SCOTT SHARPE- Lisette Crowley

I saw the eruption, but I didn't see him in it. It must have burned him up like a cinder. The Arena wasn't kind to my alliance. We didn't need enemies to die.


Erwin Jacobs

I should have known it would happen to Scott. No one got through the Arena unscathed. I should have known they would suck everything good out of him and kill him when they'd made him worthless. I shouldn't have let him affect me.


Sky Levings

Tullia was such an underdog. Whatever life threw at her, she wouldn't stop. I thought she was indomitable, but no one was against the Capitol. She did better than any of us would have.


District Five

If Tullia had anyone to come forward for her, we didn't see them. The rest of the street kids ate a little better and wished they weren't. We were all proud of Scott. He stuck by his allies and only went out because of something nobody could have seen coming. The Capitol thought it was funny when someone died like that. We didn't think it was funny at all.


Nubu Sanders

I felt bad for rooting for Zaley over Atro. Now that they were both dead, I could mourn both equally. Zaley didn't have a family I could visit. She seemed to have come from nowhere. I did what I could for Atro's family. It was never enough.


District Twelve

Zaley left behind dozens of unanswered questions when she died. She slipped away like a phantom, as mysterious as when she'd come. Strange things happened in Panem, and sometimes we never found the answers. There were a dozen boys clamoring for Atro's job as soon as he left. Thanks to Atro, someone else got a one-in-a-million chance at a job worth having. Only time would tell if his successor was equally ambitious.


Lisette Crowley

The eruption didn't follow me down the mountain like I'd been afraid of. It was more like a waterspout, since it went straight up and then died out. I hadn't looked where I was going when I ran, and I ended up on the far side of the mountain. The slope bottomed out into more of the candy rocks Scott threw into the crater. I felt safer with a mountain between me and the Careers, so I'd been wandering around hoping to find a source of water, or at least soda.

It was awful being alone for the first time in the Arena. I knew I wasn't the strongest Tribute. At this point, I was by far the weakest of the survivors. Blake and Ember wouldn't be seeking me out in particular, but they'd make short work of me if I was the one that crossed their path. Besides the selfish reasons, I was sad about Scott and Randy because they were dead. They were real people, not just pictures on a screen like when I watched the Games at home. I felt bad for those people, but they weren't as real as my allies. That was a selfish way to think- that they were worth more because I knew them. I should have been sad about everyone.

The white candy rocks started to get smaller. I looked ahead and saw a flat, desert-like plain of tiny candy pebbles. They were all different colors, but mostly blue, pink and purple. The plain stretched on a long way, but I could see something shimmering in the distance. Maybe it's water, I thought, and I started forward to cross the tiny desert. I stepped onto the tiny rocks.

I couldn't hear anything. My stomach felt weightless. One leg hurt, but the other didn't feel like anything at all. I looked down and saw I was in the air. One of my legs was tumbling five feet away from the rest of me. I could hardly tell which way was up as I fell down.

It was the rocks, as far as I could tell. As soon as I stepped on them, they blew up. The explosion threw me forward, and I was going to land on more of the rocks. They blurred toward me as I got closer to the ground. Red, yellow, blue, purple, pink... they were all going to fly up with me soon. I was going to be part of a rainbow.


Ember Steiner

In my dream, my father was alone. He was shut up in his room, and he couldn't hear me when I called through the door. My mother was at the table weeping. I tried to help her, but she didn't see me. The house was empty. There was nothing in it but them, and they were empty, too.

I was crying almost before I woke up. My hand burned, even after we'd bandaged it and applied the antiseptic in the first aid kit someone sent us. It made bile rise in my throat to remember how I'd grabbed the dangling finger and pulled the skin taught so the knife would go through it more easily. Then I had to trim the leftover nub so it wouldn't pull in the night.

It still didn't hurt as much as the dream. They say dreams are what our brains want to say but we won't let them. I missed my brother as much as my parents did in the dream. I wanted to give up and cry like they were, but I couldn't. I had to keep going to keep the nightmare from becoming real for them. My mother had always been sensitive. She never should have been with my father, and she was closer to Shui than to me. Losing him would push her to the edge, and losing me would be unendurable. The only way I could stop that was to come home. Glory wasn't important anymore. This was much deeper than that.

I'll make you proud, I promised Shui. I'll do what you would have done. I'd do something for people like him, people who didn't follow the Career mold. Shui made his own path, and I'd help other people find that for themselvse. I'd make some sort of program for children who didn't want to volunteer. Two needed teachers and politicians and so much more than gladiators, but that was all our schools cared about. You were a Career or you broke rocks.

I thought of how happy people would be if I won. People would be crying in the streets as children ran away with their arms full of gifts. I used to love the sweets we all got when our latest Victor came home. Maybe I wasn't fond of candy anymore, but the thought remained. If I did get out, I might even tell Jerky how I felt. It was crazy, and I had no idea how he'd react, but it wouldn't be a secret anymore.

Life as a Victor wasn't perfect. I grew up around them, and I knew how scarred most of them were. Megara even said she wished the Games had never existed, but only in the privacy of the Victor's Village. But some of them were happy. It just depended on the way you thought. You had to move past the Arena, acknowledging that it changed you but not letting it rule you. When the Games were over, they'd be over. I'd move on to new things and new experiences. I'd honor Shui and all the fallen Tributes by living a full life and changing things for the better. Maybe it didn't mean as much because I was the one that killed some of them. Nevertheless, that would be in the past.


6th place: Lisette Crowley- Death by Pop Rocks

It would get boring if everyone died by Blake and Ember, so I got creative. Maybe Pop Rocks don't usually blow up so violently they blow your leg off, but weird things happen in the Arena. Lisette was provided for us by Comettail, who was newer to my universe than some. I'm happy she (he? Most of us are girls) came, because I liked Lisette. She was more emotional than the stoics I usually get, but she wasn't just emotions. She was a lot of things Panem doesn't value, like kind, and caring, and friendly. She made Panem a better place while she was alive.

Someone suggested I make the votes puvlic, and now that it's just one vote for a Victor, it's safer to do so. I'm not going to start WWIII and say who voted for who, but I can release numbers of votes and voting history. Lisette is the first of the final six to die because she got no votes to win. Before that, she was generally popular. She got very few votes to die and a handful to win, so she was usually on the positive side.