Kamau's POV is a flashback since the scene is important but didn't fit into the earlier chapters.

Kamau Kariuki- Res D2M

"Mom?" I called down the hallway. Maybe it wasn't the smartest, but I knew she was beside herself waiting for me. What were the odds that there happened to be some ninja Career who'd escaped both my and her notice and was lurking between me and the door fifteen feet down the hall? If that was what did me in, clearly the universe had it in for me.

The door jerked open and Mom's worried face popped out. We hadn't known exactly what the border for the feast was. The closest we'd dared for Mom to go was around the corner to the waiting room. We hoped her not being able to see the feast was far enough, but it also meant she couldn't see the feast, and thus couldn't see if I was okay. I smiled nervously when I saw how plainly terrified she looked. It was weird seeing your mom look like that, even when you barely knew her. She raised her arms to hug me and was shocked and offended when I didn't slow down.

"We gotta go!" I said, glancing over my shoulder to see if Marley and Olivine were following. Mom understood immediately and ran out after me, standing directly behind me in case someone shot an arrow after us. I wished she wouldn't risk herself like that, but I knew if I tried to move sideways she'd just follow me.

Once we were on the next floor up we felt safe to stop. It would be nice if we could get back to our room, since it had the booby-trapped door and hallway set up already, but it was a sizable risk trying to get that far with so many Careers prowling the hallways. It might just be easier to re-rig a new room. Of course, our next step depended heavily on what I'd gotten at the feast.

I flipped the top of the bag open. It was empty, except for a little piece of paper. How is it empty? It was so heavy. Did they put weights in the side of the bag just to mess with us? Lame. I unfolded the paper.

Oops! It's leprosy!

"Isn't that when your fingers fall off?" I asked, then realized what I'd said. I hurriedly looked at my hands and was relieved to see they were still attached. I was rapidly getting pale, though.

"Leprosy turns you white?" I wondered aloud. It was such a bizarre sequence of events I barely had the presence of mind to be worried. I'd just started to register a weird lack of sensation in my extremities when Mom dove across the room.

"Quick, take this," she said, handing me our bottle of panacea. I almost dropped it when I went to close my fingers around it and couldn't feel its weight against my hand.

I hesitated. "I don't want to waste it," I said. Honestly, I was so mad I wanted to throw the bottle against the wall. The Gamemakers forced me to risk my life at that feast and then planted horrible prizes at it? This wasn't a game. It was just them toying with us.

"Take it! Quick!" Mom insisted. At the panic on her face and the tears forming in her eyes, I uncorked the bottle and drank it. It tasted like slightly mineral-laced water, which was somehow underwhelming, and left an oily film in my mouth. Immediately the feeling came back into my hands. My skin slowly darkened back into my natural shade. It was a little vain how happy I was about that. I would have looked really weird with African features but white skin.

"Well that bites," I said, looking with disappointment at the now-useless bottle.

"Don't be sad," Mom said, putting her arm around me. "Don't think of it like we don't have it anymore. Think of it like if we hadn't gotten it, you'd be dead. We'll get by without it." she smiled. "What are the odds there would be another feast?"

"Don't say it," I said, putting a hand up. "Don't even say it." The last thing we needed was a jinx.

Gaius McClellan- No Way Down 12M

The room was so much smaller than it had been yesterday. I knew it wasn't really true, but I couldn't get it out of my head. The arena was getting smaller. It was closing in on me. It was getting hard to breathe. It was my lungs. There were already turning to stone. I started to pant, the bigger breaths doing nothing to convince me everything still worked. At any moment I would feel my lungs hitch and that would be it.

I laid my hands firmly on my knees. I held my breath for three seconds, then let it out. I wasn't dead yet. Panicking would only ensure I died. There was a chance to get out of this and I was going to find a way. I had two of the smarter guys I'd met on the case, and Maxson was no slouch either. We would find a way to get out of this.

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT ZIBBY

Todd and Theo stood on either side of the words written on the whiteboard. Across the room, Max was hunched over the computer, trying to find a floor plan for the hospital.

She's really really smart, Todd wrote.

"Good one," Theo said. "Where would you go if you were really really smart?"

"I am really really smart," Todd said, laying a hand on his chest and smirking.

"All right then, Copernicus. Where is she?" Theo asked.

"In one of the labs," Todd guessed. He wrote down labs under our list of possibilities. "What else do we know?"

"She burned someone."

Todd and Theo turned to look at me. "Really?" Todd asked.

"Yeah," I said. I'd done a little studying of the more interesting-looking Tributes. I hadn't had time to learn much, but as I was studying Fable and Jessie I'd learned that Zibby had set one of them on fire.

Very volatile, Todd wrote on the board.

"It means she doesn't value life," I clarified for him. "She's very smart and she's not afraid to kill people."

"One of the pharmacies?" Theo suggested. "There's all sorts of poisons there."

I shook my head, shuddering at the stiffness in my neck. Was it from sleeping on a hard floor, or was it so much worse? "I don't think that's enough for her." I focused my thoughts on everything I could remember about her. "She was always rushing from one thing to another in the Games building. She was so curious about everything. I don't think a pharmacy would be exciting enough for her."

