+ Accelerating towards one game's end and one game's beginning. Also a major character introduction in this chapter.
/ / / / /
The night was a little darker than I remembered.
Tethys curled into a ball and wheezed. Scabby blood, both the hound's and her own, covered her shirt and hair like a second skin. She'd barely moved since we'd found this old, hollowed-out longhouse of stone and shadows after what seemed like an eternity of stumbling through the watery grave below. I'd found an exit after hours. I'd gotten us out, but I hadn't gotten us to safety.
Certainly not Tethys, at least.
A milky white growth boiled up beneath the skin of her right arm from shoulder to wrist. The mutt hadn't just delivered a savage bite to her chest, it had left behind something in that wound as well. Every time I looked closer the corruption seemed to grow, as if it were some fungus or virus chewing its way through Tethys's arm. I didn't have an answer to this thing.
"Is she asleep?" asked Delfin. He knelt against the closest wall in this long, empty ruin, his fists clenched, his jaw tremoring now and then. Delfin's courage faded by the minute. When lightning flashes shined in through cracks and jagged holes in the walls, they lit up the face of a nervous kid from District 4 who no longer looked as if he cared about leadership or glory or killing. Tethys had wanted to keep him from becoming a monster, to turn back into the friend she'd remembered from her past. It had taken nightmares to make that hope come true.
On the plus side, he wasn't acting so angry to me anymore.
I shook my head and looked away from Tethys. I couldn't stare at her arm for another second, lest maggots start digging tunnels under my skin, too. "I guess so. Dunno if it's really sleep."
Delfin swore. "What the hell."
He wiped at his cheek and turned away from me. I didn't know what to say. I'd only known these two for a couple days, and I was being thrown yet again into someone's death. I had no doubt Tethys wasn't going to make it. Only one of us would get out, and there were still other tributes out there.
"I wish they told us who was left," I said. "Like who died in the sky, or something. I hate this not knowing."
"That last cannon made seven, if we were counting right," he grunted. "If we missed anyone while underground, than that's off. Bet those bastards from 1 are still hanging around. They tried to get us to team up, those two. Them and the girl from 2 who died way back at the beginning. Bunch of schmucks. I hated the boy. Wanted to punch him, but we weren't supposed to be fighting during training, yeah?"
"What'd he do?"
"He was being a jerk. Saying we wouldn't survive on our own. Needed them. Needed to team up like 4 always does with 2 and 1. I told him to piss off. Now if both those kids from 1 are still kicking, we're in a heap of trouble unless you're hiding some sort of skill with that knife that parachuted in."
"I watched them. Back during training."
"Woo-hoo."
"The boy likes to show off. He was tossing around a sword like a toy. I think he knew how to use it, but it looked like he'd rather just be flashy. I dunno. Maybe he'll screw up if he shows up."
Delfin scoffed. "Pretty much a walking cliché of that district, then."
"Why does your district always team up with them, then?"
He looked up at me with a look somewhere between pity and disdain. "You won't get it. You're not from our district."
"Then help me get it."
"Alright, fine," he said, leaning back on his hands gazing out a crack in the wall as lightning flared. "You're from 5. What's this all to you? The Games. The arena."
I paused. "It's the Games. Twenty-four go in and one comes out."
"Yeah, well, it's not twenty-four to us. Two of us go in, and most of the time, nobody comes out. That's all that matters. Look, District 4? We were the last holdouts in the Dark Days. We care about each other, but the rest of you guys gave up then. We have each other back home, but the rest of Panem doesn't mean much. What does it do for us? Way I see it and way a lot of others do, it's District 4 versus the world. Now you and the other districts are trying to kill our people in the arena. Hell, you might try to kill Tethys and me before this is over."
"Delfin, c'mon. I'm not gonna do that."
"Oh? I would. One comes out. You know you would in the same situation."
I didn't argue that. He was right. I couldn't have killed Ember: Even though he was from backwater District 12, he still understood me, and I understood him. If Glenn hadn't asked for it, I probably couldn't have killed him, either. He was a downer, sure, but there was too much pain and humanity under his sarcasm. He didn't deserve this. Delfin, though…he was a fighter. He'd already killed, same as me. I wasn't sure he deserved sacrifice.
"So why haven't you stabbed me, yet?" I whispered.
Delfin sighed. "I'm not just gonna gore you here."
"It sounds like that's what you did to the girl from 6."
