THE BARN’S LOFT,

CHILDERBLAINE ESTATE

SOME MINUTES LATER, BECKETT SAT CROSS-LEGGED on a loft hatch of the Childerblaine estate’s barn. He sat there because, as he reasoned, his weight would make the space more difficult to access should Teddy or one of his clones try to investigate. But after several minutes he crawled into a corner because his trembling was making the hatch creak, and it struck him that if someone did try the ceiling-mounted door and find it obstructed, it would make sense for even a dim-witted clone to shoot through the hatch and into the boy who was weighing it down.

And, although Beckett was bodily present and functioning on a basic level in the barn, his mind was replaying the final moments of Whistle Blower’s life – moments he could not accept as reality, even though the images were now seared into his memory.

They had tumbled through the window, boy and troll, sharing the lingering sting from the Clonoscopy charges. Whistle Blower was clamped so tightly to Beckett’s chest that his claws cut through Beckett’s T-shirt to the skin below. There’d been no time for Beckett to strategise or even let instinct find some path to safety, as the electricity was effectively rebooting the airborne boy. Not so with Whistle Blower. The troll was beyond any kind of short-term reboot. Beckett would surely have died had Whistle Blower not flipped them over so they impacted with the boy on top. Even so, the touchdown was not so much a splat as a thump. Beckett was merely winded, which was several notches down the injury scale from death.

Beckett did not understand and, when he could draw breath, he said as much to the troll. ‘What’s going on, Whistle Blower?’ he asked, tears blurring his eyes. He felt that he couldn’t bear to lose another friend.

‘Troll magic,’ breathed Whistle Blower, the words rasping from his mouth.

Beckett rolled off his friend and saw that Whistle Blower was not himself. His face was still recognisable, but the rest of him seemed to be decomposing as Beckett watched. His limbs and innards were bursting open in soft blooms of vine and flowers, which intertwined eagerly with the existing flora.

‘Our only magic,’ said Whistle Blower. ‘We keep the secret of our race. You are the only human ever to see our return to the earth. It is a special thing.’

Beckett watched his friend’s body expand and bloom with exotic flowers and wriggle with rainbow-coloured worms. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘And soft,’ said Whistle Blower, his eyes becoming the shining carapaces of beetles.

‘You saved me,’ sobbed Beckett.

Whistle Blower’s mohawk stiffened and became a clutch of reeds. ‘Now you save the other one. Myles. He’s not so bad.’

Whistle Blower smiled and his teeth became salt crystals that dissolved slowly in a pool of Beckett’s tears.

And now Beckett was in the loft. He probably wouldn’t have moved at all had Whistle Blower’s last wish not been to save Myles. That perked up Beckett enough to run away from the approaching clones and hide in the barn. But, now that he was here, he felt the situation close in on him and any spark of purpose fade.

Lazuli gone.

Whistle Blower gone.

This was not how Fowl Adventures were supposed to go.

Beckett noticed a stack of paintings half covered by a yellowed dustsheet. He untucked a corner of the cloth, crept beneath it and draped it over himself, hoping his shivering would not billow the canvas like a sail.

Beckett Fowl shivering? Surely not. Beckett, the indomitable creature of poise and instinct, shivering? How could this be?

First, there was the damp that seemed to infuse every breath of St George air with a ghostly chill. Like many twelve-year-olds, Beckett was generally immune to cold, but he had felt the remorseless tendrils of mist curling round his bare limbs even when he was inside Childerblaine House. Having said that, mere mist would generally be shrugged off by the Fowl boy, but there were other contributing factors too – low blood sugar, stress, dehydration and something else that Beckett usually neither suffered from nor succumbed to: uncertainty.

Beckett didn’t know what to do and, worse, he felt that what he had done so far in this adventure had been all wrong.

I let Lazuli get shot in the Southbank Centre, he thought. And I didn’t know goblins were fireproof. Plus, I brought Whistle Blower to St George. My instincts told me to sneak one of my best friends on to the island, and that was exactly what mean old Teddy had wanted me to do all along. And now Whistle Blower is dead.

And perhaps worst of all: I’m sitting in a horrid loft while Myles is in deep trouble.

