I would prefer to be with Mulch Diggums.

This notion caused him to shudder.

Orion yelped loudly and scuttled backward. “I found it. Really, this time. Look, Foaly. Look!”

Foaly looked, in spite of himself, and was amazed to see that a stone actually did seem to be dancing.

“That’s not possible,” he said, and wondered, Is he somehow sucking me into his delusion?

Orion was jubilant. “Everything is real. I am abroad in the world.”

The stone flipped high into the air, spinning off across the frozen lake. Where it had been, the black hull of the escape pod punctured the ice. It rose and rose above a bass rumbling of engines that set the ice plates vibrating themselves to pieces.

It took Foaly a moment to realize what was happening, but then he too was jubilant.

“Holly!” he called. “You made it. You didn’t leave us.”

The escape pod lurched to the surface, then toppled on its side. The for’ard porthole was winched open, and Holly’s face appeared in the frame. She was pale and bleeding from a dozen minor cuts, but her eyes were bright and determined.

“Took a while for the fuel block to dissolve,” she explained over the engine noise. “Get inside, both of you, and buckle up. We have to catch that fire-breathing monster.”

This was a simple order, and both Foaly and Orion could obey without their realities clashing.

Holly is alive, thought Foaly.

My princess lives, exulted Orion. And we’re chasing a dragon.

“Foaly,” he called after the centaur. “I really think we should search for my secret birthmark. Dragons love that sort of thing.”

Artemis Fowl’s Brain; Now

Artemis was not gone completely. He was confined to a small virtual room in his own brain. The room was similar to his Fowl Manor office, but there were no screens on the situations wall. In fact, there was no wall. Where his selection of gas screens and digital televisions had been mounted, there now floated a window into his body’s reality. He could see what the fool Orion saw, and hear the ridiculous sentences dripping from his own mouth, but he could not control the actions of the romantic nincompoop who seemed to be in the driver’s seat, to use a motorcar reference that Butler and Holly would appreciate.

In Artemis’s room there was a desk and a chair. He wore one of his lightweight Zegna bespoke suits. He could see the weave of threads on his arm and feel the material’s weight as though it were real, but Artemis knew all these things were illusions constructed by his mind to put some order on the chaos in his brain.

He sat upon the chair.

In front of Artemis, on what he had decided to call his mind-screen, events played out in the real world. He winced as the usurper, Orion, rolled out his clumsy charm.

He will utterly destroy my relationship with Holly, he thought.

Now he appeared to be treating Foaly like some kind of mythical pet.

Orion was right about one thing: he was in the second stage of Atlantis Complex, a mental illness he had brought on himself through a combination of reckless dabblings in fairy magic and feelings of guilt.

I brought the guilt on myself too, exposing my mother to Opal Koboi.

Artemis realized suddenly that while he was trapped in his own mind, numbers held no sway over him. Neither did he feel any compulsion to rearrange the objects on his desk.

I am free.

A metaphorical weight lifted from his allegorical chest, and Artemis Fowl felt himself again. Vital, sharp, focused, for the first time in months. Ideas fluttered from his mind like bats from the mouth of a cave.

So much to do. So many projects. Butler . . . I need to find him.

Artemis felt energized and potent. He surged from his chair toward the mind-screen. He would push his way through, force his way out, and send this Orion character back to where he came from. Next on his to-do list would be to apologize to Foaly and Holly for his rudeness and then get to the bottom of this space-probe hijack. His Ice Cube had been torn to pieces by the subterranean river, but it could be rebuilt. In months the project could be operational.

And when the glaciers were safe, perhaps he would submit to a little regression therapy from one of the People’s less flamboyant psychotherapists. Certainly not that Cumulus fellow who had his own talk show.

When Artemis reached the screen, he found it to be less solid than it had first appeared. In fact, it was deep and gloopy, reminding Artemis of the plasma conduit he had crawled through at Opal Koboi’s lab all those years ago. Nevertheless, he forged ahead and soon found himself submerged in a cold, viscous gel that pushed him backward with floppy fingers.

“I will not be deterred,” shouted Artemis, finding that he could shout inside the mind-screen. “I am needed in the wide world.”

And then.

Deterred? Wide world? I am beginning to sound like that idiot Orion.

This thought gave him strength, and he tore at the curtains of gunk that kept him a prisoner. It felt good being active and positive. Artemis felt like the Fowl heir of old. Unstoppable.

Then he spotted something in the air before him. Bright and fizzling like a Halloween sparkler. There were more, dozens, all around him, sinking slowly through the gel.

What were they? What could those things mean?