Ashlyn Forrest, District Seven

All through the Games I'd survived off plans so outlandishly bold that they ended up working. Demetria and I had run right past the Cornucopia on the first night to make our way to the basement staircase. We'd set up camp in the gigantic brightly-colored plastic pirate ship right out in the open. We'd been living there ever since in the aquarium this crazy mall had on its bottom floor, living off the actual pineapple I grabbed at the Bloodbath.

Humans can make routine out of anything. After the first two days without crossing paths with the Careers, the Arena started to seem… mundane. The cannons that initially gave both of us panic attacks seemed like distant and unimportant trifles. Under the unchanging artificial light of the ceiling lamps time blurred and nullified. It was just a constant loop of sleeping, hiding whenever there was noise, and scooping seaweed out of the little pool full of tiny sharks and stingrays to eat. The sound of the cannons faded and only the number of the cannons mattered.

Demetria and I didn't want to be the one to bring up what the day's cannons meant. We waited until the Anthem played and the faces showed in the sky. There were four Tributes left. After Emma's face blinked in the sky that left me, Demetria, Kisarna and Mase. Two very small and very timid girls and two very large and very fierce Careers.

"They're going to get us," Demetria whispered. It wasn't until hours later that I had the idea.

It felt like evening when Demetria and I started our plan. I had no way to know if it really was. It just felt like it. We crawled on hands and knees down the pathway that led through the giant aquarium. We'd gone down there once before while exploring and had hastily fled when one of the barrel-shaped sharks had seen us and rammed straight into the glass, slamming himself into it over and over behind us as we ran and leaving half a dozen hairlike cracks. It didn't see us behind the knee-height wall at the bottom of the glass.

At the end of the tunnel we curled up against the wall and Demetria started to scream. It was a long, panicked sound that she cut short, like she'd been attacked by a mutt and too late remembered that making noise would damn her. We waited. A moment later the glass walls and enclosed space brought the reverberation of footsteps down the staircase that led to the aquarium. Down the narrow arch of the aquarium pathway, lit by the multicolored fluorescent lights meant to mimic a coral reef, Kisarna and Mase appeared.

So much of my plan relied on things turning out right. But then, I was only still here because things had turned out right so many times. Kisarna and Mase advanced down the hall. The first thing had gone right: the shark hadn't seen them yet. They made it halfway, their attention too focused on us to see the shark materialize from the gloom at the far wall of the aquarium. The second thing had gone right. The shark hit the glass at full speed. The glass held. Kisarna and Mase turned at the noise. The shark hit the glass again. The last thing went right.

My memories of the glass shattering were fractured into disparate slices. The shark burst through the glass and it shattered with the violence and distance as if it had been a cannonball. The water broke through the weakened glass in such a total and overwhelming wave that I only remembered a wall of water hitting me. I next remembered tumbling underwater with water in my mouth and no idea which way was up. I hit something- I watched the tapes later and saw it was a plaster coral decoration- and that was the last thing I remembered.

I woke up coughing and streaming water from my mouth and nose. I sat up and saw nothing but bodies. A puddle of water gurgled as it ran down into one of half a dozen drains. Kisarna lay facedown in it. Mase hung out of the shark's mouth as it gnashed, seemingly unaware that it was rapidly being beached. And Demetria was draped over the shattered edge of the tank, the water around her running red from the carnage wrought when the wave washed her over the jagged glass. Four Tributes, four chances, and only one where it turned out right.