A/N: Argh…Well, I'm back, after an inexcusable amount of time…sorry about that…

***

Root looked up as we came into his office. He was smoking one of his foul cigars, and working on a computer.

"T'dal! I haven't seen you in ages," he said. "How hard is it, working to answer questions for civilians?"
"Fine, sir," I replied. "It's actually easier than you might think, for a qualified predictor."

Foaly broke in. "Not to be disrespectful, Your Highness—" Sarcasm dripped from his tone. "—but we can't banter. I've got evidence of a possible connection with the Underground and the Mud Men."

Root narrowed his eyes. "This better be good."

His top techie nodded frantically. "I got an email from Fowl's top gorilla. The big one that took out LEPretrieval One. He says Fowl's been kidnapped by someone underground."

"And," I added, "Foaly traced the email to Russia. Which is exactly where Butler shouldn't be."

The LEP commander blinked. "D'Arvit."

"Precisely."

The centaur said, "T'dal got a reading off Fowl's laptop—I neglected to give it back, you understand—and it said Fowl was in Chute E37. Under Paris."

"Wait a sec," I said quickly. "I never said he was there. The reading pointed that way. But I think that's too easy."

Root, unfortunately, had the same view as Foaly. He laughed at that. "Too easy is impossible."

"I told her that, Commander. But you know young elves these days." Foaly shot me a highly superior look.

My eyes narrowed. "That was uncalled-for, pony."

"I'll get an agent on it. Quit bickering, you two," Root growled. Foaly and I stopped pulling faces and looked back at Root. "T'dal, go home. I'll call you when I need you. Foaly, you stay in Police Plaza." He glared at me. "T'dal, go."

I stood and took the laptop, and bowed elaborately at Root and Foaly. "As you wish, your majesty." Then I left, muttering random curses at them both.

I heard someone laugh behind me.

Okay, so I was stupid and curious. I took the next day off and followed the LEP's agent through the tunnels. You can do that with mind-magic—follow animated things, not just vibes.

No one from Police Plaza had come to my little den, which could be good but was definitely bad. Good thing: Root didn't need any help. Bad thing: I was firmly convinced that he thought I was some civilian kid with unreliable paranormal tendencies and he wouldn't come to me for help anyway.

Call me a conceited idiot, but the damage was done.

Following this agent was boring work. The small pixie space-warped five times to Chute E34, about five klicks from downtown Paris. From there she walked. My mental self hovered behind her, as she moved silently through the tunnels, clinging to the walls and stopping randomly, freezing like she had heard something.

She hadn't, of course—I could still hear, and it was all silence and water dripping somewhere. It was about half an hour before the LEPrecon agent was at the edge of a tunnel level with the ground outside E37's entrance.

The pixie paused there, and I drifted in front of her and got a look at her nametag. Mida Bell. She looked tough (despite being a little shy of two feet tall) as she pulled a ray gun—some random model, I don't know about weaponry—from her holster belt and fiddled with the setting. The gun started humming quietly.

Medium rare, perhaps. Root had joked about that repeatedly—before the whaler incident a couple years back. I wasn't sure what happened there, but it sideswiped his sense of humor. Thank the gods.

I swooped out in front of the pixie when she started moving into the cavern, but I couldn't go too far. That was a downside to following something alive—you tethered yourself to someone and had to stay within the tether length.

Bell looked everywhere for signs of Fowl, or any coherent fairy for that matter. She went in the pockets, in the little half-caves. I heard something rustle once, but thought nothing of it.

My agent, as I started calling her, went into the next cave. Something growled then. And I started having a very, very bad feeling. The pixie didn't hear it.

The soft growl was from nearby. I slid around, the next cave over, the next, the—shoot, stupid tether. Bell shifted, and I could go on. Next pocket.

I drew in a breath in my physical body, a hundred klicks away.

Something the size of a rhinoceros, with a few horns and several six-inch talons, an ugly face and an amazingly thick skull, was curled up in that pocket, matted fur quivering.

It lifted its head and snuffled. The tether eased more—Bell walked twenty feet, into her next cave.

I couldn't warn her. I hadn't included voice-control in the spell.

Bell was dead unless she suddenly started hearing things.

She was dead, anyway. No wings to get away on.

Next cave, only ten feet from death. If the magical tether had been visible, it would have curled up on the floor like a docile snake—linking a soul and a soon-to-be-dead LEPrecon agent.

She rounded the corner and stopped. Something froze me in place—I couldn't move if I tried. And I tried, I assure you.

The troll, a young one by its size, looked up. Bell stayed frozen. But no luck—the troll lumbered to its feet and shambled a little closer, pushing tangled dreadlocks out of its eyes. It grunted, snuffling, questioningly. And shuffled forward a few more feet.

Bell's undoing came in the small, fearful moan she uttered, deep in her throat, so soft I could hardly hear it myself. But the troll was another story—if you have little to no eyesight, your hearing improves amazingly.

It struck like lightning. Mida Bell, LEPrecon agent, pixie, and generally well-trained fairy, was dead in seconds, freeing me from the spell that bound me to her. I had been straining to move for the past ten seconds—the sudden release sent me rocketing back, faster than you'd believe, back to my physical body. The first thing I did was retch.

"The idiot!" I whispered hoarsely to an empty room. "Why didn't she shield?"

