A/N: Thank you all once again for the wonderful detailed reviews; I can't quite believe how awesome you guys are! I shall repay you by tendering advance cliffy warning – you will get precious few answers in this chapter, things really start to be revealed in chapter 4. Now that you have been warned, I expect to receive only minimal death threats... A couple of quick notes on things I simply have to respond to. First, AS: 'sceptical' is British, Australian, (and presumably Irish) spelling. So :P – but thanks for trying:) Second, FH: but it will destroy civilisation! (AND YOUR HOUSE!) : ) Do not worry, you'll find out more later.

Thanks again and please keep reviewing folks, it's what makes it all worthwhile!

Disclaimer: Not mine. Eoin Colfer's.

CHAPTER 3

Artemis could tell that he was very close to giving in.

He knew precisely how to diagnose the condition in someone else and he remained aware enough to be able to admit it to himself; he was in enormous trouble.

He had tried every technique he knew to keep himself sane, but somehow he always fell back to counting the seconds between each flash. And somehow, when each flash caught him by surprise, he would lose a little more of his mind, get a little closer to screaming out loud for it to stop, please, he'd do any –

Off, on. Three seconds.

He sneered at himself in disgust. His brain had never yet failed him, never yet failed to come up with a brilliant plan to extract him from any situation. But intellectually, he knew exactly how to resist psychological torture. Intellectually, he knew exactly what was happening as his psychological defences crumbled away bit by tiny bit. Despite his understanding, however, he found that he could do very little to actually stop it happening. He felt raw and exposed, and the absence of his clothes was bothering him more than he cared to –

Off, on. Four seconds.

It had been too long, that much was plain. His plan had clearly failed. There must have been something he had failed to take into account, some variable he hadn't predicted.

Perhaps, if his parents truly had been killed when he was captured… Artemis tried to push away the flash of despair that accompanied that thought and focus. Like all of the half-baked theories he had managed to concoct in between flashes, it just didn't feel right. It was true, some parts of the plan would have been more effective with his father's support, but there was nothing that would have been impossible without him, and he couldn't imagine Butler or Holly simply giving up.

If he could only identify what had gone wrong, perhaps he could work, even now, on fixing it, but there was no way he could reach that state of clarity in which he made his plans now, not with –

Off, on. Seven seconds.

His wrists and shoulders were largely numb now, but the headache and the thirst were overwhelming, and he felt as though someone had packed his eye sockets with sand. Even closed, his eyes burned and itched from the combination of the searing light, the dehydration, the persistent lack of sleep, and the now-useless mirrored lenses he had worn to resist the mesmer. He suspected those might actually be beginning to fuse to his eyeballs.

The dehydration, he was sure, would be what got to him first. The pounding of his head was getting worse, the dryness of his throat like a knife each time he swallowed, and his saliva was quickly moving past the point of being thick and moving onto the stage of actually being solid. Did his captor know how easy it was to kill a human by denying him water? Would he really –

Off, on. Five seconds.

There were whole moments when the idea of submitting to permanent slavery – the idea of being intrinsically unable to disobey the orders of someone he could never respect; the idea of being imprisoned, not with shackles, but within his own body and mind – appeared more bearable than remaining in his current situation. But the idea of being responsible for the extermination of an entire race (for he was sure that his captor would not be able to stop once he had started) remained so abhorrent as to keep him standing there, disoriented in space and time and nearly –

Off, on. Two seconds.

Artemis gritted his teeth. I am Artemis Fowl the Second, he told himself sternly, and I can think my way out of anywhere and anything.

Sool seemed to derive some sort of pleasure from ordering us to be knocked out for the transport back to the surface with 'the new drug'. When I awoke again I found out why – my head felt as though Butler was bashing it repeatedly into a wall and my mouth tasted like my tongue was at least three days dead.

It took me a few moments to realise that something must have gone wrong. We were back in the same large conference room where we had been interrogated earlier and, although Angeline was sleeping uncomfortably in a chair beside me, I couldn't see Arty or Sool anywhere. The room was packed with confused and worried fairies, but the only conversation I could make out was Kelp apparently reaming out one of his subordinates in low tones.

