The forcefield shimmered in the afternoon sun, barely visible at the corner of Thor's vision like a soap bubble floating on the breeze; behind it, Loki stalked like an angry feline, slashing at the air with one of his knives every time he turned around, hemmed in by the fields boxing them in place.

"That is not going to avail you," Thor said for what felt like the hundredth time as Loki snarled at the boundary keeping them in proximity. "The Gamemakers wish to have their fun, and their fun they shall have. The more you react, the more you justify your capture for their amusement."

Loki spun on his heel and pointed his finger at Thor. "How prosaic of you. I suppose that's what you would have told me when we were children and the other worthless little demons taunted me for my upbringing."

At times, Thor had to wonder whether he and Loki lived parallel lives. "No?" he said, shifting his foot to brace it more firmly against the ground and leaning on his bent knee. "Loki, for heaven's sake, you remember what happened. I would trounce them, and then you would trounce me for daring to impugn your sovereignty, or whatever it was you called it in your seven-year-old wisdom."

"Please desist," Loki hissed, shoulders hunched round his shoulders. "Do not offer up our childhood as audience fodder."

"You started it," Thor said, using the reasonable voice he knew infuriated Loki beyond belief, for it behoved Loki to think of himself as a dispassionate, logical being while Thor pranced around shedding emotions like a snake shed its skin. "And for the record, I highly doubt the reason anyone is keeping us here is to watch you tantrum. Perhaps they wish us to see our differences. I'm only attempting to do what's asked of us."

Loki gave Thor a withering glare, and for a moment they might almost be at home, bickering in the way they used to that would end in Loki trying to throw a knife at Thor's skull and Thor tackling him to the ground, but of course they weren't.

Since the Gamemakers drove them apart with the wall of rain, Thor had spent his time wandering the city, gathering supplies and searching for any other tributes, but while he had found caches of food and water, he had met with no other. He had, of course, come across several of Loki's traps and some made in crude imitation by another who hoped to mirror his genius, but not a trace of any tributes; not even so much as an abandoned camp. Thor had covered the majority of the Arena, yet found no one, and it set up a stirring of unease inside him. The lack of stragglers suggested a large alliance of outliers, perhaps the largest in the history of the Games, and if the Gamemakers were allowing it to continue then they had managed to be interesting enough to warrant such an exception.

Thor had travelled alone until this morning, when a wave of fire sent him running through the streets to a small square; as long as he'd remained in that space the wind and flames did not touch him, and there he had waited until Loki tore through the streets from the opposite side. Once they stood in the same space, the fire whipped itself up into the air and disappeared, and the forcefield dropped instead.

It had been, by Thor's count, six hours since they became trapped with each other.

Loki stopped his pacing, narrowed his eyes, and followed the invisible line of the forcefield. He flipped one of his knives in his hands, causing it to disappear in that showy way that Thor thought ironic given that Loki often accused him of needless pageantry, then took a strip of cloth from a pouch at his waste. Part of Thor's destroyed cloak, he realized, and was in the process of rolling his eyes when Loki gritted his teeth and wrapped it around his hands.

"Loki," Thor said in a low, warning voice. "What are you doing?"

Loki ignored him, as Thor suspected he would, and caused another knife to appear before cradling it in both hands. He studied the forcefield, tilting his head as though trying to listen to the scarcely-audible hum it made, then touched the end of the blade against the field.

"Loki!" Thor burst out, pushing himself to his feet as his brother was flung backward, skidding across the concrete and coming to a stop in a crumpled heap in the middle of his containment area. "Loki -"

Not like this. Not like this.

He nearly pounded against the forcefield in frustration, but stopped himself with his fist an inch away from the danger zone, and Thor growled, the sound turning into a snarl and then a roar before he ripped his hammer from his belt and hurled it down at the floor. Loki lay still, and Thor had pictured a thousand ways this would end, some with his blade in Loki's chest, some with Loki's hands wrapped around Thor's throat, but not like this, separated by thin air and forced to watch his brother submit to his folly in an attempt to - what? To punish him? To punish Father? To spite the Gamemakers, who had gifted Thor with his hammer and their approval, and thus take away the showdown they sought to engineer?

The bracelet on Thor's wrist, his token from his days at the Career Centre, told a story of the deeds he had committed to get where he was today in the colour of the beads woven into the strands - three animals, four solo humans, a mock Arena complete with a mix of live and engineered targets - and reminded him of what he had paid to be here. He had survived blistering heat, freezing cold, and crashing through ice into a half-frozen river, and not once, through any of the shock and pain and emotional upheaval of his training, had Thor shed tears.

