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rest of us and flung himself down under a tree. He sat there, his back rigid, his legs crossed, his arms crossed, looking inscrutable. More probably he was just sulking.
    For a few seconds, I stayed where I was. Listening. Looking. I even tried sniffing. (I smelled my own sweat, the leather breastplate, the horses, the brittle scent of greenery on which the sun has been beating all day.) Nothing amiss. Nothing dangerous. Nothing except the realization that this
was
a good place for an ambush.
    So were a lot of other places, I told myself. Jumpiness could easily progress to paranoia, and then we'd be no good to the kidnapped princess or to anybody.
    I stretched, pressing my hands against the stiffness in the small of my back. Come to think of it, I was hungry myself. Come to think of it, I had to go to the...
    Oops.
    Oh yeah. They didn't have those yet. I glanced around to make sure I knew where everybody was, then crossed to the woods on the other side of the road.
    Once there, I thought of my weapons, left with the horse, but didn't go back for them. I wasn't going far, no more than twenty or thirty feet. I could still glimpse my companions from between the trees and underbrush, and I could certainly hear them. Marian was laughing at something, her voice high and overly enthusiastic. That probably meant she was laughing at one of Robin's jokes. What an idiot.
    I was just starting back, when I heard a twig snap behind me, from where nobody from our group could have been.
Aw no,
I thought as something very hard crashed into the back of my head. Talk about being an idiot.

8. WHAT ARE FRIENDS FOR?

    The first thing I noticed was the smell.
    Oh nice, I thought. Now
I'm
looping.
    But I wasn't back in Rasmussem's stable. The smell here was worse than that had been—kind of a combination of un-flushed toilets, musty basements, and fifty-year-old gym socks. My head had been split open by whatever had slammed into me, I was sure of it, and now my brains were spilling out onto the ground, releasing stale memories as they hit the air. How come I couldn't have my life flash in front of my eyes, like everybody else did? How come my life had to flash in front of my nose? I groaned at the unfairness of it all.
    Take that back.
    I
tried
to groan at the unfairness of it all. There was a gag stuffed into my mouth, and all that came out was a pathetic little noise that sounded more like the whine of an overtired five-year-old than a protest against injustice in the universe. The gag tasted dusty and greasy, and I got a mental image of the gray, stiff rags my dad keeps in the garage—the ones he uses to wipe off the garbage cans or to clean the dipstick while checking the car's oil level.
    The Rasmussem program may be a marvel of technological sophistication, with cerebral stimulation instead of a dungeon master describing what we're supposed to be seeing, and with outcomes decided by instantaneous computer judgments rather than a roll of the die, but there's a lot to be said for a game that gets no rougher than pushing two-inch miniatures around on graph paper.
    "Harek," a voice whispered at me.
    Well, at least if I was dead, somebody else was dead right along with me.
    I opened my eyes.
    I was flat on my stomach, which I hadn't realized. The hard ground and the dampness had made me so stiff that it'd been impossible to tell which side was up. Another reason I was so sore was that my hands were tied behind my back. The next surprise was that I was indoors, which indicated some passage of time. In the dim, flickering light—torchlight, I knew instinctively—I saw that there was a wall about six inches from my face: a stone wall, dark and slimy.
    "Harek!" The whisper was louder, more insistent this time. It came from somewhere above me.
    I raised my chin off the dirt floor and found Robin. He was chained to the wall, his feet dangling above the ground.
Oh,
I thought, finally catching on.
Dungeon.
    "Hello, Robin," I tried to say around my gag.