I gazed down on the District 8 girl. I had the spear in hand, all it would take was one thrust. Or would it? Did I even know where to thrust the spear? Even if I did could I thrust it accurately? Or would I end up with a screaming, twisting girl skewered on the end of a metal rod in my hands? I sensed the whole of Panem watching. If the Gamemakers had permitted them to see my honourable treatment of Alba, they would now be wondering how I would treat this second tribute.
"How bad is that?" I asked, looking down at her side.
"Bad."
I knelt, unafraid of her. If she had been able to kill me, she would have done so while I was distracted with Alba. I pushed her hands aside and saw that Alba's sword had done its work and without proper medical attention, she wasn't going to survive. She had already lost a lot of blood, far more than I had.
"What's the point?" I almost wasn't speaking to her. "You're already done."
She looked at me numbly and then nodded. It wasn't exactly mercy I was showing her. Mercy was for someone who would live.
"Besides. I'm not far behind you." My side was throbbing ominously. I planted the spear in the ground and went to retrieve my pack. When I returned, she was still sat and continued to look at me with those big dark eyes, her emotions difficult to read. I saw the surprise in her though as I sat down next to her.
"What are you doing?"
"Do you want to die out here, all alone?"
She looked at me and then trembled, sniffing. She took hold of my hand and squeezed and I could tell immediately that she was already weakening. "Thank you." There was some huskiness to her voice though she was trying to control it, to stay strong to the end.
I looked around. This spot was exposed, dangerous. "Where did you sleep last night?"
"In a tree."
"You can get up the trees?"
"Not up one, in one. It was all hollowed out."
"Where is that?"
She pointed and I thought about it for a few moments.
"Do you want to go there? It might be more comfortable. It'll the keep the rain off you." I had barely registered the slight drizzle but now I became aware of it.
"I don't think I can move."
"I'll carry you."
She was a petite little thing and she could have been my age or she could have been fourteen for all I knew. It was no difficultly to pick her and her pack up in one. Her nails dug into my neck in pain as I lifted her but I barely noticed. Alba's finger nail marks in my arms were crusting over now. I followed her directions and carried her until we can to a tree that was as she said, all hollowed out. It was a wooden cave and perfect shelter. It was a good place to die.
I set her down and then to her surprise, produced my sleeping bag and slipped her into it.
"You may as well be warm." I shrugged and then because we were enemies, I went through her pack.
She had some more matches, crackers, one strip of dried meat, a canteen similar to the one I had first picked up and a tiny folding knife that unless stuck into a tribute's eye or neck was of no danger to anyone. That was all she had.
"You must have been cold."
She nodded, clearly broken up over the warmth of the sleeping bag. It was horrible luxury to have only once you were dying.
"Hungry?" I asked with a smile and drawing a small one from her. I fished a roll from my pack and her big eyes grew even larger.
"You have bread?"
"Something I picked up from the Careers." I handed it to her and there were so many significant things about the gesture. First, she was from another District. Alliances might be formed between the pairs from a single District but almost never did those from different Districts team up, save for the Careers. Secondly, food was precious and especially since I had burned the Cornucopia. Giving it to her was shocking. Thirdly, she was dying. Giving food to a dying girl would be seen as either a foolish waste or a beautiful mercy.
She looked at it in wonderment and clearly didn't know where to start. Perhaps she was thinking everything that I was. Perhaps she appreciated all the meanings behind it. Perhaps it had been too long since her last real meal for her to truly believe she had it.
Finally she ate it, picking at it slowly, pulling small tufts of bread from it and eating them carefully. I was looking outside, musing that the day wasn't far along.
"You're the millboy."
"I don't think that's the greatest nickname."
"It's what Joanah called you."
Joanah I presumed was her mentor. "What's your name?" At the moment, I couldn't recall it.
"Does it even matter anymore?"
She made a good point. This was hard to argue with, though I found it difficult to look at her and think F8. "What happened this morning?"
"I was in the woods on the other side of the river. I think I walked around the entire arena and then she found me. I hadn't seen anyone except little Kayla." This was F3. "Then she came out of the trees suddenly and she almost got me. Almost. I could run faster than her though. I made it down to the river and got across. I thought I'd lost her." She looked at herself. "Guess not."
"There's only three Careers left. Just three."
"And four of you."
