Lil short chapter since I can usually write one POV a night after work and went ahead and gave you two POVs to stay speedy.

Caio Sagres- District Two male

As I darted in closer, my spear arm snapped out at the mutt's legs in a slash. Like a perverted mirror of my own fighting style, it danced back in a ripple of limbs. It curled around on itself sideways and struck at me like a snake. I fell onto my back quick enough to not be slit open to the ribs but not fast enough to avoid a deep slash diagonally across my chest. Before I could get up, a bladed leg skewered my foot through the tendon where it met the leg. The mutt yanked me in, and I had a nightmarish thought that now I knew what fishing felt like from the other side.

For the first time in my life, there was a crack in my confidence. And as soon as there was a crack, the wall came tumbling down. I didn't even know I was screaming until I heard it. The mutt loomed over me like a spider on a fly. I spastically swung my weapon in a desperate attempt, praying that it would have some effect and that I wouldn't die where I lay. The blow deflected off the carapace protecting the mutt's head. The only evidence I'd even hit the thing at all was the thin tendrils atop its head, which were snapped.

The mutt reared sharply. Its leg was yanked free from my foot. Blood spurted from it as I crabwalked backwards and waited for dozens upon dozens of legs to hit the ground and hunt me down. I rolled onto my back and crawled, waiting for the skewers in my back.

I looked over my shoulder to see it coming. But the mutt hadn't advanced. Its legs were on the ground, but it wasn't coming for me. It seemed bizarrely aimless. It was tossing its head and shuffling its feet listlessly back and forth in the same spots.

It's those things on its head, I put it together. It didn't have any eyes. It saw with those skinny things, or something like seeing. I got to my feet, buckling on my impaled foot and leaning on the cave wall for support.

I was about to die.

I knew it as I limped away from the thing. It floundered behind me, and I knew that if I hadn't gotten away, I would have died. It would have beaten me. That was what made me tremble, far more than the blood and shock. It wasn't my skills or my finesse that saved me. It was a lucky strike. A stupid, lucky strike at something I hadn't even been aiming for.

I shook even more when I saw Donnatella's body swaying at the ends of four of its legs, her hair sliding in tendrils across the cave floor. I hadn't even known she was dead. It killed Donnatella and there wasn't a thing I could have done. As I limped away, sticky with blood and the mutt's fluids, the cave had never seemed so narrow and dark. I'd always known there would be fights for me. I had just learned something that would never let me be the same. There would be fights for me that I might not win.

Meenah Turbine- District Five female

My hand looked so tasty. It pale skin was almost the color of pasta. Chewy, hearty pasta that stuck to your insides and made you feel full. I never felt more like I'd eaten a real meal than after I'd eaten a plate of spaghetti. My hand, waving in front of my face, looked like nothing else more than a round, fat ziti.

It had been six days since I'd eaten. It was two days after the Bloodbath before the snotlike yellowish moss growing on some patches of the wall looked like a better option than going without. It hadn't poisoned me, so I'd kept going. I'd eaten the last of it the day before I caught Atticus.

"Hungry" had almost left me behind. I didn't feel hungry so much as I felt floaty. It was like my stomach had been so empty for so long that it had started spreading out and eating the rest of my insides. I was sure that if someone cut me in half, I would be hollow. I'd been absentmindedly sucking on my lip. It was like eating without any of the fullness. Always eating, never having eaten.

I should check Atticus again. When I took his glasses, I'd checked his pockets for food and hadn't found any. Maybe there was something I missed. Really, I knew there was nothing I had missed. No one as hungry as I was could have overlooked anything. But I needed something to hope for, even if it was nothing.

I crawled back toward Atticus. I was so empty and faraway that it wasn't as scary as I thought it would be. I'd avoided the tunnel where I left him. I couldn't imagine the thought of being in the space near him after I'd left him to die alone in the dark. Such a place would be haunted, or at the very least heavy with the significance of what I'd done. But now I literally couldn't imagine it. I didn't have the energy for fantasy. I crawled numbly, like a thing that only moved because didn't see it was already dead.

I lowered myself onto the rock that pinned Atticus and sat heavily. In the dark and with my energy level, I barely saw him until I was right on top of him. Then I saw the discolored marks on the wall where he'd tried to claw free and the nail-less fingers that were the reason he left marks.

He was looking up at me. My stomach churned when I saw his face. I heaved, but there was nothing to come up. His face was alive. Not with him. With insects. I heaved again and again as the sight of them flashed in my head even though my eyes were shut and my hands were clutched to my chest. They were rock-colored things with raised bodies and four pairs of bent legs. In front of their eight legs they had jagged, split pincers lined with little grabbing claws. They crawled on his face. They crawled in and out of his face.

They're in his nose they're in his eyes they're in his mouth his nose his mouth.

I could never have the strength to reach past them and look through Atticus' pockets. I had greater strength. Horrible nightmare insects. What I was thinking what unthinkable. It wasn't my mind that did it. Where my mind revolted, my body refused to die. I lingered outside myself and watched what happened next. I was still, mesmerized by the swarming biting picking insects. My eyes picked one out, one that hadn't been inside Atticus and didn't have pieces of him in its body. My hand reached for it. My fingers trapped it. I ate.

Ha ha everyone was like "wow Caio so strong he didn't even get hurt!" no he totally got his butt kicked. I just didn't have that last chapter since it would have been really long then. Fair complaint, though, had that actually been the case.

Yeah those are totally those nasty cave spiders. For a dramatic reenactment of Meenah's POV, see Fear Factor Las Vegas.