Aspen Silvius, 15
D7F
Northeast of the Cornucopia
8 July 329 AEDD
"I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it."
Someone in the Capitol wanted her to win. Aspen hadn't even considered that possibility. She was a rebel through and through, but maybe her training score had convinced a sponsor that she was worth saving. The parachute had floated down bearing a container of medicine, and it wasn't the kind of herb paste the apothecaries in District Twelve had on offer. This was the good stuff. Aspen had applied a generous coating to the wound the past two days, gradually preparing to take the spear out. Day Three seemed like the time had finally arrived. Blood no longer pulsed at the edges of the injury, so as the rays of sunlight drifted across the arena, Aspen was biting down on her glove to prevent herself from drawing attention by screaming. She had to twist the tapered spearhead out from her flesh, but as soon as it was finally laying on the sand next to her, she realized how much the ointment had already done.
The wound wasn't even scabbed over. Fresh tissue had already begun to appear, new and creamy. It was barely scarring. There was almost no blood, a few residual drips where the very tip of the spearhead had been buried, but Aspen realized that the medicine was healing her so quickly that the new growth had already pushed the spear out partway. Aspen had never been bold enough to wish, but god, she was recovering. It was almost intimidating to know that she had to do things now beyond just laying down and dying. For example, finding water.
She hadn't had any water at all since entering the arena two mornings ago. It had been a while since she last peed, and the urine had been concerningly brown. She should have been worried, but something in the fear lobe of her brain malfunctioned during her spear-crawl and now she couldn't make herself afraid. It occurred to her that she now possessed a spear, which could be useful since it wasn't stuck in her anymore. If Nikita came back to finish her off, she wouldn't repeat the mistake of turning her back on her enemy. She would fight. If she lost, oh well. The odds weren't in her favor, but she'd had such a close brush with death that it no longer scared her.
One option was trying to find Kenny, but that was risky. He could be anywhere in the arena. No, Aspen was on her own. Honestly, at this stage of the Games, Ash would've been much more useful as an ally. She knew how to find water anywhere, but the most notable thing about her had been her ability to conceptualize situations. The Gamemakers didn't want their tributes to die of dehydration, so they had to tuck water away somewhere. Aspen just had to find it. Ash also knew what plants were safe to drink from, but there were no plants as far as Aspen could see, just cracked desert floor. If it wasn't above the ground, she had to figure there was only one other place it could be—under it. And how convenient that Aspen had a sharp tool at her disposal!
She jabbed the tip of the spear into the ground, pitching her body weight forward as she drove it into the packed, dry dirt. It didn't do much, but Aspen wasn't ready to give up after just one try. She needed food and water, and she was determined to find it. She could try the same place, or she could try somewhere different. It seemed smartest to check around, so Aspen made some stabs at different areas until something felt different. The ground had a little less resistance here, she found, so she threw herself into digging, frantically excavating until the roof of a tunnel gave way beneath her spear. (It was hers now. Nikita had made a grave error in judgement.) The roof of a small tunnel had caved in, and at the bottom of the tunnel, the dirt was crumbly and a few shades darker in color. Aspen brought her hand to it and flaked it between her fingers.
It was damp. She was reluctant to scoop away at an unknown hole with her fingers, so she judged the slant of the tunnel and followed it with her spear, bringing down the top of it stab by stab until there was a huge ripple as it began to fully destruct, followed by a shriek from underground, and then a series of animal communications. A rodent burst up, running fast above the ground, followed by several friends. Aspen had discovered a burrow, and if a colony of animals were living in it, there had to be water somewhere. But animals also meant meat, so Aspen made a choice as more rodents streamed up and out of the ground.
She struck at random with her spear and hoped she got lucky. She didn't at first, but as the swarm grew, hundreds, maybe thousands, of rats(?) were pouring forth and it was upsettingly easy to take out a few. Aspen didn't kill any more than she needed to. It wasn't as though leftovers would last in such a hot arena, and she saw no reason to take an innocent animal's life unless it would help her survive another day. The swarm dispersed rapidly, the creatures scampering off, and Aspen felt free to finally, finally explore the subterranean landscape. She dug a foot, then two, and found a cavity of seeping water, cool and refreshing. She plunged her hands into it, feeling it coat her skin, and scooped some up to her face, ready to swallow.
