Johanna's voice begins to quaver slightly. She keeps her eyes lowered to a set of prepared notes, and noticeably away from Gale:
Even before the sun set, it was as dark as night under the forest canopy. I put the glasses on, but Schuyler didn't need them. He not only kept walking, I was sure he was getting better. I started to wonder if it might be worth letting this partnership last a little longer. At any rate, he was the one person I could be sure wouldn't use an alliance as an opportunity to stab me in the back.
He put away the twine, which I was pretty sure meant he was getting more comfortable. Then he stopped, stooped and came up with a tiny rodent in his hand. He held it up between fingers and thumb as it squeaked. Soon it quieted, and he let it sit in his open hand and then scurry up his right arm. I noticed when it reached his shoulder, it went across his back and down his left arm, avoiding the spot where he said an angel perched.
"Sky," I said, "where are you going?"
"Wherever the angel leads me," he answered. It was what I expected, and it got me thinking again. It was one thing that Sky couldn't come up with a long-term survival plan if his life did depend on it. I already decided that didn't have to be a deal breaker. In the woods, it's the people who plan as big as Napoleon and Richard who walk straight off a cliff or restock their packs by picking deathcaps. But making decisions based on consultations with an angel on his shoulder was a whole other pile of random. I got two ideas: One was to drop the idea of a partnership and walk away. The other was to ask if I could take over the executive role.
Then something else came back up in my mind: The forest wasn't a natural forest, and ultimately, the Games were not a real survival situation. The Games were never about doing what it really takes to stay alive in a hostile environment; they were about us killing each other off. Anyone who played by its rules in the woods would win nothing but a very lonely death. That was the insanity of the Games, but the thought crossed my mind, as it had now and then, that the insanity could serve a very sane purpose. As long as people's reference point for survival situations was the Games, they would forget the things that really worked. Like banding together against adversity instead of feuding pointlessly, and how might that apply to Panem society at large?
That was when I knew: Sky was a true survivor, and that was why there was nothing the Gamemasters would not do to make sure he was not the Victor. They were going to kill him. They were going to do it soon, and they were going to do it bad. I turned and ran, just before I heard the slithering.
I looked over my shoulder, and I didn't see Sky. What I did see was the ground alive with snakes. Sky must have sensed something, or maybe gotten a word from the "angel" on his shoulder, and gotten up a tree. I was glad for that, and I hoped the Gamemasters were sore about it. They were going to have to learn to try harder to take Sky in the dark. Not that it did me any good.
I sprinted as fast as I could, and it wasn't any trouble to outpace the snakes. But the snakes weren't stopping, either. There had to be at least ten thousand of them, probably enough to form dangerous concentrations all over the arena. But they stayed together in the solid, seething swarm, moving with what could only be the Gamemasters' purpose. It looked like they had decided I was worth killing, too.
Before I could outdistance the snakes, I went up and over a ridge and down into a valley, which gave the snakes extra speed on the downhill slope. Just when they were literally at my heels, I splashed right across a stream and started uphill. As I hoped, the snakes stopped at the bottom, and started fanning out the way any predatory creature would. I guessed that I had hit the edge of a sector in the Arena.
I laughed, and I was happy. I started to survey what was around me. The valley and the ridges that bounded it went on a long ways, zigzagging down from a mountainous highland toward the center of the Arena. There were only a few of the big trees here, and not very big by their standards, which allowed enough lesser vegetation for good cover. A score of some kind of pig-sized armored reptiles were coming down in the near distance, but they were grazing on plants. I remembered getting a glimpse of some kind of rift near the Circle, and I wonder if that was the end of this valley.
I went uphill a little ways, to a prominence of the ridge. Sure enough, when I looked down I could see the Cornucopia. The Careers had piled up the food and gear, and Napoleon was standing on top, with his bow and arrow at ready. The way he looked around convinced me that he had nightglasses himself, and I decided to get down. I was on the way down when I found the the boot. Badly chewed and bloody. With, I determined on inspection, the foot inside.
Hovercraft always collected bodies, for reasons that still aren't entirely clear. We had kept them busy that day, so it made sense that quality would slip a bit. Still, it had to have taken something nastier than usual to leave someone in enough pieces for one to be missed. There was no way it was other tributes. It was a big foot, definitely a guy's, and it looked to me like a match for the Niner. As for how it got detached from its owner, I got a good look at a remnant of the shin bone. The end was both sheared and fractured, and it looked like it had been all at once. The only time I saw anything like it before was when I cleaned up a jack who got his arm severed by a maul. Needless to say, I wasn't feeling happy anymore.
Just then I heard something big coming. It was one of the reptiles, and I easily convinced myself that there was no way one of these ate Niner. If anything, this was the culprit's prey. It looked like a cross between an alligator and a turtle, with a round, armored body covered in spikes and plates and a boxy, horned head. I moved in a little closer, and it squawked and gave a warning swish with a spiky club on the end of its stumpy tail. I backed off, and it started digging in the underbrush with clawed feet and tusk-like projections of its beak jaws. I could see that these creatures were far from harmless, at least capable of defending themselves and maybe of making real trouble if they were territorial or in some kind of panic. But there was no way that fat body could muster the speed to rundown a healthy man, nor could I picture those jaws doing the damage I had seen to Niner's leg. It might gnaw through somebody's leg if it put its mind to it, but it could not go through bone at one stroke.
It wasn't much longer before the faces of the Tributes play in the sky, mostly confirming what I already knew. I did find out that the girls from One and Four are dead, which would make Ion the last woman in the Career pack. I found out that the girl from Five was dead, and guessed, as I later confirmed, that she had tangled with Kohl and the dark boy. That gave me a clear enough picture of the state of who was left. Eight were divided between packs of equal size but unequal strength: One had three men armed with good weapons, the other had only one man, and unless the Careers really slipped, there was only one way that could end. The only other players left were an unaligned boy and girl, me and Sky.
I was jarred by a grunting squeal, and looked to see the reptile scuttle away and kick dirt on something behind it. I took a closer look, and saw a root vegetable partially exposed by the creature's digging. It looked like a katniss root, but I had never seen one quite like it before, except once- when Sky pointed to the cluster of leaves and announced that the angel on his shoulder warned him it was poison.