Chapter 1
District 1- Polish Gint
The woods were quiet. The only sound that could be heard was the faint sound of birds chirping and bugs clicking in some distant place. Dusk was here and it was getting darker and darker by the moment with a thin fog setting in masking trees that would have been visible. Each step I took made a small crackle of leaves underfoot. The undergrowth beneath my feet also created padding, sucking out any extra sound my footsteps might make otherwise. A faint breeze is also blowing westward. I take in a deep, inhaling through my nose and exhaling through my mouth. I can smell the rich smell of the earth below, as well as the light smell of the foliage in the trees and shrubs around me. I can also smell a distant, thick, overpowering smell of wood burning.
I see a small clearing about fifty yards to my right and head in that direction. As I walk through the woods, I can truly see the life that surrounds me. A squirrel sprints in front of my path and bounds up a tree to safety. A mother bird returns to her nest of hungry chicks with a worm. A bat shrieks overhead in search of a moth. A coyote howls off in the distance at the ever rising and falling moon. I continue walking towards the clearing, not expecting any impending danger, but I draw an arrow and nock it into my bow for safe measures. I arrive at the edge of the clearing and take in my surroundings. What little light is still being casted up from the sun is shining above the tree line in an orange flare. The sky is painted streaks of orange, purple and pink, but making the forest below a musty blue color in the transition between light and dark.
I look at the clearing itself and see an open field, somewhat bigger than I was anticipating. A small pond rests on the eastern edge of the clearing with a creek cutting the open space in two. I begin to walk forward but suddenly freeze myself. In the center of the clearing is a small backpack, almost completely obscured in the relatively tall grass from the edge of the field. I hold my breath and close my eyes. I open my ears and listen to the world around me by letting instinct take over. I cannot let my brain overthink this.
I hear the faint sound of leaves crinkling behind me. I hear something being pulled out of something, and hear a whistle moving fast in my direction. I drop to the ground and watch as the knife whirs over what would have been my head. I then quickly get up and run to a tree about two feet from where I was. I pull the string in my bow back, putting tension on both my arm and bow. I take in a deep breath and roll around the tree. Standing in front of me is a boy holding another knife in a throwing position. I release my drawn arm and watch as my arrow leaves my bow and flies into the boy's head, engorging itself in his skull. He falls to the ground dead. A cannon booms off in the distance, proving he truly is dead. I don't look into his now cold dead eyes, I have other things to think about.
I am about to head in the direction of the smoke, which can be seen clearly off northwest, when I see a small girl step out in the clearing. She stands about fifty feet away, but even in the haze of the fog and dusk I can see an angered yet determined look on her face. She lifts something small up to her mouth and I hear a small sound cutting the air as it passes through. It hits me before I am able to do anything. In my left thigh a small red dart has seemingly sprouted out of the tissue and muscle. A fire feels like it is blossoming out of my leg. Poison. I grab the dart and rip it out of my leg. It hurt more than I was expecting, making me believe it had sharp barbs on the tip, causing it to create more damage than a normal dart would. I load another arrow into my bow, but the girl has disappeared into the woods. A pain hits my arm, and poison fills it with fire immediately after. I turn and see the girl up in a tree with a blowgun. I send an arrow into what I would hope to be her neck, but she hops from one branch to another, avoiding the attack and disappearing again.
I will lose if I stay on the edge of the clearing in what seems to be this girl's domain. I quickly run into the center of the clearing at the backpack, hoping there may be an antidote in one of the pockets. I find my leg and arm are loosing use as I hobble through the openness, almost going into a state of paralysis. The backpack seems like a trophy when I finally do reach it. I sack the pockets of the backpack, looking for anything that looks like a type of antidote for the poison slowly creeping deep in my veins. I don't know how potent the poison is, for all I know it could be too late.
Then out of nowhere, the last thing I could want to happen happens. A huge ring of fire surrounds the fields, preventing any means of escape or entrance. That must mean that there is at least one other among the flame ring, the girl with the darts. I am still searching for an antidote in the backpack when my fingers enclose around something cold and hard. I pull it out and find a syringe with a light blue liquid in the vile. I don't know if this could be more poison or an antidote, but I am running out of options so I do the radical solution. I jab the point of the needle into my thigh and push down on the plunger, pushing all of the liquid into my bloodstream. I will know pretty quickly if it is going to kill me or help me, I hope.
