Chapter One: Nightmares
"Because it has to end somewhere right? The arena can't go on forever.", I tell her.
"What do you expect to find?", she asks, with blood streaming down her face.
"I don't know. But maybe there's something we can use", I say, knowing that somewhere, there's an end to this hellhole, that there's an escape that they don't want me to know about.
My eyes wander to the jagged, rocky land with the cliff...Why would it be there?
She interrupts my thoughts when she says, "Haymitch, that's all there is. Let's go back.
"No. I'm staying here." I say, hoping she sees what I see.
"All right. There's only five of us left. May as well say goodbye anyways. I don't want it to come down to the two of us.", she says, not bothering to make eye contact with me.
I knew this would happen. Allies don't last long in the arena anyways. But I cared about Maysilee. I don't know if it's because she was my ally, the only person who understood me in the past days in the arena, or because she was a reminder of District 12, my home, and the only place I've ever belonged, but I cared about her, even though I put up these walls to stop myself from caring about her because I knew it would hurt me if she died. And even though I didn't feel that way, I solemnly looked at the cliff in front of me as if I didn't care, and watched her walk away.
As I walked to the edge of the cliff, I hear a scream. And not just any scream, but the scream of a voice I had known since the day of the reaping. Maysilee's. I turn around and see huge pink birds, with beaks as long as meter sticks skew their beaks through her throat, as I run towards her...
And thats when I feel a bucket of cold water splash me, and Effie scream.
"Effie, I asked you to wake me up, not give me goddamn pneumonia.", I yell.
"Haymitch! Your knife stabbed me. And today is the day of the reaping. If you don't wake up, we get to the Justice Builidng late, causing the stylists to get angry, and causing the reaping to not start on time", Effie lectures, punctual as ever.
I stare at the knife in my hand, the knife I sleep with every night, and zone out, ignoring Effie whine about our punctuality at the reaping. The reaping. That day which everyone in this screwed up District fears. The day the Capitol uses to show that we are their powerless slaves by taking one girl and one boy every year in a competition to fight to the death. I remember this day from 14 years ago. I was one of those boys, the ones for the Seam, the poorest part of District 12 and Panem in general, who was reaped. No one expected me to win. I didn't expect me to win. But I did, even though I know I would have been better off being killed like Maysilee did. This year, another young boy will have to see what I saw, and do what I did, but not come out alive, like the past 13 pairs of kids I mentored never did.