I stand on a pedestal and look around me. There are a lot of children of my age, but a lot are younger.

We're standing in an arena. I'm scared. Scared of that one question I'm asking myself a lot right now. Will I survive?

In the arena are twelve boys and twelve girls, some of them are aged twelve and some of them are more like eighteen. I'm sixteen, from District Two. On one side of me is a girl, I don't know her name, but I know she's from District Four. She has really red hair and she is a lot smaller than me. On the other side of me there's a boy. I have seen him before, at the training and I know he's kind of a quiet one. He's from District Eight. I don't know his name either. He has dark brown hair, blue eyes and he is just a bit shorter than I am – not such a special thing, because I am kind of tall. The moment I look at him, he looks back at me. Eyes as green as grass, meet eyes as blue as the sea.

I know he's scared too, I can see it in his eyes. Everyone is scared.

The last seconds are there.

"Three! Two!" a voice says, through the speakers. "One!"

Everyone jumps off their pedestal and runs up to the place were the bags with weapons are lying. I – of course – do the same thing as all of the other children. I grab a backpack and I take a knife out of the right side of the backpack. I stab a boy or girl – didn't see what gender – in the chest and pull my knife immediately out of the person I just stabbed.

I have to tell myself that I have to kill them. I have to, or I will never see Sammy again.

I look back at the person – a girl, I now notice – I just stabbed in the chest and I see blood dripping out of the wound. The girl twitches and blood trickles out of her mouth. It's pretty gross. I look away, right into some other kid's eyes. I slit his throat. I don't want him to die, but I'm just protecting myself. I don't have a choice.

When I'm finally out of the bloodbath I run further into the arena, which has been designed to look like a ruined city. The houses are just pillars of bricks, they don't really look at houses anymore. It isn't a pretty city, everywere I look lies dust and dirt. I'm happy I live in a pretty normal district and not in a city that looks like this. The streets are also broken and it looks like everything here is thousands of years old.

While I'm walking around it's getting darker. Then I hear a loud boom, and another and another. I count thirteen booms. One boom means one death. It's unbelievable I'm the cause of two of those thirteen dead people.

When it's completely dark I've found a place to hide for the night. When I've found a good spot to take a seat, I sit down and I think back to the moment when this all started. The reason that I'm here right now.