The launch room vanishes below me, and all light is shut out. The glass tube ascends at a speed I can't quite gauge in the blackness; this feeling is unpleasant, disorienting. As if I needed that right now. I'm already shaking. My knees feel like they might drop me if I don't pay attention to them. Moments later, I am blinded by a white flash, as if a thousand cameras had gone off.
It is sun on snow. The sky is a crisp winter blue, and every inch of the arena is covered in snow. As the glass tube lowers past my feet, I feel the chill of the air and see my breath turn to clouds before me. Now I understand why I was given these warm clothes. The Gamemakers want a good show, and all of us freezing to death in the snow wouldn't be very entertaining.
We stand in a clearing, circled by trees. In the distance, I can see a snow-topped hill. My eyes dart to the Cornucopia. I don't dare risk going near it. The ground near it is covered in shining ice.
"Forty-six. Forty-five. Forty-four." The countdown slowly works its way into my consciousness. Then it dawns on me another time, as it has repeatedly in the past week: I am a tribute. I am in The Hunger Games. And it is very possible that a minute or two from now, I will be dead. Or worse, in the process of dying. It is almost certain that I will never see my home in District 7 again.
How on earth did I get here?
I remember waking up to Mella's sister pounding on my door.
"Wren! Wren!" she called, and sleepily, I dragged myself from my bed across the single room of my house— honestly, it's more of a shed than a house— to open the door.
"Mella's gone," the little girl blurted, the moment the door swung open.
"Gone?"
"We don't know where. Mama said you might know."
I took off into the woods. I knew this would happen. Somewhere, in the corner of my mind where all the worst thoughts lie, I knew Mella would run. We are both eighteen, and this year would be the last year our names were in the reaping ball. Mella doesn't deal well with emotional pressure. She's a tough girl, physically— she can swing an axe harder and chuck a log twice as far as me. Emotionally, she's a complete pushover. Iron muscles, paper psyche. I'm not sure how she gets through day-to-day life. Once, when we were sixteen, she felled a tree and found a squirrel crushed under it. The crying went on for hours.
There would be trouble for her if she didn't show up at the reaping. If the Peacekeepers found her— and they would, eventually— she'd likely be whipped, or maybe executed. Those are often synonymous. I'd even heard tell of runners being "volunteered" for the Games.
The thought of my Mella going off to the Games felt like a knife through my chest, a knife that twisted as the hours passed and I found no sign of her. It was forty-five minutes to the reaping when spotted her, high in a tree, staring out over the electric fence. She had tied a rope to a long, sturdy branch. The plan was quite obviously to swing over the electric fence to freedom. I doubted she had planned much farther than that.
"Mella!" I shouted. Her head whipped around, and her curly red hair caught the sunlight. "Mella, I'm hurt! Weren't you going to take me with you?"
"You wouldn't have agreed," she shouted back.
"Come down here! We need to talk!"
A tense moment passed. She grabbed the rope. I was about to shout again, but she didn't swing; she just dropped it to the forest floor and slid down.
"I can't go," she said.
"You have to! What are you going to do out there? You've seen what happens when people try to run."
"Not any worse than what happens when your name gets called. At least out there I have a chance."
"You are crazy!" I shouted. "There are hundreds of names in that ball. Yours is in what, seven times?"
"Eight. There was the year our store shed burned…"
"Eight in hundreds. You're a thousand times more likely to be killed trying to run from the reaping. Mella, please."
She bit her lip, the way she does when she knows I've won, and let me lead her back to the square. We were some of the last to arrive, late enough that the Peacekeepers glared at us from under their shining white helmets, but not late enough that they felt the need to discipline us.
The square in the hot summer sun is unbearable— it is black concrete, out of reach of any shade, anything that might lessen the heat. The children in their white reaping clothes looked to be cooking. I realized the two of us were terribly out-of-place, dressed in our work clothes.
Even our district representative, Marius Gen, was clearly eager to get the whole thing over with. His brightly dyed hair, green with streaks of vibrant blue, sagged with sweat. He looked ill while the Capitol's propaganda film played, projected against the white wall behind him, but managed to maintain proper conduct during the national anthem.
Some reps like to make a show of things; I have to appreciate Marius' brevity. As soon as the crowd's attention turned back to him, he dug into the reaping bowl containing the boys' names.
"Jone Feller."
"Oh no," whispered Mella.
We didn't know Jone well; he was the sickly boy that lived down the street from me when we were young. He had a bad heart. Because of his frail condition, he'd never been able to work with the loggers; he worked as the cashier at the general store.
Peacekeepers escorted Jone to the stage. Marius congratulated him, in his disinterested fashion. Jone vomited onto Marius' shoes. I felt the whole crowd wince. Mella was weeping. Mella's the kind of person that can weep for people she barely knows, or doesn't know at all.
Marius, clearly disgusted, but now twice as eager to have the ceremony over with, reached into the second reaping bowl. My heart skipped a couple of beats. He fumbled with the paper in his fingers, visibly nervous— I have no idea how he got this job, and I was starting to get angry at him, because he was taking too long and this was my last reaping, my last reaping, my last reaping—
Mella was screaming, and I didn't know why. Strong arms, clothed in white, escorted me from the crowd onto the stage. I hadn't even heard Marius call my name. They stood me up next to Jone, and I stared out at the crowd for a moment…
The next thing I remember is the room in the Justice Building, with velvet seats and marble walls. I'd never been inside this place before, and I'd never touched velvet. Mella came bursting in, eyes red, face wet, and threw her arms around me.
"Wren, you have to come back. You have to come back."
I squeezed her. "You know I can't make a promise like that."
"You have to come back, because I—" she clasped my hands in hers and pressed her lips against mine. It happened so fast, I wasn't sure what she was doing until she pulled away.
"Mella…" I whispered. "Why didn't you ever…"
"I'm stupid, okay? I'm really stupid."
"I'll try to come back. I'll do the best I can."
And like that, her time was up—a Peacekeeper came in to snatch her from the room, leaving me alone to cry.