A/N: Hmm…well, anyway. Read.

***

Root sent me a very annoyed e-mail after Foaly passed on the news, but I deleted it and went on home, after locking up the office extremely carefully and emptying the bank.

And then, home.

I neatened everything up, first—dusting, making up my bed, organizing drawers. It's sort of like that Mud Men's pop culture thing—feng shui or something. I work better when my surroundings are organized. It's been researched that the Mud Man fad actually does have some merit.

Finally, I settled down on my favorite chair and stuck that gods-blest computer, formerly Fowl's, now mine, with a screwed-up signal. I checked my power reserves—about middling. It had been a year since my last Ritual, but I was okay so far.

"All right," I said, and took a deep breath.

Then I went in.

There was the immediate, strong trail on top—magical trails are like rubber bands, by the way. The closer the subject is, the thicker the strand. It led to some warlock den in a tunnel somewhere. I followed that trail, just to get the headache out of the way, and then tried something new: Pulling the magic back into myself, I traced the trail back to the origin of the computer.

I stopped, opened my eyes. I had significantly more magic, perhaps a month or two's worth, and the overlying trail was gone.

"Yes!" I breathed, amazed at myself. It had worked in theory, as explained by a mental magic genius, but I hadn't expected it to be so easy.

Something bucked inside me, like my stomach was riding a horse that wanted me off. I jolted forward several inches (no laughing matter when you're two feet tall) and slid off my chair, sitting down hard on the floor. The laptop tipped out of my lap and slammed on the floor.

My stomach jerked again and I doubled over, feeling decidedly sick while sifting through my brain in search of an explanation.

The solution hit me like a hammer. Duh. It was foreign power.

So it wasn't that easy. I had a lot of magic from some warlock. I didn't even know what species he was—could be goblin for all I knew.

Furthermore, there was the likely possibility that I was stealing his power, which is a social taboo along with being against the law. I was risking a few millennia up at Howler's Peak.

"Oh, of course," I grumbled. "Go jumping in without looking at the risks. As usual. Real smooth, Thorn." The warlock's power seemed to agree, churning unpleasantly.

First thing was to get the laptop. I was about to summon it but stopped just in time—the spell from my power would result in a trail leading to myself, and I didn't need to know where I was at all times, if that makes sense. Probably not. I scooted across the floor and picked up the computer.

The overriding trail was still gone—because I had as good as swallowed it. So the best course of action was to throw up, right? Carefully—I was new at this, and I'd never read of any similar instances—I pictured the warlock's magic as a thread of light, which was going out of me and out of my power snares, and into the laptop, back to its owner…

Opening my eyes and simultaneously concentrating on Fowl's stupid computer, I found the warlock's trail was there, much stronger. Behind it, though, was a sort of itch—a little bit of something, like a length of fine wire in cloth. It caught my brain and I sighed.

The original trail, the one leading to the real quarry, was back. However, I had to—

Darn, this was confusing.

I got up and started pacing, from the fireplace to my bedroom door to the table, all over the room, socks making soft swishing noises on the floor. "All right," I said quietly. "The way the trail got there was that the warlock did a summoning spell, so…if I worked off the spell alone to take out the magic…it wouldn't touch the laptop…"

It was like a game of pick-up sticks, that human game with the bundle of sticks on the floor, and you had to collect them all, one by one, without moving another stick.

"If I worked off the spell alone, deactivated the spell, but put the magic aside and it would make its way back to the warlock, then the laptop would stay here—" I touched the table, where it had been when Foaly had it summoned. "And that wouldn't fool with the auras connected to the computer, because it was just on the location—and if that doesn't work I could just…"

Back to square one. I sat down, on the floor this time, and touched the smooth plastic of the laptop.

Taking a deep breath, I went back in and concentrated on the top trail. You came from a warlock who summoned you. Stop summoning.

And—the laptop disappeared. I almost toppled, even though it had just been my hand resting on it. Looking around frantically, I spotted the computer on the table, the bottom right corner, one corner unsupported by the wood. Exactly where it had been.

"Oh, Gods," I whispered fervently. "Please…"

I stood slowly, and walked to the table like I was moving through syrup. The auras were apparent from a foot away.

The top trail was gone. Completely gone, like it had never been there. Artemis Fowl's lead was up on top, stronger than ever, and pointing east-northeast, down.

Russia, some other part of my brain observed. Where Butler is.

"Oh, gods," I murmured, for the second time in as many minutes. "I did it."

I pulled the laptop off the table and sat there on the floor, and thought. "Next to do is trace the trail, then…mark the place with magic, maybe actually try to summon something from that distance so I can set up a leash extension…" Checking my reserves, I found about six months' worth left of magic, which was enough, I thought, to mentally tail someone.

