Author's note: Finally some dialogue. I likes writing dialogue (intentional bad grammar). I'm awfully sporadic at updating, so come back when you're all out of your teens and it might be finished.

Thermit: Thanks, I'm glad you like it.

Hunter-of-Fairies: My muses always fail me. They'll never get a raise at this rate. Sorry about the no-anonymous-reviews but it seemed a delightfully devious thing to do at the time. And the bloody spaces-between-words issue. It's the program's fault - it was all right when I typed it in Word, but transfer it to fanfiction and it all goes to hell. If it does it again with this chapter, I'm going to shake my fist at it (prepare yourself, it's a fearsome sight). Yeah, Holly's strange state is in the process of being explained.

P. S. shakes fist

Holly plunged down the tunnel, now and then tripping over debris or fairy carnage, and falling painfully to the ground. But she hardly seemed to notice; she simply picked herself up and ran on.

Computers were certainly not hard to come by in Haven, and nearly every door she came to had one behind it; still, the majority were damaged or had smashed up screens. After the third room Holly tried produced yet another shattered console, she rammed her fist through the screen in frustration. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately, as the case would have it – that was the exact moment when emergency power failed, and she was instantly pitched into deep and suffocating blackness. That is, except for the tiny halo of blue light surrounding her bloodied fist – the last of her fairy magic was healing her hand. Fighting the urge to just lie down and scream at her ill-luck, she used the last of the dying blue sparks to light her way back into the tunnel. She made it back to the tunnel, but she had no torch, no magic, and no sense of direction. If she tried to continue down the hall, she'd only get turned around and trip over bodies, and she hadn't a single spark of magic left to heal herself. So she played at patience and sat down with her back against the tunnel wall, willing the power to come back on. When after several minutes, it still hadn't, her mind began to wander back to the scene of a few days prior. The memory always began with a sharp jolt of pain in her chest, which became a dull ache that persisted for hours after she'd blocked the memory from consciousness. Now Holly tried to stop herself from remembering the nightmare, but felt sadistically compelled to replay it. Three days ago, Holly had been fighting half-heartedly up top, along with a good two-thirds of the remaining LEP officers.

They were attempting to hold back the wave of mudmen attacks before they could reach a critical area above Haven. By this point, the LEP had orders to set their neutrinos to kill, but Holly ignored the command and kept it on stun. She was seriously disillusioned by the ease with which her own people accepted the transition from peace-lovers to merciless killers, and even more so by the fact that they justified the butchery by claiming it was protecting that peace. But for the time being, she'd fought on. What else was there to do?

Rumours began to circulate that a mud man well-known to the fairies was behind the betrayal of Haven, but Holly stubbornly refused to entertain the idea. When it became known that human weapons had been modified to make use of fairy technology – in an eerily familiar way which smacked of Artemis – Holly's disbelief grew to furious denial. Then Foaly received intelligence from a scout who'd somehow managed to make it back to base and transmit the information before he died, that Artemis Fowl II was in a bunker nearby, and was in all likelihood the one directing operations. Foaly himself felt disinclined to accept the news, despite the bioscan read-out the scout had brought back as proof, and despite the evidence that Foaly had until now kept from the other fairies – that much of the fairies' own technology was being neutralised somehow, and that could only be accomplished by an amazingly clever tactician with access to technology much more advanced than mud men's. Of course, it was possible a fairy could have defected to the humans, but, well – the weapons dropped by downed mud people were only of part fairy make, and the very fact that the fairies were losing right now showed that whoever was leading them was incredibly intelligent and resourceful. And with Opal dead, there was no other known fairy with those qualities or the desire to put them into action in such a way. Foaly's instinct told him it was the mud boy, and every minute he kept this information from his superiors was one more that they wouldn't know what they're up against. So he decided to call in Holly.

She walked in, her face and hands splattered in days' worth of mud, sweat, and blood, exhaustion clearly written on her face – no one in Haven slept anymore. There was a strange gleam in her eyes that took Foaly a minute to place. Then he realised – she was petrified with the horror of all she had seen, and only some rapidly depleting reserves of determination were keeping her sane.

"What is it, Foaly?" she asked, as he took all this in, and gulped. "Don't tell me you just called me in to give me a break from the fighting." She was standing in front of Foaly as he sat on his swivel chair in the makeshift underground ops booth in a section of Haven as yet undisturbed. She'd come to see him as he'd urgently requested, but so far he had said nothing at all, only looking at her with a seriousness she very rarely saw in him. He seemed to be fighting with himself to tell her something. He opened his mouth as if about to get it over with, then shut it again, and his face crumpled in something like despair.

"Foaly, please, just spit it out!" said Holly. She couldn't imagine what he could possibly have to say that could be so hard to tell her – the existence of Haven was common knowledge to humans by now, thousands of fairies had died hellish deaths, and though they still fought on dutifully, every fairy knew that it was only a matter of time before they all died by mud man hands. Most everyone she loved had already died, so what could be left to upset her?

"Okay, well – the scouts went out, as you know, and most of them died but one survived and made it back, bringing bioscan readouts, and –"

"Come to the point, Foaly!" Holly practically shouted. His hesitancy was making her skin crawl in dread.

Foaly took a deep breath and said it: "It seems Artemis is the one behind the attacks." There was a long pause. "Holly?"

