A/N- Once again, thanks to Dolphin4444WSSC for her help on this chapter. And just a reminder, Rhea is Foxface.
Just a general warning, this chapter gets pretty graphic. If you don't do so well with descriptions of blood, you may want to stop reading after you see a line of five asterisks. My goal is to not get more vivid than the original series did, but just in case, please be aware. Everyone handles this sort of thing differently, and I know that I have a high tolerance for this sort of thing, so I wanted to mention that, just in case.
Chapter Eleven
Rhea's point of view
They say that real friends are hard to find, harder to leave, and impossible to forget. By that logic, I would have been the best of friends with my fellow tributes.
They were difficult, statistically speaking, to come across. The odds for each of us to be in the arena together was hovering around one in 1,500, give or take a few hundred for the differences in district sizes.
Then came leaving them. Each time one of them left the arena, and then when I left a few days ago, it was horrible. It goes along with forgetting them. Once they left physically, they seemed to linger.
They stayed fresh in our minds just as my older sister, Ember, did after she lost in the 69th games. It is now my personal mission to find out if she is here. And if so, where.
Waking up was the strangest experience of my live. They told us going in that if you lost the game, that that was it. You were done for. But somehow, we all ended up with a second chance at life. I suppose it was beautiful and amazing, the way they did it. But something seemed off...
First, everyone just seemed altogether too nice. There was tension, yes, especially between the outer districts and the inner three. But the way that everyone was so instantly accepting of this new turn of events, and no one questioned the explanations was very suspicious, especially at first.
And, though I'm thankful for this, everyone seemed to healthy. Besides a few scars here and there, you'd never know what happened to half of them. Emotionally, as well as physically. How is any of that possible?
Answers. I need answers. First, how do they piece us back together again? And I know just how to find out...
Frantic shouting of commands, sharp mechanical sounds, and the caustic smell of antiseptic grow stronger. I know I must be in the right place.
It's as if I'm back in the Games, or at least the skills I'm using to get where I need to are. I'm quiet, that I knew already. But there's a sense of power that comes with this stealth. And seeing as I've never been a particularly powerful person, it's a nice change.
There's a room at the end of the hallway, harshly lit and chaotic, with a wall made out of glass. That must be where they do whatever it takes to fix us. And that's what I'm about to see happen right now.
The tribute is utterly unrecognizable. If not for logic, I wouldn't have been able to tell who this is. One of the most feared opponents in the game is now entirely vulnerable and physically destroyed in front of me. Or so it seems...
I can't hear exactly what's happening. But as I watch, a growing team of District Thirteen's doctors get to work, examining the bruised and torn flesh. How they're going to piece it all back together, I'm not sure. But it seems impossible.
Some must have been deemed salvageable. They begin at once trying to stop the consistent flow of blood that's visibly draining from every tear.
Then comes the rest of the work. It's weird, what they do. An aerosol spary squirts around the room, tinting the air light pink. The stuff wafts out of the slight crack in the door. I gag on the chemical smell, but then notice something. As soon as it touched me, my torn cuticles closed up...
Its having the same effect in there, but to a slightly smaller extent. But it's when the same mist is condensed into a liquid and injected to a vein in the base of the neck that I notice something weird. At first, it's nothing too noticeable. But then, minutes later, it becomes impossible to overlook.
The brain waves measured on the opposite wall changed the same moment that the fluid penetrated the skins surface. That can only mean one thing; they did something to our minds.
