Chapter 59- Astrid Clearwater
"Hello, Astrid."
He's standing next to Agrippina's body, holding a bloodied piece of wire in his hands. It's fitting, isn't it? But the pieces of the puzzle aren't coming together yet; it doesn't make sense to my cloudy head. As I swipe the blood out of my eyes again, I notice that he isn't blinking anymore.
"Circuit."
He laughs, staring down at the wire in his hands; a high, unhinged laugh. "I killed her! I killed her just like I killed the other girl. Just like that, did you see, Astrid?"
"What other girl?"
"The one that was on the rock. I got the wire, and I saw her, and I killed her too. Just like I killed her," Circuit says, pointing at Agrippina, lying at his feet.
I haven't seen my district partner since I was dropped in here, but this isn't the Circuit I was in the Capitol with. Slowly it begins to dawn on me that I've been played for a fool. That maybe he wasn't as helpless as he portrayed himself to be in Training, and I'm the one who wasn't in on it. But Beetee was.
"I didn't think you had it in you to kill them," I say, trying to breathe through the waves of pain that keep washing over me. Circuit's laughter dies in his throat, and his eyes narrow.
"You don't know anything about me."
"No, apparently I don't."
"You didn't even think of asking me to be your ally. If you trained with me, you would have known. It's your fault!" he screams, winding the wire around and around his hand, until Aggie's blood smears over his knuckles. "You don't know anything!"
"I didn't want any allies!" I tell him. "So why would I have chosen you?"
"You chose to ally with the others. I saw you. You didn't even look at me," Circuit snarls.
"So what?" I honestly have no idea why this bothers him so much. Hardly any of the other tributes allied with their district partners either. I finally just hold my sleeve to my head so that I don't have to keep wiping the blood out of my eyes. I feel the fabric grow warm and wet as my blood seeps into it.
"You underestimated me, Astrid," Circuit says, unwinding the wire and shaking his finger at me. "I'm not weak, I'm going home. Do you hear me? I'm going to kill you!" He laughs wildly again.
Did Beetee pick him? This unhinged boy? Why?
"I don't think you should," I say. If I can keep him distracted long enough, I can find the axe, and then I can kill him. If Beetee chose one of us, or even couldn't choose between the two of us, then I'm going to make that choice for him.
One of the mutts screams in the distance; they're not gone yet. If one of the two of us doesn't die soon, the Gamemakers will bring the mutts back, and I don't want that. I try to move my leg so that maybe I can put some distance between Circuit and me, but the slightest movement is agonizing.
"They all thought I was weak too, you know," Circuit says, his voice dropping down to the normalcy I remember from Training. "Beetee helped me with it. We both figured that if I played the helpless boy, they'd all leave me alone."
"Agrippina wanted you too," I say, flicking a glance at the dead girl beside me. She's even smaller in death. The way she's lying with her hands by her face reminds me of a doll I had as a child that I dropped. Limp and lifeless.
"Good thing I killed her," Circuit says, and his tone is too conversational for the words he's saying. "I tried to be friendly in Training, didn't I?"
"You did. I didn't want to be friendly with you." From the moment he was reaped, I never wanted him as an ally. Not once. I tolerated him in the Capitol, and then virtually forgot about him once we got in here.
"No, you didn't," he agrees, and laughs quietly. "You even shoved me after the private sessions." He looks at me like he's studying me, and it reminds me of Beetee somehow. Maybe Beetee chose Circuit because they were alike, but I thought that about me and my mentor too. Beetee doesn't strike me as the unhinged type, but I don't know anymore. I didn't know him very well, did I?
"You wouldn't get out of my way," I say.
"We could have been something," Circuit says, and shakes his head. He still has his glasses, but he isn't blinking wildly behind them anymore; it was all an act, and I fell for it. I could read every tribute in this arena, and yet I couldn't read my own district partner. "Really, we could have."
Circuit's crazed and unhinged expression returns, and his hands tighten on the wire. "I'm going to win," he says in a singsong voice, drifting away from the boy I thought I knew in Training. I fumble behind me, searching for that stupid axe while keeping my sleeve on my forehead, but I can't find it in time.
"You can be my third girl," he hisses in my ear, wrapping the wire around my neck from behind. "The girl on the rock was noisy, and the other girl was quiet, so who knows what you'll be."
He's insane, he's unhinged and dangerous and insane, and he's going to kill me. As the wire tightens around my neck, my hazy thoughts click into place. Pulling my hand away from my head, I grapple at the wire; with my other I find the knife that Agrippina dropped on my chest. As my throat stings and my lungs scream for air, I stab backwards.
Circuit yells and the wire loosens, just enough for me to get away. I scramble to my feet, ignoring the agony my leg is putting me through, ignoring the black and white stars that are splashing across my vision. Circuit's standing there, wire hanging loose from one hand while he stems the flow of blood streaming out of his arm with the other. My hair's coming loose from its braid, and it's plastered into the blood on my face. Everything is too shiny for my liking right now, and for some reason focusing on my bloody and loose hair is helping to keep me conscious.
