The Tribute

I'm woken on what I think is the eighth day by the voice of Claudius Templesmith, the Hunger Games' announcer.

"Attention tributes. As many of you may have noticed, the arena is on fire. Because of this, we have decided to host a feast at the Cornucopia. The first tribute to arrive and press the button on the tail of the Cornucopia will activate the arena's sprinkler system. This tribute will receive a special reward. If nobody shows... you'd better hope you're the farthest from the flames. See you at the feast tributes!"

"Fawkes, should we go?" I ask, drowsily.

No reply.

"Fawkes?" I begin to struggle to my feet. I hear an electric hum. The air fizzes with power, like the time that Dellon accidentally shocked a teacher in wiring class. I turn towards the source of the sound and and see Fawkes, facing away from me, surrounded by crackling wires. There's a massive shape looming in front of him.

"Fawkes! Look out!" I cry.

The shape begins to growl.

"Shhhh." Fawkes says, softly, without turning around. "It's okay, Preston. I'm not going to hurt you. You're my masterpiece. I can't speak for her, though." He turns and points at me.

A chill runs down my spine. That thing that Fawkes is talking to - that thing with yellowing skin and stitches running up its arms - looks familiar. I freeze with terror when I realise what it was.

It was the corpse on the table. Somehow, Fawkes has brought it to life.

"Fawkes, what are you doing?" I say in a strangled voice. "It's a monster!"

Fawkes shakes his head, a grim smile on his face. "Oh, Binah... You did not just call Preston the M-word." He steps to one side, so he's no longer standing between me and the monster. "Preston, my district partner doesn't see what a miracle you are. Can you kill her for me?"

It's only when the monster is lumbering towards me that I realise that Fawkes is stabbing me in the back. I back away.

"Fawkes!" I scream. "Please, call it off. Don't let me die. Whatever I did, I'm sorry."

"You didn't do anything." Fawkes says, coldly. "One of us had to make the first move."

I back into a work surface. There's nowhere left to run. As the monster's clammy hands close around my neck, I hear footsteps on the stairs. Fawkes.

He's getting away. I did everything at could for him and he betrayed me. He'll live, at least for a little bit longer, and I'll die.

I can't breathe. My lungs burn and my eyes water. I thrash around in the monster's grip, desperate for some way of breaking free. My hands flail around, and brush against something cold and glassy on the work surface behind me. Hope sparks inside me.

There's a bottle within my reach. All I can do is pray that what's inside is dangerous.

I clutch at the bottle and raise it to the monster's face. Its mouth is wide open and roaring at me. I shove the bottle between its teeth and try to force it as far into the gaping mouth as possible. Then I snatch my hand back before the monster can bite down.

I can feel my vision fading. My entire body is shutting down. I'm like a fire. I need heat, fuel and oxygen to keep burning and now my oxygen is running out. I'm being extinguished.

The sound of breaking glass is music to my ears.

The monster lets out a whine of pain. The grip on my throat relaxes and I gasp for air.

Air! I slide down the work surface, free.

I'm not going to die. Not yet.

"Binah!" Suddenly, Ernest is by my side. I'm relieved to have one ally who hasn't turned on me. "You killed it! Are you okay?"

I try to wheeze a response but I don't have the air. I stick my thumb up so Ernest doesn't have to worry about me.

"I thought you were going to die." Ernest says. "And then I thought it was going to kill me next. I was so scared, I couldn't even speak! I knew Fawkes would betray us. I wish I'd spoken up. I'm sorry."

I try to pick myself up into a seated position. The monster lies, dead, in front of me, a clear fluid leaking from its mouth. I'd killed it.

I'd killed a monster...

But I don't feel safe here, in the lab. This is where we could hide from the Careers but we can't hide from Fawkes.

I grab a backpack and begin to pack. A little food. A little water. When I went to sleep, last night, there were eight people left. Who knows how many had died in the night? I have a feeling that, between the fire raging through the house, the feast being called and Fawkes on the prowl, the games won't last much longer. I find other useful items, as well. Blueprints. The medical kit. I can program Dellon the Drone to fly beside me, which frees up some space. I can carry my knife in my belt, which frees up even more.

