She moves like a shadow and without a sound. It's not until she shifts out from behind the tree trunk that I even notice she's there.
An eagle stares me in the eye; I say it's a she because it's smaller than I expected one to be and I feel like that would be a female trait. In the third grade we each got a book with all of the native animals and the bald eagle was included. I remember the photo clearly, but I've never seen one in real life, most likely because I admittedly don't go outside that often. Why go outside when the Hunger Games are playing inside?
We stare at each other for a while, her having to turn her head sideways in order to look at me. Its more intimidating, I realise, when she looks at me straight on, but the problem is that she can't see me when she does that. It would probably make a nice metaphor about life, or love, or murder, but I'm too tired to think of anything right now.
There are no landmarks in the forest; there are no landmarks in the desert. The only thing that stands out is the moon and it's almost halfway through the sky by now. I think that if Marie Lynn was going to come, she'd be here by now. I'm upset that she's not here, but somewhat relieved, because if our talk went longer than halfway through the night, William might get suspicious when I don't wake him up.
My friend the eagle takes flight, the sound of her wings very similar to the swooping sound of an old-style train starting up. I watch her until I can't see her glowing head against the sky anymore.
What I imagine to be two hours later, I wake William up. It turns out that him, Dai Lao and Ayler weren't really sleeping anyways, but each thought that they were the only one who was awake.
Ayler decides to stay out with William, so I shuffle into the tent with Dai Lao. We didn't want to carry pillows with us, so the boys were using extra clothes to rest their heads on.
William's pillow pile is damp, I roll over to Ayler's and find that his is too.
After hiking all day, it wasn't hard to get to sleep. I wake up when Dai Lao steps on my hand in an attempt to step over me without waking me up. His hair is disheveled even more than usual and one of his eyebrows is disturbed so that it smudges up his forehead.
Sorry he mouths before exiting the tent. I've always been slow to wake up, so I toss around for a bit before I check to make sure my eyebrows are in better shape than his and join everyone outside.
William is the first to greet me. "Morning. Dai Lao said you actually slept?"
I look around, still hunched over from getting out of the tent. Everyone's awake, sitting in dug out holes in the sand. The shade from the treeline still weighs heavy over the campsite and the sky looks like it's been tweaked by a dimmer switch so that it's just a slight bit darker than its normal blue.
"Am I the only one who managed to fall alseep?"
"Nope, Jason did," William finishes. Jason, whose sipping water from a mug, opens his mouth in a sarcastic smile.
"No one went out looking for tributes while I was asleep?" I ask
Ayler looks at me funny. "No, we figured we would have gotten lost in that mess of a forest."
"Oh right," I blush and walk towards the group. "I'm a little loopy in the morning."
"I can tell."
The sand is damp and clumps onto my running shoes as I walk towards them. Preston hands me an apple.
"Thanks."
He nods back and resumes fiddling with his pant legs. We sit quietly for the next few minutes, taking in the air and spilling sand back and forth between our hands. I can't be sure as to what they're thinking about, but right now I'm feeling anxious. I know the games are going to get harder, but for now they're feeling surprisingly easy. No other tributes have it this easy right now, but instead of helping them, we have to kill them. It's certainly a new concept.
"So what's the plan?" William finally asks.
"We need to see more of the desert," Jason says.
I disagree. "People are disoriented the first morning. It's going to be easy to track them down."
Ayler has an opinion too. "Everett said that sponsor gifts come today. We should wait to see if we get any, so we'd be together when we get them and stuff."
William purses his lips. "Hmmm. I agree with all of them."
"Animals are really active in the morning, and desert animals are scary," Preston mumbles.
"Got an opinion, Dai Lao?" Jason asks. He makes it sound sincere, but I'm sure that it most certainly is not.
Dai Lao looks up, surprised. "Uh, no."
"I think we wait for sponsors," William affirms. With a quick quizzing of the group, it is decided that we will stay and wait.
As the sun moves across the sky, we shift positions many times. Preston retreats to the tents to try and sleep and eventually Jason removes his shirt, presumably to tan. The women of the Capitol will enjoy that. We seem to be all out of conversation, whether it is from lack of sleep or circumstance.
