THEO MULROY- Peach Unk
She'd been one of us- from Twelve, I meant. On paper, we should have some sliver of advantage. We were used to going without food, and having no one to help us. Then again, the malnutrition, stunted growth, lack of job training, and hatred from the Capitol didn't set us up well. So we tended to get the short end of the stick, just like Theo.
TARABEL ASPEN- Elara Angelo
Two Twelves. What a surprise. Somehow we always seemed to go first. Did they think we were a threat or something? The Capitol, I meant. Surely the Careers didn't think the poorest District was their biggest enemy. I doubted they even looked at us until they killed us, and then they never thought of us again. At best we were somewhat gross little rats to them. Maybe they hadn't even been aiming for her at all, and she just got caught in the crossfire. Or maybe Snow just deeply hated us. My money was on both.
LEO SERROCOLD- Anjou Corriente
I wondered if he had people mourning him. Maybe a girlfriend, or some siblings, or lots of friends? Tell the truth, I didn't think anyone but my mother cared when I died. Sure, it was partially my fault, but it still sucked. Must be nice, having people on your team like that.
VALENCIA CADILLAC- Gaius McClellan
Valencia was dead, and that was a tragedy. We were down an ally, and that was a weakness. One potential winner was gone, and that was a slight boon for everyone left. It was complicated, in short. Even if I'd had a single dominant emotion about it, I wouldn't have been able to show it. I needed to be stable for my alliance- especially the emotional ones, like Todd. I envied him sometimes, being able to be so free with his heart. My stoicism made the Games easier for me, but I'd never had the bond people like Valencia had with a fellow human. The more I lived, the more I thought that vulnerability was a fair trade.
JUDE SYLVUS- Deciduous Stowercraft
I stared stone-faced at the ceiling. I didn't even have any idea how to feel. Something about Jude had been wrong. It was like they hadn't brought him back at all. How do you mourn someone's death when they weren't who you knew? The only thing I could think to compare it to was a parent whose child committed some horrible crime. Of course you're shattered, but how can you say it?
Tyler very awkwardly patted my back. "I'm sorry," he said. I leaned into him and he held me.
RICHARD FRANKLIN- Swing Vote D5M
Maybe it was obvious. Definitely it was obvious. But really, wherever we went, there was the chance the Careers would find us. I doubted we were first on their list anyway. They'd be searching the whole hospital, and they'd come across us eventually no matter where we hid. We were already working to secure the area and keep ourselves safe, just like we would if we'd settled everywhere else. But yes, to no one's surprise, we'd camped in the pediatric ward.
It almost felt like home. The pediatric walls were painted with balloons and frolicking children of various shades. There was a playhouse in the middle of the sitting area and chests of toys lying around. The hospital gowns we'd found were all covered in teddy bears or kittens or smiley faces. It was a chaotic riot of color and sweetness, down to the lollipop jars hidden in most of the medicine cabinets.
"Hey, everyone! I found gummies!" Elle said, coming out of one of the rooms with a jar held aloft.
"They give WEED to the kids?!" Nene asked, scandalized.
"What?! No! Vitamin gummies!" Elle responded.
"Oh…" Nene said.
"Why would you assume they were weed?" Timber asked, stifling a laugh.
"You all know I was in a gang!" she defended herself.
"I'm about to be so nutrition-ized," Tabitha said. Elle handed her one and she popped it into her mouth.
Elle read the label on the back and smiled. "That's what I thought," she said. "Since these are kids' gummies, they don't have the vitamins that kill you if you take too much."
"There are vitamins that kill you if you take too much? Seems inconsistent," Tabitha said.
"Oh yeah, there's a couple. Most of them, if there's extra it washes out in your pee, but some don't do that, so you can get too much and die," I said.
"Wow, when did you go to college?" Tabitha asked, impressed.
"It was for these guns," I said, flexing my prodigious arms. "You gotta fuel the machine."
"We're still gonna be really hungry," Timber commented.
"There's gotta be cookies and stuff around somewhere," I said.
"So what does weed feel like?" Timber said, turning to Nene.
She smiled self-consciously. "I never tried it."
"Really? We won't judge," Timber said.
"My mom said it would rot my brain and I thought maybe I'd die," Nene said.
"But your friends didn't die," Tabitha pointed out, then looked a little nervous. Maybe some of them had?
"I thought it might work different on autistic people," Nene said.
"Well, always good to be cautious with drugs, anyway," Elle said.
"Hey, I bet there are nutrition shakes around here somewhere," Timber said suddenly. "When I was about five I fell out of a tree and landed on my face. I had to go to the hospital, of course, and they gave me a bunch of shakes for while I couldn't open my mouth."
Maybe half an hour later, we found the right closet. Elle pulled one of the bottles off the shelf.
"I suppose you drank these too to bulk up?" Timber asked me.
"Nah," I said. "They taste alright- a little chalky-" Elle made a face at that moment as she sipped one- "But they have a lot of sugar. Bad for your teeth, you know. You gotta take care of the machine."
Wangari Kariuki- Res D2F
I sat next to Kamau as I carefully snapped off the ends of scalpels. We'd found ourselves a surgical room with a cache of supplies under the gurney. Since we'd managed to get our weapons in the Bloodbath, we could afford to use the scalpels in other ways. We'd both kept one as a backup, but the rest were for subtler purposes. There was some glue among the surgical supplies too. Maybe the Capitol could glue people together now instead of having to sew them? But there had been thread, too, so it might have been for some other purpose. In either case, we'd squirted a stream of glue down the inner side of the outside door handle and studded it with scalpel tips, short enough to not notice unless you looked real close, but long enough to stick into your hand and hopefully make you yelp. The one that kind of turned my stomach, though, was the tips we'd embedded into the cracks between the floor tiles. Every time I put one in, that same old jump-rope nursery rhyme went through my head.
