Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein

Lulu St. Clare

Aged 17

Victor of the First Games.

There are some cruel things in this world. Cruel, evil, horrid things that some can't even begin to imagine.

And no. Its not the Bogeyman.

Some of these things can destroy your life. Scar your mind, never let you forget. They drive you towards the unmentionable. They make you lose sight of who you are.

The Games are one of these things.

The Government say it's a solution. A way to… make peace. So deaths will be 'reduced.'

Ah, yes. Because sending forty-nine kids to die every year just solves everything.

Sometimes, I sit back and wonder how it all came to be. Was a politician just sitting in his bathtub, suddenly crying out 'Eureka!' when it all came to him? Did he run in his bathrobe to the White House to share his ingenious plan? Were there disagreements? Were there debates? Or did everyone just up and decide that killing people to stop killing was how they were going to fight crime rates, no questions asked?

Do they care that over the past five years, 245 children have been taken from their families and killed? Does it bother them?

No. Of course it doesn't. Because in the same five years, crime rates have gone down drastically – everyone's too afraid that their children will be punished for their lawbreaking.

The day our President gave the speech announcing the beginning of the Games, everyone thought it was a joke.

They wished it was a joke.

I still hope it's a joke.

Because if it were? I wouldn't be part of this… this freak show.

They call us Victors. It's a fancy label. It makes us sound like we've won something… But really? We've lost everything.

Everyone was still in a state of shock when the First Games rolled around. They weren't used to the customs, the events, never knowing what was going to happen. Some even half-expected that this would all play out to be a joke after all, that it was all just 'special effects,' and that their children would come home safely.

That, however, was not the case. And it was proven when a little twelve-year-old from Ohio came home in a wooden box, a dent in her skull from where the rock had hit her.

I remember her. She's there in my mind's eye, with her green eyes and blond pigtails, being lifted off her feet as an older boy pounded a stone into her head.

The drugs have taken all my memories. All but those of the Games. I remember everything in such detail – the rainforest that made up the arena. The gong that sounded the beginning of the Games. The looming horn that made the Cornucopia. The beautiful rainforest that was our battlefield. The heat in the day, the cold as the dark fell and the faces of each tribute in the sky at night.

I was but twelve years old. I was scared, young, missing the family I hold no memories of now. I didn't know how to survive. I didn't know anything about weaponry. I only knew how to hide.

The documentaries on the TV show me everything about my old life but I hold no true memories. The people on the screen are purely actors and actresses, payed to replay my life, forcing everyone to see what a Victor truly becomes. That no one really comes home from the Games. And that's true. When I left my hometown in – supposedly – Montana, I never came back.

I hid in the mountains and the trees for the three weeks that were my Games. I stole supplies. I snuck around. I outlasted the others.

I watched them all die.

All the drugs in the world will never rid me from the sound of a scream. They will never erase the sight of a mangled, rotting corpse. They will never take away the knowledge that you have ended the life of an innocent being.

And they will never end the sound of the applause, the trumpets blowing, and pain you feel year after year that all started when they called out: 'Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, the winner of the world's very first Games – Luciana St. Clare!'

Winner. Ha! I won nothing.

I thought it might end there. I thought I had endured enough pain, enough suffering, that any person would ever need for a lifetime. I thought it was all gone. Footage from my files taken of me after the Games shows me that I spent the rest of the year lying on my bed, staring off into space. Sometimes screaming. Sometimes crying. Sometimes attacking people who were once my family in fits of meaningless rage. They show me the footage a lot nowadays, or so they say, because I always seem to forget about it. And when I do see it? I think that the young girl is the most pathetic creature I've ever seen. I thought that this truly was the end for her, that it couldn't get much worse.

But I know the rest of the story from there. And it definitely doesn't stop. Oh, no, it goes on forever. Never ending.

The dinner with the President is another one of my clear memories. I was feeling hollow and empty as I usually did, but the meeting was compulsory. My mother – faceless to me now – dressed me in a pretty purple dress with a white satin ribbon. I hated that dress. I hated dresses. I still do.

