Y 184-09-02 T 05:44:01

Day 3

Lexus phoned into the hovercrafts and made sure they had counted in all of the staff but himself and Seneca- he watched on radar as they took off until their red lights blinked out of range.

They were alone in the arena's administration level now. All that was left was the hum of machinery and their breaths as they moved.

The camera feeds, hastily abandoned by staff at their posts, blinked and flickered around them. Biting his lip at the silence, Lexus flicked on an audio feed for Ronan's pursuit of the last two non-revo tributes. Unfortunately, he had picked a bad time- Ronan had traced them now to the barricaded wardrobe of a bedroom, and was tearing into it as the two young tributes screamed. Lexus winced and flicked off the sound again.

"Is that what we're broadcasting?" Seneca asked.

"Yeah; god knows what we're gonna do once the kids are dead and Ronan's the only one left," Lexus muttered.

"It's low-priority." Seneca spoke tersely and little; their words echoing in the concrete only brought home how isolated they were. "How's the map coming along?"

Lexus, where he sat on the ground at the bottom of the Pit, had amassed a sprawling holographic map of cameras now- and an idea. "I think they're trying to play us," he hummed. "There's two buildings emptied of cameras entirely- here and here." He pointed- one was far away from the epicenter of the fire, well-hidden in an alleyway. The other was in plain sight and close enough to the fire to be in heat damage range.

Senece raised an eyebrow. "What, you think it's a decoy?"

"They're not dumb, these kids. They'll know we're coming after them."

Seneca bit his lip thoughtfully. "We have one shot at this, Lexus. You have to be certain."

"Sen, I can't be certain. That's exactly the point of the decoy. They could be dumb and hiding in that building, or they could be faking it and hiding in that building. We don't know and that's the point."

Seneca pinched the bridge of his nose. "We have enough mutts left to kill them all without trouble, but not if we split them. We have to assume they're clever."

In the background, two young children screamed silently as Ronan dragged them from their hiding place and cleaved their heads from their necks. There were no cannons. There was nobody watching to fire them. Ronan frowned over the camera feed, kicked the headless tributes absently, then began tacking back out of the building and into the smoke-hazed streets of the Inner City.

Lexus stood, making for a control panel halfway up the Pit- he brought up the last of the mutts and within their maze of holding channels gave them an opening as close to the fire-damaged building as possible.

"Here goes nothing," he said, and released the mutts.

They stood- Emma shook out her arms, which were aching and sore after her night of alternating hard exercise and sitting completely still. She usually wasn't one for extended tactical discussions, but then she usually wasn't one for rebelling against the Capitol, so there was that.

"Okay- everybody clear on this?" Elizabeth said. "Quint, can you keep up?"

"I'll live," Quint muttered, standing on unsteady feet but standing nonetheless. He was a liability, Emma knew that; but he was also the only one capable of working the computers at the hatch. Hopefully.

"Right. Like we planned- formations-"

The seven of them awkwardly exchanged glances, then moved into the formation that the ex-Careers of the group had worked out. Emma was taking point (a spot she despised, as she had her back to the group, but she supposed that given her track record it made sense to the others to not have her at their backs). Glace took the right and Elizabeth the left; in the middle stood Quint, Emil and Cesal, as they were most vulnerable in a potential fight. Bringing up the rear was Theon, who after a lot of persuasion from the group had recieved one of Emma's shortswords. Emma disliked arming people she did not know, but circumstances had changed.

Everything had changed in these last few hours. Only last night she had been still a Career of sorts; the last of the Careers, Ronan at her side. But after Ronan had stated he was manipulating her into killing innocents to leave her for last- Emma couldn't take it.

When she had killed those tributes, she had done so with the rationalisation of mercy; that at other hands, at Anna's hands, those children could suffer untold torture and pain. But now Emma looked at it with the hindsight of a new, rebellious perspective? She wasn't even sure she had cared at all. They were in her way, and she had wanted victory, and freedom from her arranged marriages and her family, and she had just killed, killed without remorse or thought.

