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Well, I wasn't dead. Wet, hot, bruised, sure – but not dead.

I crouched on all fours on the black mud of the riverbank, somewhere far downriver from where Ember and I had jumped in. My lungs heaved, and I choked up a stew of snot, water, and dust. Ember wrung out a sock next to me, his face as blank as if he'd been doing the laundry for the last hour. He sure didn't look like a kid who didn't know how to swim.

After coughing out the last bit of phlegm I could muster, I flopped over on my side and laid my cheek in the mud. Ugh. "Did I win yet?" I moaned into the muck.

"No, we died and came back as mutts," said Ember, concentrating on dumping an ocean out of his boots. "Now we're stuck here forever. You. Me. Mutt matrimony."

I couldn't help but laugh. My ribs hurt and my lungs protested, but it felt good to have something to smile about.

It beat what lay ahead: Fifty yards down a sloping hill dotted with long, pale, needle-like grass stood a pair of flat, crumbling black stones, with a broken archway spanning the two. Behind them, shadowy gray buildings rose out of the dust, dark and decrepit. Here and there glossy black obelisks jutted out of the dirt in the wide pathways between ruins. Around them, an off-green haze drifted out, speckled with tiny black dots that floated like spores of pollen in the wind. Taller buildings rose off in the distance, some of them topped with angry jagged spires and broken stone keeps. The whole place smelled of antiquity with the same the musky odor of an abandoned hut.

The mood changed quickly in this arena.

"Looks like a great place," I muttered. "Guess we should get a move on."

Ember shivered. "Now that I'm back here, I really just do not want to go into those ruins," he said, his voice small and quiet. "Tumbling in the river sounds like more fun."

"Just 'cuz of other tributes in there?"

"Who knows what all is in that. But other kids too, yeah."

"We gotta run into them eventually."

"Yeah, well, I'm not very eager to die."

I frowned. The little things Ember said frustrated me. It wasn't that I disagreed with him, since I wasn't in a rush to go home in a box either, but I liked to think there was at least some chance that I'd make it out of here alive. A slim chance, maybe, but a real chance all the same. There's two of us now," I said. "You helped me out with supplies, and I can help you out, too."

"With what, killing guys?"

"If they try to kill us, then yeah. We'll kill 'em first."

Ember bit his lip and chuckled ever so slightly. "I don't think I'm going to be doing any of that."

"Ember, we're in the freakin' Hunger Games," I said, raising my voice and digging my heel into the mud. "Only one person goes home. Whoever lives is gonna have to kill someone else. I mean, I wanna go home."

"Is that how they tell you this works to make it sound better in District 5?"

"It is how it works!"

"I bet that kid you killed thought that, too."

"He didn't give me a whole lotta choices."

"I dunno, wasn't there. But maybe you could have run, played dead, just forced him away rather than killing him…give me some time and I probably could come up with more choices."

My fist clenched around a clump of mud. Ember hadn't been there in that pit, with the boy from 7 headed my way. He hadn't heard the snake hissing. The boy would've killed me. If I'd just left him after the snakebite, he could've gotten better, come after me again – something. I don't know. I had to do it. Had to kill him. Had to. I didn't really have a choice.

"Let's just go," I grumbled, shaking water off of my pack and hoisting it back on my shoulders. "I don't want to talk about it anymore. It's over."

Ember sighed. "Fine. And it's not just other kids I'm worried about in the ruins. There was something else in there."

"Something else?"

"A hovercraft dropped something not long after things got going. I thought it was supplies, so I rushed deeper into the ruins to check it out…turned out there wasn't anything there but tracks in the mud. Weird ones."

That sent a shiver up my back. "What kinda weird?"

"Looked almost like a person's bare feet, but not quite. Bigger. Broader. Deeper prints. I dunno. Just something to watch out for."

Something clicked behind the broken archway. I spun my head, exhaled, and said, "Keeping our eyes open sounds like a good idea."

It didn't take much hiking for the dotted ruins to open up into the recognizable outskirts of some long-dead city. Roofless stone huts gaped up at the black sky. Patches of worn cobblestone street cut through the dust and hard earth. The haze I'd seen earlier coalesced around some of the buildings, giving off enough more than enough light to see where we were going but seeping into stone cracks with a nauseous hue. Along with the frequent flashes of lightning, the light made this whole place feel as if some ghost lingered on in the dead ruins, whispering of a life forgotten.

"Hey. Check this," Ember said, the suddenness nearly giving me a heart attack. He waved a shiny piece of plastic at me. "Someone else's been here."

My heart thumped with the pounding blows of a sledgehammer. "Great. You don't even look fazed by this place."

He shrugged, his face as calm as if he'd been taking a midnight stroll under a full moon. "Well, I am, uh, fazed. Just good at hiding it. I'm used to the dark, anyway. My house back home only gets a couple hours of power every night."

"What?"

"Yeah, boo-hoo. We're poor back home."

I crouched against the side of a building and clutched my crowbar. If we were going to chat, I didn't want to be moving. One thing at a time in this place.

"That just doesn't make sense to me," I said. "What do you do in the winter? Just burn things to stay warm? If you only get power -"

"Or freeze. It's not like coal miners can keep the coal they mine."

"Does your family work in the mines?" I asked. "Just seems horrible. I'd freak out with all the darkness and everything underground."

He laughed. "You must hate this freakin' place then. But yeah. Well, my dad works. I don't have any more family. It doesn't really pay him enough, and he doesn't, uh…like you said, there's not a whole lot of options back home."