And the President? Well, he was hateful anyway. For inflicting this cruel fate upon the children of America. He certainly didn't look that part of a cruel man, with his bulbous figure, white head and laughing blue eyes. But there was a sense of false security in his smile, a hidden meaning in his words, and when he told me that not only would the Games continue but that I was to mentor until the rest of my days. I would have to give tips, give skills and help out the tributes year after year until my death. No, I did not have to mentor all 50 – instead, family's of the tributes or people that supported them could buy time slots and sessions with me for their children.

That night, I lost it. That was the day I became the person I am now – I picked up a cigarette. A bottle, a bag of pills. And I took whatever would take the pain away.

I wasn't even thirteen yet.

I tried to kill myself the day the second Games were announced. Of course, I'd tried before, but I suppose the President suspected this would happen, that depression would get the better of me. He had me constantly being watched by government officials. They'd take away the kitchen knife I'd try to slit my wrists with. They'd cut down the ropes I would twist around my neck. They'd come in with oxygen masks when I tried to suffocate myself.

Why didn't they just let me die?

I used to ask myself the question day by day, even though I knew the answer all along. I just didn't want to face the brutal truth.

I was a martyr to the Games. I was a symbol that once your children were taken, they would never really, truly come back. It was the President's way of reminding the people what would happen to their children: die, or turn out like the famous Lulu St. Clare.

So they let me take my drugs. Let me take my anti-depressants. It was rather contradictory, really, that they were trying to put a halt to crime yet they allowed me access to illegal drugs. But the whole thing was contradictory anyway.

The day the second Games were announced, I knew about my mentoring job that was to come… and I decided to have one more try. I thought about overdosing. I figured that no one would notice – that the officials would just think 'Ah, just Lulu taking her pills again.'

But as soon as my eyes fluttered shut, they were onto me.

All I remember from that day was waking up in a white hospital room surrounded by nurses and doctors… and his face. His round, angry face, staring down at me like I was a trapped animal.

Because that's exactly what the President saw me as.

Nine stomach pumps and a hundred and twenty-three drugs later, I met Rose Eveleth. It was my second day of mentoring sessions and I'd been injecting God-knows-what into God-knows-where. The first day had been pure hell – telling scared kids how to survive in the wilderness, and I intended to drug myself out of it the rest of the way through.

The day went by in a fuzz, which was good. Faces blurred, voices meshed, and I just felt unworried, disconnected from my senses.

That was until, of course, Rose walked through the door.

She was only fourteen – one year my senior – but the way she composed herself, the way she looked… she could have easily been seventeen. With her honey blond hair and blue-green eyes, a sharp needle of envy stabbed through my foggy haven. She had everything I had lost – Beauty. A family who loved her. Friends. Potential. A life.

Well. She didn't for much longer, anyway.

The second she laid those ocean-blue orbs on me, I could see the pity reflected in them, sharp and accusing. And I didn't blame her. I was nothing but a small, dark-haired child lying on the floor, glassy-eyed and empty. She looked at me just like everyone else did. And I treated her just like I did everyone else. Not purposely, of course. Her questions came out like the signal of a broken radio and I simply sat there, staring off into the middle-distance.

Footage from our session in Rose's files show that she had a tantrum, stamping her foot and clapping her hands in front of my expressionless face, but I don't remember living it, or much less or being there.

Go figure.

Every one of my tributes that year went into the arena unequipped. My sessions with them were meaningless wastes of time, for they had learned nothing but the joys of being a Victor.

It was no secret either that the mentoring sessions were a bust. Everyone seemed to know and think it was a waste of money and time.

This, of course, did not go down well with the President. If he wanted to fund the Games, keep the people living in fear, he would need the cash. And mentoring sessions contributed to his plans. So if people didn't want to buy lessons with the useless Lulu St. Clare, then where would I get his money from?

So he punished me.

The day of the bloodbath saw another stomach pump to rid my body of the drugs. The second I was clear, clean and sober, everything came rushing back. Screams. Blood. Guts. Betrayal. Words. Footsteps. Terror.

I yelled out. Begged for drugs, morphine, alcohol, anything. Just crying out for something to get the horrible memories from my brain.

