First off, a few excuses. I have literally been snowed under with assignments and school work, and then I literally went to the snow! A week and a half of skiing was great, but now I'm back, and writing again. Hope you enjoy it, and as always, please read and review.

Normal people, when they wanted to wake up at a particular time, utilized an object known as an 'alarm'. These devices could be set to produce noise at a selected time, to wake the owner from their slumber, and ensure they were not late to a prior commitment.

No one ever accused Alex of being normal. Partially because he spent very little time with too few people to be actually accused of anything, but mostly because it was tacitly untrue.

He woke up at 6.30 AM, just two hours after he'd gone to bed. This wasn't unusual. In fact, it was the norm. Part of SAS training was teaching the body to perform optimally on little or no sleep when it was required. Alex just took it the extra step; he never slept more than two hours.

He had asked his MI6 physician about his sleep patterns, querying whether or not it was dangerous, so the man had taken a blood sample and run some tests. The conclusion had been that his genetic make-up allowed him to function to the same standard as if he'd had eight hours on only two.

The man had used the word 'freak of nature', but Alex had simply shrugged. The difference between having 22 hours and 12 hours in a day was a considerable amount of work and gave him time to take a load off, and relax a little. When no one was looking, of course.

And he couldn't deny, nothing else in his life was normal.

Alex Rider's fitness regime in the mornings was both intense and lengthy. It began with a meal of carbohydrates, involving fruits and wheats, and finished with a large protein shake. In between, there was an hour made up of 60 minutes of cardiovascular work and 40 minutes of weights and bodyweight work. It was his routine, and he stuck to it every morning.

Then it was into the shower, pack his bag, and leave himself enough time to get to school without driving. Because like he had done ever since he could remember, Alex rode his bike to school.

The morning air was chilly, and he rubbed his arms gently as he walked down his front steps. His keys were in his bag, which took him a second to locate, but once he had, he clicked the remote on the keychain, and the garage door opened.

Inside was his pride and joy. Whenever he described it as such (which had been once), everyone (Tom) assumed he meant the car. Indeed, he was in ownership of a black Mercedes-Benz CL65 AMG, which MI6 had specially selected for him. Tom had asked why he didn't drive a Ferrari or something similar if he had the money, but there were definite rules regarding vehicles that could be seen entering and exiting Royal and General on Liverpool Street. Nothing that would draw undue attention was permitted.

While Alex loved speed, and the sensation of the world being a blur as he streaked past, he far preferred it on two wheels as opposed to four. While his contract explicitly forbade him from riding a motorbike in his personal time, bicycles were not mentioned.

Alex had bought a new bicycle for himself as a 17th birthday present, and was he proud of it. It was a 2010 Pinarello Prince road bike, in white, red and black, with a carbon frame and all the trimmings. Unbeknown to his fellow students, the bike that sat locked up in the sheds during the day was probably worth as much as any of the students vehicles in the car park.

MI6 had expressed considerable concern about Alex riding his bike to and from Brookland, slightly more than a mile away. If he was travelling at a constant speed, such as when he rode in on the weekend occasionally, it took about five minutes. In the London early morning traffic, it took closer to fifteen.

MI6 had lost out on the cycling argument, however. He'd threatened to bring a lawyer to go over his contract to see if there stipulations about riding bikes, because he knew there weren't. He would certainly be getting someone to go over his next contract, however. Who knew what clauses they would try to work into it if left unchecked?

Alex didn't mind the traffic. To him, it was all part of the challenge, trying to get from A to B as quickly as possible, without getting run over. If he annoyed a few early morning commuters, so be it.

The process of exiting his house took five minutes, as it always did, but it was now so routine that he did it almost without thinking. He could remember when he'd first got it and he'd spent a whole day memorising every single element of the setup, and then destroying all documentation of its existence. That had involved an incinerator that he'd purchased which he then taken to the scrap yard, and personally watched being crushed into a small metal cube, which he'd then bought, and had melted down in turn.

Paranoia about personal security? There was no such thing.

