Annie's legs carry her for an unfeasibly long time. She becomes a desperate, agile beast, plummeting through the forest and through the icy snow, her hands locked over her ears. Her breath comes as a rasp and cold tears run down her cheeks. The blood smeared across her face stands black in contrast to her skin.

Sequin pursues her for a bit, but she's lighter and adrenaline pushes her out of sight quickly. A hovercraft comes for the bodies of the District Two tributes and Shizue. Sequin looks around the now blood stained camp and the camera picks up the hint of a satisfied smile on his lips. How quaint.

"Sequin Asba seems to have proven himself fantastically ruthless," Caesar offers, and Claudius giggles delightedly.

The main feed whirls back around to Annie. She doesn't slow until first light, when she reaches the edge of the woods again and is looking out at the cornucopia. Her eyes swivel over her surroundings—the tall pine trees above her, the blanket of snow over dead leaves and limbs. All she has is one knife and the clothes on her back. She's clearly still in shock, her ears relentlessly covered, and she sits down in the embrace of some tree roots to sob.

"District Four's Annalee Cresta does not seem to be handling things well," Caesar murmurs, with faux gravity.

"Not everyone has the heart of a victor," Claudius adds airily. "It's a shame that more of her mentor didn't rub off on her. If there was ever a true champion, it was Finnick Odair."

Johanna Mason, lying on the couch beside him, snorts. She's been dozing on and off through the night, keeping one eye on Folia and Bex's progress. Haymitch has wandered off drunkenly, both his tributes dead in the bloodbath. Jom, sneaking off periodically to some unknown location, has not slept a wink, blank eyes directed unceasingly toward the horror. Cashmere, too, has not slept, not even looking at Brutus when her tributes killed both of his. With the onset of morning, the ranks of possible sponsors have returned, and it finally occurs to Finnick that Annie has nothing, and probably isn't looking like too attractive a candidate at the moment. He breaks his eyes from the screen for the first time in what feels like hours, looks around the sea of unfamiliar faces. No one seems to notice his presence, everyone preoccupied by the open bar and tables of hors d'oeuvres. He looks back at Annie, and thinks that if any other tribute approached her now she'd be dead. He'd have to watch her die, and there's not a damn thing he'd be able to do about it. He's not sure he'd be able to handle that. He's not sure what the alternative is.

He's trying to keep his breathing under control when he feels Johanna's shoe poke him in the ribs. He turns to her and she motions toward a woman standing ten feet away, champagne glass in her hand at nine in the morning. Her hair is an unnatural shade of onyx, her eyes the same along with the floral tattoos that spill from each tear duct. Her skin is a slightly shiny olive. When Finnick meets her eyes, she gives an inviting twist of her lips.

"Who's that?" Finnick murmurs.

Johanna shrugs, but Jom gives him a piercing, bloodshot look and asks, "Does it matter what her name is?"

Finnick slips to his feet and as he approaches the woman he pastes on that cheeky, welcoming grin, hoping it will overshadow the granite dashes under each eye and the shaking of his extremities. She appraises him coolly, and he notes the universal symbol that is the flash of gold on a finger of her left hand, standing in contrast to the look in her ebony eyes.

He reaches out a hand once in range and the soft words "Finnick Odair" slither off his tongue.

"Zavala Moray," she replies, fingernails sliding across his palm. He's aware that there's a game to be played here. Superficial, perhaps, but the Capitol is all about superficiality and Finnick would have to be blind and deaf to not have learned how to follow the pattern. "Eventful games...so far," she comments, under a veneer of innocuousness.

"I suspect this is only the tip of the iceberg," he adds smoothly. "I would know."

The longer he looks at her, the colder his blood turns. She's as painted and prim as any other Capitol citizen, as flirtatious as anyone presented with an attractive celebrity, but there's something dangerous beneath her facade. A darkness that's not part of her make-up. She's formidable, and something in her demeanor makes him want to fixate on the twelve inches of distance between them.

