"Hunters and Prey"

A/N: Sheesh, this is a bit overdue. I think that's how I've started three straight chapters now. But hey, I'm nothing if not persistent. Even if it takes me 4 separate hiatuses both announced and unannounced, I'm gonna finish this story. I owe y'all as much, and also have put far too much of myself into this story to leave it unfinished. So we'll get there. Hopefully without any more extended absences.

~Though change will come

Oh, change will come

I will never believe in anything again~

McKenna

A tipping point is coming. There's always that moment in the Games, that single day, hour, or minute where everything flips. It's where Career alliances fall apart, trained warriors get caught off guard and killed, and where the underdogs get their chance to win. Every once in a while those events will be random, uncontrollable, impossible to prepare for. The whole arena flooding, a girl from District Twelve shooting a perfect shot to knock out a Career base, a power plant meltdown frying the entire arena. But most of the time, it's just about timing. It's when the favorites let down their guard, and think they've gotten past the worst, and are smooth sailing from then on out, that they get hit by surprise.

Merrium is already in that typical mindset. She's strutting around the place like she's already won, sleeping during her watch duty, not checking her corners, thinking she's already claimed victory save having to kill me and Horatio. But I know better.

I'm not going to be another Career who dies with their eyes closed and their backs turned. I know something is coming. Something big. Something earth shattering, that will send the whole arena into a frenzy. It's a quell, and a quell that is very clearly attempting to proclaim itself the grandest Games in history. There will be a moment, and when it comes, I'll be prepared.

Electricity cackles at my fingertips, arcs of blue lightning dancing across my hand. It's taken some getting used to, but thanks to a lot of practice, I've gotten a pretty good control of whatever this is. By best bet is really just a guess, because as far as I know nothing scientifically plausible or even possible for that matter could allow me to shoot lightning from my fingers. That being said, if I had to guess, I would suppose that the Gamemakers are somehow using the artificial environment to collect electricity and somehow measuring my brain patterns to figure out where I'm wanting the lightning to strike. Or maybe none of this is real at all and we're all riding the Games out in a simulation. Considering some of the things I've seen that wouldn't be too shocking.

"Watch it with the sparkles, you fry me and you die," Merrium says, lazily staring out the window, watching the only entrance to the castle.

I hold my tongue, choosing not to respond. Our relationship is already deteriorating fast enough without the two of us bantering back and forth. I have no doubts this alliance will die out long before it's just the two of us remaining, but I still hope to keep it alive as long as possible. Preferably until we can find Horatio, at the very least. With him as an ally, and about five other tributes remaining? Then I can cut her loose.

"Holy shit," Merrium suddenly says, scrambling up to her feet.

"What is it?" I ask, joining her as she hurries towards the drawbridge controls, and watching as she pulls the lever to drop the bridge down.

The bridge takes forever to drop, and Merrium refuses to lighten the tension by speaking up, though the way she rapidly fixes up her hair already tells me enough to know who's waiting on the other side of the moat.

Standing across the bridge, serious as always, is Horatio Rex. He wears a large metal gauntlet on one hand, and a lighter, at least by comparison, glove on the other. As soon as the bridge drops into place he stalks across it, and I hustle to meet him in the middle, Merrium instead choosing to lean against the wall, waiting in place and smiling over at Horatio. He pays her no mind though, stopping at the center once he meets with me.

"Any kills?" he asks, not bothering with any formalities, not that I particularly mind.

"Just one, you?" I state plainly, stretching the truth a little with the word "kill" on that particular person.

"Just Unity," he says.

"Figured that was your handy work," I say. Perhaps I should be a bit worried by him killing someone who was technically in the Career pack, but if Horatio only has just the one kill, then I'm sure he's going to be looking for as much help as possible to further that total. Help only we can provide him.

"And your kill?" he asks.

"Cyril Lovelace, District Three."

Horatio furrows his brows. "Who the hell killed Cedric Stetson and Frazier Belfast, then?"

"Considering their early demises, at least one of them was killed by their district partner. Admittedly don't see either of those two district partners as very able," I say.

"Or maybe Frazier was killed by Gamemakers right away," Horatio tosses out.

"Possible."

"But that still leaves one other killer on the loose, plus whoever killed the boy from Eight," he muses. By now Merrium has given up on her seduction tactics and has joined us in our huddle.

"Probably the girl from One, little bitch she is," Merrium snorts.

"Which one?" Horatio says impatiently.