He slipped into his bike shoes, which stayed attached to the clips on his pedals, and adjusted his sportsbag strap across his shoulders. His final port of call was to strap on his "Met Ultimalite" helmet, the name meaning nothing to him. All he knew was that it was a mean shade of matte black, and so light that it would blow away in the lightest breeze.

Alex stamped on the pedals, his thighs straining and stretching his bike shorts as he flew down the centre line marking, ignoring the blaring horns as he raced across an intersection and south towards Brooklands. The roads were insanely crowded, as they were every day, and he made far better progress on his bike than he ever would in a car. Pulling out across the oncoming lane, weaving between stationary cars, he approached the final intersection before the school, and he saw his path was about to be blocked by a bus as it pulled out from a stop. Instinctively he bunny-hopped his road bike onto the pavement, and whizzed around a street vendor to rejoin the fracas of London's early morning traffic.

He was surrounded by other students as he cruised through the school gates, his helmet hanging from his handlebars.

"Rider! No riding your bike inside the school grounds! I've told you a thousand times!"

Mr. Redford, his biology teacher shouted at him as he wheeled past him. School on a Monday morning; it was a strange place for Alex to imagine, let alone attend.

Alex didn't have to be at Brookland, in fact, according to MI6, Alex didn't have to be in school at all. School was a waste of their valuable assets time, as far as they were concerned. Ms. Jones however had insisted that Alex received an education, and he had agreed. Intelligence of all forms was required to do what he did, and while his Spanish class was a bit of a waste of time given that he spoke it better than the woman who taught it, biology he found surprisingly useful. So Alex Rider attended school five days a week whenever possible, and it was considered very unfortunate that he had to travel away for up to a fortnight or even a month at a time to receive treatment for his mystery ailment.

This news about the mystery ailment had been 'accidentally' let slip by Tom, at Alex's request. He knew Tom was excited about the prospect of assisting an operation or simply helping keep Alex safe, and he was eternally grateful for that. Alex didn't have many friends, in fact, no one aside from Tom really, and Tom recognised the difficulties involved in being Alex and had stuck by him. He was immensely grateful for this tenuous anchor to reality that his best-friend provided.

The bike shed was in a corner of the schools vast expanse of concrete, and Alex freewheeled across the playground, weaving in and out of the student body, many of whom stared at him. Alex chained his bike up in the far corner, like he always did, with a specialised carbon fibre super-strand chain lock with a triple code lock on it. He'd got Smithers to put together the chain after he'd discovered someone trying to steal his bike only a week after he'd bought it.

The young man, who had not even had the decency to be a student, had ended up with a broken arm and a not so temporary limp, but Alex had learnt his lesson; it didn't matter where he was, on an assignment or answering his front door for the girl scouts, trust no one. Then again, according to Tom, everyone was so terrified of him that he didn't think he had much to fear from his classmates.

Alex's relationship with the student body could be described as variable, at best. They all thought (with the exception of Tom, who knew) that he was weird, and had a reputation for violence. For Alex's part, he thought they were all superficial brats whose arrogance would have been unwarranted if they'd been the last person on earth, let alone one of twenty-five students and a teacher in a biology class.

Still, he mused, as he wandered towards the front stairs, things could be worse. All these students would be picking potential colleges and universities in the months to come, deciding on their futures, worrying about costs, rent, living expenses and everything that came with graduating high school. Alex on the other hand was paid handsomely for doing the only job which could possibly keep him interested. It kept on his toes; he smiled to himself, fingering his 9mm Beretta under his shirt as he did so.

Attending school with a loaded weapon was an issue MI6 had nearly torn itself apart over. Ms. Jones naturally railed against the idea when it had first been proposed by Alex, but the attack on Jack Starbright's brother had changed everything. Alex was a legitimate target no matter what the circumstance, and MI6 had been shown they couldn't effectively protect him against all potential threats.

As he wandered through the bustling hallways, his mind transported him back to the nightmare that the Venice operation had been. It was almost unimaginable that such an operation had received a green light, but Alex had been angry, angrier than Mr. Blunt or Ms. Jones had ever seen, and they had reacted more to keep Alex happy than out of genuine concern.

