Annley Benz from District 6
Victor of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Hunger Games

Five Lessons Annley Benz Learned from the Hunger Games

When you give up, you fail.

Jaguar Stratton, the only past victor from District 6, was a peculiar man in many ways. He watched everything with the peculiar eye of a scientist bent over their instrument – peering into a microscope, inspecting the inner workings of the world as though peering far enough through it could tell him all the things he wanted to know.

"Good luck, Annley," he said, pulling the coat over her shoulders. She shuddered at the touch of the flimsy garment as though it were ice cold.

For a while, she didn't know what to say. Her fingers clutched her notebook so tightly that her knuckles were white. The paper began to crumble under her fingers, hundreds of pages of careful notes ruined in a matter of seconds.

"Good luck, Annley," Jaguar repeated.

There it was. Good luck. Straight from the horse's mouth.

There was no more pretending to be ready, no more time for dread. It was time for action. She stepped into the tube and placed her hands on the glass, peering at Jaguar's curious expression through the cloudy screen. What a strange man he was, so far removed, so deeply changed. None of the victors were ever the same when they left the arena.

Her pedestal began to rise. Annley thought of her notebook, left crumbled and torn on the floor of the launch room. She'd spent her entire week in the Capitol writing down everything he said, scribbling out his advice in the shaky handwriting of a little girl from District 6 who was about to die.

It was a privilege, she'd convinced herself, to hear the things Jaguar had to say. Straight from the horse's mouth.

All that was useless now. The moment her pedestal clicked into place, level with the fuzzy green grass of the meadow, her mind went blank of everything Jaguar had told her. Everything, that was, except for one sentence:

"When you give up, you fail."

It wasn't new advice. If she hadn't learned to persevere years before, she'd be dead – frozen to death in some winter storm or torn apart by some assembly line machine. The latter was particularly harrowing. In District 6, people died suddenly and without warning. Any moment they could be taken. If anything, that made the few people with in-tact families hold each other even more closely.

Annley took a moment to survey the arena. This would be a beautiful place to die, no two ways about that. The meadow seemed to go on for miles, rolling and twisting like a sheet of light green velvet. If there was any change in the terrain, she couldn't see it.

She dashed off her pedestal instantly when the horn sounded. She was small, she was weak, but she could run fast. The adrenaline certainly helped.

"Just pretend they're peacekeepers," Jaguar had advised her on her second night in the Capitol. "Treat every tribute like they've got a gun."

She once thought that advice was a bit extreme. Truly, though, Jaguar had her best interest at heart. Nobody could be trusted in this place. There were screams, splatters of blood, weapons switched between hands by the kids who'd trained their entire lives for this moment. It was tempting, she thought as the rubies glittered over her skin, to just fall into the grass and let herself slip away. It would be so easy, so simple.

No. Now wasn't the time to give up.

She slipped away from the cornucopia with a little package and a single knife. Not much to go off of, but it would have to do.

By noon, her stomach was already grumbling. It hardly bothered her – she'd had practice with it. She and starvation were close buddies. That was one advantage she had. Those other tributes, the careers, even the kids from 3 and 5, didn't know how to be hungry. Not like she did.

The sun had set before she reached the first line of trees. They weren't useful for shelter so much as company, as odd as it might sound. It was comforting to know that she wasn't alone in the meadow, a girl standing by herself in an endless sea of grass. Annley nibbled on a bit of tree sap to keep her grumbling stomach at bay. It was surprisingly helpful.

Time for bed. She considered waiting until after the anthem to catch some shut-eye, but that would be useless. It would wake her up no matter what. May as well get some sleep while it was guaranteed.

Annley curled up in the grass, her head pounding with thirst, her stomach screaming for food. Tomorrow, she told herself, she could search for sustenance. If she tried to do it now she'd collapse. And she knew somehow that she would never get back up.

The death recap was just as unsettling as she thought it might be. Four careers were still alive, along with seven others – half of the tributes left, counting herself. Her district partner was dead too. The acne-covered kid who refused to listen to Jaguar's advice. Whether he was too ignorant or simply in denial she couldn't tell.

He was a coward, Annley secretly thought. He'd flinched away from his fate rather than embracing it. Could anyone really blame him? Nothing had prepared them for this kind of thing.

A dark wave of sleep overtook her, tugging her downward as the stars fell like raindrops and the grass swayed in the night breeze.

Be careful who you trust.

The dust grew thicker and thicker on the windowsill. It'd been a whole day since she discovered the little cottage, nestled in the flowery meadow in the most inviting way possible. The windows were thrown open, the smell of blueberry pie wafting from the door. There were at least twenty of the little houses, placed sporadically around the arena.