Beckett had to do something, but he couldn’t for the life of him think what that something might be.

His mottos had always been:

Eat dessert first.

Blame the seagulls.

And …

Follow your amazing instincts.

But there were neither desserts nor seagulls in sight, and his amazing instincts had undeniably let him down badly in recent days.

So … was it time to actually think about something before doing it? Beckett moaned quietly.

Thinking before acting was so tedious and complicated. Myles was always planning before he acted, and look at what was happening to him – hooked up to an X-frame, which although cool was seriously uncool too.

No, decided Beckett. I think thinking is not for me. I must do as Lazuli often says: follow the way of the Beckett. Something will come up.

Beckett felt a poke in his thigh and looked down to see what was either a small dog or a large rat bristling in the shadows. On closer inspection, the creature proved to be a rat, which smoothed its whiskers and said, ‘Boy, why are you crying?’

Beckett wiped his nose and replied, ‘I’m in a bit of trouble.’

The rat was surprised to get an answer. ‘Hey, are you the talking kid I’ve heard about?’

Beckett nodded. ‘I am,’ he said in the rat’s tongue, which was not really a tongue. It was mostly a complicated sign language in which words were formed by complex strummings on certain whiskers, a little like playing classical guitar. As he was devoid of a single whisker himself, Beckett was forced to mime. ‘Who told you about me?’

‘One of the seagulls,’ said the rat. ‘Chatty guy with a black ring round his eye.’

Beckett remembered the bird. ‘Oh yes. He said to watch out for the giant rats.’

‘Watch out for us?’ said the rat indignantly. ‘I’m not the one going around lifting fish straight out of the sea with my razor-sharp bill. I eat rubbish and pass on a plague or two. That’s it. You could say I’m good for the environment.’

‘Maybe, if you cut out the plague bit,’ said Beckett.

‘We don’t do it on purpose,’ strummed the rat. ‘I’d rather not spread any plagues, to be honest. The last one killed more Bleedham-Dryes than Lord Teddy, who isn’t fooling anyone with that new body, by the way.’

This was interesting. ‘Teddy kills his relatives?’

The rat confirmed it. ‘Oh, sure. He’s been at it for a long time. Anyone who might have a claim on the ducal seat is bumped off. I heard that one time he had a garden party and poisoned all the guests. Can you imagine? Humans are the worst. No offence.’

‘No,’ said Beckett, ‘you’re right. We are the worst. Teddy is trying to murder me and my brother right now.’

‘That’s my cue to go,’ said the Gambian rat, waddling away. ‘I try to distance myself from Teddy’s targets. He tends to cause a lot of collateral damage.’

‘That’s okay,’ said Beckett. ‘I don’t blame you. Go easy on the plague-spreading, will you?’

The rat felt bad about leaving on such a downer and so paused to strum his whiskers one more time with something a little more optimistic. ‘At least you won’t be lonely after you’re dead. My gran is sensitive and she told me that this place is overrun by the ghosts of Teddy’s victims.’

Ghosts, thought Beckett. And then, in spite of all his determination to follow his instincts, he had an idea.

A scary idea.

Myles had vowed never to do it again, in spite of the fact that he might learn something from the experience, when learning from experience was one of his main objectives. He’d sworn off it, even though the experience was one Artemis hadn’t yet had, and doing things before Artemis was most certainly a prime life goal for Myles Fowl.

‘One thing you must swear, brother mine,’ he’d said back in London. ‘Artemis must never know that my discovery was accidental. When he asks, you must tell him that my peek into the spirit realm was planned.’

At the time, Beckett had called Myles a big fat liar, but his brother had assured him that nearly all scientists were big fat liars, none more so than that charlatan Einstein, so he intended to take that as a compliment.

And now Beckett was preparing to go where Myles had vowed never to return (at least until he got back to his laboratory), and this scared him.

I would prefer to fight a million voles, he thought now, and voles are notoriously dirty fighters – just ask any snail.

Beckett pulled back the dustsheet and crawled over to the circular stained-glass window so he might take advantage of the late-evening light pouring through. Any other day, the window would have fascinated him, as it depicted the battle between the island’s namesake and a red-scaled dragon, but today there was no room in his brain for distractions.

