SONG: Release my Heart by The Black Procession

After the Capitol seal disappeared from the sky, the allies sat in silence. Iris wondered if Christopher and Kasia were thinking about their fallen district partners like she was.

She'd known that killing people would take a toll on her. But the guilt was like nothing she'd ever felt before. She was no stranger to the feeling. Every customer she sold to, every batch she smuggled onto trains, she felt a twinge in her chest, knowing that she'd contributed to the downfall of someone's life somewhere. She used to lie awake at night, wondering how many people would suffer because of the actions she'd chosen.

But this? This was different. She had killed Taggerty without thinking about it. The fact that it had been instinctual, that it had come to her naturally, terrified her. If she could kill someone without a second thought, what else was she capable of? Her stomach turned over and over, and she felt like she was going to be sick.

Neither Christopher nor Kasia had killed anyone today, and she envied them for that. If she had only left when Kasia called her, if she had been happy with what she had and not gone after that backpack, maybe things would have been different. Taggerty wouldn't have gone for her. Someone else would have killed him instead.

Her mind was going a mile a minute, and all she wanted was for it to stop. She wanted the pit in her stomach to go away, the shaking in her hands to leave. She wanted, more than anything in the world, to be sitting in her dingy kitchen with Jordie.

She dreaded being awake a moment longer, but knew that she wasn't tired enough to sleep yet. Her allies, however, both looked dead on their feet. "You guys should sleep. I'll take first watch."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, Christopher. You look half dead already."

He shrugged. "Well, I ain't gonna argue."

He pulled his sleeping bag out of his backpack and began setting it up. Kasia did the same. Before long, both of her allies were asleep, and Iris was left alone to her thoughts.

She stared up at the sky. There were more stars in it than she'd ever seen at home. There was so much smog clogging the skies in District Six, they were lucky if they saw one or two stars at most. The desert sky seemed bigger, somehow.

Iris hoped that Emily had kept her word and was looking after Jordie. Her brother would do just fine by himself, she knew that, but that didn't mean she wanted him to be by himself. Knowing that someone was there for him - even if that person was Emily - made her feel a little bit better.

She was on high alert for the whole time she took watch. Every rustle was a Career lying in wait, every snap of a twig was a mutt, about to burst from the shadows. She managed to keep it together for around three hours, but when it got too difficult to keep her eyes open, she shook Kasia awake.

"Wh-" Kasia began to say, her eyes flying open in a panic. Relief was obvious on her face when she saw that it was just Iris.

"Your turn," Iris said, through a yawn.

Kasia nodded. "How long did you watch for?"

Iris shrugged. "About three hours."

"Alright. I'll wake Christopher up in three hours." She nodded towards Iris' sleeping bag. "Go get your beauty sleep, District Six."

Iris rolled her eyes, but didn't have the energy to say anything in response. She collapsed into the spot Kasia had been sleeping, used one of the packs as a pillow, and was asleep before she could remember closing her eyes.

/

She awoke with a start sometime the next morning. She couldn't remember what she'd been dreaming about, only that someone or something had been chasing her. All in all, she'd slept a lot better than she had thought she would in the arena. She wasn't sure whether that was a good thing or not.

Looking around, she saw Christopher organising his backpack. Kasia was nowhere in sight. "Mornin'," he said. He looked less exhausted than he had the day before, but there were still bags under his eyes, and his face was pink from sunburn.

Iris nodded at him. "Where's Kasia?"

He shrugged. "Went for a piss, I think."

"I'm going to do the same," she said. She walked a few paces into the oasis and squatted behind a tree, using a leaf as toilet paper. Back home, they'd never had the luxury of toilet paper. Scraps of paper or fabric were used, which were irritating. A leaf was a big upgrade from the scratchy pieces of paper or hessian, and Iris found it ironic that she was more comfortable in the arena than she was at home.

When she returned to their camp, her allies had packed up most of their stuff. "We should make it look like we were never here," Iris said, thinking about the footprints and the marks they'd left where they'd slept.

"Good idea," Christopher said. He looked around for a moment, and pulled one of the large leaves from a nearby tree. He began to sweep, brushing away footprints.

When the camp looked somewhat like how it had looked before they'd slept, the allies had a small breakfast of mangoes. They filled their packs with as much of the tropical fruit they could fit, and filled up their water bottles before leaving the oasis.

"Can I borrow your machete?" Kasia asked Iris, gesturing.

