Lucy rushed out onto the stone outcropping as Jill stumbled away from the cliff and crumpled to her hands and knees at the edge of the forest.
For one long, terrible moment, Eustace lay utterly still, a heap of charred arena clothes, and Lucy hovered a pace away as electricity hummed in the air, afraid to touch him, afraid of what might happen if she did. But then the heap shuddered, and he coughed, an empty, wheezing kind of cough, and rolled onto his side.
Lucy heaved a sigh, and Jill burst into tears.
Shakily, unsteadily, Eustace placed a hand against the stone and pushed himself onto his elbows, coughing until he could suck in a raspy breath, loose blond hair brushing sunbaked grey dust.
"Are you okay?" asked Lucy, kneeling beside him, fingers hesitating a few inches above his back.
Eustace grimaced and didn't bother looking up, ashen-faced, freckles stark against white cheeks. "Do I look okay?"
"Well, you don't look dead."
He rolled his eyes, grey mirror-glass still sharp, clear as ever. "Hurray."
Lucy retracted her hand and sat back, glancing out into the empty blue, the slightest ripple of color blurring the vast expanse before vanishing below the cliff, just like the force field beneath her training center balcony.
Eustace hauled himself, trembling, into a sitting position to test each limb individually and massage his shoulder, which must have taken the brunt of the fall. Behind him, Jill's breath hitched with panicked sobs.
"Why does she get to cry?" he groaned, "I'm the one she nearly bloody murdered."
Jill only sobbed harder.
"You got lucky," breathed Lucy.
Eustace sighed, and reluctantly muttered, almost to himself, "Hardly." He pulled his sleeve up to inspect a burn on his elbow, black fabric separating to expose a smaller hole in the sleeve of his tunic and flash of pink beyond that. "If it was supposed to kill me I'd be dead."
Lucy's brow furrowed. "Are you sure?" She looked him up and down incredulously as the terrible snap of his body hitting the field replayed in her head.
"We designed force fields in school that did more damage than this thing." He shook his head. "No, that would be too quick and easy for the arena."
Lucy glanced back again. Nothing but empty sky lay beyond the stone. "What if you hit it twice?"
"Oh, do you want to throw me off, too?"
He turned aside to cough, voice still raw and scratchy, and Lucy unslung her backpack and fished out her water bottle, offering the last few sloshing swallows to him.
They hadn't hit water all day, and the Threes' canteen had been empty for hours, so the refusal that might usually have come from the proud boy's lips died before he could utter it, and reluctantly he caved and downed the last of the water as Lucy moved to kneel beside Jill.
"I'm sorry," the girl sobbed, burying her face into Lucy's jacket, voice muffled by the fabric, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to, I'm sorry—"
"It's okay," cooed Lucy, even though that may have been a lie, but the comforting tone came out on reflex. "It'll be okay." That was a little closer to the truth.
"I just— I wanted to— I wasn't trying to—" Choking gasps eclipsed her words, and Lucy rubbed her arms and hushed her while Eustace pulled himself together.
"I suppose you haven't quite murdered me," he grumbled, and dragged himself unsteadily to his feet.
"Do you really think you should be doing that?" asked Lucy, but he waved her off.
"Yeah, yeah, I'll live." He walked slowly, pacing back and forth over the stone, and eyed the cliff with some disdain, still rubbing his arm.
"We should probably get out of here. I don't think this is a great camping spot."
Eustace shot her a long-suffering look.
It was several minutes before Jill calmed down enough to be reasoned with, but at last Lucy coaxed her to her feet, still sniffling as Eustace trudged back up into the trees and they followed a few paces behind.
For a short while they retraced their steps, pine needles crunching underfoot, and then turned south, perpendicular to the edge but well out of sight of it.
Jill grew very quiet and wiped her eyes a great deal, and eventually they stopped at a little copse of trees when Eustace said it would make a decent shelter.
"I can go make some traps," said Lucy, setting down her bag and pulling out the twine and the arrow, "If you need to rest."
"And go hungry when you mess it up?"
"I— Hey!"
"I'm doing it," said Eustace, and snatched the twine from her.