Beckett rooted in his pocket until he located the spectacles containing the intravitreal injections. Myles had adapted the glasses so that each lens could accommodate one of the injection pods, and thirty teeny-tiny micro-needles would dump their antibodies into his eyeballs at the press of a button. And even Beckett, who was usually game for anything, the grosser the better, had cringed the first time he’d witnessed the procedure, asking, ‘Brother, is there anything in the world important enough to make you want to stick needles in your eyes?’

‘There are several things,’ Myles had replied, blinking away tears. ‘Posterity, the advancement of humanity, red gummies, the envy of other scientists … I would do it for you, of course, and Mater and Pater, and, under certain circumstances, Artemis.’

Myles would do it for me, thought Beckett now. And I must do it for him. It’s the law of twins everywhere.

Beckett put on the glasses and ran a finger across one arm, searching for a plunger button. He found it and, after a moment’s tense hesitation, pressed, activating both a mist puffer and the twin pads of micro-needles. Besides a slight fright from the puffer, Beckett felt nothing.

It didn’t work, thought Beckett and, with typical boy-child impatience, he pressed the plunger again.

Still nothing but a puff of mist.

Four more times Beckett pressed the plunger, not realising that the puff was a shot of local anaesthetic that numbed his eyeballs and he had just self-administered six doses of Myles’s antibody injection. One dose usually took several hours to activate, but Myles had never tested more than one dose. Nobody had.

Until now.

Beckett packed away the SPOOK apparatus, grumbling, ‘Stupid science never works properly. I’ll just have to do things the Beckett way.’

The Beckett way was to run directly into the middle of whatever trouble was brewing and see what happened. Usually what happened was cluster-punching on an epic scale. But cluster-punching would not work on these clones, so Beckett would have to use some of the other tools in his arsenal, like the fairy art of Cos T’apa, or what he called the Windy Elbow. This move was the classic sharp elbow to the solar plexus, causing a diaphragm spasm that drove every breath of air from the victim. Beckett was, of course, very adept at landing these elbows, but he had on more than one occasion forgotten to remove himself from the strike zone and so, when the winded victim threw up a previous meal, it often landed on the twin.

‘Remember to get out of the way,’ he told himself now.

‘Out of the way of what?’ asked a voice behind him.

‘People throw up when I give them the old Windy Elbow,’ said Beckett, answering automatically. ‘Sometimes worse. So I like to strike and move on. Which is against the natural law. Usually creatures strike, then eat their prey, but I don’t want to eat clones. In fact, I don’t eat animals at all because I know what they’re saying.’

Beckett guessed what was happening about halfway through this speech, but he kept jabbering on to buy himself a few seconds during which he could come to terms with it.

Myles’s injectacles worked and I am about to see ghosts, he thought.

As little as a week earlier, that would have been an exciting proposition, but, having seen the experience’s effect on Myles, Beckett was more apprehensive than he’d ever been in his life. He felt his heart play a frenetic drum solo in his chest and a flush creep up from the neck of his T-shirt to lodge in his cheeks.

‘You don’t eat animals?’ asked another voice, this time mocking. ‘What do you survive on, boy? Grass?’

This comment annoyed Beckett slightly, as it was the same tired and lazy criticism that people always threw at vegans, and so he spun to face this judgmental ghost, but he kept his eyes down for the moment.

‘Actually, you can eat loads of grasses, smarty-pants,’ he said a little crossly, which was not like him. ‘Or drink them, at least. Crabgrass, for example, and one called bristle. Just grind them up and swallow the juice. Don’t eat the fibre, though – it’s too tough.’

The lady who had spoken was embarrassed. ‘I’m so sorry, young man. That was very rude of me.’

‘That’s no problem,’ said Beckett. ‘I’m sorry for snapping.’

Then he took a breath and raised his gaze to take in the room, expecting several nightmare columns to beam themselves directly into his brain as Myles had described.

It didn’t happen.

Because of his multiple presses on what he had dubbed the injectacles’ plunger, Beckett had skipped over several months of trials and happened on the correct dosage. Yet another accidental discovery.

