Then the clock in the living room downstairs chimed the hour. I could hear it through the floor. And about a nanosecond later, my mother-with a predictability that sometimes made me wonder if she were really some kind of automated device-called from the bottom of the stairs:

“Charlie. Ten o’clock. Time to get ready for bed.” I sighed. To my shame, I had the earliest school-night bedtime of any just-turned-seventeen-year-old I knew, and except in dire circumstances, it was nonnegotiable.

“Hey, I gotta shut down,” I said to Rick.

“You’re such a wuss.”

“You’re a Commie.”

“If it’ll get me into college.”

“See you in the a.m.” I clicked off and typed into my IM:

BBelt1: g2g.

GalaxyMaster: wuss.

BBelt1: nerd.

GalaxyMaster: cya.

BBelt1: bye!

Then I saved my paper into Sherman’s online homework file and shut down the computer.

Ten minutes later, I was lying in bed, paging through the latest issue of Black Belt magazine.

Five minutes after that, I laid the magazine on my bedside table. I reached up for the switch of the reading lamp set in the wall above me. My eyes went around the room one last time, from the computer to the tournament trophies on my shelves to the black-belt certificate framed on my wall to the movie poster of The Lord of the Rings. Finally, I looked at the back of my hand. There was a number written on it in black marker. That made me smile to myself.

Then I snapped the light off. I said a quick goodnight prayer.

In sixty seconds, I was sound asleep.

CHAPTER THREE

“Kill Him” Then, all at once, I woke up. There, in that bare, terrible room. Strapped to that chair. Hurt and helpless. With the awful instruments on the tray winking and glinting in the light from the single bare bulb dangling above.

How had it happened? Had I been kidnapped from my bed? Why? Who would’ve taken me? Who would want to hurt me? I was just a regular kid.