A sharp stinging sensation shoots up my right arm.
'Ouch.' My voice, which had once held confidence, is barely a whisper. Even so, Cooper hears me.
'Lavinia! Are you okay?' His voice too, is thin and lifeless. I look over to my arm and see that it is caught on a thorn.
'I'm fine.' We walk on, my hand clasped in his. We are hurt, tired and emaciated. But we aren't about to give up. Not yet.
At home my family is poor. Very, very poor. So poor that it takes two normal amounts of tessera to feed one of us. I am eighteen, and since there is six of us in my family, my name went into the reaping ball one hundred and eight times. I was going to get picked. I knew it, especially since District Six has only about five thousand people, and almost everyone in District Six doesn't need to apply for tessera, so there was only about five hundred slips of paper in the female Reaping ball. One fifth of the slips in the reaping ball had my name on them! I was very, very confident that my name was going to get drawn. So I had two choices. Stay and go to the Capitol to fight to the death in an arena with twenty-three other people, or run away. I decided on the second one. But he found me just as I was leaving. My older brother, Cooper. He told me that I couldn't go. That he wouldn't let me. I said to him "Would you rather watch me being stabbed to death on live television?" He eventually let me go... as long as he could come. I had to agree, because I knew if I didn't he would hold me back. We snuck out into the darkness, the night before the Reaping. We left the District and began to go south, towards the outline districts. We had no idea where we were going, and we still don't.
'What are we going to do? If we stay in the woods, we'll die out for sure.' Cooper whispers. I think and think. He's right. We are already slowly dying, and in a week we'll be dead for sure. We wriggle into the two sleeping bags that we had the sense to bring. After much talking and thinking, we both drift off to sleep.
Behind was nothing. In front was equally plain. But then I heard something, a snarl. I tried to yell out to Cooper, but my voice was muffled and my throat choked raw. Then it came, a mutation created by no other people than the Capitol. It was a mix of wolf and a brown bear, and it was heading for us. I screamed and tried to run, but my legs weren't working. Cooper threw me over his shoulder and began to run, slowly at first, but then faster. Soon enough, we reached a town. No, not a town, a District. I could tell by the sound of coal splitting against metal that this was no other district than District twelve.
I awaken to the sound of my own wailing. I am drowning in sweat, but even so shivering cold. Cooper sits next to me, looking concerned.
'Lavinia.' Is all he says, in a hauntingly ghostly voice. I can tell that it's not a question. The nightmare comes back to me. I become distressed.
'District Twelve! Twelve! District Twelve!' I gasp out.
'Lavinia, what's wrong?' Cooper sounds scared.
'District Twelve! We should go there.' Is all I can choke out.
'What? Why?'
'So we don't starve.' There's a long silence as Cooper digests my suggestion.
'You know what Lavinia? I think you might be right!' I am fully awake now, not half-awake, half still in my devilish nightmare, but fully awake and alert. We get up and moving right away. We have no idea where District Twelve is, so we just go off in a random direction.
By late afternoon, we are beginning to give up hope. But then, just as I am about to except my death, I hear something. A girl's voice.
'What was that?' I gasp, startled.
'What was what?' Cooper looks just as startled as me.
'I-I thought I heard something, that's all.' I make it sound as though I imagined it, but I know I hadn't. Then suddenly, all the birds turn silent. A small bird, a mockingjay I think, lets out one high note. Something is wrong. All the birds don't just stop singing at once, and there was something. I could feel its presence. Cooper must have sensed something too, because he begins to run. I don't hesitate as I run after him. I'm not sure how I knew that something was coming. But something was.
We only get a couple of hundred metres before it finds us. I look up and there it is, a huge, silver hovercraft positioned above our heads. I should have known. I should have known we would never make it far, that running away wouldn't work. But I didn't think. Not enough. A ladder drops down. I try to run away from it, but I see movement out of the corner of my eye. A girl is hiding, I can see her clearly. She must be from district 12, with her grey eyes and dark hair. I lock eyes with her.
'HELP!' But she just moves away. She won't save me or Cooper. But if I were her, I wouldn't either. The ladder reaches me and begins to pull me up to the hovercraft. I am petrified. I will die, I am sure. Maybe staying back at district 6 and taking a chance at the reaping would have been better for me. Maybe then Cooper and I wouldn't have ended up like this. I remember Cooper. I spin around just in time to see a sharp cable stab into his body.
I cannot breath. I cannot move. I cannot feel. I cannot do anything. Cooper is dead. He was only twenty years old. He had survived every reaping. This should guarantee him a long, happy life. But it doesn't matter. He is dead, and it is my fault. My fault that he died. I know he's dead, I am sure of it. But I can't help calling out his name, just to be sure. I should be crying, but no tears will come. I feel nothing. Not even the tiniest twinge of sadness. But I know this is just shock. It will wear off soon, and then I will never forgive myself for the rest of my life. But for now I can only focus on what is going to happen to me…