"Hurry up," JJ urged as she dropped an armload of logs beside Blackwolf where he was placing them with surgical precision to form a carefully constructed pyramid. He'd instructed them which woods would burn the hottest since they only had a short time to heat the surrounding air.
"Are you sure this is what we're supposed to do?" Will asked, pausing to wipe the sweat from his brow with his sleeve. "If we're wrong and the deadline passes..."
She shushed him with a gesture of her hand, then tossed him a potato. "You tell me what else this is supposed to mean."
"That we're hungry," he shrugged, giving her a cheeky grin.
She raised an unimpressed eyebrow and snatched the potato out of his hand. "Then they would've sent us a number we can distribute between the five of us equally. Now shut up before we get into trouble."
Derek gave them both a quizzical look, handing his collected tree bark with which to start the fire to Blackwolf. "Don't you think the fire is big enough already? I mean, they're just potatoes...we're not cooking a turkey dinner or anything."
He'd expected the comment to elicit a laugh or at least a smile, but it got no reaction other than getting him shoved back in the direction of the trees and a command to collect some more tinder.
He was on the edge of the clearing when a sudden thought caused him to turn back, frowning. "What about Emily? We're going to find her, right?"
Blackwolf was instantly distracted from his task. "She's Capitol. She is why we're here right now and she is what we're fighting..."
Derek didn't let him finish before he tackled headlong into Blackwolf and landed several punches. Taken aback, it took Blackwolf several moments before he could recover from his shock enough to fight back.
"Don't you talk about her like that!" Derek hiss from between gritted teeth. "You don't know her! Just because she's from the Capitol doesn't mean she's anything like them!" Blood was flowing copiously from Blackwolf's nose at this point, though he had managed to land a few punches of his own and Derek's eye was already nearly swollen shut.
JJ was shrieking at them to stop, but Derek was too busy seeing red. Clyde and Will physically had to pull him off of Blackwolf before too much damage could be done.
Despite Emily's continued insistence that he leave her to die, Ian found himself unable to leave her. He'd known for days that he was letting himself get too close to her, despite his determination to remain impervious to her charm.
Now, he was about to pay for his weakness, apparently, as an alarm sounded from seemingly all around and he watched disbelievingly as a hummingbird jet appeared in the sky above them. The world around changed dramatically as what had previously only been blank sky became a series of other mountain peaks as far as the eye could see.
He was confused, looking about for an explanation when Emily leapt up and shot him an accusing glare. "What the hell did you do!?" she demanded, "Do you know what they do to people who piss off the Capitol?"
Before he could answer a crowd of a half dozen or so tributes came flat-out sprinting towards them and Ian immediately felt his protective instinct kick in. Without a word, he attempted to grab Emily and sling her over his shoulder the way he had on previous occasions and head for the forest to hide. He may have been strong and skilled with a weapon, not to mention the favourite to win, but he knew his chances of successfully fighting off that many opponents at once were slim at best; he needed to get the two of them to safety until he had made sense of exactly what was happening right now.
Emily apparently had other ideas, though. "What are you doing!?" she shrieked, fighting against his grip on her. "Put me down! What's going on?"
Her tirade was interrupted by someone calling her name, causing her to stop fighting, filled with disbelief. The owner of that voice was dead. She was sure of it. Ian had told her so.
She couldn't help it – she called back. "Derek? Derek, what's happening?"
His voice increased in urgency. "Emily! Stay there, we're getting out of here!"
She fought harder against Ian's arms around her. "We're getting out of here," she whispered, somewhere between a question of disbelief and a relieved sigh.
He was still sure it was a trick, refusing to let her go lest they reach her and carry her out of his reach, beyond his ability to protect her, where his promise to take care of her would be broken. But anything further he might have done was interrupted when a current shot through the water of the arena and the one foot he had in the river was immediately sent into spastic convulsions, causing him to fall to the ground and drop Emily headlong into the dirt.
"Run," he strangled out as the convulsions travelled up the length of his body, "Emily, go..."
But she wasn't listening. "They're going to save us, Ian," she insisted, pulling him out of the water, refusing to release her grip on his hand.
There was a ladder hovering somewhere nearby and she was sure that if she could just get ahold of it, everything would finally be alright. The tributes that had been running towards them had all reached the ladder and were climbing towards the jet. Derek's voice was shouting at her, urging her to save herself, straining to be heard over the thrum of the jet engines.
The last thing she remembered before losing consciousness was the feeling of a wooden rung under the fingers of one hand and the sweaty palm of her other hand sliding against Ian's as she fought determinedly to save them both.