That leaves room for one bottle of acid in my backpack. I could probably fit more but I'd rather play it safe. I seal it in a plastic bag and bundle it in Fawkes' discarded lab coat. If the bottle were to break in my backpack and leak acid everywhere, it'd be disastrous.

"What are we doing?" Ernest asks.

"Leaving." I croak. "What if Fawkes comes back?"

"Good point." Ernest says.

I help Ernest up the stairs and we venture out into the arena. I feel like there's an enemy lurking in every shadow. Who will we encounter first? Picaresque, wild-eyed and spear-wielding? Gravel with his knife? Cornelia with her axe? A mutt?

Has Fawkes laid any other traps for us?

The entire house smells like smoke. We keep plodding towards the Cornucopia. If none of the others can put out the fire, I might as well do it.

Suddenly, I hear a scream behind me. I turn just in time to see blood pour down from Ernest's throat as Ramona 2.0 draws a knife across it. A cannon fires and she looks at me with blank, empty eyes. There's no anger in there, no violence, just cold indifference.

I turn and run, as fast as I can. I feel a sharp pain in my shoulder as one of the knives slices it. Pain instantly shoots through me.

I don't want to die.

I didn't come this far and kill one monster just to be killed by a second one,

I grab Dellon and duck through a doorway. My hands shake as I tear open my backpack an unwrap Fawkes' lab coat. I find the bottle I was looking for. Concentrated sulphuric acid. Lethal.

My fingers fly over Dellon's touchscreen. The claw closes around the bottle and the drone floats free from my hands. I have just enough time to glimpse Ramona 2.0 looming over me with a knife before I cover my face protectively with the lab coat.

I hear a crack. A splash. A strange, gargling scream.

A cannon.

Silence.

Tentatively, I lower the lab coat. Ramona 2.0 isn't standing over me anymore. She's on the ground, her face melting away from the acid my drone had dropped on her head. The smell of burning flesh fills my nostrils.

I'd just killed a girl...

Self defence, Binah. It was only self defence.

I can't look away from her face - or what's left of it - a mess of broken glass and pooling fluids. She'd died screaming and in pain.

But the acid was your best weapon, the only way you were guaranteed to kill her and live.

I get up, trying to banish all thoughts of the girl I'd killed from my head. Ramona Lopez had remorselessly murdered my ally, my friend. She deserved to die.

But not like that. She'd killed Ernest quickly and painlessly and you made her suffer...

The arena is still burning.

I hear the sound of metal clashing against metal and walk, carefully, towards it. People must've beat me to the feast and started fighting. I have a knife. Maybe if I watch the fight from a distance, the winner will be wounded and I can kill them.

A sick feeling rises inside me. Do you really want to kill again, Binah?

I know I have to. There's nobody left to protect. Ernest is dead. Fawkes betrayed me. All I can do now is win. For myself, for Dellon.

Maybe even for my mentor.

The more I think about it, the more I can see why she'd let Dellon die. Fawkes had taught me that no alliance is permanent, not even ones between district partners. Ernest had taught me that nobody can be protected from everything. Ramona (my mentor, not the girl I'd just murdered) must've known that already.

She'd known that letting my best friend die had been the right choice.

A cannon fires as I draw closer to the Cornucopia. I can see a tall figure with long hair kneeling near the body of another girl. I recognise Stema instantly - she looks so small with the axe buried in her chest, her blood leaking out and staining her hair a darker shade of red. I takes me a little longer to recognise Cornelia. She's missing one of her hands and she's trying to hold her guts in with the one she has left.

She's easy prey.

I draw my knife and stride towards her. She looks up at me, her face stained with ash and pale - too pale. I realise she'll probably bleed out anyway if I leave her alone.

"Who's left?" She asks, weakly. She doesn't even make a move to attack me.

"Gravel, Picaresque and Fawkes." I answer her. It's the least I can do.

She shakes her head and starts coughing up blood. "I killed Picaresque. In the night. There was another cannon. It's just us and one more person."

"Fawkes." I say. "It has to be."

"Would he..." More blood spills down Cornelia's chin. "Make it quick?"

I shake my head, thinking back to what Fawkes did to the Careers. What he'd tried to do to me. He has a flair for the dramatic, a talent for suffering. If he had Cornelia wounded and helpless like I had her, he'd almost certainly make a show of killing her.

