Welcome to the start of the Games! Thank you everyone who's been reading along so far, and I hope you're enjoying it. :) Take care and keep safe.
Chapter 23- Astrid Clearwater
The plate rises up through the dark tunnel, and just when I think the arena is going to be in the dark, I come out into the light. Blinding light. Where am I? The sun beats down with white heat onto my head, so I know it's not a tundra.
"Welcome to the 41st Annual Hunger Games!" Caius Glorystream announces, his voice reverberating throughout the arena, wherever we are. I'm still trying to figure it out; my eyes are half closed because of the sun that's shining down on us. Everyone's quiet; I don't hear anything but bird calls and wild howling coming from behind me.
When I can open my eyes properly, the first thing I see is water; it's surrounding my metal plate. Alright, so it's a water arena. Wonderful. I can't swim, and probably neither can most of the other tributes. This does not bode well for anyone but the District 4s.
All twenty-four of us are ringed in a semicircle around a bare and sandy island, where the Cornucopia is located, piled high with weapons and supplies. I turn in a circle; behind me is a larger island covered in trees and hills. I understand what the Gamemakers are trying to make us do; we have to choose whether to go to the Cornucopia for supplies, or run away to the larger island. It's clever, I'll give them that. I wonder who is going to run away and who is going to fight.
Thirty seconds left, and I've already made my decision. There's no way I'm going to the Cornucopia; once you get onto that island, you're going to have a hard time getting off of it alive. Meanwhile, I'm standing between Celosia from 12 and Hazel from 5; both of them seem to be getting ready to run to the smaller island. Hazel's an idiot; the Careers will kill her in a second.
The last ten seconds tick by on the timer above the Cornucopia. Where is Elowyn? Looking back and forth I finally see her; she's on the very end of the semicircle to the left of me, directly beside Agrippina. Luckily, she's getting ready to run away, too. How deep is this water? It's deep blue and murky where I am, but it gets clearer and lighter blue closer to land.
I look for Circuit next, and see him on the other side of the semicircle next to the blonde girl from 1. And a few tributes over from me on the right is the small girl from 8, next to Dominicus. Good luck with that.
The gong sounds and I leap off of my plate into the dark blue ocean. Fortunately, the water only comes up to my neck, but now I'm worried about what things might be lurking in the water. Too late to worry about that; I have to go, have to go now.
I manage to thrash my way through the water, which is warmer than I thought it would be, stepping on rocks and who knows what else. I send a silent thank you to whoever designed the uniform and gave me boots. They showed excellent sense.
Already there's screaming behind me; I don't look back, I just run through the shallowing water, until it comes up to my knees. Then I pause to look behind me and survey the situation.
There's one body in the water, but I can't tell who they are from a distance. More than a few tributes are hacking at each other on the Cornucopia island, several are fighting their way through the water towards this island, and three are still standing on their plates. One of them is Tilling. The little 8 girl surprises me by fighting her way towards this island. Time to go; if she's coming, others will be too. Where's Elowyn?
I'm pretty safe so far, though; we're the prey, and prey don't attack each other; not yet anyway. Besides, none of us are armed. It's when the Cornucopia group comes over that the Game gets more dangerous. No cannons yet; the Gamemakers will fire them when the fighting's over. Too hard to keep track of the deaths during the initial bloodbath.
I start to run into the trees and almost smack straight into Kiril from District 7. He's smarter than most of the others; he's getting away. Kiril looks at me, terrified, but when I make no move to kill him, he runs, tripping over tree roots as he goes.
"Astrid!" Elowyn's voice carries over the sounds of birds and insects and I don't know what else is in this strange forest. "Astrid!"
I'm not dumb enough to give away my location to anyone nearby who might have a knife, so I follow the sound of her voice through the rainforest. That's what this is, a rainforest, a jungle; vines hanging down from above drip water onto my head; birds fly through the trees, and everywhere I look there's an exotically colored flower. Precisely nothing like District 3.
"Elowyn?" I say when I think I'm close enough to where her voice was coming from.
"Astrid! Over here!" she calls back. I find her hidden behind a tree on the edge of the forest, wringing the water out of her jacket. Our shoes are waterproof, but the rest of the outfit is definitely not. Through the trees I can see the Cornucopia island; the fighting's still going on which bodes well for us.
"You should be happy; you've got trees," I say.
"There's nothing like this at home," Elowyn says. "Did you get any supplies?"
"The Cornucopia's a death trap; I got out of there as fast as I could."
"Let's figure supplies out later. We've got to go," she says, giving up on getting the water out. The air is hot and muggy in here, so I doubt we'll dry out completely anyway. "Almost everyone is at the Cornucopia, but that's not going to last."
"Let's go," I say. I'm glad I've taken Elowyn on as an ally; I don't fancy being alone in this rainforest. And even if she's never seen these kinds of trees before, being from District 7 is going to give her an edge.
The terrain is flat for about twenty feet, and then it starts going uphill. The ground is damp and spongey; difficult to get a foothold on. Elowyn pulls herself up using vines, then grabs me by the hand and hauls me up. Something shouts right above us and I nearly scream.
"Monkey!" Elowyn says, pointing up.
"How do you know?"
"There was one in a Games a few years ago. We can chat later; run!" Elowyn charges off, and I follow, trying to keep myself upright as we crash through bushes and flowers and over roots that try to trip me.
A few minutes later, I stop Elowyn. "What's that?" I whisper, pointing to a greyish animal hanging from a branch several feet ahead of us.
"Mutt?" she whispers back. It could be; it looks bizarre enough. It moves slowly, however, hanging by its branch by long claws. We hesitate, watching the creature for a few minutes, but it does nothing out of the ordinary, even after seeing us.
"Don't think so. Just a weird animal," I say.
"If it's not going to kill us, we ignore it," Elowyn says. She looks calm, but I know she's as scared as I am. I also notice we both went the sensible route with our hair and braided it before we got here; mine is in one fat red braid, hers in two long blonde ones.
"How far do you think we've come?" I ask.
Elowyn shakes her head. "Not far enough. Let's keep going."
So we do, moving uphill most of the way. Every once in a while, Elowyn points out a tree she recognizes from home. "That's a cedar tree there," she says, panting. Our hands and pants are covered in dirt and leaf debris from climbing the hills.
"We can rest," I say. "I doubt the Careers will be hunting us while they have supplies to go through."
"True enough," Elowyn says, sitting down on a moss-covered log and brushing the dirt off of her palms.
I open my mouth to say something, but I'm interrupted by the cannons, which echo around the arena. I count each one as it fires, each cannon representing a dead tribute.
"Five, six, seven," I count, then the rainforest falls silent again. "Seven dead. That's not many," I say.
"For the amount of tributes who went into the bloodbath, no," Elowyn says. "We should keep moving."
"Yeah."
The bloodbath is over, and now we're the next targets.