CW: INTENSE graphic descriptions of injury in the fourth POV (the one after Haylia's). If you are disturbed by gore, the right move here is to skip the whole section and PM me for a summarized or less gruesome version.

Mare Duster, 18

D10F

North-Northwest of the Cornucopia

7 July 329 AEDD

"This is a corrupt system, and I want to maximize my experience."

Mare Duster had enough experience with the desert to know that resources were hidden in the most unassuming of places. Almost unnoticeable brown plant sprouts peeked out from beneath the desert floor. Unnoticeable to everyone except Mare, that is. She recognized wild desert onions and plumberry brambles among the sand and harvested fresh yucca fruit from the bushes. This was not her usual desert, but she knew what to do. The flat yucca pods were juicy and hydrating, but she and Fahad needed fresh water. That wasn't going to be easy to obtain. She was trying to be optimistic for her district partner's sake, but she knew just what sort of task finding water would be. There were a few times she'd become badly dehydrated when on the run, and it had been horrible.

There were solutions. The undersides of stones were cool and damp. If you dug deep enough you would find seeping water beneath, but there were other things lurking in the compacted desert soil. Mare had once been stung by a scorpion after discovering a vein of water below a boulder, and that had not been a pleasant experience. She rode her horse into town, hard and fast, and threw money at the nearest doctor until he made the pain disappear. Scorpion stings weren't always fatal, but 'not always' wasn't a risk Mare had felt like taking. She was fine in the end, but there were a few things dissuading her from trying the same approach in the arena. One, there were no doctors. Two, who knows what sort of horrible scorpion mutt the Gamemakers might have cooked up? And three, Mare knew that her knowledge was pretty obscure. The Capitol wouldn't let all of its tributes dehydrate slowly, so there had to be another source within a reasonable distance.

That was the safer choice, and the one Mare was going to go with. She didn't want to put Fahad in any unnecessary danger, especially because he was so physically frail, even with the Capitol medication curbing withdrawal symptoms. It would protect him for at least two weeks, according to the escort. She might have a chance of surviving a dangerous desert critter, but he looked like a stiff breeze could take him out. He wasn't ready to tangle with any wild animals.

So Mare was walking away from the Cornucopia, half-supporting a reluctant Fahad. Mare wasn't in peak physical condition, but she was an experienced hiker and rode for hours a day, often bareback, since lugging a saddle around in a small town rest stop was difficult and conspicuous if you were, for example, an outlaw attempting to ensnare Peacekeepers and rob them blind. She held up well to the challenge of walking hours a day, but Fahad's abilities were decidedly lesser. He was trying his hardest, and Mare had made him pull an all-nighter with her so they could get as far afield from the other tributes as possible. They had been stopped for less than ten minutes total since entering the arena. Now it was well after lunchtime, which involved more yucca fruit and a meager swallow of water each, when Mare finally decided it was safe to rest.

Fahad had been crying for a while. He made an effort to be quiet so as not to annoy her, but every now and then he would snuffle miserably and another jag would start up. His motions became almost mechanical, squeezing the life out of Mare's wrist as he trudged onwards. "Fahad," Mare tried, "you can sit down, babe. Come here." She helped him lean against a rock slab and swept his feet out, lowering him into a seated posture. She sat next to him and scooped him into her arms. "Hey, I know you're tired. You've been doing so well. I'm really proud of you for managing to walk for such a long time."

Still nothing. She picked up one of his limp hands and caressed it with her own. "Here, have some water." She twisted open the bottle and offered it to him. He shakily took it from her and tipped it towards his mouth. She checked him over for signs of sunstroke or heat exhaustion and found none. Just regular exhaustion, then.

"Everything hurts," Fahad whispered.

"Do you want me to smooth some sand into a little bed for you?" she asked. "It's warm from the sun." The scorching afternoon had made the desert landscape luxurious. She was far enough from the Cornucopia, and thus the Careers, to feel safe sleeping at the same time as Fahad, and with the warm sand, it wasn't hard to set up a cozy wilderness bed. She just pawed at the soft sand to create a large, shallow divot, rolled her and Fahad's outerwear up to make pillows, and laid down with him. Then she scooped the warm sand back over them in their t-shirts, arm in arm, ready for a lazy afternoon nap. The other advantage to this strategy was the natural camouflage. It wouldn't be a jagged, colorful scar on the landscape like a sleeping bag. Mare truly felt comfortable, and with her water bottle still two thirds of the way full, life in the arena was good. So far.

