The doctor nodded glumly, thinking that he would possibly omit this session from his book. He watched Artemis stride across the office floor and duck through the doorway.
Argon studied the napkin drawing and knew instinctively that Artemis was right about his hip.
Either that boy is the sanest creature on earth, he thought, or he is so disturbed that our tests cannot even begin to scratch the surface.
Argon pulled a rubber stamp from his desk, and on the cover of Artemis’s file he stamped the word FUNCTIONAL in big red letters.
I hope so, he thought. I really hope so.
Artemis’s bodyguard, Butler, waited for his principal outside Dr. Argon’s office in the large chair that had been a gift from the centaur Foaly, technical consultant to the Lower Elements Police.
“I can’t stand to look at you perched on a fairy stool,” Foaly had told him. “It offends my eyes. You look like a monkey passing a coconut.”
“Very well,” Butler had said in his gravelly bass. “I accept the gift, if only to preserve your eyes.”
In truth he had been mighty glad to have a comfortable chair, being more than six and a half feet tall in a city built for three-footers.
The bodyguard stood and stretched, flattening his palms against the ceiling, which was double-height by fairy standards. Thank God Argon had a taste for the grandiose, or Butler wouldn’t even have been able to stand up straight in the clinic. To his mind, the building, with its vaulted ceilings, gold-flecked tapestries, and retro sim-wood sliding doors, looked more like a monastery where the monks had taken a vow of wealth than a medical facility. Only the wall-mounted laser hand-sanitizers and the occasional elfin nurse bustling past gave any hint that this place was actually a clinic.
I am so glad this detail is coming to an end, Butler had been thinking at least once every five minutes for the past two weeks. He had been in tight spots many times; but there was something about being confined in a city clamped to the underside of the earth’s crust that made him feel claustrophobic for the first time in his life.
Artemis emerged from Argon’s office, his self-satisfied smirk even more pronounced than usual. When Butler saw this expression, he knew that his boss was back in control of his faculties and that his Atlantis Complex was certified as cured.
No more counting words. No more irrational fear of the number four. No more paranoia and delusions. Thank goodness for that.
He asked anyway, just to be certain. “Well, Artemis, how are we?”
Artemis buttoned his navy woollen suit jacket. “We are fine, Butler. That is to say that I, Artemis Fowl the Second, am one hundred percent functional, which is about five times the functionality of an average person. Or to put it another way: one point five Mozarts. Or three-quarters of a da Vinci.”
“Only three-quarters? You’re being modest.”
“Correct,” said Artemis, smiling. “I am.”
Butler’s shoulders sagged a little with relief. Inflated ego, supreme self-confidence. Artemis was most definitely his old self.
“Very good. Let’s pick up our escort and be on our way then, shall we? I want to feel the sun on my face. The real sun, not the UV lamps they have down here.”
Artemis felt a pang of sympathy for his bodyguard, an emotion he had been experiencing more and more in recent months. It was difficult enough for Butler to be inconspicuous among humans; down here he could hardly have attracted more attention if he had been wearing a clown suit and juggling fireballs.
“Very well,” agreed Artemis. “We will pick up our escort and depart. Where is Holly?”
Butler jerked a thumb down the hallway. “Where she generally is. With the clone.”
Captain Holly Short of the Lower Elements Police Recon division stared at the face of her archenemy and felt only pity. Of course, had she been gazing at the real Opal Koboi and not a cloned version, then pity might not have been the last emotion on her list, but it would certainly have ranked far below rage and intense dislike bordering on hatred. But this was a clone, grown in advance to provide the megalomaniacal pixie with a body double so that she could be spirited from protective custody in the J. Argon Clinic if the LEP ever managed to incarcerate her, which they had.
Holly pitied the clone because she was a pathetic, dumb creature who had never asked to be created. Cloning was a banned science both for religious reasons and the more obvious fact that, without a life force or soul to power their systems, clones were doomed to a short life of negligent brain activity and organ failure. This particular clone had lived out most of its days in an incubator, struggling for each breath since it had been removed from the chrysalis in which it had been grown.
“Not for much longer, little one,” Holly whispered, touching the ersatz pixie’s forehead through the sterile gloves built into the incubator wall.
Holly could not have said for sure why she had begun to visit the clone. Perhaps it was because Argon had told her that no one else ever had.