"That was different."
I rolled my eyes. I knew I shouldn't be pushing something like this, especially when Delfin would have no trouble overpowering me, but I pressed on anyway. "How?"
"I didn't know her," he said, scrunching up his face and waving his hand exaggeratingly. "She was just a thing."
"Just a thing?"
"God, are you always so annoying like this? I care about Tethys. I care about me. I didn't care about her."
"You still haven't answered my question."
"Look, for whatever reason, Tethys wanted to keep you around. I'm not gonna tell her no."
He didn't say much, but that told me everything I needed to know. I was on borrowed time. If Tethys died, and I figured she wouldn't last too much longer, Delfin would turn on me in a heartbeat. My brain screamed at me to get out of here at the first chance I could find, but some other voice told me to stay. The other tributes, it said. You'll never kill them yourself. You couldn't handle a mutt. You barely handled the boy from 7.
I needed Delfin. He was right about me: I needed him to fight the other survivors, and then I needed him to die. The chilling realization skinned another layer off of my frayed nerves and shriveling conscience. Maybe I did understand Delfin after all. The arena was turning us both into monsters.
I pushed aside the gloom slinking over my feelings and changed the subject. "Down in the tunnels," I said, lowering my voice again to little more than a whisper. "What'd you see?"
Delfin was quiet for a moment. Thunder was the only interruption to Tethys's shallow wheezes. "You first," he said at last.
I hesitated. Going back to the first time I'd combed through the sewers seemed like a lifetime ago, when it'd probably only been a few days. Back then Ember was alive, Tethys and Delfin were just other tributes, and I…I'd still been a killer.
"There were things that didn't make a lot of sense," I said. "A little girl who wore clothes like I used to. There was a man who looked something like how I remember my father did when I was little, back when I remember him turning out the lights in our house, a little drunk and mad, yelling at my mom and me. A girl my age stabbing a boy when he couldn't fight back. I don't really know what any of it meant. My mind twisting some memories, or something? I don't know."
"She told me I might as well kill her," Delfin said. He looked down, fidgeting, pushing a pebble around cracks in the floor with his foot. "Tethys. I saw her. Maybe it's like you said, whatever goes on down underground fucks with our memories and our minds. She told me to kill her, because she was dead to me. She me to die, too, because I was dead to her."
He did something I didn't expect then: He laughed. "I guess it doesn't bug me because it's just the arena playing tricks on my mind, huh? But it's right though. We can't both get out of here. We stick together in District 4, and I stick with Tethys, but it's always one that comes out of the arena. Just one. Only one. One of us, at least, has to die, and I'm a little scared that I want it to be her."
You and I are alike, I thought. We really are the monsters in this horrible place.
/ / / / /
"I reached into the grave, and the grave gave something back."
He'd said that so long ago, this man. What had it been, twenty years? More? Arrian de Lange couldn't remember, but he'd remembered those words. He still didn't know what they meant, but it didn't matter. He trusted the man who'd said them, the man with so many names, so many faces, so many words and decisions that escaped his understanding.
"Many people know me by many names," he'd said back then on the dirty, rat-infested streets of Auburn's Belly. The Capitol hushed up that horrible place, that city slum that didn't exist to those wealthy whores in their gaudy clothes and shining jewelry. They ignored the Belly at best, preyed upon its poverty-stricken inhabitants for easy avox labor or idle entertainment at worst. As a child, Arrian knew he'd live a short, unremarkable life – if not a painful one.
But this man hadn't ignored it. He hadn't ignored Arrian, either. "You have fight. Spirit," the man had told him that stormy, raining day in the Belly as the sewer system failed and regurgitated its noxious slop into the side streets. "I will give you something to fight for, and I will tell you the real name I do not tell them. I am Suleiman."
Rain. It rained then. It rained now, here, as the seas of District 4 raged and surged beneath stormy skies.
The rain and wind would have drowned out the drone of the hovercraft's engines anyway, but Arrian had activated the sleek, bullet-shaped aircraft's stealth drive an hour ago. None of the fishermen down on the rocking gray seas below would see their craft, let alone hear it. Even the Capitol's defense drones, arranged in their patrols to ensure that no enterprising District 4 captain ever thinking of a mad sail for freedom would succeed, wouldn't have a clue they were there.