I collected myself, and went in.

The trail was easy this time, and relatively short. There were quick flickers of fairy settlements, interspersed with dark tunnels and solid earth. One minute later, I glided to a stop near the ceiling of a cavern, where the trail ended.

I turned, trying to take in everything. Let's see, let's see. Some suspicious-looking alcoves and pockets, reminiscent of those in the troll cave near E37. Several were quite large enough to hold a few elves and a fourteen-year-old Mud Boy, who also happened to be rather tall for his age.

Unfortunately, my laptop tracer ended right here, and that was, in theory, exactly where Artemis Fowl should be.

Bug in the system? No, remember, this is the magical stuff, not the computer. My mind buzzed with possible reasons, each more foolish than the last.

I had about a hundred feet of movement possible now, stuck to the trail. Making up my mind, I zoomed down and looked closer. I was practically on the ceiling, after all, and it was a high cavern—it was quite a likely possibility that I couldn't see correctly from two hundred feet above the floor.

One hundred feet lower, the floor was as hard and gray and absolutely empty as it had looked. I glared at it angrily. If I could just…

No. Of course I couldn't find him. They had done something to the auras. I didn't know what, but those…criminals knew I was on their trail and had fooled with my magic.

I opened my eyes back in my apartment, and scowled.

"I need a Seer," I told the clock. "Meaning my dear kind sweet beautiful absolutely positively perfectly sickening sister."

***

Yes, it's true. There is another Thorn girl, also with prediction magic, but hers is more refined—rather than specific predictions, like her horrid baby sister (that would be me), Eissandra Thorn, Eissa for short, can find lost items in a trice.

It really bugs me. I mean, Eissa has the looks, the brains, and the really useful talent in the family. Finding things—that's awesome. Predictions just make money.

Maybe I'm a little hard on Eissa. I am smarter than her after all, but people make much more of a fuss over Eissa than they do over me. Compare the short, nerdy, cute precocious elf who can predict the future with the tall, brilliant, beautiful elf who can find things, and you'll see what I mean.

I stood on Eissa's doorstep, smack in the middle of a street under Dublin. Do I really want to go running to Sissy for help? I asked myself. Well, if you need the help…it doesn't mean you're indebted to her for the rest of your life.

My beloved cynical side replied, Oh, ha-ha. You know full well Eissa will turn everything around and make you indebted to her.

Oh, shut up.

A little harder than strictly necessary, I rapped on the door. Immediately, a very small dragon started yapping. We keep the pygmy variety as pets, you see—well, the ones who don't mind the hyperactive little rats.

"Oh, Pippinsies, is somebody at the door? Clever little boy, telling me right away…who is it? Can you tell?"

I cringed. My sister, unfortunately, was one of those people who didn't mind the hyperactive little rats. She set more store by her dragon Pippin than she would with me.

The yapping stopped briefly, a trill taking its place, and then rafrafraf it returned.

Finally, the door opened, and the yaps stopped.

"Oh," said Eissa, dropping the sugar-sweet tone and the smile. "It's you." She said that like I was equal to what Pippin had just dropped on her foyer carpet. The dragon was a relatively recent acquisition, and wasn't really house-trained yet.

"The one and only," I returned cheerfully, immediately kicking myself mentally. Idiot, idiot, IDIOT…that was a movie line, a sick sitcom phrase. I had no idea where my brain filter had gone.

Eissa smiled sourly, eyes narrowed. "Thank the gods. Would you like to come in?"

I nodded. "Yes, please. I've got a business deal to work with you."

Her smile went even more sour, like week-old lemons that had just been doused in vinegar. "Wonderful. This should be good." She turned and stalked down her hallway, leaving me to follow and shut the door myself.

"Kitchen," she said shortly. "You want anything to drink?"

"Nettle smoothie," I answered. "Thank you."

She glanced over her shoulder, shooting me a very thin, but genuine, smile. "Anytime, dear sister of mine." Eissa prepared two smoothies in about thirty seconds, then pulled up a stool. "All right. To business."

"I need a finding," I said lamely. "Like everyone else who comes knocking at your door."

Pippin had followed us to the kitchen, and yipped once in agreement.

Eissa gazed at the small catlike creature, blue eyes filling. "Sweet Pippinsies, you understand what we're saying, don't you? Clever little man…"

I cleared my throat loudly. "I would like you to find something."

"Like everyone, as you said. What is it?"

"Who," I corrected vaguely. "It's a person."
"A People-person? Or do you mean that Mud creature you've been searching out, according to the Haven Herald?" Eissa demanded shrewdly. "Or was that story a load of rubbish?"

