Author's Note

In celebration of Amazon Prime Video's newest series Panic, I am thrilled to be teaming up with Amazon Prime Video and Wattpad to write this exclusive chapter that puts my characters from this story into the world of Panic!

I hope this chapter intrigues and inspires you to learn more about Panic. Visit the #PanicWritingContest on Wattpad for the chance to put your creative writing chops to the test and learn more about the show! 

To find out more about the contest, prizes, and how to enter, check out the #PanicWritingContest here: wattpad.com/AmazonPrimeVideo

Don't forget to watch the series premiere on May 28th, only on Amazon Prime Video, here: http://primevideo.com/

-X-

The Fashion of Love - Panic Bonus Chapter 

+

Panic had come back to Carp, Texas just as 17-year-old Sora Gallegos had for her senior year, and this year Sora intended to win.

It was minutes after nightfall in the dog days of Texas summer. The flies were buzzing as mosquitoes circled Sora, bitterly wishing she'd forgotten bug spray so they could bite. She paid them no mind. Her quarry was in sight. Half a mile out, the crown jewel of Spurlock's farm sprouted from the ground: a ranch-style farmhouse, three floors plus attic, a wraparound porch, and green-shuttered windows shouted wealth and prosperity in a Texas twang. The sprawling fields and contented livestock milling in nearby pastures spoke the rest.

Light spilled out from the second-floor windows like sunshine while every other was dark as a tar pit and about as forbidding.

Okay, she reminded herself, that's where I need to go. Nobody wanted to enter a dark room in a possibly booby-trapped house. Nobody without a plan anyway, and Sora always had a plan.

She skimmed the building plans she'd downloaded from the county clerk's website one more time before she shut off her phone screen. She didn't want anybody to see where she was headed, and she definitely didn't want them following her. She didn't like her chances left alone with a stranger in an unfamiliar house.

Three challenges in, Panic was nearly as cutthroat this year as it had been last year when two players died playing the game. The tires of her sister Hana's Range Rover had been slashed on her way to walk the Plan for challenge two. As always, it had been her suave knight in designer armor Ravi Misra to the rescue, there to ferry her to water towers and secure her continued participation in the game. Well, Sora didn't have a knight to rely on to help her out of a tight spot. She didn't even have many friends in the first place. She only had her books, her iPhone, and her wits. They would have to be enough. 

Keeping low to the ground as possible, Sora crept through the shadows abutting the long gravel driveway leading from the interstate through the Spurlock farmlands. Fall harvest was a long ways off and cash crops crowded the fields to above head-height, swishing toward the darkening sky as far as the eye could see, on either side of her. Giggling and cursing filled the air as other players navigated the maze of crops from the inside, getting instantly lost or deeply distracted by the deceptive promise of privacy. 

Sora donned cheap night vision goggles she'd bought with her birthday money and trotted onward. Stay away from the crops and the middle of the farm's private road. There, she was certain, lay booby traps. Nets, trip wires, sand pits, stuff Sora did not have time for if she wanted to get in, steal her evidence, and report it to the Diggins, the emcee, with time to spare.

She bunny hopped over a tension wire that blazed with a faint electrical charge on her gogges's heads-up display. Oh, they're playing dirty this year. She'd have to be on her guard. Come on, girm. You got this. You're gonna show everybody you're way more than Hana and Aiko's mousey baby sister. Then, you'll never have to see any of them again.

she grinned triumphantly in the dark and  then promptly face planted into a puddle of mud.

"Shi-!"

"Mm no, I think that's just regular mud. No smell." This sardonic voice was annoyingly familiar to her. Ravi Misra in the flesh. 

Sora climbed to her feet, stubbornly disregarding the hand being offered to her by her follower. She did not need her big sister's chronically unreliable 'soulmate' to help her in any way. She was fine on her own.

"So I guess I don't need to ask if you're okay after that fall." He was still following her. She wiped her muddy face on the sleeves of her black jacket. It would wash, it would wait. She limped along the dusk-darkened road, this time more cognizant of the disused apple crates littering the road's grassy shoulders. Ravi continued to bring up the rear, his amusement ringing louder than his footsteps. 

Laughter in the corn and cotton fields had yielded to quietly ruffling stalks and stems, their impenetrable blackness studded by eye searing flashlight beams. Sora yanked off her goggles to protect her vision, rapidly blinking away the resulting spots. She would never have given her position away like that. Didn't they know anything? Was she the only one here who wanted to win?

She stubbornly forged toward the large farmhouse looming ahead of her. Without asking, probably knowing she'd refuse on principle, Ravi fell into step beside her. Where Sora was only considered tall for a girl, Ravi was tall by most standards and she was annoyed at having to look up at him. He'd forsaken his typical uniform of an unseasonable peacoat and tailored slacks for likely designer jeans, a flannel button-down, and a basic white tee. He wore a heavy backpack just like her. Ravi was dressed to play.

She held him back. "Wait a minute, why are you here?"

"Isn't it obvious?"

"I wouldn't have asked if it was."

"You know me, I'm competitive." He shrugged. His expression was difficult to make out in the desolate blue before the stars pierced the gloom but she thought he might have been smiling. If life was a contest, by every conceivable metric Ravi Misra was winning. He had looks, wealth, health, connections, and talent; he didn't need Panic. 

Sora bodily dragged Ravi into a nearby drainage ditch to avoid a group of rowdy players tromping to the unlit front door of Spurlock's farmhouse. Together, they peeked over the grassy bank as one of the players, a brassy blonde in a letter jacket, tried to pick the lock and promptly got a nasty shock the instant he touched the doorknob. His pained shout was audible from a distance. 

"Yikes," Ravi muttered under his breath and maybe to her. "That's gonna leave a mark. We're not going through the front door, right? I kinda need my hands for things and I have a feeling there's more where that zap came from."

"What makes you think you get to come with me?"

"We're family."

"You dating my sister doesn't make you anything to me. You're a crappy boyfriend." Hana also happened to be a crappy girlfriend. They were a match made in hell, or Carp, Texas, as the case may be. And she thought it was.

"All right, so maybe I'm no good at being Hana's boyfriend, but I can follow orders  and I'm pretty sneaky." That explained so much about the boy who had brought nothing but chaos to the Gallegos sisters over the past four years. "What do you say? Partners?"  He offered Sora his hand. The newly unveiled moon reveals it to be as beautiful and strong as the rest of him.  Sora pretended the thought had never crossed her mind. She wasn't Hana, she wasn't leaping down this rabbit hole.

"On one condition: Tell me the real reason you want to win."

"You Gallegos girls never make anything easy, do you," he grumbled, immediately grabbing Sora when she made to leave him. They ducked away from the beam if headlights attached to a sheriff deputy's patrol vehicle. Players on the porch scattered like so many roaches behind tje refrigerator. "Okay, fine. Short answer is I want out of Carp, preferably on my own terms. I want to study fashion like my dad, not business like my mom wants. I want to make my own way. The prize money could help me do that. Good enough?"

Sora narrowed her eyes at him to take his measure. Even hunkered down in a ditch with him, he looked and sounded honest.  That didn't mean he was, of course, but she figured she'd come too far to shake him now. I better not regret this.

She spotted the deputy's patrol car circling the farmhouse in search of more players to round up for trespassing on private property. This was their chance. She swiped Ravi's hand and lugged him from the ditch the instant the deputy was out of sight.

"Good enough for me, fashion boy. Now, shut up and run!"

Their game was on.