Author's Note: Hey guys! Thanks for your patience! I have been so caught up with tennis that finding time to write is getting harder. Not to mention school starting on the twenty fourth. this chapter starts pretty slow but it gets good towards the end. Plus I put in a little bit of a cliffhanger for ya. Let me know what you think. I have some awesome ideas for the ending so keep reading!!! and if you have anything in particular that you want to see, let me know and I can try and throw it in.
Chapter 13
We had a minor celebration after such a dramatic victory. A few bottles of water were opened to celebrate, and we drank them heavily. It was about noon when we all settled down to sleep.
Cleota was going to take first watch until dusk, at which time I would take the next watch until about midnight. Then Sheek would take watch until the following morning.
This plan of sleeping for 18 hours pleased everyone, especially Lex and Blythe - They drew the two long straws exempting them from keeping watch.
I went to sleep with everyone else. My sleeping bag was warm and cozy in the shade of the rainforest. My head hit the pillow and I was out like a light.
I started dreaming the instant I fell into unconsciousness. I was home in District 1, but it wasn't the District 1 I remembered. Opal didn't laugh. Obsidian didn't look up to me. Instead, they cowered away.
My mother didn't give me a hug. She shook my hand and didn't make eye contact. Had I done something to upset her? Had I scared all of them? Then I looked down, and saw, gleaming in the sunlight and dangling from a blue ribbon, was a medal that I somehow knew meant that I had won the Hunger Games.
I felt something on my shoulder. I sat bolt upright, the knife drawn and poised to slice the neck of my assailant in an instant.
"Going to kill me there, Apollo?" asked Cleota. I breathed a sigh of relief and put down the knife. "Your turn to watch," she said simply.
I nodded, and she went to lie down for a night of rest. I sat down at the edge of a tree on the border of the clearing and the rainforest to keep watch until the night was half way over.
The dream had started me thinking. What would life be like when I returned home? Would my family still think of me as Apollo? Or would I be someone or something else? A killer?
I told myself to stop thinking about it. I had eight more bridges to cross before I crossed that one. It would do only harm to think about returning home.
The watch was incredibly dull. Not only was there nothing to see, but the absence of Lex's usual snores wasn't there to keep me from going insane. The hours of boredom passed slowly as all hours of boredom did in the Hunger Games.
At the appropriate time, I woke up Sheek for her watch. She seemed well rested and ready for an uneventful watch. I walked back over to my sleeping bag and laid down to sleep again, not because I was tired, but because I wanted to escape my thoughts.
It felt like only minutes later when Sheek woke me up. After consciousness had fully registered with me, I figured out that it really was only a couple of minutes later.
"What?" I asked her quietly. I could tell from the immobile lumps on the ground next to me that I was the only one she had woken up.
"Intruders, don't make a sound." The word intruders instantly woke me up fully.
"Where?" I whispered. She pointed to the pile of supplies. I could just make out the sound of two sets of footsteps. Sheek, with her night vision glasses could see them.
"It isn't Steffi and Marko," she told me. "It's the two little girls."
This shouldn't have affected anything. They were just two little girls who had to die so that I could live. But they were so innocent. How could I kill them?
"We need to get Blythe up. She can hit them without them knowing we know they are there." I said these words trying my best to disguise my unwillingness to kill them. I was pretty sure Sheek knew why I wanted Blythe to do the deed.
"Ok," she said. "I'll get her. Wait here." And with that, she began to crawl over to where Blythe was sleeping. A few moments later, as Sheek was crawling past Cleota, I heard her shriek in pain.
I crawled swiftly over to her, removed her glasses, adorned them, and then looked at her. While she had been crawling, her hand had slipped in the mud and landed on Cleota's mace. She deep gashes in her hand were dripping blood.
I turned around just in time to see two long haired figures running into the swamp, their arms full of supplies, mostly food. They had heard Sheek shriek and had fled. I followed them with my eyes until they entered the swamp.
A couple minutes later after bandaging Sheek's hand, we woke the others. We told them about the two girls, and they were eager to hunt. Sheek and I, who hadn't been sleeping for the past couple of hours, were not so excited.
"You two can stay behind if you like," suggested Lex.
"Fine," said Sheek. "I'm staying. Are you going to stay with me, Apollo?" she asked.
On one hand, I was dead tired. On the other, I didn't want to miss the action. It seemed pretty selfish to think about it, but the Hunger Games were pretty boring. All we did was sleep, keep lookout, strategize, and have a fight every other day.
"I will stay here at camp, but not all day. You guys have to come back for lunch, and we'll switch." Everyone agreed to this plan. It was still dark, but the sky to the east was beginning to turn purple, and the sun would be up in a few hours.
They took minimal supplies, and I forbade them from taking food for fear of them staying out later than they had agreed to. I could almost hear my mom laughing at me, giving out curfews.
I assumed lookout as soon as they left. I promised to wake Sheek an hour after sunrise. I'd sleep until half an hour before noon when we would start on lunch.
My watch was going as boringly as ever. No sign of any other competitors or sounds of sleeping teammates to speak of. The sun had just risen when something happened.
I saw the two figures emerge from the swamp slowly. Their heads were turned towards us, and when I perked up at the sight of them, they turned back to the swamp.