But now, looking at Loki's prone form, so close and yet impossible to reach through the impenetrable barrier, Thor's throat closed. He would kill Loki - he had to, not just as a tribute of District Two but as Loki's brother, to bring peace to his restless warrior's soul - but he could not watch him die alone from something so ridiculous as this.

Just when Thor thought he would lose control and weep for the cameras, Loki jerked, sucked in a gasping breath, and sat up, clutching at his chest. Thor swiped at his eyes before Loki could notice, for of course he would, and respond with contempt. Loki ran a hand through his hair and slapped his face with his fingers, then looked down at the smoking cloth around his hands with dry amusement.

"Are you mad?" Thor asked when he trusted his voice again. "You might have been killed!"

"Hardly," Loki drawled, giving Thor a narrow-eyed look. The balance of power had evened between them, and he liked it. "Honestly, brother, you would have me die so easily? Are you trying to shirk your duty?"

"Hardly," Thor shot back in return, and Loki's mouth twitched. "But I thought perhaps you had decided to take the cowardly way out. It would not be the first time."

Loki gritted his teeth. "If you are determined to think ill of me, you could at least do so with justification. I've experienced far worse than this."

Thor scowled. "You are, as always, a liar." Loki had left the Program and fled to Twelve at fourteen, just after his ersatz first kill. He had not stayed long enough for any of the serious endurance and pain tests, and certainly Father had not been sticking electrodes into his sons when they were children when he left them on the mountain and told them to make their way back down.

"Such as the case may be, I am not in this instance," Loki said dryly. "What do you think I was doing while I was in Twelve, enjoying their fine cuisine and hygiene facilities? I was training."

Thor raised his eyebrows. He could not imagine what measures of training Loki might have dredged up for himself in a district that could not pay for electricity to be sent to its border villages, other than starvation and environment. "Is that so?" he asked, curious in spite of himself. This, at least, brought no danger to the Centre or Two, as they could easily claim this the actions of a mad boy who fled his home.

"I used the fence," Loki said in such an airy tone that it took Thor a moment to understand what he meant. He'd never been near the district border in Two, but he had heard that Twelve was ringed by an electric fence that could kill anyone who touched it. "I did not just walk up to it and grab the wire, thank you, I had a method to my madness I assure you, but suffice to say I will not be done in by a forcefield unless I were to ram my face directly into it."

"And you are, what, tempting fate, then?" Thor asked. It seemed a foolish move, no matter what Loki might say, to show his hand in such a manner.

"I am looking for the weak point," Loki said loftily. "Every field or fence has one. Since I have a choice between bonding with my idiot brother or courting death by electrocution, I'm sure you can understand which I would choose."

Thor clenched his jaw. "You're too confident, as always."

"Too confident, he says!" Loki let out a bitter laugh. "Oh, Thor, you did not tell me you had chosen comedy as your Talent. 'Too confident' from the boy who from birth was assured of his victory by our dear father, who never once had anything but Father's full support and approbation while I had to fight for eye contact at dinner. Too confident, ah, Thor, you slay me."

That left Thor an opening to make a dark, portentous sort of remark like 'not yet', but he dare not unless he could make it convincing, and at the moment he did not trust himself to sell it. "And what else, then?" he asked, folding his arms. "What other means did you use to occupy yourself during your exile?"

"Chosen exile," Loki corrected him, and Thor did not belabour the point. "I know you will not understand, the golden child, but yes, I chose starvation and primitivism over the golden halls and flowing wine of our hallowed district because I could not bear to be a part of it while you triumphed over me yet again."

"Be that as it may," Thor said, and his chest twinged as he considered just how little rope Loki required to hang himself. "Humour me with a story, will you?"

It was a reference to their childhood, if not one the audiences would understand - Thor could not yet turn over every aspect of their boyhood together to the cameras, not until he had to - and Loki's lip curled to indicate he knew exactly what Thor was up to. As youngsters, Thor would creep to Loki's room and ask him to tell a story, and Loki would always indulge him, no matter how tired, how angry, even if they'd fought earlier until both their noses were bloodied and Father crowed with pride.

Loki's stories were never the same, though the underlying theme ran through all of them, two brothers who overcame all odds to achieve a great task on their adventures, ending in mutual approbation for both. Thor used to marvel that his brother could contain such multitudes within his own mind - whole universes, worlds and creatures and conflicts that only existed in Loki's thoughts - for he himself could come up with only the most basic of quest narratives.

