

Either reasoning, particularly the second, left a sour taste in his mouth. Nero left soon after he placed the food down on the bed and Artemis knew he would have to eat it. He needed to be robust and to be thinking clearly.

Even after the first bite and as much as his stomach urged him on, with all the possibilities of where it had come from, he couldn't eat it.

"We'll both die if I keep acting like this, "Artemis said aloud, trying to convince himself into eating. It didn't work. He hadn't eaten since… that measly sandwich from before. The hunger was likely handicapping him significantly. His brother had eaten. His brother was fine. Beckett wasn't going to die unless Artemis couldn't pull himself together.