"What do you mean on holiday?" he demanded. "What did you say to him?"

"Don't yell at me, Trubs," whined a high-pitched voice. "I'll tell Mummy, I will!"

There was a frustrated silence and then Kelp spoke again in a voice that was more forcibly restrained than calm. "Tell me what happened, Grub."

"Well, I went around to his house, like you said, but he wasn't there. So I called his mobile phone and he took a really long time to answer. I told him about Fowl, but he got really angry with me for ringing and said that he'd deal with it when he got back to work. Then he said he's got some leave saved up and he might not be in for a few days, and not to bother him at home again."

Kelp audibly ground his teeth and then sighed. "Maybe it's better if Sool's not here, anyway," he said finally. "He'd only slow things down with his political –"

He broke off as he suddenly noticed I was awake and strode over to me, looking absolutely furious. "What do you know about all this, Fowl?" he demanded. "You'd better start talking, because I'm running out of patience with your son's little games!"

I sat up, cradling my aching head in my hands and groaned, making it implicitly clear that this would be quid pro quo; no matter what the situation was, I wouldn't be saying anything without aspirin and a long drink of water.

Kelp grunted in annoyance as he caught my meaning, then placed a tiny hand on the crown of my head and said, "Heal!"

A strange tingling sensation crawled across my scalp, making my hair stand on end. I caught sight, out of the corner of my eye, of a single shining spark of blue light, which was soon joined by others. They whirled and danced around the corners of my vision and then suddenly dived towards my skin as one. My muscles convulsed in a sort of short seizure as they made contact, but the sensation swiftly passed and, with it, the pain.

"Extraordinary!" I said, shaking my head in disbelief. I felt ten years younger – like I could run (or limp quickly, at least) for miles. "If you could bottle that for a hangover cure, you could make billions!"

Kelp was unimpressed, his miniature scowl deepening dangerously.

"All right," I said, spreading my hands in resignation. "Tell me what happened."

"Your transport was attacked," the fairy spat. "When the retrieval team assigned to escort you woke up, a fairy was missing and your son had escaped. Is this some part of his scheme, or do we have less than three hours to find the box? Or was he bluffing about the whole D'Arvited thing?"

I shook my head as though trying to clear the last of the cobwebs to give myself some time to think, but it took only a moment to decide – with the abrasive Sool absent, this was a perfect time for the truth.

"Yes," I said, projecting my voice to reach the furthest corners of the room and waiting until I had everyone's attention. "Of course he was bluffing. Arty had no idea where the box was, but it was the best way he could come up with to save our lives."

"How can you expect us to believe that, Fowl?" demanded one of the shorter fairies with an enormous head and a fearsome scowl on his face. "The two of you seemed pretty convincing earlier."

"I expect you to believe it," I drawled derisively, "because if Arty's intention had been to extort gold from you, don't you think he would have demanded gold, not just our lives, in exchange for keeping the box closed? What did you expect him to do – admit to knowing nothing and let you murder all three of us in cold blood because we hadn't tried to extort you?"

The fairies' faces flushed slowly. Behind me, Angeline stirred and let out a piteous moan as she began to wake up. Remembering what Arty had said about the fairies' weaknesses, I moved over to her side to publicly display some affection for my clearly innocent and suffering wife. Kelp blushingly rushed over and provided her with a shot of blue sparks to counteract the unpleasant after-effects of the sedative, and she fell into a more natural state of early morning bleariness.

"I'll submit to a mesmer, if you want me to prove my intentions," I told him, carefully pronouncing the unfamiliar word. I didn't allow the gratefulness I felt towards him for healing my wife to touch my voice. "But why don't you just ask Foaly? He's been in on all this from the beginning."

All eyes turned to face the centaur, who hurriedly swallowed the carrot he'd been munching on. "What?" he asked, unrepentantly. "We couldn't do anything until Fowl woke up, anyway, and I was enjoying the show. All right, I can confirm at least some of what he's saying. I don't know Mud Boy's intentions – I do know that he only had a few minutes warning to concoct some sort of plan to save his life and that of his family. Butler informed Captain – sorry, Miss – Short and I of the details of what he planned to do while he was being taken underground. I have no hard evidence, but I was prepared to doctor his Retimager results if it had been needed to convince Sool to let him go because I, for one, will stand by Captain – sorry, Miss – Short's recommendation on the matter."

