Day 3: Sponsors
Since the ceiling lights of the metal labyrinth are turned on non-stop, it's hard to tell time in the arena. However, I know from previous Games that the dead tributes are shown in the late evening. Since about two hours have passed since then, I decide it's time to go to sleep. After the stress of today, it's the only thing I can do right now anyway. No sooner do I dig the sleeping bag out of my bag than I fall into a fitful sleep.
I awake by renewed noises directly before my hiding place. Reflexively, I want to jerk my head up, grab my knife, but I'm caught in a kind of sleep paralysis that forces me to listen motionlessly. There are footsteps, but no voices. Although I can rule out career tributes, a thousand thoughts flash through my mind. They are led by the question whether someone else has discovered my camp through the markings and wants to kill me, but the further I spin the thought, the more the possibility pushes itself into the foreground to be able to eliminate an opponent here and now myself. Slowly, movement enters my body again. I quietly straighten up and peer through the slits.
Outside, a scrawny figure stumbles around. The dark-haired boy has put his hand against the wall to support himself, the other one is pressed to his chest. I contort myself to see if he is leaving a trail of blood, but there is nothing. As he gasps and wheezes, I recognize him as the sick boy from District 3. Relieved, I exhale. He is weak. He is unarmed. And most importantly, he has no doctors here in the arena. Judging by his distorted look of pain and the hand he continuously presses or taps against his body, he is even worse off now than he was during the interview. Thus, I am in no danger.
Slowly, the boy walks past my hiding place, then collapses just a few steps away, coughing, crying.
A rumble begins above me. I look up and see that the pipe, whose meaning I don't understand and which I accidentally broke the previous day, is vibrating dangerously. Outside, the boy from 3 is coughing harder and harder, and I keep perfectly still so as not to draw attention to myself.
Then something falls from the ceiling onto me, shooting through the broken pipe and toward me as the metal suddenly breaks off. Startled, I back away. I would have preferred to turn on a light. Did something just attack me? Is it a weapon? A muttation? But as I carefully scan the ground with my hand, I feel only a piece of solid fabric and some cords. I bend down and reach for a tin can. What has just fallen at my feet is a parachute, a sponsor's gift.
Surprised, I twist open the lid of the can and pull out what feels like a bottle. Carefully, I stand back up to hold the object at the top of my stash in the light of the slits. I do indeed recognize a bottle. There are some words printed on the label that I don't understand, but they look medicinal. That's when my eyes fall back out to the boy from District 3. He has his head up and is staring longingly at the ceiling. I follow his eyes and see an opening in the metal directly above him.
And I understand.
The thick tube is this year's way of transporting the sponsor gifts. They fall through the ceiling to the tributes they are supposed to reach. And I have just deprived the sick boy of his medicine by my mishap.
Frozen, I stand there looking back and forth between the distraught boy and the bottle in my hand. I consider opening my hiding place and handing the bottle out to the other tribute. But if I were in his position, I would use this moment of vulnerability to kill myself. At best, my safe hiding place would be gone. So I try to refill the parachute and throw the gift through the destroyed pipe so that it will glide on and reach the boy after all. But just as the medicine comes at me again for the second time because I didn't throw hard enough, the flap in the ceiling closes outside.
The boy starts coughing and gasping again. I stand motionless, weighing my chances of survival against his gratitude. Only to end up sinking back to the floor of my shelter and wrapping the thick blanket around my ears against the boy's wails. I'm aware of what I'm triggering. And his cannon sounds about two hours later.
Even after the noise of the cannon has long since faded in my ears, I remain lying there for a while. Then I dare to eat a little of the dried fruit. While outside grappling arms from the ceiling remove the corpse, I force my thoughts back to me, to my original goals from yesterday. I need food, and I need to take out some of the career tributes before their alliance comes looking for me. I'm still fine, I notice, I don't feel too wimpy or hungry. I won't get a better time to act. Besides, I know I can't spend the Games in my hiding place the whole time. Partly because I promised the spectators more, and partly because the Capitol often tries to smoke out long-term safe houses one way or another to round up the tributes.
I pick myself up and peer outside at the empty hallway. To the right and left, everything looks the same. Where do I go? Several times I mutter the words softly to myself. Then I hear the rumbling again, the sliding sound above me, and this time the little parachute that falls through the broken pipe into my lap is meant for me. Delighted, I unwrap the small package attached to the fabric. It is a piece of paper. At first I'm confused, but as I hold it up to the light, I recognize lines and writing.
A map.
The corridors are crisscrossing the paper. I recognize a small ladder and a circle that mark the Cornucopia – as in the previous Games above the ground, it is located exactly in the center of the arena. Around it, the maze is divided into different sectors, which are laid out like rings around the Cornucopia. While many tangled corridors lead back and forth within the sectors, you can apparently only get from the innermost to the middle ring and from the middle to the outermost ring via a total of four paths. They are drawn particularly wide, with wing doors at both ends. Since I haven't seen any doors in the arena yet, I can't have left Sector A yet.
Besides the corridors and the division, I recognize another detail on the map that I can match: The sinks. They are drawn here in the form of small drops, some in light blue and some in dark blue. Probably the colors are meant to indicate which ones are open at the same time in the alternating system. At any rate, I can locate my hiding place by means of one of them. I quickly poke a tiny hole in the spot with the tip of one of my knives.
And something else catches my eye: When I hold the map up to the light, I can see bright strokes. They are almost the same color as the paper, almost like scratches in it. They form squares at seemingly randomly distributed points in the arena, each filling the entire width of an corridor. These must be the places where the Gamemakers can trigger traps – I recognize one of these markings very close to the Cornucopia. Infinitely grateful, I smooth out the paper, lean my head back, and whisper my relief to the camera, which is presumably filming my face at this moment.
This map at least solves the problem of my unbeatable disorientation.
That leaves food and the other tributes – though these two points can be connected. Should I find the camp of my opponents from 1, 2 and 4, I could eliminate at least one of them and steal their supplies on the way back. Running away is hardly heroic, but the map and resulting knowledge of traps and shortcuts would probably give me the edge over pursuers. Only how to find the career tributes? And once I get there, who do I kill first? Without detour, my mind jumps to Saylor and Cassia. Those two are without question my most dangerous enemies – they're the ones I least want to take on as the Games progress. I turn the map in my hand and look down at my knives. Two weapons, two deaths. My best chance will be when the group is asleep. However, the noise of the cannon will wake the others, so I must strike quickly. I scratch my head, and while my brain weighs how quickly I can commit two murders, one of the lamps flickers outside. How nice it would be if it were dark in the arena or if I could attack specifically when the anthem is playing and the flickering blue could hide me. But all that is too risky, too uncertain. I cannot count on finding the career tributes until the boy from District 3 who just died is displayed. After all, I have no idea where the pack is.
No matter how I turn it, there is no way to make a surprise attack in the brightly lit wide corridors. No matter how fast I am, I probably wouldn't manage to take out two of the others fast enough. Throwing the knives is also out of the question, because then I would be completely rid of my weapons.
As I rack my brain, I go over everything I've learned about the Hunger Games in the past. Everything I know, all the tactics of past Games, past victors. There has to be something that can help me, some way I can use my advance in knowledge over the technical arena. And that way comes in the form of Beetee Latier.