With thanks to abbycoraby123 and happyland3000 for your reviews of the last chapter.

This chapter took a long time to write. You're about to find out why.

Y 184-09-01 T 23:07:49

Day 2

He had not eaten anything for a full day now. He had, before running entirely from the Waterfront, risked drinking straight from the reservoir, but without food and with the almost-constant motion he had been in all day, Quint was beginning to flag.

Still he walked, through the night, past monolithic stone buildings that stretched like giant walls above him.

Quint did not feel guilt; it wasn't in his character to express that much remorse for someone else's pain. When he had looked back at what he had felt, what he did feel, overwhelmingly he realised what he thought was guilt was actually a loss of himself. Before the Games, he would never have considered himself capable of what he had done- he had firmly believed that, after a lifetime of watching the Districts and the Capitol up close, he had the semblance of mind not to conform to their games.

But on the trains, he had only watched from afar- for the Games, he had only ever seen them, never experienced them. It's easy to tell yourself you will behave independently of the crowd when you watch them from a distance. But in the midst of it all, experiencing it, Quint had discovered why the crowd behaved like the crowd- because it was overwhelmingly the only option for survival.

He had lost his spear when he threw it aside. That instrument of death he did not miss. But he had lost his precious crate of Capitol medicines, as well. While he did not need it, while he did not begrudge their use for Cesal's survival, Quint still felt a strong sense of loss in leaving behind the crate. Perhaps, deep down, he had still hoped that if he hung onto them long enough he could bring them home to help his grandfather.

Quint did not know anymore. He had lost all understanding of his own mind anymore. He had never known his capacity to murder, dogs or people alike.

If Emil had not intervened, Cesal would have died at his hands.

Quint could not find even the capacity for hatred towards Emil. He had been entirely justified in attacking him, after what he had done. Cesal might still die; and in the Games, he had never seen an injured tribute win. Who knows- maybe Emil would just realise the dead weight Cesal represented to him and cut him loose. But, Quint was fairly sure, Emil and Cesal were allied to the bitter end. Whichever went to the end first was the only question left.

But for Quint, his future was less certain. He walked on through the night because he had nowhere to go- he had no supplies beyond the water canteen in his jacket, and no allies to keep him safe, and no purpose left. This morning he had aimed to get to the Waterfront, to find water, to survive- now he had that, but he had returned to the Inner City with far more weighing him down than his water canteen. Survival felt, for once, less important. He wasn't sure what he was aiming towards anymore. He was stuck in this dome, surrounded by people watching, always watching, and all of Panem had seen him at his darkest moments and even if he was to survive this nightmarish ordeal in the name of entertainment, what sort of survival would being branded a killer be worth?

As he walked, the walls of stone buildings opened out around him. Quint looked up from his trained gaze on the ground and found himself surrounded by fountains, long strips of fountains lit from below and above and spraying silvery water into the sky, the spray of liquid forming a fine mist in the air. One fountain was on his left, one on his right- he could walk between them, down the mist of water, to a plinth and a statue- and beyond that, the Presidential Mansion itself, replicated perfectly, hung in ethereal mist.

In all of this, all Quint could think was that if he had just crossed behind the Training Center after the bloodbath in front of it, he would have found water without ever having to go to he Waterfront.

He walked silently through the mist and spraying water as it stung his face in the dark. He passed by the Starving Statue with only a cursory glance to its mist-drenched marble facade. He came to the wide, tall doors of the Presidential Mansion, steel and imposing- clearly intended in the Capitol to withstand any attack. But in the arena, attacking was the plan, and the doors were lockless and swung open with ease. Quint walked through the doors, in width twice his height, and in height four times his own, and slid them behind him into darkness.

It took him a few moments to adjust to the lower light- after a bright, fake moon glowing through the night had lit his path, it was hard to see. Still, after a few moments of frowning into the dark, Quint found himself in a hall, wide and beautiful. The floor beneath him was granite and angular, white and black panes of stone arranged in mosaic to form an eagle carrying arrows, wings outstretched across the ground in sharp stone shards, stone talons scrabbling against stone blades on the floor.

Above and around him, shadowed by balconies and lit in areas by small windows, the rest of the hall was built with stone and clad in mahogany and obsidian- every furnishing was either black or deep brown. And yet, rustling in the dark were huge red banners, draped from every balcony, with the black sigil of Panem at the top and the white of President Snow's administrative sigil on the bottom- the eternal dove, carrying a rose in its beak and a blade in its talons.

