With thanks to Glassgift for your review of the last chapter.

Y 184-08-31 T 22:36:06

Day 1

The night had faded into oblivion again as the seal of Panem had been wiped from the sky, the same way as the sun had prematurely set.

Glace held a blade in her hand where she sat, cross-legged on a concrete ground. The tinted glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows did not remove all outside light, and a shard of the fake moon's beam was reflected in the steel of her knife, silver, ethereal.

She had betrayed the Careers.

She had always intended to- it had always been what she had planned, from the start. She would direct the deaths in the bloodbath, drive a wedge of conflict between the Careers from which there could be no backing down. She did that. Theon, prompted by the blades she flung at his neck, did not even stop to consider before pushing his machete into Sheen Astara's brain, who had been fantastically easy to entice closer in the same way she had done Theon. She had directed chaos and created fear, and now the playing field was level enough that she stood a chance of survival.

And yet- and yet. Glace had felt something akin to remorse at watching Sheen's face included in the list of dead. She did not mourn him- she had not mourned since the darkest days of Rhy's death- but she felt she had dishonoured him in his death. She should have been the one to take his life, but instead she had manipulated one Career into another- and a Career that valued honour more than her had been forced into taking Sheen's life. She only held nominal views on the sanctity of an honourable death- it was messy, bloody, and she believed little of the honour of anything in life- but Theon Veux had a sense of honour that was almost regimented. She had directed a dishonour she felt Theon had not deserved. She only hoped she could give him a true execution when his own time came.

The concrete was hard, and she was aching from sitting so rigidly on the floor. She stood, stretched until her back clicked, then returned the slim blade in her hand to its place in her belt and walked through the apartment. She did not intend to settle down just yet tonight- not so close to the Cornucopia. She intended to know every inch of the place she had elected to inhabit for the night before she found a niche to hide herself in.

Mostly, she was too restless to sleep- she needed to find control, purpose.

Then again, she had been searching for purpose for three years, since Rhys died. The closest she had found was electing to go to the arena; and when chaos was all that she found even here, she wondered whether she'd ever find something to cling onto, something she could tie her searching soul to.

She tied it, for now, to the tallest building in the Capitol and arena. It was mostly the same as the real Training Center, albeit with no weaponry and very little food- the only real difference Glace saw was a long, thick concrete pole, several metres wide, stretching from the ground floor of the building to the top floor, wrapped around by the floor plan and lined up parallel to the elevator shaft. The Training Center was, perhaps, obvious, but its size made it the perfect place to hide, to observe; she could see the entire arena from the top floor.

Now, however, she wanted to see what she could observe from the roof.

She took the staircases rather than the elevator, not trusting the Capitol to have kept an enclosed metal box free of traps designed to kill her. Perhaps it was a paranoid notion, but her legs would recover from a trip up the stairs- her body wouldn't recover from a one-way trip down the elevator shaft.

The top floor arrived, and Glace was out of staircase. She walked out into the lobby of the Twelve penthouse, considering her options. There were no clear ways upwards; but she wanted that roof. She needed to see that roof. It could be a tactical advantage of astronomical proportions if she could drop things from the top of a skyscraper, if she could rig herself up to survive up there in solitude until everyone else was dead. She needed that roof.

She looked towards the elevator doors.

Immediately, she had a plan, and the doors were beneath her palms within seconds as she pushed and pulled them apart, opening onto a dark metal shaft. The elevator was far below her, and she was left with an empty run straight up to the top of the building.

Glace wedged the elevator doors with a chair and tentatively climbed on top of it, placing her hands onto the cool steel walls of the elevator shaft. If she could manage this, she could potentially hold the strongest position in the arena, permanently. She tested the metal cable in the center of the shaft, and it held steady. Glace was calm. This was just the Games; this was just an objective. No emotion and no conflict. This was what she loved, above all else. Her own control.

Stepping out into oblivion to hang from a metal cable was precarious control, but it was her own.

She climbed, using her feet to drive her upwards and her hands as grip. She regretted now not covering her hands with something, maybe some torn-up sheets- the cable was twisted steel, and tiny fibres of metal worked their way into her skin as she dragged them the wrong way. She regretted not taking the elevator now; she really was just being paranoid. What were the people outside the arena thinking of this small, determined, emotionless girl, climbing with shards of steel in her hands just to investigate a possible tactical advantage?

She didn't truly need the answer to that question- she was pretty sure she had known it for years.

She reached a set of elevator doors, brushed steel with a tiny lip that Glace balanced upon, one foot on the cable and one foot on the door. She reached forward, slid open the doors, then pitched inside, rolling as she hit the ground.

Which was unusually hard.

She sat up- but she was not on the roof of the building. At least, not technically. She was on a roof.

She realised, blankly, that the small expanse she found herself in, steel hatches and blinking red lights, seemed far too utilitarian to be Capitolian in origin. She looked up to the circular metal hatch above her, and to the concrete pole, several metres wide, that curved part of the wall to her right.

Then she understood.

An arena that, presumably, was the Capitol in a full scale replication, was large to an unprecedented scale. A dome that large needed support; and that's where the Training Center came in. It had been fitted with a column to support the arena's weight, and there was no roof because where she stood was the very top of the dome, where she shouldn't be. This was some sort of emergency entry system, with double-locked steel hatches and aged banks of red-lit computers humming ready for orders.

She saw no cameras here. She saw no sign of tribute-oriented design. This, this point at the top of the world Glace now lived in, was not a roof but an emergency entry to the arena, intended not for her but for someone who knew how to work those computers, who needed to get in somehow when other options were gone. Perhaps if someone downed a helicarrier- Glace wasn't sure. Contingencies were always the Capitol's interest.

Something within her, the same something that had screamed when the Capitol ordered the mutts that killed Rhys, the same something that had thrown her into Career training, the same something that had drawn her to follow Rhy's path to an arena, thrilled at where she stood.

Glace wondered if, finally, she had found a purpose.

As ever, thank you for reading this far.