Pip and Kip actually laughed.
“It’s a horrible feeling, impotency, ain’t it?” said Pip. “But there are worse feelings. Drowning, for example.”
“And getting crushed by falling buildings,” added Kip.
Holly banged her tiny fists on the console.
These two are so infuriating.
Pip stepped close to the camera, so that his mask filled the screen. “If I don’t get a call from Opal Koboi in the next few minutes telling me she is in a shuttle on her way to the surface, then I will shoot this pixie. Believe it.”
Foaly rested his head in his hands. “I used to love Pip and Kip,” he said.
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.