Even though there were no phantom nightmare memories zooming around, the loft had completely changed. Where there had been gradients of shadow, there were now various sections – different environments that overlapped like the bleeding edges of a watercolour painting. Inside each area was a spirit who seemed to travel complete with their own special location. There were several rooms from Childerblaine House that Beckett recognised from his quick race-through earlier. Also, meadows and forests at all times of day and night. Fancy apartments with city skylines in the background. One lady reclined in a deckchair with the lacquered deck of a cruise liner stretching off behind her. Clamped to the wall of a cliff was a young, heroic-looking chap with the Bleedham-Drye head of jet-black hair. Someone wearing a Victorian swimming costume stood under the nozzle of a beach shower. And, to continue the watery theme, there was a figure in diving gear, floating in their very own slice of ocean. Altogether there were perhaps a dozen spirits, though Beckett didn’t count them, as he was not the sort of person inclined to count.

The old man who had spoken originally was surrounded by a lamplit library with towering shelves that should not have been able to fit in the cramped loft. The fellow had a look of Teddy about his face, especially around the wide brow and sharp eyes. He was wearing a blue uniform with gold piping down the sleeves, and his chest was weighed down by three rows of medals.

‘Who are you?’ Beckett asked the man.

‘I am Brigadier General Ronald Bleedham-Drye. Teddy’s cousin. And this –’ he pointed to a girl in a sparkling ball gown and powdered wig – ‘is my niece, the Princess Daphne.’

‘Not one of the important princesses,’ said the girl, and Beckett realised she was the anti-vegan. ‘Just important enough for Teddy to murder.’

‘Can I call you Daffy?’ asked Beckett.

The ghost smiled. ‘That would be very nice, young man,’ she said. ‘And what might I call you?’

Seeing as they were playing this game, Beckett thought he might as well give himself a heroic moniker. ‘I am Sir Beckatron the Bold of Dalkey Island. The High Mage of Communicado. But you can call me Beck.’

Princess Daphne dipped her chin slightly, which was her version of a deep curtsy. ‘Beck. Delighted, I am sure.’

She extended her hand and, when Beckett leaned in to kiss it, he saw an oversized ghost ring on her finger with a lion motif embossed on the head.

The Lionheart ring, he guessed.

At this point, all the other ghosts realised that Beckett could see beyond the nightmarish level to the revenants beyond, and they all began speaking at the same time. Beckett, overwhelmed by the visceral emotion that ghosts could inject into their voices, actually pressed himself back against the hard stone wall until the princess took charge.

‘Silence!’ commanded Daphne. ‘I am the ranking royal here and will lead the negotiations.’

The other spectres, being of royal heritage themselves, had protocol bred into them and so were immediately, if reluctantly, quiet.

‘I do apologise, Sir Beck,’ said the princess. ‘Please forgive my family. They are excited. I, too, am excited to have an audience with a living person, but I do wonder how it is that you can see us on this occasion when on your previous visit you could not?’

‘My brother is a genius,’ said Beckett. ‘He invented an injection.’

The brigadier interjected from his library. ‘Is this the brother who is currently hooked up to Teddy’s mechanical doodah?’

‘That’s the one,’ confirmed Beckett. ‘He’s only a brain genius, not a fighting one like me.’

Princess Daphne sat on a fancy golden chair that materialised behind her. ‘It appears that you need our help, Sir Beck.’

‘I do,’ said Beck. ‘I thought you might help me save my brother. I have an idea, which is not my strong point, but it might work.’

Daphne’s eyes narrowed. ‘I do instinctively like you, Sir Beck, but why would we help you? We have our own struggle here.’

Beck frowned. ‘Are we negotiating now?’

‘We are, Sir Beck,’ said the princess.

‘That’s not my strong point, either. Can you tell me what I should say?’

Daphne smiled. ‘You might point out, Sir Beck, that your brother is a scientific genius and, should we assist you with his rescue, then you in turn could guarantee his help with our problem.’

Beck thought he’d better ask. ‘What is your problem, Daffy?’

The princess and, in fact, all the spirits were immediately sad, and their environments dimmed considerably.

