Implacable

Dylan (D4)

Maybe I passed him a while back. Lucian is clever. He might not have continued down the road, knowing that I would follow. He might have doubled back. He might be living it up in the gas station.

But what stops me from turning around and following my instincts is the burning knowledge that he might not have, and that every step I took towards rather than away from the Cornucopia might be one step farther from smashing the turncoat, murderous bastard's skull in.

I'd be lying if I said that every atom in my body wasn't screaming for his blood on my hands.

My beef is not with anyone else in the arena. If I came upon the two small ones, Demetra, the Three boy, though, there would be little more than a flimsy mental barrier stopping me from reverting to the constant messages to kill that have been floating through the District, and its inhabitants, since the moment of birth. My time of restraint is over. My allies are dead. Diele is dead. My friend is dead. Nothing is holding me back any more.

Why stop at Lucian? I'm going to kill everyone. Everyone in this damn arena. With my hands, if I have to.

Some little reservoir of logic in the base of my skull has been humming away through the throbbing of my head where he hit me and through the violent anger that courses through my veins, clouding my vision. This is what I know.

I am unarmed. While I am certain Lucian ran at first, he must have doubled back and tossed my clubs over the edge of the arena. I could see silver glinting there, thousands of feet to the rocky ground. I have no food. He took that, too. I know that he will be armed and fed and quite possibly expecting me. I also know that I don't care.

I have had no training with firearms. I can't pretend that I have much more than a vague idea of what I am going up against. But he can shoot me until I am more bullet holes than I am human, and I will snap his neck before I die. He can knock me over the head as hard as he likes, smash my skull to fragments, and I will rip his throat open as I spasm on the asphalt. He can cut my arm off, and I will pick it up and use it to beat him to death.

This isn't about winning. It's about revenge. Blood for blood. All of them… why didn't we see it from the start? Why did we let any of the Twos in for even a second? I don't know how any of them make it to five… the whole district is a madhouse.

For Diele, who saved my life more than once, for Chalice, who did nothing to invite what Panem did to her, for Rippel, whose death is no doubt also on his list of murders, for Gull, who must have known...

We all deserve to die knowing that our killer would remember us until the day they died, would feel our pain twice over, would see our faces in their dreams and honor the sacrifice we made so they could live. Without that, we are wasted.

It makes my blood boil that so many are forgotten, because of him. Perseverance through agony, bravery until death, a willingness to live, no matter the cost – traits that define us as Careers – are lost.

I will kill him, or I will die trying. I will win, or die trying. I will win. If only to be the one who remembers my allies. Even those who tried to kill me. Even those I could have saved. Even those who died in vain.

It will hurt, but I will remember them.

No such coordinated thoughts are truly surfacing in my consciousness, but I can feel them there when I reach. I try to cordon them off, in an effort to conserve my focus. I fixate on the stab of pain that rips through my chest with each sharp breath I take.

I can almost bring myself back to the past, with my eyes on the road and my rib throbbing. Not a pleasant time, but… better then than now. I can almost make myself see Diele running beside me, out of the corner of my eye, just outside of my peripheral vision.

No, 'going' crazy doesn't begin to cover it. Even I can see it. Maybe it's something about the immensely repetitive terrain, the fact that there is no part of my body that does not hurt, or the recent, cold-blooded murder of a friend. A friend. My only friend. Ever.

Just like that, I am seething, burning, blood-parched-angry all over again.

When I was little, my father would bring me into work with him often, to meet the men and women who were already victors, or almost certainly would be in the near future. I wasn't scared of them, because he spoke of them as if they were friends when mom would ask about work.

It was a long distance from our house. I learned just how big single family homes could be, on the route to the District Four Center for Physical Education, an large, imposing, clean building in a sea of fine houses and gritty sands swept for miles by the wind.

The day I visited, it was nearly empty, but for a few of the functioning victors, a handful of trainers, and three or four of the most devoted students.

Delmara, a woman whom I still know only by her first name, was the only one from the section of the district that I grew up in.

She looked a lot like Scilla, though she was taller and broader in the shoulders, less angular of face. She spoke the native tongue of District Four much better than the others. I gathered that it was her first language, rather than a few words, sentences here and there like most of the people my father introduced me to.