There are plenty of things for me to think about while we're waiting for what might not happen. I try not to think about the boy from Twelve, what I've seen of District Twelve and possibly having to meet his family. Maybe he didn't have a family; my mind wanders to think. A lot of those kids are orphans.
I cycle through thoughts Dredd, Marie Lynn, Trawl, Dai Lao and Jason, even as far back as the Dark Days.
That's right; a lot of these kids from the poorer Districts probably lost family members in the Rebellion. It's unfortunate that we can't talk about it. Maybe I'll ask at night when there are fewer viewers.
By the time the sun's directly on top of us, there's movement from above. What looks to be three parachutes drift down from the sky. It's only until they get a little bit closer that the heat mirage settles the image into two distinct shapes. They land on the ground just to the side of our tents and Ayler goes running to get them. One is the size of a shoe box and the other is about two and a half times as long. Both emanate high-pitched rings.
"How do we know who they belong to?" He asks, setting them down in the middle of our now-standing circle.
"Are they ringing at the same time?" Jason asks.
We all stand still and listen for a few seconds. It's hard to make out how much each is ringing, but it definitely isn't in the same tune.
"District number," Ayler's eyes open wide. "Ummmm, we have to make one quiet so we can hear the other."
Jason looks him in the eyes. "Someone lie down on top of one."
Preston moves to lie down on the bigger one but Jason stops him. "No, you're too skinny, Dai Lao, get on it."
Dai Lao's eyebrows rise up and he heaves up his pants before slowly laying himself out on top of the larger box.
"Everybody shush and hear how many times it rings," Jason holds up his hands.
One ring, followed by a pause. Very shortly afterwards it rings again, so District One is ruled out and Preston sighs.
Ring three makes Ayler moan.
Jason draws in his breath at the fourth ring, waiting to hear if it will stop. It takes three seconds before the pattern of ringing begins again, but by that time Jason is already unclasping the latches of the parachute.
What's inside is surprising, not the normal survival resources, but a book. He mulls it over I his hands and examines the inside cover.
"'Everything Not to Eat in the Woods,'" Ayler reads the title. "That's going to come in handy."
Jason nods.
"Can I get up now?" Dai Lao moans, his face inches away from the sand.
"Yes," I answer. He stands back up, heaving his pants again.
"Do you need a belt?" William asks. "We could get something from the forest."
"No, I'm fine," Dai Lao says.
The second parachute only rings twice, Ayler almost screams with joy. Inside is another unexpected gift, some sort of instrument.
Dai Lao speaks what's on my mind before I have a chance to. "What's that?"
Ayler's grin stretches his cheeks to the point they turn a bloodless white. "It's my ukulele. "
Before any of us can ask anymore, he starts strumming the strings with his thumb, perfectly turning the tune of the Capitol anthem into a comical, fast-paced melody.
"So that will be less handy," Jason muses.
Ayler sighs. "Man, you have no idea. It's handy if you know how to use it."
"You're not planning on beating anyone to death with it, are you?" Jason asks.
"Oh lord no!" Ayler scoffs, gripping it tighter. "Geoffrey is an instrument of peace."
William smiles. "Geoffrey?"
"A ukulele is nothing without a name."
"Okay, Mr. Harmony. When you're finished reuniting with Geoffrey, pick which spear you want, I wanna go hunting," Jason walks away, leaving the book in its case.
"At least I can say I got to bring a friend from home with me," Ayler jokes.
William starts cleaning up and I join in, an air of disappointment hanging over me from not receiving anything from my sponsors, assuming they're out there, that is.
I was going to stay back to watch our tents while we split up to search, but Jason insisted that him, Ayler, and I take the forest. I wasn't sure if that meant he thought of me as an asset or someone he wanted to keep an eye on.
Oh damn! Suddenly I understand. What he thinks of me doesn't matter; it's the fact that he's totally taken control of everything that I should be concerned about. Plus, now I'm not even with William, because he's with Dai Lao looking through the desert.