***

Foaly showed up at my den about ten minutes after. I was curled up in a chair, trying not to cry and trying to get all the facts straight for Root—he'd want to know why his agent wasn't sending back reports.

"T'dal!" he said at the door. "Foaly here. Open up."

I drew my sleeve across my eyes a last time and opened the door. "Mida Bell's dead," I informed him.

"That's what I…what? How'd you know?" he asked incredulously.

I shrugged. "Followed her magically. A troll got her."

"You were watching?"

I nodded.

Foaly said urgently, "You have to come with me to Root. He has to know about this."

"No really," I said sarcastically. "I have a theory."

"What, Fowl's dead?" the centaur asked.

I shook my head. "No. I might have missed another trail under the strong one to E37."

He looked at me quizzically. "Huh?"

"The first signal overrode the backtrack—it's possible they brought Fowl to E37, long enough to leave a mark, then went back a few klicks when they found out about the trolls."

The techie nodded. "Smart. Run it by Root."

"He still thinks I'm a kid," I said. "Like he'd listen. Plus, he's not paranoid. No sense for schemes."

Foaly blinked.

"I just witnessed a troll tearing into an LEP agent, I'm not going to be very pleasant company for a while."

"Was that an apology?" Foaly asked.

"I think."

"Accepted."

I shoved him.

He shoved back. "We have to talk to Root."

I followed him out, locking the door behind me.

Commander Root was chewing on another cigar—so what's new? He told us to sit down and demanded why we were both looking like someone had died.

"Because someone did," Foaly said.

Root's eyes almost popped out of his face. "What?"

"Your agent, Mida Bell," I said. "A troll got her."

He scowled. "That explains things. It didn't happen to spit out the electronics, did it?"

"I didn't stick around," I told him. "Are you insane?"

The LEP commander sat back in his chair again. "Maybe. So nothing on Fowl."

Foaly and I simultaneously shook our heads.

"D'Arvit. Ah, well. T'dal, go home, get some rest, see if you get any other readings. Foaly, you and Holly—Captain Short that is, go see what you can plan."

I could handle that. Rest was a good idea at the moment.

***

After eight hours of sleep, I was feeling a little better. It was almost morning, but I was okay, and now—

Nothing for it. I picked up that infernal lap top and set it on a table, laying one hand on top of it. It took about three minutes to pick up the vibe again—now all I had to do was follow it to the end and then search around for any undercurrents.

Easy enough. A minute later, I concentrated as hard as I could.

Nothing.

No vibes—not back to the laptop, not anywhere out of France. Every trace of Fowl had vanished completely. I, of course, panicked. I had never lost a feeling before, and it was an unpleasant sensation.

Opening my eyes, I looked around my living room, at the laptop on the table, and blinked. Everything was normal.

And it couldn't have been that Fowl had died or something—there would have been a power surge and I would have been thrown out of the link, but the trail would have stayed.

I glared at the stupid Mud People's machine, their pitiful excuse for technology. Stupid humans, stupid Foaly, stupid laptop, stupid Artemis Fowl who was too nosy and greedy and childish for his own good—

Well…I sighed, and tried again. The trail was back, leading an entirely different direction—west-southwest and a very long way. My mental self twisted in exasperation and I followed the vibe, and I added in visuals. I zoomed through a few thousand miles of ocean in a snap, staring at fish and sharks and a human diver who looked rather amazed at seeing a miniature comet sliding around at that kind of depth. A land mass next, kind of small and devoid of fairy life, through more water, and then into a big mass, another continent. And…wow, in this direction…I was under the United States for the first time.

There were a lot of fairies, suddenly. A male elf waved at my light and grinned, like he knew what I was—he was probably another predictor, I decided, another master of mental magic—

SHHWICK. Very suddenly, the trail ended and I choked, several thousand miles away in my den in Haven. Glaring around, I got my bearings and moved back a few feet, relaxing the mental tether around my throat.

I was in the middle of a fairy settlement, and it seriously wasn't safe to be hanging around sending off light like a thousand-watt halogen bulb in the middle of nowhere. Spotting a streetlight, I fled up there and hovered right in front of that source of illumination, so the two lights blended and I wouldn't attract so much attention.

The town was small enough, a little settlement like the suburbs of Haven, a few walls of apartments and three or four streets of small shops and restaurants. There were a lot of fairies walking around, hotshot sprites with their girlfriends, a group of teenage elves window-shopping, a few mothers pushing their young children in small hovercages—it was just like home.

Nowhere could you hide a five-foot Mud Boy, though.

That left me two directions: up and down.

I looked around once more and tried down. Sometimes villages were really multi-level—my mental body sank, through several layers of sediment and bedrock, but I couldn't find any air pockets. It was getting hot—I zoomed back up to the original town.

Suddenly the signal blinked out again and left me even more panicked than before. I opened my eyes and took a few deep breaths, cursing the stupid laptop and all it stood for.

It's amazing, how much someone can hate an inanimate object.

I had a major headache and pushed the laptop away. I'd go back to it later—if I ever wanted to see it again.

***

A/N: I'm really, really sorry for the delay. Everyone's been absolutely wonderful in their reviews. Thank you for reading.

Very sorry for not updating sooner,

Flamewing