The Deeps, Atlantis
Opal Koboi was making a futile attempt to levitate when the guards came for her. It was something she had been able to do as a child before her chosen life of crime had stripped the magic from her synapses, the tiny junctions between nerve cells where most experts agreed magic originated. Her power might have regenerated if it hadn’t been for the human pituitary gland she’d had briefly attached to her hypothalamus. Levitation was a complicated art, especially for pixies with their limited powers, and usually a state only achieved by Hey-Hey Monks of the Third Balcony; but Opal had managed it while still in diapers, which had been her parents’ first sign that their daughter was a little bit special.
Imagine it, she thought. I wished to be human. That was a mistake for which I will eventually find someone to blame. The centaur, Foaly—he drove me to it. I do hope he is killed in the explosion.
Opal smirked in self-satisfaction. There had been a time when she’d whiled away the prison monotony by concocting ever more elaborate death traps for her centaur nemesis, but now she was content to let Foaly die with the rest in the imminent explosions. Granted, she had cooked up a little surprise for his wife; but this was merely a side project and not something she had spent too much time on.
It is a measure of how far I have come, Opal thought. I have matured somewhat. The veil has lifted, and I see my true purpose.
There had been a time when Opal had simply been a ruthless business fairy with daddy issues; but somewhere during the years of banned experimentation, she had allowed black magic to fester in her soul and let it warp her heart’s desire until it was not enough to be lauded in her own city. She needed the world to bow down, and she was prepared to risk everything and sacrifice anyone to see her wish fulfilled.
This time it will be different, for I will have fearsome warriors bound to my will. Ancient soldiers who will die for me.
Opal cleared her mind and sent out a probe searching for her other self. All that came back was the white noise of terror.
She knows, Opal realized. Poor thing.
This moment of sympathy for her younger self did not last long, as the imprisoned Opal had learned not to live in the past.
I am merely killing a memory, she thought. That is all.
Which was a convenient way of looking at it.
Her cell door phase-changed from solid to gas, and Opal was unsurprised to see Warden Tarpon Vinyáya, a malleable pen pusher who had never spent a night outside under the moon, fidgeting in her doorway, flanked by two jumbo pixie guards.
“Warden,” she said, abandoning her levitation attempt. “Has my pardon arrived?”
Tarpon had no time for pleasantries. “We’re moving you, Koboi. No discussion; just come along.”
He gestured to his guards. “Wrap her up, boys.”
The jumbo pixies strode rapidly into the room, wordlessly pinning Opal’s arms to her sides. Jumbo pixies were a breed peculiar to Atlantis, where the particular blend of pressurized environment and algae-based filtration had caused them to pop up with increased regularity over the years. What the jumbo pixies gained in brawn they generally sacrificed in brains, and so they made the ideal prison guards, having no respect for anyone smaller than themselves who did not sign their paychecks.
Before Opal could open her mouth to voice an objection, the pixies had bundled her into a lined anti-radiation suit and clipped three bungee cords around her torso.
The warden sighed, as if he had been expecting Opal to somehow disable his guards. Which he had.
“Good. Good,” he said, mopping his high brow with a handkerchief. “Take her to the basement. Don’t touch any of the pipes, and avoid breathing if possible.”
The pixies hefted their captive between them like a rolled rug and double-timed it from Opal’s cell, across the narrow bridge that linked her cell-pod to the main prison, and into the service elevator.
Opal smiled behind the heavy lead gauze of her headpiece.
This certainly is the day for Opal Kobois to be manhandled by burly boys.
She beamed a thought to her younger self on the surface.
I feel for you, sister.
The elevator cube flashed downward through a hundred yards of soft sandstone to a small chamber composed entirely of hyperdense material harvested from the crust of a neutron star.
Opal guessed they had arrived at the chamber, and giggled at the memory of a stupid gnome in her high school who had asked what neutron stars were made of.
