A/N: I am now back from China - it's sweltering over there! Anyway, sorry for the delay, but here's the next chapter. It's sort of been thrown together in about two hours, and I haven't really checked it very throroughly, so please forgive any mistakes :S

Disclaimer: I do not own anything that you recognise from anywhere else in this story. Don't rub it in.

Chapter 26 – In which a great sacrifice is given

Piccolo ran to the side of the observation point, and sighed. Sometimes, the most reassuring and most annoying thing about having Piccolo around was that he was impossibly calm. A hurricane could tear through his house and destroy his life, and he would calmly watch it doing so, and describe it as 'interesting'.

His theory was that worrying about his past didn't do anything to help his future.

"We're almost at the edge of the eye now. Oh, and there's a madman hanging onto the helm."

And this, of course, got everyone running.

"Frond! It's Spiro!" Yelled Holly, mouth agape at the sheer insanity of what Spiro being there implied, "And he's still alive?"

"Brainwaves, Holly, brainwaves. Spiro's completely mad now, so in his mind, he's probably still on solid ground, or we're in a high speed car, or something similar."

"Then he should be dead, right?" Asked Cat, her eyes glued on the desperately clawing man who seemed intent on somehow getting to the door. "Hey! He's reached the door!"

"Don't worry, he can't get in without a key." Holly replied. "This hunk of junk may be from the stone age, but it's still got some basics like a security lock."

"Which stone age? Yours or ours?" Asked Cat, distracted from watching Spiro for a moment.

"Ours, of course. You think that you humans could have come up with this when you'd only just discovered fire?"

Cat turned away again, a sour look on her face, and she muttered something that sounded distinctly like, 'Snobs'. Holly raised an eyebrow, but didn't question her statement. Instead, Holly explained,

"The security lock is like an ordinary house lock, nothing special, but you need to have a specific key, and I'm assuming that you people have the only key, right?"

"Er… sorta…" Cat looked sheepish. Sheepish was never something to be pleased about when the expression applied to Cat.

"What do you mean, 'sorta'?" There was a slightly ominous undertone on Holly's voice, and Ivy and both Artemises could tell that she was unconsciously using the mesmer whilst she was looming over Cat.

This would have had greater effect if Holly had been slightly taller than Cat. As it were, Holly still seemed to tower over the shuffling teenager.

"Look, we've got a key, alright? Otherwise we wouldn't have been able to get into this ship." Cat defended loudly, "We've got one of two keys."

"One… of two?" Holly repeated, struck dumb for words. "What happened to the other one then?"

"It was a back-up, just in case we'd lost the first one, alright?" Cat defended raucously, offended that Holly would think that she was so careless as to lose that key.

"We left it in the care of the City Council. It's locked away at the moment, somewhere where nobody but ourselves can reach." Piccolo cut in, his quiet, strong voice ringing like a low, mellow bell over the din.

Holly frowned, and went over to her helmet again, presumably to contact Foaly to give him an update and to check that the key really was safe. Piccolo privately thought that it was pointless to check – after all, who would have broken into a loosely guarded key vault, of all places, just to steal a key that looked as if it had been hammered into shape during the Middle Ages?

Holly turned back, a frown plastered onto her face, and said,

"The key's still in that vault, but I've now got orders to destroy that key on sight. Do you have any idea as to how dangerous that is? Anyone could have picked it up, anyone could have broken into this ship. Do you realise how much trouble you may be in?"

"We're above the law in Haven, Short, remember? It's sort of why you hired us in the first place." Cat retorted, returning to the controls, preparing to try and flick Spiro off its surface by jerking the ship from side to side. As a result, the ship's occupants were also flung across the room.

"Holly! Are you okay?" Yelled Trouble Kelp, who had just come onto the intercom. Through all of the chaos around them, it was impossible to hear him, but somehow possible to hear the insistent banging on the door.

And then, the banging stopped.

A scraping sound, followed by a click of something opening, echoed through the ship.

A wind swept through the ship.

And total silence reigned.

"I think that Spiro found a third key." Holly muttered quietly.

Ivy was shocked – she never imagined that Spiro, her supposed 'uncle' through her adoptive 'father', could possibly have known about this ship? Spiro hadn't been able to trace her activities in Chicago, even when he was personally active, she was positive about that, so how had he been able to find another key?

"Brainwaves, Kestrel. If Jon Spiro thinks he can do it, then this intermediate plane somehow gives him the ability to do so. His imagination supplied the key – it seems that the dubious laws of physics are completely suspended here." Artemis whispered, his voice barely heard by the intended recipient.

"Speak in plain Anglish, can't you?" Asked the Artemis Fowl, who had never before even heard of the term 'brainwave' before. "It's not as if it's helping the situation here."

"And what do you propose we do? Blast through and knock him unconscious? The man thinks that anything is possible! We could probably stick a knife through his heart and his brain will still keep it pumping, even after it shouldn't anymore…"

"Look – the important thing right now is to somehow get the two of us back together into one body! Without doing that, we're all in danger!"

"Don't exaggerate…"

"Artemis. Do it."

