You have always lived by the skin of your teeth, ever since your parents died. You were too fast for the Orphans' Home to find you. Fast enough to spend your days and nights hiding between buildings, in alleyways too narrow to even be called alleyways. Quick fingers, and the mean old woman at the grocery stall doesn't even notice when an apple goes missing from the barrel. Jump, skip, hop, and the Peacekeepers miss you by a hair's breadth. If someone sees, you run, always run. This is how you've always lived, in the poorer half of the poorest suburb of District 5. You think this is how you always will live, but then the Reaping comes.
Always so quick, always running, always able to get away, you never thought the Capitol would capture you. Never thought they even knew you were still alive. And even as you stand on the stage, you think maybe it isn't happening. Maybe it's a bad dream, and you'll wake up behind the garbage bins or in the shadows of the factories like you always do. Maybe, if you close your eyes and hope, just maybe it'll be true.
It isn't true. Of courseit isn't true. You're on a train and no matter how tightly you screw your eyes shut, you are still on that train, still sitting at a small table with a rattling mug of what looks to be pure cream in front of you, a man wearing a suit tailored entirely out of organza to your left, and a twelve year old boy who won't stop mewling about how he doesn't want to die to your right.
You cannot run.
Trapped there, you feel as if every muscle in your body is wound as tightly as it could be. Strung like a wire, you have no choice but to face the reality of this –
And then you realize what it means. It means that if you win, if you can only just outlast twenty three others, you get a house. You get a bed to sleep in. Money to buy food with. Food, monthly supplies of food, delivered to the orphans who could have been you, delivered to the families you have filched from for years, delivered to the unobservant grocer to whom you owe your life. A way to repay your debts.
So you don't run when the stylists decide your hair could be redder. You don't run when they dress you up, humiliate you, fatten you for the slaughter. You are perfectly still. You are ignored. And then, when that gong sounds, you are gone, just a flash of orange hair and a rustle of leaves. Are you dead? For all the others know, you could be, and you want it to stay that way for as long as possible.
Days pass, people die, a feast is announced. A feastis just what you need, you think to yourself, so you go. It's hotter than hell inside the Cornucopia and you wonder if you'll be able to lift your legs without them melting away into nothing, let alone run. The heat makes you languid, and you indulge in a fantasy, one where the girl with no family or friends to interview, the girl whose name nobody remembers, a fantasy where that girl is the Victor of the 74th Hunger Games. Then you hear the whirr of the platform, and you spring forward. You relish the weight of the pack in your hand, know it means a full stomach tonight, and you flee, unharmed.
Four left. Three to go, three to go. You're following 12, waiting for Cato to kill them, but you know it will be a long wait. The 12 kids still have each other, and Clove was the brains of the outfit. You have long, hungry days ahead of you, so you ignore the pack full of dry foods whose weight is so comforting and you sneak, sneak, sneak, and you eat the cheese and the berries.
And then you run, like you always do. And maybe, you think, just maybe –