I'm pretty psyched guys, my review:chapter ratio is almost 2:1! Just four more reviews to hit that land mark, so please please pretty please help me get there! 3

That first day, I avoided doing anything to show off. I stayed back, in the simpler stations with Ash, Fillie, Hawk, Ty and Dianna. I busied myself with the simple tasks of making arrows, learning healing herbs from poisonous ones, with one eye on whatever task was at hand and one on the other tributes.

The group that was going to develop into the Career pack was fairly obvious. Blaise Donnel of District 1, Maroon Ison and Thalia Mahija of District 2, Maris, Patronelli and Riado of District 4, and a boy from District 8 all grouped together around the sword fighting station. The youngest of them was Thalia, who was 14, but most of them were seventeen and eighteen.

They were good, I'd give them that. Blaise was big, strong, and emotionless. He won round after round of sword fighting by sheer, brute force. His black eyes were blank and they never seemed to blink, which made a pit form deep in my stomach whenever I looked into his face as he fought with the others.

Maroon was fast and had a temper that burned like flames, which made her both a horrid foe but she also made mistakes. She had well-toned arms that snapped out like snakes, and her eyes flickered over the entire training area, taking in every detail. I shivered, wishing that she hadn't had such a wicked temper; I didn't want her as an enemy.

Thalia was younger, with black hair and blue eyes. While Maroon had a fiery temper, Thalia was entirely different; she was calm, calculating, and cold. She didn't have Maroon's speed or toned muscles, but she was cunning and she knew when to strike in the perfect spot.

Patronelli and Raido weren't as smart, fast, or strong, but they worked brilliantly together. I didn't know what their relationship was, because they weren't brother and sister, but they certainly seemed to know each other from before the Games. They worked together like a machine, spinning and slicing, looking in both directions and turning into an unstoppable four-armed beast.

Maris was different than the others. She was the only one who had a different kind of lilt to her step; she had a meaning to her life that the others didn't. The others were there for victory and glory. Maris? Maris was there for one reason alone: revenge. Her father had beaten her repeatedly when she was a child, and she wanted to prove she was worth something. That she was strong and she was brave, that she could win. That meant no friends, only allies; allies who would get her close to the finish line, but that she had no moral obligations to and could turn on in the blink of an eye. She was so eager to prove herself that she made mistakes; she lunged too soon or too late, she stumbled on an overzealous lunge, and so forth.

The boy from 8 was pretty unremarkable. I wasn't sure why he was part of the careers at all; I suppose he would make good bait for them, though. He'd be good at doing the jobs none of the others wanted.

A few other alliances emerged; most of them were within their own districts, but from what I was seeing it was mostly three groups: the Careers, the Delicates, and then us. By "us" I mean Ty, Dianna, Ash, Hawk, Fillie, Wind, Chryssie, Kiki, Thomas and Thray. I didn't like the thought of having so many kids with us; it would make it harder to stay under cover. On the one hand, it would make us more obvious and I would have to watch those kids die. But on the other hand, I couldn't bring myself to turn five kids out of their only possible alliance.

Thomas and Thray were the only two who were old enough for me to turn out if I wanted to and feel no remorse. They didn't stay with us as closely as the kids did; they wandered off frequently, but they would come back and tell me about how cool a certain station was or ask what I thought about their arrowhead or see what the kids were doing.

I didn't want to turn those two out, though; they were quickly showing their worth. Thomas was shy and kind, which made me think that he was also a mild sort of boy who wouldn't last long, but it was soon apparent that this was not the case. If you gave him two knives, he could scale a tree insanely fast and then completely disappear into the boughs. He said it was because he worked in the orchard parts of the farm and he'd play hide-and-go-seek with his brothers when he was younger.

Thray wasn't as physically adept as Thomas, but he was incredibly intelligent. When he had told me he had a perfect memory, he wasn't lying; he knew every single plant and all of its qualities after looking through the index of plants only once, he memorized entire survival books in a handful of minutes, and he could set traps perfectly from memory each and every time. He might not be able to beat me in a fist fight or with swords, but he could lay a trap that I would never see or anticipate and I'd be dead in a matter of seconds.

All in all, I thought between the four of us older ones I stood a much better chance of getting Ash out alive than I did without them. And that was honestly the priority; everything I could do to better Ash's chances meant that I had to take those risks. And if I could get him out of here without him having to kill anyone, so that he wasn't haunted for the rest of his life, then that was all the better. But I wasn't a naive to expect I could make that happen.