Loki shook out his hand, squared his feet on the ground, and tested the field again. This time he had prepared himself for the shock, and while it threw him back, he remained standing, pressing the heel of his hand against his chest. "I caught tracker-jackers," Loki said, his mouth curving into a wolf's smile when Thor gaped at him. "Yes indeed. I smoked out a nest, suffocated the wasps, and extracted the venom, and with that I was able to measure and increase my pain tolerance."

Tributes in training at the Career Centre did the same, albeit in safe, laboratory conditions. Thor had undergone the same experience, strapped down to a bed in the medical ward, hooked up to monitoring machines and surrounded by licensed practitioners; the thought of Loki injecting himself with the deadly venom on his own made Thor shudder. He'd thought he understood his brother's ambition, but it seemed he had only scratched the surface.

"And the hallucinations?" Thor asked, because this might be a conversation between them but it was not private, and they had been forced together in order to entertain, not bond, and he must give them something. "What did you see?"

During his own tests, Thor saw Loki die in countless ways: blue-faced and strangled by poison; emaciated and forgotten, starved to death and stretched out on the rocks; bleeding out into the dirt from any number of wounds; gnawed by muttations until nothing remained. He'd woken, choking on his own tears, to the instructors' blank faces as they took notes by his bed.

Loki shot him a dark look as he continued to test for weak points in the forcefield. "Wouldn't you love that," he said. "To hear what happens when hallucinogens lay my soul bare."

"I think everyone would," Thor said, reminding him of their audience, and Loki grimaced. "Come now, bare your soul, unless you have something to hide."

Loki skewered Thor with a glare, but Thor merely leaned back and gave him a wide, sharp smile, challenging him with easy bravado as he had always done. And, as always, Loki could not permit it to pass unmet. "I saw Father, of course," Loki said, and he turned away, examining a section of the forcefield that allowed him to stand with his back to Thor. Nevertheless, the taut line of his shoulders told Thor everything he needed to know. "I'm sure you can imagine what he said to me. I am useless, I am a disappointment, a disgrace, that he never loved me truly. That I was nothing but a tool to victory for him, a son he might fling into the Arena with little concern for we shared no bond of blood. I am naught but a safety net, in the unthinkable case that something might happen to you."

Thor swallowed, tasting bile. "Father has never said those things," he said. "This says nothing about Father, but everything to do with you. You are determined to think the worst of everyone, not just Father, and you twist their words to suit your self-righteous anger."

"Spare me the lecture," Loki snarled, whipping around to scowl at Thor through the filthy curtain of his hair, and the sight made Thor's stomach twinge. Loki hated being dirty; he'd done his best to scrub the dust of Twelve from his skin as a boy as though he might remove his colouring with sponge and soap, and any hint of the word 'Seam' sent him into a flurry of ablutions that left his knuckles cracked and bleeding. Thor clung to this breach of Loki's fastidiousness for one reason only: that while he may have turned a dead tribute into soap, he had done so merely to unsettle Thor, and had not used it himself. In a place such as this, Thor would take what comforts the Arena offered him.

"It is not a lecture, it is the truth," Thor said, dogged. "Father loves you, Loki, like we all do. He always treated you like his own son."

"Yes, precisely," Loki said, and for a moment the fury and the haughtiness flickered, and Thor caught a glimpse of something darker, sadder, that dug into his stomach like a knife. "He treated me 'like' his own son, but I never was, and never will be. And that is something that you, dear brother, in all your guileless idiocy, will never hope to understand."

The words stung, but Thor had been pierced with far worse. "You speak an untruth, brother," Thor said at last, and Loki tossed his head, fingers curled around the handle of his knife. "You know as well as I that in your heart he will always be your father, and you his son."

Loki drew back his lips in a snarl. "And what, pray, gives you the right to make such a proclamation?"

"Because," Thor said, raising his chin. "Else you would not go to such lengths to please him."

Loki stared at Thor for several breaths, chest heaving, before his entire face contorted with fury and he flung himself away. "I will not speak to you again," Loki said, standing with his back to Thor, fists clenched and shaking at his sides. "Please do not trouble yourself in an attempt to change my mind, no matter how much a blathering idiot fears silence."

Thor said nothing, lest he betray the trembling in his breast. Perhaps he might reach Loki after all; perhaps he might find that last grain of his brother - the boy who loved books and learning and watching snakes wriggle through the underbrush and who cried and threw a knife into Thor's calf when he teased frogs - buried deep beneath the madness and hatred, and tease it out before the end. Perhaps Loki would understand at last before he fell to Thor's hand.

