The noise everyone made was overwhelming.

The horses started walking and pulled the chariot onto the huge lane. There was nobody in front of us, so we had an excellent view. Lights were blinding my face while we rode the first twenty meters. They hadn't told us anything on how to behave. I wanted to smile, but it was hard, and I didn't dare to move my body because I was afraid my costume would fall apart. But seeing my serious and worried face on huge screens, I changed my mind and tried to curl my lips into a smile.

The music was bombastic and hurting my ears. This was such bullshit. This had nothing to do with competing in the Games. It was all for the entertainment of people dumb enough to accept this all. And I didn't want to smile anymore. Maybe it was an idea to remain serious the whole time. I had to look cool. Yes, that was it.

Kara was having other thoughts, but I didn't try to talk to her. It was impossible because of the noise, the wind and the movements from the Chariot.

A flower almost hit my face. I fetched it from the air and threw it carelessly over my shoulder. I felt a slight indignation from the public, but I didn't care.

Eventually we approached the end of the Avenue, which consisted out of a huge stone stairs with a platform on top of it, where the president was sitting with last year's victor at his right hand. Our chariot made a curve to right, which caused me to hold on tightly to it. Eventually we stopped and I looked over my shoulder. District 5 went left, and the one behind it right and so on. After a few minutes every single one was positioned in the semicircle in front of the huge stairs. The company on the platform had grown; the two preliminaries' victors where standing next to the president. Alexandria looked horrible in her costume, which was some sort of tight-fitting leather cat suit. District 18, livestock. If you looked from a distance she looked like the branch of a tree or a wooden stick. Fabio, on the contrary, looked ordinary. He wore a fancy suit but that was it. He looked shy and not impressed by the two-hundred thousand people screaming his name. I wondered why he won. Him being so mysterious made him even more dangerous than Alexandria, because it was a fact he killed the most people of all, even one of his District partners. No one knew what to expect, except the Gamemakers. And they were loving our ignorance.

The president ordered silence and immediately everything became rather quiet.

'I am very pleased and honored to welcome you, tributes, citizens and others, to the second annual New Games,' preached the president 'we are all very impressed by your performances so far'

God, this was stupid. How could they possibly enjoy this?

'You all look lovely, you deserve to be here. President Snow the second from Panem has asked me to salute you all and wish you the best in your journey to glory, wealth and fame.'

'Don't you think this is annoying as hell?' I said to Kara 'Don't you just want to jump off this thing and slay everyone who listens to this shit?'

'Quiet' said Kara. My mouth dropped. My counterpart didn't agree?

The president was shaking Fabio's hand and then Alexandria's. Soon after that, the Chariots were already going back.

We were the first to ride onto the lane-and we were last to leave it again. When the doors shut behind us and the crowd noises faded away, I was able to breathe again. I wanted to rip off the costume and just go back to the apartment.

'Good job, Kara!' said Laika, who was walking to our chariot while we were getting off. 'You looked really appealing to the public. Abbey, do you have some kind of tactic? Why didn't you smile?'

'Do I need to?' I asked indifferently.

'No, but it attracts people' He argued.

'Well, that isn't me. If they want to love me they'll have to love the person I am now.' I said.

'They won't. This is the Head City.' Laika said.

'I don't care. I just want this off, sorry' I said, while trying to pull some of the wires of my costume.

'Let's go home. I hope Charlotte is alright, I left her there.'

I tore the costume apart as soon as we got home and left the pieces on the ground. I hoped Prul would find it. Ha, that would freak him out. Tomorrow was the first day of training. We were free to go, whenever we wanted. It wasn't even a problem if we didn't come at all. The training center was in the basement of the building where we were staying. I didn't want to rewatch the Chariot Rides and went to bed. I wanted to train. I was motivated.

I had decided to train myself on edible plants and things like that. Combat would come later, maybe the second or third day of training. All I knew was that the arena would be in District 6, which, I had discovered, used to be 'Spain', and that I could expect heat and exotic plants.

And when I woke up, the sun was shining as always. It felt like the preliminaries were a long time ago and strangely enough I was completely used to the fact that there were only two of us left. I got out of bed, stretched my legs and hoped Kara would be already at breakfast so that we could talk about our training possibilities.

I knew Charlotte, who, on the contrary of Laika, had access to the Training Center, wouldn't help us. Last night she was in some sort of coma. We had to train ourselves.

The living room was empty, apart from servants. They served me breakfast when I sat down. I was hungry and attacked my food. I had gained weight since I got here. I ate even more than I normally did, just to annoy Prul. Maybe he'd hit me again if he noticed, but then I would hit him back.

'Morning' said Kara, while entering the room. She was wearing the same training suit as me. 'Hi. So, what will we do about training?' I said.

