There I crouched, on my knees, staring forward into the rushing wind, my hair and face and clothes being slapped by the torrent of air. Fear for my family overcame me, dust in the wind made me sneeze, and tears of panic moistened my eyes, only to be dried immediately by the windstorm of the century.

  Suddenly, there was a strange silence, despite the roar of the wind. I realized that the Sounding Rod had stopped. With wind trying to eat my hair, I looked to my left, and I saw the Rod float up from the train and hover there beside me, actually flying through the air at the same speed as the train. The black cone was gone; the sound had stopped.

  I wondered if that meant The Shield was back. The wind was still ripping at me, but I wasn't sure if the wind was considered dangerous enough to hurt me or what. I couldn't know if The Shield would protect me from wind. It sure seemed like it would, but I didn't know for sure.

  Then I noticed that all along the train, ropes were tied to the railing along the top, and were hanging down, flapping in the wind. That must be how the Bosu Zoku jumped down into the train, like a bunch of SWAT team wannabes. And maybe the Sounding Rod was what made the glass explode. My thoughts vanished in a jiffy, because before I knew it, there were hands on those ropes, and I soon realized that a lot of men in black were climbing back onto the top of the train.

  They were coming for me.

  I wanted to run, but they were climbing from both directions, including one right beside me. What to do, what to do? My head pounded with panic, desperate for a clue of how I could get out of this pickle.

  A movement caught the corner of my eye, and I jerked my head to look forward. Coming straight for me was a Bosu Zoku, only ten feet away. He jumped at me, reaching forward to grab me and pin me to the ground. I had no time to move, or anything. I was sure it was over.

  But then, time slowed. As the lunging man got within inches, he suddenly stopped, and then was swung back violently, tumbling over and over until he knocked over two Bosu Zoku just climbing onto the top of the train. All three of them fell.

  A surge of relief ripped through me from my head to my toes.

  It was back.

  The Shield.

  Why wasn't The Shield protecting me from the wind like it had the cold and snow back in that frozen world in the Blackness? There must be some good to it, something in the wind that was to help me. I barely had the thought before I was surrounded.

  They couldn't hurt me because of The Shield. The relief of that thought was like being told by your doctor that so sorry, what we thought was a terminal illness turned out to be a simple case of bad gas.

  But a big portion of my confidence had been forever altered. I now knew that The Shield was not all-powerful, despite what the Givers had led me to believe. With the Sounding Rod bound to go off at any time, I needed to do something. And the worst of all—I knew my family was in the hands of the Bosu Zoku, and that there was just no way I could risk trying to rescue them right then because I'd be dead in the water if the Rod decided to go off.

  I was surrounded but not in danger. I was all-powerful but powerless. Maybe my head snapped from the pressure, maybe some wisdom I didn't know about took over, but I then made a decision, and acted on it.

  Turning toward the back of the train, wobbling in the wind, looking like a drunk man, I took off running. A couple of Bosu Zoku tried to stop me, only to be knocked aside by the power of The Shield. From the corner of my eye I noticed one fall off the train, the other barely hanging on to one of the ropes.

  I ran and ran, leaping from car to car like some jumpingbean superhero, not caring about the Bosu Zoku pursuing me from behind. I reached the last train car, but didn't slow down. Instead, I picked up speed, running at a full sprint, straight for the very end of the train and whatever lay below.

  I could imagine the shocked expressions, universal to all languages, of the men in black and red bandannas as my wiry little body jumped with every ounce of my might from the back of the train and into oblivion.

  Two thoughts popped into my head as I reached lift-off. First, I realized that we were right smack in the middle of a huge bridge, hundreds of feet above a valley of rocks and rushing water. Second, I sure hoped the Sounding Rod stayed quiet for just a wee bit longer.

  The direction in which I jumped would have made me miss the train track altogether and fall straight down into the valley, but just as my feet left the train, a blast of wind came out of nowhere from below, strong enough to make me land on the tracks. And that landing was the oddest sensation I'd ever felt.

  I once saw a movie about a boy who was allergic to everything under the sun, and had to live inside of a big plastic bubble. Now I'm sure it's not too nice to make fun of people who really do have to live in a bubble, but this movie was pretty funny. That kid went everywhere in the world, and nothing could hurt him because the bubble would protect him. If a bus hit him, he'd just shoot into the air and then come down and bounce a few times but be totally okay. I laughed like a deranged hyena when I saw that movie. But no lie, that's exactly what The Shield was like when I fell from that train.

  I had to have been going a million miles an hour. As I fell toward the tracks, I could see the bridge rushing up to me. I tried to get my feet under me, but it was useless. I was heading straight down, front-first, ready to do the biggest belly flop in history. Except there wasn't any water, only steel and wooden railway ties. I closed my eyes and waited for the crushing smash of my skin and bones colliding with the bridge.

  But The Shield held true, and inches before I was smashed to bits, it rebounded me backward, and I shot back into the air about twenty feet, repelled by the power of The Shield.

  I felt like Superman.

  I was bubble-boy.