His mistakes in Short's title were clearly deliberate. Admittedly, I did have the benefit of having heard Arty's sketchy plan and was thus forewarned of what was about to happen, but still, I thought they were a little overdone. I would have gone for a more subtle approach – but, after all, the centaur didn't have the same experience in manipulation as Arty and I did. From the nods around the room, he was doing well enough. It appeared that Short was as respected and well liked by her comrades as Arty had suspected, and the issue of her absence from the police force was a sore point with many of the fairies in the room.

"We've all been wishing," continued Foaly, "that we could get rid of that vindictive, micromanaging stinkworm who's running the LEP into the ground. He's crazier than he's ever been right now. What comes next? Authorising lethal force on fairies? The LEP's not about murdering defenceless Mud People! The LEP's about saving lives – fairy and human. It's about keeping the peace, about making the world a better place for everyone in it. At least that's what I thought it was about when I first signed on as a civilian assistant four hundred years ago!"

I blinked in sudden comprehension of my own mortality; Arty had said the fairies had long lives, but this was incredible! I didn't know how one judged the age of a centaur – perhaps you checked his teeth – but I wouldn't have placed him much past his early thirties.

Foaly's equine eyes were bright with determination as he looked around the room. "Haven has never had a bigger crime wave than these last four months that Sool has been in charge – not even including the cleanup after the goblin revolution. Because of his obsession with triple-checking everyone's work and political manoeuvring, the guilty are going free and the innocent are being harassed and imprisoned. Sool is just one fairy, not the law itself. We've put up with him for too long. I say no longer!"

Almost all the fairies in the room were on their feet now – all but Kelp. I knew why, of course. If Sool was deposed, there was one obvious choice for his replacement and, while Major Kelp's eyes were bright with agreement with everything the centaur said, his face was composed. This was not an appointment he sought and, in waiting until it was irreversibly thrust upon him by his comrades, he was proving that he would be the best kind of leader any organisation could get.

"Hear, hear!" came a voice from the door. It took a moment – but only one moment – to determine that the new arrival was female, as her auburn hair was cropped in a standard military crew cut. The figure inside her green jumpsuit, however, was perfectly formed in miniature, in a way that made my now-conscious wife give me a knowing look as she caught me admiring it. This could only be Captain Short.

I hadn't seen Foaly send Short a signal to arrive – perhaps she had been eavesdropping in the corridor for the entire speech – but her timing was everything Arty could have hoped for when he had outlined his plan to induce a mutiny in the LEP. That was, if she didn't ruin it by overacting.

"Commander Kelp," said Short crisply, snapping to attention and saluting the major. "Captain Holly Short, reporting for duty, sir!"

Perhaps that had been too much to hope for. But obviously her performance was sufficient for her audience, because it took only a moment before a ragged cheer went around the room. Other fairies began saluting in imitation of her, the momentum of the coup building with each new addition.

The last to stand, apart from Major Kelp, was the whining corporal he had called Grub. There was a kind of horror in his voice as he spoke. "This is insane!" he said, shaking his head. "You can't expect me to… to take on Sool… and the Council! Butler was one thing, but I don't want to lead the LEP!"

Absolute silence fell over the room, broken only by the sound of fairies shuffling their feet as they exchanged worried glances with one another. I hardly dared breathe, fearing it would disturb the atmosphere, but Foaly cleared his throat meaningfully and gave Kelp a pleading glance.

"Grub," Kelp told his brother gently, "I think they mean me."

"Oh!" cried Grub, real relief evident in his voice. "Really? Well then, I guess, er… sure," he said, giving a half-hearted salute and, despite the informality, this clearly meant even more to Kelp than all of the rest of the support combined.

"Take the job, Trouble," advised Foaly, when he still seemed undecided. "It's what Julius would have wanted."

"I suppose I have no choice," agreed Kelp finally, standing up and waiting for the cheers to subside. "You do realise, of course, that this means I'll never see the sky again?" He looked around the room at the shining faces of his troops and then rolled his eyes. "Oh, at ease, for Frond's sake! And as for you, centaur…" he said threateningly, but a grin had crossed his face. "DON'T CALL ME TROUBLE!" he roared, his face turning slightly red from the exertion.

