With thanks to JadeRavenstone, Technicolour Raincoat, ColMikeFuser, deathless . smile and MidnightRaven323 for your reviews of the last chapter.
THREE DAYS EARLIER
N 50º 54.80544' , W 115º 51.7
If Lexus spent time thinking about it, he'd probably admit that it's kind of an ego killer to have your captor be both twenty-five years younger than you, and a foot taller than you.
As it was, he was a little busy having trouble with his footwork on the still-smoking rubble.
"I can't believe this," Theon growled behind him with barely-concealed fury. "I thought it could be Quint, and we get these Capitol jockeys instead?"
"Mostly I'm just surprised they survived," Elizabeth noted as she in turn guarded Seneca's movements. Given that in order to walk a long distance Seneca was draped across Lexus' shoulder, Lexus wasn't exactly sure what she expected him to do. "I mean, I'm pretty sure they live under the arena where we were prepped for the Games, right?"
"That rabbit warren?" Emma was moving in front of them, swerving from side to side to watch the two of them at all times. Her sword was more than half her height, and she wielded it like it was made of paper. The casual display of strength was more than a little concerning. "It's surprising they're not puree, let alone alive."
Glace Gratton dipped in and out of the group like a dart, swirling a dagger in her hand as she roamed the rubble, seemingly checking over every crevice. Her other hand was bandaged with spots of blood appearing through it, but if it bothered her she didn't comment on it.
"Maybe," she mused, "If they were trapped in a space with strong architectural integrity-"
"-Oh, that makes sense," Elizabeth said.
"Or you could just ask us, you know, how we survived," Lexus commented. A dirisive laugh rose from Elizabeth.
"Oh, poor baby," she mocked with enthused tones. "Isn't it hard to have a load of people talking over you and deciding your fate and you can't do anything about it?"
"Ah-h-h," Seneca mused as he walked, "So this was all a little allegory on morals. That's cute."
From Lexus' viewpoint, he could see Elizabeth smiling with more teeth than was needed. She leant in slightly.
"I'm even cuter when I'm stabbing my axe into your back, Gamemaker Crane-"
"Hey, lay off him!" Lexus said defensively. "We helped you get out of this dome!"
"Only when Quint threatened to bring it down on you as well as us," Emma mused. "How's that for losing to tactics and calling it a victory?"
"And now look what's happened," Lexus blustered, anger coiling in his veins. "We barely got the other staff out of the arena, we had to /exile ourselves to make sure they were exonerated of blame, and Seneca's-"
"-I'm fine, Lex-"
"-You're not fine, Sen, you're not, you've broken your ribs!" He craned his neck back at Theon and Elizabeth. "Come on, what are you going to do with us? Can't you have a little compassion?"
The blade that wrapped around his neck came not from Theon behind him but from Elizabeth. Her short hair bristled against his neck as she snarled in his ear.
"You take us here, you take our agency; you force us to fight for your pleasure and try to kill us when we disobey, and we're supposed to show compassion?" Her blade bit tighter against his neck and Lexus winced in pain and fear. "I should slit your neck now, you Capitolian murderer-"
Theon's voice was strained. "Lizzy. You gotta keep it together a moment, just before we get there. Yeah?"
Elizabeth's blade paused on his neck just a second too long before she reluctantly pulled back.
"Only for now," she growled furiously.
"Of course."
"Don't call me Lizzy again."
"Not a chance."
There was a moment of silence before, in a strangled voice, revealing just how close she was to bitter tears, Elizabeth spoke again.
"They killed my mother."
"I know." Theon sighed. "I know."
In silence then they walked. Lexus was mostly preoccupied by fear of death and the strain of half-carrying Seneca across the distance, but the rest of his attention went to his surroundings. Lexus had lived in a city his whole life; his only access to nature was through the textbooks at school and the screens that had shown him the vistas of the Districts. But, it had always added afterwards, the Capitol was walled for a reason. Nature was dangerous; with nature came the creatures that had been left behind in the Dark Days, created for destruction, and beyond even that the wild creatures that nature had moulded for survival. Safety, Lexus had always been taught, lay in restricting your boundaries and staying where the government could protect you. He had told himself for years he couldn't trust everything the Capitol said, but old habits died hard and as they trekked into the shaded angles of the huge pine trees around them Lexus couldn't help but feel trepidation.
Into the wilds he went, carrying Seneca with him into a tangled mess of wild undergrowth with no set paths. Having walked on pavements all his life, flat and man-made surfaces, the adjustment was hard to consciously make, and especially so with Seneca draped across his shoulder.
Emma took Elizabeth's place guarding behind them, and Elizabeth moved ahead. Far different from Lexus' stumbling gait, Elizabeth moved as anyone who had lived amongst the pines a lifetime would; with terrifying grace. Her axe, built for war and not for practicality, shone with folded steel and woven carbon fibre as she swung it with toned arms. She moved as if she was part of the nature's landscape; she could dodge bracken and neatly bypass holes or mud with just the slightest fluid movements. Lexus was struck with just how other her movements were; a District girl, not a Capitolian.
