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Twice Chosen

We still hadn't morphed by the following day, but I couldn't shake the feeling that we were at least making more progress as each day went by. We had all developed our own particular training style by this point, but it was still strangely fascinating to see how we had each formed our own particular way to deal with the Putty holograms.

Glimmer was still the one of us with the most obvious technical skill at hand-to-hand combat, but Peeta and Thresh were starting to rely on a bit more than the wrestling techniques they'd been using so far. It was hard to keep track of Liv when she kept moving around the battlefield so quickly, but I could see that she was so far managing to deal with the putties through an interesting balance of evading the putties and lashing out with some quick hits when they left themselves vulnerable.

It was hard to adjust to the idea that I was even able to get up close to potential enemies like this, when I was so used to staying away from the Peacekeepers and shooting arrows when I was out hunting, but I felt like I was finally getting used to my new strength, letting myself stand my ground and actually fight rather than try and stay away…

"You're doing that wrong."

"What?" I looked at Glimmer in surprise, realising that the blonde Career was standing just behind me.

"You're over-extending yourself," Glimmer explained, grabbing my arm and holding it out in front of me before I could object. "You're just telegraphing your moves if you keep jumping in like that; you need to let your opponent get in closer if you're going to make any kind of impact."

"I've been… taking them by surprise-" I began.

"Which works up until the moment when you missed some other enemy who might be able to alert your target to what you're doing," Glimmer elaborated. "You need to get used to getting up close; sometimes you're not going to have time to think about what you're doing in a fight and just have to focus on kicking their asses."

"…Good point," I conceded, letting another holographic putty appear in front of me before I leapt forward and kicked it in the chest. "How was that?"

"Good start, but-" Glimmer paused to leap forward and kick the rising putty in the chest herself. "You can't be afraid to kick the other guy when he's down if it means making sure he stays down."

"Blunt," Thresh observed, but in a manner that suggested he was trying to avoid passing judgement on Glimmer's words. When I looked around, I was surprised to see that Liv, Peeta and Thresh had stopped their own fights to watch my current training session.

"The priority in any fight is to win," Glimmer explained as she turned to face the Black Ranger before looking over at Peeta. "This isn't like some school wrestling match, Bread-boy; if we're going to win this, we're going to need to hit the other guy really hard and screw the rules."

"…I… guess that makes sense," Peeta nodded in acknowledgement, before he looked curiously at the blonde Career. "How do you… know all this?"

"I did train at the academy-"

"No, I get that's where you learnt all this, I meant… you're offering all this advice?" Peeta elaborated. "It's just that I got the impression that the pack was more…"

"Cut-throat?" Glimmer smiled at Peeta with what I was coming to recognise was a teasing grin, suddenly reminding me that Peeta had spent the first couple of days with her and the other Careers before we came together. "What, did you think our teamwork just consisted of not killing each other until we could kill you?"

Noting Peeta's bemused expression, Glimmer shrugged. "If you must know, we were keeping you on your toes."

"On his toes?" Rue repeated, looking curiously at Glimmer. "Why would you want to keep Peeta on his toes? I thought he was working with you?"

"For the moment; plan was that if we kept Yellow worried we'd turn on each other at a moment's notice, he'd be less inclined to try and provoke it himself."

"I… I'm sorry, but… Peeta?" I looked at the Pink Ranger incredulously. "You all seriously thought that he would attack you?"

"We all knew he was only there to try and buy you time, Red; you think any of us bought that he'd turn on you that quickly after his declaration in his interview?"

I decided not to answer that question, simply looking at Peeta in a manner that I hoped wouldn't give anyone else the wrong impression. Faced with a declaration like that, how could I say that I had believed his 'defection' when I first saw him with the pack…?

"Point is," Glimmer continued as she addressed the rest of us, "we all go into the arena knowing that only one of us will get out, but we also go in there knowing that we've got others to take down before we get that far. We all get a good grounding at the Academy, but a few on-site lessons aren't going to hurt our chances in the Arena, particularly if we're up against a tough cookie like Johanna Mason or someone pulls another Beetee on us."

"Yeah, he got those Careers good…" Thresh nodded in approval at the memory of the only games where multiple Careers had gone down so quickly; even the pro-Career Capitol often cited Beetee's victory as a highlight of past Games.

"HEY!"

"Liv?" I turned to look at the ship, surprised to see the former District Five resident standing in the door with a tentative grin on her face, suddenly ashamed to realise that I hadn't seen her leave the pit. "When did you-?"