This, Annley thought as she tiptoed into the parlor, was clearly some kind of trap. Sure, she was small, but she wasn't dumb. This arena was designed to play with the senses. The flowers were poisonous, the fireflies assembled in scorching hot swarms that left dozens of little burns on her arms even as morning came.

Annley felt more than just a little stupid as she dug into the pie sitting on the stove. Before long, she was gorging herself on everything she could find. What was she doing? She could be poisoning herself right now. This house could be on a timer to blow up. If that happened, she'd be dead in an instant. She wouldn't even know what had happened to her. Maybe that was the best way to go out.

"Maybe…"

She clapped her hands over her mouth. It was the first word she'd spoken out loud since the games began.

She finished the sentence inside her head. Maybe the gamemakers had some mercy. Maybe they didn't want her to starve to death after all. She glanced longingly at the living room, furnished attractively with a plush yellow sofa. She couldn't stay here long. But maybe… just maybe…

Annley crept over to the chair. She prodded it softly as though making sure it wouldn't blow up on her. It didn't. She slid down onto it, running her fingers over the smooth velvet.

It happened so suddenly she didn't even have time to breathe. There was the noise of scraping metal. A human grunt. A large shape pounced out of the darkness.

"Hey!"

She rolled sideways off of the chair, her limbs tangling painfully as she crashed into the floor. Where was her knife? Her mind went blank.

"Hey!"

The other tribute – whoever it was – was trying to get her attention. Either that, or they were luring her into a false sense of security.

It was a boy, maybe a few years older than her but about her height. "Hey!" He kept saying that. "Hey!"

Annley squinted her eyes. "Hey."

"You remember me, right?"

"Not really."

Her nerves were running wild. She grabbed her knife, just in case. It was far too early to let her guard down.

"You remember me, right? Right?" he repeated.

Yes, there was something familiar about his slim, scared features.

She said nothing.

He inhaled sharply. "My name is…"

"Nope!" she shouted, a bit too loudly. Sweat dripped down her forehead. What a strange situation this was. "Don't tell me your name, I mean. No offense, but I don't want to know."

He sighed, lowering his weapon slightly. "Understood."

Making friends in the arena was a dangerous game. Different from making friends in violent places back home. There, the goal was for everyone to survive. Here, there could only be one survivor.

She remembered the words of the head gamemaker, delivered to the tributes on their last day in the training center. "One month from now, twenty-three of you will be dead. There can only be one victor. No exceptions."

One victor. No exceptions. Straight from the horse's mouth.

The decision to run as fast as she could, rather than befriend the boy, was what saved her life that day.

What Annley didn't know was that the career tributes – the four of them that were left – were gathered outside the cottage at that very moment. They'd been capturing outliers and taking them as hostages, using them to falsely ally with other tributes and lure them into their deaths. If Annley had stayed in that house a second longer, she'd be dead.

She sprinted through the meadow all afternoon. The careers were behind her, following her at an uncomfortable distance, but she was small enough to slip out of sight without much difficulty. That was one of the perks of being small.

She came to a bruised, battered stop that evening, falling into a little ditch full of dead flowers. A gasp of relief burst from her lips. Finally, a moment of peace.

"If they can't catch me, they can't kill me," she laughed.

Stay quick on your feet.

The twenty-seventh Hunger Games, while not exactly groundbreaking, were well-liked by viewers from the Capitol. Ever since the utterly embarrassing first Quarter Quell, President Coriolanus Snow had been working especially hard to intimidate the districts of Panem each year. Two years later, the miniature rebellion had been beaten down. After quelling (no pun intended) the larger uprisings, Snow kept the most rebellious districts under especially high security. The jabberjays, which hadn't been used since the Dark Days, were also employed, spreading false messages of terrible yet fake events happening in other districts.

President Cornelius (Snow's predecessor) rarely rigged the reapings. Conversely, President Snow made powerful use of this tactic. Some of the rebels' children were forced into the competition, along with a few helpless kids from the outlying districts just to remind everyone that nobody was safe from his reign of terror and violence.

The head gamemaker these days – an older gent named Phoenix Carnby who'd been working his way up the president's inner circle for years now – was a fan of arenas filled with natural disasters. He'd demonstrated this with the landslides and bird mutts of the year prior. This year, the year of the twenty-seventh games, he had another opportunity to play God with a group of helpless kids.

The rain didn't start until Day 3. It came slowly at first, less than half an inch a day, but by the end of the first week none of the tributes remembered what it felt like to be dry. In fact, the cottages scattered around the arena had been designed to fall apart during stormy weather. This ensured that nobody could stay safe for long. Phoenix forced the players out of their hiding places whether they liked it or not. His was truly the iron will.