‘It is a problem easily explained but extremely difficult to solve,’ said Daphne. ‘We wish to move on. To ascend. We have seen others rise towards the light and pass through. But we, consumed as we once were by hatred for Lord Teddy, seem to have expended all our energy on that emotion. And now, when a Bleedham-Drye tunnel appears, we can only go so high before we plummet to this cursed island prison once more. For decades, we have wrestled with this problem.’ She stamped a royal foot. ‘The whole thing is simply impossible.’

And this was when Beckett knew his twin brother would accept the challenge.

‘Impossible! You should have mentioned that straight-away,’ he said. ‘Myles loves the impossible.’

THE LABORATORY, CHILDERBLAINE HOUSE

Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye was finally getting round to some criminal-mastermind monologuing – or he would have, if Myles hadn’t kept interrupting.

‘And so I said to myself, Teddy, old boy, isn’t there a way you can make Myles Fowl come to you …?’

‘Interesting,’ noted Myles, still spread-eagled on Teddy’s upright operating X-frame. ‘You talk to yourself. I could help you there, you know, with a few counselling sessions. Free of charge, of course.’

Teddy barked a derisive laugh. ‘Oh, you will be helping me, Fowl, with all sorts of things. Or at least your head will be, if you don’t want your nutrient juice drained through a plughole.’

The truth was Myles could think of worse fates than being a wise head floating in nutrient juice with all the time in the world to concentrate on big issues. But he suspected that Lord Teddy would be more interested in the small issues, like how to make his beard more luxuriant, or how to become king of the world, which might be entertaining but would hardly add to Myles’s legacy as a great thinker.

‘At least allow me to work on my own so-called nutrient juice,’ said Myles. ‘My first suggestion would be to change the ludicrous name. It’s not a fruit smoothie, for heaven’s sake.’

‘My juice, Fowl, my name,’ said Teddy, stroking his beard. ‘When you have my head in a jar, you can name the preservative.’

Myles’s tummy rumbled ominously, something he really should have taken note of, but he was too concerned with his head being sliced off, etc.

‘Anyway, Lord Teddy,’ he said, ‘you were about to explain your plan, I think. I should very much like to hear that explanation in its entirety.’

Teddy relaxed into an exquisite Edwardian club chair with intricately carved lion’s-paw legs, which Myles remembered nestling his own posterior in on his previous visit to Childerblaine. Having wiggled into a comfortable position, the duke relit his ivory-rimmed pipe, which was so oversized it might also have functioned as a French horn.

Both the chair and the pipe irritated Myles, for they were out of place and, quite frankly, dangerous in a sterile environment. The pipe for obvious reasons, and the chair because most antique furniture pieces harboured veritable legions of various mites in their upholstery. But Myles could admit the real reason the club chair annoyed him was that he would never have the sensation of sitting in one again, and he realised he would miss feeling stuff.

Teddy blew a noxious cloud that smelled of a factory smokestack towards Myles and then said, ‘I would have loved to continue sharing the details of my plan, Fowl, but I have no wish to bear your constant interruptions. The fact of the matter is, here you are, so my plan worked.’

Myles conceded this fact with a nod. ‘And it was such a convoluted plan, which, as we both know, is the most satisfying kind.’

Teddy was drawn in, in spite of his reservations. ‘Yes, you are right, Fowl. Any idiot can kill someone. All an idiot needs is the will to succeed and a crude weapon of some kind. After all, I could have easily killed you in London.’

‘You could have, but instead you decided to strip me of more than just my life.’

Teddy exhaled with obvious satisfaction. ‘I needed to beat you, comprehensively and undeniably. I needed you to come here of your own free will and deliver the troll to me. And I needed you to remain somewhat alive so you would spend eternity at my side with the full knowledge that I can pull your plug at any moment.’

Myles was impressed. ‘It is as diabolical a plan as I have ever heard. Bravo, Lord Teddy.’

‘I know you’re just playing along, Fowl, hoping that your twin will come up with something.’ Teddy laughed. ‘Well, let me tell you, my fine young scamp, Master Beckett Fowl would have to come up with something simply out of this world to put one over on the Duke of Scilly at this stage in the game.’

Don’t do it, Beck, Myles broadcast. Don’t come in here.

But he knew that, in all likelihood, his brother was already on the way to save him.

For we are twins, he thought. And that is what twins do.