Hurriedly, I woke up Sheek. I told her about the two small girls. She walked directly over to the pile of weapons and selected a spear and a couple of knives. I grabbed a long sword and our remaining bow.
We walked across the clearing to examine the place where the girls had emerged from the swamp. The mud had dried enough that we could still see the footprints where the girls had exited the swamp, reentered it, and then taken off the edge of the swamp towards us, but just out of sight.
Shocked at this development, me turned back to our supplies near the rainforest, we were surprised to see the two girls running back into the rainforest, each with a spear and a knife in their hands.
They had outsmarted us, tricked us into leaving our supplies. Something told me that they were smarter than we were, and we would have to think if we wanted to stay with them.
"We need to follow them," said Sheek.
"But we can't leave the supplies unguarded," I reasoned.
"They've taken what they want," replied Sheek. This started me thinking.
"But why did they need weapons?" I asked incredulously. Sheek's eyes widened with realization. If they had really wanted the weapons, they would have taken them last night. There must have been a new reason for them wanting weapons.
"What if they have Cleota, Blythe and Lex?" asked Sheek. This is what I had been thinking as well. "I'll go," she said. She was about to run towards the rainforest when I reasoned that the others hadn't ever been in the rainforest. Surely they were caught somewhere in the swamp.
"Fine, but I never went in the swamp before. I stood guard. You should go," she said. This was fine with me. I was sick of guard duty.
I took off into the swamp, following the girls' original footprints. They were headed into the center of the swamp, deeper than I had ever ventured into its muddy depths.
The path they took began to wind between certain trees, taking precise turns at odd angles. The multiple occurrences of these oddities alerted me to the situation. These turns were not coincidences – these girls were avoiding something.
I decided to find out what. Being extra careful, I continued the path I had been taking instead of taking the sharp angle. Pace by pace, I ventured into the mud.
I felt a slight resistance on my foot. If I hadn't been walking so slowly, I wouldn't have felt it at all. After pulling my foot back, I burrowed my hand into the mud and found a submerged wire. Gingerly, I followed the wire, pulling it from the muck.
The trap led to a bush about five feet from where I had originally encountered the wire. I grabbed a small branch that was lying on the ground. Crouched a good distance away, I tripped the wire with the small piece of wood.
A volley of cleverly disguised darts sprang from the bush. They embedded themselves in a tree twenty feet away. This was very clever, but not really conventional. Upon further inspection of the darts, I saw that they were carved from the green wood of the trees found in the swamp.
Also inspecting the bush, I found that the mechanism that fired the darts was made of hurriedly tied knots and rigidly cut shards of wood.
This mechanism definitely wasn't made by the gamemakers, nor by anyone else in the capitol. They would have used different materials. This was made by someone in the arena.
It couldn't have been made by anyone in our group. Nobody had the skill, nor had anyone spent any significant time in the swamp. Marko and Steffi, to our knowledge, only inhabited the rainforest. It had to be the two girls. Nobody else could have made this.
And if they could make this, what else could these two cute innocent girls be capable of?
I resumed the path through the swamp. The mud was beginning to fill with water again, and the trail was fading. I continually looked far ahead to remember the path for as long as I could.
Finally, the path wound through the swamp to a sandy patch that wasn't swampy. It was inhabited by the tallest trees in the arena, but there was something odd about it. I walked among the trees and camp upon what I had been looking for – my teammates.
They were caught in a net and suspended ten feet off the ground. I saw their weapons on the ground beneath them. Obviously, they had lost them as they were being hoisted into the air.
I picked up a stone and tossed it gently at them. It hit Cleota's leg, and she immediately perked up. The expressions that covered her face were confusing me.
First, she looked happy to see me.
Second, she looked shocked at something.
Third, she looked fearful.
That's when I heard a twig snap behind me. I turned, sword extended. It was the blonde girl from District 12. She had a whip in one hand which she immediately lashed at me with. The whip coiled around my sword and pulled it from my hand. It spiraled away where it landed in the sand fifteen feet away.
The second girl, the dark one from District 11 appeared from behind a tree. She too had a whip, but this one was homemade. The girl from 12 had obviously gotten hers from the cornucopia, whereas this girl had made hers from fibers from some plant or another. What worried me were the thorns that were hastily tied onto the whip.
She lashed out at me, the thorns hooking onto the skin on my arm. When she pulled back, pain exploded in my arm as the hooks were ripped from my flesh. I grabbed the mace from where it was slung on my back.
When the blonde one tried to hit me again, I parried with the mace, but with my hand high, I had exposed my unguarded torso to the dark girl. She lashed out at my flesh and again hit home.
The pain was excruciating. Instead of trying to stand and fight, I charged the girls. They spread apart, so I picked a target – the darker one. I tackled her, and as we toppled to the ground, I caught her in a headlock, my knife to her neck.
"Let her go or I kill your friends," said the girl.
"No," I told her. "Let them go or I kill her."
"How about this," said the girl who I was holding. "I push you backwards?" Her words hadn't registered when all her weight forced me from my knees onto my back. I rolled backwards to get back onto my feet, but the world flipped around as a rope settled around my ankles, and I was pulled up into the leafy foliage, fifteen feet from the ground.
So this is what they were capable of…