Hey guys. Once again, apologies for not updating sooner, and for having a short chapter (again). And thank you to everyone who reviewed. Seriously, I probably still wouldn't have updated if it wasn't for you.

Just wanted to let you know, that I'm probably going to have to wrap this up in the next few chapters. I really should get this finished before I head back to school (because I've got way too many fanfictions going on right now...). So it's gonna be kind of rushed - I know, that sucks. On the bright side, it should mean faster updates and longer chapters (I hope.) Anyway, enjoy!

I woke up with a start.

More voices. I could hear them, moving closer. "Max?" I heard someone call out, "You in here?"

I looked up, shocked. Roy?

"You know you can't hide forever."

Oh, you just watch me. I settled back in the fork, no one was getting to me here.

"We just want to talk with you," a girl's voice said. There was a girl with Roy?

Yeah, that made it so much less likely that they would kill me as soon as I showed myself. Still, I was curious, what did they want to talk about?

"We have a sort of...proposition," Another boy called. Hmmm. That was interesting.

Eventually, the curiosity got to me. Curiosity killed the cat, right?

Well, lucky I was a bird.

I crawled along a branch and slowly poked my head out, looking down to where the voices were coming from.

I slowly lowered myself onto my stomach, so that I could at least give the appearance that I was rather comfortable.

I found that I was looking down on Roy, who was accompanied by two girls, from districts 8 and 11, if a remember correctly, and a boy from district 7.

"What do you want?" I asked from my (reasonably) safe point up in the tree. I swung my legs around behind me, to make it look like I knew exactly what I was doing.

"Uh, wanna come down from there? It might be a bit easier to talk to you if you were on the ground with us."

I tilted my head to the side, considering his request for a moment.

"No," I told Roy, "I quite like it up here. It's comfortable, and there's less chance that you'll kill me."

"We're not going to kill you," The girl from 11 said.

"I think, given the aim of this game, it's a precaution that I'll have to take."

"What makes you think that I couldn't climb up there and kill you, if I wanted to."

I looked down the tree. "I'd like to see you try."

Roy shrugged, and moved to the bottom of the tree, and before I know it he was moving up...how?

Claws. Cats had claws which the used to climb trees, to eat the birds in it. I'd read it to Angel from a book once.

Roy had claws, and he was climbing a tree. To eat a bird.

Well, I hoped I was wrong about the eating a bird bit.

I watched as he climbed through the branches of the tree to sit right in front of me.

"See? No killing."

"Okay, I'll come down," I told him.

Roy began to climb down the tree. I decided to take a shortcut. I grabbed my stuff from the fork, and then jumped, using my wings to glide me down safely.

The girl from 8 looked at me with confusion. "You can fly?"

"I can glide. That was gliding," It probably wasn't a good idea to mention that I actually could fly.

"So, what did you need to talk to me about?"

"Well," the boy began, "Almost every year in these games, the Careers win. Because they train for it."

"And then they gang up on us, to make it easier for them," the girl from 8 continued.

"We thought it was about time that they got a taste of what it was like," Roy finished.

"What exactly do you mean by that?" I asked, confused. I didn't belong in Panem, so all of this stuff about how the Hunger Games went was knew to me. I was processing that while trying to understand what they were saying.

"We want to gang up on the careers," the boy from 7 told me.

"We're trying to get as many as possible to join us, then we'll attack the Careers," 11 said.

"So, you want to gang up on the careers, just so that the careers don't win," I said.

"Yeah, that's right," Roy confirmed, "So you in?"

I took a moment to think things through.

If I joined this group, there was a chance that they could kill me at any moment.

But, let's be honest, so could anyone else in this game. And I still had my secret weapon (A.K.A wings).

And really, could I sit in that tree forever? I mean, eventually this game would have to end.

"Alright," I told them, "I'm in."

Apparently being 'in' meant joining them on a long search for every other contestant alive who wasn't a career. And, unfortunately, we had to wait until nightfall to work out exactly who those were.

Which really doesn't explain how they found me, but Roy put it off as some luck and the idea that a bird might be hanging in a tree.

I'd slept a fair bit, so it wasn't really a problem that we were walking around for most of the day, trying to work out where the Careers might be now. I was the last one to have seen them, but the direction that I pointed in really wasn't much use. Of course, I could fly off and find their whereabouts quite easily, but that wouldn't do much for the secret that I had been trying to hide.

I was told that the girl from District 8 was named Ami, and her friend from district 11 was Lily. The boy from 7 was Kori. They weren't really keen on telling me what animal they were crossed with. I didn't really mind, I was keeping secrets too.

Eventually the others grew tired, and I volunteered to keep watch while they slept. I'd had enough sleep already. It surprised me how easily the accepted this and fell asleep, considering I was meant to kill them and all...

I watched closely when the pictures of dead contestants were shown that night. I made a list on the of all the districts, crossing out the contestants who had died.

Afterwards I had a list of those who weren't careers that were still out there.

I had a list of the people we needed to find.

The others were quite impressed when they woke up, and then went straight to identifying who the people on the list were.

"The girl from 12, isn't that Anita?" Roy asked.

"Yeah, the frog-girl," Ami confirmed.

"Frog?" Kory asked, surprised.

"Yeah, apparently she's a really good swimmer. Nice girl. The croaking gets annoying though," Ami told us.

"Well, if she's a frog, she's probably somewhere with water, right?" I suggested.

Roy nodded, "There's a lake on the other side of this scrub. I've been there. I'd suggest that she's somewhere around there..."

It continued like that for a while. Working out who the remaining tributes were and what they were, and from there discussing where they might be. We figured that most of the tributes would be in the forest area, rather than the desert part of the arena. Except, maybe, the boy from District 3, who was part Camel.

We made a decision to head for the lake first, as Roy knew where it was. We packed up our stuff and headed off, eating some berries which we found to be quite tasty (and not poisonous) on the way.