Maize Bono, 15

D9F

East-Southeast of the Cornucopia

7 July 329 AEDD

"It wasn't as easy as footfalls behind her. Someone was following her, but someone was very, very good at it."

Maize knew that she wasn't alone anymore. She felt the presence somewhere around her. All was not right in her corner of the desert wasteland.

Maize was being hunted. If there was one consolation, it was that the hunters certainly weren't Careers. But that didn't matter. What mattered was that something or someone was stalking her. She hoped it was another tribute. If a mutt had been sent after her this early in the Games, it was because of some transgression she'd accidentally committed while in the Capitol. The Gamemakers didn't leave any room for error when they targeted tributes, and Maize couldn't think of anything that happened in the pre-Games phase that warranted such treatment. There had been the Aran incident, yes, but Aran was dead.

Aran was dead. Aran, whose threats had driven her from Beemo, Twyla, Tom, and Brielle, was no longer able to carry out his intentions. She had a brief moment of relief. Perhaps Tom and the Threes had come to find her, now that they could ally up with no fear of tough older tributes hanging over them. Then Maize remembered that allies wouldn't be hunting her. Even if they were trying to avoid attracting attention from other tributes nearby, they wouldn't be hiding from Maize specifically.

She had the urge to turn around. She whipped her head back and there was a swishing noise, but nobody was there. The feeling of eyes disappeared.

She walked forward again. She sensed her pursuer stepping carefully to avoid detection. Maize chose her path to cross the crunchiest dead plants she could see. Sure enough, a crispy root structure snapped under the boots of whoever was following. When she looked behind her, she saw a shadow following the person who had cast it as they ducked behind a dune. She glanced at her own shadow, a little elongated and narrow, but still true to the shape of her body. The pursuer's shadow had been even narrower, so they were probably also taller than her. Not that this information narrowed things down much. At five feet flat, most people were taller than Maize.

An idea came to mind. She couldn't allow herself to be attacked, since that could prove deadly, or almost as bad, convince sponsors that she wasn't worth their money. There were things working in her favor here, like for example, the fact that she had a sword. Did the hunter? Maybe. But Maize decided that was a risk she was okay with taking. Swords were bad at defending against distance weapons, but if the hunter possessed throwing knives or a bow, they would've skewered her already.

Maize drew her sword, immediately soothed by the schick! as it left its sheath. The falcata felt solid in her hand, steadying her. She slowly stepped in a careful circle, making a full 360-degree turn. Her hearing suddenly felt sharper than ever before. Was this adrenaline? Nerves were coursing through her, but she felt eerily calm. She sensed the grains of sand scraping against one another to her left.

She lunged, propelling herself to the top of the dune, and pounced down on the other side.

She collided with someone. By some stroke of luck, she kept hold of her sword without accidentally killing herself or her opponent. Tangled together, they half-tumbled half-slid down the slope of the huge dune. When they finally thwacked into the next dune, a backstop Maize was grateful for, the other tribute, facedown in the sand, tried to scramble up from beneath her. She pinned them to the ground. Prodding the tribute in the side, she rolled them over until she could see their face beneath the boonie hat. It was the Six boy. She pressed the flat side of the sword against his throat. "Why were you following me?"

"I'm sorry! Please don't kill me!"

"I won't have to kill you if you answer my question. Why were you following me?" He eyed the sword warily.

"I don't want to upset you. You seem angry."

"Please just tell me what you were doing." It occurred to Maize that if the boy didn't explain himself soon, she was going to have to kill him to appease the Capitolites. That was a grim thought. She didn't want to be the first outlier to claim another person's life.

"I was looking for allies."

"What?"

"My allies died in the Bloodbath. Except for my district partner, who is, uh, dying right now. And I think I'll go crazy without another person, so I was looking to join up with someone." There was a slight pause. "Are you going to kill me now?"

"Open your backpack," Maize demanded. "Show me what's on offer if I team up with you." She sounded much more confident than she felt.