She sighed and hiked her bag up again to follow him further south into the forest, biting back another comment about his health. In any case, walking seemed to do him good, and the color had mostly come back into his face by the time Jill spoke up.
"We should mark the trees."
Lucy and Eustace both turned to her.
Her voice came out small and she avoided eye contact, but she cleared her throat and tried again. "I mean, so we can find the trail on the way back."
Eustace looked at her for a moment, no discernable expression on his face, and then bent down and picked up a stone to carve a shallow gouge in the bark of a tree.
He said nothing, and they kept moving, pausing every once in a while so he could do it again, until a new sound met their ears at last.
"Is that—" Jill started, and Lucy broke into a sprint, coming out a moment later to the edge of a steep but shallow ravine. Sure enough, a clear stream rushed at the bottom.
"Water!" she called back to them.
They caught up, and she turned and handed the arrow to Eustace.
"You do that, I'll do this."
He handed over his canteen and they split up, Lucy clambering down into the ravine and splashing her face with fresh stream water before filling both containers and taking several long drinks from her own before topping it off again.
By the time she crawled back up to the top, Eustace and Jill had each constructed a trap, Eustace with the arrow and Jill with a collection of twigs she's tied into a sort of cage.
Lucy handed over the canteen, and the forest had turned grey by the time they headed back to their designated camp, following the tree markers which turned out to be a very good idea once the shadows began to change around them.
She stripped a few small bushes of their berries to snack on along the way, and thought she'd been quite spoiled by the Capitol when her stomach still had the audacity to grumble. This would have been more than enough to keep her full in District Eight.
The terrain didn't offer enough material to build proper shelter, so the three of them settled wherever they liked best in their tiny clearing, and Lucy leaned back against a tree.
It was almost a comfort to camp with the cliff only a short way to the east, despite what had nearly happened there, and now that they'd hit the edge, they were also able to guess at the arena's size.
"Assuming the cornucopia is at the center—"
"Which it always is," she interrupted, and Eustace pursed his lips.
"Pardon me for being precise. I'd say it's about sixty miles across, give or take."
"Give or take what?"
"I don't know, ten or so?"
"That's not precise at all!"
"Well I don't know about you, but I've never had any reason to walk a mile in District Three, so I'm sorry if my calculations are a little off."
She couldn't argue there. The furthest she'd ever walked had been from the factories to the old bridge under the railroad tracks, back before she'd found Digory's attic.
"Besides," said Eustace, "The terrain slowed our pace quite a bit."
"That's true. I'm beginning to hate rocks."
"Just beginning?"
She smirked a little, and glanced at Jill, expecting a complaint to chime in, but none came. She sat cross-legged a little way away from Eustace, ripping a stray leaf into tiny bits and saying nothing. Her eyes never rose from her hands.
"It's all so open," said Lucy eventually.
Eustace nodded. "Harder to hunt animals. Easier to hunt people. And hardly anything grows."
"Except trees. I mean, the forest at the cornucopia looked nice, but I bet the careers got that one. Not that they need cover. Or food." The image of apples flashed into her mind before she blinked it away.
"The odds are ever in their favor," sighed Eustace. "They're probably not the only things out here that want to kill us, either. You have to wonder, with an arena this dull, what they're hiding."
"Oh," scoffed Jill, "Don't let's talk about—" But she paused, glanced up at Eustace, and bit her lip. "I mean… let's… try to stay positive."
Lucy looked from one to the other. "Well, nothing's eaten us so far."
Eustace snorted. "That's a bright side for you."
Jill looked back down at her leaf, and the shadows stretched around them, the last of the light fading away on the western horizon.
An hour later, the national anthem blared.
Lucy didn't have to move from her spot against the trunk to see the Capitol seal perfectly, shining between the trees like an eagle-shaped moon.
Only one face flashed in the sky tonight. A girl. District Ten.
"Sarah," said Lucy from memory, stifling a sigh of relief as the anthem swelled and the forest fell back into silence.
"You really did memorize them all, huh?"