They didn't give me anything. No. Instead, they carted me, sobbing and screaming, to the Capitolite House.

The Capitolite House is hardly a house, more of an endless skyscraper, all metal and windows. It lies in the centre of a small city in Colorado otherwise known as the Capitol, built solely for the purpose of the Games. The board of the Games, the managers, the publicists, the stylists, the designers, the government… All those who have ties to the Games reside in the Capitol.

The kids included.

The Capitolite House is a sort of homing for the tributes in the pre-Games preparations. They are permitted three days of weapon training in the basement of the building. They are interviewed on national television in the stadium beside it.

It's where most will spend their final days.

Mentors too are to live in the Capitolite House during the Games in our own quarters – but we are not to permanently live there. Why would we, anyway? We're rich, millionaires from winning. We could live anywhere we wanted as long as we don't leave the country – not that we could, anyway. You won't find a single airport in the United States.

The thing is… The Capitolite House is the only home I've known: memories of the little shack in Yellowstone Park that I supposedly lived in do not exist in my mind. They're gone. And while I hate the Capitolite House, I don't have anywhere else. Whenever the Games are not in session or being planned… well, I don't even know about half the things I do. I assume I drift from motel to motel until the Games come around and either Jared or Ryder come and find me.

I think that I was already close to passing out by the time they'd locked me into a room with nothing but a television set and two government officials. My tattered clothes were soaked in vomit, my eyes wide with terror, and everything so horribly clear and real. The screams I'd heard from my own Games bounced around my head, visions of the blood and gore, and a soft, motherly voice in the background I couldn't put a name or face to.

The officials did nothing. Sure, they looked sympathetic to me, a child, rocking on the floor as she screamed in fright of her memories, so poignantly real and clear before her. They even looked regretful as someone over their radios ordered them to hold me in front of the television set.

"Hold still," one told me – the kinder of the two – as his gloved hands gripped my waist, but I writhed and kicked, trying to squirm and wriggle away from the horrible sight before me on the screen.

Children I had spoken to only mere hours before dropped to the ground, dead, their lives bleeding out of them. Many of still alive had already begun to lose their minds, only a few seconds into the Games, running around in fear or anger or bloodlust.

I gaped at the screen, half expecting to see a young girl with dark hair running for the mountains to hide.

But, no. No matter how similar they were, they weren't my Games. Even though I felt the same horror as I did then.

That year, Rose came out on top. That fact became quite clear as soon as the gong sounded, when she ran to a looming hunk of meat, whispering words in his ear that convinced him to protect her for the next few days – until she slit his throat in the dead of night.

Rose Eveleth was manipulative. I hadn't seen that when I met her. She befriended all the girl tributes, seduced all the males. And then she would kill them in the dead of night, slicing open their necks into horrible, bloody smiles.

Even when it came down to her and a beastly southern boy who had lost his mind in the early days, she still obviously had the crown in the bag. Despite the fact her seduction tricks didn't work, or that he tried to inch down her pants and rape her… It was clear she had something up her sleeve. So when she broke his neck in the struggle, no one was particularly surprised that the blonde-haired beauty wore the badge of a Victor.

To say that Rose and I did not get along would be the understatement of the century. While I was glad to have another mentor by my side, to have some weight lifted from my shoulders, Rose always made me feel like scum from her snarky comments to the way she'd cut me down with her eyes.

Not that it really mattered. After all her interviews after the Games, she moved out of the Capitolite House before she got kicked out and bought a place up in her home state of California. I just kept drifting around absentmindedly, and before I knew it, I wound up back in that dreaded room with that dreaded girl and a whole new line of kids to be slaughtered.

The mentor sessions drifted away as hazily and foggily as last year. When it became clear that Rose would just brush off the girls and make out with the boys, not mentor them, everything just fell into routine again. Me, sitting there and doing whatever crazy thing the drugs drove me to, and Rose, either telling some poor young girl to piss off or groping a teenage boy.

