There is gore in Trydan's POV. Seems weird putting a gore warning in an SYOT but it's not as expected in a Reaping.

Trydan Briod- District Five male (17 when Reaped, 11 during this scene)

Dad had the coolest job. Our entire nation depended on Five's power plants to run. Without us there wouldn't be Panem at all. We'd all be riding horses and grinding flour with stones and living like cavemen. Not only did Dad keep our country running, but he did it cleanly. Wind turbines didn't use fossil fuels or leave toxic waste. They just used the air nature gave us.

"These pistons are always getting replaced, since they're under so much pressure," Dad said as he pointed at the two pistons chugging away under the panel he'd removed. "No matter how much we oil them they still get ground away in a month or so."

"There's a little chip," I pointed out, my chest puffing proudly. I loved being able to point out a problem, especially before Dad saw it. That meant I was helping keep Panem running just like he did, before I was even hired. I was too young now but as soon as I was fifteen I was going to work on wind turbines too. Or at least get paid for it. I already went with Dad to work as often as I could. One time I noticed a wire was frayed and Dad said if it had gotten much worse the whole turbine would have been shut down until they could fix it.

"Careful," Dad cautioned, nudging my finger back. "They're under hundreds of pounds of pressure. They'll pinch your finger right off."

"What's this?" I asked, pointing at a belt running in a loop.

"That's the tension gauge," Dad said. "If the belt starts going too fast it will set off a sensor and we'll know to turn it off."

"How fast is too fast?"

Before Dad answered I noticed the belt had a tiny tear in it. I pointed it out. "Oh, there's a-"

The machine came to life and pulled me in. My head bounced off the edge of the platform and I felt blood smear across my forehead as the belt sucked my finger into the crack between the belt and the machinery underneath it. There was an instant of warning ache as my finger was pinched before an explosion of crushing agony. Some part of my brain registered how high and babyish my scream was and the pain was worse for the mortification of knowing I'd gotten myself into this and worse of all, Dad was watching.

WIthout me even meaning to, my other hand shot out to pull myself free. I dodged Dad's restraining arm and grabbed for my fingers. They're going to get sucked in entirely, I thought. I imagined the sockets straining and then popping free, my fingers sliding off the bone as boneless sausages of finger flesh ripped the skin open and disappeared into the machine. All at once, a second too late, I realized I had made it so much worse. My pointer fingernail on my right hand glanced off the belt and I tried to pull it back but it wedged next to my trapped left hand. I saw the nail peel up like an opened can before it disappeared under the blood spraying from my left hand. The tip was missing from my ring finger, I noticed. The stump was literally spraying blood. Spraying blood, I thought, like I'd shoved the straw into a juice box and squeezed the box. It was pattering down onto the stopped conveyor belt.

"No!" I tried to warn Dad when he reached in next to me. His hand slid next to mine and popped the belt open, freeing me. I hadn't even noticed it was stopped. Once I noticed that I heard the siren blaring around us. He'd mentioned that the emergency stop took half a second to engage. Adding in the time it took to hit it, all of this had happened in less than two seconds. In less than two seconds my hands went from normal to... I didn't know how to describe them. They felt like someone else's hands with how little they hurt and how alien they looked. I only knew they were mine by how small they were and the puke welling up in my stomach.

Dad's coworker Dyno appeared beside me, grabbing for my hands. He wrapped a wipe around them and I gasped at the pressure and the sting of whatever was on it. He kept his hand clamped around mine, trying to keep the blood in. I tried to wiggle them and was relieved to feel they were still attached. I didn't find out until later that they were too damaged to heal and the doctor would have to neatly clip the dangling flesh free and stitch the three stumps closed. All I could think, as I stood there looking at the color spreading on the white tissue, was how Dad told me safety rules were written in blood.

Birdie Seguaro- District Five female (14)

Life is life is life. It didn't matter if everyone in the entire world said otherwise, life was life. The Capitol could throw it away but that did not mean it didn't have value. With all my life I would honor the lives of others.

"No!" I yelled at three years old when Aunt Phota lifted her boot to crush a moth caterpillar crawing on a tomato plant. I brushed it into my chubby palm, ignoring the dirt on my fingers, and ferried it over to a patch of grass next to our garden to deposit it onto a dandelion.

"Life is life!" I yelled at ten years old, lifting my colored pencil sign over my head as I stomped back and forth in front of the justice building, my friend Sunnaria wielding her own sign with a mother cow crying over a plate of steak and a little cow headstone.

"No sauce, please," I said, holding up a hand to ward off Abuela's spoon of red meat sauce. She puckered her lips at me but didn't insist. I ate my nopales with just salsa and hot sauce.

Not everyone understood veganism but if you asked me, I didn't understand people who didn't understand it. It's not hard to understand that eating animals kills them. I did sometimes wonder if I'd think differently if I'd been born into a different family. Auntie and Uncle were some of the last hippies in Panem. Most people I talked to didn't even know what a "hippie" was. Our kind wasn't looked upon fondly by the government. I could see in Aunty and Uncle's worried demeanor lately that they were afraid of the same thing I was. A fourteen-year-old protesting was a cute little kid trying to express herself. A sixteen-year-old protesting was a dissident.

"I don't know," Sunnaria confessed to me as we sat on my house's flat roof looking out at the desert sunset. "I'll always be vegan, of course, but... I want kids."

My heart clenched at the words. I knew Sunnaria couldn't give me what I wished I could give her. I wished so dearly you could choose who you loved. I also sometimes wished Cyrus was a terrible person so I'd have a reason to hate him. You should be happy if someone you love is happy. It just sucks when their happiness is your loneliness.

"I think someday I might have to keep it secret," Sunnaria finished.

"That's okay," I said. I wished she had the courage to keep fighting, but things were never that easy. It was bizarre we had to fight so hard for peace. That was what I really wanted. I wanted people living in harmony and animals living in harmony and everyone in harmony with nature. I couldn't believe the Capitol couldn't see that. They lived in their built-up houses and villages and used their machines all day and they never even touched nature. There were so many lights in the Five cities you couldn't see the stars. It must have been the same in the Capitol. It haunted me that sometime in human history the first person was born and died without ever once seeing the stars. I thought that must have been the point where we stopped really living.

It was only after I volunteered that I thought about something. When I heard Sunnaria's name I just couldn't bear it. I couldn't stand by and let her die. I couldn't let the miracle of her life, that one-in-a-billion chance combination of genes and experiences, pass away because the Capitol thought she was nothing. I didn't think about it until I saw her screaming and crying and trying to pull away from the girls holding her back from rushing the stage. I didn't think about how my life had value, too.