Page 1 of The Wild Zone

1

I Do Target Practice with the Family (I’m the Target)

Some crisp fall night, you might find yourself stumbling through the woods, wearing a burlap sack over your head.

It won’t be a fashion choice.

Your hands will be tied behind you. Your wrists will burn from the ropes that bind them. You’ll probably have a spear pointed at your back, too, poking a hole through your favorite Super Junior T-shirt.

And as your captors cackle and prod you along, you will beg them for mercy…and a breath mint.

You do a whole lot of smelling your own breath inside a burlap sack. It’ll make you really wish you hadn’t eaten a chili cheese dog for dinner.

Heck, while my fellow abductees and I were being force-marched through the woods, I wished I’d done lots of things differently.

I wouldn’t have agreed to come to this unhinged training camp, for one thing. I wouldn’t have been so trusting when my new cabinmates surrounded me, grinning like hyenas, and then jumped me and bound my hands behind my back.

And yesterday, when this whole nightmare started, I wouldn’t have made my last words to my older sister Olivia so harsh. Yes, at the time, she’d been rudely yanking my participation ribbons off the wall to make room for more of her first-place medals, but I shouldn’t have called her a heartless harpy. She’d looked so hurt—eyebrows scrunched together, mouth turned down like a sad banana.

And Mom? She’d raged, “Katie Kim, don’t you ever speak to your sister like that!”

I’d called Olivia lots of worse things before, but whatever. I hated that my last memory of Mom and Liv was of them looking so disappointed in me. Especially since I wasn’t sure I’d ever see them again. They were my only real family, not counting my dad.

Which brings me to the next thing I would have done differently. Before I left home, I really should have tucked my dad’s dagger in my boot.

It was about the only gift I had gotten from the deadbeat. The last time I’d seen him was when he came to one of my elementary school soccer matches, but he left after I scored a goal for the other team. I guess he didn’t want to see if I’d score them any more goals.

Which I did do.

Mom assured me that I wasn’t the problem. Dad just had a lot on his plate, what with his continually stirring up conflicts between countries. They didn’t call him the god of war for nothing.

That’s right.

My dad is Ares, which makes me a demigod—half mortal and half god.

So really, it was my dad’s fault that I was at this camp.

Anyway, the day Dad abandoned my soccer game, he’d left a note for Mom, along with a dagger for me. The weapon wasn’t very fancy, and it wasn’t very his. His note said I stole this from a punk named Peleus. Give it to the rugrat, if you think she’d ever be able to use it without cutting herself.

Nice vote of confidence, Dad.

At least if I’d brought the dagger, it would have helped me feel braver during our jaunt through the forest. Instead, I was forced to calm my nerves by making a mental grid of our surroundings.

That was kind of my thing—my way of containing a problem before it got overwhelming. Even with a bag over my head, I had a good sense of spatial relations. I could imagine where I was on an x- and y-axis and almost always find my way around.

It was a pretty useless skill most of the time, but it helped me stay oriented in the woods at night. Also, never challenge me to a game of Battleship. You’ve been warned.

Where we’d started our forced march, at the cabins, I’d labeled J30. Where we were now was C12.

As we stumbled and slid over rocks and wet pine needles, I cataloged all sorts of creepy, scary landmarks. At F7, we’d passed a log where something inside growled low and menacing. At C9, we splashed through a slimy creek. At C11—

“Root,” warned Grant, the captive walking in front of me.

I was so focused on gridding, I didn’t register what he was saying until it was too late.

The toe of my right boot hooked under a tree root, and I pitched forward. With my hands bound behind me, I couldn’t use them to break my fall, so my face did it for me.

Rug burns ain’t got nothing on burlap.