The banners rustled louder on the balcony they were hung from on the left, and Quint flicked his head to the side, but there were only shadows- he could see nothing more. He clutched for a spear that was not there, and it shocked him how dependent he had become upon his weapon in only a day. The fear of the Games had permeated his life at home; now, being within them, it was only the fear that sustained him.

His footsteps echoed over the stone flags as he walked- a wide staircase creaked only minutely under his weight, but it was still enough to give him pause. As he reached the top of the stairs a shifting image appeared in his peripheral vision- he turned to it, but he saw nothing. He waited for far longer this time before resuming movement.

The mansion was huge and opulent, and widely varied. While a theme remained of dark colours with slashes of red and white here and there, the modernity varied- some areas seemed to be surviving pieces of the mansion before the Dark Days, bolted onto the restored building with a care only District 7 builders could ever give. Others, outfitted in chrome and glass and with higher concentrations of white than their older and redder parts, shone with their brilliance and their purity, kept perfect and sterile. All of it was opulent in a way Quint had never seen before the Reaping; he felt, deep down, that it was not his place to stand in this sacred halls.

Quint traced his fingers over the surfaces, leaving bloodied stains on the perfect white walls. He looked down at his hands and self-consciously wiped them on his jacket, at first awkwardly but later obsessively. He got out his precious water canteen and splashed more than he could spare on his hands, his body- Quint found a perfect white towel in a perfect white guestroom and left it red as he washed his skin free of the blood that had stained it. When he was done, his skin was clean but did not feel it, and his canteen was almost damningly low on water.

He stared down at the bloodied towel in his hands and threw it across the guestroom, where it made contact with a soft 'whap' against the wall.

A shift of fabric and a connection of rubber against stone. Quint whirled as he heard the sounds at the doorframe, but there was nothing but darkness yet again, nothing at all but darkness. He narrowed his eyes into the shadows, cautiously exiting the room as he did.

Quint explored the mansion with increasing caution; he stopped listing it as paranoia when he came to the first room with a light on. He had considered at this point picking up a makeshift weapon from the staggering opulence around him, but he couldn't bear carrying anything as a weapon after he had seen what it brought out in him. He wanted control over himself more than control over his surroundings right now, and he would happily take the consequences of those actions.

When he came back to the corridor with the lit room half an hour later, the light was off. Quint stood still for solid minutes then, listening for any evidence of any sound, before cautiously sliding open the door, flicking the light switch and walking into the room.

Dressed in red sashes with the white-rosed dove of Snow and the black-taloned eagle of Panem, adorned in black and brown and red and white, the room was small but well-furnished, with a mahogany writing desk centred in the room, and bookshelves draped in sashes around it. A bag seemed to be hastily deposited on the desk- curious, as no furnishing looked hasty in any of the rooms. Quint made his way to the desk, and that was when he heard a sound from the doorframe.

Once more, he whirled in place, but once more there were only shadows, shadows he no longer trusted. Quint stood still for a long while. He made up his mind in the silence.

"If you're out there, can you just- show yourself? Now?" He said awkwardly into the darkness. "I know you've been watching me. I just want to know why."

For a moment, silence remained in the large and shadow-filled mansion. And then a shadow detached itself from the balcony corridor outside the room, and came into the light, and was made flesh from shadow. Thin but toned, with wavy brown hair scraped into a bun, a heart-shaped face that should look happy but instead was sharpened by a passive expression and glittering pale blue eyes. She had a belt of throwing knives, and her hand was clearly telegraphing its position above one.

She was, if Quint remembered correctly, the Career from One, Glace Gratton, the quietest and most mysterious of her peers, the one with the lowest training scores and the most potential danger.

She held her hand above the knives and Quint was frozen in place. She looked at him carefully with those passive eyes trained free of emotion, and there was a glimmer of something in her eyes that Quint could not place.

"Don't move." She said slowly. And then she broke free of their trance-like stillness, moving around him to the bookshelf. Quint did not move as she reached out the hand not hovering over her knives to the books, above the books, and pulled something free. Quint watched the tiny camera and its trailing wires drop to the floor from her fingers as she moved on to another.

