Cashmere Goré, District 1

"Burn up with the water

Floods around the plains.

The planets in a rose,

Who knows what they contain?"

Big Thief, Mary


I'd wanted a beautiful arena.

Every arena so far has had its charms, from the symmetrical, sandy amphitheatres of old to my brother's tropical paradise.

So imagine my fury when I rose into my place for the bloodbath only to find myself in a massive puddle of mud. Thick, clinging, greyish-white mud.

Things aren't so bad now. Now I've discovered the mysterious blue flames at night and the swirling galaxies in my head. It's such a pretty place.

Such a pretty place...

The mud has all disappeared now. All I can see is bright colours, a rainbow of bubbles and butterflies whenever I blink. I'm in paradise.

A comet floats down through a starry sky, leaving a trail of rainbows dribbling down behind it.

Oh, that's lovely... Did Gloss send me that comet?

I find it on the ground, half-sunk in a shiny oil slick. Except it's not a comet anymore. It's a rose, blooming silver in my hands.

Inside the rose is a mask.

I fix it to my face with clumsy fingers. Immediately, the air tastes fresher. The colours begin to fade. Soon, I'm stranded in the grey again. I reach up to take the mask off but then I realise what's happened.

The gamemakers must've filled the arena with gas to get us to hallucinate. The mask that Gloss has just sent me is the only thing keeping me seeing reality.

Without it, I'm defenceless.

I think back to the Capitol, the last truly pretty place I've been. I'd been dressed like a queen but treated like a little kid. Gloss' little sister.

I'm older than him by three minutes. I'm also the better fighter. I learned to walk first. I've outscored him in every test at the academy. I'm still undefeated in our weekly wrestling matches.

Gloss may have been the best male fighter of his year but he didn't really have much competition. They were all incompetent buffoons, which is why my district partner is an asthmatic sixteen-year-old placeholder named Duke.

Even though Gloss is a victor, he's not a very impressive one. All the outliers his year were pathetic! As for the Elites, all of them apart from Honeydew got killed by arena hazards and Honeydew was still recovering from malaria when she and Gloss fought.

It's time for me to show Panem that I'm better than him.

I reach for my weapons - twin knives, just like me and Gloss - only to find that they're gone. I must've lost them while I was hallucinating.

Looks like I'll have to do things the old-fashioned way...

I search for someone to kill. I soon find a body lying prone on the ground, its blood staining the mud a lovely, wine-red colour. As I draw closer, I recognise Duke, my district partner. I realise, with a sickening feeling, that I have no idea how many opponents I have left.

Duke has a trail of blood spilling from his throat. His shoes have been removed and his toes have all been sliced off. I wonder why his killer decided to remove his toes. I'm not into torture like Gloss is but he told me once that cannon-fodder is generally more attached to their fingers. Duke's pretty obviously dead.

Which makes me wonder why the body hasn't been collected yet. His cannon must've fired while I was still in a trance, otherwise I would've heard it.

There must be another tribute nearby. But, with all this whiteish mud, it'd be easy for me to spot an opponent.

Unless...

I dodge as a figure - a girl - lurches up from the mud and launches herself at me with a knife. I stick out a leg, causing her to trip. Before she can right herself, I pin her down to the mud, a leg on each arm. I grab her by her long, mud-matted hair and press her face into the filth until her struggles stop and a cannon fires.

Easy!

It's only then that I think of retrieving her knife. By then, it's too late. Her hand has sunk so deep beneath the surface that there's no hope of grabbing her weapon.

But it doesn't really matter. The games have been won by weaponless tributes before. And while, I don't think I have the stomach to replicate Enobaria Rossetti's winning kill, Kraken McAulay's method of drowning people suits my skill-set pretty well.

This is the perfect arena to drown someone.

I stride off, leaving the bodies of Duke and the outlier girl behind. I'm ready to find my next victim.

"Ready or not," I mutter. "Here I come!"


This is one of the shorter chapters, I suppose because a lot of Cashmere's character was covered in Gloss' chapter. She's a lot more dangerous than he is. There aren't many victors with the skills to defeat a Toe-taker without a weapon.

This chapter would've been even shorter had I been able to resist the Edge Chronicles reference. I couldn't set my Hunger Games in the Mire without trying to recreate that scene in Stormchaser when Twig finds Spiker's body. It's my favourite scene in the book, aside from any of the scenes containing a Hammelherd brother. I decided to muddy the waters a little (Mire puns!) by giving Cashmere one of Screed Toe-taker's lines, just so it's not as simple as Cashmere = Twig, random outlier girl = Screed, Duke = Spiker. I hope those of you who've read the Edge Chronicles enjoyed this chapter. Screed is one of my favourite villains - second only to Vilnix Pompolnius - so I hope I did him justice, even if the character I based on him was no match for Cashmere.

Next chapter contains a rather legendary canon victor, a man who has the honour of being my favourite character in the trilogy. It's Finnick Odair!