Disclaimer: The characters, much of the dialogue, and sadly, even the plot are not mine; they all belong to Eoin Colfer.

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Chapter 27: Indestructible

Holly was back in action. She headed toward the nearest alley, limping slightly at first thanks to the fact she still only had one shoe, giving herself time to readjust to her slightly uneven footing, and leaving Kronski twitching on his back like a huge overturned land turtle.

Although Holly had no way of knowing if a fairy's covertly pulling the strings behind the scenes would have had any effect on Kronski's belief concerning what had really happened to Artemis, the information was enough to snap the LEP captain back into her usual frame of mind: deadly focused.

Holly's first natural instinct was to turn and dash at full speed back to the compound, where she had last seen her friend. But instead Holly forced herself to check her emotions and think. A few seconds of forethought could mean the difference between success and failure, between life and death – or so they were constantly told in the LEP training regime back in Haven.

Though she would have liked nothing more than to take the quickest path straight to the cluster of ostentatious buildings built for the comfort of the Extinctionists, it didn't take much for her to realize that that would not be the best tactical decision at the moment for several reasons.

Despite the fact that most of Kronski's guards were still back in the center of the souk fishing for diamonds and probably tussling over those already found, and despite the fact their leader who had given the initial order to capture 'the creature' had been taken out of action, Holly wouldn't be surprised if a few stragglers still remained, off somewhere with broken radios unaware of either the diamond situation or the state of their president.

Besides, it would be reckless and stupid to go back to the compound to save Artemis, helpless and unarmed as she was. She would stand a much better chance and be of a lot more use with some equipment, preferably weaponry of some kind. She may need to break Artemis out if he was some rogue criminal fairy's prisoner, and a ready-made escape route would be sure to make things simpler.

So that was that: there was nothing for it but to go on ahead to the shuttle, then pilot it back to the compound. Unfortunately, for concealment purposes the ship was not located within an easy distance, at least not easy in a situation where, as far as Holly was concerned, seconds counted. She could only hope Artemis had left the scooter somewhere it would be easy to find, and that her human and dwarf friends had not needed to move the shuttle for some reason while she had been imprisoned at the compound. She didn't know if she would ever find it in that case; besides, the mere thought of either Artemis or Mulch attempting to fly the old ship made her shudder.

In truth, Artemis could have left the scooter just about anywhere. However, Holly had a feeling that Artemis would have made sure to hide the collapsible vehicle somewhere she would have a chance of finding it, in case of just a scenario as this. And he had already given her a clue.

"Let's meet somewhere close. At the souk."

Holly made her way through the deserted alleyways, going the long way around the souk just to be safe as she headed toward the spot where they had spent the previous afternoon in the cham pod. With no shield to hide her, Holly kept to the shadows as much as possible.

Once, she had to abruptly duck out of the way as two of Kronski's guards, arguing over who owed who a stone or two from each's small stash of diamonds for favors performed, sauntered past. However, enough merchants and tourists were still out that it was impossible to stay completely unnoticed, and Holly's sense of being short on time – a feeling she had been experiencing a lot lately – pushed her to go faster rather than be as careful as she might have been.

A couple of tourists, apparently having been among the earlier witnesses, upon noticing the elf moving briskly around the back of a stall where the merchant was trying to sell cheap, fake gold jewelry clapped and cheered for her having successfully eluded her big, truculent pursuers.

A bit of a smile crossed her lips for a moment despite herself, and Holly turned to them and pressed a quieting finger to her lips. The tourists fell silent abruptly, though still grinned conspiratorially, and by the time the merchant they had been talking to turned, frowning, to see what they were looking at, Holly was gone.

The sock of Holly's shoeless foot had just about worn through by the time she was padding up the stairway that led to the balcony overlooking the souk.

Holly went up the cold stone steps, turned a corner, and emerged onto the balcony. She searched all around the landing and leaned over as far as she dared where a railing ordinarily would have been to see as best she could the exact place they had been in the cham pod earlier, but of course it was empty.

As she pulled back, her eyes fell on the expansive area below, many of Kronski's guards still yet fighting for the diamonds. What had seemed to Holly a small army had thinned considerably, though she still made out the indisposed form of Damon Kronski, continuing to twitch and jerk on his back.

Holly returned to the stairwell and looked all around at the dirty stone walls, graffiti spotting its surface at random. She scanned the corners and the ground along the dark gray surface, searching for something, some further clue. Just when she was about to give up and go down into the souk itself to look, even if it was risky, a particular bit of minuscule graffiti jumped out at her.

Moving up close to the banister, Holly peered curiously at the tiny numbers carved neatly right above the rail right at the top of the stairway.

Nine-zero-nine. Next to that, an even smaller upside-down 'V.' An arrow?

Holly tilted her head back to stare at the corner between the ceiling and wall. She couldn't see anything in the darkness, so she stepped up onto the rail and groped blindly upward until her hand closed around a wrinkled, squashy object, like a large, mostly deflated beach ball.

Holly felt around for a moment and hit a button to deactivate the suction power keeping the only partially blown up cham pod stuck to the ceiling, and as it started to come down on top of her, she batted it over so it fell instead on the top few steps behind her.

