The next few Mothman member POVs will have the necessary awkwardness of none of the tributes revealing, in their private thoughts, whether they are or not the killer, due to the weirdness of a first-person murder mystery. Not realistic but stylistically it's needed.
Isabella Disney-Busattil, District Eleven female (18)
"How do we know it wasn't an accident?" Mike realized how silly it was even as he said it, but he clung to the hope it might not be what we all knew it was. I didn't even add "unless he was the murderer" in my head. Everything was turned upside-down by this, but one thing I still knew was that there was no way it was him. I'd sooner believe it was me.
"Maybe his head just did that,"
Zebulon cracked, then looked guiltily at Mike and dropped his eyes. "Not really a good time for jokes, I guess."
"It could have been an intruder intending to get all of us, but they got spooked off after Jack," Mike said. It wasn't even impossible. Charm or Laken or someone might have snuck in, killed the first person they reached, and then whoever was on duty scared them away.
"Jack was so short. If someone snuck in, they'd go for Isabella, since she's way longer," Beth said.
"Unless she was on duty then," Zebulon said. Or unless it was one of us, no one wanted to say.
"It definitely wasn't Isabella. She could kill us all whenever she wants, without being sneaky," Mike said.
"And if she did, she'd go for me first," Beth said. "Not that I'm super strong, but I amtrained."
"And... I don't want to killanyone!" I added.
"If this was a movie we'd dust for fingerprints," Mike said.
"We don't even know what the weapon was," Zebulon said. He looked toward the piles of weapons in the cornucopia, most of them never even touched... that we knew of.
"In the movies they say you need a motive," Beth said. They looked around at the rest of us. "I mean, we all want to survive, but does anyone have an extra motive?"
"If I don't win, Anders will get reaped," I said. "Seems dumb to tell my own motive, but you're gonna think of it eventually." I still couldn't believe this was real. My friends and I were discussing which of us murdered a kid. But we were friends...
"Maybe whoever did it thought it was for the best," Beth said timidly. "Jack was going to die anyway, you know? So whoever did this did it in his sleep, so he wouldn't feel it and he would die with his friends and not scared."
Mike looked away. I knew what he was thinking. "Whoever did it isn't necessarily a bad person. It's just... the Games. They do things to people." he said.
"But we do need to find them, before they kill again," Zebulon said.
"I can't believe this is happening," Beth said. I'd never seen someone look ashen before. I'd thought it was just an expression, or maybe you got a little pale. But Beth's face really did look like it was covered in ash. Their skin was all tight and waxy and there was a strange paleness to her eyes, like she'd seen something she could never unsee. Plenty of kids in the Bloodbath had looked terrified, but they hadn't had this aged sadness.
"I think... we should stay in pairs from now on," Mike said. He looked like he was about to cry. "Then we'll be safer. And if anyone else dies... we'll know who did it, I guess."
"Unless they go on guard duty, murder their partner, and then kill the rest of us," Zebulon said.
"I guess there's no way around that, in the end," Mike said. "But if that's how I go, I don't really want to be in this world anyway."
Elias Cuthrow, District Eleven male (18)
My stomach did that gross wet heave it had been doing lately. I leaned over at a sudden cramp and out of nowhere, slimy sludge rose in my throat and poured out my mouth. I was lucky it happened too fast for me to try to resist it, since I'd tried to hold in vomit once as a little kid and it just came out my nose instead. The sharp taste of acid and the pallid ghost of food washed around my mouth as I coughed and tried to clear the chunks out. I spat a few times, willing to lose the bit of water in order to get rid of that horrible taste, and gnawed on a banana from my pocket, chewing and then spitting it out to clear the taste without risking another heave.
Yuk. It seemed like I was still somewhat outpacing the water loss from the dirty water, but I was getting tired of chugging river juice just to stay ahead of my mouth and my backside. I'd known the Games would be hard, but it was getting to where I had to admit to myself that I didn't have time to waste. If I stayed in here another week, I might die. It didn't matter how hard I could fight if I wasted away and died in a delirious stupor.
Was this what the Capitol wanted? A bunch of pathetic kids shitting themselves to death? I'd always felt neutral about the Capitol. They were far away and out of my life. But now I was starting to hate them. Violence I could understand, even cruelty. But this was just boring. If they were going to kill us left and right, at least make it cool.The dead body mutt was cool. They should have added more of that sort of thing. But with this body count over the eight days I'd been in the arena, it was clear spectacles like that were few and far between.
When I got out of here, I should become a Gamemaker. I'd show them how it was done. I'd add weapons to every cornucopia, for starters- every weapon I could think of. Guns, too, now and then. We'd only gotten guns once and they'd been terrible garbage guns. I wanted to see what Careers would do against a twelve-year-old with a rocket launcher. Even the playing field a little, you know? In my games, you'd never know who would win.