She had helped save Quint and Glace to try and atone for the deaths of the children she had killed, but she was starting to think that the world did not care about the balance of human life- there was only blood, and fear, and the mindless push to survive.

She had cleaned her sword of the blood it had taken, but it would take a lot longer than she had time to live to clean it fully from her hands.

"Okay, guys- Emma- let's move out."

They took the stairs cautiously and awkwardly- formation was not something the majority of the group was used to, and while Emma, Theon and Glace moved in something approaching unison, the rest of the group kept bumping into each other. Emma swirled around with sword-half drawn at least twice, believing someone to be attacking her, for it to only be Quint clumsily trying to take the stairs at the same pace as everyone not winded by smoke inhalation.

They came to the doorway of the apartment building- plush, and maroon, and lit partially by the rising fake sun. They exchanged nervous glances, and Emma took a deep breath and led them into the morning sun.

The sky was pale with the dawn and pale with thousands of particles of ash. The white-grey substance floated through the air and settled on every surface- everything was covered with a fine layer of it, and now they were out in the open it began to settle on them. The city was barren, broken apart by the violence of only a few.

When Emma had first seen the Capitol through the windows of a train, it had been majestic, breathtaking- now they had destroyed its mirror image in their haste to destroy what it stood for.

Without wind in the arena, the ash flowed in a uniform direction, landing without movement on the roads, against the windows, in Emma's hair. It was silent in the hollow, ashen streets of the hollow, empty city, save for their footsteps, and their unsteady breathing, and the-

Footsteps. Seven sounds with mostly uniform shuffling, but- no. Emma stopped abruptly, half-drawing her sword- she could feel a brush against her back where Quint did not quite stop moving quickly enough. Elizabeth shifted uncomfortably.

"Emma, we're in the open, we don't have time for-"

"Sh." Elizabeth frowned but Glace seemed to have picked up on the errant sound as well- they both cocked their heads and turned with the sound, slowly, carefully, shifting themselves with the practice of years of training into position.

Swiftly as a cracked whip, Glace swirled to face the corner of a distant building. Her hand was at her belt and a knife spun in her fingers, and suddenly it was embedded in a mutt, blade-toothed and ash-streaked and white-eyed and howling.

The sound was picked up all around them in the ash-flowing air, copied and reverberated by a thousand tongues. Howls sounded in the ash. Behind Emma she could hear the slightest whimper, coming from either Quint or Cesal- she did not know which and she did not have time to care.

Half-blind and injured, like the animals surrounding them now, the Gamemakers were lashing out with all they had left.

The mutts around them would be the last.

But it would be them all.

Slowly but surely, the mutts moved from the shadows into the pale golden light, disturbing ash-coated roads like ripples in pools. Their teeth, monstrosities, blades jammed into gums, shone; their eyes, a dull off-white the same as the ash settling in her hair, were half-blind but no less malicious for it. They were bred and designed for muscle, every sinew, every coding within their DNA. They had been bred to murder rebels in the Dark Days.

Emma was new to the whole concept of rebellion, but she wasn't exactly willing to go down at her first trial through it.

The mutts advanced and the group bristled, moved in tighter. Emil and Cesal, for what it was worth, had drawn their daggers- Quint was standing frozen between them, but that was to be expected. Glace held her hand ready over another knife. Theon and Elizabeth held sword and axe ready.

The silence of every creature pausing for breath.

And then Glace's knife swirled circles in her hand and unholy screams ripped loose from the mutts' mouths and they /swarmed, there was no other word for it, and arterial blood splattered across Emma's face as she moved to meet the first mutt approaching her.

What began then felt like an unrelenting dance of Glace's wits and strength; one always moving beyond one another. One under-calculated throw of a knife and the mutts could overpower her before she could reach for the next- but if she moved too far out in an effort to hit every mutt, she left the three tributes in the middle vulnerable.

And she was running out of knives.

