Chapter One: Year Of Silence Part One
My best friend, whatever happens, I'll swallow tears and breathe in your hair. Misbehaving, we cry in each other's embrace. When we meet. When we kiss.
Head Gamemaker Glass
The fourty-eighth Hunger Games were a Games that well and truly shook the nation of Panem. Even in the Capitol, viewers had been horrified by the gore and the torture the tributes were subjected to.
"You see, Glass, last year was a true success."
I look over to Snow who is looking over at last years arena through the cameras that are still placed there. The wind blows through the trees. The blood of the twenty-three fallen is still stained into the ground.
Unsurprisingly, the winner came from District One. It came down to the male from One, the female from Four and the male from Six. The three of them unluckily bumped into each other on the third day of being the final three. And from there, the horror began. Due to their earlier alliance, the tributes from One and Four first took down the boy from Six. His intestines were ripped out and used to strangle him to death.
It says a lot about those games that his death may have been one of the least gory.
And that's when the real fight began. The girl was bigger than the boy, eighteen years of age and muscular, with greasy shoulder length black hair and a face that could scare even the President. The boy, however, while only fifteen, was cunning. He was indeed quite small, but he had speed, and the girl from Four's brute force in the end could not live up to his skill. I won't go into details of her death, but in the end he had her begging to put her out of her misery.
Snow flicks through the Arena on his screen to go to the points of some of his favourite deaths. The girl from Nine is the one he watches over and over. She made it quite far, for a girl from Nine, in the end being the seventeenth tribute to die. The pair from Two teamed up on her. Each one of her limbs was tied to a tree, holding her in position, raised from the ground. From there, the pair from Two began to throw every weapon they had at her. A sword through her gut. A dagger through her right arm. An arrow through her chest, just missing her heart – they did that on purpose.
They wanted her to suffer – and suffer she did. She was screaming for her mother to help her, something that sent Snow into a sick, excited frenzy.
She was only twelve.
"Glass!" He shouts, and I march over to his desk. He eyes me warily, clearly having it decided in his mind already that I will not be able to live up to last year and I will have to be executed. We'll see about that.
"You see what you have to live up to? Do not dissapoint me."
I nod, and twist on my heels before striding out towards my office. I have work to do.
