Evening Tide

by Fox in the Stars

based on The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

3: Games

As soon as we arrive in the Capitol, I start getting deliveries. Flowers. Candy — my sweet tooth is famous. Less jewelry this time — my tendency to lose it is also becoming famous; Mags caught me throwing an emerald bracelet into the ocean once and made me start giving the things to her.

And I start getting invitations. All of our deliveries have to go through President Snow's office, so the message is clear: if an invitation makes it this far, I have to accept. I don't even have the first night to rest before they start.

I do get breaks for the opening ceremonies and the interviews. When our tributes come out on their chariots, they're painted an "ocean" green-blue like Tully's wig and dusted with glitter, wearing only thin streaks of fake sea foam for modesty. The girl is pretty in her way, but she can't make the look work. Even if the guy can, he doesn't want to; when the overhead screens show his face, he seems to be taking it as a personal insult. I can't help feeling that the reach for sex appeal is my fault. In the interview, Caesar Flickerman mentions me to the guy by name, pointing out that we must have been classmates. He's quite open about wanting to outdo me and makes some obviously-schooled effort to pass raw hatred off as friendly rivalry. I call out "Good luck!" from the balcony, but I think he takes it as a taunt.

When the Games themselves begin, I'm at what the invitation called a "Viewing Party," so I see it on an enormous screen. The arena this year is garishly colorful. The camera pans across it to give the viewers a first look before the tributes are sent in, and the feeling is of a natural environment bizarrely dyed and shaped into something like a playground, the playgrounds for children that they have in the Capitol and occasionally show on television. The Cornucopia rests on a cherry red platform on an island surrounded by bright blue water — but no one is meant to swim out; the surface practically bristles with the marauding fins of swordsharks. The tributes are supposed to make it to shore by crossing an elaborate network of tubes and ladders and climbing ropes, none of them made to be quick or easy or safe.

When the tributes are raised up on their plates, I find our guy. A new shade of anger clouds his face as he looks around. This is no place to try to salvage your district's dignity.

The gong sounds.

The Gamemakers manage to make the initial bloodbath a whole new kind of chaos. The Cornucopia rotates on its platform to confound everyone who approaches it, buying time for others to escape. Some fall into the water and are cut to pieces by the swordsharks; a few are lucky and manage to swim ashore with only minor wounds. More make it across the obstacle course above, but some of them get tangled in the ropes or can't make it quickly enough, and when the Careers snatch weapons from the Cornucopia they start picking them off. Our quiet, serious girl shouts at the others not to throw spears; they'll fall into the water and be gone for good. Our tributes don't need them; both are used to climbing around rigging and make quick work of the stragglers with swords. In the end, District 4 has the most kills and we're ahead in the odds, for whatever that's worth.

In the days that follow, the Games are inescapable. No matter where I go there's a screen tuned to them. At parties, I actually start inveigling my way into "private appointments" in an attempt to get away from them, which occasionally works the way I want it to. More often there's a television in the bedroom, but at least I have something to distract me from it.

In the arena, the artificial sun never sets. The girl from District 3 takes a calculated risk and starts making alliances, building an Outer district pack to take on the Career pack. Her plan takes off when she gets the boy from District 11; he's only thirteen, but he's fiery, a better talker than she is, and she's content to be usurped. This isn't going to be the usual "Careers pick off the rest and then have it out" scheme — it's going to be a war, and our side is better trained and better equipped but outnumbered.

The tension is building when I have a personal stroke of luck: one of my invitations is canceled at the last minute. For the first time, I have a chance to visit the control room.

It's below the Training Center, down a special elevator I've never seen before. When I open the door marked "4," my first impression is of screens and lights and buttons jumping out of the darkness. Mags is sitting in a chair, sees me and waves, but she's busy talking to another mentor over a speaker. She seems to glow almost brighter than the screens, and I realize that the room is actually well-lit, it's just that except for the screens and lights and buttons, everything from the carpet to the ceiling is a nearly sheenless jet black.

While she's talking, I look around. I see a food dispenser like the ones in the tributes' rooms. In one corner there are two beds behind soundproof glass for when the mentors need a rest. Someone's asleep in there now; it must be one of our other victors, but the blankets are pulled over their head so I don't know who it is. Beside the glass case is an alarm button to wake them if something starts to happen, and I'm sure if the Gamemakers issue an alert to all the premium television subscribers, it'll be heard in there, too.

On the screens are several camera feeds of our tributes; the girl is taking a shift sleeping and the guy is on guard duty. There's a map of the arena showing they and their allies' locations, currently all on the Cornucopia island. I find the screen with the sponsorship totals for our tributes and their allies; in normal life, the numbers would be huge, but when I start mentally dividing them by the trivia facts in my old arena's restaurant menu, they don't come out to much. Below that screen is another one featuring categories of items that can be purchased and sent.