Perhaps. Thor tilted his head back at the sky, bright blue and unforgiving through the haze of the forcefield, and hoped he'd played the game enough to keep them safe, at least for now.

Given how horribly wrong things had gone on his watch, Clint was so fired once he got out of here. Then again, the new plan meant if he pulled it off then he would get out of here, and probably-fired sure beat intentionally-dead. At this point Clint would even take fired without the alternative; he'd love to collect his severance pay and go disappear somewhere, live as a hermit with no one else sending him on death missions. Maybe District Seven; he could climb trees, shoot bears, change his entire wardrobe to plaid, do whatever it was they did up there.

He shifted, and this time the pain thudded dully but didn't scream like it wanted to tear him to pieces. Progress, progress. Jan, the little girl from Seven, turned from watching the parking garage and looked down at him. "Are you okay?" she asked. "Do you need more medicine?"

"Nah, we've only got so much, I don't need it yet, and I've had worse." Clint waved a hand at her, and she settled, frowning. Her shiny dark bob lay dank and dirty against her scalp, and every time she touched it she grimaced. "You all right?"

She ignored the attempt to change the subject and leaned forward to check the bandage. It pulled away from his skin with a wet sucking sound, though at least it didn't stink of infection. Jan grimaced, but she swallowed and made her eyes hard. "I don't think it's bleeding more now," she said, and sat back. "What do you mean, you've had worse?"

Whoops. Maybe let's not talk about the forbidden Career training that everyone knew about but never mentioned on television. "Oh, well, you know, accidents," Clint said, grinning a little when Jan skewered him with a flat-eyed unimpressed face. "Graphite mining is dangerous. Lots of ways for big rocks to fall and squish you."

"Uh-huh," Jan said, rolling her eyes. "Okay, you've had worse from mining accidents. Though I guess I've seen some bad stuff at Daddy's sawmill. Did you know you can cut your whole hand off and not even feel it?"

"I've seen it happen to some tributes on TV." Clint studied her, but she didn't look freaked out or even all that horrified, just fascinated in a strange way. "It's a survival mechanism. Let's hope we never have to test it." Jan sobered at that, and she pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her forehead against her thighs. Clint had no idea how to talk to kids; he'd never really even been a kid even when he was the age for it. "Hey, so what do you guys do for fun in Seven?" he asked, hating himself a little.

That made her lift her head. "I liked to watch Daddy and Hank work in the lab," she said slowly. "Daddy used to teach me things, science things. And I used to play in the trees. Some of us would play Hunger Games in the woods after school, when the grownups weren't around because they'd get mad. What about you?"

"Ah, well." Clint leaned back on his elbows, fingering the knife he'd hidden up his sleeve. "Not much time for that. You know, graphite mining."

"Right," she said with a little laugh. "You and Miss Natasha. Is she your girlfriend?"

Oy, what a question, and in front of cameras, too. Clint could see them now, the audience members craning forward, waiting for the gossip. Nat was going to kill him. "Girlfriends are for kids," he said at last. Any good Career - and any spy - knew that sometimes, the best lies came from a place of truth. "Boyfriends and girlfriends, I mean, what do they do, walk around, hold hands, go on dates and get mad when you talk to another girl and stuff, right? We're more than that. Have been for a long time."

It is true, all of it; he and Nat were carved from the same rock, and the day she died would be the one Clint slit his own throat. It went so beyond whether or not they wanted to have sex with each other that that aspect of it didn't even register. Anyone could have sex; anyone could find ways to be physical together that worked for both of them. He and Nat didn't need any of that.

Jan didn't say anything for a long time. Finally she lowered her head, her stringy hair falling in sections over her eyes. "But one of you is going to die."

"Yeah," Clint said, and at the same time he cursed her crazy-ass district partner for not managing to get himself chewed apart by mutts or poisoned or anything, so that he might be able to save this girl. But he and Nat weren't the only inseparable teams in here, and Clint couldn't risk the mission to help Jan when Hank would only drag it down.

Jan toyed with the bottom hem of her uniform pants, tugging at a loose thread as the fabric puckered around it. "Do you want it to be you, or her?"

He closed his eyes. Only a week ago, he and Nat had been prepared to walk into the Arena together and stay there for the rest of their lives, literally. He hadn't forgotten that. "Her, obviously," he said. "Problem is, she'll say the same thing, just backwards, so if it came down to the two of us, it would be a contest to see who could commit suicide faster. I bet it would be pretty funny to watch, in a sick sort of way. So we probably shouldn't be the final two or it'd be a pretty disappointing show."

