With thanks to Glassgift and AbbyCoraby123 for your reviews of the last chapters. :)

Y 184-08-31 T 14:00:00

Day 1

Quint had been lucky to survive- he wouldn't count it as anything else. The bloodbath was well named; he had seen so much, too much, in the past few minutes.

His face and grey clothing were covered in a fine mist of blood from when the Nine girl had jumped off the plate.

He had acted as clearly as he could, just as he had rehearsed in his head; he had grabbed up the closest two things to his plate (a water canteen and a plastic crate, just small enough for him to heft under his arm) and run for the closest exit; he opted for the right-hand road running past the Training Center.

Of course, that's when the spear had thudded dully into his crate, trapping his grey jacket against the plastic, and Quint broke into a sprint, instinctual and uncontrolled, just how he hated it. He should have looked back and seen who had thrown the spear, but he had been, admittedly, in a state of panic at the time, and he had sprinted away without so much as removing the spear pinning him to his crate.

The streets were wide and paved with a mix of granite and marble; the stone and steel of the Inner City rose high around him. Quint ran on, regaining his calm as he got further from the uncontrolled chaos of the Cornucopia. He took a sharp left turn onto another, more thin and winding street, feeling his muscles burn at the exercise he rarely did.

The skies were a thin sliver above his head- the alleyway he found himself in was so thin, and the buildings were so tall around him, that he was obscured in a valley of shadows. The buildings on each side of him held doors- Quint disliked being this close to the chaos, being only ten minutes from the Cornucopia in the Inner City, but he needed to hole up while the cannons were still firing intermittently, shaking the ground beneath his feet. Pocketing his canteen, he tried the door to his left- it came open without any resistance.

Quint slid in and shut the door as quietly as possible- to his frustration, there were no locks on either side. He decided it was a problem he would fix in a few minutes- for now, he had greater problems to fix.

He cast about the lobby he found himself in. He had been expecting much the same as the seventy-third Games; the ruined city of those Games had held a few complete buildings, but they had been bare concrete, brick and rubble.

The warm lobby Quint found himself in was, while not luxuriant to the point of excess like the real Capitol, was decorated to an extent he would never see in any of the homes at his home district. The carpet beneath his feet was a plush cream colour; a mahogany table rested against the walls, which were covered in a luxurious purple patterned wallpaper.

Quint would have laughed. Even in a false Capitol, there was still an excess beyond reasoning. But this time, it was his, and Quint intended to utilise it to his own use.

He put down the crate and grabbed the heavy mahogany table, scraping it across the carpeted floor and propping it against the door. With his building secured, at least partially, Quint picked up his crate again and started up the wide spiral staircase, listening intently for any movement. While he doubted he'd have the bad luck to run into another tribute this early in such a sprawling arena, he hadn't come this far to die because of his own poor judgement.

His next priority, now he had barred the door, was to ascertain the layout of the building. While it was really just a holdup to survive today and tonight, Quint had learnt from his time on the tracks that to know your layout was to survive. Once, in the middle of the night, the train had broken down- the inter-district cargo shuttle he had been working on couldn't afford torches, and so he had fixed the problem blind. His knowledge of the layout of his train saved his life; it had still been rattling along the tracks, with the hydraulic brakes broken, so when he and another engineer had climbed out onto the thin maintenance tracks on the outside of the carriage, a single misstep in the dark had sent the other engineer on a short trip under the tracks, a rolling train unstoppable under his torso.

He had screamed for hours before someone with a sharpened pole could locate him and put him out of his misery.

Quint never stayed somewhere without knowing the layout of the place, and now would be no exception now he was in a fake city with dozens of people only looking to kill.

The spiral staircase was lined with glass, making it impossible to fall from as he climbed the stairs. The safety precaution seemed almost laughable given the circumstances; Quint wondered if the unusual choice was not that of the arena but an endeavour to copy an existing building. It seemed to be an apartment block, with differing styles on every floor- every one was glittering and opulent, with a perhaps bare set of furniture but the trappings that Quint would expect in a Capitolian's home, with fur rugs and thick carpets.

After some climbing and careful exploration of the building Quint found there were five floors, including the ground floor- each was rougly the size of the dining room in the Training Room apartments, with a wide, luxuriant living area and meagre sleeping and eating arrangements. It harkened to a people who barely slept, who always ate out, who only used their apartments for social occasions and nothing else- they were intended as decorative art pieces, not homes.

It was almost upsetting to Quint, to think of a people so unable to emotionally connect that they resorted to surface impressions to understand one another.

He picked the apartment on the top floor, an arrangement of pale pastel colours and a plush carpet that his shoes sank into, setting himself up in the small bedroom adjacent to the luxuriant living space. The bed was utilitarian but soft, and if he had not experienced similar beds in the Training Center he would have sunk into it then and there. But he sat, instead, on the edge, and laid out his spoils; the water canteen and the plastic crate, shot through with the spear that had taken a scrap of his jacket with it when he had pulled it free from his clothing. Quint carefully eased the spear free, lying it in precise vertical parallel to the bed- raising both hands to the crate, he flicked open the clasps and raised the lid.

The crate was carefully lined with foam, crafted to contain the six bottles within it. Each were clear, with equally clear liquid inside, neatly printed labels on their sides. Quint raised one to inspect it, the bottles familiar to his memory. Finally, as he read the long words on the label stamped with the seal of Panem, they clicked in his head- when his parents had first died, long ago, the grant he had recieved for their death had passed to his grandfather, and his grandfather had mostly used the money to purchase some expensive and high-quality Capitol medicines for his medical issues. The clear liquid ceased the rattling in his grandfather's lungs, brought colour back to his cheeks- it was nothing short of miraculous.

But the medicine had run out, as it inevitably would, and the tight breaths returned and lethargy returned to his demeanour. Quint did not begrudge his grandfather for buying the medicines- he had cared for him for years, and he had never seen him as happy as when he was temporarily free of illness.

Now, he held bottles that could save his grandfather at home; but he was no longer there to take care of him, to provide food, to keep him alive.

Quint held a panacea between his fingertips, but it was useless in this fake city of worthless excess.

Carefully, reverently, he returned the medicines to their crate and replaced the lid. He didn't know what to do with them- he didn't even understand what they did. But they were valuable, and while they were his he would protect them.

He looked around his stolen bedroom. A single window, small and high-set, looked out onto the city. Quint stood and looked out onto the city, leant against the wall next to the window so as not to be directly visible.

Silence, sunlight, shadow. From five floors up, Quint could see the extent of the arena- and it was a true copy of the Capitol, right up to the basin of mountains it sat in and the reservoir beyond. If he didn't know better, he would of said he was in the real expanse of the outdoors.

He wondered where the arena ended. He was an engineer, and the problem's solution presented itself to him. Tomorrow, he was going to go sightseeing.

The sun was lowering in the sky, turning from a canary yellow to deep, blood-red crimson.

With the next chapter, the catch-up for the bloodbath will be over. I must say, I'm really enjoying seeing these chapters working out as I planned them to. I'm really enjoying laying hints for the future as well; hopefully they'll be subtle enough to keep you guessing until I fulfil the foreshadowing.

As ever, thank you for reading this far.