Zavala swirls her neon drink with a forced nonchalance, then looks up to sneer at him without the slightest restraint. "And in your professional opinion, what do you think it would take for a tribute to gain an advantage, at this point in the proceedings?"

He allows his eyes to slide toward Annie, on screen. Tears still rush down her face, and through her throaty, wet breathing the camera picks up on her muttering to herself in incoherent syllables. She's digging herself into the snow to try to keep warm, using one hand while keeping the other against her head. Periodically, she shifts back onto her haunches and closes her eyes, shutting out all sound and sight. There's so much she needs, how is he supposed to prioritize? Can he send himself floating down on a silver parachute to save her?

"Food," he says definitively to Zavala, thinking that a few calories might snap Annie back into rational thinking. "And maybe something to keep warm."

Zavala's fierce eyes search him from head to toe. He feels hunted. He can feel his fourteen year old self urging him to resort to arena instincts: fight or flight. Feeling this woman's breath on his face only makes him want to sprint.

"Curious," Zavala smirks, and then excuses herself without another word. His eyes follow her, and though she takes a roundabout route to keep him on his toes, it's not long before she stands in front of a kiosk.

By noon, the first parachute tumbles down toward Annie through the thick pines.

m m m

Annie's curled in a cocoon of sleeping bag and snow, arranging stray sticks by length and width with one languid elbow, when the cameras all pan toward the cornucopia. They zoom in to identify Sequin, looking only slightly bedraggled, rifling through the remaining weapons. He's already loaded down by two swords and an archery set, but is undeterred. Along the edge of the woods, a girl from District Three eyes him with a brutal rationality. She pulls an arrow from the quiver on her back and notches it, pulls it to her cheek to aim, so careful and quiet that she could just be a branch stirring in the wind.

Just as District Three's eyes squint in preparation for letting it fly, on the other side of the forest, Annie moves.

Annie's intention is unclear, but Caesar helpfully offers up that perhaps seeing Sequin initiated some primal desire for revenge. It's true, perhaps, as she wrestles herself from her sleeping bag with a vengeance, grabs for her knife, locks her eyes onto his deliberate movements and breaks from the treeline. But her entire plan of action is never known. Startled, the girl from District Three lets go in the direction of new movement. The arrow flies over Sequin's head and the camera locks onto Annie's eyes as she sees it's rapid, unavoidable arc. She may have a millisecond to duck but she doesn't take it.

Finnick finds himself on his feet unexpectedly, every muscle clenched.

The arrow screams into a tree. Annie collapses into the snow in a pool of blood, concealed by the undergrowth. Finnick finds himself unable to breathe as cameras pan back toward Sequin, who looks in the direction that the arrow flew but can't see Annie's unmoving form. He directs his attention to the District Three girl, who's realized that her cover is blown and is already pounding into the woods. Sequin gains on her quickly, regardless of her head start, and sends a spear through the left side of her sternum. She collapses and the cannon goes off.

Sequin regroups himself at the cornucopia, but his eyes keep dodging over to the treeline, focusing on the arrow now drawing sap out of the trunk of a pine. The camera zooms in on Annie, now making feeble movements to crawl back toward her sleeping bag. The arrow seems to have sliced across her forehead, splitting the skin shallowly through her eyebrow and nearly to her hairline. It's a face wound, though, so it bleeds profusely across the entire right half of her face. With one hand on her ear and the other pressed to the wound, she slithers back into her snow cave to wait. For what, though, she seems unsure. Or possibly just indifferent.

Sequin, though, is on the move, approaching the arrow-impaled tree to find the trail of blood Annie has left. Annie, lying in her hole, has her eyes closed and seems to be focusing on her breathing. She doesn't hear the crunching footsteps of his boots on the snow.

Finnick has his hands at his sides, his fists clenched. He screams at Annie ineffectually, "Get up! Get up get up get up!"

He looks around the room frantically, but no one offers any help. Everyone is either as rapt as he is or drunk, but they're all equally impotent. It's when Sequin is only ten feet from Annie, scythe raised and feet silent, that the tide shifts.

Folia and Bex have reached their destination.