D9- 17- (Asher Lightwood)

Now that the day before the feast has come, I am certain that whatever is wrong with Aeris has to do with the fact that we're not doing as the Capitol pleases.

I wake up early in the morning and go fishing, fill our canteens, and cook the fish I caught. I bring it back up to our cave and sit down next to Aeris, coaxing the poor delusional, hazy-minded girl to eat some breakfast and drink some water. Then I eat myself, but I don't eat much because by my second fish, I'm feeling queasy. I only caught four, but Aeris would only eat one, so I had three. I leave the last fish in my backpack and wrap my arm around Aeris as she falls asleep.

If we were back in District Nine, I'm certain I would like her in ways that are rare in the arena, if not impossible. She's pretty in a way that's internal as well as external. I've always thought she was kind of pretty, but now that I've gotten to know her, something about the way she was before inched its way into my brain and stuck itself there, and now when I look at her, that makes the way she looks seem even prettier.

Her gray eyes open and I'm surprise by how short of a time she was asleep for.

"Hi," I whisper to her.

Her hand cups my cheek. I'm tempted to pull back, but I let her do this as she stared questioningly up at me, like I'm a mystery she's been contemplating all her life and she's finally started to crack it. She doesn't say anything, and I don't either. We end up sitting there, so close and just gazing around, though mostly at each other, for at least five minutes.

"Asher." She crops the word like she only has a few milliseconds to get it out of her mouth.

"You remember my name," I say.

She nods, frowning at me. "Asher…"

"Do you remember your name?" I ask her, trying not to get to excited. I prepare myself for disappointment—or try to. The hope welling up inside me is too strong to give into pessimism.

She thinks about it for a second, which makes my heart sink slightly and I wish I wasn't so filled with hope. After a moment, Aeris says, "Um… A… A-a— Does it start with an 'A'?" she asks.

"Yes!" I smile slightly, encouragingly, at her.

"A… Ally?... Arielle? A-Aaron… Adeline… Adelaide…"

"You were kind of close with Arielle," I tell her.

"Um… Um… Aurelia…?"

I shake my head. "It doesn't have an 'l' in it," I hint to her.

She bites her lip.

"Arica? Aras—"

"Yes!" I exclaimed. "Really close to 'Aras'…"

She groans, which makes me smile again and wrap my arm tighter around her. She just now seems to notice my arm is around her and gets awkward, but I keep her close to me anyway. "I don't need to remember my name, do I?"

I chuckle. "Yes, you do. Just guess again."

"Okay… Um… Aras… Aras… Aeris?"

She might just be coming back to me…

Or it may be a cruel trick. I suspect the latter.


D5- 18- (Anya Saitov)

My finger—oh, it burns and aches! I've bandaged it and I was sent a bit of stuff to dull the pain and heal it, but it's just a small tube and I'm rationing it. It feels no better—actually it feels worse when I put it on, but I assume that's just the germs being killed—yet, except for the pleasant dullness that comes about five minutes after application. With the little amount I put on, the dullness only lasts for about thirty blissful minutes before the pain sears again. I'm sure the pain will go away soon, but I feel like the medicine enflames it. But if it's doing what it's supposed to, I'll live with thirty minutes of peace every three hours…

That's not my only problem, though. I tell myself that the woods are within a day's trek, but I don't believe my own words. I run sometimes, when I can, but despite the food I'm grateful for that the Capitol has sent me, as well as the water, I'm weak from thirst and hunger. I've lost many pounds from starvation, and I feel ill, like my stomach is going to erupt—and once, around ten in the morning, it does. I throw up stomach acids, my stomach empty of anything else. Still the pain gnaws from within me, and I hope I don't get trapped at the feast and get killed because of it. I'm starving for whatever food will hopefully be there.

Trapped.

Hmm.

A thought flickers in the back of my head, but it doesn't seem to matter. I push it away and surge on.


D4- 13- (Nelly Carter)

I stagger along to the woods. They look so far away, though by now they're supposed to be so close… Just one more day or else. Or else what? Doesn't matter. Not anymore. Do I want to live? I don't even know—but Calypso is dead, and a girl's finger is somewhere behind me because of it. Not dead, just fingerless. One finger is gone. I think I'm dwelling too much on the lost finger of that girl's but it was just so damn creepy and disgusting.

Doesn't matter. Nothing does. One foot in front of the other, getting to the woods…

There are periods of time as I walk where I feel like if Calypso and Ryan don't come back to life and stand next to me, I'm going to explode. I'm going to take a million lives of Capitol citizens just to fill the pain roaring in my chest, only to make the swirling of my mind, the insanity, grow even larger. That's what hurts the most: the fact that I can't even be strong for them, that I'm too crazy to hold it together.

I've always had a bit of trouble focusing, but now it's worse. I have to focus on things that don't have to do with death and my friends' deaths, but it's hard. It's nearly impossible in the arena, where death is the only thing you witness. You may see another world of wildlife and different people from all over, but in the end it all amounts to your death. If you die, what you see won't matter anyway because you can never tell those outside, and if you live you'll be too broken to recount the events without a mental breakdown.

One foot in front of the other. Closer and closer to my demise.

And I can't help but think—What did I ever do for this hell?


