The airborne individual was within seconds of slotting through the rear door when a mallard, or Anas platyrhynchos, that was miles off course and months off its migration schedule flapped into the scenario, clipping the shrouded figure with a single primary flight feather. This midair collision caused absolutely zero harm to either party, merely eliciting a surprised squawk from the emerald-headed mallard and a minor alteration in the course of the shrouded figure, but it was immediately apparent that this minor alteration would send the figure under the jet rather than into the inviting portal.
“Hmm,” said Beckett and NANNI in unison, which was the equivalent of tagging Myles back into the game. And while Myles usually frowned on non-word discourse particles, he permitted himself a triumphant “Aha!”
He had perhaps a second to act, but a second inside the head of Myles Fowl was the equivalent of several lifetimes in the minds of most people. He analyzed the information displayed on the eco-jet’s smart screen: air pressure and wind speed, altitude, attitude, rate of descent, and so forth, and then took the only course of action that had any chance of working on such late notice.
Myles used his phone to activate the inflatable evacuation slide at the rear of the plane. The slide unfolded like an enormous tongue and accepted delivery of a life-form that would most definitely have passed under the fuselage. The creature inside the blob, whatever it was, bounced along the slide like a stone skipping over a lake and seemed to float in the main cabin as Beckett matched its deceleration and descent. NANNI cut the slide free and closed the door without being told to do so. In seconds, a cabin pressure of eleven PSI had been restored.
Myles swiveled half a revolution to face their guest, who had up to this point been obscured and protected from the elements with some kind of semitransparent gel. But now, as the gel fell from her person in gloopy blobs, it was easy to see who it was.
“My dear Specialist Heitz,” said Myles formally. “Welcome aboard.”
“Laz!” Beckett called over his shoulder. “What are the chances of bumping into you strapped to a rocket?”
Myles answered for the pixel. “The chances are, frankly, too astronomical to calculate.”
Lazuli was half-awake now and a heartbeat away from panic. “Myles, are you wearing a fishbowl on your head?” she rasped. “What is happening?”
Myles removed the globe. “It’s an oxygen supply,” he explained. “And to answer your second question: You may find this surprising, but I am not one hundred per cent sure what exactly is happening; however, I do feel we are being, to use the vernacular of common criminals, set up.”
Beckett tipped the flaps slightly so that the floating Lazuli was cradled by a seat and instantly secured by servo cables. Myles noticed that what they had mistaken for a hairy foot was actually a slipper.
“An easy mistake to make,” he said, nodding toward the footwear. “Were you at a spa, perhaps?”
Lazuli wiped gunk from her face. “I was in the hospital,” she mumbled, further confused by this untimely small talk. “Getting a magic-suppressor injected by Foaly. Oh, by the way, under no circumstances am I to get electrocuted.”
“I imagine that would short out the suppressor,” said Myles.
NANNI interrupted the reunion. “Myles, we have a situation.”
“Now we have a situation?” said Myles. “I would have thought that we were already quite immersed in a situation.”
He swiveled to face the smart screen and saw that the missile had not blown itself apart but had jettisoned its rear section, which tumbled toward the ocean far below. The nose cone was streaking their way under its own power.
“NANNI,” he said tersely, “I assume the small concussive device was simply a separation collar and there is a secondary weapon concealed in the nose cone?”
“I would assume the same thing, though I cannot confirm,” said NANNI. “I am embarrassed to say that I did not in fact wrangle that ole steer as comprehensively as I believed. The SCARABs have been ditched, and the original programming has reasserted itself. In short, I no longer have my electronic hooks in that missile.”
“Dwarves,” said Lazuli, shivering now from a combination of shock, gel cooling on her skin, and the aftereffects of the gas she’d inhaled. “I remember now. There were dwarves.”
Myles decided that this information, while intriguing, was for filing away rather than dissecting at the moment.
It behooved him to act on the approaching warhead.
“NANNI, please transport Specialist Heitz to the cockpit,” he ordered. “And, Beckett, the time has come.”
Beckett’s face lit up. “Not that time? The time I have been waiting for?”
“Yes,” confirmed Myles. “Exactly that time.”
Even in her dazed state, Lazuli did not like the sound of that.
“What time?” she asked in her accented, hard-learned English, as the servo arms passed her forward like a crowd surfer, gel slopping in sheets to the floor.
Beckett bounced in his seat. “Myles made me wrist-bump promise that I wouldn’t do it, but now I can do it.” He held out his wrist. “Take back the promise.”
Myles held up his own hand, aligning the scar on the side of his palm with the almost identical one on the side of his twin’s palm.
“You are released from the sacred vow,” he said solemnly.
There was a tear in the corner of Beckett’s eye. “Thank you, brother.”
And he flicked the best switch in the world. The switch that taunted him every time they took the Tachyon out for a spin. A switch that was thumbprint-coded and lurked under a Plexiglas box on the dash.
The ejector switch.
The Acorn Club
Covent Garden, London
There is a private club in London Town that presents an austere granite facade to the never-ending procession of passersby in Covent Garden. This extremely old and forbidding building with its brow of a drooping ledge almost seems to discourage any pause or investigation, if indeed a building can actively discourage or encourage anything. In point of fact, it is not the building that puts tourists off the notion of trying the brass door handles, but the infrasound speakers tucked under the olive-green awning that broadcast noise at the precise low frequency necessary to make gawkers a little queasy. Unless, of course, a person has an acorn-shaped key fob for that front door. When one uses that fob, a single beep renders that patron immune from infrasound-induced nausea.
There is no sign over the door to indicate the establishment’s name, but those in possession of the fob know it: the Acorn. And some of those members also know that the Acorn is the oldest private club in London and has been open continuously since the fifteenth century. Three of the fairy regulars are very sure of this, because they attended the opening soirée.
Once inside the lobby, things take a decidedly more hospitable turn. The staff, who are of various shapes, sizes, colors, genders, and species, are courteous but do not insinuate themselves. They smile but never grin, as it were. The furniture is minimalist but perfectly comfortable, and the elevator doors are a lurid shade of gold that would be horrific anywhere else, but not in the Acorn, because here it is understood that this uncharacteristic garishness is an ironic jab at some of London’s flashier establishments.