"Then I'm rooting for you." Cornelia says. "I know you'll make it quick."

I know what I have to do. I raise my knife to Cornelia's throat and slice as quick and as deep as I can.

I know she's a Career. She'd killed Stema. But I know that part of that was out of the pressure that her district had put on her. I think back to the bruises on Cornelia's arms when she was reaped. Someone must've put them there. Someone must've hurt her to turn her into a killer.

As Cornelia's cannon fires, I feel water pour down from the ceiling. I look up to see Fawkes standing by the tail of the Cornucopia, his hand on the sprinkler button. He smirks at me from across the room.

"I killed your monster." I say.

"He wasn't a monster. He had feelings like us. If you'd had some respect for them, maybe he wouldn't have tried to kill you." Fawkes says, in his usual, knowing tone. "Honestly, didn't you ask your stylist what your parade costume was, Bride of Frankenstein?"

"Don't act like it was his fault." I snap, all my anger pouring out of me. "You were the one who told him to kill me. You lied to me. You said he was harmless. You said that we'd work together until we'd killed Ramona."

"That's the oldest trick in in the book!" Fawkes laughs. "Even your mentor tried it. Don't you remember Ramona's games? She had her whole alliance convinced that Renault Flint, a boy who was too shy to say a single word in his interview, was a mass-murderer who'd killed his district partner four days in. Do you remember that, or were you too busy crying over your best friend?"

I fight the urge to charge at Fawkes. He's weaponless. I could kill him if I wanted to. But first, I want to find his weakness, to make him suffer.

"They'll hate you!" I cry. "If you win, you'll go back to District 3 and they'll hate you. You set a monster on your own district partner. You'll be a district traitor for the rest of your life. Do you want that, Fawkes?"

Something flickers in his eyes but it's gone in an instant. "They won't hate me. They'll know I only did what I had to do. I know that, given the choice, most of them would rather have me back than you. It'll be just like when Ramona won. I remember everyone was so happy to have a victor, someone beautiful and clever to grace their TV screens, nobody missed poor, little Dellon Takeda."

"I missed him!" I roar.

Fawkes shrugs. "Like I said. Nobody missed him."

Rage fills me as I charge. I have my knife. He has nothing. I can kill him.

But, more than that, I can put him through everything I had to watch Dellon go through. All the things that Régine did to my best friend are burned into my mind. I'm sure I'll figure out how to cut him to really make him bleed. I'll make him regret ever trying to use Dellon against me.

As I'm running, a dizziness suddenly seizes me. I slow down and Fawkes dodges to the side. His foot hooks around mine. I sprawl out on the soaking-wet floor, knife still clutched in my hand.

Then Fawkes brings his foot down on my wrist. Hard.

I'm surprised by how much it hurts. I didn't know he was that strong. Maybe the pain comes more from the precision of the blow, the purpose to it. Another kick and the knife jolts out of my hand. Fawkes bends down and picks it up. I've lost my weapon.

Fawkes has won. He's going to kill me. I hope he regrets it. I make a silent resolution to struggle as much as I can. I might not be able to beat Fawkes but I can make it hard for him.

I know exactly how to make him guilty.

"Please," I beg as Fawkes peels my head back from the ground and hold the knife to me throat. "Don't kill me. I love you."

Fawkes laughs. Either he knows I'm lying or he just doesn't care. "I'm glad you do. You know who else fell for their killer before being killed with her own knife? Régine Maurin. You're just like the girl who killed your precious Dellon."

Then he leans in, so close I can feel his breath in my ear. So close, he can whisper something to me without the cameras hearing.

"I'm sorry."

I don't have enough time to figure out what it means.

Because Fawkes cries out seconds later. Suddenly, the knife is clattering to the ground and he's being pulled away from me. I turn to see him being dragged away by something, into the darkness.

Then I remember that the gamemakers had promised whoever pressed the sprinkler button a 'special reward'. What if that reward had been a mutt? Hadn't Fawkes said it himself, when I'd been given that ridiculously high score in training?

"They're gamemakers. They mess with people."

"Binah! Help me!" He screams.

"Sorry, Fawkes!" I crow. "You're not the only one who can set mutts on their district partner."