D10- 16- (Nick DiLaurnetis)

I feel more betrayed than I thought possible. I've moved far away from Damien and Decon, though I can still see their silhouettes in the distance I've put between us since I woke up at five a.m. this morning. I thought it was then, at least, and by my guess it's two o'clock in the afternoon now. It's really hot, and gray clouds dance around the sun but no rain falls. I doubt it will until day eight—wouldn't want anyone freezing to death and wouldn't want the rain to obstruct the Capitol's view of the feast.

They were like my best friends! I'd grown close to them, bonded with them through the death and destruction that ways on our shoulders in this damned arena. I never would dream of killing one of them because they were a hassle, and killing Astrid was like killing a very small part of me that was growing larger slowly. They were a part of me too. They had set up an invincible campsite in my heart and they wouldn't go away until the very tents rotted away into nothingness. So how could they even dare to betray me like that? To break the trust we'd grown so firmly between us? Maybe I just got too attached to them, and the friendship we had was no more than a pitiful delusion. Maybe our trust was no stronger than the fragile strands spread thin between normal allies.

As much as I feel betrayed, I feel devastated and I'm stricken with grief over Astrid. I liked her a lot, and now she's gone… Honestly, she didn't have much of a chance of winning anyway, though I feel horrible for thinking this. Still, it's hard to think that she's just dead like that. It has taken losing someone I cared for deeply to understand just how awful the Hunger Games and all the deaths in them can be. Of course, I resented them before, but not to this level.

I will play their Games—I have to, don't I? It would show them nothing for me to just give up and stop trying to show a point. The point wouldn't be shown and I'd be dead very quickly, picked off by some Career, or if one of my old allies were to kill me, hopefully I'd be reluctantly slaughtered by them, though mercifully. I hope… I don't know what to expect of them anymore, but I don't trust them enough to be allies with them.

I've been to shocked and sad to truly get angry, and now that I think about it, I am pissed. How could they? The bastards! Astrid never did anything to harm them. We could've kept her around a long while before her death became necessary for them, before her living became a threat to them, and by then the group would've already split up. There was no need for killing her yet!

Maybe that's what they were thinking, though. Maybe they were just clever and they decided taking her out now would be one less to take out later… Despite the fact that I see logic in their decision, I still am furious and shocked at them for it. I decide now that there is no room for more trust in me, especially not trust in them. Even with their camp stuck to my heart, I'm done with them.

And shouldn't I have been all along? It was a stupid mistake to ever believe they deserved my kindness and belief that we were too determined to kill the Careers—the main reason the three of us allied in the first place—together to kill one another. I assumed that Astrid was now just part of that detail, that unspoken pact… when I was never a part of it in the first place.

Oh, they're going down. Screw them, screw the friendship I thought we had—they're going down.


D7- 16- (Damien Andrews)

"…Check."

"Enough food to make it there?"

"Check."

"Water?"

"Uh… meh, sorta check?"

Decon looks over at me with slightly narrowed his eyes, but I know he's not angry. We're taking inventory so we know just how far we can push ourselves to get to the woods on time depending on how much food and water we have to replenish our energy and strength. He's just getting into it, and so far we had our weapons, backpacks, stuff for snares, food… and the water was just a "meh." I can see how that might irritate him slightly, but not directly at me.

"So now we have to delay for water," he says with a sigh, swinging his axe into its place in his belt and starting to jog. We veered away from the river when we killed Astrid, but I'm pretty sure Nick did too, or he stayed and sulked so he's far enough away. Plus, it's one of the only places to get water unless it rains or if there're rivers we just don't know about, and the latter would be generous. I've never known the Capitol to be generous.

I follow after him silently to preserve my breath as we run diagonally (toward the woods but more toward the river off to the side), finishing off my canteen while we go. Within an hour we're back to the old river and filling our canteens. We reward ourselves with the half an hour it takes to purify the water as a break, and laugh when I see I scooped up a minnow in my canteen and half to start over—hey, that's just five more minutes of break, right?

"Ready to go?" Decon asks.

I nod, and we run toward the woods, prepared for whatever comes at us—especially a pissed-off/depressed Nick or a bunch of jackass Careers.


D12- 18- (Krumr Strongthews)

I wonder who is closest to the woods briefly.

But then Carlyn brings me back to the world and rambles on like she does sometimes, "Oh, goodie, we're nearing the trap. What do you think they have in store for us here, Krumr? Mutts? Explosions? Traps? Well, it's all a trap—you and me, we've got that part figured out. Ooh-ooh-ooh, and I bet they hate that!" She giggles. "Probably be the worst deaths for us."

"I'm not going to die," I mutter, irritated. No matter how cool Carlyn is, she really pisses me off sometimes with her lack of faith in me and her constant pessimism hidden within the cheeriness of her voice. What really gets me sometimes is when she tries to act girly or cute to anger me because she knows it make me mad, and then when I yell at her she just keeps doing it!

"Everyone dies," she says, rolling her eyes. "If you live, when you get old—sixty, seventy, eighty… the ages victors live to—what are you going to do? Tell death, 'I'm a god now—you can't take me,' or, 'I'm immortal now—you can't take me'? Or are you going to just say, 'Hell no,' and expect death to quiver away and run?" She looks up at me, an eyebrow raised.

"I think the 'hell no' one would be more badass. Let's go with that."

She rolls her eyes. "You are so irritating."

I smile insincerely. "You too, dear."


No one dies so there is no tribute list.