Storm settled on making camp in a raised area concealed by the destruction the tornado had wrought. Debris had been thrown everywhere, and the canyon wall that had come down offered a buffer against the desert air and any enterprising tributes. The beast within the cave had contented itself with devouring the remains of Laredo; Gannet speculated it wouldn't leave its sanctuary. Just to be sure, the trio set up for the night a good twenty meters away from the river bank.
Three tributes had died on the day; Laredo and the boy from District 11, along with the girl from 11, bringing the grand total for the Games up to thirteen. That wasn't a lot by common standards; sometimes that many died alone at the Cornucopia, and it still left eleven tributes running about on Day 5. The Gamesmakers would surely want to whittle that number down.
An unexpected gift dropped down in the form of a parachute as night fell – a welcome present to three tributes who had been subsiding on river fish. They split a meal of beans, rice, and some type of bird meat nobody could place six ways, each taking half their share and packing away the rest for the next day. To Sam, it was little respite for the events of the day – the Games had been vicious and showed all their tenacity. Laredo's family wouldn't even have anything to mourn over, and they'd only have her to pin the blame on.
Sleep didn't come easily. The tornado had seemingly made everything colder, and although the rock slide had created a barrier against the night wind, the dry air cooled quickly. Sam found herself curled up with Gannet as the two took the first watch, letting Storm sleep for a few hours. Their combined body heat did little to keep out the cold night, however – but every little ounce of warmth they kept helped.
"What's it like in District 10?" Gannet whispered as the moon lazily glided along the sky.
Sam let the question fall over her. An odd yet simple thing, really; nobody from the districts ever saw the others. The only ones who did were the victors, and the only way they accomplished that was through an event that resulted in deaths from every one of the districts. There was something symbolic in that.
"It's…big," Sam managed. "It's mostly a big prairie. There's a lot of grass that the animals eat…we raise cows, pigs, sheep. Lot of dust too; it gets everywhere, but you get used to it. It's warm most of the year and then snows sometimes in winter. There's a green grassy hill that I always went to before we all came here; when you sit on it in summertime on a clear day, you can see for miles in any direction, over the entire district. You can see all the ranchers and herders, you can see the town square and the little shops and the train station; you can see a wood that I scampered off to whenever the animals didn't need tending or after they had shipped off to the places where they were made into food each six months."
"To me it's nice…just…kinda slow. Slow, and we're forgotten by everyone, but decent. I guess it's easy for me to say, since my family has some money and most in District 10 don't. I didn't have to take tesserae like most, and I always saw my best friend having to. Most kids would say they go hungry a lot, and that they wish they could have a decent meal. Some never get that. But for me…there's things I always wish could be better. I always wish those kids could have food, that nobody would starve or be hungry or die from getting kicked by a horse. But I'm not going to complain. I can't change that."
Gannet smiled a tad as Sam recollected the memories that she'd likely never see again. "So you like it?"
"It's all I ever knew. It's home," Sam said. "Yeah, I like it I guess."
Sam replayed the scenario in her head. Why did she like it in District 10? Sure, it was better than this arena, and easy to say when mutts weren't ripping apart people like paper. But there were all those bad things back home as well. The people in the streets, dying from hunger. The ranch hands who purchased alcohol from the merchants and did something stupid and ended up paying for it dearly. The slaughterhouse butchers, all of them poor, who toiled away in terrible conditions – they were the worst-off of those who actually worked by far. If they had families larger than three people, there was no chance their meager income would feed everyone with even stale bread. The dairy milkers weren't much better. It only paid to ranch, and you had to have skills or family ties to do that.
But she didn't have to worry about that. Sam had been born lucky – not luckily enough, apparently, but lucky for District 10. She'd been blessed not just to come into a family that dealt with raising, rather than killing, animals, but one that controlled a big stake in the production as well. She could afford to sit by a river, skip rocks, and look through the trees in the wood on a sunny summer day. Could most kids? No. They did that, and they'd end up going hungry and dying. The stratified atmosphere of District 10 was anything but fair.
But why spoil her personal good thing?
Sam privately wondered whether her stressed mind was glazing over the details, locked in a state of frenzy in what could always be her last hour of life. Maybe it did; maybe it skipped over the bad parts to remember the good before her death. She saw no problem in that.
"How's District 4?" Sam asked back, diverting her mind before she could question the picturesque scene she'd imagined. "We would only hear in school that you guys fished, so I always imagined something really pretty. You know, like clear water, like a bath, but that was life. I've never seen the sea."
"It's actually cold and rainy in the winter," Gannet fretted, her sea green eyes looking out over the stars. "It's gray all the time then. My family's full of fishers like most people, but you have to go out on the boats even when it's gross like that. The canneries are where the people whose kids have to take tesserae work at…we had to tour one in school, and it was bad. I'm glad I don't have to do that."