Graciously, I thought, I said, "That article was such trash, not even Pippin would dare get a taste." The stupid reptilian pet had a habit of getting into the disposal cans.

My sister glared. "How dare you?"

"I happen to not like dragons," I said dryly. "But anyway. Maybe it wasn't a load of rubbish. It's relatively true, I'm helping the LEP with finding Fowl. Tracked him from a computer of his three times, coming up nil—and believe me, there were no viruses."

She asked, "Is it possible there was an invisibility spell?"

I shook my head. "There's an automatic truth-seeing charm, every time you follow an aura. Didn't you know that?"

"It's not my headache," Eissa retorted. "Why waste brain space?"

I suppose she had a point. "Well, still. There's no chance of an invisibility spell, and I would have sensed a confusion charm, too. Noting on that count either."

"So it's basically assumed that whoever kidnapped him has messed with the laptop. Can they do that?"
"Yeah, it's hard magic, but—oh, royal crud—no, never mind—"

"Kindly explain?"
Shaking my head again, I replied, "Nothing, really. I had just suddenly considered something, then dismissed it because I had searched for him, not his laptop case or whatever."

Eissa nodded slowly. "I get it. So you want me to use my superior magic to find the little bugger."

"It's not superior!" I said hotly. "You can't track something continually, now can you? As soon as you find him, I'll use the trail of your magic and mark him there and then I'll always be able to see him in a trice, rather than you searching for him…"

She grinned twistedly. "Call it mage's snobbery. You always think your magic is better than anyone else's. Okay. I'll search for him. But I need information."

"Like what?"

"What he's like, duh. Looks, likes, dislikes, intelligence, how he's been brought up…his attitude towards the People might be helpful..."

"Ohh…that's easy. Give me a minute, and I'll thought-transfer."

I composed my thoughts, figuring out what Fowl was, and a minute later nodded. "Ready."

"I am too," Eissa said. "Hands or head?"

"Hands are easier for me."

"Same here, actually," she admitted. With that, she put her hands on the table, palms up. I placed an index finger on each of her palms, and we both closed our eyes.

Thought-transfers aren't exactly difficult—starting them is easy, but ending them is another story. It's relatively hard, trying to stop the flow of thoughts from your brain to the next.

Well, it's not exactly like that. There are computer likenesses that I use a lot—like when you highlight a section of text in a word-processor document. If the text goes on to another page, it's hard to get exactly what you want and nothing more. More often than not, the cursor gets out of control and you end up highlighting the entire thing with your mouse, so you have to backtrack. It takes a while to get it precise.

With considerable care, I thought of everything I knew about Artemis Fowl, and "copied" it. The copy was tied up with a bit of magic and the entire thought bundle went through the connection between hand and fingertip, to Eissa's brain. Her eyes popped open.

"Wow…what'd you do, hack into his personal memoirs?" she breathed. "There's an entire book up here!"

"Um…Holly Short," I told her. "She told me everything. Plus a few hackings into his family records and so on, back when the first thing happened. I was interested!" I said defensively when she gave me a weird look. "You needn't look at me in that tone of voice."

Eissa rolled her eyes. "That made no sense."

"Of course not," I retorted. "But anyway. You've got all your information. Now can you find him, please?"

"Yeah, yeah. Pippinsies, stay here." The dragon stared at her with large purple eyes, pitiful and pleading, but she scowled. Pippin curled into a ball and started moping.

As we left the room, I asked, "Do you ever call him by his proper name? He's Pippin, right?"

Eissa made a scornful sort of tsk. "That little rat answers to anything. Pippin, Pippinsies, Pip, That Creature, Small Rat, Reptile, Mutt…"

"I thought you loved that thing," I said incredulously.

"Of course I love him," she answered. "He's my sweet little Pippinsies. I have to pretend he's been bad for him to obey."

That made some kind of sense, I thought, but as I never had a pet and probably never would, I'd never really understand. Dragons were small, yappy, and left messes. They took money to feed and were generally useless—claws were soft as butter. Their teeth weren't even poisonous. And never did they do anything even remotely entertaining. So really, what was the point?

Eissa had stalked into another room which was much more interesting than the kitchen. The doorway was hung with beads, the walls were painted a shade of dark blue, and there were pillows all over the shag-carpeted floor. Furthermore, a small table between two of the more ornately-decorated pillows held a crystal ball, glowing with a pearly sort of halo and full of whitish fog, on a gold stand.

"Sit there," she said, pointing at a pillow. I obeyed, dropping onto it and immediately scraping my leg on a patch of nasty sequins.