"So. How's the Games so far?" I asked nonchalantly. As Kamau had seen, emotional conversations were not my forte. Many Careers had trouble starting any normal conversation. We preferred to roast each other or segue into training stories.
"Kinda sucks," Kamau said.
"Oh good, now I can be honest, too," I said. As Academy students, we were never prepared for when the Games actually hit. It was never the grand adventure we thought it would be. It was usually pants-wettingly terrifying- even if we lied and said it was a breeze- and it was always massively uncomfortable. I was beyond grateful that this time we had a hospitable arena.
"Honest about what?" Kamau asked innocently.
I hadn't expected to be put on the spot so quickly. "It's just… when I was your age-" we both shared a bewildered glance at the situation- "I was really excited about the Games. If we're going to get out of here, it's better I'm like that again."
"Yeah, of course," Kamau said, seemingly unbothered.
"I just didn't want you to be, I don't know, shocked at seeing your mother be really violent," I managed, entirely unsure how to put it.
"You're not just my mom. You're a person, too. And I'm sure you want to get out of here," Kamau pointed out. "So go ahead and go feral."
I smiled. "You're a pretty cool kid."
"You're a pretty cool mom. Weird, but cool," Kamau said. I ruffled his hair.
"You really did grow up to be a handsome young man," I said.
"Ewww, Mom! Gross!" Kamau wailed.
"Not like that!" I shrank back.
"No no no, I would have done that even if you were a normal mom. I'm a normal teenager," Kamau said.
I grinned wickedly. "So, you made any special friends since I last saw you?"
"Grandma said I couldn't date until I was sixteen," Kamau said.
"Oh yeah, she totally said that to me, too," I said, not able to look him in the eye as I thought of all the times I'd gone out for "night classes".
"That must be why you totally didn't have me when you were fourteen," Kamau snorted.
"I'll have you know, I found you in the marketplace. You were on sale," I said.
"Sure," Kamau said.
"Okay, have it your way. What really happened was-"
"Ewww, Mom! Gross!"
Rachel Larson- Let The Good Times Roll D5F
The plan had been to find a water source and then confer on long-term plans. The "confer" part of the plan, however, assumed there would be allies to confer with. Instead I was on my own, sitting on a reclining hospital chair looking at a vision test chart across the room, waiting for either myself to think of something or for the Careers to burst through the door and kill me, whichever happened first.
I felt horrible reflecting that losing my allies all at once was kind of easier than just losing one or some. It was so quick that I could hardly process it. It was like I'd never had allies at all. I kept thinking to myself that Akari was dead, or Jezzebel and Jasmine were dead, but it seemed like just words. I almost felt like I was going crazy and I'd made them up entirely. I'd seen them, though, in the sky. They'd been here. They'd just been wiped away like an erased chalkboard.
"So, allies, what should we do for long-term plans?" I asked my nonexistent allies, pretending to look around the room. Bit morbid, but what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. If they came back and got offended, I'd apologize when I almost certainly came back with them, since the odds against me alone were a bit steep.
"Finding some food might be a good idea," I answered myself.
"Good idea, Rachel," I said in a lower-pitched voice, visualizing Akari. I wasn't going crazy or anything. I knew she was dead. I was just trying to cope with a very, very weird situation. Sometimes you reflexively giggle when you find out your grandma died, and sometimes you pretend to voice your dead allies. People are weird.
"It's unanimous," I said, ripping the paper lining on the chair as I scooted off of it. Sometimes all you can do it move forward. It wasn't the first time I'd lost someone close to me. I'd only known my allies for a week or so. I'd lost years-long friendships to drive-by shootings, or gang skirmishes, or most often from alcohol or morphling. Eventually you developed some gallows humor.
I was walking down the hallway minding my own business when the door four rooms down the hallway opened. I was an instant from bolting when I saw Jacquard's face peek out of the crack in the door. He saw me and froze.
"Oh," I said. "Hey."
"Hey," he said in a little high-pitched voice.
"Going this way?" I said, pointing behind myself. Jacquard certainly wasn't going to attack, and just because we were both in a deathmatch didn't mean we couldn't be polite.
"Yeah," he said.
"I didn't see any food there, if that's what you're looking for," I said. The second after I said it I realized he would most likely think I was lying, but I really hadn't been. I didn't see any need to pick a fight with a timid little thing like Jacquard. I might have been tough enough to fight most people in the arena, but I wasn't mean enough to.
"Oh. Thanks. I'll go this way." Jacquard cautiously exited the doorway and scuttled ahead of me toward the stairwell.
"I'm going down," I said, pointing at the floor. It was one or the other, so I might as well take the easier path on my knees.
"I'll go up then," Jacquard said. He blanched. "Not because I don't like you. Just to be out of your way."
"Okay," I said, waving. "Good luck."
"Good luck," Jacquard said. He continued scuttling and disappeared through the stairwell door.
Strangers in the night, I thought as I followed at a slow pace so he'd be gone by the time I got there. It was nice seeing another person, even if we couldn't be friends. Only one could win, sure, but us outliers were in this together.