Jan let out a long, slow breath. "You don't think you could live without her? Even if she wanted you to be happy?"

Clint laughed, and wasn't not a pretty sound, not a camera-ready Career laugh but something deeper, ugly, hooked into his guts, and unless he took care fast, he might pull them all out by accident. "I'm too selfish for that. If she's not there, then the rest of my life is pretty much just sitting around and knitting. No offence to people who like knitting, but it's not really for me."

This time Jan glanced around, and when she saw nothing but the shadows of the garage around them, she turned back to Clint, eyes wide and desperate. "I used to think the same thing," she said in a fierce, hissing whisper. "But now I don't know. Hank - he - I love him, I was going to marry him, I was. But he's not the same." She balled her hands into fists. "He's - since he came here, he changed."

Oh. Now this, he could use. Clint chose his words carefully. "So have you," he said. "We all have. It's what the Arena is, what it does. You're not that naive little girl anymore who volunteered so you two could be together. You're stronger now."

Jan stayed quiet for a minute, then shook herself. "I'm going to go keep lookout," she said, too fast, and scrambled up and over, disappearing out of sight.

Hank and Nat should be back from their supply run soon enough; if Clint could get her alone, if he could manoeuvre the Sevens into talking between themselves, he might actually be able to pull this off. Maybe if they saved one more it would make up for all the ones who died - who might still die - because Clint had to go get himself stabbed like an idiot.

After a while, everything all kind of bled together and sounded the same. The rushing of blood in Jean's ears when that Career girl sliced her open; the rumble of water as it thundered down the subway tunnel; the roar of the flames as they consumed the building, the pressure rising and forcing the windows to explode in fireworks of glass.

Jean hated fire. The air choked in her lungs, already weakened by years in the mines, stuffed half-full with coal dust and Snow knew what else, and every breath burned all the way down her throat into her chest. She hated fire because she couldn't outlast it, couldn't swim through it, couldn't hold on long enough for someone to slap a bandage on her and slow the bleeding. Fire consumed everything, just like it had half the Seam that one summer when she was twelve, when lightning struck one of the buildings and half the main stretch went up in smoke before people could wake from their beds. It was a good thing nobody in the Seam could afford pork, because none of them had the stomach for it after that.

She definitely didn't hate fire any less with it all around her, when the smoke filled her lungs and crept into her brain and stole her reason so she couldn't remember where the door was, or the other exits, or anything. Jean kept herself down, because any Seam kid learned that's what you do, stay down, and she craned her ears through the crackle of the flames for any sound that might mean rescue. The only thing she heard was screams, and she couldn't tell if they were hers or someone else's and it didn't really matter. did it.

Finally the air closed in and the flames were too close and Jean had joked to Sam that she had 'not dying' as a superpower but that's all it was, a joke, just like everything about this Arena was a joke, just like this so-called Rebellion was a joke, ha ha ha, and Jean would laugh if she could find the breath but she couldn't. She curled in a ball with her arms over her head and waited for the end; maybe this time it would be permanent.

No such luck. Jean didn't know how long the rain poured down, how long it took for the flames to die; she jerked awake to stale, sooty air and water soaking her jumpsuit, and she struggled to her feet, coughing and gasping and spitting out long streams of black. Hands pulled at her, tugging at her clothes, holding her head above the rising water. "You okay?" asked Sharon. She rubbed Jean's back as she wiped at her mouth. "It took me a while to get free, and it's so dark, I thought -"

"Unkillable, that's me," Jean said, struggling to her feet. Sharon's face, smudged black in the semi-darkness, floated pale and ghost-like in front of her. "You okay?"

"I'll be fine," Sharon said, clenching her jaw in a face that looked a lot like Steve's. She'd really taken to him, down to the part where if she needed to be brave she imitated his mannerisms. It'd be cute if they weren't all going to die. "What about -"

This time Jean had enough brainpower to know the screams she heard weren't hers, and she and Sharon sloshed through the water and debris and the rubble until they found Jenny, trapped underneath a fallen beam with her face pressed to the floor and the water creeping up toward her mouth. Jean cursed fit for a miner and wished her arms weren't so thin and Sharon a little older.

"We've got you, it's okay," Jean said, and wasn't that just rich, her making promises like this, but Jenny looked up at her with her eyes big and wide and scared, and Jean had to. She heaved up, Sharon scooting around to the other side and lifting with her, and Jenny squirmed and pushed up with her hands against the floor enough that she got her head out of the water. Jean's muscles shrieked at her, but she turned, braced the weight with the backs of her shoulders. Sharon's leg shook - right, her ankle had healed mostly but it wouldn't stand up to something like this - but she bent her knees and dug in her fingers.

