Medusa Gorgona- District Two female
There was something disconcerting and unnatural about waking up after spending a night sleeping on the ground. Instead of the satisfaction and renewal of energy I usually got when I sat up in bed in the morning, I felt like I needed to go right back to sleep. My back and shoulders ached from spending hours pressed against the hard ground. Even with the sleeping bags it still felt like I was sleeping on lightly cushioned stone. The sleeping bag material was damp and clingy with the wetness of the air and the sweat from spending the night in it. I peeled it off and sat up.
I didn't have to look at my reflection in the water to know. I could feel it. The dampness in the air, the sticky heat, how I hadn't done anything to prepare for it... my hair was free. That sounded sounded vain and it was, but ten years of ridicule left a mark, even on a Career. A long time ago, before I started straightening it, I used to think my hair was pretty. It looked just like my mother's.
Beside me, Andromeda sat up and stretched her arms. Percy and Sagar were already up standing guard. It had been a pretty quiet night aside from when Alsace finally straggled in to regroup and get some food. He was still sleeping.
Andromeda turned her head as she yawned. She got a look at me and her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened and I felt my face draw in anticipation.
Look at the chia pet!
Medusa stuck her finger in a light socket again.
This is why people die when they look at her.
"That's so cool!" Andromeda said, her face splitting into a huge grin. "I wish my hair did that!"
"Do not," I said. "It takes forever to get un-poofy."
"So just leave it like that. You're like a lion," Andromeda said. Which was a lot better than 'chia pet'.
There was something about Andromeda's open admiration that made me want to pay it back. I hadn't had friends in a long time, but it wasn't because I didn't want them. It was just that back home no one reacted to me like she had.
"All the girls I knew wanted straight hair like yours," I said.
"Booooring. Anyone can straighten their hair. Mine will never look like that," Andromeda said about my humidity Afro.
"I got it from my mom," I admitted proudly. I felt the tightness beside my eyes and realized I was smiling a real smile, the first in a long time. It felt good to smile again.
Rigel Aspen- District Seven male
I could never stop moving. Even among all the Tributes in the Arena, I was the one that would never not be hunted. Alsace was out there somewhere. The only way I would survive was if he simply never found me. And so I kept moving.
It really wasn't fair. Any other year I would have had a chance. A big chance, honestly. I was a big, strong guy. A lot of the others were pretty young or pretty gentle this year. Nothing was certain and I didn't want to overestimate myself, but the odds were in my favor. A lot of people probably had bets on me right now. Of the outliers, I was almost certainly the favorite. And none of that mattered at all, because like the Baskervilles, I had a hound that haunted no one but me. I was the victim of an entirely senseless vendetta that had nothing to do with me.
I remembered the day Lyon died. I was eleven years old, watching on a screen with all the other kids in the town square. Everyone was supposed to watch whenever they could, but that day all the shops and businesses had been shut down, since they knew the finale was coming. Just three years after Hades, it looked like we could win again. I wondered if Alsace had any idea what it felt like. Every year One thought they would win. Every year One could win. Hope was something they had every day. They didn't know how precious it was to us. I remembered cheering and not believing it and just everyone going wild when Loki won, when one of us actually lived. I had no idea that all the way across the nation there was another boy just like me. My world had just been opened up and his had just ended. I wouldn't have cheered if I'd known.
Eventually I would reach the force field. When I did, I supposed I would start circumnavigating the Arena. Or I could find a hole in the mud somewhere and curl up and hide. If I never moved it would be nearly impossible for Alsace to find me. But the Gamemakers will have their blood. They would flush me out somehow when he got near.
That was the crux of it, really. I couldn't run forever. This was the sort of thing the Gamemakers lived for. They would force the reckoning on me no matter how hard I tried to escape. I could evade Alsace. I couldn't evade the Capitol.
I walked a little farther, until a strand of sparsely-vegetated trees came into view. I didn't bother trying to hide as I walked toward them. When I reached them, I snapped off a solid-looking branch as thick as two of my fingers. I rooted around in the mud, silt wedging under my fingernails, until I found a stone. I sat at the roots of the tree and started to scrape.
Pik Reynolds- District Eleven male
I'd survived the night. Not all of us had. If my memory of the Bloodbath was right, it was Raina who didn't outrun the cold. It was coming again tonight. Everything it took to survive that first night, it would happen again and again, as many nights as it took.
But that wouldn't matter if I didn't even make it to sunset. All I'd grabbed at the Cornucopia was a bottle of water in a plastic bag. It was that plastic bag that could save my life. I put the empty bottle to my mouth and nipped through the plastic bottom with my fangs. I kept nipping and tugging until I'd removed the entire bottom, tucking the disc into my pocket in case it came in handy later. I put a handful of the siltiest mud I could find in the topless bottle. On top of that I put a layer of some sandy sediment I found at the base of a clump of brass. On top of that I put a later of rocks. I carefully dipped the bottle underwater vertically to fill the rest with water. I held it over the plastic bag and waited.
The broadcasts never prepared us for how very much of the Games was spent doing nothing. I sat there holding the bottle over the bag until my arm ached and I had to wedge it into the mud so I wouldn't lose my grip. I sat there stewing in the water like moldering garbage, submerged up to my chin, mud squelching into my hair from where I leaned my head against semisolid ground, feet anchored in the soft mud under me. The water was calm, but before long I became aware of the subtle movements as something like tides shifted in and out. I had to fight an increasing urge to stand up and just be dry, to just not be wet. I felt the water billowing under my shirt and through my pants legs.
Once, the surface was disturbed. A tiny ring appeared in the surface and spread out as it dispersed in the water. I froze, almost dropping my bottle.
It's just air bubbles, I told myself. Maybe it was. Maybe it was a sea monster the size of a school bus. I had no way to know. I had no way in hell of knowing if I would die for staying still or if I would die for moving.
A frog broke the surface and pulled itself up onto a clump of grass. No swamp monster. Not this time. For a moment I was glad to have something like a friend. Then it crossed my mind that in less than a day I would be ready to eat it raw.
It was something most humans never thought about, how close we always were to dying. We were a series of timers constantly resetting. Three weeks until you starve to death, resetting every time you ate. Three days without water, resetting with every cup. Three minutes without air, resetting every time you take a breath. I was never more than three minutes from death, not from the moment I was born. The only time that timer ever changed was once, when it got shorter.
I looked back at my filter. The sun had traveled halfway across the sky. I had a third of a bag of water.
Well what do ya know, no deaths. I just thought I'd really let this one develop- try something new, you know? See where the characters end up.