He shivered. A District girl with an axe, he a Capitolian with none. He did not believe himself a different class of humanity for being of the Capitol, but he did believe that if certain branches of humanity were given their chance for recompense upon him they would do so without thought or regret.
He shivered again.
With the sun beginning to wane in the sky the warmth of the air was cooling against his skin. He could begin to feel the damp of the undergrowth in dusk. Seneca stumbled slightly and Lexus, forced to take more of his weight and unable to both do so and keep his footing on the uneven ground, went tumbling down. Seneca hit the ground and cried out, curling in a ball; Lexus shot back up in an instinctive move to protect Seneca to face Glace instead, fast as a whip, her knife laid humming against his cheek.
"We're here," she said with her silk-smooth, nigh-emotionless voice. "So stop moving."
"Where's here?" Lexus mumbled, wincing as the words scraped the blade against his cheek. His eyes had been soley on Seneca, who was struggling to move where he lay, but now he turned his head just a little (ow, he thought as the blade cut his cheek), he could see a small pile of backpacks and weaponry, the armed guards that had been his escort, and among them Emil Reynolds and Cesal Nesbin. Cesal had clearly been left behind to guard Emil, who looked despite the bandages as if his leg had been liberally tossed into a meat grinder.
"What happened to him?" He asked.
"You did," Cesal shot back. He stood, opening his jacket and pulling a dagger from its holster. "You, and the Capitol, and your fucking Games. So I'm about to show ya how precisely your guts look while you're still alive to see them-"
"-Hey!" Theon jumped in front with his sword as Cesal surged forwards to attack. "We can't just kill him!"
Cesal's tone was casual but his hand was shaking. "Sure we can, ya just take the knife and-"
"-Theon's right, we can't just kill him." This voice came from Emma, who tucked her sword into her belt but seemed not much less intimidating for de-arming. "We don't know where we even are, and they do. We can't kill them, not while they have answers to give us. It's just tactics."
"Fuck tactics," Cesal bristled, although his shaking hand was already sheathing his dagger. "These fuckers did this to us. To Emil. To Quint. To Dane-"
With a strained tone Cesal cut himself off hurriedly. His eyes widened just slightly, fearfully, before regaining their fire.
"My point is," he said at length, "Sure we can kill them."
"Sure we can," Elizabeth said slowly, "But.. Yeah. You're right. We can't touch them until they tell us where we are, how to get back."
"Get back?" Glace's eyes widened slightly, her voice threaded with incredulity. "But we just escaped Panem. Now we can go find somewhere new."
"We don't know if there is anywhere new," Theon countered. "They always said Panem was all there was."
"Yeah, and they said that President Snow shot rainbows out his ass," Cesal muttered mutinously. He began pacing between the group and the prone body of Emil.
On the floor, Seneca gasped out a sentence that was entirely unintelligable. Elizabeth frowned.
"What? Speak up." She poked at him with her bloodstained sneaker a little, and he slowly pushed himself into a seated position, leaning heavily against a tree.
"I said," Seneca gasped again, "Let Lex go and I'll tell you."
"What?!" Now Lexus had the expression of incredulity that Glace had sported, and he wore it more plainly than her. "Sen, you cannot be serious, even if that wasn't on principle stupid it's not a deal they'd even keep to-"
"-Damn right," Cesal cut in. "I say that you tell us or instead we cut your boyfriend's throat."
Glace didn't wait for further instruction; she moved her dagger from Lexus' cheek to his throat, rounding so she was behind him and her arm was wrapped around his neck. Lexus gasped out words desperately as Seneca did the same.
"-Oh, Christ, please, I have a daughter-"
"-No, please, I can give you the co-ordinates, I can tell you-"
"-STOP!"
While every one of the tributes carried their own authority in their voice, only Elizabeth's carried that undeniable thread of leadership. The group stalled as she yelled, and Glace's blade pulled away a little from Lexus' neck.
"-Stop," she repeated softly, seemingly unused to having such a large group of people hanging on her words. She paused, looking at the group, before laughing bitterly. "Wow, this has gone too far. Glace, he's not going anywhere without Crane. You may as well let him be for now."
Lexus gasped with relief as the biting blade disappeared. He moved away from the group uneasily, guarding Seneca where he sat.
"God." She sighed, moving to toy with her hair before seeming to realise her hair now stopped a few inches from her head. She started to instead toy with her axe, before putting it to one side and crouching down to match Seneca. "It didn't take us long to copy you."
"I've never put a knife to anyone's throat, kid." Lexus was perhaps a little more cutting than he should be when surrounded, but he was struggling to find the energy to be careful. All that was really keeping him upright was the fear of his location and the need to stay alive for both Seneca and his daughter's sake.
Elizabeth's expression hardened. "There's no difference between up-close execution and what you practised."