Holly had gone pale and her breath had stopped halfway to her lungs. She tried to swallow but her tongue stuck in her throat, completely dry.

"That's not true, Foaly," she finally managed to whisper.

Foaly mistook the calmness of her words for the real thing. "I don't want to believe it either, Holly, but every sign points to Fowl as leader of the enemy's operations." He went on to list the evidence, assuming Holly's fixed eyes and unmoving posture denoted rationality. As he went on, Holly began to breathe heavily, and when he got to the long-range feed the scout had captured, she screamed and leapt at Foaly, shaking him violently.

"It's not true, it's not! Artemis would never do this, to us – never! For no amount of gold!" Her shakes gradually became less powerful, and she eventually broke down in sobs on the floor, holding her knees and rocking back and forth in overwhelming agony and frustration. She realised now that a part of her had always suspected Artemis was somehow behind the massacres, but until now she had been able to push the nagging doubt out of her mind. Now it all made sense – why their equipment was malfunctioning, why they were losing despite their supposedly superior technology, why they could not contact Artemis to ask for his help. He had turned on them, as the People had always feared he would. And all she could think was, "why?"

Foaly, momentarily shocked by a the picture of a Holly completely devoid of hope, finally came to his senses, stood up, and lifted her into his chair. She did not even seem to notice.

Foaly didn't know what to say. He'd never been faced with such anguish. He knew she'd seen things up top that he only saw as briefings on paper. "Holly…" he stammered. "He – he's a mud man, and he's always been a particularly ruthless one…" Here Holly choked on her sobs and looked up at him. "It's just – we were fooled, it's no one's fault –"

"I knew him Foaly," she cut in, her words simultaneously emoting hurt and anger. "I could see right through him, and he would never have dreamed of doing anything like this unless…something made him…"

"It would have to be a pretty big something. Like what?" said Foaly.

Holly leapt out of her chair distractedly and began to pace the room. "Oh, I don't know Foaly, something. He could be under the mesmer, or had false memories inserted, or…"

"That would require the efforts of a rogue fairy even more sadistic than Opal was, Holly," said Foaly, unconvinced. "And none of the LEP's known criminals comes anywhere near that category of evil."

"Who says they have to be known?" snapped Holly, her eyes blazing. "You're brought up thinking we're the good guys, we're humane, we're civilized…well, I don't see any evidence of that! All it took was detection and a couple of mud man bullets, and we butcher them like they butcher cows. Those 'peaceful' fairies, the ones you sat next to in school and traded digi-games with, they're out there right now shooting sixteen-year-old boys without blinking an eye." She hesitated for a moment, then said what was really on her mind: "I think your definition of 'evil' needs to be reassessed, Foaly."

Foaly's eyes widened at what he was hearing. Despite his intelligence, the greater import of her words flew over his head. "What are you saying, Holly?"

Holly shook her head in all the hopelessness of one whose entire belief system had suddenly been proven groundless. Her eyes drained of the light that had fed her passion a moment before, and became clouded-over and lifeless. "Don't you understand, Foaly?" she sighed. "We're no different from them, we're all the same."

Foaly was not prepared to accept this momentous revelation. "Holly, I –"

"Look, it doesn't matter any more. I doubt mud man or fairy will be alive much longer to think about it. But Artemis – I know he was different. Something's going on, or something happened to make him do this, and if it's really him in there, Foaly, I'm going to find out what it is," she said.

"Holly, no! It's a suicide mission!" protested Foaly. "You can't be thinking of walking into the middle of that war zone."

"I don't care if they kill me so long as I get to talk to Artemis first. I've got to know, Foaly. It's all I have left," said Holly.

Foaly was silent, thinking. Holly watched him. "Will you help me, Foaly? Because I'm going whether you want me to or not, and I'd stand a much better chance of making it to the bunker if I had you on my side."

Foaly hung his head. "All right, Holly, I'll help you. I guess there's no use delaying the inevitable, eh?" He looked up. "I'd like to know why he did it as well, but I wouldn't risk your life for the answer."

"It's already risked, Foaly," said Holly. "All of ours are."

"I know. But it's a harsh truth nobody wants to look at." They were silent for a moment, then Foaly spoke again. "There's a good chance I'll never see you again, Holly."

Holly's eyes filled with tears once again, and she nodded. "You were a good friend, Foaly, the best of friends – I'll miss you."

Foaly's drew in his breath sharply, his face twisting in an effort to remain under control. Finally he gave up and snatched her in a hug so tight she couldn't breathe.

A blast shook the floor Holly sat on just before a wall of fire shot half-way down the tunnel towards her. She leapt to her feet, half her mind still on the painful memory, and struggled to take in the present situation. Before the flames began to retreat back down the hall, she came to herself and thought quickly. One of the bodies scattered about her must have a working torch on it – if she could find one before the light disappeared again, she could search for a working computer.

Glancing swiftly about herself, she patted down two or three bodies before spotting a torch on another. She didn't hesitate – she'd seen too much death in the last month to be squirmy about it now. Holly snatched up the torch just as the flames receded back down the tunnel and again left her stranded in the deep gloom. She held her breath – would its power source still be working? She flicked it on – and instantly a long beam of white light shot out across the smoky air of the underground. She exhaled shakily and began to walk. This was it.