As it went down she felt something hard inside it and her suspicion of what it might be was confirmed when she looked inside the pod and found a metallic disc the size of a frisbee.

As Holly stood, clutching the object in one hand while the flat cham pod hung limply in the other, she glanced back up at Artemis's addition to the already pretty-well defaced wall, the fairy police emergency number with the arrow next to it.

Holly rolled her eyes slightly. A tad obvious. Artemis must have been really pressed for time.

The darkness seemed to swallow Holly as she drove the scooter out of Fez and away from the lamplight of the merchants' shops still open even at this hour, though even they were starting to pack up now last Holly had seen. Soon she only had her superior night vision and the tiny pinpricks of light of the bright, shining stars above to rely on, afraid as she was to flick on the Lambretta's headlights, as they would probably be better than a lighthouse beacon to tell everyone within a three-mile radius exactly where she was.

All vestiges of the blazing heat of the day were now gone as the night chill bit at her fingers and exposed neck, which still felt sore from her struggle with Kronski.

Holly drove as fast as she dared in the darkness. If she'd been Doodah Day, she probably could have pushed herself to go faster, but she didn't have quite the gift with ground vehicles the little fish-smuggling pixie did, though if it had been an aircraft in question that point probably would have been arguable.

The entire way, Holly battled the mounting sense of urgency growing in her chest. The tedium of waiting for each second to tick slowly by while she knew Artemis, if he was alive, could be in danger somewhere right now was beyond aggravating. She wanted to open the throttle as far as it would go to cut down that twenty or so more minutes it would take to get to the ship by as much as she could, but she kept repeating to herself that being overly remiss about details and her own safety now wouldn't help Artemis.

As Holly reached the area where the golf courses were, she felt like impatience was going to eat her alive as her eyes flew about in the darkness, searching for something familiar that could lead her back to the particular sand dune she had parked the shuttle in, but every dune looked pretty well identical to the next in this light.

Holly dropped her eyes to the small screen on the dash. Going into the scooter's navigation system, she quickly tapped in the coordinates of the shuttle. The tiny computer responded by providing her with a map, where the shuttle's location was marked with a tiny red dot, and so Holly took off.

As Holly hurtled along the road next to the olive trees, gnarled twisted trunks lining her path like prison bars, she urged the scooter a little faster, moving out into the particular golf course indicated on the map, filled again with the sense that she didn't have any more time to waste. Where was it? Any minute, surely –

"Well, well," said a low, guttural voice from somewhere to her left. "Good to have you back, Captain, I suppose. I was beginning to think I wouldn't be seeing you again."

Holly slowed the scooter and turned. She could just make out the outline of a short, stubby figure standing in one of the golf course's sand pits, grinning with weirdly huge square teeth.

Holly didn't bother to point out that he would be seeing her again regardless of what happened to her now, as he would be interacting with her present self – the self of this time – in excess in the near future for some time to come. Instead, she spun the scooter around and shot right toward where Mulch was standing.

Mulch took no notice at first, still talking in his usual merrily irksome way. "Looked like you might be a little lost over there about how to find where you landed your own ship, so I thought I'd do you a favor, and in return I was just thinking you might – Whoa, watch it!"

Mulch had to scramble out of the way as Holly rocketed over, collapsing the scooter and flipping open the hatch with one movement as she did so.

"Back in!" Holly barked. "We're going."

"Thanks, Mulch, you're a live saver," grumbled the dwarf sulkily as he followed Holly reluctantly into the ship, pulling the hatch closed behind him. "You're welcome for the rescue, Captain."

After tossing the scooter-disk unceremoniously aside, engendering a "Hey, careful with that!" from Mulch, Holly headed immediately for the pilot's chair, abaya hem caked with sand and dirt swishing around her legs and scraping against her ankles. Catching sight of the side of her own head in a bit of reflective surface on the dash in front of her, one ear still looking like it had been savaged by a very small shark, she reached up and ripped off the nu skin bandage Artemis had put there, throwing it back over her shoulder without looking. She'd toss it into the on-ship recycling smelter later when she had the chance.

"Sit down and buckle up," she ordered as her hands flew over the V-board and she reached forward to flip switches, starting the hum of the ship's engines.

"What happened to your pet Mud Boy?" Mulch wanted to know. "Are we leaving him? Too bad, I s'pose he was starting to grow on me – for a Mud Person. Should I start planning out my speech for the funeral?"

Holly's throat contracted convulsively, but she ignored it. "We're going to get him," she said curtly. "Now what part of 'get in and buckle up right now' do you need me to clarify for you?"

"So you lost him," noted Mulch summarily. "Gotta say, you two really don't seem to have it together. Can't say I'm impressed with this level of performance. Or better yet, as Julius would say – "

The engines were already finished warming and Holly had performed all the pre-flight checks in record time. "Mulch," said Holly tightly, cutting him off, "I'm going to count to two, and if you're not in a seat and strapped in, you can have fun telling me later about what it's like to be a live dwarf pinball."