The storm's sudden arrival with its towering clouds and sheets of rain meant that the fishing boats were packing up to head back to District 4's harbor early, however. Arrian would have to hurry.
"A cautious man might hold up at the fishing perimeter," Arrian said, running his hand along a console full of glowing orange lights in the hovercraft's cockpit. On the cockpit screen in front of him, a series of holographic numbers jumped to life: Elevation, wind speed, the effects of the storm on navigation, and more. "But this man...I do not mind the security drones."
A hulking, pale-skinned man lurched through the narrow cockpit door and leaned against the gunmetal gray wall behind Arrian. He was powerful but not inhumanly so, his hair dark but not unnatural, his wide eyes green but not piercing. Suleiman tread the line behind man and beast, always sure to keep one foot in the former category. His face with its high cheekbones and square jaw was full of strength and determination, but more so, the man's offset eyes and teeth that were just so slightly crooked showed that he was as human as anyone else.
An intimidating human, but human nonetheless. He called the Capitol home, but Arrian had a feeling it wasn't the same Capitol that cheered on tributes in the Hunger Games.
"There," he said, pointing to an indicator light on Arrian's console. "Two trawlers heading back. Close on them."
Suleiman scowled as the hovercraft shuddered. The thunder roared outside, and the sea's swells rose as tall as the ships. Each wave swallowed the blinking buoys that marked the outermost perimeter of District 4's fishing zone. As long the boats kept inside the Inclusion Zone marked by the buoys, a giant swath of ocean stretching from District 4's bay to far offshore and teeming with fish and all sorts of bounty from the sea, they were fine. One foot outside of those markers, however, and the cloaked Capitol surveillance drones lightning up Arrian's radar would blast them into flotsam if they didn't turn around in five minutes.
"Chestnut Rose," Suleiman read off the name of the closest boat on the cockpit's readout. "One of Rio West's associates captains that."
"It's inside of the buoys by a half-mile," said Arrian, his attention focused on keeping the hovercraft level.
Suleiman waved off the concern. "Better that way. It's in the line of sight of the other ship. There will be witnesses, and we want that. Target the nearest drone. Hit it with an EMP, knock out its camouflage, and make a show of it so that the boats will see. I'll take care of the trawler."
"Anything specific?"
"Lower us to thirty feet. And open the back hatch."
It was child's play for Arrian. He nosed the hovercraft down to just above the sea's swells. On the heads-up display in front of him, one of the Capitol's drones popped up amid a series of red and green numbers. The delta-shaped aircraft was barely larger than a car, but it was bristling with enough weaponry to sink a half-dozen fishing boats. Not that it needed them: No one in District 4 had been stupid enough to sail out of the Inclusion Zone on purpose in forty years. Everyone in the district knew that.
Suleiman and Arrian were counting on that.
The bad weather was complicating things. Not to be deterred by nature's wrath, Arrian lined up the Capitol drone in his sights, grabbed a joystick with his right hand, and fingered its trigger. Something hummed for a brief second, and on cue, brilliant blue lightning split across the sky in the distance. This didn't come from a storm cloud. A dark shape formed out there just outside of the buoys, its machine mind too stupid to figure out what had just happened.
Back in the hovercraft's cargo bay, Suleiman kicked something out the hatch doors and into the ocean below.
Splash!
"Pull us up!" Suleiman shouted from the rear, his voice cutting through the cacophony of the storm with a baritone roar. "We're done."
Arrian, however, wanted to watch. He nosed the hovercraft higher but kept an eye on the sea. Something dark and sleek cut through the ocean below, leaving behind a narrow wake as it sped towards the nearest district trawler a mile away. The ship never had time to see the danger, let alone get out of its way.
With a bloom of orange-red flare, Suleiman's torpedo split the fishing boat in two. The ship's fuel exploded in a cloud of fire and death, raining burning oil and metal debris across the raging ocean. The broken prow of the boat listed to one side, splashing down into the merciless water like a tired old whale on its last voyage. The stern wasn't so graceful, its superstructure aflame, shooting fire and shrapnel here and there as it surrendered to the waves.
In these seas, no one would survive that. A half mile further away, however, the other trawler wouldn't have missed a thing. The exposed Capitol drone hovered off in the distance like a guilty suspect caught at the scene of the crime.
It had been one of Arrian's easier jobs.
"Word of mouth will take care of the rest," Suleiman exhaled as he leaned back into the cockpit. "We're done here."