Chapter 52- Astrid Clearwater
High above me, the shimmering is back, silver against the blue sky. Somewhere, something hurts, but it's a duller ache than before. The silver shimmer sounds like the rushing of the waves on the beach, and it shifts back and forth like them too; rushing forward, then retreating.
And then, as I watch it, the silver breaks apart and falls down in pieces around me like snow…
"Astrid, wake up!"
I open my eyes, and there's just blue sky above me, not silver. What's going on?
"Come on, you have to get up." Elowyn comes into view, kneeling over me with a worried look on her face, her hair hanging loose and tangled around her.
"What?" I ask, but it comes out more like a whisper. My head is pounding, like someone is hitting me with a rock repeatedly.
"We have to go, now."
"My leg?" I ask. My throat feels like it's full of sand. How long have I been out?
"I'll explain later," Elowyn says, grabbing at my arm and pulling me up to standing. My leg doesn't hurt as much anymore; was the moth real? Did Elowyn really stab me with a knife, or was that just part of my dreams?
It doesn't matter. What matters is that, even though I have no idea what's going on, I'm still alive.
"Explain what?" I feel dull and stupid, with all my thoughts lying at the bottom of my head, and I hate it. I need to be smart to get out of here, and all I can do is say two words at a time.
"Listen," Elowyn says, and I can hear terror in her voice. "The water's starting to go out, and go somewhere, and I don't want to be here when it comes back. Understand?"
I jerkily nod my head and let Elowyn put my backpack on me. "Let's go then," she says, and starts to haul me into the jungle, away from the beach. I turn back, just briefly; Elowyn's right, the water is leaving the land.
The Gamemakers are up to something, and the last time they played a trick, Tilling died and I nearly did too.
Even though my leg doesn't hurt as much, I'm still limping as we go; but Elowyn is pulling me along almost faster than I'm able to walk. And slowly, as we hurry through the trees, my head clears and everything starts to come back to me.
What happened last night? Was it last night?
"How long was I asleep?" I ask as I stumble along, Elowyn gripping my forearm ahead of me.
"You passed out yesterday afternoon, but you woke up here and there," she says.
"What about my leg?"
"We got some medicine in a parachute. It seems to be working, but I'll look at your leg when we sit down again."
I choke out a laugh, making Elowyn look at me funny. "What?"
"I thought it was a moth," I tell her. She grimaces and keeps going.
"Some moth. It scared me half to death when it came down; I thought it was another mutt."
Elowyn glances backwards and her grip on my arm tightens. "It's getting louder. We have to hurry."
She's right; the roaring of the water behind us is louder than before. All I can think about, though, as Elowyn pulls me to the base of a steep hill, is Tilling going down with the Cornucopia while we watched from the pedestals.
"Can you climb?" Elowyn asks, looking at me wide eyed.
"I'm going to have to," I say, already grabbing a root sticking out of the ground and pulling myself up. I can hear the water coming; if we don't get up this hill we're going to get sucked into it. And I haven't done everything I've done in here to drown now.
Elowyn's faster than I am at climbing, but she doesn't leave me behind. Instead, even with the water coming, she waits for me, hanging onto the steep hill by her fingertips.
She's helped me more times than I can count, and I'm going to have to repay her with her murder. Not now, but soon, and I'm not looking forward to it. The fact of the matter is, though, that there's only going to be one victor, and it's going to be me.
And I'm sorry for it.
My ally scrambles up the last of the hill on her knees and immediately turns around to help me up. I grab her hand just as the wave hits the bottom of the hill, water splashing halfway up and pulling loose stones and sticks down with it.
"That was too close," she pants, brushing hair out of her face and streaking it instead with dirt. I'm silent while I watch the water churn down below, close enough that if I really reached, I could touch it, but not close enough that it's going to kill me. Not today.
"They've taken out half the island I'll bet," I say, patting dirt off of my jacket with shaking hands. "Like they got rid of the Cornucopia."
"They're bringing us closer together," Elowyn says, and some emotion I can't place flickers in her eyes before fading at the sound of a cannon.
Boom.
A flock of birds takes off behind us, probably startled by the cannon going off. I turn in a circle, watching their flight upwards into the sunlit trees above. Not mutts, just birds unlucky enough to be imprisoned in here with us. Unlike us, though, they're not expected to kill each other.
Another tribute is down, and I'm closer to getting out of here.
"Who do you think it was?" I ask, and Elowyn shakes her head.
