Jack Schnapps, District Nine male (13)

By the lack of movement and the lukewarm temperature of the air, I could tell it was still the middle of the night. Once in a while I would hear someone shift in their sleeping bag, and once I heard whoever was on guard duty roaming about. Other than that, it was just the wind in the air or the occasional sound of a twig breaking loose and falling into the water.

There's still no hope. The best thing that possibly could have had happened. I'd fallen in with a bunch of genuine good people. But it didn't mean anything. I had a stay of execution and then, still, there would be an execution. Every day I was alive was more than I'd expected. I'd outlived everyone's expectations. But winning wasn't even past expectations. It was not even... not even a thought. Not even in the realm of the possible.

Maybe it was better to not even think about that. No one controls the future. All I needed to think about was one more day. I might not survive the Games, but I might have one more day. I could splash around in the water. Eat Beth's soup that was better than anything I'd eaten at home. Learning about my friends, hearing Mike's stories from his radio show. Being alive, for as long as it lasted.

I wondered what was going on back home. Dad and Daniel would have already thought up a new scam. After I lost them the bet, I suppose that was the last they thought of me. They thought of how they didn't have a tragic disabled kid to get them money, but they didn't think about me. Not their son. Not their brother. Just lost money.

You know what? I'm better off here. What a world. I was better off in the arena with people I'd known for a week than I was at home with the people who were supposed to love me. Sure, I wasn't always the most lovable, and some of my isolation was my own fault. But this was a new beginning for me. New friends who didn't know about the kind of person I used to be, just the one I was choosing to be now.

The wind stirred in my hair, cooling the front of my face. I lay with my eyes closed, not doing much at all, until my thoughts went away.

Beth Crissino, District Four female (18)

I was already awake when Isabella came to get me for my shift. A cannon had come earlier, waking us all up, but we'd fallen back asleep eventually. I woke up again by some internal clock, probably from all those practice exercises in the academy. I sat up quickly and slid out of my sleeping bag into the not-quite-cool morning air. The sunlight was just barely starting to make a dent in the darkness. The earliest risers, like Mike, would be up soon. The cornucopia would be filled with movement and noise again as we chatted and planned and at the same time tried not to think about the future.

Just out of boredom and habit, I started making a round. I didn't leave the edge of the dry dirt around the cornucopia, since I didn't want to get muddy or get blocked fro sight by any tall grass or anything like that, so it was just a slow circle around half a dozen sleeping bags. Isabella was just getting settled back in, while Zebulon was on his side, his face buried in his bag. Mike was hidden entirely within his bag, and I smiled at how of course he would look like he was in a cocoon. Jack was was lying on his back, his head tilted to one side so his cheek rested against his sleeping bag.

I'd never been one to put stock in the "sixth sense" some careers bragged about, but my body knew before my mind that something was different. The hairs on my arms stood up as I walked nonchalantly to Jack's sleeping bag. I knelt by him.

Oh my god...

Mike Mothra, District Eight male (16)

I tensed as someone shook my awake. I opened my eyes blearily to see Beth looking down at me, their face white and their lips pulled tight on their shocked face.

"Jack's dead," they said, as I was still sitting up and rubbing my eyes.

"What?" I asked. I must have still been dreaming, or in one of those moments right when you wake up or fall asleep and hear things you later wonder if you really did.

"Someone killed Mike," Beth repeated. I looked over at Jack's sleeping bag and noticed how pale he was, his face turned away from me. I didn't remember Jack being that pale. Isabella was standing guard, pacing around the edge of our dirt patch in agitation, her axe twitching at her side as her arm flexed. Her eyes searched the empty forest around us with a hunter's precision. As I got to my feet, Beth left me so they could wake up Zebulon.

The others gathered behind me as I crouched by Jack. In the gathering morning light, I could see his face, seemingly peaceful and undisturbed. The tiny trail of blood from his ear looked like a stray lock of hair. I put out my hand to lay on him and yanked it back the second I touched his skin. It was wax skin. A doll's skin.

"How could this happen?" Beth asked. "Someone snuck in and didn't kill anyone but Jack? When? When whoever was on guard was looking the other way? That's not even..." It didn't make any sense. None at all.

Zebulon delicately took Jack's arm and tugged it. It cleaved stiffly to his side. My chest clenched- there was an inhuman, grotesque uncanniness to what had been human flesh behaving like dried clay.

"He's been dead a while," Zebulon said. No one doubted him. He was a hunter. He knew how death progressed.

"The cannon from earlier," Beth said. We'd all waken up, but we'd looked around, seen nothing was disturbed, and went back to sleep.

"It happened earlier than that," Isabella said. There was a horrible flatness to her voice. She looked like a woman I'd never met before. There was danger, and horror, and clarity in her voice. "And it wasn't an intruder."

"You can't mean-" Beth's eyes flickered over each of us in turn. It seemed I was the last of us to understand.

Isabella Disney-Busattil, District Eleven female (18)

The cannon came hours into the night. Long enough that we'd all taken a shift on watch before that point. But no one had seen anything. No one had interrupted an intruder walking right into our camp and killing one of our members. It happened so neatly. Whoever it was struck Jack hard enough to knock him out while his life slowly leaked from his fractured skull. Some hours later, the cannon finally caught up to him. No one had heard the intruder.

"This was one of us."

16th place: Jack Schnapps- Murdered

I didn't ever think of an SYOT murder mystery. Then this story came and all at once I saw so many elements coming together I never would have thought of until I saw it. I needed a big alliance. Motives. Friends tight-knit enough that they wouldn't immediately descend into a brawl. Characters sympathetic enough that it would be shocking one would turn on the others. I saw all that here and knew greatness had dropped into my lap. So Jack, who was destined to die early anyway, got to live past the Bloodbath so I could do this. I finished out Jack's story about foiling his family's plan and got to do a murder mystery all at once. Thanks Very New to This for a fatalistic Tribute that just kicked off one of the juiciest storylines any SYOT could hope for.

This would have been better later, after the cult had more time in the arena to become desperate and for their morals to fray, but I needed this many people left in order to have a decent number of suspects. Instead of killing other people early or putting the plot on hold for a bunch of no-death chapters, I chose to accelerate things unrealistically as a necessary evil. So pardon the unrealistic characterisation in that regard, since it was the best option I had.