Valencia Cadillac, District Six female (18)

There were fifteen people in the arena, each trying to kill everyone else. But really there were thirteen people trying to kill everyone else. There was one person just trying to kill one particular woman, and one woman just trying to thwart him.

From what I'd seen in the Bloodbath, Romeo had been distracted by his alliance's unexpected team-up with Isabella's. That was good for me in that it gave me a chance to get as much distance from him as possible, but it was very, very bad in that it gave him weapons and supplies. I had nothing but the stick I'd sharpened against a tree, not to mention my difficulty with getting water. I'd been making do, no pun intended, with the water I could lick off of leaves in the morning, along with what I could squeeze out of the lychee trees I'd found in abundance. They didn't look quite like the ones I remembered from my father's fancy dinners he threw to impress clients, but so far I hadn't died, so I assumed they were just a different type. If the Games went on for too long I'd have to start looking for more substantial food, but for at least two weeks I was sure I could live off fruits and water.

After walking near-constantly for days, trying to make sure I was on the exact opposite end of the Cornucopia as Romeo, I was relieved to find there wassome solid ground. I didn't know what would happen if my feet stayed wet indefinitely, but I could guess it wouldn't be good. It was bad enough dealing with the dirt caked all over my lower body and wedged underneath my fingernails. I'd been using the dew to try to clean them a little. It wasn't even rich-girl fussiness- I was just scared of what sort of worms and parasites must be in all that dirt. My sympathies went out to any Tributes who were for some reason stuck in the wetter parts of the arena. I couldn't imagine the smell coming from their own bodies. Eventually they'd just rot away...

"Valencia."

Oh my god there are ghosts.My heart clenched away from my ribs, because the sound had come from underneath me. There were ghosts and they went downwhen they died. Without meaning to, I glanced downwards, controlled by some perverse instinct to see what was about to get me. I let out a low, jagged moan at the sight of a finger sticking up from the ground.

"Valencia. It's Kade." the voice came again. Slowly, my brain heard the letters and knitted them into words. Kade. My ally, if she survived the Bloodbath. She had, it seemed. And she'd somehow gotten underground and was wiggling a finger at me.

"How do I know?" the words popped out as I shied my foot away from the grotesque finger. More words tumbled after them. "What the hell are you doing underground and how do I know you're not a ghost?"

"My face wasn't in the sky," Kade said, her voice muffled by the dirt on top of her.

"How would you know? You're underground," I said.

The finger disappeared. "I can see through the holes," she said. "They look bigger from this angle."

"How'd you get under there?" I asked. My pulse was slowly calming as the air returned to my lungs. It did sound like Kade, and it would be strange for a mutt to wait so long before attacking.

"There's tunnels. They're really small but we can fit," Kade said. "Here, follow me." There was silence and then her finger reappeared a few feet away. I followed her, still unsettled by her zombie-like way of signaling me, until she vanished once more and then appeared in the mouth of a small hole in the ground.

"I think they go across the whole arena," Kade said, lying on her stomach to point out how the tunnel receded into the earth.

"You've been down there this whole time?" I asked.

She nodded. "Rainwater drips down into the holes," she said.

"What have you been eating?" I asked.

"It's really gross," she hedged.

"Well now I have to know," I said.

"Worms," Kade said. She smiled at me, and my stomach turned at the thought of what must be stuck in her teeth. "So we can be allies now, right?"

"Kid, I can't say you don't deserve it. We can be allies."

Galvan Fabre, District Five male (18)

I'd always wanted to see the ocean. The arena was no ocean, but it wassomething I'd never thought Id be able to see. I'd seen a lot in the past few days that I'd never thought I'd be able to see. There was the gross stuff, like the leeches I kept picking off my legs whenever I wasn't in the water.

How do leeches hunt? Smell, maybe?I definitely smelled- even I could smell myself. I got an idea and scooped up a handful of thick, gloppy mud, wincing a little at how it flowed underneath my fingernails. But this was no time for squeamishness. I started painting the mud down my legs, then thought I might as well embrace the camouflage and added it to my arms and face, too. My skin crawled at the sticky clumpiness of my hair and the way the mud caked onto the skin of my back and neck. I'd never been v fussy kid, but not many people like being filthy. The mud must have been crawling with germs and literallycrawling with all those little multi-legged bugs and microbes that gave people diseases I'd never even heard of. But most diseases take a few weeks to kill you. Careers are faster.

I hoped the Games didn't last long. The sun was high overhead but even then, the trees blocked most of the light. Everything was steamy and overcast and looked somehow like time had gone back to some primeval period where humans weren't the masters. The river I was camped beside- in the banks of, really, hiding in the crevices in the mud- was chocolatey brown and so opaque I couldn't see down an inch past the surface. Farther out than I was brave enough to wade, I had no clue how deep the water was. It didn't matter- beasts could hide in two feet as well as twenty- but when I swam across for whatever reason, I did it faster than I ever swam laps at home.

Funny that when I was surrounded by water, I was dirtier than I'd ever been. The mud penetrated past my skin and I thought it must be in my bone marrow by now. My clothes were stiff like armor, so crusty they chafed my skin in the brief moments they dried. My underwear was sodden. I'd never had reason to use the word sodden before, but that's what they were. I thought of my bathroom sink back home. I turned a handle and sparkling clean water came out. I'd taken it for granted. How was it possible I'd taken for granted that water could be clean?That I could be inside a structure and not exposed to the elements twenty-four hours a day? I was starting to think that was what it meant to be human.

