What had happened? He remembered the cloth on his face, on his ears, on his head, wrapped tightly and roughly around his neck with a cord. He remembered the bumps and thumps of being dragged, then the stomach-tilting whirl of being lifted from the ground, thrown across someone’s shoulder. And then he’d felt it—a prick, a little stab of something sharp. Then the world had faded just as he felt his captor begin to run.

His eyes were still closed and he couldn’t open them. But his thoughts lifted out of the haze.

How? How had they been taken so easily, taken before his friends could come to the rescue? Kletter had been there; surely the others had been right behind her. The man named Timon was by himself. Or . . . there had been another . . . a woman . . . he’d heard her voice. And the ones who’d carried him away.

It was a blur. His head hurt. Why couldn’t he open his eyes? Why did he feel nothing solid, as if he floated in the middle of a dark and warm ocean? What had happened? Who had taken them?

He didn’t understand.

He slipped away from consciousness once again.

It was a light that brought him back, this time. A bright one, piercing his eyelids as if they were made of stretched wool. He blinked them open, squinting into the white brilliance. It disappeared, replaced by a man’s face. An ugly, bearded, pockmarked face. Even though the light had messed with Isaac’s vision, he could tell that much, at least.

“Bless me,” the ugliness said. “It’s like you people have never been given a drug in your life. Knocked you out cold.”

Isaac groaned. He tried to say something but coughed instead.

The man jerked back and sat on his haunches. “Hooboy. Get this man a mint. He smells like Gilgamesh’s vomit.”

Isaac rolled on to his side, groaning again; it felt like he’d been asleep for three days, every inch of him drenched with weariness. And his head pounded, right behind the eyeballs. His mind swam through the weariness, trying to break the surface. He felt the alarm of being taken, felt the panic, but it was dull and distant, like a throb in his ankle. Until he remembered Sadina.

He sat up, a sweet explosion of pain rocking his head, followed by a spill of nausea.

“Where is she?” he sputtered. “Where is she!”

“I’m here, Isaac.”

He looked to his right and saw her, sitting on a chair. They were inside, in a room of a house, although it was too dark to decipher any details. He breathed a deep sigh of relief.

“You two must be close.” A woman’s voice, spoken from a corner draped in shadow. Isaac thought he made out a folded set of arms, the rest of the body leaning against the wall. “At least you’re together in this.”