The Lost Colony (9 page)

The effect was impressive. The filter successfully equalized the light throughout the building. It boosted or dimmed so that every person in the building was seen in the same light. Those on the stage appeared caked in makeup, and those in the boxes had no shadows to hide in.

Butler panned across the boxes, satisfying himself that there was no threat present. He saw plenty of nose-picking and hand-holding, sometimes by the same people. But nothing obviously dangerous. But in a second-tier box adjacent to the stage, there was a girl with a head of blond curls, all dressed up for a night of theater.

Butler immediately recalled seeing the same girl at the materialization site in Barcelona. And now she was here, too? Coincidence? There was no such thing. In the bodyguard’s experience, if you saw a stranger more than once, either they were following you, or you were both after the same thing.

He scanned the rest of the box. There were two men behind the girl. One, in his fifties—paunchy, expensive tuxedo—was filming the stage with his cell phone camera. This was the first man from Barcelona. The second man was there, too—possibly Chinese, wiry, spiked hair. He had apparently not yet recovered from his leg injury and was adjusting one of his crutches. He flipped it around, removed a rubber grip from the foot, then nestled it against his shoulder like a rifle.

Butler automatically stepped between Artemis and the man’s line of fire. Not that the crutch was aimed at his charge; it was pointed stage right, three feet from the soprano. Just where Artemis was expecting his demon to show up.

“Holly,” he said in a low, calm voice, “I think you should shield.”

Artemis lowered his opera glasses. “Problems?”

“Maybe,” replied Butler. “Though not for us. I think somebody else knows about the new materialization figures, and I think they’re planning to do more than just observe.”

Artemis tapped his chin with two fingers, thinking fast. “Where?”

“Tier two. Beside the stage. I see one possible weapon trained on the stage. Not a standard gun. Maybe a modified dart rifle.”

Artemis leaned forward, gripping the brass rail. “They plan to take the demon alive, if one turns up. In that case, they will need a distraction.”

Holly was on her feet. “What can we do?”

“It’s too late to stop them,” said Artemis, a frown slashing his brow. “If we interfere, we may upset the distraction, in which case the demon will be exposed. If these people are clever enough to be here, you may be sure their plan is a good one.”

Holly claimed her helmet, slotting it over her ears. Air pads automatically inflated to cradle her head. “I can’t just let them kidnap a fairy.”

“You have no choice,” snapped Artemis, risking the audience’s displeasure. “Best-case—and most likely— scenario, nothing happens. No materialization.”

Holly scowled. “You know as well as I do that fortune never sends the best-case scenario our way. You have too much bad karma.”

Artemis had to chuckle. “You’re right, of course. Worstcase scenario, a demon appears, they anchor it with the dart rifle, we interfere, and in the confusion the demon is swept up by the local
polizia
and we all end up in custody.”

“Not good. So we just sit back and watch.”

“Butler and I sit back and watch. You get over there and record as much data as possible. And when these people go, you go after them.”

Holly activated her wings. They slid from her backpack, crackling blue as the flight computer sent a charge through them.

“How much time do I have?” she asked as she faded from sight.

Artemis checked the stopwatch on his watch.

“If you hurry,” he said, “none.”

* * *

Holly launched herself out over the audience, controlling her trajectory by using the joystick built into the thumb of her glove. Invisible, she soared above the gathered humans. With the aid of her helmet’s filters, she could clearly see the occupants of the stage-side box.

Artemis was wrong. There was time to stop this. All she had to do was throw the shooter’s aim off a little. The demon would never get anchored, and Section Eight could track these Mud Men at their leisure. It was simply a matter of touching the marksman’s elbow with her buzz baton to make him lose control of all his motor functions for a few seconds. Plenty of time for a demon to appear, then disappear.

Then Holly smelled burning ozone and felt heat on her arm. Artemis was not wrong. There was no time. Someone was coming.

N
^o
1 appeared on the stage, more or less intact. The trip had cost him the last knuckle on his right index finger, and about two gigabytes’ worth of memories. But they were mostly bad memories, and he had never been very good with his hands.

