ALYSANNE AUDREN- Oaken Mushroom

I never wanted to think about what I did to her again.

Lancia Audren- District Six mentor

I'd lost my family without ever getting to know her. I didn't feel like I deserved to mourn. I would have said it was like a false pregnancy. I didn't have the pain of losing an unborn child. I would never claim to understand that. I would have said it was like a false pregnancy but I didn't think I deserved even that pain. But it did hurt. I did miss Alysanne. And I dared not speak of it to anyone because I was ashamed at how much it hurt.

District Six

Sensei Nakamura never took another foster daughter. He added Alysanne to the shrine he kept for his ancestors and each Obon he cleaned her grave as well as theirs. Royce's father became something of a recluse. He worked in his shop and he went home at closing time and he sat with his thoughts.

Clair Mushroom- District Seven female (17)

There was no hope for a tomorrow for us. Therefore we would make the most out of today.

"I know what I want to do first," I said to Oaken.

For the first time since the Games began, we actually used the elevator. I looked at the panel of plastic buttons sitting unlit waiting for someone to press them. I'd only ever been in an elevator once before in my life, when I visited my uncle who worked in a giant lumber mill. There were only five floors in the mill. On the panel before me there were one hundred and three buttons to press.

I pressed every last button.

"Was it everything you dreamed of?" Oaken asked as I looked at the now brightly-lit panel.

"It pretty much was," I said with satisfaction.

"So we just gonna stand around as the elevator goes to every single floor?" he asked.

"No, we can get off at the next floor," I said. "I didn't want to visit them all. I just wanted to press them all."

Oaken Mushroom- District Seven female (17)

"We really should have done that before we sent the elevator to every floor," Clair said after I unveiled my idea.

"Whatever," I shrugged. "It'll take us long enough to gather the materials."

"Long enough for a rather slow elevator to go down to the basement and then up a hundred and three stories?" Clair asked. She was trying to give me a sarcastic look but both her expression and her voice tone were hindered by the way half her face was sort of weirdly slack. It gave her a bit of a lisp I'd been too polite to mention.

"Work slow, I guess," I said.

As it turned out it did take a long time to gather the materials. It wasn't hard finding a printer. We found lots of those. It was hard trying to figure out how to get the ink out. The cartridges were buried somewhere deep in the printers and when we tried to open them we just got error messages.

"Hold on," Clair said after another foiled attempt. "What if we just find where they keep extra cartridges?"

By the time we found a supply closet that contained paper and stuff instead of mops and stuff or file cabinets and stuff the elevator was probably ready. In any case it was ready by the time we filled a plastic bag full of cartridges and pressed the elevator call button.

Clair and I peeked over the railing at the long, long way down. The ground was so far away I could barely make out any details. Lucky thing, then, that we had stuffed so very many cartridges into the bag.

"Ready?" Clair asked.

"Yep," I said. We lifted the bag and tossed it over. It tumbled down and down, twirling around as the air caught in the folds of plastic, looking kind of like a poor cat thrown from a building and clawing at the air. Down it went until it looked barely bigger than an apple. Then it hit the pavement and exploded. A rainbow of ink spurted out in all direction like a spiked water balloon. It fell in thin streamers all over the sidewalk.

"Was it everything you imagined?" Clair asked.

"I kind of wish we'd used a bigger bag," I said.

Clair Mushroom- District Seven female

The Careers had used a lot of the food stocked in the kitchen. Other Tributes passing through had chipped away at what was left. But when Oaken and I looked around there was still plenty of food left. Almost all of the non-prepared food was still there, for obvious reasons.

"Hey, you think this bread is good?" Oaken asked, holding up a loaf almost fully covered in mold.

"Sure, for penicillin," I said with a wrinkled nose.

"This is good," Oaken said, sliding a box of pancake mix out of a cabinet.

"I don't think pancake mix ever expires," I said. I started rummaging around for syrup and butter while Oaken started throwing ingredients into a bowl.

"I don't think these eggs are good anymore," I said about the suspiciously old eggs in the refrigerator.

"It's okay, this stuff just uses water," Oaken said.

"Wow, Capitolites are really lazy," I said.

Hearing the pancakes sizzle on the grill made me want to cry. We ate a lot of pancakes in Seven. Despite all the jokes about lumberjacks, it was for a more practical reason. We had a lot of acorns in Seven. A lot of acorns means a lot of acorn flour. The cheapest thing to do with flour is flatbread. It was going to be weird eating pancakes made with fancy bleached white flour.

I set a table by the window with the trays and plastic flatware in the cafeteria. When I went back into the kitchen to help Oaken I found him stirring a jug of orange juice.

"Freshly squeezed... out of this can from the freezer," he said.

The pancakes were the first real meal I'd had in three weeks. The tiny noises of plastic forks hitting plastic trays and the thumps of our glasses being set down on the table seemed to reverberate in the open emptiness of the cafeteria. Before we'd never known where someone might be lurking. Now we were the only two and the sheer hugeness of the Arena around us was apparent. Just floors and floors and floors of nothing. Nothing in an entire skyscraper but two twins.

Oaken Mushroom- District Seven male (17)

The subdued noise of eating and the ghostlike lack of people around us was creeping me out.

"So. Anything to get out? Confessions, compliments, unaired grievances?" I asked. They would have come out naturally eventually but I was ready to speed things along.

Clair set down her fork and looked out the window. "This sucks," she said.

"This sucks," I repeated.

"It's crazy," Clair said. "I never thought of either of us going in the Games but I thought for sure if I ever did and if I won I'd be happy."

"I hope you are happy if you win," I said.

"Maybe in fifty years," Clair said.

"What are Mom and Dad going to say?" I wondered aloud.

"Just..." Clair said a word they wouldn't have approved of, then started to laugh at how utterly messed-up it all was. "What do you do when one of your kids escapes certain death by killing your other kid?"

I started to laugh with her. How do you react to something like that? Life is absurd. Sometimes there's no sense to be made of it. "Maybe they'll ground whoever wins."

"No parties for two months," Clair said, almost wheezing between each word. "You killed your brother."

It was good to laugh. It was a horrible thing to laugh about but I was glad I could laugh. I was glad to laugh with Clair for one last day. We'd been giggling together even since we were two years old switching places to confuse our parents. I hadn't been alive that long but in my short time on Earth I'd learned that happiness is largely a choice. There are things outside your control, like mental illness or abuse or whatever, but for most people it was a choice how they wanted to react to what life gave them. This day I was eating my last dinner with my sister before one of us watched the other die. But that was only one way of looking at it. This day I was eating pancakes with my sister and laughing.