DAHLIA REDWOOD- Beth Crissino
Everyone has choices. I didn't understand why someone would make so many of them the way she did. I wanted to say everyone had value and it was sad she died, but what if she hadn't? Someone else would have- someone who almost certainly would have deserved it less. I guess it wasn't right to say it was right that Dahlia was murdered. I guess what I was willing to admit was that I wasn't sad about it.
Loki Saberhagen, District Seven mentor
It was the most selfish thing I'd done in years to hope Dahlia would win after we lost Timber. Everyone hated her. People would probably have thrown garbage at her if she'd lived. It would have been the worst, least satisfying Games in years. All the people of Seven would rally around her and burn in their hatred of her. Any maybe they would have forgotten how much they hated me.
DISTRICT SEVEN
How do you tell someone their brother is dead when they will never understand death the same way you do? Sequoia knew her brother was gone. She knew he wasn't coming back, and that someday she would die, too. But she knew it differently, and she experienced it differently, and grief is lonely enough without being alone in this way we could never understand. Jay, meanwhile, worked through his grief for someone he felt guilty about secretly wishing might die, and confused about secretly wishing might take him back. He went into his next relationship bursting with hope for a new life. But people don't change just like that, and he found that without addressing his own struggles, all he did was find someone else who would treat him like Dahlia had. It took three more tries for Jay to find someone who wasn't like her. But he did make it through three tries, and he did make it to four.
Kade MacNamara, District Eight female (13)
My mother wouldn't recognize me. I didn't know if I'd recognize myself if I saw myself in a mirror. I was covered in mud. Just head to toe covered in mud. It had soaked through every inch of my clothes- they moved like caked sheets of cardboard. I wondered sometimes if the mud would soak into me eventually- if it would just swallow me up and absorb me and I'd be a mud creature. Would I be part of the earth then? Just a node of mud that thought it was once human?
Mud squelched under my palm as I scuttled forward in the tunnel to get out of one of the shallow channels that were forming in the rain. It had been raining nonstop for two days, another thing that wasn't helping me feel better. My skin looked ghostly white and wrinkled like an old woman's. How would you know if you were dead? Was it possible I'd been dead a long time and I looked like this because I was rotting? But Valencia was still talking to me. Unless we died together... I hoped that if I became a ghost I wouldn't imagine myself all gross. I would think a dead kid would probably see themselves as wearing their favorite outfit. My favorite outfit was my bunny pajamas. I definitely was not wearing them.
Even if we were on the surface, we wouldn't see the sun. That was another thing that got to me. The sun was hidden behind both trees and the clouds that had been in the sky for two days. My mother could see the sun. I hoped she was looking at it.
"Valencia?" I asked, looking for her eyes glittering in the darkness.
"Yeah?" she asked.
"We're people, right?" I asked.
"What? Of course we are. What kind of question is that?" She picked up her hand, which lay in a puddle, and made a strangely funny attempt to wipe the mud off on her completely muddy pants.
"It's just... it's dark down here, and so gross. I hope when we go back up that the light doesn't hurt my eyes," I said. We'd peeked up a few times since the Games began, mostly to gather food, since Valencia didn't like the worms. But we did it at night, like two wandering ghosts.
A section of the wall broke off beside Valencia, dropping mud all over her. She squealed and rolled away, wiping mud out of her eyes. Her fingers left little trails of pink skin on her cheeks.
"If it gets any rainier-" I started, glancing up fearfully.
"Let's not take any chances. Let's get out of here," Valencia said. She scooted behind me through the passageway that led to the surface. Something fell on the back of my head and I swatted at it, thinking it was a little bug. But my hand splatted down on nothing and when I looked up, water was streaming down into the holes that lit our tunnel. Before I reached the next one, the droplets had become a tiny stream.
"Oh, no," Valencia said.
"What?" I asked, not daring to look back. I knew what she was going to say. I wished I'd asked her not to say it.
"I think it's a flash flood," Valencia responded. Her dimly lit face was swallowed up suddenly as the hole above her head was choked with water and then collapsed on itself. In seconds the arena was pitch-black as the holes ahead of me melted into mud.
Then I wasn't human anymore. I knew it. I was a rat creeping forward on my stomach, clawing at the soft mud under me, the mud that slid through my fingers so I fell back deeper into the sloping tunnel. I could faintly hear the rain drumming on the surface and what sounded like the shifting planes of mud around me.
