Thresh slowed his pace to a jog as he approached his camp. His blood was racing and it was all that he could do to stop himself from throwing his backpack against the ground in anger. The Feast. A clever term for the device the Gamemakers used to force the tributes to prey on each other.
Thresh didn't want to be a killer, he really didn't, but at this moment he didn't feel any remorse for what he'd done to Knives. She was cruel and she deserved it. As he retreated from the Feast, he could hear Cato shouting for her, sounding genuinely distressed. Thresh assumed they were using each other from the beginning, Cato and Knives, but wondered now if maybe they were closer than they'd let on. Maybe the brute really cared for his ally. Not that it mattered. Their alliance had killed the little girl, he was sure, and he would not allow them to survive together when he couldn't bring his own district partner home.
It shouldn't bother him as much as it did. He didn't care especially for her. He treated her the same way he treated all of the other tributes – in other words, with complete indifference. But she couldn't have been more than, what? Eleven? Twelve? You don't hunt down little girls, even in the Games. It's not as if he went into the Games expecting not to kill. But the object is to survive. You kill to survive and you kill to defend. You don't charge through the arena spearing everything that breathes.
And then came that revision. It needed to have come earlier. He could have protected her. They could have gone home together. Was the change planned from the start? Was it always looming over them? Should he have kept a closer eye on his district partner from the very beginning?
Was the audience now having a laugh at the tributes who realized, too late, that they'd had an ally all along? It was sick. The entire thing was sick.
He thought about his grandmother and his sister. The little girl had siblings, too, didn't she? He vaguely remembered somebody, maybe Caesar, mentioning that. How many children have lost a sister? He wondered idly. How many are too young to understand why? That's what the Games did. They destroyed people who didn't even partake in them. And then he wanted to crush something and wished that District 2 was around.
The Games were getting to him. He could feel it. It always happened at this point, his mentor had told him. Tensions running high, danger mounting. Anger becomes misplaced. Some tributes give in to stress, some go mad, and feelings start getting in the way of strategy. It all makes for a good show. They were playing him right now.
And they must have gotten into his head somehow, too. Because realizing that only made him want to fight harder.