"We can't lift it any higher," Jean gasped out. Sweat mingled with dust and dirt and soot and filth, running into her eyes and dripping down the end of her chin. "You're gonna have to get yourself out."

Jenny gritted her teeth. Her leg was caught under something too blackened for Jean to be able to make out what it used to be, and she got her hands against it and pushed. Jenny was a little girl, even younger than Jean, and no way would she be able to move that but Jean didn't know what else to do. If she shifted her position, the whole thing would fall down, and she could throw herself out of the way but it wouldn't help Jenny.

"I'm not dying here," Jenny said, and Jean would have jumped if she'd had the freedom, because that was an awful big voice for such a tiny girl. "You hear me?" Jenny shouted, turning her face up to the ceiling. "I am not dying here!"

Jean didn't get a lot of miracles back in the Seam, and since getting thrown in the Arena she'd revised her definition to mean 'finding a bar of soap' and 'not getting chewed to death by mutts while she slept'. So maybe she wasn't an expert, but she damn well knew it counted when Jenny yelled, shoved all her weight against the thing trapping her leg, and it actually moved.

Not a lot, not like Jenny suddenly picked it up and tossed it across the room, but it budged enough for her to get free. She dragged herself out of the way, Jean and Sharon flung themselves to the side, and the three of them scrambled back through the filthy water while everything crashed around them.

"Where's the exit?" Jenny asked, her face pale. Blood streamed into her eye from a gash on her forehead.

Before Jean could answer she covered her ears; the screech of shearing metal tore through her skull, complete with the sputtering sound of melting steel and splintering wood, and a bright blue light filled her vision, cutting through the fallen door in front of her in a straight line. Something was coming through - mutts, some kind of Gamemaker creation, Jean had no idea. Without thinking, Jean grabbed Jenny and pulled her in against her side, though how she was supposed to protect the kid from anything she had no idea. Maybe her allergy to death would rub off on Jenny or something. Sharon drew close on Jean's other side, fists clenched. They'd make an adorable picture if someone had come to finish the job.

Jean flung her hands in front of her eyes as sunlight flooded the room when the fallen wall collapsed, and in the meantime her brain registered voices. Not the growl or shriek of mutts but actual human voices, and ones she recognized.

"Have you got them?" Steve called, his voice tight and controlled, and Jean let out her breath in a whoosh. "Sharon, if you can hear me, it's going to be okay!"

"Got three right here," said Tony, and Jean lowered her hands. Tony Stark stood in front of her wearing an oversized metal glove, a circle in the centre of the palm still glowing blue.

"What the hell is that?" Jean demanded. Steve pushed rubble out of the way and held out a hand, and Jean let Jenny and Sharon go first before scrambling up and over. Steve knelt and pushed Sharon's filthy hair out of her face, checking her for injuries; nice to see that a little near-death experience jarred him out of his grief-stupor long enough for him to play nursemaid.

"Just a little something I whipped up in the kitchen, honey," Tony quipped, and he was still wearing those stupid sunglasses. One of these days Jean was going to smack them right off his face.

Jean glared at him as she pushed past him, brushing off Steve's hand as he attempted to hold her upright. She didn't need his help, just clean air.

"Is everybody okay?" Jenny asked. Bruce, the quiet boy from her district, pale and shaking, grabbed her and pulled her into a hug, a hand the size of her head stroking over her hair. Her voice came out muffled against his shirt, but she didn't seem to care.

A cannon fired. Everyone sucked in a collective breath.

"Where's Sam?" Jean demanded into the silence, as a scream tore through the air.

People didn't keep pets in the Seam unless they could give something back, like meat or eggs or milk, and didn't eat much, but Old Man Morris had a dog. A mangy thing that chased rats and growled at Peacekeepers until they threatened to shoot it, but Old Man Morris loved that stupid mutt until the day he died. Problem was, the mutt loved him, too, and the day Old Man Morris never got out of bed in the morning, half the Seam knew it because the dog wouldn't stop howling. In the end, fearing the Peacekeepers, one of the neighbours took Rascal out back and shot him quick. Jean had been about eight or nine then, and she'd thought a ghost had come to tear them all from their beds when that dog took to yowling.

She'd never heard a human make it until Sam just now.

"We're missing one," Steve said, big blue eyes wide and panicked in his soot-stained face. "Ororo. Where's Ororo?"