For minutes there was a shocked silence, as Quint watched the Career girl clearly and defiantly pull every camera from the room, leaving trailing wires in her wake as she pulled them free of the walls, the bookshelves, the doorframes. As she returned to Quint's eyeline he started to move- she held her hand closer to her knives and raised an eyebrow. He held up a hand between him and the knife.

"You missed one," he murmured. Glace's passive eyes flickered with something akin to surprise. Her hand lowered from the knife again, and Quint walked carefully forward, next to her, and pulled the well-concealed microphone from where it had been placed for the best sound quality in the light fittings. He held the tiny device in his hands, inspecting it for a moment to admire how high-spec it clearly was, before sharply pulling it free of the light fittings, yanking it from the wires as he did so. He dropped the tiny microphone on the ground, and for good measure stepped down on it heavily, cracking the plastic and destroying the insides. Glace closed the door behind them.

They stood now in the only place in the arena that the Capitol could not see or hear them. Quint spoke softly so that no microphones outside could possibly pick them up.

"What are you doing? Are you crazy?" He whispered urgently. "They'll have seen that, and they'll call it rebellion."

Glace licked her lips anxiously, a rare tell of emotion. She slowly sat down on the plush carpet, gesturing for him to follow her- he did, after a moment.

"You helped. Clearly you're either as crazy as me, or don't think I'm crazy at all," Glace said with a curt logic Quint couldn't deny, but didn't want to confirm either. He switched the subject urgently.

"So what the hell did you need to tell /me that the Capitol can't hear?" He asked. They had never met or even spoken before, to his knowledge- he had no clue why Glace, a Career, a One girl, would have any interest in doing something clearly so inflammatory against the Capitol just to speak with him.

She licked her lips again- Quint wondered if she knew she did that, if she had clearly trained so much of her emotional response to be still.

"You're- Quint, right? The Six tribute?"

He frowned. This was personal? "-Yeah, I'm Quint."

She nodded, as if that meant something greater to her than him. "You work in District Six, then. On the trains?"

"I'm a- I was- I'm a mechanic." He struggled with what tense he could use when it was all so in the balance at the moment. He sat only yards from a Career tribute with a belt of throwing knives.

"You're a mechanic? You know how to use computers, then?"

Quint's engineering abilities had not been questioned since he had been thrown into the arena to fight for his life, and his interest was piqued.

"Those are two really different questions, but- yes. Most of the Capitol trains I work with are computerised nowadays; I'm usually a mechanic, but Six doesn't have enough computer engineers to spare across the district, so we all have at least some proficiency in working them." He shook his head furiously. "No. /No. This is surreal. Why the hell would you want to know about what I can do with /trains?"

Glace sat back slightly, observing him. "Do you hate the Capitol?"

He almost laughed at the question, because a One girl asking a Six guy that was almost more surreal than the situation as a whole right now.

"Do you hate the Capitol?" He asked, because his answer should be obvious, but hers clearly wasn't right now. Her District was the darling of the Capitol, unlike his, riddled with drug abuse and blamed for almost any quota problems that happened in Capitol deliveries. She was a Career, one of the ones with the highest odds of survival- she had volunteered to be here, so why the hell would she hate her masters when it was she alone they spared the whip for?

Her expression did not change. "I watched my best friend die at their hands. Yes. I hate the Capitol."

He frowned. "What, they've introduced capital punishment for you as well?"

"No." She shifted minutely, her eyes training themselves on the ground. "We offer ourselves up to the Capitol, they have no need of it."

Quint blinked. "Are you saying the Capitol killed your friend because he was a Career? I- no offence, but that's expected of volunteering," he said, unsure what was going on anymore.

Glace bit her lip, her eyes for a moment awash with anger. "His name was Rhys."

Quint almost didn't place the name. It had been so long. But the seventy-third Hunger Games came back to him in a rush, and suddenly something far more worrying than mere anger at a friend's death became apparent in Glace's countenance. Glace took out a knife from her belt, one of seven, and inspected its edge.

"He was a friend of mine. He had reached volunteering age, and I was not sad to watch him go as it was expected. He seemed sad. I didn't understand why until he reached the arena." She held up the knife to the light, inspecting its sheen. "He broke away from the Career pack. He started protecting the smaller, younger tributes instead. Nobody could understand why he was defying his training until he found a camera and told the world before the Capitol could mute him that his-"

Quint remembered the rest, because it had been so inflammatory that they never showed the seventy-third games since beyond tiny highlights of what had killed him.

