The administrator chuckled dryly at his own tasteless joke every single time he cracked it. Lazuli never even smiled.
It was exceedingly exasperating for a pixel not to possess the magical phenotypic trait, especially since her driving ambition was to achieve the rank of captain in the LEPrecon, a post where abilities such as the mesmer, invisibility, and healing powers would most certainly prove to be boons. Fortunately for Heitz, her obdurate streak, sharp mind, and dead eye with an oxalis pistol had so far carried her through two years of intense training in the LEP Academy and now to specialist duty in a safe zone. Lazuli did suspect that her Academy application might have been bolstered by the LEP’s minority-inclusion policy.
And Lazuli certainly was a minority. Her DNA profile breakdown was forty-two percent elf, fifty-three percent pixie, and five percent undeterminable. Unique.
The evening’s exercise was straightforward: Fairies were secreted around the island, and it was her mission to track them down. These were not real fairies, of course. They were virtual avatars that could be tagged by passing a gloved hand through holograms projected by her helmet camera. There would be clues to follow: chromatographic reactions, tracks, faint scents, and a learned knowledge of the species’ habits. Once she punched in, Specialist Heitz would have thirty minutes to tag as many virtual fugitives as she could.
Before Lazuli could so much as repeat the mantra that had sustained her for many years and through several personal crises, which happened to be Small equals motivated, a pulsating purple blob blossomed on her visor’s display.
This was most unusual. Purple was usually reserved for live trolls. Perhaps her helmet was glitching. This would not be in the least surprising, as Academy equipment was always bottom of the priority list when the budget was being carved up between departments. Lazuli’s suit was threadbare and ill-fitting, and packed with weapons that hadn’t been standard issue in decades.
She blinked at the purple blob to enlarge it and realized that there was indeed a troll on the beach, albeit a tiny one. The poor fellow was smaller than her, though he did not seem as intimidated by the human world as she was.
I must rescue him, Lazuli told herself. This was undoubtedly the correct action, unless this troll was involved somehow in a live maneuver. Lazuli’s angel mentor, who directed the exercise from Haven City, had explicitly and repeatedly ordered her never to poke her nose into an operation.
“There are two types of fast track, Specialist Heitz,” the angel had said only this morning. “The fast track to the top, and the fast track out the door. Poke your nose into an operation where it doesn’t belong, and guess which track you’ll be on.”
Lazuli didn’t need to guess.
A thought occurred to her: Could it be that the coincidental appearance of a troll on this island was her stinkworm?
This was very possible, as LEP instructors were a sneaky bunch.
A specialist’s mettle was often stress-tested by mocking up an emergency and observing how the cadet coped. Rookies referred to this testing as being thrown a stinkworm, because, as every fairy knew, if a person was thrown an actual stinkworm and they mishandled it, there would be an explosive, viscous, and foul-smelling outcome. There was a legend in the Academy about how one specialist had been dropped into the crater of an apparently active volcano to see how he would handle the crisis. The specialist in question did not respond with the required fortitude and was now wanding registration chips in the traffic department.
Lazuli had no intention of wanding chips in traffic.
This could be my stinkworm, she thought.
In which case she should simply observe, as her angel would be keeping a close eye.
Or it could be a genuine operation.
In which case she should most definitely steer clear, as there would be LEP agents in play.
But there was a third option.
Option C: Was it possible that the Fowls were running an operation of their own here? The human Artemis Fowl had a checkered history with the People.
If that were the case, then she should rescue the toy troll, who was perhaps six feet away from two children her facial-recognition software labeled as Myles and Beckett Fowl.
Lazuli hung in the air while she mulled over her options. Her angel had mentioned the name Artemis before the Dalkey Island exercise.
“If you ever meet Artemis Fowl, he is to be trusted,” she’d said literally minutes before Lazuli boarded her magma pod. “His instructions are to be followed without question.”
But her comrades in the locker room told a different story.
“That entire family is poison,” one Recon sprite had told her. “I saw some of the sealed files before a mission. That Fowl guy kidnapped one of our captains and made off with the ransom fund. Take it from me, once a human family gets a taste of fairy gold, it’s only a matter of time before they come back for more, so watch out up there.”
Lazuli had no option but to trust her angel, but maybe she would keep a close eye on the twins. Should she do more than that?
Observe, steer clear, or engage?
How was a specialist supposed to tell a convincingly staged emergency from an actual one?
All this speculation took Lazuli perhaps three seconds, thanks to her sharp mind. After the third second, the emergency graduated to a full-blown crisis when a shot echoed across the sound and the little troll was sent tumbling with the force of the impact, landing squarely at the rowdy child’s feet. Beckett Fowl immediately grabbed and restrained the toy troll.
This effectively removed Specialist Heitz’s dilemma. It was just as her comrades had foretold:
The Fowls were kidnapping a fairy!
An LEP operative’s first responsibility was to protect life, prioritizing fairy life, and so now Lazuli was duty bound and morally obliged to rescue the toy troll.
The prospect both terrified and thrilled her.
The first thing to do was inform her angel of the developing situation, even though radio silence was protocol during exercises.
“Specialist Heitz to Haven. Priority-one transmission…”
If anyone was on the other end of that transmission, they would have been left curious, because at that moment dozens of flares were launched from the house, and Specialist Heitz was forced to take evasive action to avoid being clipped. She had barely gotten her rig under control when there came a rumbling series of booms and Lazuli felt a wave of crackles pass through her body. The crackles were not particularly painful, but they did have the effect of shorting out her communicator along with every circuit and sensor in her shimmer suit. Lazuli watched in horror as her own limbs speckled into view.
“Oh…” she said, then fell out of the sky.
Not all the way down, fortunately, as Specialist Heitz’s suit launched its backup operational system, which ran like clockwork, because it was clockwork: a complicated hub of sealed gears and cogs ingeniously interlinked in a series of planetary epicyclic mechanisms that fed directly into a motor in Lazuli’s wing mounts.
Lazuli felt the legs of her jumpsuit stiffen and instinctively began to pedal before she hit earth like an injured bird. The gears were phenomenally efficient, with barely a joule of energy loss thanks to the sealed hub, and so Specialist Heitz was able to reclaim her previous altitude with a steady midair pedal. But she was still quite plainly in the visible spectrum, looking for all the world like she was riding an invisible unicycle.