Merrium gives him a dirty look. "How about the one who was rummaging around the castle and destroyed an entire room in a temper tantrum?"

"One of them is in the castle?" Horatio's eyes light up, and he looks torn between storming into the castle and tearing off Merrium's neck.

"Was," I jump in, attempting to diffuse the situation. "Prestige. She jumped out a third story window and into the moat."

"And survived?"

I shrug. "Apparently. A canon went off about a minute after she jumped so I figured it was her, but somehow she survived it."

Horatio nods his head, giving me a solemn look. "Show me. We're gonna find Prestige. We have unfinished business."

Rain

I stare into the shiny water at my feet. We've been following the stream for days. Dad says we're just going to keep on walking, and that eventually we'll find something. Hopefully it's a bed that we find. The first two nights sleeping on the grass was kind of fun, even if it was also scary. But now my back hurts all the time and I just want to jump back into my bed I had in the Capitol. When I told dad that he got real quiet for a while, then told me that I'll get to real soon.

I wish he would stop pretending I don't know what's happening. I look down at my reflection in the water, and I know why he acts like he does. He just thinks that I'm still a little kid who can't handle the truth. He thinks I don't understand where we are, and what it means. But I do.

My hands cup together, and I splash water over my face, washing away the dirt and rinsing out my hair. Once I'm at least a little bit clean, to the point where I can't feel the chunks of mud and dirt on my cheeks, I take the two water bottles and fill them up. Filling up our water was the first thing that he's let me do this entire time, and even then he says he has to be the one to put the iodine in it to make it safe to drink. Just another thing he doesn't trust me with.

I try not to focus on bitter thoughts. He's just trying to keep me safe. He still thinks I'm the same baby I was when he went away. He doesn't realize what happened while he was gone. I still haven't even told him about Amara. Maybe he knows already, and is just hoping I don't know that Amara isn't just gone. That she's dead. That she's never coming back, and that either me or him will be dead by the end of this too.

I shut my eyes, squeezing my hands against each other as I take in a shaky breath. When I open them again, I see something new in the water. Standing behind me is a woman, a strange blue circular light glowing around one of her ears.

As I spin around, I nearly fall into the water, attempting to climb to my feet, but tripping and falling back onto my knees as I face the girl. I'm frozen in place. I haven't seen someone other than dad since before the Games, and I had started to forget other people are in here too. Other people who want to hurt me.

The woman doesn't attack me though, she just crouches down and smiles at me. "Hello," she says in a sweet voice. "I'm sorry if I scared you."

My hands are still shaking like crazy, and I can't find any words, so I just shrug.

"My name's Clara. I'm from District Nine. You're Rain, right?"

She doesn't make any moves to get closer to me, still smiling warmly at me with nice, calming eyes.

"Y-yeah," I stutter. "I'm Rain."

"Well, it's nice to meet you, Rain," she says, reaching out her hand and patting me on the shoulder. "I hope you don't mind if I get some water from that stream. I'm real thirsty."

"It's not my water," I say, giggling a little bit, and even that sounds nervous.

"Thank you, Rain," she says, taking out a water bottle and filling it up. "Are you hungry? I found some berries that are real tasty. No poison, I promise." She smiles.

"I already got some, but thanks," I say shyly, peering in for a close look at the light on her ear now that she's up close. From here I can see that there's a metal triangle that's in her ear, and that the blue light is coming off of it.

"Wondering about this?" She asks, putting away her bottle and taking off the triangle, placing it in her palm and showing it to me.

I nod my head. "Yes ma'am, what is it?"

"Never been called ma'am before," she says quietly to herself, chuckling. "It's just a little thing that shows me things that I can't see with my own eyes. Tells me when a berry is safe to eat or when it's poison, and when I can drink some water, or if it's too gross."

"It tells you that?" I ask.

"No, it shows you," she says, her smile breaking into a full grin. "Here, why don't you try it out yourself," she says nicely.

I break out in a big smile at that, her big blue eyes giving me a warm look as she begins to move the thing to my ear. Then, there's a flashing, blindingly blue light, and a moment later, her eyes suddenly go cold. The smile drops from her face, her extended arm dropping to her side as the piece of metal drops onto the grass. Further down, below her eyes and her smile that's gone away, a pointy tip of metal pokes through the front of her chest, drops of blood slipping through and streaming down her chest.