I'm curious, but I'm afraid to touch anything.

Mags finally says goodbye to the other mentor and the speaker cuts out with a little pop. "Free?" she asks me.

"For now." I take another chair. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing to do right now."

"How does it work?"

"Now don't you dare worry about all this," she says decidedly.

"Just curious."

She sees me staring at the ordering screen. "That, you hit 'special order;' nevermind the rest. Do better talking to 'em, I find."

I nod. Usually Mags is a woman of few words, but somehow that seems just like her.

I'm still staring at the screen.

"Can play with it if you want. Hard to mess up."

The curiosity is irresistible. I touch the word "food" and it brings up a menu where all the prices are constantly ticking upward. I see bottles of water, crackers, cheese, dried meat, fruit... The things she sent me aren't even listed. I back up and touch "supplies." After scrolling through matches, rope, flashlights, cookpots, I find something Mags sent me: a waterproof backpack. The price is dizzying. I got it the first night, it wouldn't have been that much... But I don't know how much more of this I can take, and I know what I have to do while I still can. Back up, touch "weapons"... I have to scroll down several screens to find the trident, and when I do I nearly fall out of my chair. At least I know I wasn't bought cheaply...

After a few moments of my head swimming, Mags reaches over and flicks at the screen, scrolls it all the way to the bottom. "Hm. Guess they still make 'em." She points to a bolt-action rifle. "My year, gave us each one of them right at the start. Hid the shells around further out."

The number beside the rifle is so huge it isn't even real anymore; I can't believe that much money exists in the world. Even if you could somehow pay it, the rifle would be useless without bullets, and even blanks cost as much as knives. Hollow-points are more than my trident just for one of them.

She's not lying — tapes of her year are so rare the trainers don't have them, but when you see the "However-Many Years of Hunger Games" montage on television, there's always the clip of Mags with her gun at number seven. She's not lying, but I can see what she's doing. And it works. I don't feel quite so bad now.

There's a knock on the door. An Avox comes in and offers me a gilt white envelope on a silver tray.

"Thank you." It's not her fault I've got a new invitation. Or I don't, not exactly. The party I was scheduled to be at tomorrow is starting early. The hostess must have taken the chance to buy up more of my time.

"Got to go?" Mags asks.

"Yeah..."

She pulls me over with her hand on the back of my neck and gives me a kiss, just a dry, motherly peck on the lips. It's my favorite kiss I've had in years.

But she needs a kiss for good luck more than I do, and I put one in the edge of her wispy hair as I get up to go.


My hostess is a woman named Aquilia with metallic gold hair that flares like a bell to hover over her shoulders and blue gems patterned across her face and nails. We have my talent in common, and that evening I'm lounging on a couch with her hearing all about her pleasure boat and the trophies on her wall when someone shouts "Look, look!" and points to the giant television that she'd be remiss as a hostess not to have playing...

Everyone goes silent and turns toward the screen. The war is starting. I'm within arms' reach of a plate of chocolates and start nervously sucking on one.

The Outer pack has been keeping to the woods on the mainland, hiding their numbers and drawing the Careers into their territory. Now, as the hunting party heads back to the island, they're attacked on the beach, outnumbered two-to-one. The guy from District 2 is mobbed first; he kills one attacker and wounds a second, but he can't withstand them all.

It turns out that our quiet, serious girl is like Dana was — just too decent to be a victor. She could be up the ropes in a second, but instead she covers her allies' escape. As the cannon rings out for the guy from 2, someone throws a rock at her head, and it stuns her just long enough for the mob to get hold of her, drag her down, wrench her own sword out of her hand...

I squeeze my eyes shut; my trainer isn't here anymore to tell me not to. The cannon fires. The sweetness on my tongue burns like an accusation.

Aquilia runs her fingers down my arm. "I'm sorry —" Her hand freezes. "What in the world—!?"

I hear everyone in the room making strange sounds. From the television, screams. Another cannon blast. Another.

When I open my eyes, a new army has joined the war. I see flashes of fur — black and white, brown, buff, gray — bloody rodent teeth — rabbits! The Gamemakers have made mutt-rabbits the size of wolves and sent them bounding out of the candy-painted trees into the midst of the Outer pack, and they're ripping tributes apart in broad fake daylight. The surviving Careers are safe on the island and just watch, dumbfounded.

