I'm not impatiently waiting for forms this time. I just wanted to finally get to the end of the first SYOT. I'm almost there.
Sarla Mondins
I'd never been so close to death before. Daniel told me he'd stay with me and keep me safe. I watched him die in the Bloodbath. Daniel was running to me to make sure I was all right, but he never got to me. He was my hero, but he died as easy as a kitten. It changed everything. He was my rock. Nothing was certain without him. My entire world was gone.
Without Daniel, all I could do was hide. I lay down flat and covered myself in mud, lying still for hours on end. The Careers ran by once just feet from my head. They were chasing another girl who had just passed by and who I had been too afraid to speak to. I heard everything as they killed her next to me. It wasn't safe to move, even to cover my ears. The only thing I could do was close my eyes.
There were cannons every day. Sometimes I heard the screams, and sometimes it was just quiet. I suspected many of them were from sickness. Someone sent me a bottle of water purification tablets, and it was probably the only thing keeping me alive. I would wait until the dead of the night and slowly sit up from the mud. My clumpy, stiff hair would brush against the mud as I scooped some water into my bottle and purified it. The water tasted like chemicals and the silt stuck in my teeth. I felt like an animal as I scrabbled for life in the darkness.
I woke up one day to the sound of groaning. My reflexes locked my body still and I carefully opened my eyes a slit over a perion of minutes. I expected to see a boy bleeding out next to me, but he didn't seem hurt at all. He was lying facedown with his nose barely above the mud. I blew some mud out of my own nose, and then I smelled him. I thought the brown sludge around him was just mud, and some of it was, but the rest was something else entirely. I'd never smelled such a rotten, sickly filth as the stench that came off the boy. I couldn't tell which parts came from which end- his mouth was leaking yellow ooze and his pants were a lighter brown than the mud we were covered in.
The trainer in the Capitol had told me about dysentery. He said you could lose all the water you drank in three days, no matter how fast you drank it. He told me how it came out both ends until it burned and you felt empty. The life just ran right out of you.
The boy on his belly next to me was pretty far gone. He barely had the strength to keep his mouth and nose out of the mud. His back arched and his stomach tucked in as he retched, but there was nothing inside him to come out. He whimpered and bent his head lower to slurp the water from the mud.
I thought of the bottle hidden underneath me. The boy was so far gone it probably wouldn't help. If I tried to share it, he might panic and attack me. I couldn't really convince myself that was a valid excuse, though, since he couldn't possibly hurt me. What would Daniel do? Daniel would tell me to leave the boy alone. He was concerned about me, not anyone else. But what about me? What would I do?
It wasn't right to leave the boy. It wasn't safe to help him. It wasn't safe to move and possibly give away my location. I was a rabbit among foxes. Anyone who found me could kill me easily. Even easier than they killed Daniel. Daniel wanted me to live. He loved me so much. If I didn't help the boy, was I worthy of that love?
I hadn't noticed the boy had fallen silent. The next noise I heard was his cannon. I bent my head up and saw him facedown in the mud. I wondered if it was the sickness or if he had drowned. If it was the first, I might have been able to help. If it was the second, I definitely could have saved him. I would never know if I would have.
The last cannon came two days later. I was too afraid to move, so the hovercraft never came for the boy's body. Through the last forty-eight hours, the smell went from sickness to death to rot. I saw his body from the air as they lifted me away. His hair was strewn limply in the water. His skin was white and it was sliding off his skin. Leeches and maggots were teeming all across it. Pale, scummy liquid floated on top of the muddy water. I wished I could go back down there and flip him over so his face was to the sun and not the mud, but I was afraid that if I did, he would grab onto me and beg for the help I didn't give.