Jared Klerk was eighteen at the time. When I met him, all he was to me was a fuzzy silhouette: a dark figure with huge arms and a deep, husky voice that was on the couch with fifteen-year-old Rose within seconds. Not that I remember any of that, but footage from Jared's file shows his mentor session. It looks like I was high on meth that day, because the video shows me sitting in the corner with a freakish smile on my face as I stared at a dot on the wall, having random spasms of movement every now and then.

There's a cloudy memory of me when I was watching the tributes training. My drug supply was low so I'd been wandering around with a bottle of vodka all day, which is probably why I can remember bits and parts of that day.

Most kids didn't really train. They had no experience, so what was the point? To learn to shoot an arrow, you'd need years of experience. To fence, you needed the build and the balance. To know edible foods, you needed to have had it drilled in your brain for a long time.

Jared had been standing in the middle of the room, talking to two other boys – one younger and one about his age. By his tense shoulders and clenched fists, I had guessed it wasn't a particularly friendly conversation – especially when Jared's knuckles connected with the younger boy's jaw.

He was quick-tempered, that Jared, with a certain dislike for city kids. That explained a lot – the two boys he was talking to were from Miami and the other from Boston.

There's a dead end for me after that first punch. All that's left of that are snippets: a bloodied nose, an all-out brawl, one of them being pinned to the floor.

But the strongest memory of that day is of Jared, standing up, position tense and ready to fight as his head whipped around and his eyes connected with mine.

I don't even know if he remembers that, or if it ever really happened. But in that moment, I saw the confident, cocky farm boy for what he was – scared. Shocked. Frightened. Just like everyone else in that room.

But after that, all there is for me is darkness.

When the third Games rolled around, they took away my drugs but spared me (minimal) alcohol. Once again, I was trapped in a room, forced in front of the television set, yet this time around it was Rose that needed to be held there. No, she wasn't writhing and squirming and screaming, but her eyes were haunted as the gong sounded, shiny with tears and fright. I was having difficulties myself: the memories were still hazy, but they were clearer, and there was the distinct ringing of a cry in my ear of a little boy that was dissected in my own Games.

But it was easier than the previous year. Even Rose at some point decided she needed comforting and wrapped her arms around me, clinging to my smaller, hollow body.

That time around, I tried to focus on watching one particular tribute. It was an older girl – Kathleen was her name – with black plaits and big green eyes. I chose her because… well I don't even know. I don't even think I had a mentor session with her. Maybe it was because she took in all the younger kids? Saved them? Tried to feed them?

Died for them?

Maybe. Possibly. I'm not sure. She didn't make it that far, anyway.

I'll tell you who did go far. Jared. That moment in the training centre changed him, because when the gong sounded, he charged at the two city boys in a rage and snapped both their necks with his bare hands.

That's how he went about the whole Games. He'd hunt down the kids who pissed him off, setting traps with ropes and running around with his knives, throwing tantrums whenever he couldn't get to someone. A younger girl, hanging upside-down in a tree too far away, taunting him. A black-skinned boy from Wisconsin with an axe waving in his face.

I guess that it eventually went to his head like it did for me, because even when they crowned him winner, he came back a changed man. Black spots of anger and rage formed within him, causing him to lose it over the silliest things. At his Victory dinner, he almost punched Rose's lights out because she took the last chicken wing. Not that that turned her off of him, though. Rose was thrilled to have a male Victor as part of our… 'group.' She fawned over him, chasing him like a lost puppy and throwing herself all over him every chance she could, and hey, he loved the adoration, but he didn't respect her in the slightest, sometimes struck her or shouted at her.

Jared and I never really had much of a connection. I got along much better with him than I did Rose – he was kinder, funnier and… Well, he respected me. And nobody ever did. But we had nothing in common, nothing really to talk about. Sometimes he sought me out if he was looking for a drunk night out, but that didn't occur too often until later years: who would want to be hauling around a fourteen-year-old druggie?

The only trait we did share was that we were both homeless: staying in the Capitolite House as long as we could, camping out at bars, drifting through Bed & Breakfast hotels… But Jared sometimes drove back down to his farm to visit his family. Sometimes. It was rare, and barely ever happened, but he'd occasionally drop in. A couple of times, he even let me crash on his couch.

I remember it was comfy.