The streets were swarming with mutts now- several dozen at the least, a hundred at the most, and all baying for their blood. More and more were falling now, as Theon and Emma were brutally efficient with their blades, but more remained. Both Elizabeth and her were at a disadvantage with their ranged and close-combat weapons, and while Cesal and Emil were doing what they could from the edges with a dagger and a leather-wrapped baton that Emil had apparently been concealing, they were no fighters. Quint had no weapon at all, and the few injured mutts that made it past the group to the middle were brought down with nothing but his fear and his hands.

Glace threw and pivoted and aimed and threw again, until her fingers counted two knives and no more. She bit her lip.

"Quint," she snapped. "Knife in my belt."

"What?"

"Take the knife."

Glace felt one knife drawn from her belt- she took the other and swirled it in her hands. It would do; it would have to.

And now seven of them stood armed amongst blood and bodies, fighting to protect each other despite standing in an arena of combat. Mutts snarled and leapt from every angle, and Glace pivoted and thrust and stabbed, but one knife and one small girl was not sufficient to stand against an army. Every few motions, a mutt would lash out with bladed teeth or bladed claws and inflict damage, a laceration or a light cut; every time they did, Glace moved more slowly, more painfully, and the next damage taken was deeper, more painful, more potentially lethal.

She could not do this much longer.

"We can't fight them all!" She said, raising her voice against the snarls and howls of the dozens of mutts still running from the shadows towards them.

"We have to!" Theon called desperately, slamming the hilt of his bloodied shortsword into a mutt's skull as another went for his face.

"No, we don't!" Glace said, looking away for a split second from the action towards the road ahead. "We can run!"

"Run from these?!" Emil gasped, shadowing Elizabeth as he hit what mutts she missed with her axe. "They're huge!"

"You can run from them," Quint said, his voice hoarse but carrying well enough to hear. He dipped into the action, lacerating a mutt that Glace had failed to see- the mutt snarled and lunged but Glace swirled and tore open its stomach with her knife. "Not for long, but you can run from them."

"Okay!" Theon yelled. "Careers, take up the back! Outliers, get in the front! We go to the Training Center and we barricade the door however we can! Three- two- one-"

Glace took all the energy left in her and pushed it into her legs.

The group ran to the chorus of a thousand howls.

Quint, when he was reaped, had known he was going to die.

But he had expected to die alone, surrounded by Careers, with a dagger through his heart. Dying amongst a group of semi-rebels, surrounded by Careers that gifted him knives and protected his back as he ran from the Capitol's mutts? That was something he had never expected.

And if there wasn't a last mission left to him ahead, he would have perhaps been content to die in the Games like this. But in the Training Center, at the very top, where the fake sky met the real, lay his final mission.

His lungs burned from smoke inhalation and oxygen depletion. His hands were covered in blood from attacking mutts- he was almost rendered catatonic from the idea that amongst the mutts stood Cesal, who could have died at his hands, who still could if he couldn't save them all.

And still they all ran, together and alone against the Capitol, mutts at their heels and the President at their necks.

Cesal was running roughly parallel to him; he stumbled, and Quint shot out a hand to steady him and pull him along. Cesal almost looked up to thank him, but his eyes widened as he looked at Quint's face, and he looked away without a word, running on and ahead.

They turned into the ash-covered and scorched Victory Road, and every step started to become a struggle. Quint was struggling to breathe even at a normal walking pace, so sprinting among Careers and against mutts was practically taking everything he had. The wide streets of Victory Road were empty ahead of them, but behind them they filled with swarming, blade-toothed mutts. The Training Center was ahead, sliding glass doors open and waiting.

"There's too many," Emil gasped. "Those doors won't hold them."

"Get there first- then debate," Theon said between breaths and swings of his sword.

The mutts were gaining but the Training Centre was close. The group sprinted past the Cornucopia, and Glace stumbled and screamed as a mutt knocked her knife from her hand and scraped its bladed teeth against her flesh. Quint looked back and grabbed her shoulder, pulling her forward in front of the non-Careers- the mutts, now starting to win against the Careers, surged on unabated. One or two began to gain closer and closer where Theon and Emma could not reach them, towards Glace, towards Cesal; towards him.

