Wiress Plummer, District 3

"The time has come

The clock is such a drag

All you who change your stripes

Can wrap me in the flag."

Vampire Weekend, Hudson


12:00 - Lightning

Wiress didn't like meeting new people.

She hated the way people expected her to look them in the eyes and answer their questions. Most of the time, they already knew the answer. They were just asking her for no particular reason. When she'd been reaped, the feeling of all those eyes on her had been agony.

She'd divided the ordeal ahead of her into segments. The reaping. Meeting her mentor. The parade. Training. Private sessions. Interviews. The games. The games seemed so far away when Wiress thought about those things.

Right now, she was on the train, trying to sense the movement of the wheels beneath her. There. She could hear all the whirs and vibrations of the mechanisms in the belly of the train, everything regular and contained. There was something slightly off, this one clicking sound that didn't fit the rest of the pattern. It wasn't enough to make the train break down but it would slow their journey down by a tiny amount.

And it would annoy Wiress for the rest of the journey. Her brow furrowed.

"There's something wrong with the..." she mumbled. "A mechanical fault. I can hear..."

"You've got good hearing," a man said. "You'll be able to hear your opponents coming."

Wiress looked up and saw Beetee Latier sitting across the carriage from her. Wiress glanced into his eyes, mostly out of curiosity.

She saw it. Victory. Inspiration. Lightning.

"I think I can win..." Wiress' gaze dropped. Now she knew what Beetee's eyes looked like, she wouldn't need to look at them anymore.

"I think think you can," Beetee agreed.


1:00 - Bloody Rain

Wiress ran.

It was her left. Her and the massive boy from One. She'd planted a bomb near his camp. All she'd needed to do was get out of range and she'd be able to set it off. The detonator she'd managed to cobble together out of parts from her junkyard arena and sponsor gifts was in her hand.

Suddenly, a hand closed around the hood of her jacket. She didn't need to look to know that it was the boy from One and that he was armed and ready to kill her. Wiress had a choice. She could either let him do it or press the detonator and blow them both up.

The Capitol won't have a victor this year...

Wiress pressed the button.

Noise. Too much noise. She had good hearing. It hurt.

She was on the ground. There was a burning heat across her back and something hot and wet raining down.

Blood.

There was nothing left of the boy from One but bloody rain.


2:00 - Poisonous Fog

Wiress' brain was full of fog.

Am I dead? She wondered.

She couldn't move. She could see blurry, white shapes. The fog was swallowing up everything.

Eventually, she felt the mattress pressing against her back and realised she was in a hospital bed. Tentatively, she tried to sit up and found that she could.

"Where..." she mumbled.

"Congratulations, Wiress!" Said a crimson-haired Capitol doctor. "You won!"

"What..."

"You killed Paragon! You won the Hunger Games! You're a victor!"

Wiress remembered the Hunger Games...


3:00 - Vicious Apes

Wiress watched the Careers.

They weren't like her. They didn't seem like anyone Wiress had ever met. She wondered why.

She knew, of course. Evolution.

Wiress was at the edible plants station. She was learning which plants were poisonous. They'd evolved to be so so they wouldn't be eaten. Just like she'd evolved to make machines, indoors. Just like the Careers had evolved to fight.

The Careers were like early humans. Adapted to fight and hunt and kill. To survive in the wilderness. Savage.

Wiress knew that it was just a matter of environment. The environment that they'd grown up in meant that they were prepared for the arena. They had those primal, animal instincts. They had muscles that Wiress would never be able to develop.

But Wiress had instincts of her own. Her mind was a well-used muscle. She knew how it worked, inside-out.

It was a matter of brain versus brawn. Machine versus man. There was no way of telling which would be stronger until they fought.

Sometimes brains won. Sometimes brains ended up splattered all over brawn's sword.


4:00 - Jabberjays

Wiress tried to forget about the interviews.

It wasn't that they'd been a nightmare for her. They had. She'd hated every second, forced onto the stage with the entire country's eyes on her. But it wasn't that.

It was because of everyone else's interviews.

Wiress could forget a face. She could turn the features of the other tributes into blurs in her head. She could forget they were even alive. But she couldn't forget a voice. She had every word of those interviews, the speech patterns of every one of her opponents branded onto her brain.

It reminded her that she was a murderer.


5:00 - Venomous Snakes

Wiress hated looking strangers in the eyes.