'Whoa, not so fast. I need to wake up already.' She moaned, and planted her elbows on the table. 'I'm sorry. I just don't know. How do we know what to do without Charlotte?'

'Maybe Laika?' I suggested.

'No, he's never been to the Training Center and was instructed not to interfere with tribute training because he's an escort' said Kara. 'He told me last night.'

There was no schedule for tribute training. You were allowed to train whenever you wanted. After breakfast we went down with the elevator to the basement.

The training Center was huge. It was a massive gym with all sorts of materials to practice endurance, strength, weaponry and natural things, like fire-making. I thought we were pretty early, but there were at least twenty other people in this hall.

'Well, where do you want to start?' I asked. There was no doubt we would be training together.

'The fire-making will do' she said, and we looked around to find the station. Strangely enough there was no teacher there.

'It's like they don't want us to train' Kara complained 'no mentor, no teacher!'

I nodded furiously. We sat down. 'I have no idea what we must do' I said while looking at the pile of branches, leaves and stones, and reached for two wooden sticks. While rubbing them against each other (maybe that would heat them?) I couldn't help staring at some other tributes. I saw Hayden at the knife-throwing station and I felt myself becoming really angry at her. I was still ashamed because she managed to trick me and let her freaky sis shoot me. Although I wanted to attack her, I was scared too.

I also saw Fabio, but he wasn't doing anything significant. 'How can you make a fire out of sticks and stones?' Kara remarked 'we should have watched the Hunger Games more often, then we would have known how to.'

'Maybe we can help' someone said. I looked over my shoulder and saw two boys.

One of them was very tall and slender, covered in pimples and had ginger hair. His glasses made his eyes bigger than they probably were. The other, however, was his complete opposite; chubby, short, pink-faced and black-haired. They looked like they were the most comfortable on the couch with a bag of potato chips, not in a training center.

'What?' I said.

The chubby boy spoke. 'We couldn't help noticing that you two were having some trouble making a fire. We, well, at least he-' he pointed at the ginger '-knows very well how to light one.'

I looked at Kara and she at me.

'Why would you help us? Why should we trust you?' I asked.

'Can we sit down?' said fatty. We nodded. They did. The boy started whispering. 'Our friend was shot with many arrows, shot by that witch from eighteen. We barely escaped, we hid behind a desk. We saw you when you came in, you discovered him and then you were also lured into their trap. But you escaped.' He said to me.

'So? Why would that help us trust you?' Kara said.

'Why would you want to trust us? We are just offering you help because clearly you cannot make a fire on your own. Timothy here is excellent with nature.'

The ginger smiled nervously. 'I've had a lot of practice. You then, Mika, you know all sorts of traps.'

'Where are you from?' I asked. They were obviously from West.

'35. Just above 5, and under 7.' The chubby, who apparently was called Mika, said. 'Don't you have a mentor?'

'Yes, we do. She's just not here. She's a Morphling addict.' I said. My mind was blank. I hadn't had the drug in a couple of days now and it felt like crap.

'My aunt was one too' the silent boy said, Timothy 'She died two years ago.'

'Look, are you going to show us how to light a fire or not?' I interrupted. Timothy looked up, blinked a few times with his weirdly big eyes and then got a branch and a stone. Less than a minute later we had a fire. I wasn't really the person to be impressed with something, but I couldn't resist complimenting him. 'Where did you learn this stuff?'

'There's a lot of space to do so in 35. A couple of small cities, but the rest of it is just grazing land, hills and forests. I used to live in the forest.' He answered shyly.

'How old are you two?' Kara asked.

'I'm sixteen, he is fourteen' Mika responded, while his hands were blindly building a small trap out of the sticks on the pile.

It was surprisingly easy to like the boys from 35. I had forbid myself ever to trust anyone again, but something said to me that these two could be useful in the arena since we only had 3 days to train and so much to learn. In the lunch break I went up to the apartment and watched back the preliminaries death of their friend, the one I'd seen lying behind the desk, pierced with countless arrows. It was horrible to see how the boy, whose name was Marten, was murdered by Alexandria. It gave me Goosebumps. However, Mika was telling the truth, because the camera filmed them while they were hiding behind another desk. They had experienced the same horror as me: an almost-death by the girls from 18. I knew they weren't acting nice, like Hayden did.

I just knew Kara and I were going to need their help really badly.

It took very long to upload a new chapter, sorry (just as long as the delays at the London Underground when I was there :/) but now I'm having a lot of inspiration so new chapter soon!

update August 10th - New chapters coming soon! I almost had to repeat my sophomore year so I had to work really hard to keep my grades up, but now it's summer break and I'm really bored so I wrote up to 10,000 new words! New update this week, maybe even tonight :) Thanks for the patience, the reviews, I hope you don't want to stone me for not giving you any new chapters for so long :(

Major plot twists coming up 3