Mulch heaved a dramatic sigh before reluctantly flopping himself down in the copilot's chair. He clicked his tongue and a chattering Jayjay, seeming to appear out of nowhere, scaled the tall back in a second and came a moment later to rest on Mulch's head. Mulch shifted the animal to his lap.

"Don't mind Captain Short, Jayjay," he told the lemur as he locked the two of them in place. "She's always like this. But you'll get accustomed to her rough, uncultured ways eventually."

Jayjay clapped his tiny hands with happy approval and chattered again with a sound like laughter.

Holly's sense of priority made it so she was at the moment almost totally consumed with what she needed to do: getting to Artemis.

However, somewhere at the back of her mind Holly had a thought that the real Commander Root would be turning in his grave, so to speak, if he could see a being thought by anyone to have any resemblance to him getting along so well with his old kleptomaniac, epically pain-in-the-rear nemesis.

Once the shuttle was up in the air and piercing through the night sky like a javelin, albeit a somewhat misshapen, unrefined javelin that may have originally been designed to look like a hippo by accident, Holly felt a bit more relaxed. Enough to say, if grudgingly, "Thank you, Mulch. For the help. You've done a lot."

"It's a start," he replied. Then continued, being the incurably voracious dwarf that he was, "Now if you could just make your tone a bit nicer. Oh, and I wouldn't mind if you threw a few gold coins into that, too."

"You're asking for coins when you're already getting this whole ship and everything in it. Tell me, doesn't carrying around that bottomless pit of greed ever get exhausting?"

"Nope," said Mulch blithely, shrugging. "Never too tired for gold. Or food."

Holly rolled her eyes, but decided it was best not to respond, her gaze still searching for when they would come upon the compound.

"So," said Mulch after a moment, "what did happen to your Mud Boy? He got you out I'm guessing by the look of it, then what happened to him?"

This was a question Holly did not want to answer, but considering Mulch's usual level of sensitivity, she had a feeling he would pester her anyway until she provided a satisfactory response, so she said honestly, "I don't know exactly. We got separated."

"Just 'got separated,'" repeated Mulch, in a tone that held in every inch skepticism of the simplicity of Holly's explanation. "So it'll be as easy as plucking strawberries off a cake, then, will it? All we have to do is nip down there and pick him up. No complications."

"Probably not that easy," Holly admitted.

Holly realized the muscles in her arms were tight with nerves and she forced them to relax. She would fly better if she wasn't so tense, not there was any trouble to be expected. Yet.

Everything is going to be fine, she told herself. Artemis is at compound, still alive and just waiting for the calvary to show up. Or perhaps he already had everything under control. After all, if Holly had ever met a living being that was indestructible, it had to be Artemis Fowl.

Of course, she had once thought the same thing about Commander Root.

A/N: A bit of a slow chapter, I know. Next chapter will be better, if on the short side, (even though I know how much you all don't like short chapters, lol.) But chapter 29's one I really enjoyed, so hope you can look forward to it. (;

Sigh, I'm posting this from a university computer instead of getting started on my five-page paper on three different artworks... Procrastination is really not my friend. But for some reason we always end up going to parties together anyway. X3

Here are my billions of notes, as usual: On the balcony overlooking the souk thing, I looked at as many photographs that I could taken of the souk I could get off google, but I couldn't find anything that resembled a balcony. So I'm thinking this means one of three things: one, the photos aren't clear enough and is making something that is a balcony not apparent (because of the relative small size of the objects in the photos), two, the balcony was simply made up for the purposes of the story, or three, possibly all the photos were taken from the vantage point of this balcony, hence why we can't see it. There is one online body of text that I see over and over concerning the souk that says something about a balcony, but I haven't found anything else about it.

The only places I could see where one might 'sucker a pod to a shadowy underside' of something were the upper floors of the buildings/walls surrounding the place that stuck forward (with walls above the outcropping rather than a landing) However, those wouldn't be considered balconies, would they? I thought about several different ways to describe things, but in the end had to just choose one and stick with it. Therefore, the way I depict the balcony may not be accurate, but I did try my best. If anyone has been to the souk and knows about this, or knows of a photograph or website that has information on a balcony, I would love to hear about it. (: (Though I can't promise I'd change it at this point xD)

Secondly, concerning the balcony and pod, I also didn't understand how they had managed to get the cham pod suckered underneath it, or how they climbed in and out of it either... Are they going in from below, or above? Going in from above seems like it would be more difficult than the book makes it sound; however, if the pod was that close to the ground, wouldn't there be a chance someone would run into it by accident? I figured the stairway would be outside the wall if they went down to get out, but would probably have to be inside the 'wall' if they went up. It may not be accurate, but for purposes of this fanfiction I decided to make them go up and she went down the stairs through the building, rather than outside it.

Yes, I am being manic-obsessive when it comes to details, lol (it's to make up for the ones I completely miss because I don't notice :P)

Anyway, sorry for so many notes at the end. Thanks for reviewing, please tell me what you've thought so far! I've really been enjoying hearing from all of you. (:

By the way, this doesn't really have anything to do with anything, but has any read the excerpt from The Last Guardian yet? :3

Posted 2/23/12