The careers quickly realized how useless it was to hunt in one pack; in such a flat and featureless arena, it was impossible for them to travel without revealing themselves to any nearby victims. Instead, they split into two pairs. The boys from 1 and 4 stayed at the horn, while the girls from 1 and 2 sprinted off to hunt for victims by themselves.

Our leading lady, Annley Benz, travelled sporadically throughout the first week of the games. She only dedicated herself to speedy travel when Jaguar sent a note urging her onward. The rain, he informed her, showed no signs of stopping. Not until that entire meadow was underwater.

Annley was used to rain – the people of District 6 were poured on nearly every day, living so close to the largest enclosed body of water in Panem – but she'd seen nothing like this before. The lightning struck at perfectly timed intervals, and every raindrop was a uniform size. This was no normal storm.

The fireflies were equally annoying. Annley woke up screaming in the middle of the seventh night; an entire swarm had attacked her, burning into her skin with their red-hot bulbs. Even the rain did not discourage them – they, too, were artificial.

Annley imagined herself wearing the victor's crown with little burns peppering her face.

The thought was striking, and it shocked her so terribly that she nearly fell over. That was the first time she'd ever considered that she could win the games.

The thoughts turned themselves over with all the speed of her mind. Surely, there had to be some chance she could make it. She spent her entire week in the Capitol deluding herself that she had one, but was she really the hopeless little termite she thought she was? Maybe not.

That didn't mean it would be easy. As the rain fell harder and harder, hypothermia replaced dehydration as the greatest threat to survival.

The boys from 1 and 4 died after that (their camp overrun by a group of aquatic lizard-like creatures with razor sharp teeth). That left the four remaining outliers (Annley from 6, the allies from 11, and the boy from 12) to fend against the girls from 1 and 2.

Moving quickly was what kept her alive. In an arena so full of random dangers – lightning strikes, structure collapses, mutts lurking in the deep water – the ability to burst into action or stop on a dime was absolutely critical. Literally and figuratively, Annley Benz was a girl who ran into things headfirst. Even if that meant leaving her a little lightheaded.

Be observant

It was the third week of the twenty-seventh annual Hunger Games. Annley couldn't be sure exactly what day it was. The exact calculation kept changing in her head. Sometimes, she was absolutely certain it was Day 17. Or maybe Day 16. Had it even been two weeks at all?

She was tempted to ask Jaguar for clarification. It would only take two digits out of the precious character limit for his sponsor message! Even so, she knew it was a bad idea. She didn't want to look desperate. Desperate tributes never won.

Annley wasn't a great swimmer, but she'd been forced to teach herself as the rain fell and the water level rose. Most of the time, her feet touched the ground through the water, so she could wade noisily without needing to actively keep herself afloat. In other places, she had to literally swim for her life.

Halfway through the day, when the golden sunlight rested on top of the water rather than bouncing over it in bands of color, a barrage of wooden boards drifted by. They were too uniform, too cleanly cut to have been naturally torn away from a tree. These, Annley realized, were remnants of one of the cottages. They must have been too weak to withstand the flooding. It might even have been the house where she was nearly killed.

Of course, the planks might have drifted miles ever since they were torn away by the angry water. It was a funny feeling, being so close yet so far to a place where such a terrible thing had happened.

Annley clambered onto one of the boards, savoring the brief respite from the chilly water.

"Zero," she muttered.

Zero kills. She had killed nobody. How in Panem – how on earth – had the gamemakers allowed her to survive this long?

Maybe, she thought, there were lots of rebels in these games. Rigged in by the president. And they've all been killed off, out of the running by default.

But that wasn't very convincing. She must have had something the gamemakers wanted. But what?

The rest of the day passed listlessly. Annley found she could push and pull the passing of time as she wanted by filling or emptying her thoughts. It was a weird ability she'd acquired back home in District 6, when the nights were so cold that the people could do nothing but wait for morning.

When she grew bored of her own thoughts, she turned toward the physical aspects of her condition. The knife – the one she'd had since the bloodbath – was stowed safely in her pocket. The other blades she'd been sponsored were closed in the little belt around her waist. It was a gift from Jaguar, a courtesy of the only man she'd ever really put her trust into. At least, that's what she thought it was. His note had certainly made it seem that way.

She stopped swimming suddenly. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and the air stank of ozone. She had only a moment to process what was happening before the lightning struck the water. From her distance, the pain was minor, but she imagined it would have been a deadly threat to anyone unlucky enough to be near the place where the bolt hit the water.

A cannon shot confirmed this. How ominous.

What Annley realized – and what the other tributes didn't – was that the lightning struck in a uniform pattern. It struck in six different locations around the arena, moving clockwise once every hour. The incredible ferocity of the weather – the frequency of the lightning, the speed of the wind, the power of the waves as they threw her up and down – indicated that the twenty-seventh Hunger Games were coming to a close. It was time for action.