"Maybe they'll even things out for me." I shook my head. I had killed two Careers through lucky chance. Even if one of them was killed by the others, it still left two trained fighters to contend with. My other three opponents… I didn't think of little Kayla as much of a threat and she had probably survived this long through stealth. "District 8 then… textiles."
"District 9, grain."
"Grain. Wheat, rye, barley… I only see it when it's being ground into flour. Grains go in one end, flour comes out the other. Each and every day. What did you do?"
"Depends. I usually make dresses. I once had a shift in the factory that makes Peacekeeper uniforms."
"How much spit goes into them?"
"Interfering with the manufacture of Peacekeeper uniforms is punishable by death." She was quoting and I wondered how many in District 8 received the death penalty for simple sewing mistakes that were declared treason.
"What isn't?"
She shrugged. I doubted this conversation would make it to the Capitol or the Districts.
"Panem's breadbasket." That was the nickname for District 9. When someone signed up for tesserae, it was usually our grain they received. I imagined all those poor souls in Districts 10, 11 and 12 being nourished by our grain at the price of increasing the risk of coming here, I wondered how bitter it must have tasted. "If District 9 and 11 just stopped, the whole nation would fall apart in a matter of weeks."
"It wouldn't make any difference if we stopped."
"Don't you make stuff for the Capitol? They'd all die if they lost their clothes."
"We just send them cloth."
"11 grows it, you turn it into cloth and the Capitol turns it into their costumes."
"Why do you care?"
"I've spent my whole life turning grain into flour. The rest of the District is out in the fields, ploughing, sowing, farming, harvesting… All I ever do is make sure the wheels keep turning and turning the grains they grow into flour. I hate flour. What you do… it's interesting, isn't it?"
"If you say so." She smiled to herself. I was curious about the other Districts because we knew hardly anything about each other.
I sat beside her and I wondered how the rest of the world was taking this in. I was probably playing on the heartstrings of the audience by staying with her as she slowly bled to death. I could see her side was turning blue, indicating she was bleeding internally. I wondered what the people of District 8 thought of a tribute from another District comforting one of their own. I wondered what my own people thought. Perhaps they thought we could win this year.
"Thanks." She said. "For being here. They don't tell you how lonely it is in here. They tell you to look for water, find food, how to throw knives and make a spear. They don't tell you that the last person you speak to is your stylist and then you're all alone. It's worse than the cold, worse than the hunger… loneliness."
"That's why there's only one victor. No one to share the experience with." I looked out at the trees and felt tired.
"At least now I have you, millboy."
"Poor company." I mused.
"Do you have anyone at home?"
"Why do you ask?"
"You seem like you don't have anything to fight for."
"I don't. My mother died when I was baby and my dad… my dad…" I chuckled dryly. "They had raised the production quotas and the only way to meet them was to increase the shifts from twelve to eighteen hours. My father worked eighteen hours a day for two weeks straight. By the end of it he couldn't think straight… none of them could." This was the portion of the story that was difficult to tell. "The cold weather can cause grain to get stuck at the top of the silo. My father had lost all sense and he tried to clear it out from the inside. He was crushed when it fell on him. Twenty tons of grain…" I scratched at the fingernail marks in my arm. "They blamed him for it, they blamed him for ruining twenty tons of grain. I work for nothing because all my wages go to paying off the cost of that ruined grain. Every day I have to work with the stuff that killed my father, to repay them for the loss of the stuff that killed him and I have to claim tesserae and live off the damn stuff. Because my father did back breaking labour for fourteen days with maybe four hours of sleep a night if he was lucky." I closed my eyes and inhaled. "People think it's a funny story; a man stupid enough to drop twenty tons of grain on himself. That's the only experience of fighting I have; beating the hell out of people who think it's funny."
She didn't know how to respond to this and really, who could? It was my story though and telling it to someone, did make me feel somewhat better about it.
"I have three sisters, one older. One little brother. They all knew I wasn't coming back. We all knew." She inhaled, clearly fighting the need to cry. "At least we got to say goodbye."
I put an arm around her and she flinched but only because she hadn't expected it. She was grateful and the audience would be very confused. I had brutally killed two tributes and now I was easing a third toward the grave. I could almost hear the commentators calling it the true spirit of the Games; ruthlessness and mercy in equal measure.
I gave her an apple but her appetite was waning. It was a bad sign.