Yet, despite the fact that I may have preferred Jared over Rose, I still felt distant from the other Victors.

That was, of course, until Ryder Fletcher joined our little freak show.

A California-born jock with a tan that even Rose envied, when Ryder walked through the door to his mentor session acting like he owned the world, I was sobering up fast. Firstly, because some idiotic thirteen-year-old rich kid thought it would be a good idea to steal my supply the previous day. Secondly, because when Ryder arrived, Rose pinched me so hard that if she did the same to a corpse it would bring them back to life. And thirdly? Ryder Fletcher was – quoting Rose – a 'sex-god.'

Too bad he didn't have the personality to match.

He encouraged Rose with cheesy pick-up lines. He got into constant fights with Jared for calling him 'a hick.'

And me?

I don't remember. Most memories of Ryder before the Games are blurred like everything else… more or less. There's a pitying look, a witty comment, a sympathetic smile and a brush of the shoulders, but pre-Games Ryder is just like every other tribute – a foggy mist of voices with no faces, of people with no names.

I had no connection or attachment I can recall of to Ryder Fletcher to begin with.

The Fourth Games was routine by then – for me and Rose, anyway. I sat with my legs crossed on the sofa, glassy-eyed and drugged-up, while Rose combed her hair absentmindedly, getting ready for the horror all over again.

Jared was another matter.

Being his first year of mentoring and watching the Games, those spots of anger decided to make a reappearance. He completely lost it – thrashing and growling and fighting the officials. Snippets of that fight are there in my mind's eyes – Jared, yelling and trying to escape, to get out, while the officials pinned him to the ground regretfully, holding him in front of the screen like a trapped animal.

He settled down eventually. Well, not really. He just stopped writhing and punching, but they had to tie him to one of the other couches so he wouldn't either go rabid or run away.

Rose flinched when the gong sounded, and Jared had started to make this awful howling noise, starting to cuss when the first cannon went off, muttering death threats and the likes.

By the time the second day of the Games rolled around, us Victors were more or less under control, thanks to my genius plan: sharing the small container of anti-depressants I had been allowed.

Ryder Fletcher, however, was slowly losing his mind.

Ryder had had a lot of screen time from the beginning when he nicked a knife and got an ally at the Cornucopia. He got even more time when he got bitten by a snake and started to get… delusional. The fuzzy memory of the arrogant jock was quickly replaced by a clearer one, one of Ryder going mad from poison and dehydration. He attacked his ally, killing him, but it earned him a dagger lodged inside his shoulder that he was frightened to pull out. It was a surprise to everyone when the mad boy got another ally but he killed her too, convinced that she was trying to poison his food. He killed five people, all in all, but it seemed he invented others. About halfway through, he started muttering for 'Arthur' to be quiet, that he didn't like 'how Arthur liked to kill people,' or 'Bad Arthur.' When he overpowered a blonde-haired girl who'd been running around on her toned-legs the whole Games, the crown was placed atop his crazy, messed-up head.

He was hospitalized for a whole month.

His file is probably the thickest of all of us. Videos, medical records, legal documents, therapists he's been to, information on the multiples mental disorders he has. There's footage I've seen from when he got out of the arena: eyes wild, bleeding, wounds everywhere with nothing but skin-and-bones, screaming bloody murder, talking to people who weren't there. Shrinks were hired, psychologists, and there's a tape of every session. It's interesting to watch: his first session was spent running around, begging Arthur to hush up. The second was used up by explaining Ryder's mental state, what psychosis he possessed and such. And slowly, he began to pull himself together.

Ryder Fletcher is a disaster of a man. He has a schizophrenic voice in his head that he calls Arthur that likes to kill things. He has an alter-ego called Steve who is cold, logical and unfeeling. He has ADHD. He has PTSD. He is paranoid. He hallucinates. He has random attacks of cheerfulness. And sometimes, he's like the cocky jock he was before the Games.

And despite all this, he's my best friend.

