Hi everyone! Just here to say that there is a change of POVS in this section...(It's labeled). But this starts off as Lottie.

The Girl. Who was she, a tribute? She had to be, there was nobody else in here, after all.

I stood there for a moment, completely silent. Silently, the birds stood and watched, as if Carla's death had forced them into silence. Micah was still slung over the dead girls unmoving body, his hand still clutching her lifeless hand. He looked at her with such intensity, as if he just waited long enough, he stare alone could bring her back to life.

Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Her long, brown hair that had seemed so beautiful before was now caked with blood.

Micah was bent over, facing away from me, completely vulnerable. I could kill him, I could kill him easily. My hand reached for my spear, which was with my pack on the ground. However, I stopped it. Why was it so much easier to kill a fish than a human being? Possibly because we can't identify with a fish. As for as we need to know, fish are not like us at all. Fish are food. Never once in all my years of fishing did I think that is was wrong or inhumane. You don't go to jail for murdering a fish, you go to jail for murdering humans.

Except for here.

I shuddered. Micah was still absorbed over Carla's dead body. Before he had time to reach a raging point and attack me, I picked up my bag and slung it over my shoulder, and placed my spear in my hand. There was a small path at the other end of the clearing…I could follow that, and then just maybe try to find the girl Micah was talking about. The girl who had saved me.

If I could find her, which honestly seemed unlikely. Tracking the path of a fish was easy for me, I knew how they moved, how they reacted, and I was always one step ahead of them. However, I knew nothing of this girl. I didn't know how she walked, traveled, or where she might spend the night. Micah hadn't even given me a physical description so I could pinpoint which tribute it was. Over the days in training, I could match each tribute to district, and a few to name.

I contemplated asking Micah what The Girl looked like, but before I had a chance to, I saw a figure at the edge of the clearing, right over Micah's head.

Beau. I recognized his bleach-blond hair and large muscles, along with the white shirt and tan pants he had worn into the arena. With his right hand, he was holding onto the strap of his brown knapsack. He was armed too, with a knife within throwing distance of me and Micah.

And he was prepared to throw.

"Micah!" I yelled, trying to warn him of the attack. Right as Micah looked up my spear fell out of my hand. It was leveled incorrectly and fell backward. I leaned down to pick it up. I grabbed the spear swiftly and threw it with horrible aim, in a desperate attempt to just do something. Because of this, the spear landed straight in Beau's right shoulder. He took a few steps backward and then toppled over sideways, but I knew I did not kill him. As he fell, I noticed that something was missing.

His knife was gone from his hand.

I looked down to see the knife in Micah's chest. He had fallen sideways. I had been so busy trying to pick up my spear and throw it that I hadn't even noticed that Beau had thrown the knife.

I bent down next to him, clutching his hand as he had done to Carla. Honestly, I wasn't sure why. He wasn't my boyfriend. We didn't know each other. He tried to kill me the other day, for crying out loud. But part of my realized I didn't have another choice. The position of where the knife was lodged, the lack of medical equipment….This kid was going to die.

A kid. Why would I call him that, he was four years older than me at the very least! But that's what he was, as he sat helplessly, the light in his eyes trying to desperately hang on as he bleed and his body failed him.

Yes, he had tried to kill me. But who was I to talk? I had come close to killing him several times…And what choice did either of us have? What choice did any of us have?

I saw as his eyes moved to Carla's, and he was able to make one, barely audible whisper.

"Strong girl…." He breathed, using all of his strength to reach to her with one of his arms.

The light left his eyes, and his arm fell. The cannon must have boomed, but I didn't bother to hear it.

The slight noise in the distance caught me, however. The sound of the hovercraft coming to collect the bodies. Quickly, I stood up. As a last gesture of kindness, I closed both Micah and Carla's eyes. In a haze, I ran off. I had gone too far when I realized I left my spear inside the soldier of a still-alive Beau. It was too late to go back and get it, Ellia and her crew could be there by now. Grudgingly, I squandered on, Beau still hanging in my mind. If nobody came for him, he would surely die from blood loss.