She was right about the loneliness though. Simply being beside her took away an edge I hadn't even known I had been feeling. I wasn't a social person but even in the mills, you had been surrounded by people. Even with the work, those people might be happy or as content as you could be in a District. Their good mood was yours, most of the time.
"So you haven't killed anyone?"
"No. No I haven't." She sounded proud and rightly so. The Games might have claimed her but they hadn't made her into a monster.
"I've killed two Careers. Sulla and Alba. District 2… wiped out by a millboy." I mused. "I wonder what that's done to the betting odds in the Capitol."
"You shouldn't talk like that."
"Why? What's the chances of me getting out of here?"
"You've killed two Careers."
"Luck." Things with Alba could have gone very differently if she hadn't been overconfident.
"I think you might make it. Someone destroyed all the Careers' food and I think Kayla's the only one who really knows how to forage. She's fast but she can't run forever."
"She can hide though. Forage, run and hide; she could outlast all of us. I definitely can't run." I looked at my side and didn't want to think about walking long distance let alone running. "Burning their supplies really did help though."
"You did that?"
"I knew I wasn't going to last long out there and they had all the food. I reckoned they wouldn't think anyone was stupid enough to try and take it so I thought, why not try for it? And I did… luck… Luck and whoever stuck Sulla in the leg… Didn't think I'd succeed but I thought it was better to die attacking."
"And you think you can't win?"
"There's still three Careers left and I won't have surprise or luck on my side if I meet them."
"You should win."
"I don't want to win. I'm about the only one who doesn't have a reason to. But I don't want to die… That's it though isn't it? I live and everyone else dies…"
She nodded. It was the truest fact of the Games and I had been stating the obvious but saying it out loud to another tribute helped deal with the fact.
"So many things I never did." She said.
"Don't think about it."
"I'm dying." She managed to say it with a degree of amusement. "I'll think whatever I want." She managed to look defiant. "At least I never had children."
I grunted. I didn't like to think about how hard it must have been for mothers in particular to lose their children to the Games. Fathers spent so much of their lives working that most had little or no relationship with their children. That was the perhaps the Capitol's second greatest crime, reducing men to lonely slaves.
Right now, I was actually the least lonely I had been in years.
"I've never been kissed." She mused, almost out of the blue, except she had already said she was thinking about things she had never done. "You?"
"There was a girl… a long time ago… Her family was moved to the far side of the District." It really had been a long time ago. The two of us had been twelve and the kisses… her idea. I still thought about her from time to time but I wasn't pining for some lost love. We had still been children…
"I've never had anyone…" She was looking at me with a very odd expression and I suddenly put two and two together.
"What?!" I said rather foolishly.
"I am dying." She managed to laugh and then winced as the movement pained her. Even though I knew it was genuine, it was still very well played.
"What makes you think I'm that kind of guy, Sora?" I remembered her name now.
"You could be dead tomorrow."
This was a good argument but there was still the fact the arena cameras were watching us and more than likely with great interest. This made for good television. I could almost imagine the perfumed and powdered Capitol people yelling at their screens, egging me on to grant this dying girl a last wish. It was sickening.
But it wasn't about them.
District 8's Sora proved to have very soft lips. Soft and dry thanks to the sword wound in her flank. I was already reaching for my canteen before we parted.
"You call that a kiss?" She asked teasingly. She was flushed and clearly thrilled though not because of me. She took the canteen eagerly enough and after sipping, looked at me again with those big brown slanted eyes. For someone in a lot of pain, she looked very… enticing.
I indulged her. Not just because it was what she wanted and because she was dying but because honestly, kissing at sixteen was very different to twelve. This wasn't simply a brief touch of lips, this was more, much more. I placed a hand on her cheek, as we seemed to duel, challenging each other.
All too soon we seemed to grow weary, our wounds catching up with us both and as pleasurable as it was… it was effort, a lot of effort…
"Now I can die." Sora said wistfully, cutting through me far more effectively than Alba's sword.
"Eat something."
"I'm not hungry." She said and suddenly her eyes were full of sadness. "I'm so sorry."
If anything, her first kiss was every bit a final wish for her as it was for me. As enjoyable as it had been… beyond all belief… there was a certain finality about it, like I had accepted without any further doubt that I was not leaving this arena in any other way except in a hovercraft's claw.