The water at the river's surface reshaped itself. It mounded up and its movement mesmerized me. It was a good thing, since I would have died if I'd moved. I didn't see what I was looking at until some water slid off the pebbly mass and revealed a golden eye the size of a baseball, a vertical green-edged slit it its center. My mouth fell open a crack as I saw how large, just how large, a crocodile could be. My brain could tell it was perhaps fifteen feet large, but I'd never understood how long fifteen feet was. My first thought to pass the prey-like veil over my mind was that at least once when I'd swam across the river, that thing had been underneath me.

It's going to eat me, I thought with fatalistic detachment. So I lay still and made no attempt to flee as the crocodile glided to the edge of the river. Its dinosaur foot pulled clear of the water and it slid itself up onto the bank- the bank where I was lying on my stomach. Usually crocodiles pull you into the water,I thought. Would this one pull me and itself back under, or would it just eat me on the bank?

There was a low, soft hiss when the crocodile opened its mouth. I hadn't known how primalits teeth were. They were blunt and off-white and I thought I saw chunks of something in between them. I was a small, fragile animal and I was what this thing ate.

The crocodile lifted its leg and set it down directly on my shoulder. I held me breath, not so much out of fear as because its massive weight shoved me down face-first into the mud. It didn't even mean to. It was just so large that without thinking it nearly suffocated me. I would have died there, my lungs full of mud, if it hadn't lifted its leg again and wrenched my thigh when it unthinkingly stepped again. I felt a series of impacts all down my back, and then droplets of water splashed my face. Slowly, knowing it might kill me but unable to stop myself, I tilted my head in the mud until I could see a sliver of the world. There was nothing but widening ripples on the water by the bank.

What was that. It... wasn't hungry?The mud slowly tightened on my skin in the sun and it came to me. It hadn't seen me. It hadn't smelled me. I was wrong to malign leeches. They were my very favorite animals in the world.

Anjou Corriente, District Ten male (18)

ClearlyI wasn't meant to have allies. At least not that group, though I'd decided maybe being alone for a while was better. I had some things to think about, and I didn't need Dahlia and Romeo constantly berating me.

Perhaps I wasn't a perfect boyfriend. If I was really being honest with myself, perhaps I wasn't even a good boyfriend. A bad boyfriend, even. If that was the case, maybe I should work on myself for a while before I tried again.

What do I even want in a girlfriend?I asked myself. Obviously I'd never found it. Every girl I met had so many things I wanted to change about her. Since I was slowly starting to admit that perhaps I was not going about that in the best way, I needed a different method. For example, what if I just didn't try to change my girlfriends? Clearly then I would need to meet someone already perfect, which seemed unlikely. But if I never met the right person, maybe I'd just stay single. There were plenty of things I liked to do on my own. I wouldn't have to settle for an imperfect girlfriend, and girls wouldn't have to worry about me trying to mold them. Win/win, sort of.

But what did it even matter? I was starting to think nothing mattered at all. Everyone talked about morality and being a good person. Where did it come from? Not from the government, that was for sure. Not from common sense. The one thing everyone could agree on was that no one agreed on anything. It didn't seem to come from any higher power, not with the way good people like Rainbow died and bad people like Romeo lived. That was another thing. Where did he get off telling me I was a bad person? I tried to guide my girlfriends and sure, I went a little too far, but I didn't try to murder them. I tried to help Rainbow. I was ready to risk my life for her in the Bloodbath. You want a real piece of work, Romeo? Look in the mirror.

So whatis right? It seemed I'd gotten a lot of it wrong, so I needed to start with the basics. It was wrong to kill people- that, everyone but the Capitol agreed on. No, no, they agreed, too. They just didn't think Districters were people. So that was one rule: it's wrong to kill people. But why? We have value, somehow? From where? It could just be a biological thing- people inherently don't want to kill people because we want the species to continue. Something told me it was more than that. It was just a gut feeling, but I'd always put stock in my gut.

I guess we had value just because. I didn't know the reason but it was so obviously true to me that it was just... because. People had value. But what about people like Romeo or Dahlia? I didn't personally see much in them, but I was a bit afraid of where to draw the line, so I decided to err on the side of caution. But did that mean... my old exes had value? Just the way they were, without me changing them? Maybe they weren't good as girlfriends for me, but people had value outside of me. If I wasn't met to have a girlfriend, at the very least not for a while, maybe I should work on seeing the value in people in other ways than romantic. Just like I wasn't that great as a boyfriend but I had value outside of that.

Romeo, Dahlia and I could agree on one thing: it was best I stay single. I didn't even want a girlfriend anyway. Now that the cat was out of the bag- all of Panem had heard me say I was asexual- I might as well face it. It wasn't allbad, what I'd tried to do with my girlfriends. I'd wanted to help them, even if it hadn't worked out. It was a good thing to want to help other people. If I spent some more time alone, working through my mistakes and finding better alternatives, someday I might be able to help people more effectively. If I won the Games I'd have time to study and learn and think about things. I'd definitely have a lot of money. That was one thing about myself that I knewwas good- giving things to people came easily to me. If I had all that money a Victor got, I'd give lots of it away. I'd just have to remind myself not to tell people what to do with it. That was my next project: to listen more to other people and help them the way they wanted, not the way I thought they needed.