I tried to retract the guilt I felt, the guilt that ate at me from my heart, to my brain, and to my very hands that had thrown what could kill him. But he killed Micah, I thought, trying to convince myself that what I had done was okay. And there were most likely more in his pack. He was going to kill you.

It didn't help though. The sickness stayed with me, and when I heard another cannon, knowing that it was most likely Beau, I threw up behind a tree.

Jewel's POV

Ellia was starting to get antsy.

"He's been gone too long. I should have gone with him, or at the least sent one of you two!"

Beau had gone back to the clearing a while ago to finish off the girl from district twelve. We had heard a canon and presumed it was her, but still he had not returned. Me, Reagan and Ellia were all sitting in the backyard of some random suburban house on some random suburban dead end street.

"Calm down," I said, opening a package of crackers. At this point it was late afternoon. We had wanted to go back into own and get into the other side of "Suburbia Land" (This is what Ellia referred to the arena as) by sunset.

Ellia kicked a rock into a shed. "I'm going back to get him." Ellia's long black hair had been pulled into a ponytail, which she readjusted just about every chance she got. Her yellow eyes, which I thought were fake when I first met her just because of how bright they were, pierced through everyone and everything she looked at. The girl always had a sense of intensity about her. Maybe it was because both her parents and all of her older brothers are peacekeepers.

This was one of the few things I knew about Ellia's personal life, one of the few things she allowed people to know. I knew she was the only girl in a family full of boys. I knew one of her younger brothers used to stick their mother's jewels up his noise (a fact she told me when I introduced myself to her). I knew that at only 16, she was the best out of everyone at the district 2 training facility.

On the counterpoint, she knew plenty of things about me, and about everyone basically. She knew my favorite color is white and that I favor an axe as a weapon (one that was not supplied at the cornucopia, just to my luck). She knows that I'm an only child and that I was the first to volunteer for the games after a twelve year old girl named Shine was chosen.

I guess the more you know about a person, the easier it is to kill them.

As soon as Ellia started to leave, another canon fired in the air. Reagan and I stood up quickly.

Ellia groaned, "Perfect."

We all gathered up our belongings and started walking back to the clearing. An unspoken communication and understanding fell upon all of us: something was wrong with Beau and we all needed to go back.

Soon enough, we saw a hovercraft above us, most likely going to pick up a dead body. At this point we ran, wanting to see what was left of the mess before it was gone.

When we entered the clearing, the first thing we saw was the craft lifting up two bodies from the tree near the pond. The first body was a girl, probably the one that Ellia had hit. The second was a boy I didn't recognize.

We were so distracted by the dead bodies that we didn't see Beau, standing maybe only fifty feet away from us. A spear was sticking out of his shoulder. All three of us ran toward him, me and Reagan with words of concern, Ellia with words of scrutiny.

"What the hell have you done!" she screamed running toward him. "What happened?"

Beau was choking on his own blood, but somehow he was able to talk. "The girl-she was already dead…" he muttered, "Boy and other girl with her...Small…Blonde girl…"

"Charlotte?" Ellia asked.

"I think it's just Lottie," I corrected.

Ellia turned to me, "That's stupid."

"She threw the spear," Beau continued as I crouched down next to him and tried to help or support him in any way that I could. "And then she ran off."

"So she stole our spear," said Ellia, examining the object sticking from Beau's shoulder. She went to grab it.

"Wait," said Reagan, "You're not supposed to remove an object when someone is stabbed; you're supposed to wait for medical professionals to-"

"Does it LOOK like there are any medical professionals around her waiting to help us?" Ellia gestured toward the empty field. She gripped the spear and pulled it out of Beau.

"AHHHHHHH," screamed Beau as Ellia removed the object. "You've already had significant blood loss, and there's high damage down to your shoulder. It doesn't look like we have any choice here."

"What do you mean we don't have any choice?" asked Beau, still wincing and gasping in pain.

"Yeah what do you mean?" I asked, turning sharply to her.

"We don't have the provisions or time to fix him up," She explained coolly. "He'll just slow us down, and we just can't let him sit and wait it out until he dies. Somebody else might come along and he could tell them our plans."

"Excuse me?" I asked, shocked.

"I wouldn't do that-"Beau interjected.

