We lay in shadows, the night tumulus around us from howls and moans in the trees beyond.
I hug my pillow tighter to my chest, bite into the skin of my lip until the taste of copper stains my tongue. There will be no sleep tonight, not at the expense of my life or Hebe's or the twins or even Pan's.
Across the space I catch eyes of darkness, of the Underworld which they call the harsher parts of his home. "Are you okay?" he mouths.
"Yes." I mouth back. "Are you?"
He nods, glances down to a sleepy Hestia who has her head rested in his lap and is snoring little girl sniffles. She has a cold, the wetlands at the base of the mountains seeped into her bones and trying to turn her cells to rot.
There was medicine in the cornucopia, a feast fit for Gods. New clothes, new weapons, old faces. The heads of dead tributes hang from spikes in a ring around the meadow, warning guards that if you take a step past them the beasts beyond will tear you apart.
Rule two of the Pantheon: you will remain in the party ring until the morning light.
It's almost as ridiculous as rule one: no killing. You can tell all of the tributes are itching for some blood, some split skin, some dead hearts. From the moment Dionysus said there would be peace, we have all wanted the opposite.
I look to Artemis, swaying under the darkness and ready to doze off, Morpheus threatening her vigil. Apollo is already knocked out, snoring with drool running onto his twin's thigh where he rests his head as if Artemis is his personal pillow, the same way Hestia does with Hades. But there is something inherently intimate about the way Artemis caresses Apollo's hair back from his face, whereas with Hades it is nothing but paternal concern for his baby cousin.
I don't blame the twins for their affections of each other; Mother always said the only people you can trust in this world is your family. I never felt intimate want for Plutus, yet I would have given my life for his had I been able to take his place when he was whipped. But the guards held me down, opened my eyes when I forced them shut and told me to watch, watch what happened to a big-shot nobody field hand boy with a traitorous mouth.
Now memory Plutus' screams mix in with the howls of the animals beyond.
We all looked like scared deer after Dionysus disconnected from the arena intercom, told us to be good and recuperate and make some new allies. "Get to know your fellow tributes," he said, and what I heard was, "Give a soul, a name to the prey so you know how much of a killer you really are."
I bet the audience of the Capital is at home in front of their television screens just licking this up, watching us sweat until the light of dawn when a whole new bloodbath will begin. Some tributes cannot help but sleep, others sit awake like wild wolves ready for the hunt of morn.
Ares leers at me from across the bonfire set by the Gamesmakers as soon as night fell. His eyes shine golden in the light, red at the edges. He isn't aware of the death-glare Hades is sending him, only of my shaking hands and copper mouth and how he would probably like to swallow my blood of his own drawing like he did earlier before I left him with that ugly bruise on his face.
Hephaestus, the lame boy from Tría, was the first to take Dionysus' words at fault. He limped to the cornucopia with an air of carelessness, grabbed a leg of lamb and tore into it with metal teeth. The Demigods followed, and then those from the middle districts as well. Artemis and Apollo dragged Hebe and I along so they could secure new golden bows, and Pan tagged with on trembling instinct.
That's where I ran into Hades again, where he saw the pin sticking to my corset and his eyes went wide. "Where did you get that?" he asked.
"My friend from back home," I answered.
"It's from my republic," he said.
I nodded. "I know."
Nothing else was said between the two of us, silent exchange of words in fleeting glances. You're alive, our eyes said, followed by an unbidden feeling of relief. I can't explain it, I really can't. I just know that since that day he decided to take me at my word I wouldn't hurt Hestia, things have been different for us. We aren't competitors; not until the very moment it matters will we be.
I check on Hebe again, sleeping little girl curled with Pan for warmth under triple-thread tapestries made of the Capital's finest ordered silk. She said that back in her republic it would have taken them three weeks to stitch just a row of that kind of design, and now it's simply a blanket thrown here on the dirty ground about to be soaked in the blood of innocent children used as a blunt tool to show the citizens of Elláda how little they mean to the Capital, ants under their thumb.
It was only when I split from my group, just for a second in sight of a pretty, sparkling scythe plastered at the edge of the cornucopia, that Ares caught me, a slithering serpent with venom in the mouth. Pressed his body into the back of mine and bowed me into the golden horn, teeth sinking into my pulse just a moment. He was excited, evidence pressing into my lower back as he laughed and I trembled.
