Chapter Twenty-Two: And they wept

Maize quietly led Cana away from the direction Annie Cresta had been ambling towards, not caring that it meant they would have to find another trail to follow. She ignored his meaningful glances as she picked up a stong looking branch from the ground and began to peel off the bark with her knife. The moment that Cana felt they were far away enough to talk he opened his mouth.

"Why?" he asked, confusion evident in his voice.

"I'm making a bō staff." she stated bluntly, purposefully ignoring the real question he was asking.

Cana huffed, "Not that. I already knew that. I mean why did you let her go?"

She hesitated for a moment before deciding to just be honest with the younger teen, "Waverly is-was the name of Annie's District partner. He's younger than you. Or was, I guess. I think he must have been one of the cannons we heard last night."

The fourteen-year-old nodded carefully, "Okay. So, we let her go because..."

"She's grieving Cana. She's walking wounded. Cresta's not a danger to anyone anymore." Maize's voice had a finality to it. An end to her District partner's questions. Walking wounded was a colloquial term that they used to describe people in their District that had nothing to live for anymore... they were just moving around and working because it was routine. No one was ever really surprised to find them hanging in the deeper parts of the orchard. The only person that Annie could harm was herself at this point. (And that was if she came out of her denial over Waverly's death, Maize didn't think that the Game Makers or the Capitol for that manner would be patient enough for the redhead to come to terms with the grieving process before the dam broke).

"I understand." Cana whispered back in a soft and understanding manner. Back home, everyone knew someone who was a walking wounded. She knew that Cana would understand.

They kept walking.

It took roughly another hour before they finally found a small stream. Based off the mud around the stream the only visitors to the area had been animals and not any other tributes, which made the knot that had tightened behind her chest unwind somewhat. They were quick to fill up their bottles and drop in the water cleansing tablets to do their job. Maize sat down on smoothed boulder as she continued to carve out her bō staff while Cana built some small unnoticeable traps in the foliage to act as a warning system around their perimeter.

Despite knowing how all of this would end, Maize did not have a set time limit for when exactly the dam would break. She knew that the longest that the Game would last was approximately five days (after all there wasn't going to be a lot of bloodshed with the small number of tributes left... and it would be like finding a needle in a haystack at this point for all of them to find each other without the Game Makers interfering and pushing them together), the smallest amount of time would be three days... And considering that it was already mid-day during their second day in this miserable arena, Maize was feeling more than a little antsy. She wasn't a lucky person (obviously). She didn't think that she would be getting away without shedding blood.

As soon as she finished the staff, Maize unzipped her pack and pulled out the baby rabbit they had caught earlier and began to gut and skin the animal. Cana began to build a very small fire on the dry sandbank using only dry wood from a tree that had fallen two yards away from the stream, he started off by using some dried-out twigs that he lit with one of their matches before building a teepee shape with his collected logs to promote airflow and decrease the likely-hood of leaving a smoke trail indicating their location to anyone watching the skies. The rabbit took only twenty minutes to finish cooking, considering how small it was, and was nicely filling. By that point, the water had finished being cleansed and the both of them took careful sips of the cool liquid, not wanting to throw it up because they drank too fast, until it was all gone.

This time Maize made their little area disappear, leaving no trace that she and Cana had used the stream as a rest stop, while her District partner refilled their canisters and plopped another water cleansing tablet inside of them. They would not be making camp near the stream, after all if they found the stream it was likely that someone else would encounter it as well, and they would probably never return to it. She wanted to continue to get as far away from the dam as possible. This time she chose the direction that they would be taking, south from the dam, before they once more began trekking through the forest, only stopping when one of them needed to use the restroom.

The sound of two cannons firing in the distance made them pause as they looked at one another anxiously. Two more tributes dead. Six tributes left. The Career Pack was probably going to be splitting up about now. She knew that Annie wasn't one of those cannons, she could only hope that it meant two more of the Career Pack was dead, but the more logical explanation was that the tributes for 10 were dead now.

She was barely able to convince Cana to continue climbing up the hill they were scaling with the promise that they would be resting for the night in a tree above. The arena was like a valley with the cornucopia located in the lowest part of the valley. Maize didn't know much about dams, but she had loved everything about the ocean during her first life (she was going to be a marine biologist but had even debated becoming an oceanographer before she eventually decided that wanted to work with marine life more, it was probably what she missed the most about her first life). The best place to be when a tsunami warning has been issued is above high ground and at least ten miles away from the coastline. They were already about fifteen-sixteen miles away from the dam. Even then Maize did not feel very confident with the distance between them and the impending flood.

After all, this wasn't going to be a natural event, this would be an induced "tragedy" by the Game Makers. Who knows how many gallons of water they are going to drop onto the tributes, they were sadistic enough to not even give a fuck about the laws of nature (or common sense) and just flood the whole arena anyway when the dam breaks. Maize was still inwardly planning on climbing the tallest tree on hand the moment she heard the dam crack.

The moment that they reached the top of the hill, they took a quick water break, Cana had been quietly pleading her for over an hour already, before scaling a sturdy looking tree and tying themselves to the trunk for the night. It wasn't too difficult to convince Cana to break open the last of their dried food for dinner tonight. They ate in companionable silence as they got themselves comfortable before they began to drift off into Morpheus' realm. The peace was only briefly interrupted at what she assumed was midnight for the Death Recap: Waverly's young face is projected onto the false sky first before both of the tributes from 10 grace the screens. Maize prays that their deaths weren't painful and that they were in a better place as she subtly kisses her palm and rubs her fist over her chest.

Maize bit her lip to the point where it bled, as she muffled the broken sobs from escaping her lips and alerting the last two remaining members of the Career Pack where she was. She clutched Cana's bloody District token in her hand, it's weight leaving an imprint in the palm of her hand. Either way, she wept.

Words: 1,355

Edited~ February 9th, 2020