The Sowing

Once all the obstacles have been cleared, each Recruit must successfully deactivate the transmitter that is programmed to detonate explosives placed within his or her Incentive. The last Recruit to make it through will only be allowed to deactivate one of his or her Incentives, making the choice as to which. Good luck. And may the best Recruit prevail.

I feel like I’m disconnected from reality, as if a bomb has already gone off in my own head. All around me, I can see the meaning of those words dawning on everyone else’s face. Corin takes a step closer and shoots me a panicked look.

Explosive charges within each Incentive? No wonder we were all so tired this morning, even though we were anxious about the Trials. They drugged us—probably spiked our meager dinners—to put us to sleep while they implanted micro-bombs inside each of us.

The lights of the obstacle course brighten. Spread over the entire field, spaced just a few feet apart from each other, are the writhing bodies of prisoners, at least a hundred. They sprout waist-up from the ground like a harvest of withered crops, battered and bloodied. Flashing silver discs are crammed into the spaces in the ground between them, bathing their faces alternately in rotting green and bloody red. Their cries and moans are amplified through the speakers.

You must time your steps through the course so as to only step on the circular discs when they are lit green.

Dahlia shoots me a look before joining Rodrigo and Leander in front of the projected images of the Recruits. Together they stare into the faces of the strangers who will decide their fate.

Commence… now!

DING!

Cage and the others spring forward.

The five of them scramble across the field, leaping from one green disc to another as the prisoners shriek all around them. How they can concentrate with all that unnerving screaming, I’ll never know.

My heart boomerangs inside my rib cage. So far, the five Recruits are neck and neck, with Boaz and Crowley at a slight advantage and Cage and the rest not far behind.

Drusilla leapfrogs across one of the prisoners to take the lead. Arrah lunges forward, never leaving Drusilla’s side, tracking her progress. Drusilla lands on an emerald disc—

Just as it turns crimson.

Arrah drops to her knees and screams.

“Drusilla!” Mr. Ryland shouts.

Crackle!

Drusilla leaps up just as a burst of arcing energy erupts from the disc. It grazes her right foot and sizzles through the air like a whip, slashing through the surrounding prisoners and dismembering their bodies, which fall to the ground in clumps.

Then Drusilla stumbles onto the next green disc, clutching her foot, her face in agony. It looks like it’s still attached, but who knows how deep it’s been cut. She teeters, her body swaying to the left, right next to a blinking red disc…

Ryland clutches his chest.

“Be careful!” Arrah’s scream pierces the chamber.

Drusilla drops—

“I gotcha!” Cage swoops in on the other side and scoops her in his arms. “Hang on!” Bearing her weight, he jumps to the next disc just as the one he was standing on starts blinking red. Boaz emerges from a smoldering pile of body parts, nursing an injured arm with a long, ugly, smoking gash carved into it.

Unlike the time I went through the Trials, this whole thing’s rigged for the Recruits to die. They’re facing dismemberment and the rest of us are wired to explode. The prisoners are just a grisly bonus added to the mix.

On the field, Preshea is closing the gap between herself, Crowley, and Boaz, leaving Cage and the injured Drusilla trailing behind. I can tell from the exhaustion on Cage’s face that the burden of leaping from sphere to sphere while carrying Drusilla is taking its toll on him.

“Can you walk?” he asks her.

She grits her teeth and nods. “Think so.”

He sets her on the closest green disc and they both dive for the next one, narrowly escaping the lethal red flashes.

The discs are flashing faster now, speeding up with each passing minute, making it that much harder and deadlier to get across the field. The half-buried prisoners are wailing louder, their screams intensifying with each illuminating strobe of the discs in front of them.

Boaz lets loose a guttural yelp as he sails through more flying body parts, his cheek bearing a smoking scorch mark, the price of his temporary victory over death.

“It’s okay… it’s okay…” Tristin is clutching Corin close, trying to comfort him and keep his attention diverted, but the kid’s in a frenzy now, all pretense of being a badass long gone.