Rubbing at my ankle, I watched Eissa wander around the room, dimming all the lights and somehow turning the bulbs an odd shade of dark pink. She lit a bit of something in a burner that gave off a smoke which made me sneeze. Incense, I guessed.

"You certainly go all out. You don't really need all that, do you?" I demanded.

Eissa glared at me. "Yes, actually, I do. Now shut up. You're disturbing the auras."

Not caring to be quiet, I raised one eyebrow and said, "Oh, I'm sure—you need dark, weird colors, and allergy-aggravating smoke. Right. Furthermore, auras are my line of work. You just need a mentality."

My sister's glare intensified. "The dark makes it much easier to see what's going on in the ball. The 'weird colors' help calm me. And the smoke…it…um…" She stuck out her tongue. "Darn you. Smoke has no use, and really neither do colors." Eissa thought. "And sorry for getting into 'your line of work'—I'm used to diddling customers—talks of auras usually makes them feel like it's something real. They're stupid."

I nodded. "Quite true."

"Right. Now that we've finished arguing, I shall commence. Oh, sorry."

"Shut up. You're disturbing the auras." I grinned as Eissa sat down and glowered.

"Shut up yourself." With one last poisonous glare, she closed her eyes and concentrated hard.

The milky fog in the ball condensed into a marble-sized sphere, which began to vibrate frantically. About five seconds later, the sphere exploded and grew to fill the entire ball, pressing up against the glass sides. After another five seconds, the fog went transparent, came back, flickered a few times, then disappeared completely. A picture took its place.

I was watching from the top corner of a black granite cave, sparkling with pieces of quartz, and I could see everything. The sides were almost unnaturally straight and nearly perfectly smooth. It wasn't so big, maybe twenty feet high, and on the cave floor was a motley kind of band.

Four goblins grouped around a fire, licking their eyeballs from time to time and playing poker, it seemed. A handful of elves, six at most, mixed with two pixies, three gnomes, and a lone dwarf, circled another fire, talking and tossing suspicious looks over their shoulders at the goblins. On the floor between them lay a tall (comparatively—he was the size of a tall goblin, which is nothing to sneeze at), skinny Mud Boy. He seemed relatively healthy, well-tended, but unconscious.

"That's Fowl," I whispered. "Wait a bit, Eissa."

She made a sort of affirmative grunt, and I went into my magic. The trail connecting Eissa and Fowl was clear, a whitish string leading off east-northeast and down a few degrees.

I followed it straight, zipping off and trailing the magic. In seven and three-eighths seconds I had moved about a thousand miles.

Even in mental form, I felt the bone-cracking cold, and a mile up, radiation. Middle of Russia, I thought. Figures.

There I was, up in the corner of the cave, near the sheer walls. While there, I carefully examined the others. None of them had an unnaturally large amount of mental magic—meaning they wouldn't see the impossibly small comet that was going over to their illegally-obtained charge.

It was simple enough to slide over to Fowl. On closer inspection, he seemed a little too thin, and a bit too pale. Perhaps being below the ground so much—and he had never gotten much sun anyway. He didn't have any protection against radiation on him, either, which was definitely a factor in his current mediocre health.

Hmm. Well, if I was going to do the Ritual soon, then what would it matter? I laid a spell on him for anti-radiation, which would renew itself over and over as it ran out. It would drain me, but when you're running red-hot it doesn't matter. After that, I marked him with another bit of magic. I'd be able to find him anywhere now.

There. Done. I retreated back to my body and opened my eyes.

"All right, I'm finished," I said to Eissa. "Thanks."
"Welcome," she returned, actually smiling now. "Anytime."

***

So finally. I had a tracker-thing on Fowl that could not be removed.

It took me several minutes to remember why we were so gung-ho about this fourteen-year-old Mud Boy, who had proved himself a worthy adversary on one occasion and a mostly useless brat a year later. Then I figured it out—Butler had sent the e-mail begging for help, and Foaly had capitulated somehow.

Darn that ignorant centaur. Now I had to make a surface trip, and keep tabs on the boy, and find a way to rescue him or something. And then there was the task of searching out the gorilla, finding where the rest of the Fowl household was (Holly Short had told me of his mother and a girl who could be persuaded to be decent). Madam Fowl and Julia or Julianne or something must be found.

Yet another set of variables. Well, crud.

I had a feeling I'd be seeing more than enough of my dear elder sister in the next few weeks.

***

A/N: *goes down on knees* I'm sorry! It's late! Sorry sorry sorry! But there's been marching band and stupid things like sleeping and eating and…but excuses are futile. *stands up, brushes dirt off pants* Reviews are always appreciated…

~Flamewing

Okay, that was garbled. Sorry. It's late and I had a heavy dose of sugar.