I didn't meet the new Ryder until the fifth Games arrived. The past few months had been a blur, and the last clear memory I had was watching Ryder win the Games – and that had been nearly a year ago. I suspect that I must've been camping out in bars and motels, and I must've been arrested at some point because I remember finding a scrunched up contract that showed I paid some sort of fine for drunk and underage driving as well as vandalism, but, surprise surprise, I don't recall any of it.

What I do recall, however, is sitting on a bar stool begging for a drink. I'd completely forgotten the number I had to call for supplies, and there weren't any dealers on the street anymore.

Things were getting clearer, easier to see and make out, and the hovering face of a blood-covered boy drifted before my eyes.

He, however, was replaced by another boy. A taller, handsomer boy with bright blue eyes and bronzed hair and muscles any bodybuilder would kill for – his only flaw being a snakebite above his eyebrows and a knife wound visible through his singlet.

I had blinked at him. Once. Twice. His face was familiar, locked away somewhere in my brain, but I couldn't put a name to him. All I did know was that the arrogant smile was gone, the cocky set of the shoulders.

"Lulu," he had greeted me with a lopsided smile. "Long time, no see."

"Do I know you?"

"Its me. Ryder Fletcher? You don't remember me? What? Why? Am I that forgettable?" he had thrown questions at me, eyes going from friendly to wild in a matter of seconds as he cracked. "Nobody loves me. Nobody cares. You forgot my name. I should've just died in the Games."

The word 'Games,' snapped me back.

Ryder. Ryder Fletcher. ADHD. PTSD. Schizo. Demented. Paranoid.

I don't remember much of what happened next. A few uttered words of greeting, but as soon as he pressed a cigarette into my hand, everything just fell away after that. All that's left is a yell, a question, a crazy glint in a pair of blue eyes, a leather-seated car and a pair of hands that held my shoulders in a way that was so safe and so secure that it almost made me feel like I was home.

Ash Lee was the first Victor who didn't get a mentoring session. Her African-American family couldn't afford the ridiculous price of having a one-on-one chat with the freak show that made up the Victors. Not that is would have benefited her, anyway. I was no help, always doing some weird thing the drugs would cause me to do. On crack? I'd be talking non-stop about unicorns. On ectasy? I'd probably be all over the tributes. On cocaine? I'd have odd flashes of happiness before turning grouchy and aggressive. Anti-depressants? Blank and mopey. The ever-changing Lulu St. Clare was no help to any tribute.

Not that the others were any better. Rose, if she wasn't performing a striptease for Jared or trying hopelessly to hit on Ryder while he was in a (relatively) normal mood, would simply seduce the boys and tell the girls to seduce the boys.

Jared was probably the most helpful, I suppose, seeing as he was also the most sane, that it made sense: how to react in the Cornucopia, how long to stay with allies – he helped the kids like we never could. Well, he'd help out country kids. He'd pick a fight with the city kids.

Ryder was pretty much the same as me: ever-changing and unpredictable. Some days, he'd be walking around with a bloodthirsty look in his eye, preoccupied with talking to the little Arthur-voice in this head. Other times, he'd be hyperactive and annoyingly bright, in your face and wanting to be friends with everyone. At some point, he would turn into Steve and go through army and ambush tactics that barely made any sense whatsoever. Most tributes just gave up on talking to Ryder, so the two of us would be thrown together. A lot.

Of course, many of my memories of him are distant. But they're there – laughing as he snorted beer out his nose, locked in an intense thumbwar, debating with Steve on why anti-depressants actually do work, him finding me in the gutter outside a stranger's apartment. We were sixteen and eighteen and our lives were a wreck, but he brought me sanity. Even though we were both insane.

Everything's a bloody contradiction.

When the gong for the fifth Games sounded, us Victors were having some… technical difficulties.

Three guesses as to why.

I'd been furiously injecting caffeine into my system ever since they took away my stash. So I was basically bouncing off the ceiling. Rose's hairdryer had broke and she was still having a tantrum because her hair was going frizzy. Jared had smoke coming out his ears because of the most problematic Victor that day. You guessed it – Ryder.

While we had (more or less) allowed ourselves to be escorted calmly into the room, Ryder came in in a straitjacket, thrashing around and screaming at the top of his lungs.