She couldn't make out Eustace's expression in the dark, still blinded by the pasty blond girl's face burned into her vision, but shrugged. "My mentors told me to get to know my competition."
"Is that what you're doing now?"
She blinked, his silhouette gazing steadily back at her, moonlight in his hair, illuminating one sharp cheekbone and the line of his straight nose, eyes overshadowed, unreadable.
She took a deep breath of cool air and hugged her knees to her chest, resting her chin on top as the nighttime noises filtered in around them. "I'm just playing the game."
Eustace watched her for several moments before glancing out into the singing forest.
Cricket-filled silence stretched between them until Lucy spoke again.
"Should we take watches?"
Eustace shifted and looked back at Jill, now huddled against another tree. "She didn't sleep much last night. Well, neither of us did, really."
"Then you should sleep, I can take first watch."
He eyed her.
"I don't even have that arrow anymore, I couldn't stab you if I wanted to."
Eustace breathed what might have been a laugh, and shook his head. "Alright then, suit yourself. Wake me when you get tired." And with that he flopped down onto the bed of pine needles.
Soft snoring followed only a few minutes later.
Lucy stared off into the trees, watching, listening, soaking in all the new and strange sensations of wilderness. The rustling in the branches and the cries of insects she didn't know, the exposed feeling and the blindness in the dark, only able to watch shadows and wonder if they'd moved or if it was only her imagination. All manner of things might jump out at you in the arena, and she'd pictured several terrifying mutts from past games before the drag of time and the unbroken cricket song finally convinced her that nothing was going to happen.
Probably.
At least the nerves kept her awake.
Her mind wandered as the hours slipped by, and she said nothing when Jill stirred and crept over to curl up at Eustace's back.
Only when she absolutely couldn't keep her eyes open anymore did she wake him to take her place, and at last collapsed to the forest floor as a sea of stars twinkled overhead and the day's exhaustion claimed her.
The next morning Eustace and Jill seemed to have gone back to normal. Or at least, the first thing Lucy heard when daylight finally pried her eyelids open was "Ugh, I'm too tired to go all the way back to the stream."
"You think you're tired?" grumbled Eustace, "You're the only one who got any bloody sleep, what are you complaining for?"
"I'm sore all over!"
"That's what comes of sleeping on the ground, you'll have to get used to it."
Jill huffed, and Lucy sat up, rubbing her eyes against the offending rays of dawn.
"There, she's up," said Eustace, "Let's go."
"What time is it?" mumbled Lucy, still squinting as she combed pine needles from her hair and wished very much for a hot shower.
"Too early to be walking anywhere," whined Jill, but Eustace tugged her to her feet.
"The sun's been up for an hour, I'm starving."
"Then you check the traps," she groaned, but followed him anyway, and there was no venom in her voice like there had been yesterday.
Lucy hauled herself to her feet and stretched, every joint in her body aching as if she'd spent a night in the alley behind the dumpsters.
The trek through the forest woke her up, though, and when at last they reached the traps, they were gratified to find a decent sized squirrel in Eustace's, and a wild bird none of them knew the name of in Jill's.
Jill clapped her hands and bounced on the balls of her feet as if she hadn't been complaining of soreness only a few minutes earlier, "Oh, it worked! It worked!"
Eustace handed both catches to Lucy by the feet. "You're welcome."
She wrinkled her nose at him, but her spirits rose instantly at the thought of fresh meat, and the knowledge that the land might not be so barren after all.
Jill fell to re-setting her trap at once, Lucy refilled their water, and Eustace volunteered to clean the game as they headed back to camp. (He'd learned about it in training and was keen to try it himself.)
The girls were significantly less enthused by this prospect, so they split off instead to collect firewood that wouldn't smoke too much.
Crunching side-by-side through the forest, Lucy realized she'd never been alone with Jill before. The Threes usually came as a package deal, and if they were ever apart in training, Jill was the one missing.
She stole a glance at the girl, shorter than her, about Marjorie's height, and in fact her delicate hands, rounded thighs and heart-shaped face carried an air of Marjorie about them too, though that was where the similarities ended. Her mousy brown hair wasn't trimmed as neatly as the familiar black bob cut, shining in the patchy sunlight where unbrushed wisps stuck out, and her skin was pale like Lucy's, not the smooth olive that always looked soft as satin.