Then she reconsidered, letting it flow back into the pool. She needed to purify it to take care of any pathogens, and she also had to cook the rodent meat. She had no supplies, but she had found food and water by thinking like a Gamemaker, so she paused to think. There was nothing flammable in sight, but that meant it just had to be within reasonable walking distance. Aspen did have the container the jar of ointment had arrived in, so she filled it with water to take with her, rolled the dead rodents up in the accompanying parachute for easy keeping, and tucked the ointment into a pocket. She was close to dehydration, yes, but she also had to be close to hitting the jackpot.
It was double or nothing, and since Aspen was playing on someone else's dime, she saw no reason not to go for broke.
Kenny Michaels, 15
D8M
West-Northwest of the Cornucopia
8 July 329 AEDD
"I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It
always made me want to do just the opposite."
Kenny was deep in the jungle. Something about the noise unnerved him. The wide, open expanse of the desert had been frightening in its loneliness, with no sound at all. Even the breezes were completely silent. The rainforest never stopped speaking to him. Technicolor insects droned, yellow-beaked birds chattered, and the verdant tree canopy slapped and swished as animals Kenny had only ever seen in picture books went about their daily business, commuting across the great natural turnpike in the sky.
The desert made Kenny feel alone. The jungle made him feel watched. From the glossy-eyed monkeys to the squinty, oval-bodied beetles, every living thing in the vicinity was intensely aware of his presence. Kenny wasn't used to scrutiny. Even the Peacekeepers largely ignored him. He was just another filthy District Eight hoodlum until he pissed someone off. Solitude had filled the void Travis's death had created. Kenny talked to himself, talked to the pictures of his brother on his nightstand, filled the stinging moments with Kate Tyson's clear blue gaze while his own shimmered with the pressure of all he had lost. His parents' sympathy had been too sharp to endure, so he spent a lot of time on his own, learning how to move on from the unthinkable.
The Capitol's attention was a staccato ache. Every year during the leadup to the Games, the television would flicker with highlight compilations or Bloodbath reels and press on the fading bruise of the Michaels family and Kenny would feel compelled to raise some sort of hell. In his own way, he was holding the line for Travis, keeping his memory alive. The Peacekeepers would never forget his death as long as Kenny lived to keep reminding them of it. Travis was soft, charismatic, a fervent believer of the goodness in people. Kenny once was too, but as he grew into Travis's age, the anguish turned his jaw tense and his hands mean. Now, they held a stout knife, and Kenny was prepared to use it to destroy someone else's Travis.
Even the Careers had people who would be devastated by their absence. Aspen's district partner had three younger siblings or something, or at least that's what someone on the Twelve team had said to her. Somewhere else in the arena, he was holding a weapon and hoping to claim lives with it too. They weren't so different, Kenny figured, because they were both going to die and devastate their families. Right now, though, Kenny felt smugly satisfied. He had water. He had a weapon. And he was eating goddamn gourmet. Saccharine fruits, savory jungle animal meat, the food in his bag, mixed with tangy herbs he foraged. It was seasoned. It was filling. Kenny's mentor, a rather bland man named Brennen, had told him confidence was dangerous. Outliers who got too cocky wound up dead.
Yeah, Kenny supposed that was a legitimate comment, but a minimum of 23 outliers wound up dead anyway, so Kenny figured he'd do it his way. It reminded him of his parents back home, who had always accepted that Kenny would make his own choices at the end of the day. He understood that there would be consequences, but he was born with his own brain and he intended to make full use of it. The Capitol and the muppet they called a mentor didn't expect Kenny to make anything of himself. They assumed he would die quietly and forgettably.
Kenny already knew he would die by the hands of another outlier. It would increase their sponsorship prospects, boost their ratings, and contribute to their storyline. The Hunger Games were one giant television show, and the producers favored the characters who developed, whose time in the arena had a structure. Kenny would be an obstacle they overcame, and his death would elevate the chances of that outlier winning. A win for Three, Six, Seven, Nine, Ten, Twelve, they would all be wins for Eight because they were losses for the Careers. The ordinary citizens of Panem were all on the same team, and they were rooting for whoever's child could come back home instead of a trained celebrity murderer.