I don't notice any fire like when the darts hit me, but it could very well be a different type of poison. I don't have any time to respond or think about what that liquid is doing inside my body because a moment later, the little girl with the darts steps out from behind a tree and sprints towards me, firing a dart in my direction.
I drop the syringe and roll forward to avoid the dart. I end up in a crouch on one knee and fire an arrow at her head. I hear her make a small shrill of panic, but moves to the side at the last second. I quickly notch another arrow and fire it at her. Instantly I know it wasn't going to kill her if it did hit. I watch as the arrow cuts wind and impales itself into her shoulder. She lets out a scream of pain and falls to the ground. Now is my opportunity to strike and kill now. I draw one last arrow from my pack and fire it into her skull. Her cannon rings out and I watch as her lifeless body slumps to the ground.
I walk to go retrieve my arrows from the girls head and missed shots, when suddenly everything around me turned to a liquid and melted away. The trees in the surrounding forest just melted and turned into blackness. The soft earth beneath my feet turned into a hard surface and I was surrounded by blackness, but I was clearly able to see my entire body. I have underwent this feeling several times before, each time as perplexing and stomach turning as the last. Slowly, a small light formed what seemed a great distance away. That light began to grow quickly until I was standing in a white space instead of black, and colors began to take form as my surroundings reappeared into reality, not some virtual world.
I am in a very complex room, filled with wires and machinery all around me. Lights pulse out of everything from the floor to the ceiling around me. I am standing in a place in the floor slightly elevated from the rest of the room like a podium. The lights and wires all corresponding with each other until they reach the spot where I am standing. To my right is a monitor with the forest I was just in. I can see the girl I just killed with the arrow still sticking out of her skull. Below that monitor is a reading of my body. My heartbeat is normal, as it always is. Brainwaves and adrenaline levels are also read, along with a plethora of other medical things, which I haven't bothered to try to learn or understand, not that I need to.
In front of me is a large glass screen tinted green that is elevated on the wall. Inside is a control room with all of the settings of the forest I was in as well as the people monitoring my personal health as well as my activity and progress. Basically a bunch of nerds all being overseen by a heavy hitter.
"Cashemere!" I scream at my mentor and trainer. "I wasn't finished yet. I still had to hunt down that last tribute at the campfire. And by the way, you call that difficult? That was simple compared to tributes I actually will have to face. At least District 2 has actual trainers and not shitty simulations like I go through every day in this miserable District. Can I please just go to the Capitol already and win these impeded Games?" I am mad. I didn't get to finish the hunt, which always makes me angry and considering how easy it was to kill almost every tribute in that arena, it was like I was surrounded by a bunch of twelve and thirteen year olds. The only true fun I had was "killing" Canvas and he gave me some good sport.
A tall woman walks to the front of the control panel and pushes a button before speaking into a microphone. "Polish," she says calmly as she always does, "I am sorry about your disappointment about not getting to finish. As for the basic level, I personally blame these lab rats we call technicians for not having good enough reflexes as most of the other tributes. I also blame them for their stupidity, or we can blame their mothers." All of them suddenly looked at her but she paid them no attention. "Tomorrow I can get a simulation with eleven of the best teams in the District as training before the reaping." She began to walk away before returning to the microphone. "Also, in that simulation, please don't kill Canvas in the first five minutes. We all know that you can, we don't need to prove it again. Go home, get some sleep, I will see you tomorrow morning.
District 1- Canvas Marshall
Training for the most part today had been rough. I had to run twenty miles, do thirty sets of one hundred push ups, twenty sets of one hundred-fifty setups, and bench press my body weight of 235 pounds consecutively one hundred times. I began thinking it was an indirect punishment towards the end of training for breaking a kids leg, collar bone, and dislocating his wrist yesterday. It wasn't my fault! Kid called me a "Stupid pussy ass faggot"! So what if I acted out? I do that at times for a few reasons. One of which is to stay hidden. The other is just because its fun.
Anchor, my personal trainer for today said I was done after I was done with my reps and I could go "play with the toys" after. She treats me like I have the brain capacity of a five year old, but then again, most people do. Anchor is also a former Victor. She is one of the largest people in District 1 and is extremely strong. She won her Games by using a hammer and breaking every person she met skulls in. She refused the pack on the first day and killed each one of them in the Bloodbath. She currently holds the record ending the bloodbath fastest with one minute and fifty-six seconds.