My mouth opens and closes, and some sort of sound comes from my throat as she falls backwards, revealing dad standing behind her, that deep red blood all over his hands and splattering the front of his shirt, a raging look in his eyes. A flash of another memory runs across my mind, and my breath catches in my throat, and I can't breathe anymore.

Dad is saying something, but I ignore him, scrambling over to Clara and kneeling over her, shaking her as I shout out her name, her eyes slowly flickering over to me, blankly, before they go still, and in the distance a canon goes off.

"Rain, you need to go," dad says, reaching out to me.

I pull back, scampering away from him. "You killed her!" I scream at him, sobs mixing into my voice.

"You don't understand," he says, somehow in a calm voice. "She was going to hurt you, okay Rain? You have to be careful."

"She wasn't going to hurt me. She was nice!" I can barely even talk anymore, my sight blocked out by the tears that pool up in my eyes. "She was nice," I blubber.

He crouches down. "Rain, this is the Hunger Games, nice people don't make it this far. This girl, she's hurt people already, and she would've hurt you too."

There's a million things I want to say. I want to tell him I thought we were nice people, and that we've made it this far. That she was nice too, that maybe she was just like us. That she could've hurt me but instead she was nice. But I can't say anything anymore. I can't look at dad. I can't look at Clara, and her empty eyes that stare right through me. I can only lie down, hugging onto the ground, my hand reaching out and grasping at the tiny metal triangle, squeezing it in my hand as the sobs keep on forcing their way out of me.

Ephraim

It took Peeka thirty minutes to wake up. Those thirty minutes must've been the longest of my life. Sitting there, that other boy dead, killed by Peeka, whose entire chest was just gone. All that just moments after Peeka's guts fell out of her body, and she got up and was fighting again a few minutes later. I sat there, on the ground, looking at the scene. Peeka's guts still lying on the ground, herself lying just a few feet away, her body slowly filling in the gap in her chest, but doing nothing to erase the blood that splattered over her hands and shirt.

After a few minutes of shock that left me unable to move, I finally started doing something. It was the grossest thing I've ever done in my life, but those guts, just lying there, I couldn't take it. I picked them up, ran over to the foliage and heaved it onto the ground, out of sight of myself, and away from Peeka once she woke up. I washed myself in the river for a while after that, and then spent the last few minutes using my damp shirt to scrub the blood off of Peeka, leaving the giant weapon that fried Peeka twice to be picked up and brought out of this arena with the boy.

She woke up with a start, gasping in air like she had never breathed before, and spent a panicked minute seemingly forgetting how to. Once she finally came to, she just sat there for a long while. Didn't say anything, couldn't even be bothered to look at me. It wasn't until the anthem that she finally stirred. She looked up in the sky at the boy's face, her face devoid of any emotion, and murmured just loud enough for me to hear, "I'm sorry."

It sounded empty, hollow. Peeka, the naive girl from District Ten who wouldn't harm a fly, and now she had killed two people, and it doesn't take a psychologist to figure out she blames herself. I tried for a long while to think of something to say to her, some arrangement of words that could make everything all right, but I couldn't think of anything. I'm not sure if anything even exists. It wasn't her fault, she killed both of them because she had to, because if she didn't then they'd have killed her, and even then both of them were accidents, just raw instinct. But none of that matters. Killing someone? I'm not sure that's something you can take back. I'm not sure you can rationalize it, or forgive yourself for it. Looking at Peeka now, still that hollow shell of the once bubbly girl I knew in the Capitol, I hope that I never figure out.

I know that we'll have to do something soon. Peeka has just sat in the clearing, hasn't moved a muscle or said a thing, while I go out and fetch us water and berries that she refuses to drink or eat. How long before the Gamemakers decide to make her do something interesting? Lead somebody here, and make her fight again. Make her kill again.

I'm still thinking of some way to tell this to Peeka, to get her to understand that we have to move, that we can't just sit here and wait, when a fog moves in from the forest. It collapses in on us from all directions, so that there's no possible way to escape. Peeka still doesn't even stir, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the clearing. I move closer to the fog, carefully reaching out my hand, finding to my relief that the fog doesn't burn me. It doesn't even make it any harder to breath, it just blocks my vision even more, so that I can hardly see my hand if I extend it.

"Peeka?" I call out, blindly. "Where are you? I can't see a thing in here."

She doesn't reply.

"Peeka? Seriously, just say something, I can't find you." I stumble around aimlessly.

The forest is completely silent, save for the soft rustling of leaves as the fog blows against the ground. Then, faintly, from behind me, the sound of metal sliding against metal.

