Merry early Christmas!

Gavin Booth- District Ten male

Some Tributes looked at the Bloodbath- more accurately they didn't look at the Bloodbath, since it was pitch black- and concluded that it was suicide to run in blindly to a nest of Careers. I, meanwhile, looked at the lightless Bloodbath and thought "heeeeere goes nothing!"

God watches over drunkards and fools, because I wasn't dead. Instead I had what was definitely a spear, since I pricked my hand picking it up, and a bag full of what seemed like canned food and a water bottle. When I'd first felt the cans I'd had a flash of cosmic panic thinking that I didn't have a can opener and the Careers would find me squatting by a rock like a caveman bashing a can against it. God smiled again, because they had pull tabs.

That was when the smiling ended. I was hardly smile-provoking anymore. While I was sprinting away from the Bloodbath I smashed full speed into a cave wall. I still tasted blood. If I got out, I'd have to see if my nose was broken. Oh, well. They say it builds character. If it wasn't broken then it might be now, since I'd bumped into walls a dozen times after that. I also tripped once and managed to land on the ground instead of the spear.

Sure would have been nice, I thought. Sure would have been nice if the Bloodbath had had any flashlights.

The sound of jingling chimes was like a celestial chorus. I took a cautious step toward the noise, calculating that the sponsor gift couldn't be coming from a wall and I therefore wouldn't smash into one. After two steps something pressed down on my hair. I looked grabbed the capsule as it started to slip off my nose.

Inside the capsule was something with flat parts and pencil-shaped parts. I turned it around in my hands and brought it up to my face as if I could see it if I just looked closer in total darkness.

I could see it. I saw through it, anyway. I saw the dirt and rocks on the other side of the night vision lens and sat transfixed for some time, wide-eyed and enraptured at just... seeing. I slid the lenses on with reverence and cried quietly as I looked around in slow circles.

When I happened to look down at the capsule, I saw another pair of glasses nestled among the tissue paper in the bottom. Also among the tissue paper was a note.

Make a friend?

Enzo Ranger- District Six male

The first night was over. I'd heard a lot of cannons, but none of them were mine. I'd been huddled behind a pile of rocks, hoping I wasn't visible. The cave walls were damp and there were little streams I could use to fill the canteen I'd gotten from the Bloodbath. I also had a weird folding knife, some energy bar things, and a single arrow. I hadn't heard a peep from the Careers. Not that I would have heard them if they'd come for me.

Speak of the devil.

There was a scuffling from farther into the tunnel. I shrank against the wall. The noise stopped before I could triangulate it and pick a direction to run. I waited in silence, utterly terrified. I had no idea who it was. I didn't know if it was even a person, I realized, and tears formed in my eyes. It could be something from my worst nightmares, feet away from me, and I had no idea and no hope.

Something bounced off my face. I reared back and batted at it. It landed with more a clatter than a thump- a very artificial noise. I was hyperventilating as I crouched lower behind the rocks. Out of panicked desperation, I felt around with a hand on the ground. My hand fell onto something hard and plasticky.

"They're glasses."

I fell over sideways at the voice. It was still some distance away, but it carried the certain truth that whoever it was could kill me as I crouched helpless. Seeing few other options, I put on the glasses.

I could see. I broke out in a huge grin as I saw, for the first time, a normal boy peeking around a corner in the tunnel. It was like being born again.

"Someone sent me two pairs," he said. "I was afraid if I got closer you'd run away, so I threw them at you. Allies?"

"Ten, right?" I asked as I stood up and wiped a stray tear. "Yeah. Allies. I had a really cool idea, actually..."

Visenya Lloyd- District Nine female

People thought I was cold and logical. Really I was just cold. I wasn't more logical than anyone else. I wasn't really that cold, either, I just didn't know how to react to things I'd never been through and I tended to default to not reacting at all. At the moment, though, I needed to be exactly as cold and logical as people said. I needed to keep my head on straight and think in nothing but facts and realities. If I let my mind wander or drifted from the next step ahead of me to my full situation, I would go mad.

I was walking blind inside the earth. I was living the universal nightmares of being buried alive and being unable to see in the presence of mortal danger. If I let myself realize that, I feared I would lie down and never get back up. So I kept putting one foot in front of the other and repeated what I needed to get done.

Find Linden. Find Linden. Find Linden. Linden had our supplies. It had been our plan for me to run and him to go in for supplies, since he was faster. He would have a flashlight or torch or whatever illumination there had been in the Cornucopia. I wouldn't be able to find him, exactly, but if I kept going and stayed away from the Career long enough, he would find me. It was scary to put that much faith in someone so much more secure than I was, but I didn't think he'd betray me yet. Call it faith.

It felt like evening when I sat down with my back against the cave wall. It felt like I'd been walking downhill, deeper into the earth. I sat in the stygian silence. The only sound I heard was my soft breath. I closed my eyes so I could pretend that was why I didn't see anything. I had no idea how long it had been since I had last seen light. It was like I was already dead and lay in my dark coffin unable to admit it.

I thought I had died when it happened. My eyes were open again, although I didn't remember when I'd opened them. I was facing up at the cave ceiling, but it must have fallen away. I knew it must have when a star bloomed. A tiny pinprick of light hung suspended in the sky.

I've died, I thought. I've died, and I'm rising to heaven. I was out of the cave. I was free.

Another star was birthed. Then another, and another. I stared at the tiny, incandescent things, beaming out their light like angels spreading splendor past anything a human could understand. The stars multiplied until there were too many to count. Some were clustered and some were alone in expanses of blackness. It was worth it to die, I thought. I'd never realized the universe was so beautiful. The moment lingered, light reflecting off light and reaching me, its only witness. Constellations spread out above me, galaxies spiraled, and in their light, I saw the expanse around them was stone, not sky.

I wasn't dead. I was still in the cave. They weren't stars at all. For the first time since the lights appeared, I looked down at my hands and saw them dotted blue on me and the ground below me. Glow-worms, I thought. It had been years since I'd read about them in some cheap adventure novel. That was all they'd seemed to me at the time: a magical invention for a children's story. They were real, though. They were real, but they very much were magic.