The doors ahead were glass. They numbered seven; their number of people able to fight off the mutts had dropped to two. They had to, somehow, get to the top of this Training Center.

Quint, for the first time, was certain death was here for him. Even when he had last been chased by mutts, that had been for entertainment; this was with the express intent of murder.

Quint ran knowing he was going to die.

Until the screaming started.

Half of them turned and half of them didn't, and they crashed across the threshold in a bloodied heap. Elizabeth and Emma sprung up and slid closed the large glass doors- a mutt bounced off of the doors, shook himself and snarled, then turned and rushed towards the sounds of screaming, back by the Cornucopia. The mutts had swarmed on top of something, bladed teeth ripping into- something, something that was /bleeding.

"Who's that?!" Emil yelped. He turned and turned, looking at the bedraggled group. Elizabeth frowned.

"Is that one of us?"

Quint counted hastily. "There's seven of us here. We're all here."

"Then who's that?" Glace managed to say as she clamped a hand on top of her bleeding arm.

"Does it matter?!" Emil said in horror. "We have to help them, look-"

"We do not have to help them, no more than you 'helped' Anna," Cesal snapped, "We have to take care of our own and go upstairs, now-"

"-What?!"

"This isn't a city hall debate, let's go," Theon said sharply.

"Wait."

Emma was staring with blank eyes at the glass doors, and beyond them to the now blood-streaked Cornucopia. The mutts shifted, yelped; a hand emerged from the pile, more flesh than skin, holding a sword. Emma gasped and stepped back in horror as the mutts ripped at the bloody hand and tore off its fingers. The sword dropped and the mutts resurged upon the body.

"Who is that?" Theon said.

"Ronan. Ronan Horne." Emma's voice was dry and cracking.

They stood then in silence. Ronan Horne, the final Career. Ronan Horne, the last true tribute in the Games. He could have won- he could have lived.

And now the Gamemakers, afraid and malicious, had ripped him apart. Blood splattered against the Cornucopia. Ronan's screams began to become gutteral howls.

"We have to get up there," Glace managed as she staggered to her feet. Blood dripped from her damaged arm and she gripped the lacerated flesh a little tighter, wincing. "He died so we can live."

"He probably doesn't see it that way," Emma said tightly as the howls began to stutter to a halt. "Given that he's still alive."

"Not for long, and the mutts are going to get bored," Glace snapped. "Push it down. He's as good as dead, but we can live instead. His death means nothing if we waste the opportunity he left us." Without a word she took the stairs, and Quint followed closely behind.

Emma was the last to tear her eyes from what remained of Ronan Horne.

And then she followed the group up the stairs in a sprint.

They didn't have the energy left to sprint, and now that the howls of the mutts were distant they had started taking the stairs at a light jog instead. Glace had trained for endurance, but she had never been the natural physical powerhouses of Theon and Emma's like, and coupling this with the throbbing pain of her lacerated arm, she was beginning to flag.

Two things and two things only kept her going- the thought of escape, and the eyes of thousands of cameras watching them ascend.

Emil came up beside her as she dropped behind the Careers; he rustled through his backpack and pulled out some bandages. Glace hesitated, unwilling to trust, but eventually grabbed the bandages away as Emil took the hesitation for an invitation to wrap her arm himself. She pulled the wrappings tight against her arm, blood dripping onto the carpet beneath their feet as they climbed. Her arm was in agony, and bleeding profusely, but it was not a problem for now- their priority was the hatch at the top of the Training Center.

But the thousands of eyes watching them knew that too.

Seneca watched them climb with dull fury.

"We killed none of them. A hundred mutts and the only person we killed was Ronan." He bit his lip. "If we don't get these guys, we're going to be killed."

"Or worse."

"Don't talk to me about the Re-Education Bureau, Lex, not /now, god."

"Fine." Lexus sifted through camera feeds, tracking the tributes as they climbed. "So what now?"

Seneca frowned. "What is the Capitol seeing right now?"

"Uh-" Lexus flicked through screens. "-Recaps."

