Or at least this used to be the case. Recently, things have changed. In some ways he is as sharp as ever, but a shadow has fallen across Artemis’s mind.
Once upon a time, Artemis saw things that no one else could see, but now he sees things that are not there. .
CHAPTER 1 COLD VIBES
Vatnajökull, Iceland
Vatnajökull is the biggest glacier in Europe, with an area of more than five thousand stark blue-white miles. It is, for the most part, uninhabited and desolate and, for scientific reasons, the perfect place for Artemis Fowl to demonstrate to the Fairy People how exactly he planned to save the world. Also, a little dramatic scenery never hurts a presentation.
One part of Vatnajökull that does see human traffic is the Great Skua restaurant on the shores of the glacier lagoon, which caters to groups of ice tourists from May to August. Artemis had arranged to meet the proprietor at this closed for the season establishment very early on the morning of September first. His fifteenth birthday.
Artemis steered his rented snowmobile along the lagoon’s rippling coastline, where the glacier sloped into a black pool dotted with a crazy-paving pattern of broken ice plates. The wind roared around his head like an excited crowd in a stadium, carrying with it arrowheads of sleet that peppered his nose and mouth. The space was vast and unforgiving, and Artemis knew that to be injured alone on this tundra would lead to a quick and painful death-or at the very least abject humiliation before the popping flashes of the tourist season’s tail end, which was slightly less painful than a painful death, but lasted longer.