"I don't know. Career?" she says hopefully. If we're really lucky, it took out the girl from 2. She's out to get me, I know she is; she told me as much in Training. And I'm not fond of the way she killed me in my dream.
"Maybe."
"So what now?" Elowyn looks down at the water, watching it slam against the hill we're standing on with a touch of fear in her eyes.
"We should go inland," I tell her, turning away from the flood. "Get away from the water in case it starts to rise."
"Are all the beaches are gone, do you think?" Elowyn asks, brushing her hair back again; her fingers are shaking and one of them is bleeding, leaving a slight red streak to the blonde hair.
"Probably." My leg is starting to hurt again; not even Capitol medicine is going to heal that sort of injury fast. I'm not going to show I'm weak; I was sick and dying last night, today I'm alive. They can fix me when I get back to the Capitol, but I'm not going to get back there riding on pity.
And Beetee? I'm not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me weak, especially since he didn't help me until I was delirious. If that's the way he wants to play the Games, then I'm going to win them with or without his help.
"Let's go," I say, and I start off, leaving the churning water behind me. The beaches are gone, the Cornucopia's gone, but we're still here. And the only way out is forward.
Once, when I was a little girl, there was a fire in a building just down the street from my apartment. With how close together District 3 buildings are built, especially where I live, we just live in tinder, that's how fast they catch fire, and Mama thought that we would lose our house too.
It was a long time ago, before Mama married Saul and had Axel, before Saul died; back when it was just my mother and me alone, but I remember her holding me in her arms and watching our neighbors fight the fire with water from the wells down the road. And finally, they put it out, and our building was saved, but I've never forgotten the feeling of overwhelming dread of waiting for our apartment to burn, and the relief when it didn't.
I feel the dread now, looking at Elowyn walking beside me. The fire's going to burn her soon, going to burn everyone else in here, and I'm dreading it, dreading watching my ally die. Aggie from 2 can burn for all I care, her and her allies, but it's just their group and our group left, with Circuit and that idiot from 6 in the mix, and the fire is going to catch up to all of us sooner or later.
And I'm just waiting to feel that relief when it's over.
"Careful coming down; there's water down there," Elowyn says, balancing at the edge of the hill, holding onto a large tree whose branches dangle over the side.
"How much?"
"Not a lot. Just a stream."
"We should be able to get across it, don't you think?" I ask, coming to look at it. She's right, it's not much, just seawater that flowed inland by the force of the wave.
"Of course we can," Elowyn says, shaking her hair behind her.
"Wait a minute," I say, as she's about to start down. "We're up high, we can see anyone coming, so let's sit down for a minute. You're tired." I'm tired too, but I'm not going to say that for the cameras. Besides, Elowyn's hands are shaking harder, and she has a dizzy look to her that I don't like.
"I'm fine," she says. When I said I was fine, I wasn't, and she isn't either.
"Did you sleep at all last night?"
Elowyn shakes her head. "I was on watch."
"So sit down, Elowyn," I tell her, and she finally listens to me, even though she stumbles over a vine and nearly falls onto a log.
"How's your leg?" she asks, gesturing me towards her.
"I think it's fine," I say, rolling up my pant leg to show her. Carefully, I unwind the bandage to reveal the wound underneath; it's not infected any longer, I can see that. It just looks ugly and jagged instead. But as long as the infection's gone, I'm going to be fine. Just scarred, but I can live with that.
"Here, I have more bandages," Elowyn says, pulling her backpack off her shoulder and opening it up, before tossing a roll of white cloth at me. I unwind a length and tear the last with my teeth, then wrap it back around my leg. There. It's fine.
It's when I toss the bandages back to Elowyn that I notice things here aren't all natural. Charred wood to my right; boot prints in a muddier area- a glint of silver in a bush.
"Something's here," I say quietly, making Elowyn's eyes grow wide. As silently as I can, I take my own pack off and pull out the axe within. Elowyn nods, pulling out her own axe with trembling hands.
Pressing one finger to my lips, and clutching my axe in my other hand, I stalk towards the glinting silver. The last times something was watching us, we gained an ally and lost one as well, and frankly, I don't want either of those scenarios. The silver doesn't move, just loses its sunlit glint as I approach it.
It's a knife. A short, silver, throwing knife lying alone in the bushes; nearby I can see a place where somebody must have lain. Somebody has been here, and recently.
"This is someone's camp," I say, gripping my axe even tighter. "We need to get out of here, right now."
Somebody used or uses this place to camp; somebody has been here in the last six days besides us.
The only trouble is, I don't know if they're dead or alive.