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again. When I felt the woman relax her grip on me, I snapped my head around and sank my teeth into her hand. She let out a muffled scream, whipped her hand free, and whacked me a glancing blow behind the ear. By then I was already halfway out the door. I nearly succeeded in shutting it on her, but she was too quick, and before I knew it she had grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and dragged me back into the room. I was flailing my arms when she spun me around hard and shoved me against the wall. I trembled, thinking she was going to whack me again. Instead, she glared at me, containing her fury. Her arms folded across her chest, she squeezed the elbows repeatedly—a signal of her wrath that I would come to know well. Then she grabbed my hand and nearly yanked my arm from its socket, pulling me across the room to the other door. Without a word she opened it and pushed me through. I wanted to bite her again, but I didn’t dare as I looked around at a room so cavernous I felt for an instant as if I were falling through space.
    The room was at least the size of a football field. Its walls were pocked brick and peeling plaster, and powerful lights hung from the ceiling rafters four stories up. There were craters in the floor where huge rusted pipes had been exposed. A half dozen workmen in bluejumpsuits were soldering electrical connections on the far wall. About thirty yards from me, two other men, one young, one old, were standing beside a pair of chairs upholstered in burgundy velvet. The younger man had dark, rust-colored skin, an angular face, and a black crew cut. His muscular arms bulged beneath the rolled-up sleeves of his checkered shirt, and he wore a blue and white tie. A pencil behind his ear, his face tight with concentration behind a pair of black horn-rim glasses, he was clutching a thin roll of blue paper and obviously explaining something to the older man.
    Impeccably tailored in a black suit and gray silk shirt, the latter was listening with two fingers pressed to his temple, his chin resting on his chest. About sixty-five, short and stocky, he had white hair combed back flat and a thick white moustache, neatly trimmed. His expression was calm and relaxed. And it did not change when he raised his head a moment later. The woman released my hand and roughly—but more subtly so, with a surreptitious jab to the ribs—urged me forward, and we walked toward him.
    The younger man stopped talking, and as I approached them, the old man studied me keenly with his pale blue eyes. He had a flower in his lapel unlike any I had ever seen: alternating yellow and red petals—jagged-edged like licks of flame—around a fiery orange center. I felt frightened, yet I wondered what kind of kidnapping this could be. Knocking around with my adoptive parents, spending more time in diners and bars than schoolrooms, I had seen a few things, and it struck me as more than odd that all these obviously well-heeled and otherwise occupied people had gone to such trouble to kidnap someone like me. I was an orphan, after all, a nobody, with no money, no connections, and no family aside from my young aunt. And the notion of her coming up with ransom money was laughable.
    So what on earth could this old man want with me, I asked myself as he reached out and gently squeezed my shoulder. And it struck me suddenly, terribly, that their motivations might have nothing to do with money.
    “Welcome, Enzo,” he greeted me. One side of his mouth went up in a smile and I saw a dazzling set of white teeth. “You know, your real name is Enzo,” he went on.
    I winced, rubbing my arm where the woman had yanked me around. When I looked up at her, she was staring at me coldly.
    They really are crazy, I thought. “I want to go back to my aunt,” I said, my voice breaking.
    The woman peeled off her gloves and stuffed them into her handbag. “I am your aunt,” she said acidly, to my further astonishment.
    “That’s enough,” the old man