"-His friend was only the same age as those tiny kids, and he couldn't kill them when the Capitol was throwing them at his sword," Quint murmured. The words felt like treason, but nobody could hear them- which was also treason. "That was you. He defied the Capitol directly, because he couldn't bear to kill the kids that looked like you, that the Capitol was training and throwing at his sword that were too young to die."

Glace shivered slightly. "And then the Capitol sent the mutts-"

Quint knew all too well how terrifying mutts were. "-And the mutts ripped him and the kids apart," he muttered, only too aware that the same could have happened to him this afternoon. "Because he stopped playing the Capitol's game."

Glace laughed, and the sound almost broke in her throat. "I mourned, for a while," she murmured, seeming unable to put her voice any louder than that. "I kept asking- why? Why the hell would he not only stop killing, but find a camera and hold the Capitol accountable for it? When he knew that would be signing his own death warrant?" She returned the knife to her belt and looked up at the ceiling. "I couldn't figure it out, and I didn't want to feel responsible for his death anymore, so- I trained. I threw everything I had into the Games because it was easier than feeling. I came to the Games, split from the Careers, because- I needed to feel what he had, I needed to figure out why."

"For closure."

Glace looked up strangely. She mulled Quint's words a moment.

"Yeah. I never really thought of it like that, but- yeah."

"And have you found it?"

Glace nodded. "Purpose. After years and years of the killing, the endless cycle of watching people die- I think Rhys saw me coming into the Training Center, you know, this tiny girl only up to his waist- and found purpose in going to the Games to try and beg them to stop. For me."

Quint frowned. It was touching, but he still didn't see what this had to do with him.

"So, what- you need me to beg the Capitol to stop? Thanks, but-"

"-Please. Credit me with something, Quint." Glace looked up at him, and while for the first time she seemed genuinely upset at speaking of Rhys, she still had that glimmer of danger in her eyes. "I have a different purpose to him. And it needs you- and others- anyone I can get, but you especially."

Quint felt a thrill of danger through his veins. "Which is?"

Glace leaned in. "I found something, in the elevator shaft in the Training Center," she murmured, softly, but clearly enough for Quint to make it out. "I was looking for the roof, but there is no roof."

What are you saying?" Quint could feel his mind reeling, with joy or horror he could not tell. Adrenaline was beginning to surge under his skin at the thought of what Glace was planning.

"I'm saying I found room at the top, with a hatch to the top of the arena," she said, her usually passive face no longer needing her emotions trained free of grief- she had found a better outlet than repression. "And I'm saying there are computers around it. And I'm saying that if someone can crack them- someone like an engineer- then you, and I, and anyone we choose, could escape the arena before the Capitol could even try to stop us."

Quint exhaled in shock. Escape the arena? Confronting the Capitol had been enough to kill Rhys. Ripping out the cameras could be enough to kill them. But this? This was rebellion of a new type. This was doing more than just raging against an omnipotent machine. This was destroying the Games and saving themselves, and everyone else.

This was a real, viable plan. And it could save them all.

Quint did not realise his mouth was hanging open until Glace next spoke.

"Well? What do you say?"

Quint's responding voice was weak but carried clearly.

"Let's do it." He laughed, light-headed from excitement and adrenaline and lack of food but now he had a purpose, now his always problem-oriented mind had a real plan. He stood up, shaking but ready. "Let's do it."

And Glace stood and picked up her bag and the two of them walked together as they opened the door and-

-And walked onto the balcony of the mansion's interior, alight with orange, crackling with light. Glace and he reeled back in shock, racing to the staircase, but that was alight as well, the light and the smoke burning his eyes, the red sashes of the Capitol alight on the balconies and walls.

The mansion was on fire.

After three months and almost 100K words I'm finally, finally revealing the intent of the Games that I've planned since the beginning and let me tell you, I have never been this enthusiastic to write. Anyone who struggles, like I did, with giving up on writing projects because they seem too big- set yourself a daily target and keep at it. Just. Keep. Writing. Every day. Don't let yourself sit down and stop moving. After a while you can relax out your timing if you need to spend more time on a chapter (like this one) because you know you're disciplined enough to. But just write every day.

Anyway. There's my little motivational speech for the day. Next chapter is going to be a big one, but who knows? I might get it done by tomorrow night.

I have at most six chapters left before the end and I still have a few twists left before Jacquerie finishes. We're close to the finish line now, guys.

As ever, thank you for reading this far.