QUARLA HYDRARGYRUM- Arroyo Cardoso
To be honest I wouldn't have thought I'd be the last Career. I thought I'd make it to the final ten, sure, but I thought there would be a lot more Careers with me. So much for a glorious all-Career finale where we duke it out in a battle royale. Sucked about Quarla, though. It was stupid how hard it was to get past a face. I wished I could say something noble about how true beauty was on the inside. Really all I could say was I was thankful I didn't have her life.
Kazuo Braun- District One mentor
Some years were harder than others. Neither Quarla nor Dionysus were the first choice for the Games and the people of One went into this disgruntled from the start. Now that neither of them reached the endgame they were embarrassed and upset and in One humiliation means lashing out. I was the only one alive so I bore the brunt of it. After all these years I didn't really care anymore so I let them wear themselves out.
District One
Dionysus' friends had their school memorials and his parents had their grave they could visit. He hadn't been their first pick but it hadn't been fair how he'd died and they felt for a fighter robbed of his fight. The bigwigs at the Academy got to work tightening volunteer restrictions and brainstorming ways to punish interlopers without the legal ability to do anything about it. All in all it was a year One wouldn't look back on fondly. Luckily, there would be more.
Clair Mushroom- District Seven female (17)
Oaken and I had steered clear of the tunnels since the cockroach incident. We'd gotten by with shimmying up and down the elevator cables and making use of the elevator doors, which helpfully hadn't been outfitted with any sort of lock. It would violate so many workplace safety laws if anyone actually worked here. Imagine someone curiously prying open an elevator door and it actually opened and they fell right down a hundred stories. It would be entirely their fault, sure, but workplace safety laws were as much about stupidity as they were about danger.
Whoever brought a sack full of granola bars to work and put them in a refrigerator was kind of weird but they had my thanks. Most of the food in the fridge was spoiled and Oaken and I were starting to think we'd have to take our chances eating the potted plants.
The Arena might have had forty stories but it still felt claustrophobic. It wasn't anything like the open air of home. It was all narrow corridors and harsh artificial lights. The hallway around me and Oaken felt like the constricting walls around cattle being funneled to the slaughterhouse.
Oaken was just turning to tell me a joke when I grabbed his hand and bolted. Before I even reached the end of his arm he was following me without question. I didn't know what I'd heard that startled me but this was no time not to trust my instincts. As we rounded the corner we'd been about to reach I heard the pounding footsteps that told me a stalking predator knew its prey was aware of it.
The hall ahead of us stretched on far too long before it ended in a stairwell. The elevator doors in the middle of the hallway were much closer to us and that's what we ran for. As Oaken and I yanked at the doors, which weren't locked but they were heavy, I saw a shadow growing at the other end of the hall as our pursuer neared the corner. With a flash of inspiration I threw the bag of granola bars into the corner. As I'd hoped, the shadow recoiled sharply. It was just a bag of granola bars, sure, but it was also a flash of sudden movement and also could theoretically be a bomb or something.
Our pursuer hesitated for only a second but it was enough for me and Oaken to haul the doors open. We jumped into the empty shaft.
Oaken Mushroom- District Seven male (17)
We were only about ten feet down the cable when I saw movement at the edge of the elevator doors. Arroyo appeared in the opening and looked down at us, spear in hand. He tensed to attack, then drew himself back with annoyance.
Got a problem, don't you? I thought with adrenaline-fueled levity. We were some distance away and moving down every second, but it wasn't as easy as throwing a spear at a slowly moving target. If he hit one of us, we'd fall down the shaft with his spear still in us. Good luck getting your spear back...
Arroyo said something probably foul and kicked the side of the elevator door in frustration. Then he got a wicked smile and reached up a hand. I looked up at the elevator some fifteen floors above us just as he pushed the "down" button.
"Go go go go go!" I yelled as Clair reached the same conclusion and we both started almost free-falling down the ropes. The elevator groaned and moved downward with surprising speed, bits of stray metal scraping at the sides of the shaft as it descended toward us. I had a horrible vision of stopping at one of the floors and getting squished like a crushed can after being too slow to get the door opened. Really it would be more like getting peeled, though... Part of me would be in the elevator doorway and only the back half would get shaved off like a peeled banana...
"All the way down!" Clair yelled. The elevator was moving quickly but we did seem to be moving faster and if that was the case we could build up some distance and have one solid chance at the bottom floor. We scooted down in intervals, loosening our grip until we reached the edge of when we'd be able to stop ourselves by painfully tightening our grip. I gritted my teeth as each grinding stop burned the palms of my hands. In the dimly lit shaft it was hard to tell but it seemed like the elevator was no more than twenty feet above us. It was a resolute monolith that was made to reach its destination and wouldn't care at all if something was in its way. It would be like a boot crushing an ant the wearer hadn't even seen.
My arms and stomach burned along with my hands as we reached the bottom. I fell more than dropped onto the floor and jumped up to aid Clair, who was already at the door.
Holy * )$ it gained speed
The elevator was definitely going faster than it had been. Maybe it would slow down as it neared its termination. But that would be even worse To be slowly uncased until we hit the point where escape was impossible and we could only bend and then crouch and finally lie on our backs. To feel the metal hit our noses and press until they collapsed and it his our foreheads and have an instant's stay as our skulls tried to protect our brains until all at once they gave until our bodies went from crushed to mutilated to paste.
My fingernail tore and bent backward halfway down the quick as I clawed at the doors. Warmth and a sharp but not painful sensation and the distant register of bodily damage nagged at the back of my lower brain while my higher brain was entirely consumed by escape. A thin red streak of blood painted the doors as I got my fingers into the crack and ripped them open partway before losing my grip on my own blood. I shoved my arm through the gap and levered them open the rest of the way. Clair and I spilled through them and onto the floor. As we flipped over and got to our feet the elevator slid into place. The indicator light flicked on, obliviously cheerful.
Ding!
With the eulogies and epilogues this chapter turned out kind of an awkward length between adding another or keeping it like this. I felt like adding an unrelated POV would be awkward after the previous two related ones so I left this chapter short.
Background info: Elevators move at anywhere from 5-20mph. I have no idea what floor Clair and Oaken were on nor how far above them the elevator started, since I did not want to calculate things accurately (or account for how far down a rope someone can shimmy before fatigue) and thus left most variables blank so I wouldn't be able to.