  I came back down and bounced again, shot up into the air by The Shield. This time I only went about ten feet up. The next time, five. By that time, I was okay, and landed nice and easy on the old feet. Once again, The Shield had saved my hide.

  I caught my breath, allowed the adrenaline to calm down, and sat down on the tracks. The reality of everything that had just happened hit me, and it felt like a million tons of granite had just been poured on my head. My family was gone, once again kidnapped by ruthless thugs of the Shadow Ka. Just because Raspy was gone obviously meant nothing. They were everywhere, and my blocking of the Black Curtain had been a useless waste of time.

  My family was gone. For all I knew, they might be dead. I was in the middle of a foreign country where I couldn't speak the language. I didn't have any idea where I was. I had no food. I had no money. I had no possible way of knowing where my family would be taken to, if they were even meant to stay alive. And I certainly didn't know where that stupid magic book was located. I had absolutely, positively not one idea of what I should do or where I should go. The situation had turned hopeless.

  Not to mention the fact that I was on the middle of a huge bridge, with another train coming down the tracks, straight toward me.

  Shaken from my sad stupor, I yelped like a little dog and shot back to my feet. You'd think in our modern society they'd build train bridges that were nice and safe with a little walkway for nice boys who fall off trains and sit there and mope until another one comes by to run him over. Who knows how long I had been sitting there, but it didn't matter anymore. I was on a bridge that had nothing but tracks, and I was smack dab in the middle. I didn't need to be a genius to calculate that the train would reach me before I reached the end of the bridge.

  My grandpa (on my mother's side) used to say something about a frog and boiling water and frying pans and jumping with fire, or something like that, and I never had a clue what he was talking about. But I had the strangest thought as I stared at this speeding bullet of a train that maybe old grandpa was talking about this kind of hairy situation, because it seemed impossible that I had not noticed the thunderous noise of the train sooner.

  Now, I knew that The Shield would protect me. That wasn't my concern. The main thing to worry about was how the train would react when it hit The Shield. I didn't want to be responsible for sending a train full of nice Japanese people to a fiery death in the valley below.

  I turned and ran, but this was only a temporary thing. I knew I couldn't make it. But what else was I to do? The only other alternative was to jump into the valley, and I was flat-out sick and tired of jumping off things.

  The roar of the train was getting closer and closer. The driver must've just noticed a little foreign boy on his tracks because suddenly a loud horn sounded, and the sound of screeching brakes and the smell of burnt metal filled the valley air. I ran and I ran, hoping against hope that maybe the train could stop in time after all.

  I had made it about halfway to the end of the bridge, but there was still a good football field or so to go. I chanced a look behind me, and the train was rushing up fast, bellowing its horn and grinding its brakes. But it wasn't going one bit slower. I pushed, I grunted, I tried to think myself faster.

  My foot snagged on a railway tie, and I flew forwards, face first, and landed on my stomach, right in the middle of the tracks. It didn't hurt because of The Shield, but that didn't matter too much at the time, because the train was almost on me.

  Suddenly reminded of the first time I saw a Shadow Ka in the Blackness, I did the crabwalk, scooting backward as fast as I could down the tracks.

  The train was forty yards away.

  I got back onto my feet and started to run again. I looked back.

  Thirty yards.

  I stopped running.

  Twenty yards, no sound of brakes. The driver had given up. Today a poor foreign boy would be tragically run over by a speeding train.

  Fifteen yards.

  I just couldn't bring myself to jump.

  Ten yards.

  From somewhere within, from somewhere deep down inside of me, from a special place I can only thank my parents for, I found a little morsel of courage, and grabbed onto it with every part of my mind and heart.

  I jumped from the tracks, feeling the passing wind of the speeding train brush my hair from behind as I descended into the misty depths.

  Yeah, I was really, really getting sick of jumping from things.

  Have you ever fallen from an airplane without a parachute? For that matter, have you ever fallen through the air even with a parachute? Ever decided to jump off of a building just for the heck of it? Okay, probably not, and neither had I. So I wasn't quite prepared for what it felt like to suddenly free fall for hundreds of feet. It was fun, sickening, exciting, terrifying, and downright stupid all wrapped up into one.

  The air whipped against my clothes and me as I fell, still making me wonder about how strange it was that The Shield would repel snow and cold but not wind. My heart was in my throat, and my stomach was somewhere in my brain. I couldn't breathe, and the terror of seeing the ground rush toward me at a million miles an hour was just about too much to handle. It didn't help that the ground was full of rushing water and rocks, not nice things to fall onto from the sky.

  But, of course, as scary as the whole ordeal was, deep inside of me I knew that The Shield would protect me.

  It couldn't have been more than a few seconds, but it sure seemed like a month or two went by as I fell. As fast as the rushing wind and upcoming ground were, it still kind of felt like I was going in slow motion. Weird.

  But then, I hit the ground, right in the middle of the rushing, white-water river and the jagged rocks. I actually felt myself get a little wet before The Shield bounced me backward, back into the air. This time I went way higher than I had when I jumped off of the train. I flew up and forward down the river a ways, and ended up bouncing a few more times before I finally settled down and landed in the middle of the river.

