Body Games (A Games Novel) by Jill Myles, Jessica Clare Read Free Book Online Page B

I’d get back to camp and there’d be no fire. Whatever. I kept my steps calm as I took the tiny map in hand and began to follow the marked path labeled on it. Inwardly, my heart was hammering. Near water, it had said. Near water. That wasn’t much of a clue, considering we were on an island surrounded by water…but the fact that it was tied to the canteen made me wonder if it was talking about the well instead. I’d start my search there. A forked tree shouldn’t be that hard to find.
    Excitement surged through me. Pandora’s box! They sure were making it easy to find. A clue on day one, and an obvious one. It was evident that they wanted it to be found. Did that mean that there was something bad inside it?
    Did I care? Not really. Things couldn’t get much worse in my opinion.
    ~~ *** ~~
    It took me a half hour to find the well, and it was no more than a rain-barrel dug into the ground and covered with a cutesy island-motif top. The lid had BOIL ME FIRST carved into it. I wondered, if there wasn’t natural water on the island, how hard would it be to fill the barrel with drinking water instead of whatever this was? But I supposed boiling water was part of the Endurance Island challenge. Canteens filled, I slung them over my neck and started to look for a forked tree.
    I searched for two hours, both near the well and as far as I dared wander. No forked tree. Dismayed, I buried the clue below a tree with spidery roots and headed back to the beach. I was tired, sunburned, and hungry, and I’d need to do something about shelter if I planned on sleeping tonight. The canteens now full of water I couldn’t drink, I headed toward camp, hoping to be greeted by the smell of smoke from a nice fire.
    No such luck. When I returned, Kip was laid out on the beach, soaking up the sun and enjoying himself. Nothing had been done at camp.
    Gritting my teeth, I set to work. First, fire. Then, I could boil water. After that, I’d have to look for shelter of some kind. It was abundantly clear to me that one of us thought he was going to get by on charm alone. Come to think of it, he’d pulled the same stunt last time we’d played and I’d been too besotted to notice. Gullible, gullible Annabelle. Someday, you’d think I’d learn.
    So I gathered brush for tinder and dug a fire pit in the sand and lined it with rocks. I gathered wood. By the time I had a decent stack of firewood, the sun was going down and I was too tired to work on the fire itself. We had no flint, so I’d have to make a fire by rubbing sticks together - good ol’ friction. That required a lot more energy than I had at the moment.
    With the last of my strength, I went to the edge of the beach and picked up a coconut. They were everywhere, luckily, but I knew that they wouldn’t last. Still, it’d do for today. I’d gotten pretty good at cracking coconuts the last time I played, and I had it open with two well-placed swings. Coconut juice began to dribble onto the sand and I grabbed it and tipped it back to drink the sweet liquid.
    “Hey, you going to save some of that for me?” Kip asked.
    I paused in my drinking long enough to respond. “Nope.” And I tipped the coconut back to get even more of the juice.
    “Bitch.”
    I ignored him. I drank all of the coconut’s juice - and it was a full one - and then cracked it open to eat the meat. I ate as Kip picked a coconut for himself and then proceeded to nearly chop his hand off trying to open it. I watched him, thinking that I should probably help him.
    Instead, I ate another piece of coconut.
    When I was done eating, I got up, rinsed my sticky hands in the ocean water, grabbed some palm leaves that were lying on the ground, found the box top, curled up, and tried to sleep.
    My first night on Endurance Island. No shelter, no water, no fire, and no Pandora’s Box. Kip as a partner.
    Yep, things were going great.

Chapter Six
    “Maybe I should have left her alone, but…I don’t know. I saw that, and my