Dematerialization isn’t a particularly painful process, but materialization happens to be a thoroughly enjoyable one. The brain is so happy to register all the body’s essential bits and bobs coming together again that it releases a surge of happy endorphins.

N
^o
1 looked at the nub where his previously whole index finger used to be.

“Look,” he said, tittering. “No finger.”

Then he noticed the humans. Scores of them, arranged in rings, rising up to the heavens. N
^o
1 knew instantly what this must be.

“A theater. I’m in a theater. With only seven and a half fingers.
I
have only seven and a half fingers, not the theater.” This observation brought on another fit of giggles, and that would have been about it for N
^o
1. He would have been whisked off to the next stop on his interdimensional jaunt, had not a human near the stage aimed a tube at him.

“Tube,” said N
^o
1, proud of his human vocabulary, pointing with the finger that wasn’t altogether there.

After that, things happened very quickly. A flurry of events blurred like mixed stripes of vivid paint. The tube flashed; something exploded over his head. A bee stung N
^o
1 on the leg, a female screamed piercingly. A herd of animals, elephants perhaps, passed directly below him. Then most disconcertingly, the ground disappeared from beneath his feet and everything went black. The blackness was rough against his fingers and face.

The last thing N
^o
1 heard before his own personal blackness claimed him was a voice. It was not a demon’s voice, the tones were lighter. Halfway between bird and boar.

“Welcome, demon,” said the voice, then sniggered.

They know, thought N
^o
1, and he would have panicked had the chloral hydrate seeping into his system through a leg wound allowed such exertions. They know all about us.

Then the knockout serum caressed his brain, tipping him off a cliff into a deep dark hole.

Artemis watched events unfold from his box. A smile of admiration twitched at the corners of his mouth as the plan unrolled smoothly, like the most expensive Tunisian carpet. Whoever was behind this was good. More than good. Perhaps they were related.

“Keep your camera pointed at the stage,” Artemis said to Butler. “Holly will get the box.”

Butler was squirming to cover Holly’s back, but his place was at Artemis’s side. And after all, Captain Short could look after herself. He made sure his watch crystal was trained on the stage. Artemis would never let him forget it if he missed even a nanosecond of the action.

Onstage, the opera was almost over. Norma was leading Pollione to the pyre, where they were both to be burned. All eyes were upon her. Except those involved in a drama of the fairy kind.

The music was lush and layered, providing an unwitting sound track to the real-life drama unfolding in the theater.

It began with an electric crackle downstage right. Barely noticeable, unless you were expecting it. And even if some patrons did notice the glow, they were not alarmed. It could easily be a reflected blotch of light, or one of the special effects these modern theater directors were so fond of.

So, thought Artemis, feeling the excitement buzz in his fingertips. Something is coming. Another game begins.

The
something
began to materialize inside the crackling blue envelope. It took on a vague, humanoid shape. Smaller than the last one, but definitely a demon, and definitely
not
a reflected blotch of light. Initially the shape was insubstantial, wraithlike, but after a second it became less transparent and more of this world.

Now, thought Artemis. Anchor it, and tranquilize it, too.

A slender silver tube poked from the shadows on the opposite side of the theater. There was a small pop, and a dart sped from the tube’s mouth. Artemis did not need to follow the dart’s path. He knew that it was headed straight into the creature’s leg. The leg would be best. A good target, but unlikely to be fatal. A silver tip with some kind of knockout cocktail.

The creature was trying to communicate now, and making wild gestures. Artemis heard a few gasps from the audience as patrons noticed the shape inside the light.

Very well. You have anchored it. Now you need a distraction. Something flashy and loud, but not particularly dangerous. If somebody gets hurt, there will be an investigation.

Artemis switched his gaze to the demon. Solid now in the shadows. Around him the opera steamrolled toward act four’s crescendo. The soprano lamented hysterically, and every eye in the theater was riveted on her.
Almost
every eye. But there are always a few bored audience members at an opera, especially by the time act four comes along. Those particular eyes would be wandering around the hall, searching for something, anything, interesting to watch. Those eyes would land on the little demon downstage right, unless they were distracted.