Now that Eustace wasn't there to fill the gap between them, Lucy found she didn't know what to say, but it turned out she needn't have bothered because Jill spoke first.
"I'm sorry."
Lucy glanced up to meet brown eyes, almost the color of honey in the light.
"For what?"
Jill smiled, a little ruefully. "You needn't be as polite as all that, you know exactly how I've been acting, and it's…" she dropped her gaze and kicked at a stick. "Pathetic."
"You're scared and nervous, it's understandable."
Understandable. The word she'd used so many times to excuse Marjorie's cowardice, still rolling off her tongue as easily as ever.
"So are you," said Jill, "So is everyone. Well, maybe except for the careers. But nobody else cried themselves out of the interviews. Nobody else spent half their training hours sulking in the bathroom. Nobody else threw their district partner off a—" She choked on the word, swallowed, and took a deep breath. "I've been nothing but a drag this whole time, and… I'm… I'm just sorry, okay?"
"Okay," said Lucy, and gave her a small smile.
Jill turned quickly and picked up a stick, and Lucy remembered what they were supposed to be doing, scanning the ground as she walked and collecting a few smaller branches from the base of a dead tree.
Marjorie would never have apologized. Not like that, not really. Of course she always said she was sorry, but it never changed anything. She would never have called herself pathetic, except to elicit the same response Lucy always gave. It's understandable.
She watched Jill as she snapped branches and piled them into her arms.
"Eustace said you knew each other in school."
Jill snorted and shook her head. "That's one way to put it. He's bullied me since first year."
"What?"
"Well, mostly he sucked up to the real bullies, but he was always a horrid little beast himself."
Lucy raised her eyebrows. Eustace didn't strike her as a suck-up. Or a bully for that matter, regardless of how blunt he could be.
"His family had money," clarified Jill. "The kind that meant they could do anything to anyone."
Lucy nodded. That was something she understood.
"But then the Capitol stopped using whatever his father made, and they lost their house and all their cars and maids and things. I'm sure the worst part for him was moving next door to me." She breathed a short laugh. "Of course the bullies turned on him the second he couldn't afford to buy them out, and he got a taste of his own medicine, I suppose. I think that was the first time he realized other people might have feelings."
Lucy smiled. She could just imagine the thought connecting like wires in Eustace's mechanical brain. "And that's when you became friends?"
"Well… not exactly. We've never been particularly fond, but I don't think he liked being alone any more than I did, much as he'd deny it. I think… I think he felt like he owed me something." She smiled faintly, and then went silent for a while.
Lucy watched her mind working behind brown eyes.
"I already knew it," she said slowly, "but… I don't know, I guess I didn't realize just how much he'd done for us until… well, until I nearly killed him."
Lucy opened her mouth to say something, 'don't be too hard on yourself,' but then shut it again.
Jill looked up at her, and this Jill was almost a different person from the one she'd met in the Capitol. "I suppose if he thinks I'm worth all this then I might at least try too."
Lucy smiled and reached out to squeeze her hand, clasping delicate fingers in her own calloused palm. For just one moment they weren't in the arena anymore.
Jill smiled back.
Then Eustace's voice cut through the forest from the direction of their campsite. "Are you two collecting firewood or gossiping?"
They looked at each other and giggled as they split apart and hurried their hunt.
"There, is this enough for you?" Jill dropped her heap of sticks in the middle of the clearing, and Lucy set hers beside it, stacking them up the way she'd learned in training.
"Took you long enough."
Eustace already had the bird plucked and cleaned, big enough that Lucy thought they hardly needed the squirrel.
Jill rummaged through her jacket pockets for a small tin of matches, and after several minutes of fiddling with brush, blocking the breeze, and wasting the first three matches, they finally got a small fire blazing.
They'd just divided up the meat on sharpened sticks for skewers when a faint high pitched ringing caught their ears, and they looked up to find a silver parachute floating down toward them through the trees.