The images are so absurd that someone sitting near the screen starts laughing — and it catches. The next moment everyone around me is laughing as the tributes fight for their lives, run desperately for the trees — one is so panicked she goes splashing into the water and the swordsharks take her and everyone laughs over the screams and the cannons...

I feel sick. The air in the room is choking me. The chocolate is curdling in my stomach. If I don't get out of here I'm going to throw up.

Everyone's eyes are fixed on the screen, giving me an opening to head for the balcony. I want water but I don't think it's fancy enough to be served here and I can't waste time searching. As I cross paths with an Avox carrying a tray of drinks I mutter an apology, grab a random glass and flee.

The air outside is starting to cool in the night, but it still feels summery, especially after the artificial chill inside. If someone follows me out here, I have no excuse for the way I'm shivering.

When my hands have steadied a bit I rinse my mouth, too distracted to even taste the drink before I've swallowed it. A moment later it fills my throat with a sudden burst of heat and fumes. Coughing, I look at what I got: a shallow pool of amber in a crystal orb of a glass, a fine brandy swirling with flakes of real gold just to make sure everyone understands how rare and valuable it is. I don't like it. I don't like anything that strong, not after seeing what alcohol has done to some of the other victors, but right now it's any port in a storm.

I have to calm down and piece my act back together — let it all wash over me, be playful, smile... All I can manage right now is a bitter twist of my lips. At least I'm allowed to smile here, but I'm only allowed to smile.

That Outer district pack is being crushed as a joke. Half of them were dead before I made it out of the room, and I saw the boy from 11 go down, the one who was holding them all together and stoking their courage. I should have known the Gamemakers would never let them get away with it.

All District 4 has left is our guy, the one who wanted so badly to wipe away our shame and they sent him into the most humiliating Games I've ever seen — the memories of my own arena feel like undeserved blessings. This year, the only possible dignity is to win, and I hope he does it. I really hope he does it...

The view over the balcony is beautiful and dizzying. It's a penthouse in the first ring of skyscrapers that looks down on the heart of the Capitol from higher than a hovercraft flies. Below, lights bathe everything in washes of color. I can see the Training Center framed against the Twelve Towers; somewhere below it, Mags is trying to pick up the pieces while I'm standing here drinking gold. Past that, past the Towers, is the homelike glitter of water — the artifical sea, the Capitol's fishbowl, infinitely more extravagant than mine...

The brandy tastes like it's part lamp oil, but there's a vague kind of richness to it, and the heat inside feels good when it settles. Before long I've sipped it dry. Blame that for the swimming head, the dull tingle I can feel all over... I set the glass on the balcony rail from arm's length. I'm dizzy enough as it is; I don't want to get close to the edge and look down at the plunge to the street. But it does occur to me to nudge the glass over and let it fall.

Temptation has almost won out when I hear the door behind me open and close. It's Aquilia. "I wondered where you'd gone," she says, comes over and hands me another drink, this time a flute of champagne. "I'd hate for you to be the one that got away."

"I wondered who'd be first to come looking for me." I've calmed down enough to slip back into character after all, and I smile at her with half-lidded eyes. "I hoped it would be you."

She rests her arm over my shoulder and holds my gaze.

"Can we see your boat from here?" I ask.

"Mm-hm. That one right — there."

I gaze along her pointing arm just for appearances, leaning in as if to match the angle until my cheek is on the edge of touching her skin. "I'd like to see it closer."

"You will."

"When?"

"When would you like to?" she asks me.

I breathe the words to her ear. "How fast can we get there?"

"Let's find out," she replies, and sweeps back inside to announce it to the guests.

I put the champagne on the balcony rail untouched. With a last fleeting chance for temptation, I jab it with one finger; it gives a musical ting and drops out of sight. I don't wait to see if I can hear it hit.


The party decamps to Aquilia's boat, she and I trading first wit and then kisses in the back of a limousine. The vessel that's waiting for us would make the Boatman gnash his teeth with envy, practically a floating penthouse in itself. Another giant screen is quickly set up in the prow so the guests can keep watching the Games, but in a rare stroke of luck, I can't see or hear it from the stern, where the fishing equipment is.

I vow to give my talent my undivided attention, but it's a lie; I don't have undivided attention to give. I just want to spend the night staring at the water, listening to it wash into the wake... It looks and sounds and even smells a bit like home — like how home used to be. The view over the rail here isn't bad. It's even inviting.

What would happen if I fell overboard? Someone would see it. I don't want the attention.

I never have enough privacy for that, but most of the guests keep watching the Games or retire to cabins, so it's quiet. I get to watch the dawn break over the water, first softening blues and then a blaze of pink that throws long, cold shadows...

