Early update! Woo! Mainly because this is such a short chapter and wasn't worth a week's wait.
Thanks to everyone who reviewed/alerted :)
Hunger Games belongs to Suzanne Collins.
Chapter Thirteen: Sand
We spent the night on a large tree. I had tied Lian to a branch using my net as he was thrashing around so much from the pain of the bites. Obviously the poison affected him badly, my whole body was stinging as if acid was running in my veins, but it was an inconvenience. Lian was out of his mind with pain, fluctuating between shouting in agony and lying so still I had to check his pulse. From the higher tree branches, I could see a hill of sand sticking up from the blue water. I would have gone there straight away, but Lian's cries would have alerted the other tributes to our whereabouts.
So I spent a sleepless in an uncomfortable tree watching Lian scream and call out to his sister and his parents.
As the sun rose in the morning I untied Lian from the branch and set him back on the logs. It was only fifty metres to the hill, but his constant thrashing meant it took me the whole morning to propel ourselves over there. By the time I got to sandy hill I was so exhausted and irritated that I was ready to leave Lian to be killed, but the memories of Genn and Millie kept me from doing either of that. Instead, I hauled him up the sand so he didn't roll back into the water and then sat on my haunches, staring out across the dune, waiting for another tribute to appear.
As the sun began to set, I grew bored of waiting and gathered up the two water bottles that Lian had been carrying. It had been ages since I had drunk anything and even longer since I had eaten – but we had finished our food during the walk before the wave came. It was a relief to drink water again, though. It consumed an hour or so of waiting as I perfect a technique of letting the absorbent material of my robes suck in water and then squeezing it out into a bottle, but it meant my hand never had to get too close to the dangers under the surface.
At one point Lian opened his eyes and glared at me. Sweat covered his shivering body, dripping onto the sand below him. I went to his side immediately, lifting his head up slightly to trickle some more water into his mouth.
"Lian, stay awake now, this isn't the time to be sleeping," I ordered. His eyes started to close again, so I shook him hard. "Wake up. It's hard to save you when you keep dying on me." I sighed in relief as his eyes opened again. "Why don't you do the talking? Tell me about District 4; tell me anything you want to get off your chest."
"This is your fault," he croaked through cracked lips. "It's your fault she's dead."
I didn't respond; I couldn't think of what to say. My eyes shifted uncomfortably away from his face, instead looking out at the sea all around us. I could see the fins of the huge piranhas sticking up above water, circling ominously, reminding me of pushing Millie towards their hungry mouths.
However Lian didn't seem to care that I wasn't paying attention to him. "I never wanted to be your ally. It was all Genn's idea; she thought that you would be a decent guy because you were hot. She was hoping you would fall in love with her while we were in the arena. You didn't see her face in the tree because you weren't paying attention, but she was so happy that you were talking to her." He spat a mouthful of blood onto the sand next to him. "Look where it got her. She died and you didn't even bother to try and save her, you just let the piranhas get her. My sister. You let her die. You killed her, like you killed that other girl."
I pulled my knees up to my chest and rested my head on them. My eyes dropped from the muttated piranhas fins, down to my trident, lying on the ground, still stained with blood. Millie's blood.
"You killed her," Lian croaked quietly before slipping back into unconsciousness.
Next update: 5th/6th February