  The Shield never ceased to blow my mind away. Normally, in the middle of that huge, fast, gushing river, I probably would have been swept away until I hit a big rock, passed out, and drowned to death. But The Shield protected me.

  It immediately formed a protective barrier around me, so that I was getting wet and everything, but as I rushed down the river it would protect me from sharp rocks or logs or dangerous waterfalls or anything that could hurt me. It was like I was in a circular, rubber balloon boat, bouncing around on the river and having just a dandy of a time.

  In fact, once I settled in for the ride, it was the most fun I'd had in quite a while. I even let out a few yelps here and there, and kind of let myself forget what a horrible mess of a life I was in. It wasn't long before I felt guilty that I would even think of having fun so soon after my family had been stolen from me.

  Anyway, there I was, rushing down this huge river, bouncing around, going a mile a minute, when something caught the edge of my vision that wiped my thoughts clean. I jerked my head around, looking for what I thought I had just seen. It had only been a brief glimpse, but I was sure that my eyes had just seen something very profound. I knew I had to get myself to the side of the river somehow. I had to confirm what my eyes had just told my brain.

  Maybe they had been tricked.

  I started to roll my body, and push out and push off with my hands, trying to slowly move out of the current and toward the riverbank. It was hard, and The Shield kept getting in my way because it didn't want me to get hurt. But before long I remembered that my brain was the boss of that Shield, and it finally let me get a little risky with my hands and knees, so that by the time I finally got myself over to the same side of the river where I'd had the sighting, my body was all skinned up from the roughness and rocks of the river bottom. I also felt ready to collapse from the effort it had taken. White water body surfing was tough work.

  I dragged myself out of the river, soaked to the bone like a skinny-dipping sea lion, and plopped down on the rocky shore to get a breather. I looked back upriver to see if I could spot anything, but there were too many trees.

  After a couple of minutes, I got up and started winding my way through all of the trees and bushes and fallen logs, hiking back up the way I'd just come. I couldn't help but think how odd it was that I was in the middle of Japan, hiking by a river, soaking wet, looking for a …

  There it was.

  I'd been right.

  My eyes hadn't fooled me.

  A huge, gangly tree that dwarfed all the ones around it, stood right by the river, like it was the grandpa of every tree in the forest. There was one monster branch in particular that hung out toward the river. From that big branch, two chains were hanging, with a wooden board attached to the ends, tipped at an angle and very old, looking like it might fall off at any minute.

  On the board, there was some fresh white paint, having obviously been put there very recently. The paint spelled out some words, and it was those words that had given me a start in the river, but seeing it right in front of me, being confirmed as real, was just too much.

  On a riverbank in the middle of Who-Knows-Where Japan, I sat and stared at an old wooden sign, wondering how it could be possible and what in the heck it meant.

  The sign said

  Jimmy Fincher

  enter the fire, turn to the cold

  express your desire, you must be bold

  the fire will kill you, there is no doubt

  the Ice will fill you, the other way out

  beware the rift, see it and die

  steps be swift, do not turn the eye

  you have three days

  I stared and I stared. I confirmed to my own brain over and over that my name was indeed Jimmy Fincher, and that it was definitely painted on that sign. There was no way on earth it could be a coincidence. The odds of there even being a Jimmy Fincher in Japan were slim enough, but the chances of a sign addressed to him by a river that I just happened to fall into were completely zero. I continued staring, seeming to think that somehow that would eventually trigger something to explain this unbelievable sign.

  After a while, I noticed something odd on the ground.

  Below the sign, there was a little pool of white paint, slowly seeping into the dirt and trickling down to the river. From that pool of paint, there were little drops and splotches along the ground, leading down a path that went into the woods. I figured that meant one of two things. Either the painter of the message was very messy, or he or she, or it, wanted me to follow the trail of paint for some reason. Either way, I decided that following the paint was the only way I'd have any questions answered.

  A twig snapped to my left.

  I quickly looked in that direction, and just barely caught some movement. There, in the darkness behind the trees, was something that seemed to stand out, a massive shape that didn't quite seem like a tree. Keeping my eyes glued to the spot, I stepped a little closer, momentarily forgetting about the unbelievable sign addressed personally to me.

  The shape, the shadow, moved back. With a quick intake of breath, I stopped. Whatever stood there was way too big to be human, and suddenly I didn't care too much to know what it was. I stepped back.

  The shadow moved again, and this time something was coming out of the dark toward me, very slowly.

  It was a hand, a very hairy hand, a very large hand. Definitely not human.

  Losing my breath, I stumbled backward and fell onto the ground. The hand jerked back into the woods, and with a swoosh of air and moving branches, the shadowed owner of the hairy hand vanished into the trees above it. A path of shaking trees was the only sign of the creature's departure into the dark forest.

  Going into the woods no longer seemed like such a good idea. Catching my breath, standing up, I tried to figure out what I'd just seen. It had been huge, absolutely huge. The shape of the shadow in the trees had been more than twice as tall as my dad.