"I've got you, Énteka," he said, grinding his erection into my backside as I tried not to cry out in panicked violation. "In the morning you're going to die, but first I think me and you are going to have a little fun." He was circling his hips into me suggestively and I thought I could kill him right there if not for the damned rules, that I could tear out his throat with my teeth the way he'd mocked with me.
"I hope your actions support your mouth," I said to him, did not let my voice break. "Otherwise I'll be the one slitting your throat, Dyo."
I slammed my head back into his nose then, because while Dionysus said there could be no killing, he'd hinted a bit of violence wasn't bad. And Ares had bitten deep enough to draw blood; I wasn't about to not repay the favor.
He howled.
I walked away even as he clutched his pretty golden mouth where the lip had split and his pretty golden nose where the cartilage had crunched to my satisfactory, pretty no more even as he spit curses after me. It was Artemis who saw the blood on my neck first, held up a vial of medicine she'd just used half of on Apollo's stab wound. There was just a scar on his skin now, like there had never been a wound at all. The medicine did the same for my neck, but I know Hades saw the red before it was completely gone.
It's the reason he looks at me in concern now.
There's another girl awake too, the tribute from Enás named Hera who glares at her partner, Zeus, with malice and a secret want. She pays no attention to the rest of us, doesn't see the point and doesn't care, this porcelain and steel skinned woman-girl with a name fit for a queen.
See, I know all the names now. Dionysus came back on over the intercom and told us to form a circle, say our name and a little bit about ourselves. While most idealized it as a stunt to draw the attentions of sponsors, I took it for what it really was: the equivalent of madness. Of control. State your name, your story for the record. The Capital will wipe it away with the flick of a wrist, with sacrificial killers. We mean that little to them, pawns.
Because the Victors of these games are not the Gods here, but President Kronus and all his little followers. They are the ones that decide life or death, decide fate. They sit on their thrones and deem who is worthy of life and who isn't. But I'm willing to bet they all bleed like us, that if I could stick in a knife in them, that even they, the Gods would die. Because Gods are just men in spoils; deities are mortals with a spin.
We use the word God to give meaning to things we can't otherwise give meaning to. Because surely if you are almighty then even killing innocents can't be wrong, can it? Surely if you are almighty then your rule is law. None can oppose it. Why would they when you are ethereal?
The taste of pomegranate is still sweet on my tongue. Hestia skipped the distance between her alliance and mine, a fine line, to give me six tiny seeds. "From me and Hades," she said, and the latter looked at me in awe when I took the forbidden fruit and swallowed each seed with purpose.
Truth, I told him. Not deceit.
And I know it isn't healthy to be thinking of him so much, to be analyzing his movements instead of Ares' or that deranged girl Eris from Exí who supposedly killed neighborhood pets for fun in her republic, insane like her partner before Hades ran him through with a sword. I shouldn't care so much about that, about how Hades saved me in that moment even though Poseidon from Téssera got the kill count for finishing the Exi boy off before he bled out.
And I really shouldn't care about the draw I have towards Hades either, the quirk of his scarred lips or glint in his eyes or the way he's almost so dangerous and unattractive and dark and good that he makes my palms sweat in an abstract want.
"You should just fuck him," Artemis mumbles, and I glance over in alarm to see her propped up against her lush pillows courtesy of Pantheon gift, arms crossed on her chest and one eye cracked open. She has something new on, a draping toga with breastplate and the peacock feathers in her hair replaced for sprigs of amaranth.
"What?" I ask her, blinking.
"Fuck. Him." she reiterates. "We're all gonna die here anyhow, huh? May as well soil the maiden bit and go down kicking."
"He's my competition, Artemis," I say, giving her a look of discipline.
"So am I," she says, not flinching under the weight of her words. "We all are, Kore. But for now we're neutral, as long as we can be before we have to turn on each other and save ourselves. May as well take advantage of it. Lover boy over there wants the Demigods dead before you, so get everything you can out of life before it ends."
"Who says I'm going to die here?" I ask her, half from denial and half from sleep deprivation.
"Fate," she deadpans. "If it isn't in this arena, it will be somewhere else someday. Even the Gods die, Kore. That's how the world works."