"That wasn't very nice," he says, halfway between sanity and madness. I'm going to black out if I keep standing on my leg; I have to do something. If I go down, then he'll just kill me and everything will have been for nothing. With unsteady hands I turn the knife over in my hand, getting a better grip. I never spent enough time at the throwing knives in Training.
"No." That's all I can say with my leg on fire and my vision going black and purple and green. But I'm ready for him when he comes at me again, stab wound or no stab wound, wire outstretched to wrap around my neck.
The wire never reaches me; it dangles loose from his relaxing fingers instead. His eyes widen behind his glasses, and I think he really is shocked. No acts. We've both dropped them. He's just a boy and I'm just a girl, and I've just driven my knife into his stomach.
"You?" he asks, echoing my own words.
"Yes. Me." Shock still written across his face, Circuit crumples at my feet, the bloody wire dropping to the ground. His eyes move, frantically, then focus on somewhere in the distance and go still.
Boom.
All around me, the jungle echoes the sounds of trumpets; fireworks light up the sky above me. I stand here, amidst the dead, covered in blood, and I listen to the sounds of my salvation.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, I am pleased to present the victor of the Forty-First Hunger Games: Astrid Clearwater of District 3!"
I won.
I look around me at the dead tributes on the ground; Agrippina looks so small, the boy from 2 is flat on his back with my axe in his head. Circuit is at my feet with my knife driven up to the hilt in his stomach. And Elowyn- my ally- lying dead with a knife in her throat. They all died, but I won. I'm alive.
And everything hurts.
High above me, a hovercraft appears above the trees, then drops a long metal ladder down to me. I can leave, because I won. I won. I'm not going to die. I don't have to stay in this jungle forever.
I can go home.
Shakily, I reach my bloodstained hand out to touch the ladder, then manage to step close enough for me to put my uninjured leg onto the lowest rung. An electrical current freezes me in place, and I'm glad, because there's no way I can climb all the way up to the hovercraft. Instead, it pulls me up, taking me away from the jungle and the arena, away from the blood and death below me.
As soon as I'm inside the hovercraft, the ladder releases me and I slump onto the floor. People bustle around me, talking to each other but essentially ignoring me sitting here. Someone, a girl in white, kneels down next to me silently; maybe she's an Avox, but I don't know. Quietly and gently she wraps soft white bandages around my head, wipes carefully at my face with a damp cloth. My forehead stings when she wipes it with something; the burning sting of antiseptic.
My hands start shaking harder; in fact, I'm shaking all over. I won. I won. I'm not going to die. But they all did; I killed them, and they almost killed me, but I'm alive. I want to cry, but I won't. I'm a victor, and victors don't cry.
I'm a victor.
"Where are we going?" I ask, and surprise myself with how strong my voice sounds.
A man standing a few feet away answers me. "Back to the Training Center. We're going to get you to the hospital."
The hospital. That sounds like the best place for me.
"My leg," I say, but he interrupts me.
"We'll put you right once we get back to the Capitol."
I nod; what else can I do? The girl in white hands me a cup of water and three pills; the clear cup looks disconnected from my hand. It's so clean, and my hand is red and cut up, and smearing blood on the glass. But I drink the water anyway; I haven't had a chance to drink for almost the past day. I take the pills too, washing them down with the water.
Yesterday the wave happened; yesterday Elowyn woke me up from unconsciousness and we ran from it. A few hours ago we were sitting in the tree together. Now she's dead, and I'm in a hovercraft going back to the Capitol. It doesn't seem like a few hours ago; it's a thousand years ago. Sitting on the white floor, I can almost believe that the Games never happened. That it was just a week long nightmare.
The pills must take away the pain, because after a few minutes my leg stops throbbing and I can lean against the wall in peace. Mama. Axel. I get to go home soon.
Everything is too bright and white in here; it hurts my eyes. I lightly run my fingers over the cold floor that's smooth and shiny, just like my thoughts right now. Cold and shiny and starting to slip away from me. That's alright with me. I don't want to think. Maybe later, but I just want to slip away like those shiny, shiny thoughts in my head.
After a long time, I can feel the hovercraft start to descend. "We're here," the man says, and I manage to nod. My head's too cloudy to think; maybe it's the pills, or maybe it's the blow I took when I fell out of the tree. The hovercraft lands gently, and almost immediately the hatch opens, letting in what seems to be an army of Capitol people.
"Let's get you up," one man says; I vaguely register that he has bright pink hair. Two of them lift me up and out of the hovercraft and down onto a bed that's waiting on the landing. Nothing hurts, but the world seems a little too shiny to be real.
"What's going on?" I whisper, but nobody hears me, and I can't talk any louder. The bed rolls away, and I recognize the feeling of the elevator dropping after a moment. Then the pills take hold and my thoughts slip away completely, and I can't catch them in time.