Iris frowned, but handed it to her. "Why?"

Kasia didn't answer, and instead walked over to a tree and hacked down one of the branches. "Walking stick. Make it a lot easier to walk up those dunes."

"Oh, good idea!" Iris copied her idea, and chopped down a branch for herself and Christopher. She felt slightly bad, damaging a tree in the oasis that had been so good to them, but reasoned that the trees had been created by the Gamemakers, and she wouldn't have thought twice at cutting a limb off of a Gamemaker.

Just before they were about to leave, a thought occurred to Iris. "Wait! Wasn't there sunscreen in one of the packs?"

"Yeah," Kasia said, and began rummaging through hers. "I'd forgotten about that."

They all took turns slathering a decent layer of the stuff on their faces. "We could just stay here. Wait til night to leave, when it's cooler," Christopher remarked, looking at the stream.

Iris shook her head. "I'd love that, but we need to put more distance between us and the Careers. If we wait until night to leave, they'll catch up with us easily."

Christopher sighed. "Yeah, I guess you're right. I'm just not lookin' forward to walkin' all day in this heat."

"We don't have much choice," Kasia said.

"Let's just go now, before we can talk ourselves into staying." Iris wanted nothing more than to go for another dip in the stream - the water looked so cool and refreshing. She felt like it was calling to her, and tore her eyes away from it. "Let's go," she said, forcing herself to walk away from the stream.

Her allies reluctantly followed. They all winced as they stepped into the sun. It wasn't even that high in the sky yet - the hottest part of the day was still yet to come.

/

It wasn't until early evening they ran into someone for the first time since the Bloodbath. The sand dunes had gotten taller the further north they walked, and it felt like they were doing more climbing and slipping than they were walking.

They hadn't seen anything out of place about the dune. It looked exactly the same as all the dunes they'd climbed up so far. Maybe, Iris thought later, if she had've looked a bit closer, she would have noticed footprints, handprints, something to tip them off on what was awaiting them. But she didn't. And he had gotten the jump on them.

The boy from Seven had, apparently, seen them at the bottom, because when they reached the top he had jumped out at them with a crazed shriek. He ran at them wildly with his knife, not seeming to have any sort of plan of attack, because if he had thought it through surely he would have realised that attempting to fight three people at once wasn't a good idea.

The boy ran straight at Christopher, and before he could react, Christopher had lost his balance and disappeared from sight, rolling halfway down the sand dune before managing to stop himself.

Kasia hit him hard in the back of the knees with her walking stick, and the boy crumpled to the ground. Kasia kept him there with her stick, and Iris slit the boy's throat without hesitation. He looked up at her as he died, gurgling, his face burnt badly from the sun, large pieces of skin peeling from his forehead and cheeks. Iris looked up at her allies with a grim expression on her face.

"He must've gone crazy in the heat," Kasia said quietly. "His water bottle's empty."

"Poor kid," Christopher said regretfully, hauling himself back up over the top of the dune.

"We probably did him a favour," Iris replied. She wiped her machete on the sand and stood up, looking away from the empty eyes of the boy she'd just killed. Yes, better to think that she was in the right for killing him. Better to consider his death as putting an end to his misery, rather than admit to herself that it had been murder.

"How can you say that?" Christopher said.

Iris shrugged. "Did you forget where we are?" She found herself looking at the boy again, at his wide, frightened eyes. Christopher stepped forward, and gently closed the boy's eyes. Iris looked away.

"Iris is right," Kasia chimed in. "Dehydration would have killed him a lot slower than we did."

"I liked it a lot better when you two weren't friends," Christopher said. "C'mon. Somebody would've heard that cannon." He stepped away from them both and began walking down the sand dune without looking back.

Kasia and Iris looked at each other. "This isn't the right place for him," Kasia said. "He won't last. He's already not coping and he hasn't even killed anybody."

Neither have you, Iris resisted the urge to say. She looked at her feet instead. "This isn't the right place for anybody."

"Yeah, but at least the two of us have accepted it for what it is. Accepted what we have to do. He's delusional if he thinks he can get through this without hurting anyone."

"It's not fair," Iris said quietly. "He doesn't belong here." She wasn't sure if she was talking about Christopher or the boy from Seven.

Kasia took Iris' hand gently. "None of us do."

/

Iris was reluctant to stop walking when it grew dark. There was a feeling of unease in the pit of her stomach that had been there since they had left the oasis. She wanted nothing more than to turn back, to stay there another night, to submerge herself in the stream and gorge herself on mangoes. The temptation of it scared her.