"Start recording this. Put it on an hour delay for release."

Lexus blinked. "What?"

Seneca turned to him. "Either we get them or we don't. If we get them, we can cancel the broadcast, no big deal. But if we don't, and if they kill us- or worse- then they're going to try and blame it all on us. And then we show the Capitol that we weren't to blame for our deaths."

Lexus inhaled sharply. "They're going to know what happened here was rebellion- all of Panem."

"Only if we can't catch them."

"So stop rebellion or encourage it? On whether or not we can kill some kids?"

"Sound like a plan?"

Lexus looked at Seneca thoughtfully.

"You know, that would kind of make us rebels."

"Oh, no kidding."

Lexus rolled his eyes, brushed back his silver-dyed hair, and hovered his fingers above the control panel.

"Well, I thought Ol' Coriolanus was kind of shit anyway." He said, his voice shaking slightly even as he laughed it off. "Here goes."

The record button was pressed. The two of them shared glances of mutual fear.

Behind them on the radar, several large red dots began to advance upon the arena from hundred of miles away.

The stairs ran out, and they stepped into the luxurious replica of the District Twelve penthouse.

"You had all of this?" Cesal said to Emil vaguely. "All District Eight got was an en-suite."

"Only an en-suite? Wow, you were slumming it," Emil quipped back.

They were both nervous, Emil knew. The stairs were gone and still they hadn't reached the top of the Training Center- the vague promise of escape lay in the blood-streaked hands of Glace Gratton having told them the truth. There was still a possibility that Glace was lying- that this whole thing had been some ploy to win.

Glace walked to the elevator doors of the penthouse.

"What, you want to call the elevator now?" Cesal said. "If you're trusting enough of the Gamemakers to take it, why'd we take all those stairs?"

"Shut up and help me open this," Glace snapped, more with pain than any real aggression. Still, Cesal bristled slightly as he crossed the room to slide open one door as she slid open the other.

"Now what?" Elizabeth asked.

"Now we climb," Glace said. She winced as she flexed her arm. "There's an extra floor the elevator can go to, but the stairs don't- that's the floor we need to be in. So we have to climb up the elevator wires."

The group all looked into the dark expanse of the elevator shaft. Emil couldn't even see the bottom for the dark and length.

"You know," Cesal sighed, "After all of this, I'm going to think the rebels in the Dark Days never did /shit. Let's see them shimmy up a wire fourty floors up."

"Let's see you do it first," Theon quipped. Cesal seemed almost taken aback by the joke coming not from Emil but from a Career, but recovered quickly.

"Alright," he said, shaking out his limbs and preening slightly for the group, "Let's see you do this, Career."

Cesal hesitantly leaned out into the elevator shaft, stretching out and testing his grip on the wire- he was only about 5"5', and was at full stretch to even wrap his fingers around it.

"Ces, you good?" Emil said with a frown.

"Fine," Cesal said with a strained voice. Quint spoke up hesitantly from the back of the group.

"Maybe someone else should go first-"

"Maybe you shouldn't have stabbed me," Cesal snapped back, which was maybe slightly low, but Emil would be the last one to complain about dealing out low blows to Quint Barkwater. Cesal poised himself on the edge of the floor, then leaned as far out as possible, gripped the wire with both hands, and pulled himself up onto it, wrapping his legs around it as he did.

"Yeah!" He said with a grin, shimmying up it slightly. "Eight power!" He disappeared slightly into the murk of the elevator shaft. "I'd like to see you do that, Career."

Theon looked up at Cesal. He looked around at the group. He grinned at Elizabeth.

He reached out, grabbed the wire without having to stretch at all, and lifted himself up onto it with just his arms like he was just stepping out onto a platform. Cesal and Emil stared as Theon casually climbed up the wire.

"Want to do some acrobatics?" Theon said, sounding for everything as if he wasn't pulling himself up a metal wire with nothing less than his upper body strength.