"I think we all know that," Tony said. Steve rounded on him, but Tony wasn't kidding around or even grinning. He just stood there with that weird gauntlet on his hand and a solemn expression that made his whole face look five years older. "Wait, kid - Twelve - dammit, what's your name, don't go over there!"

Jean didn't even bother to snap at him that calling her by her district number was a dick Career move; she stumbled through the broken glass and blackened metal, following the sound of Sam's wailing, until she found him, half-crouched under a girder. "Oh, shit," Jean muttered, then raised her voice, not wanting to startle him, not like this. "Sam. Hey, Sam."

Sam rocked back and forth, holding the body against his chest, and Jean didn't have to come close to know whose cannon sounded a minute ago. "No," he choked out. "This wasn't supposed to happen. I'd just found her again."

"Sam," Jean said again, her chest clenching, and not just from the horror of it all. The last of the smoke still sat in her lungs, except now something worse joined it. A fire took out three houses on her end of the Seam once last year during the dry season; Jean had hoped she'd never deal with that acrid, nostril-burning scent of burned flesh again. She held back the gag reflex. "Sam, you've got to put her down, the hovercrafts are coming."

"She was in the rubble," Sam said, barely above a whisper. He stared out at nothing. "She hated being trapped underneath things, ever since her parents suffocated after their house collapsed. I was supposed to keep her safe."

Jean swallowed a wave of curse words. "It's the Arena," she said, and risked an angry glance upward at the net above them, blocking out the sun. "Nobody can make that promise. Nobody blames you. Only one of us is getting out of here, remember?" She spat out that last louder than she needed to, hoping the people who'd lied to a bunch of desperate kids about a secret rescue plan were listening. Maybe they'd tried but it just hadn't panned out; maybe they'd lied about the whole thing in the first place. Either way, Jean wasn't going to wait for a miracle anymore.

Sam shook his head. "I was supposed to bring her home."

This time Jean winced, ducking her head to keep it away from the cameras. The last thing anyone needed was for Sam to go all canary in a coal mine and start singing before he died. "You've got to put her down," Jean said, kneeling next to him. The smell filled her nose and her throat and her mouth and her lungs, but Jean forced down the bile in her stomach. "Sam. Let her go."

"They'll put her in a box and put her underground," Sam insisted. "She'll be scared!"

"Sam." Steve put his hand on Sam's shoulder and crouched beside him. "It's not safe. We have to get out of here before whoever set the fire comes back, or something even worse happens."

Sam shook his head. Behind them, the others dug through what remained of the building, searching for supplies and anything they could bring with them. Overhead, the last of the clouds from that sudden rainstorm dissipated, leaving the sky a bright, insulting blue. Jean half expected songbirds to fly past them, twittering prettily. The Gamemakers could go jump down a mine shaft.

Jean glanced at Sam's back, and hissed at the dark stain spreading through the fabric of his shirt. "You're burned," she said, making wild gestures to call Steve's attention to it. "We've got to get you some salve. C'mon, Sam, let's go."

The others would be arguing whether or not to leave Sam behind, and if he insisted on staying here and having a meltdown, that wouldn't be a stupid plan. But Jean sat here breathing and living because Sam put her guts back in and sewed her up and kept hold of her in that flooded subway tunnel, and she'd be reaped twice before she let them leave him.

"Listen to Steve," Jean said suddenly. "He just lost somebody too."

Steve flinched, but he nodded. "It's true. Let's get out of here and we can talk."

"Talk." Sam laughed, a wet, broken sound. "Talk about what?"

"Talk about what to do," Steve said, and whoa, not good; Jean's eyes widened as Steve's voice went dark and furious. Beside him, Sharon stared up at his face and flinched. "Talk about how to show them this isn't okay."

Sam let out a long breath, then finally, finally he uncurled his grip and laid Ororo down on the pavement. "All right," he said, and his voice came out cracked and hoarse but underneath it all, a matching current of rage. "Let's do that, then."

He stood back, and Jean tried not to look at the remains of Ororo but her eyes dragged themselves down anyway, the mess of bone and muscle and skin, all fused and charred, and she scrambled backward and nearly fell over right on her ass. "Let's go," Jean said, reaching out to touch Sam's arm and stopping right before, wincing at the burns all along his forearm and up his bicep. Jean wracked her brain for any detail of Ororo, what she'd been like, but she'd never met the girl before she showed up all crazy. "When you get out you can plant an apple tree for her. She liked apples, right?"

"Yeah," Sam said, and a look passed between him and Steve that Jean would give all her sponsor money never to see again. "When I get out."

