Marley Astero- Wandering Souls D2F

It wasn't something to ack about during a polite dinner with my escort, Chinchilla. As the fancy plates of weird sculpted potatoes and caviar made of fruit made their rounds, I played with my food and waited. I scraped my fork through some red sauce, idly thinking it was almost like paint. I could make little art nouveau swirls in it. Then, when Chinchilla finally left to do weird Capitolite stuff, I pounced.

"How can I see my grave?" I asked Pray.

Pray rubbed her nose. "How did I know it would be something like that?"

Minutes later, an IT Avox was helping us navigate the fancy computers to a death database. I bookmarked the page at once, then sifted through it to find myself.

My grave was a tilted flat slab of black marble. I'd left notes for my parents just in case, and I was glad to see they'd followed them. In the middle of the reflected stone there were just three lines of etched silver letters, flanked by two sprigs of nightshade I'd drawn.

Marley Astero

AP 51-68

Rest in Peace

That's me, I thought. Under the grave,under the dirt still slightly depressed from the hole, I was laying. Even in the old days, embalming could last more than a year. I might still look like I was "just asleep", as they said. I'd have my hands folded over my chest like a vampire, and all the stuffing and hidden props they used to make someone dead look like someone alive. I pulled up a picture of my funeral and saw the faint marks of makeup hiding the bruises and abrasions all over my face. Someone got to make me up all pretty like that. Maybe I'd missed my calling. Someone got paid to do that and didn't even have to risk the Games.

Now I have to win, I thought. I had the unique position of being back only a year after I'd died. My body was still fresh and beautiful. If I won, I could go dig myself up. I could dig myself up and lacquer myself and put myself on display. Wouldn't that be cool? To have my own dead body in my house? Talk about a one-in-a-million chance.

Perfecta Flawless- Killer Vacation D1F

It was too bad Gary-Stu wasn't here. We'd really gotten to be friends in the short time we knew each other. Maybe I could make some other friends instead.

I wished I could help some younger Tributes in the training room, but of course there were none. Instead I looked for whoever seemed to be having the most trouble.

"Hi," I said to the girl at the throwing stars station. "You're Sofia, right?"

"Yeah?" she asked, shifting away a little. Most people were scared of Careers. I could see why.

"Mind if I come join you?" I asked. I saw her confusion and added, "I just like helping people. I know I'm a Career, but I'm going to be fighting the other Careers, since they can defend themselves."

"Okay," Sofia said unenthusiastically. Clearly she just didn't want to tell me no, but I was sure I could put her at ease eventually.

"You're already doing really well. Did you train at home or something?" I realized and covered my mouth with a giggle. "Oh wait, that's not allowed, so of course you didn't."

"I just got lucky," Sofia said, not quite as nervously. She threw a star and landed it in on the target. Not the bullseye, but the target, which was better than most people.

"When I throw, I keep my arm really straight and only move my hand. I want my whole arm to feel like one piece," I said, I threw a star and it went straight into the bullseye.

Sofia threw again and her star landed pretty close to where her first one had.

"It doesn't happen right away, of course. But if you throw really close together like that, it means you're already precise."

After that, I helped Briar at the spears station. There wasn't much to teach when it came to spears, but I could at least help her get her stance right so it would be hard to knock her over.

"Hey!" someone waved from behind me as I walked back to my room. I turned and saw a Capitolite boy in a rainbow suit. "You're Perfecta, right?"

"Yes, that's me," I said.

The boy ran up, breathless from having chased after me. He leaned over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath. "I'm totally going to sponsor you. You're so cool!"

"Thanks!" I said.

The boy stuck out his hand and I shook it. "I'm Corvus," he said. "I just wanted to meet you."

"Glad to meet you, too," I said. "Hope I see you around."

Back in my room, as I sat writing letters to my sister, I made sure to tell her about how nice everyone in the Capitol was. The Games were going to be dangerous, sure, but I knew everything would be okay.

Kamau Kariuki- Res D2M

Ava sat across beside me as Mom and I looked over across the table at each other. How was I supposed to think about food when I was looking at my dead mother? My dead mother, who looked like she was the same age I was. She'd been eighteen when she died. I'd been a bit of an earlier bloomer at fourteen, but then, neither of us had really bloomed in the Arena, had we? More of busted. And all that was beside the point. How, how in the world, do you react to your dead teenage mother?

"You've grown up strong," Mom said in a little voice.

"It's nice to see you," I said back in an equally little one. We'd hugged when we'd first met, and we'd both cried a little, but I think it was mostly confusion. I wasn't the little kid Mom remembered. Mom wasn't the authority figure I remembered, so much taller she seemed to be from another world and impossibly wise about things four-year-olds didn't understand.

"Do you still like cheetahs?" Mom asked after visibly getting up the courage. Her voice went up a little at the end of the sentence.

I smiled. "Yeah, I still like cheetahs." They'd always been my favorite animal. I guess some things don't change. "I lost Blur on a field trip, but I still miss him," I said of my old stuffed animal.

"You used to like cheetahs," Mom said, more to herself than to me and smiling back.

"So what is this going to be?" I asked suddenly. "I'm a different person." Mom's lips went tight. "How are we even going to... be?" People changed over their lives. In ten years, ten of my most formative years, I'd changed so much I wasn't really even the same person, cheetahs or no cheetahs. Your parents are with you through that and learn the new you as it develops, but Mom hadn't seen that. And now I was a teen, someone who knew their mother in a different way than a wide-eyed, dependent kid. How could I learn that overnight?