Aquilia brings breakfast for the two of us, and once she's there I have to start trying. It's almost noon when I actually do bring something in — and of course, it's a swordshark. Not a particularly big one, but by that time the guests are awake and things are apparently quiet in the arena, so they're all there to applaud it.

"I'll have to have it mounted for you, to remember us by," Aquilia says.

"No." I don't want to remember any of this, and after seeing this year's Games I never want to look at a swordshark again. I can't say any of that, but I have the perfect excuse...

"No?" she asks.

"It's just that I've never had it with cream sauce," I tell her.

Everyone likes this idea; it means they'll get a piece, too.

And it means I've done my job for now and can fall asleep in a deck chair. My nightmare can't get to me; I don't manage more than a doze with the sun beating down and people constantly coming around. They heedlessly gossip about one politician's love life and another's suspicious death. Someone laughs recalling the rabbit attack and comments that "maybe Snow got thirsty," as if that smell on his breath is from dead tributes' blood. Others discuss where I rank among fashionable party entertainments and how long the waiting list is to get me. I hear people remarking on my "sleeping" form and feel their fingers playing with my hair or running over my body. Twice someone even steals a kiss. I just let it flow over me and pretend I'm sound asleep.

There's a fully-stocked kitchen right here on the boat, and my swordshark with cream sauce is ready for dinner. People sitting near me are shocked that I've never had the dish before, being from the fishing district. I can't tell them that hardly anyone in District 4 has money to waste on it, that eating one you caught yourself would get anyone but a victor strung up for poaching. I make the excuse that back home, someone else always gets to it first.

After dinner, the party finally breaks up, the guests disembark, and Aquilia takes me back to her penthouse. We left it so suddenly that she never got a chance to show me her "private collection."

She's still waiting to get what she paid for.


As it turns out, there really is a private collection, a wall of jewel-blue aquaria overlooking the foot of her bed. While Aquilia is getting ready, I look it over for anything I can work into my act and flatter her with.

I start with the large tank at the center, and at first in the dim light I don't see anything alive in it, just rocks, fake broken vases... I lean very close, tap on the glass — and in a cranny among the rocks just inches from my face, blue light flashes in luminescent rings.

I freeze and slowly back away. I know what she's got in there, and she has to be insane.

Blue-ringed octopus. No bigger than your hand, but that blue flash means a bite, and one bite from them will kill you. They taught us all in school what happens: first you feel a tingling around your mouth, then paralysis gradually takes hold of your body and your lungs — but it doesn't touch your mind. You'll be wide awake as you lie helpless and slowly suffocate.

Looking around the tank now, I see the circled patches of their skin here, there... She must have a half-dozen of them at least.

I fall to a seat on the foot of her bed and take in the entire collection. Aquilia is completely insane. I see the floating lace of scorpionfish, the banded blades of lionfish, the cone shell you you don't even dare carry in a sack because it can punch through with a fang like a harpoon, a tank that stretches from floor to ceiling to hold the draping tendrils of a man-o'-war... Everything she has here is absurdly poisonous.

One tank appears empty. Out of morbid curiosity I think I'll ask her what she plans to put in it, but then I see what already is in it: the ugly, unobtrusive lump of a stonefish, over a foot long. The spines on its back will sting at a touch — the more pressure, the more poison. The lightest brush is agony. Get a fatal dose and you'll spend your last hours writhing, out of your mind with pain, until your heart can't take it anymore...

I hear her coming in time to mask my disbelief and put on the proper face.

"I'm beginning to feel at home here," I drawl, leaning back. "I see you have a weakness for charming and deadly things from the sea."

She doesn't even bother tying her silky robe shut, just slides in beside me and leans over me, lips hovering on the edge of a kiss. "How could I resist the most charming and deadly of them all?"


Hours later, we've finally lapsed into quiet cuddling.

Aquilia is lying back with me as her cushion, and I'm toying vaguely with her hair. It's not a wig; she went all the way and actually had it gilded... A lock of it slides suddenly through my fingers as she sits up and checks a clock, then retrieves a remote control from the bedside table and turns on a television that folds down from the ceiling.

When I recognize Claudius Templesmith's voice, I slink around between her and the screen and start kissing her again — kissing and pleading. "You're not bored with me already, are you? What could they possibly put on television that's worth tearing yourself away from me?" Maybe she'll choose me instead and turn it off...

But no. "We have to at least see the midnight recap," she says.

She cuddles me while she watches, and I try to bury myself in her body. It's enough to block out the words — and what's worse, the cruelly humorous music — but I can't help hearing the cannon shot. Someone else died today.

Another cannon shot. Her fingers freeze in my hair. "Oh, Love, I'm sorry."

I already know what it means, but I don't want to admit it to myself.