"She hasn't been doing much in the Games, as far as I can tell," Todd mused aloud.

It came to me. "She's doing experiments." More pieces came together even as I said it. "She would want the rarest and most interesting things in the hospital- things she wouldn't ever have access to in Eight. And she'd want things that could hurt people, when it came to it." I stood, putting a hand on the table when I wavered on my numb feet. The Gamemakers had to do it in the most nightmarish way possible. Aside from the light tingling in my fingers and the possible stiffness in my neck, the petrification seemed to be moving from the bottom up.

I limped across the room to Maxson. "Is there any sort of dangerous chemicals storehouse in the arena?" I asked him.

"Search 'hazardous materials'," Maxson said.

"'Hazardous materials' yields ninety-five possible results," the computer said.

"'Most hazardous materials'," Maxson clarified.

"The most hazardous materials are stored in the hazardous materials stronghold, located on the seventh floor," the computer said. It flashed an image of a bank vault-style door emblazoned with an array of foreboding symbols.

"That's it," I said. "That's where she is."

Unique Dior- Res D1F

All right, Ones. Guess you know what we have to do. Here's hoping One culture hasn't changed much since I left. In my day, any One knew there were two birthstones for each month: one precious and one semiprecious. Rose quartz is one of those birthstones. If you want to ally, meet me at the floor whose number corresponds to the month associated with rose quartz.- OneTryingToSurvive

I didn't realize my error until I was halfway down. Rose quartz was January's alternate birthstone. Did "1" correspond to the first floor, or to the basement? I hurried down the last set of stairs and breathed a sigh of relief. I'd already passed the "1" sign for the first floor. The basement floor sign read "basement level". That was one problem avoided, then.

The hospital was dead silent with so few people left. I wasn't sure anyone at all was on the entire floor with me. There were seven stories, plus the basement. Probability would seem to indicate that someone was, but people tended to go up when they were scared. All those horror movies where dumb heroines fled upstairs instead of outside really were true. Those who didn't were probably the minority who tended to hide under things. They were likely in the basement. Or there might have been plenty of people here with me, either hiding in terror just a few walls away or actively waiting for me to come close enough to kill.

Come on, Elissa, I said, crossing my fingers. Let it be Elissa. Let it be Elissa. And please, please, don't let any of the Twos be weirdly into gemology.

"Hey."

It was hours later when the voice came. I jumped off the couch I'd been awkwardly waiting on, scanning my perimeter. I'd chosen a waiting room with unimpeded view of my surroundings. If someone approached in any direction, I'd be able to see them either in front of me or in the reflections of the glass partitions in front of several help desks. I didn't see anyone, which meant whoever it was was only close-by, not immediately near. Luckily, one thing that hadn't changed about One was our accent.

"Hey," I called back. "Over here." It didn't sound like Olivine, though I wasn't at all confident I could pick her voice out of a crowd. If it wasn't Olivine, it wasn't someone allied with a Two. Jessie and Chrome were too sneaky to try something so obvious.

Priscilla appeared at the end of the hall to my left. "This the One party?" she asked, her hand hooked around the corner of the hallway as she peeked nervously at my bow.

I couldn't help but smile. Sometimes things are so bizarre you just have to smile. "I guess," I said, laying it on the couch. "Not too many people showed up, though."

"Their loss," Priscilla said as she strode down the hall. "It's still pretty early. Maybe more will come."

At least two is better than one, I thought. Oof, bad phrasing. The Twos had probably already mustered and were making their rounds, sealing doors as they went. One ally wasn't much, but it was a lot better than being alone.

"So how have the Games been?" I asked. It seemed rude not to make conversation. After the first tense instant where we came into fighting range, both of us steeling for the sudden attack, we'd settled into a resigned easiness.

"Sucky." Priscilla said. "My brother died and I wasn't even there."

"Oh," I said. "I'm so sorry." What a dumb thing to say. You knew she lost her brother.

Priscilla shrugged. "What are you gonna do? Gotta keep going, right? You know how it is. You lost your friends, too."

"Yeah, but they weren't my brother," I said.

Priscilla shrugged again. "What are you gonna do," she repeated. She looked down the hall for a moment and then back at me, seeming to reset her expression. "Hey, weird question, have you ever played hoops?"

"I don't think so," I said, immediately beating myself up for not leaning into her clear attempt to change the topic.

"It's pretty easy," Priscilla said. "On my way here I passed one of the little gyms they have scattered around, with the weights and stuff. It had a ball in it. You wanna play some hoops while we wait to see if more Ones come?"

What? I wanted to ask. How could anyone play at a time like this? But before I could form a response, I saw the logic in Priscilla's view. We couldn't stop what happened to our friends and our brothers here. So much of our lives was going to be bad, no matter what. It was almost rebellious to be happy anyway. One of the last bits of freedom we had was to choose to keep going. At the very least, maybe we could get our minds off it for a few minutes.

"You know what? I would like to play some hoops."