She found eyes hard to understand, especially the unnaturally coloured eyes of Capitol citizens. President Snow was the worst. He had yellow eyes, like a snake. Gajin told her that he used to have blue eyes but he'd changed them for reasons that nobody would ever know.

Those eyes had bored into Wiress' as the president had placed the crown of a victor on her head. Wiress' blood ran cold as he whispered something to her.

"I'm glad I have a victor to crown, Miss Plummer. You gave us quite a scare."

Those eyes had been laughing as Wiress, barely eighteen, signed the contract that would allow the Capitol her body for a year but keep her family alive for decades.

Those eyes had glittered with joy as the president had read the card for the Third Quarter Quell. The card made certain that Beetee would be going back into the arena. The question was, which of District 3's other victors would be joining him.

Wiress made the decision that it would be her.


6:00 - The Beast

Wiress never found out who slit her throat...


7:00 - Vampire Bats

Some people are just like bats - nocturnal.

Wiress' district partner, a boy named Yung Neil, was one of those people. He had a night shift at a factory. Every time she saw him, he was bleary-eyed, too tired to speak to her.

The only time Wires ever heard him speak was during his interview and she tried to forget about the interviews.

Yung Neil was nothing more than a face in the sky to Wiress. She soon learned that it was the best way things could be.

The two victors from District 3 who'd come before her were the same. They were guiltless over their district partners' deaths. The two that came after Wiress were different. They'd both watched their district partners die.

They were both haunted by them.


8:00 - Giant Spiders

Wiress couldn't see what the issue with spiders was.

Spiders produced their own silk. They built their own webs. They caught flies.

Wiress was a little bit like a spider. She didn't catch flies, like other tributes from Three had done before her. But she built her own way to victory.

Wiress built bombs.

Her arena was a junkyard. She found a bottle, a rag and a can of fuel while searching through a pile of junk. She had matches from the Cornucopia.

She could make a Molotov cocktail without sponsors. She could make so much more with them.

As the games went on and Wiress' kill count grew, Beetee sent her wires and batteries. Chemicals sealed away in glass and oil. They were activated many different ways. Heat, timers, movement, pressure.

They grew more and more elaborate. It was therapeutic for Wiress to keep her hands and her mind working.


9:00 - Poison Dart Frogs

Wiress didn't usually get to mentor a volunteer.

It looked like she wouldn't this year, either. Her tribute mentored herself.

"Here's the basic outline of my plan," the girl said. "I'm going to ally with the Careers. I'll find a way to control their food supply. Then, when all the tough outliers are dead, I'm going to poison them. Do you like the sound of that plan?"

"Yeah..." Wiress whispered. "How do you..."

"My father's a doctor," the girl said. "I might not have had a forest full of plants to train in but I know how the human body works."

Wiress smiled. The girl was confident. If she wasn't, she wouldn't have volunteered. Confidence was good. The girl reminded Wiress of a poison dart frog. Harmless at first glance, bright and deadly.

She would be deadly. Wiress had a gut feeling - intuition - that this girl was a victor.

She hoped that Panem was ready to watch Ramona Hirose win the Hunger Games.


10:00 - Giant Wave

Wiress didn't hear the gong.

She heard the clicking sound of the mines deactivating milliseconds before the gong went off. That was her signal to run.

She didn't look at any of the other tributes. She heard. There were waves of panic crashing in her ears as she ran for the supplies.

Adrenaline and instincts carried her away from the bloodbath with a water bottle and a box of matches. Her entire body was buzzing as the wave subsided.

Here she was, shipwrecked in a junkyard.

It was perfect.


11:00 - Swarm of Insects

Sometimes, Wiress scared herself.

She sat and watched the recap of all her kills, disgusted by how easily she'd managed to reduce seven people to ash, blood and burning pieces.

It had been scarily simple. The only time she'd hesitated was with her final kill, when she'd been in the blast radius. Most of the time, she hadn't even had to watch her victims die.

She was watching now.

Human beings were fragile things. Wiress had made them burn like insects under a magnifying glass. Everyone was an insect in the end.

She wondered if any of the other victors were as scared as she was.


Wiress is a strange character to write. It's only when you begin to investigate what's going on inside her head that you realise how smart she is. It's probably because she's a lot quieter than other smart characters.

I came up with the twelve arena hazards layout myself. It's probably my favourite chapter layout so far (the other two contenders are for District 3's next two victors). It was fun picking characters for Wiress to associate with the arena hazards. It was also fun playing around with time. I guess it suits the victor who had the strongest connection with the clock arena.