Right on cue, a large stage lamp broke free of its clamp in the rigging and swung on its cable into the back canvas. The impact was both flashy and loud. The bulb exploded, showering the stage and orchestra pit with glass fragments. The bulb’s filament glowed with a magnesium glare, temporarily blinding everyone staring at it. Which was almost the entire audience.

Glass rained down on the orchestra, and the musicians panicked, fleeing en masse toward the greenroom, dragging their instruments behind them. A cacophony of squealing strings and overturned percussion instruments shattered any echoes of Bellini’s masterpiece.

Nice, thought Artemis appreciatively. The clamp and the filament were rigged. The stampeding orchestra is a lucky bonus.

Artemis noted all of this out of the corner of his eye. His main focus was the diminutive demon, lost in the shadows behind a canvas flat.

Now, if it were me, thought the Irish teenager, I would have Butler drop a black sack over that little creature and whisk him out the stage door into a four-wheel drive. We could be on the ferry before the theater crew got the bulb changed.

What actually happened was slightly different. A stage trapdoor opened beneath the demon, and the creature disappeared on a hydraulic platform.

Artemis shook his head in admiration. Fabulous. His mysterious adversaries must have hijacked the theater computer system. And when the demon appeared, they simply sent a command to open the appropriate trapdoor panel. Doubtless there was someone waiting below to transfer the sleeping demon to an idling vehicle outside.

Artemis leaned over the railing, gazing into the audience below. As the houselights were brought up, the theater patrons rubbed their dazzled eyes and spoke in the sheepish tones that follow shock. There was no talk of demons. No pointing and screaming. Artemis had just witnessed the perfect execution of a perfect plan.

He gazed across to the box on the far side of the stage. The three occupants stood calmly. They were simply leaving. The show was over and it was time to go. Artemis recognized the pretty girl from Barcelona and her two guardians. The thin man seemed to have recovered from his leg injury, as his crutches were now tucked underneath one arm.

The girl wore a self-satisfied smile, the kind that usually decorated Artemis’s own face after a successful mission.

It’s the girl
, Artemis realized with some surprise.
She is the brains here
.

This girl’s smile, a reflection of his own, rankled Artemis. He was not accustomed to being two steps behind. No doubt she believed that victory was hers. She may have won this battle, but the campaign was far from over.

It’s time, he thought, that this girl know she has an opponent.

He brought his hands together in a slow hand clap.

“Brava,”
he called.
“Brava, ragazza!”

His voice carried easily above the heads of the audience. The girl’s smile froze on her lips and her eyes searched for the source of this compliment. In seconds she located the Irish teenager, and their eyes locked.

If Artemis had been expecting the girl to quail and tremble at the sight of him and his bodyguard, then he was disappointed. True, a shadow of surprise flitted across her brow, but then she accepted the applause with a nod and royal wave. The girl said two words before she left. The distance was too great for Artemis to actually hear them, but even if he hadn’t long since trained himself to lipread, it would have been easy to guess what they were.

“Artemis Fowl,”
she said. Nothing more. There was a game beginning here. No doubt about it. How intriguing.

Then a funny thing happened. Artemis’s clapping hands were joined by a scattering of others from various spots in the theater. The applause grew from hesitant beginnings to a crescendo. Soon the patrons were on their feet and the bewildered singers were forced to take several curtain calls.

On his way through the lobby minutes later, Artemis was highly amused to overhear several audience members gushing over the unorthodox direction of the opera’s final scene. The exploding lamp, mused one buff, was doubtless a metaphor for Norma’s own falling star. But no, argued a second. The lamp was obviously a modernistic interpretation of the burning stake that Norma was about to face.

Or perhaps, thought Artemis as he pushed through the crowd to find a light Sicilian mist falling on his forehead, the exploding lamp was simply an exploding lamp.