"Food, um. A sleeping bag. Other stuff. Water! I have water." Somehow, Maize wasn't the most nervous person in the arena anymore.

"Okay. What did you practice in the Training Center?"

"Survival. I can, um, find water, allegedly. Not sure about that in deserts. I can set animal traps. I can make fires and do stuff you don't want to do. I can use a shank." He pulled a small knife from a boot strap.

"Why did you put that there?" Maize asked.

"Good question. Seemed like I was less likely to stab myself with it by mistake, but turns out, it also makes it impossible to get to if you happen to get jumped on by someone with a sword."

"What's your name?" asked Maize.

"Danny. What's yours?"

"Maize. I think an alliance would be nice, actually. But just in case you're thinking of killing me in my sleep, keep in mind that I scored a nine and I'm on your side. In case the Careers come calling." Maize couldn't actually battle a Career, but he didn't need to know that.

"Thank you," he said. Maize sheathed her sword and smiled. She felt much safer with someone watching her back. For some reason, Danny didn't seem like the betraying type.

"Let's see about this arena, huh?"

Haylia Boaz, 17

D2F

Cornucopia

7 July 329 AEDD

"Figure out what you have. Figure out what you need. Then use what you have to get what you need."

Haylia was getting into the swing of things. The most important thing Floy Academy had taught her was that trainees couldn't be forced into developing a Career mindset. You either had it or you didn't, and if you didn't, you'd better figure it out before the rest of the alliance figured you out and decided to trim the fat. Haylia wasn't the meanest Career of the bunch, but she could do her job as effectively as any of them. Possibly more effectively.

The problem with the other Careers was that Haylia liked them. She disliked stepping in to mediate their petty disagreements, but they all seemed like nice people. She didn't want to kill any of them when the time came, but unlike certain Careers of the past, that didn't mean she would back out. It just meant that she had to keep herself in the right frame of mind. This was easier for her than for the others because she had a good deal of sense, of which there was a desperate shortage. Something about the idea of achieving celebrity status seemed to make Career trainees delusional. Haylia knew that winning the Games could yield amazing rewards. That was why she volunteered. But she wasn't so naive as to believe it would come for free—she knew she was expected to pay in other ways.

She was expected to pay in entertainment, which meant she would be murdering a whole bunch of other people. She knew about this in advance, obviously, but it was a little harder to put into practice. She was a good person. She didn't enjoy the killing. She did, however, go through with it. She took down Jeremiah in the Bloodbath, which was a serious boost to her odds. She hadn't seen the betting centers, but she knew she would be near the top of the charts. Haylia was, at heart, reluctant to do the things the Games demanded of her, but she knew the rules.

The Academy had more rules. The Academy told Haylia that personal affiliations could be a liability in the arena, which was true. She had never been very close to most of the other trainees, but when she and her girlfriend got together, they made sure that their other friends dropped in the rankings. Haylia didn't want to end up in the arena with someone she cared about, and she had taken pains to make sure that wouldn't happen. Unfortunately, she really did like the other Careers. She had her own special relationship with each one, relationships that she didn't want to end. Tybalt was soft with her, and only her. She felt almost honored that she'd been selected as his confidante of choice. He needed her, and if someone needed her, she was useful enough to be kept around.

The landscape intrigued Haylia. She'd learned about arena geography at the Academy, and she was pretty sure the Gamemakers wouldn't throw straight desert at the tributes. Most of them wouldn't have a chance in hell at surviving it, so to even things out, the Gamemakers would have to include oases of some kind. Those would also be great places for tributes to gravitate towards and camp out near, since the promise of water and prey animals would tempt them to remain in one place. Once the Careers were strong enough to start moving around again, they would try to track down such an oasis and search it thoroughly for hidden tributes. Even if they didn't find any, the audience always enjoyed a good hunt. They wanted to see the Careers working together. The Gamemakers also occasionally pulled out tricks to guide errant Careers in a more useful direction if they were veering away from concealed outliers. The Games were never about the tributes alone, they were about the storyline.

