Dominique Rindelle, District Nine female
It would be hubris to think I could win. District Nine had won just two years ago. We weren't due a Victor for at least a decade. I knew statistics didn't really work that way but I couldn't shake the feeling. Districts didn't win back-to-back like that. Not unless they were Career Districts.
My odds of getting out of the Bloodbath weren't bad. Usually about eight kids died. My odds were one-in-three. That is, except that the Careers never died and there were six of them. So eight kids out of eighteen. Four kids out of nine. Forty-four percent, roughly. Better than fifty-fifty, I guess. It turned out only six kids died, one of them by dropping her necklace onto the bombs around her platform. So really only five kids died in the Bloodbath. The odds were with me there.
So many of the others had something unique about them. Castiel was part of a religion and that was very dangerous in Panem. Haber had her "I hate men" thing. Rapture and Priscilla were both legacy Tributes, as I recalled. I felt very normal among them. I was just a normal girl who had wanted to reach eighteen and live a normal life. I didn't have any special angle that viewers could latch onto and root for me to win. I guess I'm not normal anymore. Only twenty-four children a year were chosen as Tributes. I was one in a million now. The Victor was one-in-a-million too. It was crazy to think that could happen twice.
The Capitol hates it when most people die from natural causes instead of killing each other. After I got back to the Capitol I found out what happened. The Gamemaker in charge of seeding water throughout the Arena had improperly prepared it. There weren't any iodine tablets in the Cornucopia since the only water came from bottles scattered in the garbage. That was all well and good until the improperly treated bottles became contaminated with all the filth of the Arena and everyone started getting cholera and dysentery. After the first few days there wasn't much action. The Careers, along with everyone else, were holed up somewhere trying to sip water and wash their underwear. I had it, too. It just didn't kill me as fast as it killed some of the others. Strong metabolism, maybe. Got lucky and found some less contaminated bottles, maybe.
What the water didn't kill the infections did. Anyone who got the tiniest cut was doomed to a slow death from blood poisoning and sepsis. My only kill came about because of that. I never could have killed Allen in a fair fight. I only got out alive because of the suppurating wound over his eye that left him half-blind and weaving with delirium. I don't even think he knew who he was fighting. I think he thought I was a Career and was attacking him. Neither of us wanted to kill anyone. We just didn't want to get killed.
I actually saw the final Career fight before the Capitol recap. Margo was chasing me- more slowly than she would have, since she had a relatively mildly infected leg wound- and I managed to shake her off by hiding in a pile of tires. But in a twist of fate Alex was also in the area and all the commotion attracted him. He and Margo got to it while I watched like a fly on the wall. Margo came out ahead but neither of them could really be called "ahead". Margo wasn't dead, sure, but she had a huge gash all down her side and a stab wound just below her collarbone. I didn't want to think about what a deep puncture like that would look like once it got infected.
I slid out of the pile of tires and started toward Margo. She tried to run at me and collapsed. She weakly slashed in my direction as I easily stepped around her blade and stood over her. I could have waited until she died but it didn't sit right with me. I could see the thanks in Margo's eyes as I brought down the wrench I'd picked up on my way over. She looked up at me with fire and fight and didn't stop trying to slash me until I brought the wrench down on her head.
Afterwards I was finally able to see where I went wrong with my statistics. There wasn't a 0% chance that lightning would strike twice- that someone would both be Reaped for the Hunger Games and win them. There was a 100% chance. It was just a question of who.