Jill leapt to her feet and caught it out of the air, staring down at the silver container in her hands as if she could hardly believe it was real, the number 3 raised in glossy material.
A sponsor gift.
"Well, what is it?" asked Lucy.
Jill blinked, and twisted it open to reveal a few packets of seasoning, labeled in clear black letters. She took them out.
"That's it?" asked Eustace.
"I guess," said Jill, still marveling at the parachute.
"Gee, thanks," said Eustace, squinting at the sky, but he took the packets and opened one, sprinkling the seasoning carefully over the meat before propping their skewers out over the fire.
Their hunger made it impossible to set themselves to anything as the meat cooked at an agonizing pace besides watching and checking it every few minutes, but at last Eustace declared it done, and Lucy and Jill took the skewers while Eustace put out the fire.
The moment they bit into the rich brown skin, any hint of disappointment at the seemingly insignificant gift vanished. For a moment Lucy was back at dinner with Digory and Polly and Caspian, even more satisfying now for how long she'd waited.
None of them spoke for several minutes, and Lucy wiped the trickle of juice from her chin as she nibbled the last scraps of meat from the bone.
"Guess you showed them to underestimate you." She flicked the bone into the coals, eyeing the rest of the bird even though she knew better than to waste it on one meal. "It's not all about sword fighting after all."
"Glad to know someone out there appreciates my vast array of talents," said Jill, still working on her wing.
"Or maybe they just felt bad for me getting toasted yesterday," said Eustace.
"Oh, Scrubb!"
"What?" He fended off a swat to the arm and grinned. "Hey, I'm an injured man! I have this scab on my elbow, see?" He lifted his arm to show the small hole in his sleeve.
"Well if that's all it is then I'm sorry I didn't push you harder!"
Jill froze and looked momentarily horrified with herself, but then Eustace burst out laughing.
Lucy had never heard him laugh before, a short but honest sound, and the way his eyes crinkled even made her think he really could be quite good looking, in his own way.
It seemed Jill had never experienced this before either, judging by her startled expression, but then a small smile flickered over her own lips, and Lucy grinned too.
Whether it was the food, or Jill's improved attitude, or the hope that came with the silver parachute they wrapped up and put into Lucy's backpack, the rest of the day went by in high spirits, and their good mood even drove them to scout out the thicker forest to the south.
They ate more of the meat for dinner, nearly as good cold as it had been straight off the fire, and then checked the traps again as the sun dipped behind the trees. They'd caught another squirrel, but nothing else, so they dis-assembled the traps and planned to set them up somewhere else the next day.
"Put me in the rotation," said Jill when they discussed sleeping in watches, and somehow even the hard ground didn't seem quite as uncomfortable as it had the night before.
It wasn't until Lucy bolted awake to the boom of a cannon that she remembered what exactly had been missing from the arena.
She blinked blearily in the early morning haze, dew clinging to her jacket as she shivered and looked at Eustace, already fully awake as he'd taken the last watch, and Jill, hair half sticking to her face.
Birdsong slowly filtered back in, and a minute later Eustace shifted and simply said "Sixteen to go."
That was how their fourth day in the arena began.
They made the trek to fill their bottles, cooked last night's squirrel, and then set out to explore even further south, now leaning a little south-west, away from the edge.
The idea had been to find a new place to set up traps, but it turned out the forest didn't extend much further that direction, and they came out onto barren rock again, stretching out around them and sizzling under the heat of a cloudless noonday sky.
"I don't suppose the river flows down here," said Lucy.
"I think we would have passed it coming down," said Eustace, "Unless there's another one, but I doubt that. Looks like it's not worth leaving the forest."
Lucy opened her mouth to agree, to say they might as well turn back, when the clap of footsteps and a chorus of shouting in the distance made their heads snap up.
"Get out of sight," hissed Eustace, and Lucy's wits rushed back to her.
Nothing surrounded them but sparse spindly trees and the jagged maze of uneven rock, so they scrambled down into the nearest gully and pressed themselves against the earthy wall just as someone else crashed down among the stones nearby. A boy, clutching his side and panting.
Lucy's heart skipped a beat.
Caspian.