Why can't I keep a hold on anything? It was so easy to tell everyone what to do in the Captiol, it's just now that it's like the playing field is completely evened.
"Maybe if this stupid forest wasn't so thick we'd be able to find someone," Ayler moans.
"Maybe if this stupid forest wasn't so thick I'd be able to find my feet," I bounce back.
Jason, who's a few feet in front of us, shushes us. "I hear water."
"I think it's just the leaves," I say. "These trees sound like water when the wind blows."
"No, I hear water being poured."
At that we all stop and hold onto our weapons tighter. Sure enough, someone or something is splashing in the water nearby. Ayler points in front of him and we direct ourselves that way. After a short walk, we're facing a pond.
It's hard to see her at first, but there's a girl digging around in the mud by some tall water plants on the other side. The sound of her splashing must camouflage our entrance, so it's a miracle when she looks up to see us.
I recognize her face, but not enough to know her District. Her already wide eyes open even wider in fear and fixate on us. That's right, she's from Eight. That means she's Dai Lao's District partner.
Ayler immediately starts running around one side of the pond. In assurance that I won't run into him, I trace the other. Jason, who was originally in a stupor, takes the bull by its horns and dives right into the water. There's no surprise when he gets to her first.
In order to be able to swim to her before she got untangled from the weeds, he dropped his sword along the way. As soon as he's there, he's on top of her, with his hands around her neck. She's struggling, so he thrusts her under the water and a moment of peace passes while her screaming stops.
Ayler and I are there by now, but there's too much struggling to even begin to join into the fight. We pass glances at each other, Jason's a little scary when it comes to killing.
Out of nowhere, Jason falls backwards into the water. The girl emerges, dripping and horrified and turns to run out of the pond after catching her bearings. Jason fell over, but he never went down. In a flash he's back on top of her again and has her under the water. He turns frantically to Ayler and I and shakes his free hand around wildly. I hand him my sword. The water gets very, very red after that.
When the cannon fires, he lets go. I jump a little less this time, but the noise still rocks me. Jason sighs and dunks himself in the water to clean off. He pulls himself out of the pond much more easily than the girl did, I suppose it would have been a simple task for her too, had she not been cornered by the very three creatures of her nightmares.
The sun's nearly set, so it becomes hard to notice the tint of the water. William, Dai Lao, and Preston will have heard the cannon fire. I don't want to be the one to tell Dai Lao that we killed his District partner, but I assume that Jason would take on that task anyways. In fact, I'm almost certain of it, considering how he acted when Dai Lao tried to take his kill.
If I wouldn't want to tell my ally that we killed his District partner, would my ally want to tell me? Suddenly I'm suspicious of how Kristen died. You got points for kills at the bloodbath, but anyone could have pulled a Dai Lao and claimed that they killed one of the nameless corpses, rather than Kristen. I suppose now it doesn't matter, she had to go anyways, but still, there's no room in our alliance for a liar.
Haha, never mind. I've got Marie Lynn; if anyone's a liar, it's me.
"The sun was setting over the desert yesterday," Jason says, still breathing heavily. "If we get to the desert by following the sun, it will be easier to get to the tents from there."
There's a poll on my profile asking for your top three favourite characters, just so you know ^_^
I made a big decision to submit some of these characters into SYOTs. To be honest, it felt like I was auctioning off my children, but to steal the words from my friend's mouth, I'm sure they're going to good homes.
Preston and Jason can be found here - s/9710448/1/174th-Hunger-Games-SYOT
As I'm posting this, that author's still looking for Tributes, so get on over there and see if your characters can take on Preston and Jason ;)
William is here- s/9674689/1/Cutthroat-The-Tale-of-the-Thirty-Third
ANNNNNNNND I've submitted Ayler somewhere too, but there's no word back on whether or not he's been accepted.
Even if you're reading this much after I've stopped updating, I still encourage you to go read those SYOTs, it will definitely be interesting to see how other authors will write about the boys
(and hopefully since there's four of them, one of them will win)
Watch for the eagle!