The Fowl Twins. Eoin Colfer

no flying Beckett home, unless it’s an emergency,’ said NANNI. ‘Mother’s orders, so don’t bother arguing.’

      Myles was surprised that NANNI’s sentences were unnecessarily convoluted. It seemed as though the AI were developing a personality, which he supposed was the point. When Artemis had first plugged NANNI into the system, so to speak, her responses were usually limited to one-word answers. Now she was telling him not to bother arguing. It would be fascinating to see how her personality would develop.

      Providing NANNI doesn’t become too human, thought Myles, because most humans are irritating.

      At any rate, it was ridiculous that his mother refused to authorise short-range flights for Beckett. In tests, the drone robots had only dropped the dummy Becketts twice, but his mother insisted the drobots were for urgent situations only.

      ‘Beckett!’ he called. ‘If you agree to come back to the house, I will tell you a story before bed.’

      Beckett flipped over on the rock. ‘Which story?’ he asked.

      ‘How about the thrilling discovery of the Schwarzschild radius, which led directly to the identification of black holes?’ suggested Myles.

      Beckett was not impressed. ‘How about the adventures of Gloop and Angry Hamster in the Dimension of Fire?’

      Now it was Myles’s turn to be unimpressed. ‘Beck, that’s preposterous. Fish and hamsters do not even share the same environment. And neither could survive in a dimension of fire.’

      ‘You’re preposterous,’ said Beckett, and went back to his whistling.

      The crown of Beck’s head will be burned by the evening UV rays, thought Myles.

      ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Gloop and Angry Hamster it is.’

      ‘And Dolphin,’ said Beckett. ‘He wants to be in the story too.’

      Myles sighed. ‘Dolphin too.’

      ‘Hooray!’ said Beckett, skipping across the rocks. ‘Story time. Wrist bump?’

      Myles raised his palm for a bump and wondered, If I’m the smart one, why do we always do exactly what Beck wants us to?

      Myles asked himself this question a lot.

      ‘Now, brother,’ he said, ‘please say goodnight to your friend, and let us be off.’

      Beckett turned to do as he was told, but only because it suited him.

      If Beckett had not turned to bid the dolphin farewell, then perhaps the entire series of increasingly bizarre events that followed might have been avoided. There would have been no nefarious villain, no ridiculously named trolls, no shadowy organisations, no interrogations by a nun (which are known in the intelligence community as nunterrogations, believe it or not) and a definite lack of head lice. But Beckett did turn, precisely two seconds after a troll had surged upwards through the loose shale at the water’s edge and collapsed on to the beach.

      Fairies are defined as being ‘small, humanoid, supernatural creatures possessed of magical powers’, a definition that applies neatly to elves, gnomes, sprites and pixies. It is, however, a human definition, and therefore as incomplete as human knowledge on the subject. The fairies’ definition of themselves is more concise and can be found in the Fairy Book, which is their constitution, so to speak, the original of which is behind crystal in the Hey Hey Temple in Haven City, the subterranean fairy capital. It states:

      FAIRY, FAERIE OR FAERY: A CREATURE OF THE EARTH. OFTEN MAGICAL. NEVER WILFULLY DESTRUCTIVE.

      No mention of small or humanoid. It may surprise humans to know that they themselves were once considered fairies and did indeed possess some magic, until many of them strayed from the path and became extremely wilfully destructive, and so magic was bred out of humans over the centuries, until there was nothing left but an empath here and there, and the occasional telekinetic.

      Trolls are classed as fairies by fairies themselves, but would not be so categorised by the human definition, as they are not magical – unless their longevity can be considered supernatural. They are, however, quite feral and only slightly more sentient than the average hound. Another interesting point about trolls is that fairy scholars of their pathologies have realised that trolls are highly susceptible to chemically induced psychosis while also tending to nest in chemically polluted sites, in much the same way as humans are attracted to the sugar that poisons them. This chemical poisoning often results in uncharacteristically aggressive behaviour and uncontrollable rage. Again, similar to how humans behave when experiencing sugar deprivation.

      But this troll was not sick, sluggish or aggressive – in fact, he was in remarkable physical health, all pumping limbs and scything tusks, as he followed his second most powerful instinct: REACH THE SURFACE. (Trolls’ most powerful instinct being: EAT, GOBBLE, DEVOUR.)

      This particular troll’s bloodstream was clear because he had never swum across a chromium-saturated lake and he had never carved out his burrow in mercury-rich soil. Nevertheless, healthy or not, this specimen would never have made it to the surface had the Earth’s crust under Dalkey Island not been exceptionally thin, a mere two and a quarter miles, in fact. This troll was able to squeeze himself into fissures that would have made a claustrophobe faint, and he wriggled his way to the open air. It took the creature four sun cycles of agonisingly slow progress to break through, and you might think the cosmos would grant the fellow a little good fortune after such Herculean efforts, but no, he had to pop out right between the Fowl Twins and Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye, who was lurking on a mainland balcony and spying on Dalkey Island through a telescopic monocular, thus providing the third corner of an irresistible triangular vortex of fate.

      So, the troll emerged, joint by joint, reborn to the atmosphere, gnashing and clawing. And, in spite of his almost utter exhaustion, some spark of triumph drove him to his feet for a celebratory howl, which was when Lord Teddy, for diabolical reasons which shall presently be explored, shot him.

      Once the shot had been fired, the entire troll-related rigmarole really got rigmarolling, because the microsecond that NANNI’s sensors detected the bullet’s sonic boom, she dispensed with her convoluted sentences and without a word upgraded the villa’s alert status from beige to red, sounded the alarm klaxon, and set the security system to siege mode. Two armoured drobots were dispatched from their charging plates to extract the twins, and forty decoy flares were launched from mini mortar ports in the roof as countermeasures to any infrared guided missiles that may or may not be inbound.

      This left the twins with approximately twenty seconds of earthbound liberty before they would be whisked into the evening sky and secured in the eco-house’s ultrasecret safe room, blueprints of which did not appear on any set of plans.

      A lot can happen in twenty seconds. And a lot did happen.

      Firstly, let us discuss the marksman. When I say Lord Teddy shot the troll, this is possibly misleading, even though it is accurate. He did shoot the troll, but not with the usual explosive variety of bullet, which would have penetrated the troll’s hide and quite possibly killed the beast through sheer shock trauma. That was the absolute last thing Lord Teddy wanted, as it would void his entire plan. This particular bullet was a gas-powered cellophane virus (CV) slug that was being developed by the Japanese munitions company Myishi and was not yet officially on the market. In fact, Myishi products rarely went into mass production, as Ishi Myishi, the founder and CEO, made quite a lot of tax-free dollars giving a technological edge to the world’s criminal masterminds. The Duke of Scilly was a personal friend and possibly his best customer and had most of his kit sponsored by Ishi Myishi so long as the duke agreed to endorse the products on the dark web. The CV bullets were known as ‘shrink-wrappers’ by the development team, and they released their viruses on impact, effectively wrapping the target in a coating of cellophane that was porous enough to allow shallow breathing but had been known to crack a rib or two.

      And then there is the physicality of the troll itself. There are many breeds of troll. From the three-metre-tall