I sobbed when I saw the light from the tunnel's end. I reached for it, clawing for the light just feet away from me. The last bit of tunnel underneath was slanted upwards. I pushed forward and whimpered with panic as the mud gave away bonelessly under me. My arms and face plunged into the soft ground over and over as I tried to find anything solid. I felt Valencia's hand on my backside and then I was sliding up onto semi-firm ground, out in the air, the real open air with the sky above me.
I turned around to help Valencia and my eyes went wide when I saw the water creeping over the ground. It was only an inch deep, but it was moving so fast. There was so much coming. I grabbed Valencia's outstreched hand and tried to pull her up. She was so heavy with the mud clinging to her. All I could see was a brown arm and then some human-shaped mass of sodden earth. I braced my feet, the ground giving way underneath me, and pulled. Valencia slid toward me, and I slid toward her, and she was on the surface up to her hips when the tunnel gave way.
Valencia Cadillac, District Six female (18)
I was going to drown. I was going to drown in mud. I was in my own coffin. The lid was creaking shut ahead of me. I would see some last seconds of Kade's screaming face as she tried to pull me out and then the tunnel would fall and the ground would swallow me up. My arm would be on the surface. My arm would see the sky one more time. I tried to feel it with my fingers. Just to feel the sky one more time...
Like a perverted birth, I slid onto the surface, sodden with muck and water. Mud settled around my hips like a snake sliding up my body to swallow me up. I pushed myself up on my arms and turned to look at the flood coming from behind us. Maybe it would stop. Or maybe it wouldn't. Maybe if I didn't get free in the next few minutes, the water would keep creeping up around me until it covered my chest, and my chin, and my nose, and I'd die looking up at the sky shimmering past an inch of water.
Kade jumped to my side and started digging. My first thought was the paralyzing fear that the tunnel would open under her and I'd watch her sink under the mud. But it held firm enough that she was able to start scooping at the mud that held me pinned. I twisted my back to help her and we both scooped dark fistfuls of mud, making divots that filled again with the mud around them the second our hands lifted.
Water trickled over my arm and I screamed. I could hardly even see the flood through the pounding, driving raindrops beating on my head. I flopped sideways in the shallow stream forming around me and droplets sprayed into the air. A sodden clump of hair fell into my eye and it stuck to my scalp when I wiped it away. I tried vainly to pull my legs free, feeling them sliding back and forth in the mud like I was churning butter. I had the sudden image of something from deeper in the tunnel closing a hand around my foot and tugging me closer, and I gagged. I clawed at the earth, no longer even trying to find the best way but just hoping I could tear free- tear my own legs off , I didn't care. I looked behind me and saw the water coming. I looked ahead of me and saw death coming.
Laken stood unhidden between two trees, regarding me and Kade with interest but neither malice nor compassion. Beside him Beth was struggling to wipe their thick hair of their face without another section sliding right back into place. Laken didn't bother taking out his grappling hook. Instead it was only a long knife that glittered with the water dripping from its blade.
Kade saw my reaction and turned to look. As Laken raised his knife I shoved her sideways, contorting my spine to add force. She stumbled onto her hands and knees in the shallows and the mud squished under her enough that she was almost hidden by the water. She crawled further into the water and looked back at me in horror.
"Go!" I screamed. Kade belly-flopped forward into the water and disappeared into the dark, debris-filled current. Beth looked after her. She looked at Laken, then at me, then at Kade swimming away, and she didn't move.
Laken approached with more caution of the rising water than of my trapped form. As soon as he was close enough I grabbed his legs. It wasn't out of any hope I could hurt him. He braced himself, leaning backwards, and his weight was enough for me to drag my thighs clear of the tunnel. I yanked my feet clear and I lay on solid ground, looking up at the same sky Nico would see after me, as Laken came.
6th place: Valencia Cadillac, District Six female- stabbed by Laken
Valencia was a survivor, hence her high placement. She was both cold and motivated, and she'd arguably been through worse before. If the Games weren't so massively rigged towards Careers, she likely would have won. But that's the Games. There are unfair downer endings. So Valencia leaves behind an orphan and other people live to keep fighting. Thanks queenoffunerals for such a tough, seasoned fighter who showed that nurturing is not weak.