"I've been alternating between training out here and seeing what I can find out about this ship with the kid and Alpha," Liv shrugged. "I just figured that if Blues are typically the smart ones of their teams, it's pretty much my responsibility to know a bit more about what we're working with in this ship beyond what machines keep us fed and where we sleep, right?"

"…Makes sense," I nodded at her in tentative understanding. "But… why are you telling us this?"

"Because I've just hacked the live feed from the Capitol announcing the winner of the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games."

"Already?" Peeta looked at Liv in surprise. "It's barely been a week-!"

"Yeah, but when was the last time they lost half a dozen Tributes a couple of days after the bloodbath?" Glimmer pointed out, the smile on her face noticeably grimmer than when she'd been giving us strategy tips as she indicated the six of us. "Seriously, once we all got taken out of the picture, my old team would've just needed to find Eight's girl and Ten's guy before they started turning on each other-"

"Wasn't Three still out there?" Thresh asked, even as we walked into the ship after Liv.

"He asked to join the Career pack after the bloodbath because he had a few ideas that Marvel found interesting," Peeta put in. "He wasn't allowed to join in the hunts, but they… trusted him enough to guard the camp."

"More we thought he wouldn't do anything to jeopardise its safety," Glimmer put in. "He had some big idea about using the explosives around our platforms to protect the supplies; set them all up in a pattern that…"

"Let me guess; he'd only tell the rest of your group the safe path?" Thresh asked.

"I certainly didn't know anything about that," Peeta put in, his expression shifting as though he wasn't sure how to respond to that news.

"Like I said, we all knew you were only here to buy Red time; even if we didn't think you were going to kill us in our sleep, we weren't going to make it easy for you to steal supplies and go off to join her," Glimmer explained. "Marvel and Cato would probably have told you the basics if we'd gone back after finding this place, but with us gone, I can see people getting careless…"

She shook her head and turned back to Liv. "So who's the newest Victor for this screwed-up world of ours?"

"Clove."

"Shortie won?" Thresh looked at Liv in surprise. "Seriously?"

"Like small things can't be dangerous?" Rue said, folding her arms as she gave her District partner a teasing glare.

"Hey, I'm not being… size-ist, but when she'd be up against the big guys from One and Two, I think I'm allowed to assume she'd get her ass kicked-"

"Just follow me and you can see it for yourself," Liv cut Thresh off, eagerly indicating the ship behind her. "They were just about to start the recap when I left; if we hurry we should only miss the bloodbath at most."

With that offer made, our Ranger training was silently ended for the moment as we hurried into the ship, where Liv led us to one of the other side sections leading off the main entrance 'hub'. Just like the other rooms we'd found so far, this area seemed to be surprisingly well-suited for our current purposes, as a large screen on one wall was surrounded by a set of chairs so that we could sit around and watch whatever it was showing. By the time we arrived in the room, the screen was displaying how the opening bloodbath had concluded with the death of the boy I recognised as District Six's male tribute, his throat slit by Cato with a machete he'd grabbed from the cornucopia.

As the six of us settled in, I noticed Peeta making a clear effort not to look at the screen as it displayed his counterpart making his 'pitch' to the Careers that his claim to be in love with me was just for the sponsors and he'd help them track me down. I decided to focus on the fact that I had made enough of an impression that the offer of insight into my own methods actually inspired them to let him live, rather than question what that said about Peeta's alleged feelings for me, as the narrative continued.

With around half the Tributes dead in the bloodbath, I wasn't entirely surprised when the footage only briefly looked at the survivors from Eight and Ten as the girl tried to make a fire and the boy set up a basic camp under a tree. I was surprised to see how closely Rue had been following me after the bloodbath, but I chose not to bring it up even as Thresh looked at our 'extra' member with a slight smile.

After a few minutes skimming over our activities on that first night, the screen reached the point where Peeta and Glimmer went off to look for survivors while the other Careers followed the plan of the boy from Three, who introduced himself as Axel, and buried the mines around their food pile. When the time came for the other five future Rangers and myself to gather at the cave where we'd found the coins, I was relieved to find that Glimmer's guess had been correct about the lack of cameras in that area; they all saw us go into the cave, but the camera angle stopped anyone realising there was a cave there until I actually went into it. Caesar himself expressed regret that they'd missed seeing what had actually happened to the six of us after some kind of tremor shook the area, offering such ideas as Glimmer or Thresh striking some kind of natural fault line inside the cave to the tremor being part of a trap Liv had set up (although quite how she was meant to have done anything of the sort I had no idea).

