Elmer, District Seven
I wasn't a bad kid. I never hurt anyone. Sure, I had bad luck, but I never asked for that, either. It was just coincidence. Just coincidence that worn-down axes broke when I was holding them. That a tree I'd just been leaning on fell the wrong way when it was cut down and broke a boy's back. I was my own victim, too. I never even took tesserae once but out of ten thousand slips in that bowl, it was my luck that went bad.
I'd only ever seen castles in storybooks. When I saw the Arena my first thought was how wonderful it was. It was like something from a fairy tale- the tall stone walls, the heavy wood drawbridge, the moat all around the castle, the stained glass windows. I remembered thinking how unfair it was they spent so much money on making it. They could have made a hundred houses for that money, houses for people who would have thought a single one of these rooms was a mansion.
My luck held for four days. I didn't run across anyone else, and I even found a wine cask full of water and some rock-hard biscuits I could eat. I kept to myself in a little room in the cellar and ignored the clanking of the armored mutts patrolling the halls at night. It lasted for four days until one of them found me and chased me out into the courtyard. It wouldn't leave the interior rooms, but it was too late. The boy from Three had seen me. I guess his first four days must have gone differently. He was a lot readier to kill than I was.
All my life I'd worked in the forest. I never knew how strong I was until I met someone who worked indoors. In Seven, everyone was like me. I was nothing special, except for my luck. The boy from Three was smarter than I was, but I didn't know how much stronger I was until I hit him. Right in the face I hit him, and he fell like I'd cut his head off. He fell almost six feet to the ground. I knew you could die if a tree fell on you. I didn't know it could take no more weight than a person's own body. He fell with his feet in the shallows of the courtyard pond. I was already running back inside when he hit. If I'd known it had killed him I would have looked back. When I saw him that night, I couldn't believe it was me.
How do you keep going when you know you've killed somebody? I found my way back to the little cellar room and didn't move. Days stretched into two weeks as I waited for the armored mutts to find me again. This one time my luck was strong. I stayed in that room, forgetting what the sun looked like, forgetting what it was to stretch my legs, until I heard music I thought I recognized.
I was the last one in Panem to learn how I won the Games. I hadn't known the pond was connected to the moat around the castle, so that the water mingled. I hadn't meant for the water to hasten decomposition, letting the rotten bits of waterlogged corpse that the hovercraft missed seep into the water. I never would have dreamed that almost everyone in the Arena was drinking that water. They told me the name of the disease that finished off the last eight people in the Arena. I forgot it. They all sounded the same.
I didn't mean to hurt anyone. A hundred Tributes had killed people near water and this had never happened. I'd just sat in my room waiting to die. They didn't have to clamor around me and tell me I'd set a record for outlier kills. They didn't have to congratulate me and send me fan mail.
When they did, they didn't have to call me Blight.