"I was thinking about that, too," Mom said as Ava pretended to get a phone call so she could give us some privacy. "There's so much we've lost. Baby, I don't think we have time to put it back together." her voice got thick as she hunched forward in her chair. She looked up at me with sad eyes. "I was thinking, what if, for now, we think of each other as family? Like people who lived together but then we moved apart? Almost like..." she sighed. "You almost see me more as a big sister now, don't you? And that's okay. However you see me is okay. This is impossible to ask of you. So however you want to see it. Just, I love you."

"You'll always be my mom," I said, and that's when she really started crying. "I'm like some kid who got kidnapped. You're like some super young teen mom. And we're both about to die, probably. I guess... let's look at it like we're both on hospice and the most important thing is spending time together."

Mom smiled. "Okay. Let's do that."

Havelock Grimm- The Poseidon Adventure D4M

"That was messed up, how I died." Ember and I were sitting in her room. The lounges were all overrun with the number of Tributes, especially the Career Districts. Through some wordless acknowledgment, Floki and I had agreed that we'd always be brothers and we'd look out for each other, but we didn't need to be together all the time. We both knew he belonged with Whyte, so I discreetly looked for someone else to hang out with. Ember was a safe choice, since she wasn't in the Games with us. We'd never really been together together, but we'd been friends. Maybe if I won we could see what happened. Maybe we'd end up still friends. It wasn't like her friendship was a booby prize.

"God, it was horrible." Ember's voice cracked and I looked up in surprise. She was looking away like she was there again. "Everyone with their eyes covered, calling for each other." Her throat moved. "Not hearing you and knowing it had happened."

"Oh," I said, unsure of how to go on. "But, uh, cool you won."

"Oof, that was worse." Ember smiled painfully. "Not that you weren't a big deal, but that was bad."

"So what's it like being a Victor?" I asked, landing on the first different topic that popped into my head.

"Dad's so happy," Ember said. "Every day it's, 'hey, sweet pea, want to go to park?' or 'are you going to come over for dinner today? I made soup.' He texts every day, and if I don't respond for a while I'll get a call from Mom saying 'your father keeps calling me and saying 'at least someone will talk to me'."

"Dads, am I right?" I shifted on the couch. My own parents were not quite so extroverted, but we'd always known they'd loved us. I wondered if they still believed so much in our Norse traditions when Valhalla cost them so many sons.

"It's cool getting fan mail. I would have thought I'd get less, since it took so long for me to win, but nope, people still think I'm cool. Most of them aren't even weird creeps," Ember said.

"I guess they knew you'd get there in the end," I said. Maybe I was saying it for myself, too. Ember and I were part of the Res gang now. Over and over we came back, someone seeing something in us that we certainly hadn't proven. All of us wondered if that secret ingredient even really existed. I was sure that if Tributes got fan mail (surely we did, and the mentors just didn't want us wasting time on it), Floki would get piles more than me. I thought about asking Shane, but that wouldn't be a good idea. Better to keep reminding myself that I was my own person, even if Floki was the "better" Tribute. People didn't see the things I had that he didn't. I didn't have a boyfriend or the following Floki had. But he didn't have the friend I had in Ember. It didn't have to be an or, that Floki was cool or I was cool. It was an and. One thing Ember and I had talked about made me smile. If I ever did look at my fan mail, I'd see two equal piles of fan mail for both me and Floki from one location. Two people out there, back somewhere in Four, thought we were both cool.

Camille Igawa- Let the Good Times Roll D9F

In both a cosmic and very high-pressure way, this was my greatest chance to live out my life's motto. This Games was chock-full of Careers. I was pretty sure the ratio of Career to outlier was far higher than normal, and of course by sheer numbers they were far higher than a normal year. Out of all these privileged heirs and babied, train-from-birth cheaters, if someone like me won it would be the ultimate middle finger to society. At least that was how I was trying to look at it. I was the brave protagonist in a sea of champions, not some girl who was trying to tell herself she wasn't the smallest fish in a very big pond.

One thing was for sure: in my grand quest to defeat the Career elite, I was not going to win by fighting bravely. No, I was going to win by running smartly. In my short few days in the training room, I'd been putting in long hours at the running station, the tracking station, and the camouflage station. At the running station I was doing intervals training to get better at getting far away from someone who wanted to get closer to me. At the camouflage station I was getting better at making sure people would think I was simply not there. And at the tracking station I was learning everything I could about following someone, so I would know exactly what not to do to attract the people following me.

Once I'd learned everything I could about staying hidden, I finally let myself learn how to make a blaze of glory. For my glorious standard, I chose a spear. Spears were long, meaning my opponent would be farther away from me. The spear I chose was also heavy, more of a close-up spear than a throwing spear. Should my opponent disarm me (quite likely, since they'd be a Career) I could simply run for it, leaving them to chase me while carrying a very heavy spear that would hopefully get caught on things.

In my usual cautious way, I found the expert spear sparring partner and challenged her. She killed me in seconds. So I attacked her again and double-died in seconds. But the third time, she also killed me in seconds. But the twenty-second time, she killed me in almost half a minute. Progress aside- and fighting for thirty seconds is both longer and more tiring than people think- it was just plain kind of fun. After all the boring stuff like painting myself brown, I was having a great time doing something dangerous and fast-paced. Getting killed thirty times was honestly kind of a rush.