He made his move at 2:00 AM. The house was silent as he pulled off the plastic mask and disconnected the IV lines, tucking everything back into the wire basket that hung from the metal pole. Snowflake butted sleepily against his hand, expressing that she didn't think it was time to get up, but if her master did, then she certainly believed it was time for breakfast.

David closed the door on her as he headed downstairs.

He couldn't move as silently as his brothers, but he made his best effort. Contrary to expectation and literary requirement, the steps of the old house were not creaky at all. In a minute he was flicking on the light in the kitchen and crossing to the phone.

And that's when his plans were foiled.

He had noticed right away, the previous morning, that the phone was a rotary dial. That was okay; his mom had had one in their apartment until just a few years ago, when he had browbeaten her into getting a touchtone. He knew how to use a rotary dial.

What he hadn't realized from across the room was that the dial was missing. All the phone had was the sticker with the ten digits in their circular arrangement, and the pin that the dial should have spun on.

Damn it.

David leaned one hand against the wall, thinking. He could solve this. He had heard about this. He pressed his other hand to his face and tried to remember.

Some of the older members of the hacking forums he hung around on liked to talk about a kind of phone hacking they used to do. They had called it phreaking. They had ways of making free calls from payphones, ways of patching into corporate phone systems, even ways of spoofing numbers. David had made fun of them for being so old.

But they also had a way of dialing a phone that was locked, where you couldn't push the buttons or spin the dial. One afternoon when he'd had nothing better to do, David had read a long, patronizing post about how back in the old days, when hacking was hard and phreakers had had real skillz, they had used a trick called…

Tone dialing.

David pushed off the wall and picked up the receiver. "Here goes nothing," he muttered to himself.

Quickly, carefully, he tapped the lever the receiver hung on. Once for one, twice for two… through the ten digits of his home phone number.

The line started ringing. David held his breath.

"Hello?"

The voice didn't sound right, but he blurted out, "Mom, it's me."

The briefest pause, but it felt like an eternity. Had he gotten the wrong number?

"David, honey, where are you?"

He almost cried. Not his mom, but the right number.

He pressed the phone closer to his ear. "Aunt Terri, where's my mom?"

"Worried sick, is where she is," Terri said, without a hint of a reprimand. "She's out looking for you. D, honey, you need to call my cell phone. Do you know the number?"

"No," David said.

"Here you go," Terri said, and read him the number. David memorized it and repeated it back. "You got it," she said. "I'll see you soon, D."

David wasn't too sure about that, but he just said, "Thanks, Aunt Terri," and hung up.

So far, so good. He picked up the receiver again and painstakingly tone-dialed the other number. It rang three times before the line clicked into silence.

David looked at the receiver, not knowing what to do.

"How do I -" came a voice faintly. "Is it - Oh, it's on? Hello?"

With a strange sense of unreality, David brought the phone back to his ear. "Mom?"

"David?"

"Mom, you are so embarrassing."

It was like she didn't even hear him. "David, where are you? What happened? Are you okay?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm okay." He closed his eyes and leaned against the wall, with his whole body this time. "The guys have weird ideas about how sleepovers work. Listen - I don't know where we are, but we drove for what was probably a few hours and they said we were going to some place called Northampton."

"Northampton!" Mom shouted at someone. "They're in Northampton! David, how did you get to Northampton?"

"Some guy named Casey Jones gave us a ride," David reported.

"Yes!" Mom shouted. "Casey Jones! David, your mother is not so stupid after all."

"Okay," David said uncertainly. "But Mom, please find me. I think they're planning to kill me."

"What -" Mom started, and then there was a scuffle on the other end of the line before a completely different voice said, "They are not planning to kill you."

David blinked at the wall. "Mr. Splinter?"

"If they had been planning to kill you," Splinter said, "you would already be deceased, and please be assured that their own demises would be imminent."

"I don't like where this conversation is going," David said.

"What else can you tell us of your location?" Splinter asked.

"I don't know," David said. "There's nothing here. It's a big old house. A lake. Some woods."

"Have you gone north or south?"

David glanced at the kitchen doorway, afraid of being caught. "How should I know?"

"What have you observed about the stars?" Splinter pressed.

"I don't know." David glanced towards the window, but there was only his own reflection. "I can see them?"

"You have much to learn," Splinter said, which David thought was an entirely inappropriate comment, given the situation.

"Are you asking me to learn astronomical navigation?" he asked. "I just tone-dialed a rotary phone. That's all the ancient technology I can handle for one night."

A long silence. "Talk to your mother," Splinter said.

"David, how can we call you back?" Mom asked.

He was going to die from embarrassment - if his brothers didn't get him first. "Mom, you're on a cell phone. Just look at the call record." He glanced at the doorway again. "But don't call me back, okay? Use reverse look-ups to find the address."

"Reverse look-up?" said Mom. "What's a reverse look-up?"

"Mom -"

"Oh, never mind. April knows."

"You're with April?" David could feel his face flushing. "Tell her I said hi."

"You can tell her yourself," Mom said. "We'll be there as soon as we can."

"Okay." David squeezed the phone. "I love you, Mom."

A soft sigh. "I love you too, D."

"Bye."

"Bye."

Gently, he put the phone back in the cradle. Before tiptoeing back to bed, he liberated a huge roasting pan from a cabinet under the counter and filled it with food from the pantry. Smuggling this back to his room, he set it on the desk next to the baskets of medicines. Snowflake ignored him as he propped the chair under the doorknob again and threaded the IV needles back into his veins. He was ready for anything.

But afraid of what might happen in the morning, he barely slept.