By consistently moving clockwise, she could avoid the lightning almost perfectly. Two days later, there were only two tributes in the arena: Annley and the boy from 12. The rest had died in a number of ways: drowned, washed away, beaten by floating debris, burned like seafood.

Only a small area of dry land remained around the cornucopia. The boy from 12 was already there when she arrived. He was so easy to kill. So easy it was almost cheating.

The medical team carried her into the hovercraft, but Annley couldn't claim to be battered. In fact, her body was in great condition. Sure, her arms and legs and face were burned by fireflies, and infection had taken root in a debris-inflicted gash on her chest, but few victors could claim to be as unscathed as she was upon leaving the arena.

There was something fishy about all this.

Life isn't fair.

Annley groggily opened her eyes. A machine beeped faintly to her right. The view from the nearest window showed that she was still in the hovercraft, but it must have been hours since the games ended. Maybe even longer.

"Oh, you're awake."

She jumped so hard she almost screamed. She had to remind herself that every other person was no longer a threat to her life. It was a weirdly embarrassing thing to have to correct herself about.

"I thought you'd like to have these."

Jaguar dropped the notes into her lap. The crumbled up sheets she'd left back in the launch room. Her careful notes, the transcribed words of the stylists and trainers and everyone else who'd tried to help her. Straight from the horse's mouth onto the paper.

She leafed through the pages, uncomfortably aware of the cold chemicals rushing through her veins. Was it true that she'd held these papers before? A girl with her face and her name surely had. But maybe that was an impostor. Surely she wasn't the same person she was before the arena.

Annley snapped herself out of her daze. Clearly, Jaguar wasn't here to exchange pleasantries. He had something to warn her about.

"I want you to contain yourself, Annley," Jaguar muttered. His eyes were wild with fear. "President Snow… he has some plans for you."

Her stomach churned with dread. "What?"

"I tried my best to stop this. Goodness knows I tried."

"What is it, Jaguar?"

If there was one thing Annley hated, it was people who minced words. Why wouldn't he get on with it? "Jagaur!"

He told her, and her stomach shriveled up inside of her like a rotting fruit. A peacekeeper pulled Jaguar away, leaving her alone with her thoughts and her dread.

The next day, it was time for the Spill – the conversation the president had with the new victor, where he told them how they would spend the rest of their lives and what their role would be in Panem. This was one of the many traditions President Snow borrowed from his predecessor.

"Seat yourself comfortably, Ms. Benz," Snow said.

She stared deep into the eyes that were so snakelike.

"What do you want?'

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Please seat yourself."

It was safer to grab a viper by the tongue than to take a seat in President Snow's study. But the man had a strangely magnetic demeanor, almost as though she were being charmed. She blinked hard. Maybe hypnosis wasn't just a fairy tale after all.

"Do you know about the plans I have for you, Annley?" he asked.

She gulped. "Mister President?"

"Don't lie to me."

"Yes."

"Alright," Snow hissed. "Jaguar told you, didn't he?"

She said nothing.

"You are a lovely young girl, Ms. Benz. A beautiful, beautiful young girl."

Her stomach churned again.

Beautiful, beautiful. Straight from the horse's mouth.

List of Victors

District 1 (4 Victors): Luxor Dodge (1st), Citrine Whitacre (9th), Peridot Partridge (18th), Vintner Aphelion (23rd)

District 2 (4 Victors): Tyrell Crowley (3rd), Lancaster Percy (6th), Ajax Mathers (15th), Maximus Decimus (21st)

District 3 (2 Victors): Lumen Orlaith (12th), Cobalt Thindrel (19th)

District 4 (3 Victors): Mags Flanagan (11th), Ripple Hart (16th), Makani Lee (26th)

District 5 (2 Victors): Electra Wilty (4th), Fumer Griffin (25th)

District 6 (2 Victors): Jaguar Stratton (7th), Annley Benz (27th)

District 7 (3 Victors): Rowan Dobson (2nd), Willow Merrick (13th), Ebony Merrick (14th)

District 8 (2 Victors): Georgio Bronte (8th), Burton Flax (22nd)

District 9 (1 Victor): Izzy Mayfleet (17th)

District 10 (1 Victor): Argus Collymore (24th)

District 11 (2 Victors): Bluebell Singer (5th), Crow Kensington (20th)

District 12 (1 Victor): Canary Roselock (10th)

A/N: I'm not dead, I promise XD I just struggled with this chapter quite a lot, and real life responsibilities have been sort of getting in the way. That being said, I quite like how this chapter turned out! Hope you enjoyed reading Annley's story. And hopefully the next chapter doesn't take me a whole month to get out like this one did 0_0