VEDA KEATE- Talise Cicero

That must have been the cannon we heard. Of course we were hoping it was one of the circus kids but they had enough numbers to not need to hide in a building. It was impressive how long Veda had lasted, especially on her own. I never would have expected it of such a sheltered religious girl.

Randy Mills- District Nine mentor

How do I even describe someone like Toddward? Never had there been nor would there ever be someone else like him. The world lost someone irreplaceable. And of course the same went for Veda, in a quieter and more delicate way. She had gone through so much before she even went to the Games. It broke my heart knowing her daughter was out there.

District Nine

The chess league wasn't the same without Toddward. It lost its competitive edge without its greatest competitor. The only silver lining in all of this was that Randy was able to track down Kass's father. For an obscenely high amount (but also an obscenely low amount, considering the purchase) he bought the girl and turned her over to a social worker who placed her in an appropriate family.

Tabitha Sparks, District Three female- (15)

The thing about water is that I like to drink it a lot. I drink it every day. MORE than once a day, even. So even after the four of us got a bottle of water it wouldn't last forever, especially since all my allies also liked to drink water multiple times a day. The Careers couldn't be faring much better, either. They had definitely been hoping that things would end faster after they poisoned all the water and soon they'd be hoist by their own petard. Assuming we lasted that long. Also what's a "petard" anyway?

Energy buzzed in the air as we sat around trying to think about who should say it first. Not me, obviously. No one would take it seriously if I proposed an attack. They would think it was a joke, which, fair enough, but I only told funny jokes. Nene wasn't going to suggest it either. She was the only one of us blissfully unaware that anything was even different than usual. And really Lester wasn't going to bring it up since he didn't want anyone to get hurt. So I guess that left Irina.

"We gonna do this or what?" Lester surprised me by blurting out. "Attack the Career, I mean."

"Wait, we're attacking the Careers?" Nene said.

"It's just on everyone's minds," Lester said. "I mean, we're gonna run out of water eventually. I guess they probably don't have much either but it's a big risk to hope they have less than we do." He looked at our bottle.

Irina had been restlessly pacing, as she'd been prone to do lately. I could have made an actually funny joke about how she was turning into one of her own lions. She peeked out of the window again as though Alice and Talise might have zoomed up all the way across the open plain in the last five seconds since she'd checked.

"Some of us will die," she said. It sucked all my jokes right out of my brain the way she said it. Not creepily, not ominously. She just sounded so old. I'd always thought of Lester as my protective big brother. I never thought as much about how Irina must see herself as the protective older sister to all of us. And not only just a big sister. She was the only one of us with a lifetime of training. Irina thought of herself as a single soldier entrusted with protecting seven civilians. Four of us were already dead...

"ATTENTION, TRIBUTES." The loudspeaker stopped the discussion before it began. "THERE IS A FEAST AT THE CORNUCOPIA. YOU'LL FIND SOMETHING THERE THAT EVERY ONE OF YOU NEEDS."

Lester Browning, District Three male- (16)

"The Careers must not be nearby if the Gamemakers just now set up a feast," I said.

"Unless they just want us to get slaughtered," Nene said.

"That's not very funny," Tabitha said, about the Gamemakers and not Nene.

"We have like three minutes to decide whether or not to take the chance," I said. The Cornucopia was just barely out of line of sight of our window. We could get there in twenty seconds. If the Careers were far away we could nip in and get our water before they even came close. If they weren't we could walk right into a trap. Seeing as the Gamemakers always wanted the Careers to win I wasn't very confident.'

"Fortune favors the bold, I guess," Nene said.

"We need to try to get water. I guess we should go now and have a chance at being first rather than go late and have the Careers take it all," Tabitha said.

I didn't want to go but I knew they were right. I couldn't protect my friends by always running away from everything. If we didn't need water I could but we did need water.

"All right. Let's go."

Talise Cicero, District Four female (16)

It was some twisted sort of funny how much it felt like a western movie as Alice and I rode toward the Cornucopia. We were two cowgirls on their horses heading for a showdown at the center of town. The sun, though it wasn't quite high noon yet, was hot on my neck. I half-expected a man in a black suit to show up and challenge us to a duel.