"There's a world of difference." Seneca's voice was hollow. He didn't sound like he believed even his own words.
"No, there isn't, and you're both executioners for President Snow, and you /enjoyed it," Cesal snapped.
"Okay, you know what, kid?" Seneca's eyes regained a little of their fury, and he curled a hand around his injured chest as he growled. "Don't talk about things you don't understand. We didn't enjoy it, not even a little. You don't even understand where we are, or what happened to Sanchez, or why you're all here, you're just a bunch of District teenagers, so why don't you shut the fuck-"
Seneca cut himself off when Lexus placed a hand on his shoulder. Cesal had gone silent. His face had paled. So had a number of others in the group. Glace and Elizabeth seemed mostly unmoved, but the others had frozen in place at his tone, at his words. Cesal's hands were shaking again. Emma's mouth was twitching with the force she was using to keep it mostly steady. Theon was shivering, his head automatically lowered just the slightest inclination.
It was the coldest realisation of how true and untrue their words were. It was the most damning realisation. Face to face, despite the clear disparity of power, a lifetime of conditioning had worked its awful magic. Even now, despite pushing their way from the Capitol's influence, despite holding swords and speaking like they were the rebels of the Dark Days reborn, they were just teenagers, young and afraid, and the face of Seneca Crane had ruled their lives with the fear of the Games for so long that even now it still scared them.
Lexus stepped forward, just slightly, and watched Theon subtly shift back, as if afraid of being hit. He was a father, even if he hadn't always been the most present of fathers to his child, and Theon's fearful motion made his heart instinctively break just a little. He bit his lip slightly, moved back again, and lowered his voice to something more gentle.
"Okay," he said, and found all other words had died in his throat, and tried again. "Okay. It's fine. It's all fine. I don't know as much as Seneca knows but I'm gonna tell you as much as I can, and then Seneca's gonna take over, and he'll be more polite, and then nobody's going to hurt anyone, okay?" His eyes met Theon's, then Elizabeth's; he worked to meet everyone's eyes before he continued. "Is that okay with everyone?"
Glace had been the most visibly unmoved by Seneca's outburst, but her voice was still cracking slightly under the strain of being used. "Start talking."
Lexus sighed, sitting back to look at the scared and heavily armed teenagers he was stuck at the end of the world with. He bumped his shoulder softly against Seneca's, if only for a little reassurance that he was not entirely alone in this.
"We're in a section of the continent that is uninhabited and unused but for arenas. Maybe Seneca knows better, but nothing else exists here. Nothing ever has since the Great Collapse. As far as I know, nothing exists outside of Panem; nothing but the wilds."
There was a long, painful moment before anyone spoke; everyone had been hopelessly daring Seneca to contradict Lexus, but he just stared at the ground instead. Finally, Emma spoke.
"So where are we?"
"One thousand, eight hundred miles north of the Capitol. Nine hundred miles away from the closest District. Seneca probably knows what this place's pre-Collapse name was-"
"-Canada." Seneca had taken to staring at the ground exclusively now, like looking at anything else was too tiring.
"Yeah." Lexus sighed. "Yeah."
"That's-" Cesal coughed in shock. "I can't- nine hundred miles?"
"I think that would be the distance to District Seven," Lexus added bleakly. "I wasn't great at geography."
Theon's sword dropped in a clatter to the floor. "There's nothing?" He said. His voice caught up with him and he yelled it like it was the only way to say it. "Nothing?!"
A jabberjay caught the words in the air and shot them back softly.
"Nothing," it mocked harshly to the wind as it fluttered upwards from its perch in the trees. "Nothing."
"We're stuck hundreds- thousands of miles from home," Emma said, "With nothing, no-one, but Panem? The Great Collapse killed everyone but us?"
"They made efforts to search for other survivors," Seneca said at length. "Back before my time. But by that time so much of the land had changed, and so much lost to our understanding; and that which we could find was empty. Most of the files were classified for a level above mine, but what I could read suggested that however our ancestors survived, it was by subterranean means that no others had. Half of the previously mapped land was gone, and it was getting harder to explore the further they went to the truly toxic areas of the world. Eventually, it was just- given up."
"There's nothing," Elizabeth said bleakly. "We're alone."
"Alone," the jabberjay crowed to hundreds of miles of empty forest. "Alone."
So my mind thought, where's the worst place to abandon my and your darlings in? The solution seemed clear- /Canada. If you run those there coordinates through google they will turn up where our fearless friends are all actually situated at the moment. For a poor Brit who didn't know where D.C actually was until this year, I've planned their locations meticulously.
So you may ask, why are they trapped in Canada? To buy cheap souvenirs shaped like moose, obviously. Nah, I do have a plan, but it's one of those things where you're gonna need to trust that I have at least some idea of what the hell I'mdoing. It's hard to tell, I know.
Next chapter I introduce another character from the new roster, so I'm excited to write that; whether I et it done before the summer holidays is a different question.
As ever, thank you for reading this far.