The Alliance Archive

Epilogue

Don't read the epilogue until you've read the chapter before it!

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There’s a boy on the shore. No one knows him. No one gets close to him. For five days he lays there, and on the sixth the coroner goes to see if he was drowned or murdered. When he puts a hand to his neck, he finds a pulse. Fluttering, like a wounded butterfly. He tells authorities the boy is in a coma, and he ends up in the local hospital. They puzzle over him for many days. Who is he? What is he doing here? When he does wake up, he says words that don’t make sense. Elves? Fairies? There’s no such thing. They deem him unfit to leave the hospital, and he’s transferred to a rehabilitation ward. There, he writes and takes walks in the garden, looking for things that aren’t there and never will be. After a few months, a mysterious boy shows up at the hospital’s front desk. He asks many questions about the boy, and is shown to his room. When he sees him, he lights up, and says the name that the doctors have been hearing for weeks.

Artemis.

They have quite a long chat, and even walk through the garden. The boy seems alive again, but still emptied somehow. One day, a nurse comes to the boy's room to give him his pills, and the boy is gone. There is a note on the table, but it is never read. It can never be read. It's not even in an existing language...

*          *          *

Len looks over his teacup at Artemis.

“So where’s Syd?”

“She’s dead,” He replies nonchalantly.

Len looks at him.

“I see.”

And he sips from his teacup for a minute before looking at Artemis and showing him a picture inside his wallet.

Artemis' eyes open wide and he stares at the picture for a moment before sitting back in his chair and sipping his own tea cup.

"Have you told Mr. Lucas Mortes?"

"No. Of course not."

"I will answer your question, then. I know she's dead because the bomb Jene had prepared was so devastating that it literally rips your flesh from your body. We found her skeleton. It had one tooth, a molar, left in it. It was enough to identify her."

"Well....." Len put a finger to his lips. "What if, say, there was a way to bring her back? What if, hypothetically, she wasn't dead?"

"But that's impossible, how do you expect us to do something like that?"

Len waved the photo in the wallet at Artemis "Trust me, Artemis Fowl. I think I know who I'm dealing with..."

                                                                           End of Book Two