"Great," Jean said with enforced positivity, her heart pounding in her chest.

They were halfway down the street when the hovercraft came to pick up Ororo's body, but Sam didn't turn to watch it. He and Steve kept walking with short, powerful strides, and even though they said nothing, Jean got the feeling they were both having a conversation no one else could understand.

Sharon touched Jean's arm. Her limp had come back, but she didn't complain, just winced and stumbled a little whenever her foot hit the floor. If nothing else, Jean gave her props for that. She wasn't the little girl in the Training Centre, shivering in the corner anymore. "We should leave them alone," Sharon said in a quiet voice. "Whatever they're going to do, we can stop it later."

She and Jean dropped back into step with Jenny, Tony and Bruce. "Do you think they're planning something stupid?" Jean asked the boys.

"Oh, probably." Tony ran a hand over his face. He'd put the weird glove thing away, and Jean didn't bother asking. He'd only say something sarcastic again. "Great, this is just what I wanted. A babysitting job."

"Okay, listen, we're not kids -"

"I wasn't talking about you," Tony said, grim-faced.

"Yeah, we're not even the ones you need to worry about, not with Sam burned like that," Jenny said. Bruce gave her a small, distracted smile and ruffled her hair. "I found one of the packs. It's mostly useless, but there's burn cream in it and I don't think the package melted too bad. We can use that once we find a place to settle down."

"Now if only we had something that cured sacrificial tendencies," Tony snarked, but it fell flat.

Sharon looked out after Steve, blood and soot on her face, hair smeared in a mess of dirt and filthy water. "He'll be all right," she said, lifting her chin. "If he were alone he'd go and do something stupid, but he's not. He's got us."

Jean almost laughed at that level of sentimentality in an Arena designed to murder all of them, but for whatever reason, today she didn't feel like it. "Damn straight," she said instead, and she punched Sharon in the arm. Now she just had to hope they could actually help, otherwise she'd feel even more useless than she did already.

Tony clapped a hand to Bruce's shoulder. "Hey, big guy, if you want to take your mind off how much things totally suck, I might have a project for you. Interested?"

"As long as it's not going to get anyone killed, yes," Bruce said. Jenny laughed, a choked-off sputter like she knew she shouldn't but also couldn't help it.

Above them, the artificial sun burned bright in the illusory sky.

Jacques, flattened back against the building across the street, watched the hero squad walk off hand-in-hand into the distance like the naive idiots they were. Like it wouldn't all come down to blood and screaming in the end; he'd given them a chance to cut their numbers without guilt, but no, they'd gone and rescued each other. Well, not for lack of trying on his part, and at least it meant more people to play with later.

"I got one of them," Jacques called up to the sky. District Nine never drowned in sponsor funds in the times Jacques watched, drumming his fingers as their tributes wept and sobbed their way to ignominious death year after year. This year, despite Jacques being a much better candidate than half the others in the Arena, he'd only received a package of dried meat and fruits, and a canister of water he'd had to fill himself during the flooding. "That should be worth something."

At least some bread; Jacques missed the tang of ethanol in his nostrils from the refineries, missed stealing the best bread from the morning delivery as it went to meet the train of supplies to the Capitol. But really, anything at all; he'd stolen some of the children's supplies before he set the building on fire, but it wouldn't last long. He could stretch it, but he deserved better. He'd given them something to watch after the alliance did nothing but sit around and collect supplies and cry all day.

No answering chirrup from the sky, no parachutes descending. Jacques frowned, squinting up into the painted clouds. "Are you still bored?" he demanded, swinging his sword through the air. "Well, fine! Tell me what to do and I'll do it. If you want someone interesting, I'm your tribute."

He waited, sword held high, and finally, a few buildings down, he heard the clatter of metal as something ran toward him. Jacques' heart rate leapt. Finally! They'd routed him another tribute - possibly the large, arrogant boy from District Two - to battle, the message as clear as if they'd flown a hovercraft across the sky to write it in the clouds. Defeat his opponent and the rewards would come.

Judging by the mad growls and snarls, the Two had a rough time of it these past few days; he'd gone right out and lost his mind, which at least would make this interesting. Jacques shifted, gripped the sword like a scythe, and waited.

Then three muttations - two giant dogs, one lion - burst from the building opposite and tore through the street, fangs dripping. Jacques hissed, but stood his ground, adrenaline pumping through him.

If they wanted entertainment, he'd give them entertainment. He waited until they closed the distance to ten feet, then bared his teeth and charged.