I finished my final rep and she said, "Ok Canvas. You are done for today." She spoke as if she was really trying to baby a five year old, speaking slowly to make sure I understood every word. "You can go practice with some weapons now. Polish should be joining you in a little bit. I was almost positive I could here her screaming down the hall at someone."
I looked back at her with shallow eyes and a huge childish, idiot grin and said back," Thank you!" and rushed off to grab a spear.
I could barely hear her mutter under her breath "Nitwit" before leaving herself and me to my own amusements. I couldn't help but smile at this. For years I have been fooling everyone that I am a complete retard. I have failed every class I have ever taken at the academy expect gym and training. Of course, I knew what was going on the entire time and could easily pass, but I don't. When I was first admitted into the academy I was much more advanced at everything than everyone. I knew I wouldn't be able to learn anything about anyone from looking down from the top, after all that is never how things fall. I made sure I was looking up from the bottom and I have learned so much more about humans than I would from the other end of the spectrum. And I consciously made this decision at five years old, to be a retard until I decided it would be the right time to attack and reveal my true colors in the Games and allow me to leave as the sole Victor.
Luckily for me, I have also been given an extremely athletic physique, one where I am the number one when it comes to fighting in all hand-to-hand combat weapons. That doesn't require much thinking, just a lot of instinct so no one has though twice about it.
That is when the queen bitch walks in. Allow me to introduce the biggest thorn in my side, Polish Gint ladies and gentlemen. Polish is the most arrogant, self absorbed, obnoxious, person I have ever had the displeasure of meeting. She may be beautiful with perfect blonde hair, striking blue eyes, and the softest skin you will ever touch, but her heart is about as black as pitch at night without a moon. I truly detest her as much as I can without hating her, but I still trust her more than anyone else because I know who she is, what her motives are, and we are forced to trust each other.
"Hi Polish!" I say a little too excitedly, much like a child when seeing a friend.
She looks at me with a sneer, and continues walking over to then archery station. District 1 has a station for every weapon imaginable, along with survival stations mimicking the Capitol's setup for training, except ours is much more elaborate with more choices and better trainers and technology. Polish, at the archery station, grabs a bow and set of arrows and heads over to the laser simulation. She turns it on and raises the difficulty to the highest setting. This training device is a set of lasers that track your own personal movements as well as setting up enemies that fight back and can be killed. Their weapons will not harm you, but the simulation will end the second you are hit. Its confusing, but its effective. Polish and I have both mastered every setting on that course, even the hardest which we have both decided silently is predictable and unworthy of our own individual talents. Knowing she is doing fine, I put all my focus into my spear throwing.
I keep hurling one after the other at targets scattered across the room, each one either hitting or inches away from the bull's-eye, until I hear something that truly surprises me. Polish lets out a scream of anger at the machine and I watch as she takes a mace, and begins to destroy the machine. One of two things just happened; 1- She just won easily, and became frustrated at it being so easy, or 2- She lost. Judging the way she is using all of her energy to obliterate the machine, I say the later.
She is going to get herself hurt, and knowing that I do something I really don't want to do. I run over to her as fast as I can. Fragments are laying everywhere on the ground from Polish's smashing. She wields her mace back again, prepared to take another blow at the now crumpled piece of junk when I step in her way, hoping to stop the blow. Not one of my finest moments, as she still continues swinging her mace towards my head. I luckily get to duck down at the last second avoiding her blow, and then I spring into her chest tackling her and brining her down onto the floor. I managed to catch her off guard and take the wind out of her. I use these few seconds to pin her down and keep her from getting up.
"Canvas!" She screams at me. "You better get your retarded ass off of me before I kill you when I do get up!" Her blue eyes have turned into ice as they try to burn through my head in an act of intimidation.
"You won't kill me, Polish." I say rather stupidly and matter-of-factly. "You need me to volunteer with you for the Games this year, which you know is a Quarter Quell. And the announcement is next week, so you're not going to kill me." I look at her and then quickly add "Yet."
She mumbles some insults and swears to herself before saying with venom in her voice, "Fine! Now let me up!" I climb off of her and let her stand up. When she is fully up, she slaps me hard across the face. I pretend I didn't see it coming or wasn't expecting it.
"What was that for?" I ask trying to sound as genuinely hurt as I could muster.
"If you pin me down again, I will cut your cock off and feed it to some goats!"
I just look at her smug face and think, can kill you already, bitch?