Page 44 of The Wild Zone

I marched to the courtyard’s central hearth and smiled tightly at the little girl as I tossed the note in. Fortunately, the girl asked no questions. Maybe she thought she was hallucinating me.

The note burned quickly with a green flame—nothing eerie about that at all—but its words lingered in my mind.

Go back. You’ve only scratched the surface.

I fiddled with the ring on my finger, no doubt the subject of the message.

Somehow, the note-writer knew that Grant and I had found the ring’s hiding spot. That meant we’d been watched. And this note meant I was still being watched. If what I’d been through so far was just “scratching the surface”…

My stomach turned loops. The ring suddenly felt too tight on my finger. I marched away from the hearth, tugging at the silver band to remove it. My panic and jerky motions made my knuckle start to swell. I couldn’t work the ring past it.

“Come on!” I grunted, stopping at a tree just beyond my cabin. “Come off!”

I twisted the ring from side to side, trying to wriggle it off my finger.

And then…my finger disappeared.

And my hand.

And my arm.

A wave of nothingness washed over me until my entire body was simply gone.

“Ohhh, no,” I whispered.

Harper had been right. I was invisible like Frodo Baguette!

I lost my equilibrium. I tried to steady myself against the tree, but I couldn’t judge where my hand was. I ended up crashing into the trunk with my shoulder. You don’t realize how much you depend on being able to see your own body until you can’t do it anymore.

The dizziness got worse. A force slammed into my skull, pushing its way into my brain.

Grainy images flashed before my eyes. Memories I’d worked so hard to bury.

First, I was standing on a soccer field as the opposing team cheered and my team shouted at me for scoring an own goal. But I wasn’t really listening. I was too busy watching Dad ride off on his motorcycle. Done with me.

Then I was using my ink-stained fingers to hold up a messy paper I’d finger-painted with Korean letters. Ones that spelled out Katie. Mom tsk-tsked and scolded me for getting so messy. My Korean wasn’t enough to overcome that.

Next, I was opening a drawer to shove in a package addressed to Dad and decorated with heart doodles. Across my doodles, someone had written Refused in permanent marker, and the post office had slapped a return to sender—refused stamp on it for extra insult. I could barely fit the package inside the drawer alongside all the other rejected ones.

Then the graininess cleared as I was plunged into a more vivid memory.

Olivia and I were in the backyard in our fencing gear, sparring with foils. She thrusted; I parried. She advanced aggressively, and I stumbled back.

With that break in my defense, Olivia lunged and touched me cleanly in the chest with the tip of her foil.

“Halt!” she announced proudly.

“You don’t call halt!” I complained. “The referee calls halt!”

I pointed at Mom, who was watching us from the porch swing.

Olivia rolled her eyes and gestured to Mom.

Mom, in turn, smiled like they were sharing some inside joke. “Halt.”

I growled and returned to an en garde position. As soon as Olivia did the same, I advanced several steps and thrust. Olivia dipped her wrist and whipped her arm to one side, using her foil to knock mine out of my hand.

“Halt!” Mom said this time.