Neutrons, boy, Professor Leguminous had snapped. Neutrons! The clue is in the name.
This chamber held the record for being the most expensive room per square inch to construct anywhere on the planet, though it looked a little like a concrete furnace room. At one end was the elevator door; at the other were what looked like four missile tubes; and in the middle was an extremely grumpy dwarf.
“You are bleeping joking me?” he said, belly thrust out belligerently.
The jumbo pixies dumped Opal on the gray floor.
“Orders, pal,” said one. “Put her in the tube.”
The dwarf shook his head stubbornly. “I ain’t putting no one in a tube. Them tubes is built for rods.”
“I do believe,” said the second pixie, very proud of himself for remembering the information he was about to deliver, “that one of them reactor sites is depleted so the tube do be empty.”
“That sounded pretty good, Jumbo, except for the do be at the end,” said the dwarf, whose name was Kolin Ozkopy. “But even so, I need to know how the consequences of not putting a person in a tube are worse than the consequences of putting them in one?”
A sentence of this length would take a jumbo pixie several minutes to digest; luckily, they were spared the embarrassment of being pressed for an explanation when Kolin’s phone rang.
“Just a sec,” he said, checking caller ID. “It’s the warden.”
Kolin answered the phone with a flourish. “Y’ello. Engineer Ozkopy here.”
Ozkopy listened for a long moment, interjecting three uh-huhs and two D’Arvits before pocketing the phone.
“Wow,” he said, prodding the radiation suit with his toe. “I guess you’d better put her in the tube.”
Police Plaza, Haven City, The Lower Elements
Pip waggled his phone at the camera.
“You hear anything? Because I don’t. No one is calling this number, and I’ve got five bars. One hundred percent planetary coverage. Hell, I once took a call on a spaceship.”
Holly swiped the mike sensor. “We’re moving as fast as we can. Opal Koboi is in the shuttle bay right now. We just need ten more minutes.”
Pip adopted a singsong voice.
“Never tell a lie, just to get you by.
Never tell a tale, lest yo
u go to jail.”
Foaly found himself humming along. It was the Pip and Kip theme song. Holly glared at him.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
Artemis grew impatient with the fruitless wrangling. “This is futile and, frankly, embarrassing. They have no intention of releasing Opal. We should evacuate now, at least to the shuttle bays. They are built to withstand magma flares.”
Foaly disagreed. “We’re secure here. The real danger is in Atlantis. That’s where the other Opal is. You said, and I concur, that the serious explosions, theoretical explosions, only occur with living beings.”
“Theoretical explosions are only theoretical until the theory is proven,” countered Artemis. “And with so many—” He stopped mid-sentence, which was very unlike him, as Artemis detested both poor grammar and poor manners. His skin tone faded from pale to porcelain, and he actually rapped his own forehead.
“Stupid. Stupid. Foaly, we are both imbeciles. I don’t expect lateral thinking from the LEP, but from you…”
Holly recognized this tone. She had heard it during previous adventures, generally before things went catastrophically wrong.
“What is it?” she asked, afraid of the answer, which must surely be terrible.
“Yeah,” agreed Foaly, who always had time to feel insulted. “Why am I an imbecile?”
Artemis pointed an index finger diagonally down and southwest in the approximate direction they had come from the J. Argon Clinic.
“The oxygen booth has addled my senses,” he said. “The clone. Nopal. She’s a living being. If she explodes, it could go nuclear.”
Foaly accessed the clone’s file on Argon’s Web site, navigating with blurred speed to the patient details.
“No. I think we should be okay there. Opal harvested her own DNA before the time line split.”
Artemis was angry with himself all the same for momentarily forgetting the clone.
“We were minutes into this crisis before the clone’s relevance occurred to me,” he said. “If Nopal had been created at a later date, my slow thinking could have cost lives.”
“There are still plenty of lives at stake,” said Foaly. “We need to save as many as we can.”