"Peeka?" I try one last time, quieter this time.

"Ephraim," Peeka's voice calls out from behind me through gritted teeth. There's the sound of leaves crumpling. "Run."

I go to say something, to ask her what she means, what's going on, and a million other questions I have. But before I get the chance, an ear-piercing scream rings out from Peeka, a scream that slowly morphs into something bordering on what can only be described as a howl.

A part of me wants to be brave, to run towards Peeka, help out my friend who has something seriously wrong with her. But as fearless as I like to act, with the hazy fog leaving me blind, and that eerie silence only punctured by her animalistic screams, I'm scared as hell. So I run, and I run away from Peeka as fast as I can.

I don't even see where I'm going, leaves and twigs crunching against my feet as I stumble over branches, barely managing to stay on my feet. Behind me I can still hear Peeka screaming, a guttural, pained sound that gains on me with every moment. Before long she's right behind me, closing in on me so that I can feel her ragged breath on the back of my neck. I lung forward, my ankle catching on a stump as I collapse to the ground, facefirst into the dirt. Peeka flies past me, leaping over the log and skirting to a stop, only the silhouette of her visible through the fog.

She stalks back and forth, glowing red dots piercing through the thick smog, staring at me as I slowly crawl to my feet and look back across at her, heaving in desperate breaths, my lungs burning and my face covered in scratches and cuts from my fall. We both stand still for a minute, then, slowly, she begins to walk towards me. I stumble backwards, too tired to run anymore, and knowing that it really won't do me any good.

"Peeka, it's me, Ephraim," I say weakly, but she just keeps on walking.

I let out a tired sigh, stumbling backwards and onto my rear, leaning up against a tree trunk as she continues to trek towards me. Thoughts begin to race through my mind. I think of Alita, and that night at the fireplace with her. I think of my dad, and I feel a pang of regret for not appreciating him enough. I think of my mom, of the only thing that I know about her, that paper note in a shoe box. Maybe I'll be seeing her soon. I suppose I'm about to find out. Through the surging panic that pumps my veins with adrenaline, I feel a small wave of acceptance washing over me, a sort of calming drug that makes me think everything is okay, that this is fine.

A tree branch snaps from a few dozen feet over. Peeka immediately turns away from me, sprinting off towards the sound. A voice, a boy, has just enough to time to plead with her to stop and let out half a shout before he goes silent. Faintly, I hear the sound of metal slashing against flesh, like a butcher hacking into a slab of beef. The fog is fading now, turning back to it's normal haziness, and as I squint off in the distance I can just barely make Peeka out, standing over the boy, claws dug into his chest.

Something's changed though. She's not hacking away at him, that feral look is gone. She sits over him, hands shaking as her claws remain plunged in his chest. Willing up my last shards of bravery, I walk towards her. I step over a branch, and her head snaps over to me. I feel immediate guilt at the way I leap backwards, Peeka staring me in the eyes, silent tears splotching her cheeks and pouring out her eyes as her mouth gapes open and closed in what I can just barely make out as being some sort of apology.

Her claws pop back into her hands, her whole body shaking as I speedily walk over to her, not letting her get out a word before I crush her in a hug, her body going limp as she murmurs incomprehensibly into my ears, the word "sorry" repeating itself over and over again. I don't say anything, I just continue to hold onto her, letting her sob into my shoulder, while I do my best to ignore the shredded, torn apart boy who lies still next to us. I just keep holding out, pretending that we're back in the Capitol, and everything may not be okay, but there's still hope. There's still that light in her eyes. Because when she pulls back for a brief moment, before falling back into my arms, and looks me in the eyes, that light is gone. Her hands are dipped in red coating, the same red that stains her shirt, that same blood that drips from her hair, her cheeks, her mouth.

I just hold onto her as tight as I can, and try to block out those images, and just try to focus on that picture of her eyes in my head. Her eyes, not cold and empty, not bright and optimistic and stupidly naive, not anything at all.

A/N: I'll hopefully be back soon to update with the next part. Until then, thank you to those of you who are still hanging around. As a reminder, deaths won't be confirmed or named until they're shown in the sky by the Capitol.

I'm really excited to be writing this story again. I have so many plans for this, and promise you that all this confusion and chaos will be going somewhere very soon, and your many questions will be (mostly) answered.

Trivia(1 point): Favorite POV?

Trivia(1 point): Who just got murked by Peeka?