Why is the fence electric? There aren’t any warning signs. Forget winning the competition, Christian is going to sue them. Get his money that way. Start his own company. Pissed off and shaky, Christian examines the tower. It looks like a guard tower, now that he thinks about it.
Maybe he didn’t really see someone in it. Maybe it was his brain, sparking from the electric shock, sending random images. It’s risky, he knows it, but he reaches out and touches the bottom of the tower, anyway.
Not electrified.
“I’m gonna throw that son of a bitch right out of it,” Christian mutters to himself as he begins climbing. He’s a good climber, and even with the lingering muscular twitches, he’s halfway before he has to stop and rest. He looks up.
He was right. There’s a person in the tower.
Before his brain can process what the person is holding, the shot rings out. Christian drops to the ground, and the pain of the fall can’t claim a spot in his brain with the hole in his shoulder demanding all his attention.
Shot.
He’s been shot.
He stands up, staggering, hand pressed against the bullet wound. There’s no space for anger, for questions, for anything other than the need to run. He staggers back into the park, an animal keen of terror and pain coming out of his mouth.
Christian pushes straight through, ignoring the paths. The paths all lie. He stumbles and careens but somehow aims better than he had this morning. If he can get back to camp, if he can get there, there will be help. He’ll be okay.
He’ll be okay, because he has to be okay.
He has to be.
At last, he breaks free of the grasping branches and finds himself face-to-face with a terrified and shocked Ian.
“What the hell?” Ian shouts.
Christian falls. Ian crouches over him, saying something that Christian can’t understand. A shadow appears behind Ian. It blocks the sun, and Christian is hit with a sudden clarity that electricity would have been a better way to go, after all.
* * *
—
The sun goes down, blanketing the world in a darkness that does little to soften it. The spotlight doesn’t turn on. Ava, LeGrand, and Brandon use Ava’s sense of direction and make it back first.
“Holy shit,” Ava breathes out like a prayer. Her heart races, trying to flee its fragile cage of bone and flesh. She throws the spotlight switch, illuminating the way, then turns and watches the path behind them, waiting. Hoping. Refusing to look at the overturned table, the scattered cots, the blood.
The blood.
“Come on, Mack,” Ava whispers. “Please.”
* * *
—
Ava, not feeling at all beautiful, is exhausted. She can sense the resentment radiating off of Jaden as they trudge back toward the camp, like the Axe Body Spray of aggression, stinging her nose and making her heart skitter with anxiety. Their plans today—to follow the others and figure out a way to set them up like Jaden did with Sydney—didn’t result in anything. Instead, they ended up out of time to find their own good spot. The trunks of one of the tortured topiaries had grown around a hollow center, and they squeezed inside. In another circumstance, maybe it would have been romantic. Hot, even.
It had been hot, but not the good kind. She’s sick of Jaden, sick of the way he walks a step ahead of her always, sick of the way he didn’t even go far enough away for her not to hear and smell him peeing as soon as it was dark enough to climb out of the tree. Sick of him for not waiting for her to pee before they started back.
Sick of herself for choosing him.
She’d had other options. She could have stayed friends with Mack and the other Ava. She could have reached out to sweetheart Brandon, or even annoying Christian. Not LeGrand, still. He gives her the creeps. But she made her bed—cot, in this case—and now she has to sleep in it. She chose what was familiar because familiarity felt comfortable, but this comfortable has no comfort.
Lost in her own misery, she doesn’t even notice the state of the camp. Doesn’t have a chance to, though, with the other Ava launching herself in a snarling whirl of fists at Jaden.
“What the fuck did you do?” the other Ava demands, Jaden already on the ground, arms up to protect his face as the other Ava straddles him, pinning him down.
“Get off him!” Ava tries to tug them apart, but Brandon, sweet Brandon, takes her firmly by the elbow and turns her around.
“Oh,” Ava breathes.
It looks like a crime scene. The supplies table knocked over, contents scattered, some of it trampled and smashed. Half the cots have been flung aside. And in the center there’s a dark pool. A trail of dripping accusation leads up to it, and smears of horror lead away from it.