While Cato caught the girl from Eight by surprise shortly afterwards when she started a fire that night, I had to admire how she'd managed to put the fire between him and her long enough to grab one of the flaming branches as a weapon. The actual fight had been brief, but she'd still managed to hit Cato in the side of the face with the flaming branch before Cato stabbed Eight's girl in the chest with his sword. He was left with a serious burn on his face and some kind of damage to his eye, but it was hard to tell how bad it was, even if his opponent was definitely dead.

"Could they sort that?" Rue looked curiously at Glimmer as the screen shifted back to the Career camp. "I mean, if he'd survived, would the Capitol doctors have been able to fix his eye?"

"Hard to say," Glimmer shrugged. "Obviously we're all warned not to actually lose anything, so as long as the eye's still in his head it's possible it could be fixed, but at the same time it's pretty much common sense not to put your eyes at risk when you're in a fight…"

When the footage jumped to the following morning, Clove and Marvel had gone off to hunt the missing boy from Ten, now identified as Flint, while Cato and Four's girl, Mara, remained on guard at the Cornucopia with Axel. There was no way to be sure how much time had gone by before the footage showed the search party returning to the camp, but eventually Flint attacked the camp directly; I guessed that he had concluded that as the only non-Career left, it was better to take a chance and go out on his own terms than stay away and get drawn in later when he'd be less able to put up a fight. He only had a couple of small axes and daggers, but he actually put up a pretty good fight despite the odds, practically taking Mara's head off with one of his axes and landing a good blow on Marvel before Cato was able to impale him with a spear from behind.

"Ouch," Thresh said, looking at the way Marvel's arm hung at his side after Flint's axe had struck him in the shoulder. "That limb isn't going to be doing anything any time soon."

"How do you know?" Peeta asked, as the recap returned to the cornucopia.

"Saw someone take a blow like that to the arm once when another guy attacked him with the farming equipment during a harvest," Thresh explained. "Poor guy was never able to work again; one of the few times I think the rest of Eleven agreed with what the Peacekeepers did to the idiot who started the fight-"

Rue suddenly screamed as Axel held up one hand and suddenly a series of explosions went off all around the field. Clove was able to jump onto the pile of supplies once the bombs started going off, but Marvel was blown off his feet and Cato… the only term for what had happened to him that I could think of was 'disintegrated', as his entire body seemed to explode into a red mist that dissipated as soon as the explosions had ended.

As though the end of the explosions was a cue, Axel moved towards Marvel as soon as the last bomb had gone off, only for the boy from One to roll around on the ground and strike his counterpart from Three with a desperate punch; clearly, even after being thrown like that, the trained Career wasn't going to go down easy. As the two boys fell to either side, I was suddenly struck by the sight of two knives striking them in the chests, the knives positioned at an angle that at least suggested they'd struck from above. My question was answered when the camera shifted to reveal Clove perched on top of the pile of supplies with a belt of throwing knives visible under her jacket. When the victory bell went off a few moments later, the only surprise was that it had taken Marvel and Axel that long to die; I could only assume that Clove didn't have a good angle when making her throw.

"And there we have it!" Caesar's voice said as the screen shifted back to Clove and Caesar in the studio. "One of the more abrupt Games in recent history, but none of us can deny that it came to a suitably dramatic conclusion."

"Definitely not," Clove put in, grinning at the screen in a cool manner that made me think of Rita. "Kind of regret I didn't get a chance to see what Eleven's guy and Twelve's girl could do in a clinch, but you can't have everything."

"Talking of the Lost Tributes, what about your lost alliance partners?"

"Glimmer and bread boy?" Clove smiled. "Trust me, we all knew he wouldn't betray his sweetheart like that; it was just a case of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer, you know? He was tough enough to be a problem if he'd wanted to be, but we all knew he'd never really turn on her…"

"A sensible enough strategy," Caesar said; I noted that his tone seemed to at least be hinting at a sense of sympathy for Peeta, but decided not to analyse that. "And Glimmer?"

"Could've been tough, but like we saw, this year's pack wasn't that much to write home about," Clove shrugged. "I mean, Marvel was basically the punching bag for the outliers; how much of a threat could she have been?"

"A fair point, certainly," Caesar nodded. "Still, I suppose we have to give Axel credit for the originality of his own strategy; we haven't seen a takedown like that since Beetee's little trick."