She gently lifts my head back, enough to kiss my forehead. "I'm sorry your district didn't win this year."

I can't do this anymore. It should be safe, she expects me to be upset... I excuse myself with a muttered apology and sink down on the mattress, finally curling up with my back to her.

The guy who called me a whore is dead. In the end, he couldn't wipe away our district's shame. This year, there won't be any proud celebrations back home, any new buoys to protect people from the Line, any dock rats playing with sardine cans. He died fighting for those things while I was here playing around with the people who laughed at him. I didn't even do him the courtesy of watching; I'm only finding out now in this strange woman's bed.

The pain of the truth bleeds through my bones.

He was right about me.

Mags' job is done. Tomorrow we'll be back on the train to District 4, and then I'll go back to hiding in my house, hiding behind Mags, hiding from everyone's looks and whispered words, and they're all right about me. And next month and next year I'll get back on the train to do this all again...

Aquilia has curled up against my shoulders and is tracing a circle in my hair with her finger. Maybe she even likes the idea of comforting me when I'm in pain, but when my face clenches beyond the point of attractiveness, she can't stay silent. "It'll be all right. There's always next year."

"No, I... I knew him when we were younger..."

"He did very well. The odds just weren't in his favor." She says it as if it's supposed to help.

For a few minutes it's back to the silent caresses.

"What should I do to make it better?" she asks at last.

She asks as if she thinks she can make it better. She can't bring the tributes I trained with back to life. She can't change the truth that I can never really go home again, that I'll just be standing in the shallows forever, looking at the place I love and knowing that everyone there despises me. She can't change the fact that I'm being passed around as a plaything and I hate it and it makes me hate myself but it's starting to feel like the more bearable part of my life...

"Hm?" she presses.

I have to say something. I open my eyes and try to think. She at least turned the television off, so I can just watch the shifting net of light-through-water dancing on the wall, hear the hum and bubble of her insane aquarium...

"You'll pay for it as long as you live."

"What will you give me?" I ask her, very quietly.

"Anything," she whispers.

I curl up tighter, play at freezing her out. "You don't mean that."

"I do," she says. "Tell me anything you want."

If I'm too direct, I'm afraid she'll see through me. I reach down to the floor, sit up with my shirt in my hand and throw it the way you'd throw a net, against the side of the octopus tank. Blue rings flash.

She clambers up beside me. "Oh, you don't want one of those!" — but she says it without a drop of concern. Her caring demeanor is falling away, as is any notion of keeping her word. We're haggling now, over the price of her whore.

"I do want one," I insist. "Something charming and deadly... I want something to make me feel like that again. For next year."

"It won't make it to next year. Those things are practically impossible to keep alive."

As a portrait first of myself and then of our district's tributes in general, the likeness becomes more exact. But she doesn't want to give me one.

She gets out of bed, puts the silky robe back on and this time ties it. "What about this one?" She suggests the lionfish. "This one reminds me more of you."

"If that one reminds you of me, it should stay here with you always," I tell her, in a tone I don't think she can argue with. There's no space to make another play for an octopus, so I have to make a second choice, something equally portable and deadly...

"What about him?" I point at the stonefish.

She laughs. "I thought you wanted something charming."

"He is charming. Kind of ugly-cute." I need a better reason. "He reminds me of Mags." That must have been the most horrible thing I could possibly say, and the truth is that I really don't want to be reminded of Mags right now...

But it works. Aquilia can't be jealous of a woman in her seventies. "All right, that one. I'll get him for you in the morning." I can't know if she'll keep her word, but I can't question it.


When she lets me go to sleep, my nightmare is there waiting for me. The water is up to my shoulders; my arms float at my sides. There's a new shadow in the water, swimming faster than the others, bumping against me more aggressively — it's the guy who died today. Even he still doesn't attack me.

I look at the boats in the docks, the lights of the houses on the slope. Home. I'll never see it again with my eyes open.

As I gaze at it, wavelets are coming in toward shore, small ones, but enough for the water to break over my shoulders. I start to shiver when it washes up the nape of my neck — higher than it came at first. Before long it splashes up into my hair, and then comes the wave that doesn't break over my shoulders, because my shoulders are already under. It laps up around my chin...

I wrench myself up. Aquilia is snoring beside me. I stare down at the pillow as if I could stare at the dream itself in disbelief. After three years of having the same nightmare, you'd think I would know what it was about, but only now do I realize.

They don't have to pull me under to have their revenge. It's enough if they just hold me there and wait.

Under my breath, I give the pillow a tragic laugh of understanding and breathe the words to name what's suddenly obvious.

"The evening tide..."

To Be Continued...