The Fowl Twins. Eoin Colfer

The Fowls’ main electronics would not be affected, as the entire villa had a Faraday cage embedded in its walls, and the Fowl systems had back-ups that ran on optical cable. A little old-school, but, should the cage fail, the cable would keep systems ticking until the danger was past.

      ‘Hmm,’ said Myles. ‘That seems a bit drastic. What is the nature of the emergency?’

      ‘Sonic boom detected,’ said NANNI. ‘I would guess from a high-powered rifle.’

      NANNI is guessing now, thought Myles. She really is developing.

      ‘Guessing is of little use to me, madam,’ said Myles. ‘Scientists do not guess.’

      ‘Oh yes, that’s right. Scientists hypothesise,’ said NANNI. ‘In that case, I hypothesise that the sonic boom was caused by a rifle shot.’

      ‘That’s better,’ said Myles. ‘How certain are you?’

      ‘Reasonably,’ replied NANNI. ‘If I had to offer a percentage, I would say seventy per cent.’

      A sonic boom could be caused by many things, and the majority of those things were harmless. Still, Myles now had a valid excuse to employ the EMP, something he had been forbidden to do unless absolutely necessary.

      It was, in fact, a judgement call.

      Beckett, who had somehow become inverted in the delivery chute, tumbled on to the floor and asked, ‘Will the EMP hurt my insects?’

      Beckett kept his extensive bug collection in the safe room so it would be safe.

      ‘No,’ said Myles. ‘Unless some of them are robot insects.’

      Beckett pressed his nose to the terrarium’s glass and made some chittering noises.

      ‘No robots,’ he pronounced. ‘So activate the EMP.’

      For once, Myles found himself in agreement with his brother. While the sonic boom could possibly be the by-product of a harmless event, it also might herald the arrival of an attack force hell-bent on wreaking vengeance on one Artemis or the other. Better to press the button and survive than regret not pressing it just before you died.

      So, thought Myles, I should activate the EMP. But before I do …

      Myles rooted in the steel rubbish bin until he found some aluminium foil that he had been using for target practice with one of his many lasers. He used it to quickly wrap his spectacles then stuffed them down to the bottom of the bin. This would protect the lite version of NANNI that lived in the eyeglasses in the event that both his safeguards failed.

      ‘I concur,’ said Myles. ‘Activate the EMP, NANNI. Tight radius, low intensity. No need to knock out the mainland.’

      ‘Activating EMP,’ said NANNI, and promptly collapsed in a puddle on the floor as her own electronics had not yet been converted to optical cable.

      ‘See, Beck?’ said Myles, lifting one black loafer from a glistening wet patch. ‘That is what we scientists call a design flaw.’

      Lord Bleedham-Drye was doubly miffed and thrice surprised by the developments on Dalkey Island.

      Surprise number one: Brother Colman spoke the truth, and trolls did indeed walk the Earth.

      Surprise the second: the troll was tiny. Whoever heard of a tiny troll?

      Surprise the last (for the moment): flying boys had sequestered his prey.

      ‘What on earth is going on?’ he asked no one in particular.

      The duke muttered to himself, ‘These Fowl people seem prepared for full-scale invasion. They have flare countermeasures. Drones flying off with children. Who knows what else? Anti-tank guns and trained bears, I shouldn’t wonder. Even Churchill couldn’t take that beach.’

      It occurred to Lord Teddy that he could blow up the entire island for spite. He was partial to a spot of spite, after all. But, after a moment’s consideration, he dismissed the idea. It was a cheery notion, but the person he would be ultimately spiting was none other than the Duke of Scilly, i.e. his noble self. He would hold his fire for now, but, when those boys re-emerged from their fortified house, he would be ready with his trusty rifle. After all, he was quite excellent with a gun, as his last shot had proven. Off the battlefield, it was unseemly to shoot anything except pheasant, unless one were engaged in a duel. Pistols at dawn, that sort of thing. But he would make an exception for a troll, and for those blooming Fowl boys.

      Lord Teddy loaded the rifle with traditional bullets and set it on the balcony floor, muzzle pointed towards the island.

      You can’t stay in that blasted house forever, my boys, he thought. And the moment you poke your noses from cover, Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye shall be prepared.

      He could wait.

      He was prepared to put in the hours. As the duke often said to himself: one must spend time to make time.

      Teddy lay sandwiched between a yoga mat and a veil of camouflage that had served as a hide of sorts for almost a month now, and ran a sweep of the island through his night-vision monocular. The whole place was lit up like a fairground with roaming spotlights and massive halogen lamps. There was not a millimetre of space for an intruder to hide.

      Clever chappies, these Fowls, thought the duke. The father must have a lot of enemies.

      Teddy sat up, fished a boar-bristle brush from his duffel bag, and began his evening ritual of one hundred brushes of his beard. The beard rippled and glistened as he brushed, like the pelt of an otter, and Teddy could not help but congratulate himself. A beard required a lot of maintenance, but, by heaven, it was worth it.

      He had only reached stroke seven when the duke’s peripheral vision registered that something had changed. It was suddenly darker. He looked up, expecting to find that the lights had been shut off on Dalkey Island, but the truth was more drastic.

      The island itself had disappeared.

      Lord Teddy checked all the way to the horizon with his trusty monocular. In the blink of an eye, the entirety of Dalkey Island had vanished with only an abandoned stretch of wooden jetty to hint that the Fowl residence might ever have existed at the end of it.

      Lord Bleedham-Drye was surprised to the point of stupefaction, but his manners and breeding would not allow him to show it.

      ‘I say,’ he said mildly. ‘That’s hardly cricket, is it? What has the world come to when a chap can’t bag himself a troll without entire land masses disappearing?’

      Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye’s bottom lip drooped. Quite the sulky expression for a hundred-and-fifty-year-old. But the duke did not allow himself to wallow for long. Instead, he set his mind to the puzzle of the disappearing island.

      ‘One can’t help but wonder, Teddy old boy,’ mused the duke to the mirror on the flat side of his brush, ‘if all this troll malarkey is indeed true, then is the rest also true? What Brother Colman said vis-à-vis elves, pixies and gnomes all hanging around for centuries? Is there, in fact, magic in the world?’

      He would, Lord Teddy decided, proceed under the assumption that magic did exist, and therefore, by logical extension, magical creatures.

      ‘And so it is only reasonable to assume,’ Teddy said, ‘that these fairy chaps will wish to protect their own, and perhaps send their version of the cavalry to rescue the little troll. Perhaps the cavalry has already arrived, and this disappearing-island trick is actually some class of a magical spell cast by a wizard.’

      The duke was right about the cavalry. The fairy cavalry had already arrived.

      One fairy, at least.

      But he was dead wrong about a wizard casting a spell. The fairy responsible for the disappearing-island trick was a far cry indeed from being a wizard, and could no more cast a spell than