"The boats are better in the summer though," she went on, losing herself in memory. "The sea calms down and the fish seem to like it better. You swim in the water and the current's warm. Since most of the time the boats just trawl on long nets and lines rather than fish like you might think with a hook. It's faster, but you end up having to do a lot of boat repair. People get hurt sometimes. If the line comes up with anything the Capitol doesn't take, however, all the fishers get to keep that stuff since it's just 'junk.' There's a lot of big squids, maybe a foot shorter than me and red. The Capitol doesn't want squids, so that's something you eat a lot. You do learn knots fast."
Sam laughed lightly at that. She wondered if Gannet was doing the same thing; glazing over District 4's best parts rather than giving a realistic picture. They had Careers, so she doubted it – besides, districts like 10 and 12 took far more tesserae than one like 4.
"So you like it?" Sam repeated Gannet's question with a smile.
"I guess. I would guess most of the other districts don't like us since we usually have volunteers to the arenas, though," Gannet spoke. Sam noted that she didn't use the word "Careers" – of course, not, that was the derogatory term from District 10 and the other outliers. "Nobody volunteered for me, though."
Gannet's quiet thought left a silence hanging over the two.
"Why didn't anyone?" Sam piped up after a minute.
"The best girl everyone says is gonna win whenever she volunteers is seventeen. Everyone thought she was gonna volunteer this year, and in the preliminary pool to figure out who raises their hand – that's how we figure out volunteers, since there's several of them each year – she was the one picked," Gannet explained. "But she didn't do it. She just didn't volunteer, so nobody else did either."
Sam said nothing. That was a real tragedy – Gannet had no business being near the Games in a district like that where hearty, beefy kids volunteered every year. It was probably better for her that things had worked out that way – one less Career – but not for the girl curled up to share her body heat, biting her lip as she stared at the starlit night sky.
"What are you guys gonna do with me?" Gannet spoke up suddenly after a brief intermission in their chat.
"Storm wants to go to the Cornucopia," Sam tried to avoid the topic; the girl from 4 was smart. She knew there was only one victor. "He thinks the Careers might have left and there'll be something to find. We'll also be able to get a better view of the arena since we've been in the canyon forever."
"Only one person's coming out, Sam," Gannet said, a note of futility entering her voice. "I overheard him earlier. He wants you to win. He doesn't have much to look forward to back in District 12…unlike you and I, I don't think he likes home."
"He" clearly meant Storm, but this was exactly what Sam had hoped to avoid. Storm had really made no act of pulling for Sam. He'd always looked for her when the three had been together, conferred with her, talked with her. Sam had watched over Gannet, but more and more she'd assumed the centerpiece in an alliance that clearly couldn't last forever. Three tributes from three vastly different districts would, at some point, have to kill off one another, especially if they were the last three standing. That was Sam's worst-case scenario.
"Gannet, don't talk like that," Sam admonished. "We'll think of something. There's a lot of time before the Games are over to figure out a solution."
"One comes out; one only," Gannet repeated, refusing to make eye contact. "Both of you have killed someone; I haven't. I don't think I can. What happens when Storm tries to kill me?"
"He won't try to kill you," Sam said.
"He will if there's just three of us left. He'll let you kill him but won't do that with me. What if the Careers all die and the other kids do too, and the Gamesmakers are waiting on us three? What if something happens to you and it's just us two?"
Sam didn't have a reply. Gannet had asked the one question she had no answer for, and wouldn't as long as she was still alive and kicking with the two others in the arena. If Storm tried to kill Gannet in front of her, maybe she could take him out – but what then? It'd still be Gannet and her left, and she knew she wasn't willing to toss away her own life for the little girl, no matter how much she looked after her. Home with Jake and Clay and Clara was still waiting back on the District 10 prairie, and trying to be noble was one way to end up going home in a box.
Silently Sam cursed Storm. If she had his sense of idealism, his zealous drive to play the Games on his own terms and to not fear death, she could do it. She could sacrifice herself, let Gannet go home. But she didn't have that, and she never would – Sam was not an idealist. She was smart, and the smart way in the Games said to take care of yourself when the price of not doing so was death. If Storm wanted to take care of her as well, then that was two heads looking out for one.
"That's Venus up there," Sam pointed up at a particularly bright point in the sky, leading the conversation into less lethal places. "The bright yellow one. My brother says it's a planet, rather than a star…I always wondered, still wonder, if there's other people up there. Maybe they're like us, looking down and wondering what's down here. Wondering if there's two tributes an arena from faraway districts watching them."
"It's the planet of love. It's funny…we're in a game where we're supposed to kill each other, but the planet of love is winking down on us."
"It does funny things, love," Gannet said. "I know you won't hurt me, Sam, even if you killed the boy today. I won't hurt you either. You looked after me when everyone in these Games ignored me or rejected me. Saying I was too small, or too weak. You're the only friend I've had since I left home."
She looked unhappily over at Storm's sleeping form before finishing her line of thought. "But he's only wanted you in these Games. He took me along with you two to make you happy. He loves you, even if you haven't seen it yet. That kinda thing makes you do funny things in a moment like this."