I looked away. District 5 wasn't the wealthiest place in the world – it certainly wasn't the Capitol – but most people still had enough to eat, and power didn't last just a few hours a day. Mining coal sounded a whole lot less interesting and a whole lot more soul-sucking than working on the power plants, too.

Picking at my thumbnail, I whispered, "Did you know your mom?"

Ember wasn't kidding about hiding his feelings. Whatever he thought of my intrusive question, his face didn't flinch an inch. "Yeah," he said. "Had two big sisters for a while, too. Two years ago a big wave of pox rolled through the district and killed a bunch of people. Guess I'm lucky I'm alive still, but it doesn't feel that way."

He closed his eyes and grinned. "But the odds are in my favor. It's good. I'm ecstatic."

"I'm sorry," I said. I didn't know what else to say. We barely knew each other, and here he was opening up about his brutish past to me.

"Doesn't matter now," Ember said with a shrug and a sardonic laugh. "Besides, one of my sisters was kind of a sissy. Raine wouldn't like watching all this fun we're having."

On that somber note, we picked up our trek deeper into the ruins. Step by step the black sand wastes fell behind and this urban necropolis opened up all around us. I found myself checking every corner we turned and peeking into the darkness within every yawning hut. I clutched my crowbar and looked around a pair of stone pillars when Ember yanked me back.

"Hear that?" he whispered.

I shook my head, but a second later I heard it. Somewhere down the narrow, debris-strewn path in front of us, something was wheezing.

Rocks clacked to my left, from around the side of a dilapidated stone yurt. The haze dissipated around a mound of jagged, broken iron struts, torn patches of cloth, and chipped granite bricks in the dust ahead. It was hard to see through the rubble and the darkness, and I squinted to get a better look as I crept forward. I felt Ember trudging along an inch behind me, his breath hot on the back of my neck.

I missed my footing, stumbled, and landed on a broken pile of stones. Crack! A surprised croak echoed from the other side of the rubble, and taking advantage, I hurdled over the last pile of rubble in the way and held my crowbar up, ready to attack.

A brilliant white light blinded me. I shouted and jumped back, thrusting my weapon at dead air before something started laughing. I backpedaled, ready to strike out again, but the flashlight shined away – up at the face of the kid who was pointing it, slouched against a blood-stained rock.

"Believe this," said a familiar voice. "What a stupid coincidence."

I gasped. It was Glenn.

My district partner huddled against his rock, but he didn't look like the same person I'd ridden into the Capitol with. Almost half of his face had been torn off, with the skin shredded into a bloody tarp from just below his right eye down to his chin. A gaping puncture wound in his right chest leaked a diseased yellow fluid around a scabby crust of blackened blood. Glenn's skin was as pale as a sheet of paper, and his chest heaved with quick, labored breaths. Something – or someone – had ripped him apart.

Ember vaulted over the rubble, saw Glenn, and looked as if he wanted to jump right back over. "Oh, what the…" he whispered.

Glenn looked up at him, coughed up a spray of blood, and laughed with a hoarse, cynical chuckle. "Guess you got over making friends."

"You know this guy?" Ember asked, his eyes as wide as watermelons.

I nodded, still in shock at the sight. "Yeah, I…he's my district partner. Glenn, what happened?"

He choked again. Glenn leaned to his right and spat up a wad of blood, bile, and slime, hacking onto the rock until he was through. "So now we're partners?"

"I'm not gonna hurt you, Glenn."

"You're carrying...what is that, a crowbar?"

"Can you just tell me what happened?"

He coughed again and wiped a smear of blood from his chin. "Pretty much what I expected to happen. Something half-murdered me. Wasn't no kid either. Something big. Something weird."

"Look," I said, waving my hands in front of me and glancing around. "We can…I can try and patch that up, or do something to stop it from getting infected…"

Glenn wheezed and shook his head. "Don't think so."

"Glenn, I'm not just going to leave you there!"

"You sure are," he said, his voice trailing off into little more than a whisper. "Unless you found a hospital at the Cornucopia, this isn't getting any better. I'm not gonna linger around here and die slowly. I tried to fight that thing that got me. That's enough to earn my trip to the Flame Gates. I just want you to send me there a lil' faster."

He glanced at my crowbar and looked back up into my eyes. Realization snaked its way into my guts. He didn't want me to help him – not on this world, anyway. He wanted me to kill him.

Ember figured it out just as I did. "Terra," he said, his voice trembling. "He's going to go into shock soon. You don't have to kill him."

"Don't get holy on me," Glenn spat with a last ounce of malice. His words were trailing off now, his speech slurred, and his voice filled with exhaustion, as if he were getting ready for bed with the sun long since set. "You have no idea what I want. Terra, you said you wanted to go home. Well, you can get a little closer to that and do me a favor. I'm going where I belong. Make it easier on both of us."

"Don't listen to that," Ember said, taking a step towards me and reaching out a hand. "Don't be any more of a murderer. He's not threatening either of us. He's going to die anyway. Let's just walk away."

Glenn coughed and clutched his stomach. "Terra. Please. I just wanna go."

I exhaled and hefted my crowbar. "Ember, don't look," I said.

"No. Terra, you've got a choice here," he said.

"I really don't," said, gritting my teeth. "Glenn…good luck, okay?"

My district partner closed his eyes and said, "Nicest thing I've ever heard. You too, Terra."

Ember bit his lip, stepped back, and looked away. I raised my weapon. At the last moment, Glenn smiled.