The Delicates were the third group, and they had a little less than a dozen people in them. The twins from District 10, Mirabella from District 7, and a handful of other graceful, quiet, strong people seemed to like spending their time together. It was a quiet battle of their wills, constantly raging against one another, but they were so quiet in their interactions it was hard to tell. I wasn't as worried about them as I was about the careers, but a few of them definitely worried me.

And so, naturally, I avoided both the other groups. About fifteen to twenty people weren't in one of the set alliances and so they went around by themselves or in pairs, and if I had to be with a tribute that wasn't in my little alliance, I chose the unaligned rather than the Delicates or the Careers.

The first and the second day passed like that, somewhat awkward and somewhat uncomfortable. But that was alright; it was better than bonding with these people. Having a bond with eight was bad enough, but if I bonded with another forty-some-odd people? I would never be able to get Ash through it.

On the third day, I finally built up the courage to go see what the maze was in the middle. Only a couple of tributes had dared venture inside and they came out bruised and hurting, and unfortunately I couldn't see much of anything that was going on within its depths. The mirrors did do one thing, though; they bounced sounds back through the entrance very well. So we heard lots of screaming.

There was one other thing outside of the maze though that no one could come up with a reason for; a gigantic red zero was glowing out of one of the mirrors. Pretty much everyone ignored it, because it never changed.

I bit my lip, watching the opening. If anyone else started going towards it then I wouldn't. On some level, I was hoping someone would go to the maze just so that I would have an excuse not to, but no one did. I walked towards it slowly and I felt eyes fixed on me, causing a shiver to run down my spine. When I stood in the doorway, I glanced back over my shoulder and saw Ty watching me with an encouraging grin on his face.

I walked in. I walked slowly, looking carefully for anything that might appear; I stepped delicately over the thin wires I saw glistening. The mirrors were disorienting, watching a few thousand versions of myself go through this task from various angles, and it gave me a headache just trying to focus on what was around me.

I paused, taking a deep breath. I forced my mind to settle down and tried to push the stray thoughts away; I pushed thoughts of home and Mom and Dad and Baby Blue and Ash away, I pushed thoughts of the Games and the people outside away, I pushed the thoughts of murder and blood away. I let myself empty until there were only two things in this world: me, and the maze I was in.

I took another step forward, but my foot sank too far. I looked down and saw that the floor tile I had stepped on was farther down than all the others. Confused, I lifted my foot, and a whooshing sound made me spin just in time for a large dart to go flying into my left bicep.

"Shit!" I hissed, staggering to the side. A drop of blood trickled down my arm, and I yanked the dart out, throwing it to the ground. The dart collided with one of the trip wires, and the walls behind me clapped shut, preventing me from returning the way I had come.

I cursed again under my breath, but then I heard something and stood very, very still. I couldn't make it out, but whatever it was was getting louder. I frowned, concentrating, trying to focus.

Footsteps.

My heart leapt into my mouth and I crouched, snatching up the dart from the ground in case I needed a weapon. No one had said what was inside this maze, but it had never crossed my mind that I might end up in combat with someone.

I walked slightly sideways in order to minimize the sound my shoes made on the floor, and I crept for the nearest corner. I tried to steady my breathing, but my heart was demanding more oxygen than I could get while breathing quietly.

Suddenly, the figure that belonged to the footsteps rounded the corner in front of me. It wasn't a "someone", although it looked that way; it was a gigantic, metallic humanoid with a chest as big around as a tire. It stomped towards me, and a small clanking sound came out of its mouth as a loud roar ripped from its metal throat.

I took a step backwards, taken aback. The dart in my hand seemed tiny and harmless in comparison to this metal bloke, but I threw it anyway. It clanged off the metal and fell to the ground with the tip bent. I glanced up at the metallic face again and took another step back, not sure what to do with it. I kept walking backwards, looking over my shoulder to avoid the tripwires I had seen before.

The metallic monster didn't bother avoiding them, and he tripped two at the same time. A series of darts flew into its shoulder, pinging off just like mine had, leaving a dent or two in the metal but not causing any more damage. A set of walls started moving in around me, and I made a quiet, strangled noise; I had no where to go. If I went back, I met the closed walls from the tripwire I had hit. If I went forward, I went straight into the marching metal figure.