And Haylia needed to claim some plot beats before she got lost among the other characters. Her knives were sharp and plentiful, and she was ready to rumble. The second day of the Games was slowly drawing to a close, dusk reaching down to stuff out the dimming sunlight. It had been uneventful and relaxing, a little vacation for Nathaniel to recuperate from his tangle in the Bloodbath, but there wouldn't be two days off in a row. The viewers would be expecting gore. Yeah, maybe they would be more forgiving if exciting things were happening in other parts of the arena, but that posed its own concerns. What if the Careers fell out of favor because they were doing less interesting things than the other tributes? That would be very bad.

How fortunate that Haylia was such a captivating fighter. She had been having a lot of conversations with her mentor in the Capitol, conversations surrounding the concept of star power. Victors were rarely crowned by chance. Haylia knew that she would have a big leg up if the audience found her compelling. In terms of fanbase, tributes tended to either pick up steam or fizzle out as the Games progressed. Surviving to the finale wasn't a guarantee that people would find someone satisfying as a winner, but the Gamemakers choreographed their Victory scenes. They wanted to choose who triumphed in each showdown. Were there exceptions? Well, there were exceptions to everything. Haylia knew it was more likely that her Games would fall in keepingg with the pattern.

She was strong and committed to her future. She had family to get back home to, well-prepared allies, and weapons that could have been forged by the gods themselves, but if nobody found her interesting, she could kiss her Victory goodbye. So she had to get their attention at the earliest possible opportunity, and she had an idea in mind. Once she got the other Careers to join her, she would be unstoppable. It occurred to her that perhaps Orpheus had been right after all: Nathaniel gave the orders, but Haylia set the strategy.

Vica Madsen, 17

D6F

Southwest of the Cornucopia

7 July 329 AEDD

"No thief likes a full moon. Like mushrooms and owls, they do their best work in the dark."

Vica was no stranger to the concept of pain. It had been branded into her psyche since childhood, the brazier of hunger burning in the pit of her stomach like a piece of chewing gum she'd accidentally swallowed. When her family died for her mistakes, she'd tattooed herself with three notches in the ink of blood, not out of some urge to repent but because she vowed never to forget what her shortsighted actions had led to. She had traded a little money and a little food for all the people she'd ever loved. She had carried that pain every day since, and she gave herself ulcers with anxiety, but she had never before felt any pain like this. Angled deep tissue damage was a different caliber of hellish. Tybalt had cut her down to the bone. When she had explored the injury with hesitant fingers, she cringed as she felt the new notch in the soft, nutty grain of her femur, edges sharp, catching against the ridges on her fingers like the chipped rim of a coffee mug.

He had missed her femoral artery. Vica wished he'd struck it. When Danny had checked in on her, he had offered her the dagger. She foolishly rejected it. She was too afraid to die. Now, she was too afraid to do anything but die. She could clearly see the mottled layers of vermillion muscle intersected by islands of translucent white fat, plump and shiny from a layer of wet blood that seeped up from the depths of her body when she flexed her thigh.

She had spent two whole days waiting for the Careers to come finish her off. At one point, she'd begged for death, wailing at the sky and pleading with the Gamemakers to end it all and sic a mutt on her. But that wasn't happening and she was deliriously thirsty, so Vica did what any sensible girl in her position would do: she decided to embrace it. This wasn't work she could have done under the oppressive conditions of the day, but now that it was night, the world had cooled enough for her to try to escape this dreadful fate. The question of her death was a when, not an if, but she wanted to avoid a slow end by dehydration.

She couldn't walk. She could only half-crawl. So she bandaged her wound tightly with her undershirt to protect it from the elements and pushed off. She couldn't walk, but she could roll. She couldn't roll uphill, but she could propel herself across flat areas with her hands. She had to change direction several times, but yes, there was always someplace she could travel. At some point, the dunes started to space out. The areas to Vica's front and back sloped uphill, but to her right, the ground shifted down into an extremely gradual plateau.

She kicked with her good leg, extended her arms above her head, and rode for what could have been hours. She thwacked her head on a dry branch and brambles tore at her flesh with thorns. She got so dizzy that her body attempted to vomit, but there was nothing in her stomach to get rid of, so she dry heaved all the way to her destination. When she bumped into a huge shrub (or maybe a moderately sized shrub—it was hard to tell from the desert floor), she seriously considered resting there and sleeping like a normal person, but that wasn't an option. It was double or nothing, and Vica had nothing better to do than roll the dice again and hope for the best.