"But we don't know that. I am taking necessary precautions," she said, slinging her bow from around her back and grabbing it. "We can't leave any footsteps behind us, and we can't spend our time trying to fix you. I'm sorry, but you're useless," she explained while picking an arrow from her quiver.

"Ellia, what you are doing is wrong, there are other ways-" I shouted.

"This is the only way! We have to be careful! Just the smallest slip up could cost me-us!" She started to aim her arrow. "He'd be dead soon anyway. I'm just going to speed up the process." She said. "Put him out of his misery."

"Stop trying to justify what you are doing." I yelled back.

She pointed the arrow at me. "I could easily hit you as well. Now shut up and let me speed up nature." She turned and pointed the arrow at Reagan, "And don't you try to do anything either."

Reagan stepped back and looked away.

"Necessary," said Ellia again as she pointed the arrow back at Beau's head. He closed his eyes, trying to prepare himself for what was going to happen. She released the arrow, and the canon boomed around them.

"Necessary."

Lottie's POV

Beau was not on the back of my mind, he was the only thing on my mind. As I walked through the woods and back roads aimlessly, my thoughts were all geared toward him. The fact that he was most likely dead right now. The fact that I had caused it. How I was now left weaponless, not knowing where I was.

My mind was dizzy, and I had a light-headiness that I could not shake. It got to the point where I was stumbling down some street, wishing that Ellia would pop out from the woods and kill me. I found myself out of breath, and my mind kept racing, repeating itself. Images of Beau, what his family must feel like….I wondered if he had siblings, or a girlfriend…My thoughts consumed me, and every bit of sanity I could still cling onto.

I guess I started hallucinating when I reached what was probably a mock high school. The building stood up three floors, near a sports field and a large parking lot. I swore I could see Ellia from one of the windows, waving at me, smiling a sinister smiling, as if she knew something horrible was about to happen to me. I knocked on the window, but it was unbreakable. The doors were bolted shut as well, just like every other building in this fake town. Of course, Ellia wasn't really in there. She was just a figment of my imagination…A trick my own mind played on me.

I continued on a path that went into the woods behind the school. Eventually, it lead to another sports field, where I saw my aunt standing in the middle of it. Her brown hair was pulled back into a bun and she had on a red lipstick. She wore her normal blue pantsuits. Mavi I thought, suddenly reminded of her name. As soon as she saw me, she made a face as if she was disgusted and turned away. I walked on.

Back in the woods, I saw Jewel sitting by a tree. She was sharpening a piece of wood into a point: a makeshift spear. She eyed me keenly. "Keep on going," She whispered, before returning to her work. She was the first to talk to me.

The sun was beginning to see, and the woods were getting darker, and more eerie. I didn't seem to care, still loopy and still seeing things that weren't there.

The path opened up to a park, with a small pond, gazebo, baseball field, and jungle gym. Carla and Micah were swinging on the swings together, happy and smiling. However, the blood from the last time I had seen them had not disappeared. They were as they were when they died: Both covered in blood that matted their hair and made their clothing stick to their skin. They didn't seem to care, or even notice. Horrified, I ran across the field to the woods at the other side.

I ran through the woods until I saw the outline of a recognizable figure. When I got closer, I realized I was seeing Svetlana, my stylist. How long had it been since I saw her? Only a couple of days? I was happy to see her, until I remembered what happened the last time I saw her. The red eyes.

"The Firefly is with you, Lottie Wilson"

Like her movements were aligned with my thoughts, she turned around, her eyes the same bright red from our last encounter. "The Firefly is with you," she said in her accent, "The Firefly is with you Lottie Wilson."

Terrified, I turned around and ran back to where I had come from. The bloody Carla and Micah were better than seeing the woman you trusted turn into something…Something you don't even know is human.

When I got back to the park, Carla and Micah were gone. I could feel my eyelids getting heavier, and my feet dragging on the ground. In a desperate attempt to find somewhere safe, I made my way to the gazebo.

This is where I collapsed, finally, on the banks of another pond. How many freaking ponds can a fake town have? The last thing I felt before falling unconscious were two arms around my back.

And this wasn't a hallucination.