Chapter 10

Clove crouched in the shadows near her comrades' cells, holding her helmet in her hands. Her heart thumped wildly and sweat leaked in a thin line from her hair. She felt very unprotected and alone. It wasn't exactly that she trusted the big Mud Man to cover her back, but it still would have been nice to have him there.

And as for that Fowl. If devious could be a middle name, he would have it. He had more guts than that skinny little stomach had room for. She never would have thought to blast her way into the commander's prison using her helmet. Against regulations, generally speaking. The rule was at least implied, considering that LEP personnel were not even supposed to remove their headgear above ground. That would make blowing it up just a tad inadvisable.

But Artemis Fowl had told her to. Something about the way he spoke made people listen. Besides, she had nothing better to do with herself as long as her superior officers were trapped inside Clifford's dwelling.

She crept out from the shadow of a long table and slunk over to what she thought was Root's cell door. A momentary doubt niggled at her but she shook it away. She was just getting unnerved by the thought of several trolls separated from her by nothing more than a thick steel slab.

She wedged her helmet onto the lock mechanism. Artemis' plan was fairly simple from his end. He didn't have to manipulate magic, just the people who possessed it. She on the other hand would have to accurately direct a flow of sparks into the inanimate helmet workings, which Butler had rewired into a bomb waiting to happen. That man probably had more dubiousness in his past than an LEP ration pack of synthesized spaghetti.

But it wasn't easy, this direction thing. Clove loved magic, had taken three extra courses in it in college, and often tinkered with it when she got bored on traffic detail. When she was a little fairy she had aspired to be a warlock. Then she'd seen Holly Short's face on the news and, abracadabra, she wanted nothing more than to get a Neutrino on her belt.

But even though she was a natural with the blue sparks she wasn't sure she could pull this off. Artemis assured her that the blast would be sufficient to breach the door but not to cause harm to any of their party. Hopefully, he'd added. He was acting on the theory that, since magic was pure energy, feeding it into the helmet's now-volatile innards would cause an explosion of epic proportions. Of course it was more detailed than that but Clove hardly cared. She was a soldier, not a scientist.

She took a few steadying breaths and concentrated on the magic boiling at her fingertips. Once a thin tendril of sparks touched the metal casing she backed up slowly, extending the line as she went. She had to be careful not to break her magical contact with the helmet or the sparks would be undirected and cause a premature explosion.

She could have just pumped magic into the helmet full force. The catch was that she would then be standing right next to the helmet when it detonated. She'd be gutted like an Atlantean fish, and that's pretty fast. There'd be nothing left of her but her reinforced boots. Feisty

So she continued to back up, holding the line steady with trembling hands, heading for the farthest corner. It sounded easy, but they only taught this kind of manipulation in high-level courses as the magical fallout sometimes caused internal injuries to untrained fairies.

She planned to get behind a thick filing cabinet before letting fly with her tank of sparks. Then she'd extricate her superior officers and they'd go wreak havoc on Clifford's nasty scheme.

Of course, the best-laid plans can go awry. And with an explosion all it takes is a tiny hiccup. In this case the hiccup happened to be a stray vial lying on the floor in Clove's path. She was concentrating completely on maintaining the magical flow and didn't notice the clear glass cylinder behind her.

Her heel came down on it and rolled. She slipped, fracturing the magical connection and swearing loudly to herself. Most unprofessional; obscenities are not the most inconspicuous words in any language. But it didn't really matter in the end, as no one could have possibly heard her over the deafening explosion that followed.

Clove didn't even have time to swear at the greater of her two accidents as the blast barrelled into her with all the force of an angry tidal wave. In fact, Clove was having trouble seeing anything through the flames that engulfed her, which was why she completely missed the sight of her writhing magic scooping up the helmet and flinging it at the next cell door.

The cell door of a troll.

Clove was hurled against the far wall broken, burnt, and bleeding. She had never felt, had never dreamed of agony like this, but it was here in the flesh and demanding to be acknowledged. She impacted near the ceiling and slid down the wall, a good fifteen feet to the floor. She crumpled where she landed, folding over her shattered legs and ribcage.

Her skull was cracked open from the impact but amazingly she wasn't unconscious. Because her magic had been cut off she still had some left, and it apparently wasn't ready to let her die just yet. A part of her begged it to let her slip into nothingness, fall into the black abyss of death, anything to end the rampaging pain. But the part of her that had signed up for training college caught hold of life and wouldn't let go.

Flames licked anything combustible, which in a lab is a big problem. Luckily for Clove nothing in this lab was particularly flammable. In any case she didn't care. She simply lay there, waiting for the magic to reconstruct her into something resembling her original blueprint. Anyway, the door was open. More than one door. Something was moving inside, coming out. It was making noise. A lot of noise. Oh gods, was that what she thought it was?

Holly was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling and trying to think through their options, when the entire cell door blew to pieces.

She was flipped backward by her heels, hitting the wall face-first. Not a very dignified way to sustain life-threatening injuries. So she was doubly thankful that she didn't. Oh sure, something in her shoulder bent a little farther than it should have and her rear end got scorched, but nothing happened that she couldn't walk away from.

Smoke filled their cells as Holly struggled to get her bearings. Someone coughed nearby. "Short? You okay?"

"Fine, Commander," Holly called, locating the bars and clinging to them. "What about you?"

"Intact. The doors are open. What in Haven?"

Holly scrambled out of her cell, waving away billows of smoke. Stupid, in retrospect. What came through that smoke was the biggest bull troll Holly had ever seen. And she'd seen some beauties.

It caught sight of her, its noise-crazed eyes fixing on her small form. It reached out long jagged claws to grab her. She froze, staring. There was nothing else for her to do. She had no wings to fly with and no weapon to fight with. She didn't even have a helmet to give her a few extra moments to live. She had no words to tell the commander to forget about her and run. She just gaped at her death as it brushed her with rank fur.

She prayed for it to be over quickly.

At that precise moment a silver bullet shot out of the dark corner.

Corporal Plank smashed into the troll head-first, impacting with a crunch. Holly fell on her seat as the troll reacted with panicked flails. Corporal Plank was the one who had sprung them? But how? And where was her helmet?

The troll roared and flung the corporal to the ground, lumbering away for a moment's confused reprise. Plank flopped on the ground, her wing rig only half-functional and her limbs twisted. There was more than troll-damage here. Plank must have been caught in the blast, judging by her charred uniform.

Holly crawled over to her. "Corporal," she gasped, trying in vain to summon healing magic. "Plank, talk to me!"

Blue sparks were already swirling around the damaged cranium, sealing in regenerated brain matter. Plank's rolling eyes settled on her idol's face and a very small smile appeared on her bloody lips. "Captain, I accidentally set loose a troll," she mumbled. "Sorry. But it was Artemis' idea."