Ginny might've had a problematic past several days, but she'd still grown up in District 1. She'd never gone hungry, she'd never had to deal with the permanent effects of malnourishment, she'd had years to practice running, practice sprinting, just… practice.
Those around her weren't so lucky.
Despite her young body she began outpacing them quite quickly, watching with her heart in her throat and her ribs in her lungs as the Peacekeepers kept on firing.
And then –
At first it could've been mistaken as just another Capitol jet.
There were plenty of those; they'd been hearing them, fleeing from them, off and on for hours now.
The slight difference in sound – they whirred with a different pattern – she noticed only after they'd managed to make their distinction clear in a more obvious way:
They'd opened fire on the Peacekeepers.
They'd hit.
Ginny had no way of knowing it – of the Alliance, only George and Harry (who Death still popped in on occasionally) could have conceivably been aware – but while the Capitol had been becoming increasingly lax in their military training, District 13 had never forgotten exactly who their neighbors were.
They practiced too, practiced like Ginny, and for much the same reason.
The Peacekeepers, then, the most immediate danger to those on the ground, were promptly dispensed with.
The air combat was more of a struggle.
As the two forces – the same forces that had fought almost exactly one century ago – fired at each other in the air those on the ground kept running, fleeing.
There were more than Ginny had previously thought – clearly there had been other warehouses, other buildings, and plenty of people who hadn't hid anywhere at all before they'd started running.
They were in the woods now, a dense thick bracket that hadn't seen many humans at all over the past decades, but the sheer number of people converging as they raced forward made it increasingly clear how many District residents had already made it this far.
It motivated them on.
A plane crashed, near enough for the sound to hurt, near enough that many were doubtless killed under its body, but still they continued forward.
The sounds of air combat persisted.
Ginny glanced back, eying the rest of her group as they struggled to keep up, to keep going.
It took her five tries to spot Ron, a gash across his face soaking everything under it in red – had he been hit by a branch?
They continued on.
Another plane crashed.
The foliage was dense, now, too dense to see who – and it was further away, anyway.
Ginny hoped no one was underneath that one, at least.
It was the seventh crash that did it.
If she'd had time to think, she would have thought it ironic; seven, a lucky number, her lucky number given that she was her true parents' seventh child, and that was the plane that landed on her.