Finally. I'd gone two days without seeing anyone else. All I'd had to go on was the scattered footprints that disappeared without warning only to reappear hours later, looking like some of them weren't even the same set of feet. When I saw the Tribute ahead of me, his back to me as he bent by the riverside, I smiled to myself. He was a victim, first of all. Beyond that, it looked like a water filter he was carrying. Finally I'd be able to drink and have the water stay where it was supposed to go. It looked like the boy from Ten. It made sense he'd have supplies, since he and his friends had joined the attack on the Careers. I didn't see his buddies around. Most likely they'd abandoned him. I would have, too. I didn't hang around with kiddie lovers. It was the perfect moment. Supplies, someone to kill, and people would celebrate me for doing it.
Anjou Corriente, District Ten male (18)
Later, I'd reflect that it was something out of a cheesy book. A branch snapped behind me and I turned around, startled but expecting it was probably just a bird or a random falling twig. Instead I saw Elias barreling toward me. Instinct took over and I found that I had a fight response when my arm scooped up a branch off the ground and swung it at him like a bat. He put up his other arm to shield the one holding his knife and huffed when the branch hit it heavily. He grabbed the branch and yanked me forward as I let go fast enough to avoid getting pulled directly on the blade. But by then he was too close for me to run.
Everything or nothing, then. I launched my fist right at Elias's face. It took both of us by surprise, it seemed, since it cracked into his nose and he staggered back as blood gouted from it. He glared at me and swung the knife at my face. I leaned back, almost falling, and before I could right myself he slashed the blade across my chest. It deflected off my ribs but still tore a painful gash across my skin.
As Elias' arm continued past me with his momentum, I grabbed him near the shoulder and tried to flip him. It wasn't perfect but it did get him off-balance, and it kept the knife farther from me. I shot out a leg and kicked him in the back of the knee. He fell, but I didn't let go in time and fell with him. I landed on top of him, knocking the wind out of him, and capitalized on the moment by head-butting him in his already broken nose. Even as he bellowed in pain he brought his knife arm up toward my head. I pulled back and the knife smacked into my temple. It couldn't penetrate my skull bone, so instead the motion carried it forward to scrape across my temple until it reached the edge of my face and kept going into thin air.
I flopped forward onto Elias' knife arm, pinning the blade underneath me. I was surprised he hadn't kicked me off of him yet and pressed my advantage by donkey-kicking him in the stomach as he tried to spin the knife in his fingers and weakly stab me with whatever force he could generate with his wrist. I punched him in the face and felt a pop as my knuckles hit the bare bone of his forehead. I thought I felt my thumb lengthen from its position inside my fist. Then I was distracted by the bludgeon-like impact in my hand as I punched him over and over. Can't punch me if he's getting punched by me...
Any second he'd be getting up. I was beating on him for nothing, just buying a few instants of life with every blow until my time came. Then a cannon boomed and I knew he'd gotten past me and stabbed me without me even noticing. I kept punching, some part of me wanting to avenge my own death, and slowly realized there was something weird about Elias face. It felt weird. It wasn't moving right.
My fist paused in midair as I looked down at Elias. He wasn't moving right because he wasn't moving at all. His face was so swollen I could barely see his eyes. It was mottled and purple and he wasn't wiping off the blood that was flowing into his open mouth. Some rabid part of me wanted to bite him and I had to shove it down.
He's dead. I'd beaten him to death. At the moment I realized it, the pain flooded into my hand. I looked down and saw my swollen, twisted fingers. I couldn't even make a fist when I tried again. My hand trembled in midair, vibrating with the pain of multiple fractures from the thin bones in my hand meeting the much thicker bones of Elias' skull.
I sat backwards, just to the side of Elias' body, heaving for breath and trying to go back from an animal to a person. I'd killed someone. Elias was dead. I couldn't get myself around it. It was wrong to kill someone. But I didn't feel any worse for it. Was it not wrong, what I did? Or did I just not have any idea at all of what "wrong" meant? The world wouldn't condemn me for what I'd done. The Capitol might even reward me for it. Clearly they didn't know what was right either. If he'd killed me instead they'd have had the same reaction. No good guys. No bad guys. Just as long as they got death.
Elias Cuthrow, District Eleven male (18)
I savored it. When the moment came and I felt something give inside my skull, I could savor the fact that I'd never felt pain like this. It was a once in a lifetime sort of pain.
15th place: Elias Cuthrow, District Eleven male- beaten to death by Anjou
There were so many cool people left there wasn't a clear next kill. It was a bit of a letdown to choose Elias, but honestly the realistic death for him was the dysentery he was riddled with, so I split the difference and had him go down fighting, cutting his opponent pretty badly in an arena where that very likely means death. Elias found himself in the wrong story, tbh. This population of tributes didn't give enough good victims and the environment was extremely taxing, leading to a very pitched fight when he met someone who's been drinking clean water this whole time. It's a bummer Elias didn't get to do more, but he died as he lived. Thanks Luthienlight for Elias and bummer he ended up in such a weird group of tributes.