Reconnaissance had led them to a single building in Venice, narrowing their search. But it was massive, three stories tall, covering an entire block, and as far as their infrared scanning could tell, at least two levels of basements. Storming the building through the front door was quickly ruled out. Alex had been able to cross it off the list as soon as he set eyes on the place.

It was simply too vast for there to be any chance of them reaching the hostage before the element of surprise had worn off. To begin with, they weren't even sure where he was being held.

It had taken nearly a week of stake-out, but eventually the team that had been assigned to assist with the operation, made a break through. They located a cleaning lady who worked in the building, and lived only a minutes' walk away. She had obviously been selected because she suffered from an impaired mental state, and struggled to communicate anything, let alone specifics.

But speech and brain injury specialists managed to translate some of what she babbled about after she was snatched during the night. Fortunately, there was little chance of there being more than one flaming red head in a Venetian building. It had been a tense six hour period, as she had to be back at the house, without any noticeable blemishes, to avoid arousing suspicion.

They had discerned that Tom Starbright was being held in the basement in the north-east corner of the building, and had struck quickly and viciously. Every threat was neutralized as soon as the hostage had been secured, ensuring no surprises on the way out. Tom Starbright was then bundled out onto a speedboat, which flew down Venice's waterways, and out into the open ocean, to rendezvous with a US aircraft carrier, from which he was flown back to the United States, to meet his waiting sister.

Italian authorities were up in arms about a dangerous gang which had conducted a fire fight in such built up area without anyone hearing or seeing anything, and MI6 had not seen fit to rectify this assumption. Certainly the use of weapons traditionally associated with Italian organized crime had helped them stay 'under the radar'.

Alex had never seen Jack again after she departed from Heathrow airport the day the news of her brothers kidnapping broke. The ransom note had been delivered to Alex's Chelsea home, but as per MI6's directions, Jack never got wind of it. If Alex hadn't intervened forcefully, he knew there was a strong chance they would have happily traded the life of the brother of Alex's housekeeper for one of their top agents. He had spoken to Jack over the phone days after Tom Starbright had landed in Washington, and she had told him what he already knew; she wasn't coming back, ever.

"Rider! Repeat to me what I just spent five minutes telling you!"

The snap back to the present was not a pleasant experience for Alex, as he realised he was staring out the window, daydreaming as his first lesson of the day passed him by. Everything seemed so mundane to him, and it was making him fidgety. However Ms. Jones now had a copy of his report and disciplinary report card on her computer, and he knew he would get an earbashing if he wasn't living up to standards. It was all part of his cover, they claimed, so he wracked his mind for a second.

"A Euclidean is a geometric object that has both a magnitude and direction. A Euclidean vector is frequently represented by a line segment with a definite direction, or graphically as an arrow, connecting an initial point A with a terminal point B and denoted by AB with an arrow above it."

Alex smiled at the slight look of disbelief on his teacher's face as he reeled off word for word what Mr. Bryant had said not thirty seconds beforehand. Powerful memory exercises for remembering codes and directions had left him with an agile mind that operated more like a bottle than a sieve. Despite having been thinking about somewhere across the other side of the continent, his instant recall was dialled in to pick up snippets of contextual noise and other stimuli, much the same as if he was conducting one conversation in a room while attempting to eavesdrop on another.

It had taken him many, many months to even begin to perform it to a slightly competent level, and he still struggled unless the rest of the room was silent, like it was now. It was like those brain-training games people had on their mobile phones, computers and mp3 players, but actually practical.

"It would be nice if you faced the front," Mr. Bryant said, sounding slightly deflated. Alex simply nodded, before brazenly returning to staring out of the window.

Good news and bad news. Good news first? I have finished all my assignments, and hopefully another chapter will be forthcoming very soon. Bad news? I have exams in a few weeks, and that's going to eat into any writing time I have. I also get shocking writers block, and blow hot and cold on stories in the space of about five minutes. It makes it very hard to get anything done. If you've got any hints for combating writers block, it would definitely be appreciated.