I liked Delmara a lot, though her hands shook too much to hold a spear, and she didn't seem to have a protégé like the rest did. She seemed a good person. My mother would later tell me that the older men and women of the district, who trained before the Great Rebellion, were the remnants of a lost generation of District Four, one which was thinned greatly by the war they chose to fight, and did not win. While my father and Delmara would have been too young to participate in any kind of war, they remember.

It makes them different than the other residents of the training center—best to admit what it truly is.

While few of the people there paid me much mind apart from the obvious comparisons to my father, Delmara would sometimes speak with me over the lunch break. While my father spoke quietly with other trainers, she would tell me about the greenback minnows she and her little brother once caught. I liked her stories, I remember, because she mixed her two languages together as she told them.

She was reluctant to give me advice that might lead to my joining the center full-time. But she seemed to accept that I would, though she never encouraged me like my father did.

I think that might be where he and I began to get angry at each other, when I first exhibited a reluctance to do, as he put it, the 'right thing'. And I think that may be why I still question what we are doing, in the end, as Careers. I never really had a good reason. I had to make up my own.

Delmara was not terribly instrumental in my training once I began in earnest.

-Who would want him to win? she would ask me, in the language that would not be understood even if those around us could hear, on the occasions our lunch schedules would intersect, and she and I would eat together. I would be telling her the story of the boy who broke his sparring partner's collarbone only to receive a class promotion, or the new recruit who won a coveted place in a high-ranking swordplay study group, supposedly, through the skilled bribery of a teacher. Isn't the goal to learn how to win? No one will want you to win if you are like them. No one will teach you how if you presume to already know.-

She was right. In the long run, while the public schools cannot refuse anyone proper training, neither boy I asked her about was called back the next year to the center.

I did things the right way, tried to listen to her, the instructors, the victors, my father.

Look where it's taken me.

If I was to return to Four, right now, I would not be the restrained, careful person that Delmara wanted for me to become. I have let rage overcome my sensibilities. I have not considered my actions' effects on anyone, not even myself.

She is not likely pleased with what I've done.

I'm not sure I am.

One of the stories she told me, about the minnows, was about keeping them in a glass jar, feeding them, and having them swim there for weeks on-end, obedient little pets, wriggling through the tiny cylinder that made up their world.

I used to imagine that, being cut off from the rest of the world, in a little bubble of my own, necessary supplies provided in a manner beyond my understanding.

For some reason, those daydreams were always happy.

This arena is my own little hell.

Maybe, if no one else, my dad is proud of me. I'm made it very far. I hope I haven't disappointed him, too, somehow.

I probably have. It's the only thing that could make this torment worse.

I continue down the pavement, feeling sicker and weaker with every footfall, as my head aches and my lungs burn and my ribs cry out for rest.

There won't be any rest for me.

I have nothing else to live for but to kill Lucian Gray. So that's what I'm going to do.

As I run, I feel disapproving eyes on my back, goading me inexplicably away from the people whom I could not all please.

Though I am driven by terrible, forceful hatred that shows so outwardly I have difficulty containing it, the invisible hand pushing me forward is a wordless anger at what I have become, and the blind, ceaseless hope that if I travel another mile, I'll finally make them… all of them… see that I am worthy of their approval.

There is a silver package from the sky that breaks my concentration, somewhere along the trek that has nearly numbed me to the pain and the repetition of it all.

It's oddly oblong, but I hold on to the hope that it is food, somehow… in a bizarre container.

When it isn't, I feel irrationally angry. Instead of a bottle of water, which I desperately need, or a cylindrical pile of vegetables, which would be even better, it is a long, light wooden bat with the weight and feel of smooth, bleached driftwood.

The muscles in my arm flex of their own accord, and I smash it against the pavement without breaking stride. It's very light, cheap wood. Nothing else so easily used as a weapon could make it into the arena so late.

It cracks into three spars, one splintery, short and unusable, one too bulbous at the end to be anything but a club. The third looks almost like a spear.

I discard the others, finding the balance of my crude weapon. My fist tightens around it, the jagged edge of the split digging into my palm. Above me, I hear a bird's cry, slowing down and looking up in time to see it dive from thousands of feet to some point below my line of vision.

I almost wish it had come for me. I want to test my spear.

Maybe it's better that my first true target will be Lucian's chest.

When the time comes, I'm sure I won't miss.

-x

I'm back to a normal writing schedule. Next chapter will be with the Gamemakers, and the chapter after that, there will be a death.

This update's question: Who do you think the next victim will be?