Elizabeth sighed. "Okay, guys, I'd let the dick-measuring contest continue, but-"

She leapt out onto the wire, grabbing it with one hand and turning a complete circle around it before grabbing it with the other hand and pulling herself up on it. She wrapped her legs around it, took away her hands and leant back so as to look up the wire at Theon and Cesal. She smirked.

"I win."

Cesal and Theon's jaws had dropped loose. Emil rolled his eyes.

"Yeah, like that wasn't a dick-measuring contest," he sighed, tentatively leaning forward and grabbing the wire. "Just start climbing."

The group slowly all pulled themselves up and onto the wire, following Cesal as he shimmied up the metal elevator shaft. The wire was twisted steel, not meant for climbing, and shards of steel worked their way into Emil's hands as he slid them up the wire. Still, he wasn't the one having the most problems- Glace, below him with her injured arm, seemed to be in significant pain. Emil looked down again at her, checking she was still okay.

That's when he saw it, and the rumbling started around them as he began to speak.

"Guys," he said nervously. "Is that the elevator?"

Emma and Glace followed his gaze below him. Glace made a pained gasp of fury.

"Climb faster."

Emil looked up- Cesal had frozen on the wire as it began to shudder. Something silver was swimming into view beneath them.

"Ces, climb. Now." Cesal blinked, licked his lips, and didn't move.

And this was when the fear, and the pain, and the sheer adrenaline of everything he had done, caught up with Emil.

"CESAL NESBIN," he yelled with a fury he had never thought he was capable of, "START CLIMBING, RIGHT FUCKING NOW."

Cesal's eyes widened, he took a shaky intake of breath, and the group began to climb faster than before as the echo chamber of the elevator shaft roared with engines. The wire was shaking under Emil's hands- other wires around them were beginning to move up or down, and their wire, too, began to move up. Beneath them something silver was moving upwards, faster and faster.

"I've got the doors!" Cesal called down at them as the group stalled to a halt on the wire.

"Open them, now!" Glace yelled.

"Yeah, thanks, princess, I did get that concept!" Cesal yelled back, leaning out with one hand towards the door. He placed one foot on the lip of the elevator shaft, pulling at a door. It opened excruciatingly slowly, spilling light into the darkness of the elevator shaft. Below them, an elevator was rumbling upwards.

"Cesal," Emma said warningly from her place on the wire just below Emil, "Better hurry it up."

"Not helping," Cesal growled as the elevator door opened enough for someone to get through. "Okay, here goes-"

He leant back on the wire, then launched himself forward into the light. A swear and a groan.

"Okay, let's go!" Cesal called from the top floor of the arena.

The tributes began to shuffle up the wire that was moving upwards as they were, faster and faster and beginning to outpace them. First Theon, then Elizabeth- by the time Emil jumped through the gap, it had been a matter of just jumping as the wire pulled him upwards. Emma sprawled out on the ground beside him. The elevator was roaring, the engines just above them growling in response. Glace jumped; but not far enough. She slammed against the side of the elevator shaft, grabbing onto the ground of the top floor with her injured arm and crying out in pain, sliding back towards the shaft. Emil and Emma surged forward and started to drag her up- she gasped, grabbing onto them.

"Come on, come on-" Emma said sharply. "We need to get you clear, give us a little help, come on-"

Glace, perhaps urged on by Emma and perhaps urged on by fear, kicked out and against the elevator shaft with her legs, wheeling herself up against the ground and into Emma and Emil. The group sprawled onto the ground as the elevator slowed to a halt beside them.

They were finally there- the top of the arena. The exit. Their escape.

Emil looked up as the elevator halted, its doors open, beside them.

And he gasped.

Hello.

Tomorrow morning, 0700 GMT, I am going to release the final chapter of Jacquerie.

I can't tell you how scared and excited this makes me. Five thousand-odd hits, a hundred-odd reviews- I expected a quarter of that at most. I know it's not a lot in relation to other HG fics, but it really means a lot to me to know how many people have read this, have reviewed this, have enjoyed this. It's been a fun six months building this little Games.

But tomorrow, the Games shall end.

But until then, and as ever-

Thank you for reading this far.

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