“So what do you think?” Amber says again, her voice a little less cheery. “The pack or the tent?”

Dawn chooses the pack. She’s sick of having to tie everything up in that stupid tarp, and anyway, it probably won’t rain, and even if it does, she has Lucas’s tent pegs to keep the tarp down.

That’s what she tells herself, anyway.

As Amber mentioned, part of Dawn’s reward is she gets some actual food this week, too, instead of just a sack of rice and whatever. Amber gives her six little boxes that look like Army surplus, and smiles another game show host smile that would be super irritating if Dawn wasn’t so sick of freaking rice.

Anyway, Dawn stuffs everything in her new backpack, and then she joins the rest of the Pack on the grass behind the buildings for pictures, and then it’s time to go again and Christian’s leading them to this week’s trail.

“You’re going to love this one,” he tells the group, grinning that ghoulish smile. “I promise, this week is going to be fun.”

Chapter 22

THE NEW TRAIL CHRISTIAN CHOOSES seems to go straight up through the rain forest, over like a million switchbacks on a steep, narrow path. Dawn’s new pack helps, but the straps dig into her skin through her yellow T-shirt as she climbs and she’s tired and she’s hungry and she thinks about Christian’s burrito and decides she would trade her new pack and her clean yellow shirts just for a bite of it.

But there are no burritos in Dawn’s future. There’s only hiking.

The new guy, Alex, turns out to be a pretty good hiker, just as Dawn suspected. She can see his yellow shirt keeping pace with Christian and Warden at the head of the Pack, even with no backpack and just a stupid tarp to carry his stuff.

Dawn kind of hates him already.

The Pack makes camp for the night on the shore of a little lake just below the tree line, beside a large boulder field that looks something like Mordor, rocks the size of dump trucks scattered around the mountain slope. A hundred feet up the slope, the trees end, and it’s just bare rock and grassy moss and a towering cliff face, high above. Beside it, a rocky spine of a ridgeline leads off behind the trees. The clouds are pouring over it as the last light of day disappears. It looks naked and barren and soulless; Dawn shivers and hopes they don’t have to go up there.

“Fart Mountain.” Lucas’s voice scares her out of her trance. Dawn stifles a shriek and spins around to shove him.

“Don’t do that,” she says, angry at first but not really, especially after Lucas gives her that big white smile. “Wait, what?” she says. “Did you say Fart Mountain?”