Chapter 6: The Boy Who Doesn't Wave at Cameras

Twenty-two hours into SURVIVE Season 9, Kai Voss had built a shelter, filtered four liters of water, and identified three edible plant species from a field guide he'd memorized in the two weeks between his acceptance notification and departure. His engagement score was four hundred and twelve.

Caden Rhys's was two point three million.

The shelter was a lean-to, technically, though calling it that felt generous in the way that calling Ferris Falls a city felt generous—accurate by the narrowest possible definition, and not something you'd brag about at a dinner party. He'd lashed spruce boughs to a ridgepole between two trees at a forty-five-degree angle, the low end facing away from what he'd clocked as the prevailing wind direction based on the bent grass at the riverbank. It worked. That was the whole criteria. It worked, it didn't collapse, and he hadn't performed its construction for anyone.