I swallow at that, acid in my lungs. Glance to Hades and find him looking on in curiosity, sharpening his new sword on a stone. He's got a helm now too, a color like his cape that makes him invisible with the environment.
"I wouldn't know what to do," I confess to Artemis, because while I remember the way Prometheus touched me when we shared those few kisses before I was sent into the Games to fear for my life, I also remember I didn't really touch him back. Just fists in his shirt, his tongue in my mouth, whispers of my mother's name. How does one have sex like that? "The maiden nickname fits all too well."
"Well," says Artemis, "you kiss him, and then you touch his cock and when he touches your cunt you direct him to the clitoris. And make him keep touching it with his cock in you, because it won't be much fun if he doesn't. Men are always missing things like that bunch of fumbling, bloody idiots, if you ask me. Girls are better about it; they know just where to go. I could show you, if you want?"
"I know where to touch," I tell her, cheeks heating at the idea this could all be presented on a television screen in front of my mother right now my overprotective, sheltering mother who wanted me to take a vow of chastity rather than be dragged away from her by young love.
Too late for that, a voice in the back of my head whispers. You're fighting for your life against other innocent kids; the last thing she's worried about is you falling in love and getting married.
"I could still show you," Artemis smirks. "I bet you taste pretty, like lilies and fresh soil, or maybe lavender and cypress wood."
My blush deepens and I toss a pebble at her head. "You're as insufferable as your brother."
She laughs, glances down at her sleeping twin with a smile that soon turns into a sad coo. "He always comes back, y'know," she says. "We both do. Family's the only real thing you can count on."
"I know," I say to her, eyes itching as I remember the agony etched on Plutus' face as he died, the madness in my mother's eyes when she told me to win before being dragged out of Enteka's temple and I was boarded on a train to death. The last touch of my father before I never saw him again. "I know."
I realize that this place is sure to be a gravesite the moment the animals stop howling.
One breath the forest around us is alive with myths, and in the next everything is silent. Crickets chirp, starjars sing, and I am left gasping for air. Some others still sleep, the fire having burnt out long ago so they burrow under their beds for warmth.
What was the point of any of this? I wonder, keeping weary eye on the horizon as it begins to turn from blue to gray in light. To bring us together in a slaughterhouse? What will it do besides speed up means to an end? I thought they liked a long show, not one over in a week and a half.
Pan is the first of my little group to rouse. He's got sleepy eyes and pale skin and I reach out a dark hand in contrast to give him a canteen to drink from. He sniffs the water for hints of betrayal I flinch a bit at that before taking a cautious sip. And then another, another, one last pull and then he's handing the canteen back.
I close it, fasten it to my pack and pick up my new scythe, steel shining in the embers of the bonfire, chain swinging. There's a touch of pink on the horizon; I stoop to shake Artemis awake and she lashes out with a knife from nowhere, delirious, before registering the spring of my eyes and kicking her twin out of slumber.
They wake Hebe next, and I see Hades across the way quietly tapping Hestia on the shoulder.
Ares rouses his allies with threats to get up or he'll slit their throats, and one by one his yelling wakes the rest of the tributes. It's only when the last sleepy body stands to shake the crick in their neck that the intercom crackles overhead, Dionysus calling out in a cheerful voice.
"Good morning tributes!" he says peachily. "It was such a treat to watch you all interact! Such unity in our republics! But remember, there must always be order as well. That is why I regret to inform you that the Pantheon has now come to a close." The words echo just as the fake sun rises, morning light threatening the kiss of Thanatos, the Death God, the first winner of these Death Games.
Every tribute comes alert at that, raise their weapons with a step to kill or run.
"But before you get too ahead of me!" Dionysus quickly calls in retract. "We must all remember the chaos we once had, that the Capital brought order upon. The animals they brought down."
The howls of the forest begin anew, but this time they don't stop at the meadow's edge. The beasts creep in on fog of nightmares, glowing eyes and snapping jaws. There are lions with scorpion tails and hounds with rotted skin and giants serpents with goats' legs and bulls on near human feet.
"Oh Gods," Artemis whispers next to me.
I think some other tributes say the same, but I am looking at Hades, his panic for Hestia, his panic for me, my panic for us all.
"Tributes," calls Dionysus, a smile in his flighty voice. "Find your order in the chaos!"
And it's then the animals rush us, their howls drowned by our screams, our blood.