I kept retreating back, hoping that maybe I would be able to climb over the mirrored walls and get away. The robot kept following me back into the narrowing abyss, snagging every trip wire it came across. Suddenly, there was a crunching sound, and something that sounded like grinding gears. The walls on either side of me quivered, and the robot was struggling in front of me. The walls had gotten trapped around the tire-sized chest of the robot, squeezing it so tight that it couldn't move.

I stared at it, shaking slightly. I watched it for a while until it stopped moving, and then I waited for my pulse to slow. I shook myself and put one hand on the walls on either side of me, which were just close enough for me to reach properly. I jumped up, using the rubber soles on my boots to hold myself in between the two walls, and then continued scaling up until I was high enough to go over the robot and to the other side. I kicked off of the robot's head, landing and rolling slightly on the other side to minimize the impact.

Now I knew what the screams had been coming from. I realized then that not only had I not screamed, but I wasn't hurt beyond the small cut in my arm. Yet, anyway.

I continued along the narrow passageway, careful to keep an eye out for the occasional wires and the stones that didn't fit into the ground quite right. When I reached the first split in the path, I stood there, uncertain of which direction to go. They were virtually identical, and both curved to the left if I stared down the path long enough. But there was something else different between the two paths that I couldn't quite place. A difference in color, in lighting perhaps.

The difference in color was because of a reflection. On the left path, there was something moving that I could just see reflected in a reflection. My stomach twisted, and I went for the right hand path, moving quickly. I heard a sound from behind me; a buzzing, a thrumming... And I went faster. I turned corner after corner, not even looking behind me to see what the thrumming was coming from. I didn't really want to know.

I heard another sound behind me, a human sound, and I did throw a glance back over my shoulder to see that someone had entered the maze behind me. One of the District Eight boys was yelling, flailing his arms around his head as something swarmed him. Fake tracker-jackers that were leaving what looked like blue paint marks on his arm flew back down the passage they had appeared from, and the boy grimaced after me. I turned and started running faster, taking huge flying leaps instead of steps, hoping to avoid all the tripwires and stones just by sheer luck.

There was another sound ahead and I slid to a stop, accidentally hitting a trip wire and causing the walls behind me to clap closed again, separating me from the District Eight boy. One of the trainers, armored to the teeth in a solid sheet of metal, stepped around the corner. He had a sword in one hand that was dulled and dripping with red paint, and a small gun in the other hand.

I glanced around, but there was no place to go and no where to hide. I crouched, ready to fight, and unsure of what that gun was going to fire. There was no way they would risk injuring one of the tributes seriously before throwing them into the arena, so it obviously didn't fire bullets...

It didn't take long for me to find out. I heard a yell above my head and looked up to see that the boy from Eight had tried to climb over the wall. A lazer coming out of the gun in the trainer's hand was focused on his chest. The boy was completely still, almost as if he couldn't move.

"You're dead," the trainer said calmly. I tackled the trainer to the ground before he could get me as well, kicking the gun out of his hand. "Alright, alright!" he yelled, my fist inches from his face. "You can pass. Your threat is dead. I gotta get the kid and take him out, though." I nodded, got to my feet, and took a few steps away, snatching his gun off the ground.

"What was that?" I asked.

"Your training suits. The fibers will stiffen so you can't move when you're hit with a laser beam, so that if a hit with a real bullet would have been fatal you'd know it," the trainer said, rubbing his shoulder. He grabbed a hold of the boy's ankle and yanked, pulling the kid down into his arms and setting him on his feet. The trainer pulled a small remote from his pocket and pressed it against the boy's suit, and the boy's shoulders sagged. Suddenly, he could move.

"I have to admit," I said, arching an eyebrow, "That's pretty cool."

"You better get moving," he said, scowling. I didn't wait for a response or wait for the trainer to ask for his gun back; instead I just continued on, racing through the passages, hoping I was heading in roughly the right direction.

At every opportunity, I took a right turn, knowing it would get me out eventually. A few other trainers and robots appeared along the way, but I just trained the gun on them and they were frozen stiff, until I ran past.

I saw the light reflected off the mirrors, showing me the outside of the maze. I ran faster and skidded outside of it, blinking up into the lights. I looked back at the maze, taking a deep breath.

The gigantic, glowing, red zero turned into a one.