She felt the precipitous drop as her descent steepened and her roll grew faster and faster. She knew the canyon was coming. She practically hurled herself over the edge, desperate for the catharsis of death, ready to not be in pain anymore.

She wound up with a lungful of tepid water instead. She burbled desperately, frantic bubbles escaping her nose as she tried to retain what should have been her final breath. Would it still be? Had she been praying for water only to die surrounded by it? Was this the Gamemakers' idea of granting her request? Was she going to drown? Would it hurt more or less than the other possibilities?

The rapids spit her back out. The river kicked her up to the surface, where she sucked in air, gasping, before plunging her head back underwater for a swallow of water. She felt the cracks in her tongue begin to fade away as she drank.

The water was taking her somewhere. She didn't have any idea where, but when she saw the opportunity, she clambered up onto a huge floating log to stay above the surface. She clung to it as the river swept her downstream. The foot attached to her bad leg dangled in the water. Something skimmed against it, a flash of color under the sparkling, moonlit foam.

A fish. Vica dove for it, losing her grip on the log in her desperation for food. She hadn't realized how hungry she was until she bashed it to death against the log and devoured it ravenously on the spot, bursting its taut eyes between her molars and telling herself they weren't fish eyes at all, but something like maraschino cherries atop a nice scoop of vanilla ice cream.

She could have lied to herself and said that she forgot the trainers' advice in her panicked state. Nobody would blame her. But that's not what happened. She deliberately fed on raw arena fish and slurped up unpurified water with the full knowledge that the Gamemakers could have done any number of awful things to it. She was simply too desperate to heed their warnings. It wasn't the most immediate danger, and only the immediate dangers mattered tonight. As a new day dawned, the water dragged her further downstream until it diverged into a delta and deposited her on a soft bank. But Vica didn't even notice, because amidst the crashing waves, she had finally, blessedly, dozed off.

Griffin Cadbury, 18

District One Mentor

Early Afternoon in the Mentor Lounge

7 July 329 AEDD

It was my second afternoon on the phone when the Head Peacekeeper knocked sharply on the door of the penthouse lounge. "You're all here," he said. It was a statement, not a question. I was certain that he knew everything about our whereabouts. Mae Lowland had only just returned from her wanderings a few minutes prior. "We're initiating Operation Theta." The other mentors in the room all apparently knew what this meant. I did not. They began to form a single-file line in front of him. Each of them extended their arms and he passed the red beam of a handheld zapper over their communication bracelets. Once each one was finished, they saluted and left the room. I got up to join them, but Head Peacekeeper Fassnacht turned his cool gaze on me. "Not you," he ordered. I sat back down. I waited until all of the other mentors were gone. Then he turned his attention to me. "You're probably wondering what's going on," he said. He smiled.

"Yes, sir."

"Operation Theta was the original Plan B established in response to the first Capitol-based coup. We have occasionally implemented it in small-scale situations relating to national security, but this is the first time a need for the entire protocol has presented itself. Your job is to stay right here, right by that phone until this threat has been dispatched. From now on, you are the only mentor in the house."

"But the other districts, I, I'm a Career, they—"

"And this year it's your turn. Do you think the Career mentors were happy when District Eleven had to substitute for them last time this occurred?"

"No, sir."

"You have all the escorts and tribute teams. You have Tribute Coordinator Merveilleux. But you're responsible for looking after all of the tributes on behalf of your fellow Victors, arranging sponsorship deals with integrity, and otherwise managing the tributes appropriately. You can call the Gamemakers anytime you need an assist."

"Sir, please, I can't—"

"You can and you must. I'm sure you can make it work. There's a good man." He fixed my lapels, flicked an invisible mote of dust off my shirt, and left.

I was all alone.

Hey y'all,

It's me again! Next chapter should go up tomorrow. We'll be chatting with Twyla, Kenny, Aspen, and Orpheus. As always, if you want to request a sponsor gift, just shoot me a PM! Your reading is much appreciated. POV banner quotes come from the book Loot by Jude Watson this chapter. I'm having loads of fun with this story and I can't wait to see you again soon!

—LC :)