This was evidently a joke, as the entire room collapsed into the slightly hysteria-edged laughter of those who knew they had just passed the point of no return – this was mutiny, and if they couldn't get approval for their little coup from the higher-ups, things could get ugly very quickly. Perhaps it had been an unnecessary precaution, given that Sool appeared to have taken a voluntary leave of absence in any case. Still, the chain of command had now been irrevocably altered and Sool's ability to interfere with Arty's plans would be severely curtailed even he did get reinstated by the higher-ups.

As the fairies crowded around Kelp to offer their personal congratulations, Short made her way across the room to greet us. "Nice to see you again," she said with a grin wide enough to encompass both of us. "Although I don't think I ever officially met you, Angeline, even if I did manage to retrieve half my ransom for curing your depression."

I made sure my face didn't twitch with surprise, even though my heart felt as though it was about to burst with pride for my son. From what I had managed to piece together, that would have been half a tonne of gold – something that any Fowl would have had trouble giving up. To do have done so for his mother's mental health... Any last vestiges of doubt I had harboured as to the veracity of Arty's moral turnaround were swept away. My boy's heart was purer gold than the ransom he raised.

"A pleasure," said my wife, with admirable poise given that the only information she was running on was a hissed 'I'll explain later'. I resolved to bring her up to speed as soon as I possibly could. "And thank you, I suppose."

"Most welcome," the fairy returned with equanimity. "Artemis has saved my life a few times now, so helping out the two of you was the least I could do."

"Excuse me," I interjected, "but I can't seem to recall meeting you either, Captain Short."

She looked momentarily surprised and then a look of understanding crossed her face. "Of course, your memory was wiped, wasn't it? I was the one who pulled you out of the Arctic Ocean and healed what I could of your wounds – after Artemis had you shot."

I nodded blandly, trying to suppress the horror that ran through me at the thought of someone tampering with my mind. That Arty had apparently shot and killed me, prompting my captors to throw me overboard, was one of the few facts I had managed to get straight once I had regained contact with my information network. The conflicting reports from the two men representing the Mafiya in the exchange, in combination with the fact that I was unquestionably alive, had made it clear that the whole thing had been some sort of elaborate – and very convincing – fraud orchestrated by my son. I had never understood why he felt the need to keep his own role a secret from me, but I had long suspected that something unusual had happened to me. My memories of that time were mostly blurred, as though I was viewing them through a pane of distorted glass. I added it to my mental list of things I needed to have a long talk to my son about; my memories were what made me who I was, and I did not appreciate having the very makeup of my personality altered without my consent. Still, I had to admit, it was better to be alive than dead, and perhaps it had simply been the standard procedure of his allies.

The newly elected Commander Kelp interrupted my musings and the general joyful atmosphere in the room with a reality check. "I hate to say it," he said, "but has this actually helped us start tracking down Pandora's box? Or Fowl and Corporal Rheeson? If they're being held by the thief, we have to assume we're on a time limit before the box is opened. Fowl may be able to resist the mesmer, but that doesn't mean he can hold out against coercion indefinitely."

Angeline clutched at my hand and I remembered that, without having heard Kelp's quick briefing, this was probably the first she had heard that her son was missing. I squeezed her hand reassuringly and then brought it up to rub a spot at the back of my neck in a memory of pain – this was my last planned move in Arty's scheme. Hopefully, it would be enough, because from here on in, I was on my own; a stranger in a very strange land.

"Actually," I said, "everything is still all going according to Arty's plan. He guessed that the thief would believe in that prophecy, and would attempt to kidnap him and force him to cooperate. Butler injected us both with a prototype of Arty's latest project in nano-technology – a microscopic tracking device that he said Foaly should be able to locate. If we can find Arty, we can presumably find the thief and the box, too."

Hope resurfaced around the room as everyone turned to Foaly. The centaur, however, was not looking as confident as everyone else. "About that," he said sheepishly. "I'm afraid I've got some bad news."

To be continued...