FLEUR LAVEAU- Walcott Patel

I'd been freaking out for hours. She just fell over and had a seizure and died. What killed her? Was it going to kill me? Was it the sponsor gifts? The Capitol doesn't let people sponsor poison, right? That was her face in the sky. Something killed her. Any second it might come for me.

Hlenn Rambutan- District Eleven mentor

Those who deal in death eventually pay their debts. Even the ones who make it out of the Arena die eventually. We all die eventually, but I believed the ones who sent others before them had to pay for that somehow. Fleur would know better than I would. And Vaslav got to sidestep all of that and go to whatever lay in store for children and innocents.

District Eleven

The stories about Satine Laveau didn't stop with her daughter's death. New tales popped up of her hexing Peacekeepers or piecing together voodoo dolls of President Snow. No one stopped to wonder why she hadn't done that already if she'd ever been capable of it. Dr. Nikulin retired from neonatal care after losing his own baby. He continued serving the people of Eleven but left their children to surgeons whose hands didn't tremble.

Clair Mushroom- District Seven female (17)

Oaken and I didn't belong in the basement. We were from the land of towering trees and endless wilderness. Being in the basement was like rotting in a jail cell. Everything was narrow corridors and barren gray walls. Just the knowledge of the hundreds of tons of metal above my head made me feel trapped. I felt like a mole clawing through a dark, claustrophobic tunnel.

"Let's go back upstairs," I said.

"You're getting creeped out, too?" Oaken asked, looking nervously at the sterile gray ceiling and the alien-looking pipes that ran down it. "I feel like we should at least take a look around in case there's something useful. But then we should leave."

"What if we take a look around and there's another Tribute down here?" I asked.

"Run for it, I guess," Oaken joked.

I felt guilty over how half-hearted my laugh was. I didn't want to admit it but I feared that Oaken and I had different plans as far as the Games went. Oaken wanted to live but he didn't want to think about killing someone. Me... I wanted to live. I didn't really want to think about it either, but I had, and if the opportunity presented itself, I think I would kill someone. I'd hunted before. Just little squirrels and the kinds of things you could kill without real weapons, but hunting was hunting. A person dies the same way as a squirrel.

We probably won't run across anyone. It was a big Arena and only eight people were left. And we'd just come from an encounter with Arroyo. That meant we weren't due for a while. It didn't really work that way but I wished it did. If it worked that way I wouldn't have gotten Reaped... I certainly hadn't been due for it. There were a thousand girls in the District and I hadn't been to a thousand Reapings. Like much of what I'd learned in school, percentages seemed to be useful only in that building.

The Anthem was about to play. I didn't know for sure but I'd gotten a pretty good feel for it over the days in the Arena. Or maybe it was just a self-fulfilling prophecy, since I tended to guess early and I was always right after waiting for a while. I still tensed at the sudden blaring horns. Oaken and I both looked up to see whose cannon it was we'd heard.

Fleur. Not a surprise but not not a surprise. There had been something mysterious about her in the Capitol. I barely remembered her aside from that vague impression.

"She had an ally, right?" Oaken asked.

"Walcott, I think," I said.

"I wonder if she killed her," Oaken said.

"I don't think so," I said. Walcott was weird, definitely weird, but I didn't think she'd betray her ally. But what did I know? I was making guesses about someone's moral code and their actions under duress when I'd only ever caught glimpses of them for a few days. I didn't know who anyone was in the Arena other than Oaken.

We reached an open entryway leading into a room and Oaken stepped into the opening. He stopped in the doorway and barred my way with his arm when I tried to walk past. I cocked my head at him and then noticed his eyes focused on something in the corner. The room was lined with shelves of cleaning supplies and chemicals and gave the impression of being empty. I was about to whisper a question to Oaken when I saw what he'd noticed. First, the dusty floor had smudges on it. Then, against the wall near the far corner, there was some sort of large industrial apparatus that probably fed into a heater or something. It had a similar smudge on it about waist-high. About chest-high, if you imagined a scared girl running into the corner and ducking behind it when she heard someone coming and didn't have time to run.

What if we look around and there's another Tribute down here? We were about to find out.

Oaken Mushroom- District Seven male (17)

Claire and I backed out of the doorway and quietly crept a few feet down the hall, keeping our eyes on the doorway.

"What do we do?" I whispered.

"Let's try to figure out who it is," Claire whispered back.

I went over the Tributes in my head. Not Arroyo, obviously- he would have attacked.

"Arroyo couldn't have gotten down here this fast," Clair whispered. I was about to agree when she smiled a little and said, "Oh, wait. Elevator."

"He would have attacked, though," I said.

"Yeah. And Alysanne, probably. I think Flint might, too. So Edward or Lacey or Walcott," Clair said.

"I think it's Lacey or Walcott," I said. Something about how small the hiding place was and the image of a smallish girl running to hide instead of risking a fight.

"I think so, too," Claire said. She glanced up at the doorway with something like regret.

"We could go the other way and get out of here," I said.

Clair didn't look at me. "I wish we could," she said.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"There's a reason she lasted this long," Clair said gently. Of course I knew what my twin was thinking. We'd both hunted and trapped before. We knew that no matter how beautiful a wolf was or how much we sympathized with it, if it came into the village it had to be killed. Romantic fantasies only end in dead children.

"She probably got this far just by hiding," I said. It wasn't really a defense. I was just trying to stall until I could come up with something better.

"It's her or us," Clair said, saying each word like she had to pull them out against her own resistance. "We don't get to come out of this without scars."

"This is something we can't undo," I said. I wondered if Clair knew everything I was saying. I knew Clair was right. We had to kill whoever was in that room. I hated it but I wasn't afraid of it. What I was afraid of was what it would do to Clair. Hunting had always been harder for me than it had been for her. Hunting was a necessity for Clair, like it was for me, but there had been traces in her. Traces of pride after a particularly crafty quarry was taken. Traces of fascination in the inner workings of an animal as we butchered it. A sense of not just success but pride in her skills. There was a tiny little seed in her that never would have grown into anything if we'd never been in a position where killing a human became a necessity. But if we took that step, if we took that first taste of the most dangerous game, I was afraid of what might happen. What she almost certainly wouldn't turn into but would become a possibility.

Clair may or may not have known my fears but she knew the gravity of what we were discussing. I saw the pain and reluctance lined on her face as she finally looked at me. "If we want to live, this is what we will have to carry," she said.

The sudden patter of footsteps made us both jump. I looked away from Clair and to the doorway to see Walcott sprinting down the hall away from us. She must have known we were there and finally decided to make a run for it. I glanced at Clair. She glanced back at me. And in a moment Walcott disappeared around a corner. We'd had our chance to run after her and neither of us had acted. Walcott was alive and we weren't murderers. As long as I lived I would never know what I would have said to Clair had Walcott not run.