“And the runt who made off with Jasher’s seed was called Tark, the surviving member of the Giddy Nine.”

“Correct. Your eyes are very close together.” Jason grinned sleepily.

“Stay focused.”

“How do you stay focused? You’re practically a cyclops.”

“Stay with me. We need to discuss your fears. Of what are you most afraid?”

“Getting killed by a puppet. Like a marionette or a ventriloquist’s dummy.”

Someone in the room snickered. Damak looked in the direction of the snickering. “You getting this down?”

“Yes, sir,” came the controlled response.

“What else frightens you most?” Damak asked.

“Enclosed spaces. You know, claustrophobia? Not every type of enclosed space. Some are worse than others. I heard a story about some prisoners of war who were squeezed into these confining boxes for a long time. I would hate that.” Jason shuddered.

“What else? List some.”

“Having body parts crushed or maimed. Finding out nobody has souls. My friends or family getting killed. Suffocating. Getting brain damage. Heights, if I’m not secure. Getting gangrene. Getting radiation poisoning. Titan crabs. Having my eyes poked out. Getting rabies. Having a toothache and no dentist, then trying to yank the tooth out, and having half my jaw break off. Getting cancer. Puking. Having my belly button come untied. The devil. Being tortured. Manglers. Leprechauns. Forgetting a class I signed up for and then remembering on the day of the final. Drinking rotten milk. Earaches. Catching on fire. Getting lost. Dying. Finding out—”

Jason stopped speaking and began to lurch against the immobilizing straps. It felt like somebody had lit a string of firecrackers inside his head. His eyes rolled back, and he jerked and trembled while Damak steadied him.

“What else do you fear?”

Jason opened his mouth to speak, but only a tiny gasp came out. The spasms increased.

“The venom is wearing off,” Damak said to someone.

He uncorked a vial and waved it under Jason’s nose. The seizures subsided, and Jason sank into a dreamless sleep.

Jason awoke in what looked like the same cell where the snake had bitten him. His muscles felt sore, as though he had spent the previous day strenuously lifting weights for the first time in months.

He sat up and looked around. A new small loaf of dark bread sat close by.

He picked at the scabs from the snakebites on his arm and legs. He could remember an old man asking him questions. The man had written the book about manipulation Jason had read in the Repository of Learning. What was his name? He could not recall. Yes he could: Damak.

He remembered learning that the venom of the snake was a mind-altering substance. The conversation with the old man seemed like a vaguely pleasant dream. Had he been floating? Maybe it hadn’t really happened. Maybe it had all been in his head. He hoped so. He had spilled his guts about Galloran and a lot of his fears, but the specifics remained vague. He had remembered the Word, but he recalled none of it now.

Jason crawled over to the puddle for a drink. Then he retrieved the bread. Even as hungry as he was, Jason crammed almost half the loaf into the hole in the wall to plug it up before devouring the rest.

He felt tired after eating the bread, dimly realizing as he slumped to the floor that it must have been drugged.

When Jason regained consciousness, he could barely move. Everything was black and smelled like metal. He was inside an iron container tailored to the contours of his body. He was lying on his back. He could wiggle his fingers and squirm a bit, but that was the extent of his capacity to move.

He closed his eyes and tried to resist his rising panic. He hated tight spaces. He had told them that in his dream. It must not have been a dream. He began breathing faster. He tried to thrash against the container but could hardly twitch. Was this a sarcophagus? A coffin? Had he been buried alive? No, he could breathe. There were slits near his nostrils.

He was hyperventilating and getting sweaty. He cried out, and his voice sounded close and muffled.

Jason kept his eyes closed and concentrated on breathing more slowly and deeply. Nobody was going to free him, so he had to get used to this. He tried to go back to sleep but was unable.

The silence was oppressive. He began singing songs. Songs from the radio. Television theme songs. He hummed themes from movies.

He wiggled his body as much as he could. It was tough being encased in such a tight space. The only sounds came from his voice. The only smells were musty iron and his own sweat. The perfect darkness left nothing to look at.

After a long time he heard a door open. He heard footsteps; then a hatch over his face opened. The torchlight was blinding until his eyes adjusted.

A pliable hollow tube brushed against his lips. He could see a hand holding the tube. “Drink,” a male voice said.

Jason sucked on the tube and eventually began swallowing water. He paused, then drank more. He had not realized how thirsty he was. The water tasted flat, but he could not get enough of it.

The tube was removed. Dirty fingers began feeding him cold wads of stringy meat. It was not good. It was too salty and may have been raw, but Jason ate greedily. The fingers gave him stale bread, followed by another sip from the tube. Then the hatch closed, returning him to darkness.

“Hey,” Jason complained. “I have to pee.”

“Then do it.”

“I’ll drown.”

“It’ll drain.”

“Wait, I have some questions—”

He heard the door close.

Time became Jason’s nemesis. He was trapped with virtually no sensory input. He tried to keep himself company. He recited quotes he remembered from movies. He prayed aloud. He sang. He flexed his muscles and wiggled. He slept as much as he could.

Sometimes he thought about the people he had left behind—his parents, his brother, his sister, his baseball team, Matt and Tim. He wondered if his face was on milk cartons. He wondered if he had been on the news. By now there might even be a headstone in some cemetery with his name on it. Wherever they imagined he was, he doubted any of them would guess he was locked within a sarcophagus in the dungeon of an evil wizard.

He thought back over his adventures, marveling how Maldor could have instituted and maintained such an elaborate fabrication. He wished he could get a message to Galloran that the Word was a fraud. He wondered if Tark and Rachel had completely escaped, and if they had planted Jasher’s seed. He wondered what Drake was doing.

Nobody visited except to bring him food and water. After the few words on the first visit the man who fed him would not speak.