I didn't see any of the circus kids as we road toward the table in front of the Cornucopia. Some of the dirt had been disturbed where the Gamemakers had set down the table and arranged the various bottles but there was no sign that anything had been touched or moved. Though I suppose I wouldn't know if some bottles weren't there, since I wouldn't see them. But even if the circus kids had come and left it was all the same. We'd take our own water and get out of here to plan our attack on our own time and at our own location.

When we rode up close to the table I saw it wasn't just water. There were glass bottles of all shapes and sizes filled with liquids of all sorts. A tall slender yellow bottle filled with orange juice. Clear bottles filled with chunks of ice swimming around in water. Brown bottles I suspected held beer. A clear bottle filled with milk.

"Wow, it's a whole buffet," Alice said. "Anything you want as long as it's wet." It struck me as about the grossest way to phrase it but I didn't say anything. At least she didn't say "moist"...

I came around the corner of the table and reached out to take a bottle. Just then Alice grabbed one behind me and spurred her horse to a run.

Alice Mason, District Two female (17)

You can get a lot done in two seconds. I glanced up and saw something moving in the Cornucopia behind Talise. Instantly I put it together that the circus kids had in fact gotten there before us and that those marks in the sand were from where they'd pulled the table closer so we'd have to get right on them. There were four people, one of them trained and one of them really really scary-looking, in there who had finally made their move against. Irina, the one I'd seen moving, was looking at Talise. I could: A. Fight back and start the big battle or B. Grab a bottle and ditch Talise.

I came here to win, not make friends.

Irina Sokolova, District One female (18)

I struck out at center mass with my whip. I couldn't hit a small target anymore but I could hit something as large as an entire human body. My whip coiled around Talise's torso and I yanked. Talise's horse shied away at the sudden movement and snakelike shape of the whip, knocking Talise off-balance and making it easier to yank her from her horse. Behind her Alice grabbed a bottle and galloped away, not even stopping to lay down some cover fire. Immediately the odds shifted very heavily in our favor.

Even as Talise hit the ground heavily, grunting as her shoulder impacted, she was reaching for her gun. Again, it was too small a target to try hitting. Her face was much closer and much larger. I winced a little as the whip snapped into Talise's cheek, opening up a bleeding line from her cheek to her eyebrow. She reflexively brought her hands up toward her face, pivoting in the middle to grab my whip and yank. I stumbled forward and tried to carry the motion into a kick. Talise did the same thing I would have done: grabbed my leg and twisted. I fell on my butt, painfully biting my tongue, and lurched forward to pin her.

Tabitha and Lester ran around me to help me hold Talise down. Talise cocked her leg back and donkey-kicked Tabitha in the face. She squawked as she flew back an entire body length. Talise grabbed Lester by his hair as he bent down to attack. She pulled him between me and herself as a shield. As I recoiled she shoved him backwards at me. The back of his head hit my forehead in a blow that must have hurt him a lot more than it hurt me but still hurt me quite a bit.

Then Talise's head jerked forward violently, shooting a splatter of blood onto Lester.

I looked up and saw Nene holding Talise's gun with a nonchalantly curious expression.

"I think I got her," she said.

Talise Cicero- District Four female (16)

I knew it was over when they got me off my horse. Just because it was over didn't mean I was going to stop fighting, though. I punched and kicked and wriggled and evaded until the moment cold metal touched the back of my head. District Four wasn't going to win this year. They threw my life away as a meat shield and all it got them was sixth place- and not for the person I was supposed to be shielding. Fourth place. I hoped they choked on it.

6th place: Talise Cicero- shot by Nene

The votes shifted a lot before I wrote this chapter. It was a last-minute change that did in Talise (with a result of -1). Talise was a scrapper from the start and I'm not surprised she made it this far. She was a young Career and an unfavorite in her own District but she refused to accept that destiny. In a nonvoting Games she definitely could have won. Thanks JAJ for someone who I can only say was screwed by the interface.

IMPORTANT INFO: the votes ended in a tie. The other person who tied with Talise is on death row right now. I didn't have that Tribute die in this chapter because I want to have it happen in a certain way but that Tribute is marked for death and shifting votes in this next chapter will not affect that. Send in your votes as normal but the tying Tribute is already counted as dead in my notes in order to maintain voting fairness.