"Yeah, I'll give the traitor that much credit," Clove said (I had to bite my tongue at the idea of her calling anyone a traitor when the Careers always turned on each other; she was just bitter because someone beat the Careers to it for a change). "Still, that's the thing about becoming a Victor; where's the point if you did it beating easy opponents?"

"And nobody can argue that you've earned this moment," Caesar nodded at her in approval before he assumed a more curious expression. "Out of curiosity, what would have been your strategy if Axel didn't have his explosives?"

"Wait for someone else to make a move and then start throwing my knives," Clove shrugged. "Would have been trickier if we hadn't lost six to that mini-earthquake, but when everyone else was more about hand-to-hand, long-range would've given me the edge I needed to take them down."

"Indeed," Caesar smiled at her and then settled back into his chair, once again looking curiously at Clove. "So, with your victory behind you and the crowning ceremony ahead, what's in your plans for after that?"

"…A garden."

"A garden?"

"Cato… he talked sometimes about wanting to see about growing things if he'd won his Games," Clove said, her tone surprisingly tender as she turned her head to her left, as though looking at something only she could see. "I mean, I'll be training at the Academy, of course, but apart from that… if he couldn't make it, I might at least try and see what I can do."

"You were… close?" Caesar said, actually looking truly regretful as he looked at Clove.

"I know it seems stupid now, but he and I…"

I was grateful when Glimmer reached forward and turned the screen off, and a brief glance around was enough to confirm that everyone else had been dealing with the same awkward discomfort about the whole question of how to feel about Clove's confessions.

"So… that's it," Liv said, breaking the silence as she looked around the room at the rest of us. "We're officially the 'Lost Tributes' of the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games, and Clove's the winner."

"Lost Tributes…" Thresh repeated, before he smiled at us. "I kinda like it."

"Should…" Peeta looked awkwardly over at Glimmer, who I only now realised was sitting a short distance from the rest of us. "I mean, Marvel was…"

"A dick," Glimmer shrugged.

"Really?" Thresh looked at her with no clear trace of his usual hostility. "You volunteered together-"

"It's not like we all get told who's volunteering weeks in advance before the big day, you know," Glimmer cut him off. "The Academy helps pick out the cream of the crop, but that still leaves a few candidates at the end; some of us still like to give a sense of the final choice being random for the look of the thing."

"And Marvel was just… some guy to you?" I asked curiously. "I mean, if you were at the Academy together, and if you made it that far-"

"All I knew for sure about Marv was that the guy was good in a fight, but just because he could hold his own didn't mean he could do anything else," Glimmer said dismissively. "I saw enough of him in training to be sure that he'd be tough, don't get me wrong, but he'd have been screwed if he was fighting someone who could hold out against him for more than a few minutes."

"He'd fall for 'rope-a-dope'?"

"Rope-a-what?" Rue looked curiously at Peeta.

"It's a kind of fighting style I learned about when I was on the wrestling team back home," Peeta explained to the little girl. "You just let the stronger opponent wear himself out trying to hit you by dodging or deflecting his blows to you, then you hit him back once he's too tired to do the same to you."

"Yeah, Marv would have definitely bought that," Glimmer nodded at Peeta before she turned to me. "Don't get me wrong, I didn't think of him as a 'bad' guy, but he just… frankly, the name didn't work; the guy had nothing going for him in the Games no matter what he might have thought of himself."

"I never really knew Pryce."

"Your partner?" Rue looked at Liv in surprise.

"I mean, we never really knew each other even before the Games, and once we got on the train… well, we both knew only one of us would be coming home, so we didn't exactly get around to hanging out," Liv explained, looking down in shame as she indicated the four of us. "I mean, you all… you stayed together, and Glimmer and I can't even…"

She fell silent, but as I looked at the other five people sitting around me, I was struck by the thought that she had a point. Even when I'd been preparing myself for the idea that I'd have to kill Peeta in the end if I wanted to get out of the Games alive, I'd never been as… indifferent to him as Glimmer and Liv clearly had been to their District associates, and it was clear even to me that Thresh and Rue were close even if I had to wonder if that dated back to before the Reaping or was just something they'd formed on the way to the Capitol.

I suddenly wondered which of us had been lonelier; the four of us who had at least been able to tentatively find companionship with each other on our respective floors, or the two who'd taken care to live apart from the only other person who could understand their position because it was easier that way?

Even after getting out of the Games, I was finding new ways of looking at everything that I'd once taken for granted about the system Gale hated so much…