I sit and wait for his screams to stop, even when they turn from cries of terror to gasps of pain. I wait for the trumpets to sound and declare me victor.

But they never come. Even as Fawkes' screams grow fainter.

I can wait, though. I can wait and let Fawkes Chau be punished for everything he'd said to me.

Who said I had to only write one betrayal? So much action happened in this chapter! Binah almost died three times! Everyone in the arena decided to go to the feast, so that resulted in everyone dying. If the gamemakers hadn't sent in the mutt, the games would've ended there. It also would've ended if Fawkes had been a little quicker killing Binah, but he was so arrogant at that point that he just couldn't resist the monologue.

Honourable mention: Preston, Fed acid by Binah
Preston didn't exist in my first draft. I included him because I wanted to bring Fawkes closer to the dark side and he was a cool way of killing Binah (or trying to) g. Preston was basically Frankenstein's monster if his creator hadn't abandoned him straight away. He didn't just wake up and start strangling people; he had to be abandoned and rejected first. Fawkes realised this and saw this as an opportunity to manipulate him into becoming murderous. Fawkes' interactions with Preston weren't just manipulation, though. They were a mix of that, Fawkes talking to himself to preserve his sanity and Fawkes trying to make a connection with the one person in the arena he didn't have to worry about killing him. You can interpret them any way you want. Fawkes is a really ambiguous character because he's constantly putting on an act and we never get to see what he actually thinks. His conversations with Preston could be seen as manipulative and evil or show a glimmer of a conscience in Fawkes.

6th Place: Ernest Curtain, Throat slit by Ramona 2.0
On paper, it's a massive surprise that Ernest made it this far. He got really lucky with his alliance. From a storytelling point of view, however, he got really unlucky with his alliance. He got stuck with two really big personalities and decided to keep quiet and stay out of the line of fire, which is a viable strategy. It means we never got the full picture of what made Ernest tick, but more could be revealed later, since his mentor happens to be Ramona's best friend...

5th Place: Ramona Lopez, Acid-attacked by Binah
My original plan had Ramona Lopez as Binah's final opponent. On paper, she was the perfect nemesis to Binah. She had all of the original Ramona's bad qualities (apart from one). Unfortunately, the original Ramona made it hard for Ramona 2.0 to make an impression, since she couldn't use the same strategy and had to resort to hiding until the feast was called. That didn't make Ramona 2.0 any less of a threat, though. She still managed to kill Ernest, which was the one thing she did in my original plan that I couldn't take away from her. Even so, Binah still felt extremely guilty over killing her in such a gruesome way. I knew that Binah would be able to pull off a kill with some extremely strong acid (I don't know if there's a real acid that melts someone's face off like that but, if there isn't, I'm sure the gamemakers can develop one). Ramona 2.0's death is really the turning point for Binah. It's only at this point that she starts playing the games like the original Ramona, or, even worse, Régine...

4th Place: Stema Ashwwell, Axed by Cornelia
Stema was an underdog. She was the last character left who didn't really have much relevance to Binah. I kept her alive this long because I knew I wanted her to go out in a blaze of glory and fatally wounding the last surviving Career seemed like a good way to go. She may have been a background character but she was an awesome one. She put up one hell of a fight. If she hadn't, Cornelia would've probably been able to win.

3rd Place: Cornelia Lavenza, Mercy-killed by Binah after wounds inflicted by Stema
Cornelia was based on Vivian Lopez, so, naturally, she had to be a pyromaniac. I didn't intend her to be the last Career standing but her weapon was so destructive that it took out all the others. Her upbringing was also probably the closest to the abusive Career upbringing that Binah was worried about, so it made sense for them to have a moment of bonding. In her last moments, Cornelia realised that there was no point in fighting Binah and died peacefully, on her own terms.

So, we're down to the final two. Binah and Fawkes, the district partners. The not-so-star-crossed enemies. Will we have that grand finale or will the gamamkers decide to give them both a deadly alien virus and see how long they last (something that has actually happened, in my first game of Betrayal at House House on the Hill, before I even realised that I needed to main Jenny LeClerc)? One thing's for sure, though. There won't be any more betrayals at this House on the Hill. We know who's dead, and who's still trying to kill Binah.

Or do we?