This quiet, subdued voice was not one that came often from Ivy Kestrel. The visions of the horrific pasts, the magnificent adventures, the heart-wrenching losses… they were all there – in those blue eyes…

There was no time for him to reply before Spiro ran at the two of them, pushing the Artemis in the archaic clothes onto the floor. In the shock and franticness of this sudden new development, the suited Artemis pounced onto Spiro, feebly trying to wrestle the man who should have been dead off of the other Artemis, and there were shouts and screams and shrieks and the ship was rocking from side to side and he was so sure that they were all going to get thrown out of the gaping door any moment now…

"Geroff, you dwarf with an unhingable jaw, geroff!"

That's what passes off as swearing there? I feel sorry for Kestrel.

With surprising strength that obviously came from experience in rough-and-tumble play such as this, the archaic Artemis shoved both of them off, and sat up, his left hand raised slightly towards Spiro, almost defensively, and his eyes flashing slightly.

However, unlike most clichéd heroes, his eyes weren't flashing in fury. His eyes, like any sensible human with any amount of intelligence would have, were flashing in fear. Scrambling to get up, he faced his shorter foe, his expression wary.

Spiro looked like a fish out of water, his eyes senseless, his appearance tousled, his pupils dilated. Both Fowls looked at the madman in wonder, and both marvelled at the determination of the man – even if it was determination to kill both of them. The man's eyes now swivelled from one identical Artemis Fowl II to another, and you could almost hear Spiro's brain trying to figure out which one was the real Fowl and which one to kill. The silence was suffocating.

From the agonising safety of Haven, Root could shove Trouble aside and only stare at the feedback from Holly's (borrowed) helmet camera at the events unfolding in that primitive shuttle. Even from the computer screen, with imperfect resolution, Root could recognise that Spiro had gone completely mad. In a rather transparent attempt to break the tension and shift Spiro's attention from murder, Cat piped up,

"Hey, Spiro, why don't you just sit down before we're forced to take you down?"

She was immediately elbowed by Holly. Cat was obviously not equipped for this sort of situation.

Root, however, was. Spending over a century in the LEP made it quite likely for hostage situations to arise, such as the Fowl thing. However, being on the screen of a helmet made it fairly difficult to deal with the situation as it should be. Instead, Root was forced to employ his least favourite method – soothing the hostage taker.

"Holly! You've got to calm Spiro down, before he goes berserk!"

"Yessir!" Even after half a year out of the force, Holly was still jumping to attention at the sound of that abrupt and loud voice, "Now, Mr Spiro, let's all calm down. We're not strangers here, are we?"

Her voice was soothing, slightly laced with the mesmer, after all, it never really hurt for persuasion, and Spiro was lulled into a barely conscious state. His arms, earlier held up in a boxing gesture, fell loosely by his sides. His fists relaxed, and his eyelids closed slightly. He seemed to almost be entranced by the mellow tones of the diminutive PI, thanks to the influence of the mesmer.

Later on, Root would probably attribute the failure of this method to either Holly's magic waning, the intermediate plane's interference or the appearance of Kestrel. All in all, it was probably the appearance of Ivy that drove Spiro back into a state of perfect consciousness. It seemed that the Spiro's hatred had managed to extend to a few more people during his absence.

"You!" Came the strangled scream, and the screech that tore out from Spiro's throat didn't even sound remotely human. Cowed by the insane wrath of her 'uncle', Ivy took an involuntary step backwards.

"You! You're the one who landed me here!" A giggle escaped, before converting itself into another inarticulate scream. Root had seen this sort of behaviour before in a light-driven troll. He half expected that Spiro would start frothing at the mouth at any moment.

He hadn't, however, expected Spiro to pull out a gun.

"D'Arvit, Short! Disarm the man, now!"

"I'm going to do what I should have done two years ago, Fowl! I'm gonna shoot you stone cold DEAD!"

If it wasn't for the fact that their lives were in mortal danger, Root would have really enjoyed this show – it reminded him of some of the Mud Man films that he had recently become so addicted to watching.

Artemis, the one who knew what a brainwave is, was panicking. It was most uncharacteristic, just like his inability to formulate a plausible plan at the moment. It seemed that being under threat of a gun always drove any coherent thoughts out of his head. Then, after he had almost given up on thinking up a plan, his counterpart asked boldly,

"Which one?"

This brought everyone up short. Heads swivelled towards the medieval-clad Fowl in confusion, even Spiro seemed slightly puzzled.

"Which Artemis Fowl are you going to shoot?"

Spiro's eyes bulged.

"Well?"

The shaking gunpoint twisted from one Fowl to another, and the man's knuckles were so white that nobody dared to approach him. Even Holly judged the situation too dangerous to try and disarm Spiro, and Kestrel's special 'gift' seemed to have deserted her along with her tongue. Her green eyes were wide with fear and horror.

The gunpoint pointed from left to right, and back again, repeating the pattern so quickly that the routine was set. Then, frustration came out of Spiro in the form of a howl, and he changed direction completely, giving nobody any chance of reacting, and shot.

Ivy Kestrel clutched at her chest, just above the heart. She looked down, feeling slightly dizzy, but no pain, and saw something red spreading out. She fell backwards onto the floor.

D'Arvit…

Ivy!

Oh Frond…

Ivy Kestrel took a small breath, and died.

Ivy: You killed me?!

PeridotNox: It was necessary!

Artemises: Why couldn't you have killed someone else? Like Cat?

Cat: What was that? Cracks knuckles

Artemises: Nothing!

PeridotNox: Sighs and rolld eyes Just help me and review, please.