Oaken Mushroom- District Seven male (17)

There was only one person left for us to get through. I thought we could do it. Alysanne was strong and she was definitely better at fighting than we were but we could make it. There were two of us and if we worked together and did things right we could do this. We were so close.

I really should have thought to make a bolo earlier. They were so simple and easy to throw together with easy-to-gather materials. All we needed to find was some cord and some heavy stuff. It was clunky trying to tie knots with my hand in a sling but we had plenty of time. My arm didn't even hurt anymore. I was just keeping it in the sling because I was afraid it was still weak and if I did anything it would pop out again. If I got out of the Arena I'd probably end up one of those old men who can tell when a storm is coming because of his trick arm.

"It's weird," Clair said. She was looking out of the windows that covered almost the entire wall of the fancy executive suite we were sitting in. Whoever worked there had an obsolete obsession with paperweights. There were more paperweights in that office than sheets of paper. All the better to make bolos with.

"The city, I mean," Clair continued. "It's just so many buildings. How long do they go on? There are no trees anywhere."

"It feels like a big box trapping you in," I agreed. Clair was the only one who could understand how alien it was. My home was open air and trees and grass and everything living around you. To live in Seven was to be part of Earth- part of life and the world and nature. It colored everything in our lives. Being in the Arena wasn't just like being somewhere unfamiliar. It was like being somewhere alien. It was like living in a sterile spaceship on some unfathomably faraway planet. The sense of disconnect, the unnatural wrongness, had been pricking my soul since the moment I walked into the Arena like a splinter working deeper into my thumb the more I tried to get it out.

"This is what Six is like," Clair mused, still looking haunted out the window. "This is what her life is like."

Alysanne. She was out there planning to kill us just like we were planning to kill her. All I felt toward her was sadness. It was sad she lived somewhere with no trees and no smell of redwood and pollen in the air. What was it like to walk and walk for hours and still there was nothing but streets and metal and pavement? It was not just sad but heartbreaking to me that only a single day ago we had sat together in the Arena basement giggling at each other's Capitol accents. All that was gone now. Now we were enemies and all that remained was my regret that we had met and parted too quickly- deliberately, for our own mental preservation- to know each other as people.

The city was reflected in Clair's eyes as she spoke, all bleached-color buildings and a gray that reached even the cloudy sky. "I can't see the stars here," she said. The stars were deep and dark in Seven. They always looked to me like pinpricks in the fabric of reality leading to some other world. I was sad for Alysanne, for if she died she would have never seen the stars.

Alysanne Audren- District Six female (15)

I hated how quiet everything was. With the Careers there was always so much happening unless we were hunting and had to be quiet. Mostly Arroyo, of course, but also Dionysus and sometimes Tulsi back when she was still alive. And me. Even though I felt like a weird half-Career I still enjoyed being with them and talking with them. Then after they were gone I fell in with Lacey. She was more of a friend than the Careers could be, except Arroyo. We talked about so many things both silly and deep. Then she was gone too.

The Arena wasn't just quiet. It was soulless. A skyscraper is supposed to hold hundreds of people. It's a bustling hub of work and relationships and ambition. It's like a tiny town all its own with its cafeteria and neighborhoods of cubicles. On all the floors I crept through there wasn't a single soul. Offices lay empty, some of them with papers thrown around to make it look like someone had been there and- vanished? Jumped out the window? Gotten swept up into the clouds by aliens or some deity? The halls echoed with silence. Sometimes I heard the faint sound of air shifting in the vents. Other times there was nothing at all.

Somewhere out there was Clair and Oaken. They were looking for me like I was looking for them. Just yesterday we were working together. It would have been easier if we'd never looked each other in the eyes and spoken together as humans. I was only glad we never let ourselves become friends. Though we'd been friendly during the alliance I'd been closer to Lacey and they'd been closer to each other. No explicit words were exchanged but those invisible alliances had been clear. Now the basement where we once had gathered was a no-mans-land. Both of us feared going there to spy on the other in case the other had gotten there first and would see them coming.

I didn't know what kind of people they were. I knew Clair was a little quieter than Oaken. I knew Oaken wanted to be friends and would have made a connection had we stayed together a few more hours. From the Capitol I knew they were both older than I was. A lot of Tributes thought I was super strong and mature since I did martial arts. I think a lot of them didn't realize I was fifteen. I couldn't even drive yet. From my point of view Oaken and Clair were older and super mature. They were almost adults and I was still a kid. An old kid, sure, but not an adult yet and I didn't want to be one. I guess we were all adults now.

Clair Mushroom- District Seven female (17)

Whoever worked in this office must have been the big boss or something. They had a whole couch. It was leather and shiny and overstuffed. I reclined on it as I looked out the window at the city that was now a checkerboard of dark gray buildings and little square lights in their windows. The sky overhead was inky-dark purple. There were still no stars.

"What are we going to do if we win?" I asked. It wasn't a hopeful question and Oaken could hear the foreboding in my tone.

"Go home, at least," he said. "See trees again." The only green we'd seen in the Arena was some hideous plastic plants. It didn't look like a real plant and it didn't feel like a real plant. Maybe to someone who'd grown up in a city it might make you happy but to us it was like a corpse in the place of an actual person.

"If we do get home..." I tried to put the thought together in a way that said what I wanted to say but didn't make me feel guilty. "I think I'll be angry."

"We'll have everything we want, though," Oaken said.

"I don't care," I said. I looked out the window for another few seconds. "I'm already angry." I couldn't say why, of course. I couldn't say out loud how violently angry I was at the Capitol for just existing. I didn't know what went wrong in someone's soul to turn them into something like that. I should have had sympathy for little baby Capitolites born into the world and brainwashed from birth but I didn't. I wished they hadn't been born. I had to help kill someone to get this far into the Games. I'd bear that for the rest of my life. I wished it had been one of them. Then I wouldn't feel guilty at all.

"Yeah," Oaken said softly, acknowledging everything I couldn't say but he still heard. "Me, too."

"I'm going to bed," I said. I turned over and hiked up the tablecloth I was using as a blanket. It wasn't cold in the Arena but it was chilly. People didn't really use blankets because they were cold, though. I just wanted the weight and the security. Everyone knew monsters can't get through blankets. There were a lot of monsters in the Arena.

"Okay," Oaken said. We'd never really set a routine for standing watch. Oaken and I had always slept light. We both tended to wake up half a dozen times every night and when we set an alarm we always woke up five minutes before it would have gone off.

Oaken came over by the couch and gave me an expectant look. I smiled even though I didn't want to. When we were little our father always used to sing to us before bedtime. One night he left without doing it. He must have thought we were too old or something. So Oaken and I peeked out at each other from across the bedroom and almost at the same moment we started singing it to ourselves. We'd done it every night since, even after we got old enough to need a curtain to divide the room. I used to imagine being married someday and singing to my baby while Oaken did the same to his.

"Twinkle, twinkle little star,

How I wonder what you are..."

Surprise, no finale yet