There weren't any private sessions, which was weird but made sense. Sponsoring wasn't allowed for anyone but Rose, and nobody wanted to bet when the Gamesmaster was an unpredictable child. We still trained, but there were no sessions. The only one upset was Rapture.
"I feel like training is kind of useless by now," I admitted at breakfast. Rapture kept staring "sneakily" at us from across the room. He knew as well as we did that, barring Rose's interference, we were the only three possible winners. We caught him spying on us in the training room and started incorporating flashy but useless moves into our sparring. We'd save the real stuff for real fights.
"It gets to a point where you don't really learn anything new and you're just practicing," Emma said, and she shrugged. "The last few weeks of the Academy are like that. We all know who's getting picked. It's pomp and circumstance after that."
"What made you want to volunteer?" I asked. "Not that you're spoiled, but you sort of had everything."
"That's why," Emma said. "I didn't know what the other Districts were like, but I knew how rich we were. I got everything handed to me on a platter. I wanted to do something hard to see if I deserved it. If I had to be a princess, I at least wanted to be a warrior princess."
"Are you all rich there?" I asked.
"No, we have poor people. At least I would have called them poor. I guess I don't know if they really are. To me, 'poor' meant a family of six living in an apartment, or walking to school because they couldn't afford the bus. We don't have anyone who needs to poach food," Emma said.
"We have rich people in Ten, but it's the same thing. I thought a guy in town was rich because he threw out his bread when it got stale," I said.
"Looking back, we're kind of snobs. We thought the outer Districts were a bunch of dirty farmers. We got most of our food from the 'dirty farmers'," Emma said.
"We thought One was a bunch of pretentious magpies. But we were right," I said jokingly.
"Obviously not, since I hang out with you," Emma said back, and we laughed.
After we were done training and we were back in Ten's lounge, we started to wax philosophical. Without the sessions, there was only one more day until we went into the Games. It was going by so much faster than usual on this, my third trip in. This time was (maybe?) my last chance to talk to Emma, and I wanted to get some things squared away. I waited for a lull in the conversation after we'd started discussing the Games.
"Hey... we might be the last two," I said. I let the unasked question hang.
"Yeah, I knew we were both thinking about it," Emma said with a serious and wistful face. "We had to say it eventually."
"It's probably a bigger deal for me, since you're a Career," I said, then hastily added, "Not that you're cold-hearted or anything, you've just probably already had to deal with it. But anyway, whatever happens, I won't be mad."
"Don't be too certain you'll get the worst of it. You outlasted me once before," Emma said. "What happens in the Games happens. Allies only last until someone decides she wants to live."
I wanted to say we'd be friends forever, and I wanted to believe friendship would stop us from doing to each other what we intended to do to everyone else. But it wasn't fair to ask that of her, and it was unrealistic to expect it.
"You're the best friend I've ever had," I said, discounting Dustin because he was my brother. "But I'm not delusional. Fuzzy feelings don't go that far. I'll be proud of you if you win, even if I come in second. I might scream and cry, but don't mind that," I said.
"I'll fight with you as long as I can. I'll confess something. If it's me that does it, it might not be as quick as I want. But it'll only be because my hands are shaking," Emma said.
With anyone else, a conversation like that would have made me abandon an alliance. But it was just honesty, more honesty than a lot of allies had. We were both the stars of our own stories, and both of us could only imagine one outcome. People were people. They wanted to live, and they put themselves first. If that made it so I couldn't be friends with someone, I'd spend my life alone.