"They're coming to kill me! They're coming to kill me! Must kill them before they kill me. Kill. Kill. Kill. No. Ahhhh!"

Havoc ensued. Somehow, he managed to rip apart the straitjacket with his teeth before lashing out, scratching at the door like a deranged cat, sobbing and screaming while Jared and the officials tried to get him under control.

Jared and Ryder rolling around on the floor throwing punches ensued.

At some point, more officials came running in, and I suppose they got the situation under control. If you count Ryder being fitted into three straitjackets and being chained to a chair as 'under control.' Then they had to shove Rose's shirt – which she happily gave up – into his mouth as the gong sounded to stop him from making the horrible wailing sound that escaped his lips.

I recall spending most of those Games by his side, trying to calm him down. Sometimes, he'd relax under my touch, but after a few moments he'd go ballistic again, eyes trained on the screen and wide with horror.

When I was focused on the TV screen, it was mainly centred around a little dark thirteen-year-old who'd managed to get a pair of army knives from the Cornucopia, hiding in the shadows and killing people when their backs were turned. For one so small and innocent, she was one of the most lethal contenders in the Games.

In the end, it came down to three: An avid swimmer from Michigan, a cadet girl and Ash. Ash was clever – she allowed herself to slip into the shadows, watching and waiting, and when the other two found each other, Ash was watching them, waiting for it all to end. And it did, eventually: the cadet girl, while she was busy bludgeoning the boy long after she was dead, didn't really notice the small girl sneaking up behind her until she had a knife sticking out of her back.

Ash was crowed Victor last year. And even she lost her mind.

Recent footage of Ash being plucked from the arena after she won shows her completely glassy-eyed, numb and indifferent. Things went downhill from there.

At first, they thought that Ash would be – like Rose – one of the only Victors that didn't need therapy and hospitalization.

Oh, how wrong they were.

Sent back to the Capitolite House and given her own quarters, Ash was being prepped up for her interviews. We welcomed her back warmly – or, at least, I tried to and Ryder did as well. Jared and Rose more or less ignored her. Yet… even when he showed her her room and gave her a proper tour of all the Victor functions, she seemed to jump every time we spoke. She'd cover her ears randomly and shake her head when we tapped her on the shoulder. So when she ran half way across a room to cower in a corner when Jared flicked her over the forehead because she wasn't paying attention, a shrink was hired, and Rose remained the only sane Victor.

While interviews were post-poned and psychologists hired, files and news and documents of Ash's mental state were sent back to the Capitolite House. Ryder and I, being the curious things that we are, decided to have a little peek into the mail.

Ash had been diagnosed with severe panphobia – fear of everything.

I haven't seen Ash since. Not that is really mattered – I didn't care much for her. It was only when I was on crack or ice and feeling unusually happy that I'd feel like giving her a snuggle, or something similar. But she'd always run away screaming, convinced I was going to attack her.

But now… it's time for the sixth Games. The gore, the horror, the blood… it's all starting again.

Us Victors came back to the Capitolite House about a month ago, same as always. Rose had come back from a week of partying at her mansion in California. Jared drove up in his truck from visiting his ranch. Even Ash showed up – her parents dropped her off.

Ryder and I also made quite the entrance: he'd found me at some motel, broken down and unconscious from a crack overdose. Because he's such a genius (not) he decided to take me to a water park instead of the hospital – but that's where we ended up, surprise surprise, for yet another stomach pump for me and a fine we had to pay for breaking the water slide.

How we broke it?

I don't remember.

What I did remember, however, was the fact that I had the Victor Party.

Not so much a party but more of a… pre-Games dinner, I suppose you could say. The last day of (relative) sanity we had before another month or two of horror and death. Its not really optional, either. It's the day the officials draw out all the drugs and alcohol from your body for the following day: for the Games. Its the day we watch the reapings. The day we watch the videos of children being stolen from their homes, their lives.

It's a ritual, I suppose, a tradition.

And its tonight.

Party time.

Not.

Apologies for the late chapter. The original author who was to write it experienced some personal issues, and the chapter wasn't taken over until last week.

Lulu, Ryder, Taryn, Ash and Maddie