Nassor Doyle- District Nine mentor
This hadn't happened in seven years. Seven years ago was the last time I watched District Nine's Hunger Games end in three minutes. I could call it a blessing in the way it was a blessing to die of a gunshot to the throat rather than the stomach. After a single paroxysm of grief and pain it was all over. Compare that to the other years when they slowly died over days and dangled the prospect agonizing they might live.
District Nine
Nine's organized crime world exploded into infighting and skirmishes as a dozen players tried to take Vulpes' throne. Three bodies later the lines were redrawn and the power recentered. Cyrus and Kasha found a smaller apartment they could afford without Mattie. They continued to feed her cats, most of which weren't interested if Mattie wasn't there and slowly became feral again. The rats of Nine didn't comprehend what had happened but did notice their newly burgeoning numbers.
Cornflower Fields- District Ten mentor
It wasn't the first time by a long shot both Tens died in the Bloodbath. It but in my heart I thought it was because I was a bad mentor. No one ever said it but I was afraid they were thinking it.
District Ten
On quiet nights children dared each other to go to Marrow's grave. They told stories about her that grew every day until she was a serial killer who ate her victims. The story went that if you visited her grave at midnight she would grab your foot. Sometimes a particularly compassionate kid left a wildflower. Colton left a legacy spanning across the nation and all the way to the bunkers of District Thirteen, where a handful of people told their children about the boy who showed them the way to freedom.
Flint Kenyte- District Two male (18)
Children were still screaming and the same screams were getting cut off as I reached the stairs. I sprinted upwards driven by some lizard-brain reflex to climb a tree when there were predators. It must have been about eight floors later when I impulsively shoved a doorway open and ran through it. It opened into a narrow hallway with long floor-length windows on one side and a row of doorways on the other side. I opened the first door and found a meeting room with a long table surrounded by wheeled chairs.
Find somewhere to hide, my brain was screaming at me. I was alone in a deathworld with trained killers who would open the stairwell door at any second and come for me.
Somehow I had the presence of mind to shut the door quietly before I opened the next one. It opened into another smaller cubicle maze. It had a lot of hiding spots but something stopped me. There were plenty of places to hide and that's why it was exactly the kind of place the Careers would look. And just the thought of trying to find the right spot in all of those, knowing that the wrong choice would be my last, made me sick.
The third door was another nest of cubicles. I ran farther down the hall and found an empty doorway leading to a little nook with a cabinet and a tall garbage can set into a wooden stall. I didn't even bother to look in the cabinet. I opened the hatch to take the garbage can out and looked down into it. The Gamemakers had thoughtfully prefilled it halfway with coffee grounds and banana peels and things like that. I took out the bag and climbed into the can, holding the bag with one hand. I lowered it down into myself and arranged the bag over the lips of the can until it looked like there was nothing there but garbage. I curled myself around in the bottom of the can and faced what I couldn't run away from.
They're dead. I entered the Games with two friends and before I could say a word to either of them they were dead. Just gone, like a page torn from a book. A little bit of me felt guilty- I was a bodyguard that couldn't save either of them. But mostly I just felt grieved. Mattie and Colton were gone and nothing could change that. My face went warm as my eyes misted. Tears slid on my cheeks and trickled onto the hard plastic of the can. And they stayed there, because I was too afraid of noise to wipe them away.
Walcott Patel- District Three female (15)
Fleur grabbed my arm when I started to run up the stairs. She shook her head and pointed downwards. I didn't know how she could be sure but in the moment I was ready to latch on to anything. I followed her down, and down, and down...
"How far are we going?" I panted. Flight after flight of sterile gray concrete stairs blurred by under my feet and my hand on the guardrail.
"All the way," she said. I was starting to guess her logic. The Careers would want to split up and start taking each floor in order instead of going all the way down or especially up. Unless they used elevators...
Maybe five minutes later we saw the staircase stop as we reached the bottom floor. Fleur opened the door and we found ourselves in an equally sterile concrete basement. Pipes ran overhead and the mostly empty hall had only scattered boxes of rubbish and industrial parts to break up the monotony.
"We need to find the cleaning supplies," Fleur said. "And the Careers will go up, so we have time."
"How do you know?" I asked.
"People always go up when they're scared. It's an instinct," she said.
It was like the calm before a storm. Fleur and I ran through the basement halls unafraid of making noise but unsure how long we could remain that way. She took the rooms on the left and I took the ones on the right. I saw everything from a room full of nothing but reams of paper to one that seemed to be for broken equipment, helpfully broken and put there by a Gamemaker for a handyman that would never come.
I waved for Fleur when I saw a room bordered with stark wooden shelves stocked with hundreds and hundreds of plastic bottles. "I think I found it," I said. Then my eyes fell on a floor-mounted hose in the corner and I made a beeline for it. I washed Erida's blood off me while Fleur rummaged through the bottles.
"What are you going to do with all of these?" I asked as I scrubbed a thick gloppy spot from my arm.
"I got an idea watching Mattie in the Capitol," she said. "Let's see if I know enough to get it done."