She wanted to walk through the night, and would have, had Christopher not been in the state he was. She and Kasia needed him, and leaving him behind would not only leave them with less protection, it would mean they would have less sleep. They were nearly out of water - the only reason they hadn't gone through it already was because they had all drank as much as they could before leaving the oasis.

Iris volunteered for the first watch again. She didn't think she would be able to sleep. The burnt, peeling face of the boy from Seven appeared whenever she closed her eyes and merged with Taggerty and Axel. She wondered what his name was. How old he had been. Whether he had friends and family, what his favourite thing to do was, whether he'd ever eaten a mango. It wasn't that she regretted killing him - she just wished that she'd had a choice. That he had run from them instead of at them. She was angry that he had forced her to kill him.

The desert was eerie at night. It was as if there were two extremes of weather - the sweltering, dry heat during the day, and the icy chill at night. When there was wind, it sounded like the swishy footsteps of people walking up the dunes, and whenever she looked over the top of the dune, Iris half-expected to see a horde of Careers about to murder them.

She was dreading another day of walking, but knew there was no choice - what else could they do? It wasn't as though they could set up camp on the top of a sand dune. They didn't even have enough water for a day. It was hard to tell that they were even going in the right direction. Without any real landmarks, the only thing they could do was check the sun obsessively to make sure they were still going north. Even then, it was hard to be certain they were moving. Each dune was the same as the last. There was the occasional cactus or boulder, but otherwise the landscape was nothing but sand as far as the eye could see.

The only cannon they'd heard since the Bloodbath had been the boy from Seven - there was no way that his death had satiated the Capitol. They would be wanting gore, action, epic fights full of bloodlust and suspense, not a simple slit throat in a fight of three against one. The Careers evidently hadn't had much luck finding other tributes, which both reassured and terrified Iris. If the Careers were struggling with the landscape just as much as they were, it evened the playing field a bit. It also meant that they would be frustrated, and when they did eventually catch up, the fight would be ruthless and would likely last a while.

There was no doubt in Iris' mind that if something interesting didn't happen soon, the Gamemakers would unleash hell upon the arena. She shuddered to think about what sort of mutts there would be in a place like this.

Despite the lingering threat of Capitol boredom, it wasn't the biggest problem they had. They were running low on water. Although they had drunk as much water as they could force down at the oasis, the sun had beat down on them all day. Iris had tried to ration hers, but she had only a few sips left. Additionally, they'd had no sight of another oasis or water source, and Iris didn't know anything about finding water in a desert. She was cursing herself for not spending more time in the survival stations during training.

There was no doubt in her mind that the alliance had earned some sponsor money, especially being the only ones to have killed since the Bloodbath. But she also didn't doubt that the price of water would be exorbitant in an arena like this. They'd been fortunate to stumble upon the oasis when they had, but she doubted that something that convenient would happen again.

"We might have to go back to the idea of travellin' at night," Christopher rasped, when they had stopped for a break the tenth time the next day. "We can't continue like this."

"We don't have much choice," Kasia replied. "Even if we only do our walking at night, we'll still be sleeping out in the sun, and that might be worse than walking. We'll need shelter, for one, and I don't think I've seen any sort of material we can use for that."

"I feel like we're not moving at all," Iris said. "I know we said we'd stay North, but we might have to consider choosing another direction. We haven't seen anything since the first day. We'll die of dehydration if we don't get more water soon."

"Do you think the Gamemakers are misleadin' us, or somethin'?"

"I wouldn't rule it out. Surely I'm not the only one who feels like we're going in circles." Her allies nodded. "We need to change it up. We're not getting anywhere. If we can get past the dunes, I think we'll be alright. But right now, we're walking ourselves to death."

Kasia sighed. "I think Iris is right. We said we'd stick to the north, but that was before we knew what the arena was. I think we need to be adaptable and take a chance going somewhere else. I'm going crazy looking at sand, all day, every day. I can't stand it anymore."

"Alright then," Iris said. "It's decided. Tomorrow, we go east. Does that sound okay? Christopher?"

"Anythin's better than these goddamned dunes," he said, wiping his brow. "I ain't built for all this climbin'."

If there were dunes in the East as well, Iris didn't know what they would do. There was no way they'd survive another full day of travel without water. She realised that it was quite likely she was leading her allies to their deaths.