Noah doesn’t want to have his brain improved, but he knows he must bide his time. He knows Mrs. Delancey is a big fat liar, liar with her pants on fire. He’s keenly aware that even though everybody seems very nice, and treats him as if he’s really special, they’re holding him against his will, which is the same as kidnapping. He knows all of this and one thing more: they’re lying about what happened to his mother when the school exploded. He knows in his head and his heart and his bones that Mom didn’t die there, like they said, and that someday soon she will come to get him, and when she does Mrs. Delancey and all the others will be in big, big trouble.

That’s what Noah knows.

The thing about being afraid is that after a while it makes you tired. At first the fear is like fire in your blood, and all your senses seem enhanced. Smell, color, sound-everything is more vivid. I suppose that must be the adrenaline, keeping you wide-awake, ready for anything. And then as time passes it just gets so exhausting that all you want to do is close your eyes and go away.

Minutes after the plane lands, I’m sound asleep. No idea how long I’m out, but when I finally do wake up it’s to find myself in what at first glance looks like a dimly illuminated luxury hotel suite. Heavy drapes cloak the windows. The furniture is low, ultramodern, and for some strange reason-something to do with my dreams?-looks vaguely sinister. The next thing I notice is that I’ve been dressed in cotton pajamas-who do these belong to?-and then something clicks in my head and I’m sitting bolt upright shouting, “Noah! Noah! It’s Mom!”

A moment later the woman with the flouncy mop of Harpo curls appears by the bedside, eyes almost comically wide, her mouth a pink O of surprise. “Hey!” she says, looking as panicked as me. “Hey! Calm down!”

It’s the petite little woman who let me out of the cage, who told me Noah was alive. My captor, my savior, whatever, my only direct link to him right now, and I can’t help myself.

“Where is he?” I demand, grabbing her wrists, pulling her close. “I want my son!”

Frightened by my iron grip, she cries out in a high voice, “Eldon! Eldon!” and a moment later a slightly larger male version of herself appears, looking equally startled.

The husband. I must have glimpsed him when they transferred me from the jet to the van, because he looks familiar, and not just because of the physical similarity to his wife. This is the Eldon that “made half a billion last year, isn’t that amazing?” The man behind the plan to lure me to the airport, knock me out, stuff me in a dog kennel, and whisk me away in his fancy private aircraft. My enemy, no doubt, and maybe, if his wife isn’t completely off her rocker, my friend.

“You said you had my son!” I remind them, letting go of her and focusing instead on him.

“Not us,” he responds, carefully backing his wife out of range, as if I’m a grenade.

“Who, then? Where is he?”

Eldon can’t bring himself to look me in the eye. “We think we know who took your son and why. We think we know where they’re keeping him, okay? At least the general vicinity. At the moment we can’t do anything about it, but we’re on your side, lady, I promise.”

“Prove it!” I demand. “Take me to Noah! I want to see him with my own eyes, right now!”

Husband and wife exchange a glance.

“Not possible,” Eldon says. “How about some breakfast, you must be starved,” he suggests, in what he intends to be a soothing voice.

“I don’t want any fucking breakfast-I want my son!”

They exchange another mysterious glance, come to some sort of silent agreement, and then quickly withdraw from the room without another word.

The door, no surprise, is locked and solid as a bank vault. Pounding on the door gets me nothing but a sore fist. Windows! Go for the windows. If it’s not too high maybe I can jump, or scream loud enough to get somebody’s attention. But when I draw back the drapes, I discover that the windows have been covered from the outside with heavy aluminum storm shutters, blocking out light and sound.

I’m still in a cage.

Time passes, maybe an hour. Hard to tell under artificial light, without benefit of clock or watch. I’m starting to deeply regret refusing breakfast when the lock on the door clicks softly.

I’m right there, ready to bolt through the opening, but my new visitor has anticipated my eagerness and sweeps me away with a strong arm and shuts the door firmly behind him, all in one smooth move.

Thrown off balance, I fall to the carpet, landing on my butt.

“I do apologize,” says the visitor, looking down at me with what can only be described as a benevolent expression. “You’re being confined for your own protection. Your host family has asked me to explain the situation, and I shall. But first we need to get some food into you. Did you know you’re trembling and that your teeth are chattering? That’s not the air temperature. That’s because you’re hungry. Even a healthy person like yourself has to watch the blood sugar.”

His appearance is enough to stun me into silence. Standing over me, dressed in simple black like a priest devoid of collar, is perhaps the homeliest human being I’ve ever encountered. Not ugly-ugly can be scary or threatening-but painfully, exquisitely homely. The man has a hunched spine, a protuberant little belly, and no chin. His spindly neck is heavily wattled, his prominent nose looks like a fat, crooked finger, and his asymmetrical ears could be borrowed from Mr. Potato Head. To make matters worse, all of his features are slightly askew, as if he was somehow blurred at birth, and the effect is to make me want to look away. Which I would happily do, except for his eyes.

His eyes, set deep beneath a jutting, simian brow, are strangely, compellingly beautiful. Old and deeply wrinkled, but nevertheless beautiful, although I couldn’t say what color. Not blue or green exactly, but somewhere in that range.

“Take a good look,” he encourages me, attempting a smile with his misshapen mouth. “I’m used to it. Arthur used to say I was the ugliest creature on earth, and he loved me for it.”

“Arthur Conklin.”

“Himself.” He nods, looking somehow both wise and tortoiselike. “Our founder and my one true friend.”

“Your one true friend stole my little boy,” I remind him, getting to my feet.

He shakes his head. “No, never. Absolutely not. Arthur would never have done such a thing. Not when his mind was his own, and certainly not now. There are other forces at work. Dangerous, greedy people who will stop at nothing.”

“Who?”

“If you’ll take a seat and try to relax, Mrs. Corbin, food will be brought in. You must eat-you’re shivering from hunger-and then I’ll try to explain exactly what’s going on and what we’re going to have to do to get your son back.”

Ordinarily I’m not big for scrambled eggs, but when Eldon and his bookend wife scuttle in with a tray of food, the smell of eggs and buttered toast makes me ravenous. Side of home fries, small dish of warm, cinnamon-tinged applesauce, more of the amazing toast slathered with jam. I probably consume enough calories to last a week. As my visitor predicted, the shivering stops and my head seems to settle firmly upon my shoulders.

The homely man is Wendall Weems, and if Arthur Conklin is the pope of the Rulers, then he’s the cardinal who serves as the Vatican Secretary of State. Or, that’s how he’s begun to describe himself.

“Though that’s actually a terrible analogy,” he concedes, sipping from a glass of water as I mop up the last of the scrambled eggs. “The Conklin Institute is not a religious organization. Far from it. In all of Arthur’s writings there is no mention of God or soul, or of any necessity for a spiritual life, or indeed of a promised afterlife. For which, by the way, he has been branded an atheist, a charge I consider profoundly unfair as well as beside the point. In his many works Arthur has never denied the existence of a supreme being-he has simply never chosen to discuss the possibility. Spirituality and the prospect of eternal life are outside of his purview. Instead he concentrates on improving the human mind by rewiring the way we process thoughts. That’s the essence of what we do-teach people to control their thinking. We’re all about self-improvement.”