Kenny considered the other prospects. The Threes, Twyla and Beemo, notably young tributes, thirteen and still alive. The Sixes, Danny and Vica, who Kenny knew nothing about. Tom from Seven, allied with Twyla and Beemo. Himself, of course. Maize from Nine, a quiet underdog. The Tens, Mare and Fahad, lovers in a predicament. Aspen, the ally Kenny had lost track of in the Bloodbath and hoped was doing well. One of them had to become the Victor.
A low snarl made Kenny's head whip around. Apparently, the constant noise had also desensitized him to his surroundings. A pitted head had emerged from somewhere in the moist underbrush, rising from a blackwater stream he hadn't even noticed he was passing. It opened a toothy mouth, saliva dripping from what Kenny could only describe as flesh-hooks. The leviathan slowly waded out into view, each foot of its body more muscular than the last. It was a crocodile, or at least, something that looked very much like one. The Gamemakers occasionally tricked out an ostensibly normal animal into some sort of doomsday mutt, and Kenny did not plan on making assumptions.
It pulsed forward at him. Kenny did not know that crocodiles could have beaten him in a sprint. It was somewhere in the top ten freaky arena problems he never anticipated, and he only had seconds to make a decision. It took Kenny approximately four of them to determine that 1.) the Gamemakers were responsible for this, 2.) if they wanted him to die, there was nothing he could do to stop it, and 3.) he had to pull off a good enough response to convince them he was worth more to the narrative alive.
He charged towards the crocodile, preparing to attack. It was expecting this, and it prepared to do him a fatal chomp, but Kenny wasn't going to meet it. He was going over it. He dodged the teeth and leapt onto the crocodile's back. Its skin was slick and lumpy, which made it hard to hang onto, but Kenny had to keep out of reach of the most dangerous part. It didn't feel less risky to be scrambling onto it from behind, but it would give him the best chance at taking it down. He struggled to cling on with one arm while drawing his dagger, but he just managed it with a little help from his leg muscles. He had no knowledge of crocodile anatomy, but he figured stabbing it in the side of the head would work if he did it enough times. The crocodile thrashed wildly, but Kenny kept plunging the knife into it until he hit something that made it start dying, and once it stilled under him, he hesitantly clambered off.
He'd made it.
Twyla Behring, 13
D3F
North-Northwest of the Cornucopia
8 July 329 AEDD
"Love's a grand solace, isn't it, my friend? Deep and dark as sleep."
Twyla was getting a little taste of Careerhood, she supposed. Beemo's poisoned darts were so powerful that the alliance felt comfortable freely traversing the arena. Everyone wanted to get as far away from the Careers as possible, and as they trekked further out from the Cornucopia, a division appeared on the horizon. There was more to the arena than just the desert in the middle. There was a jungle, and when the alliance reached it, a three-story-tall white obelisk came into view. When Twyla touched the side, the doors slid open, welcoming the three tributes into what was actually a hidden fortress.
So now they were all chilling in the hidden fortress. Beemo was on lookout at the top floor, Tom was on the bottom resting, and Twyla had the whole middle level to herself. She had a lot to think about. It had been a while since she was alone with her thoughts, and she finally had the space to decide how she was going to play the rest of the Games. She valued her alliance, that was certain. Beemo and Tom were friends, and their presence comforted her as she checked over her shoulder for the spectre of death. The alliance was strong. Twyla was sure of it. They had everything they needed to survive the foreseeable future, several advantages, and there were many tributes remaining, so there was no reason a betrayal would open up new possibilities for the boys. Twyla was safe, and that gave her a buffer. She couldn't waste it.
There were six Careers left and seven enemy outliers left. The alliance had agreed to lay low until the field thinned, and Twyla knew that the Gamemakers would be looking forward to the Pack's first successful hunt. The third day was about when things picked up, so it ought to result in a death and tide over the Capitol for a while. Twyla had a hunch that Maize would stick around for a while, especially considering her high score. Twyla thought Aspen would probably be among the next few deaths, largely because of the relationship she shared with her district partner. He despised her, and killing her would make for excellent television, so the Careers would no doubt be looking out for her. But that still left a lot of tributes unaccounted for, and Twyla, as the leader of the alliance, had to figure out what to do next.
It was going to involve killing. It seemed that luring people to the obelisk would be a good strategy, since Beemo could fire down on them from the notches cut out of the stone, but she was undecided. If they attracted the Careers' attention, overcoming all six before they could attack would be extremely difficult, even for someone with Beemo's skills. She didn't know if it was worth it, especially so early in the Games. They could stay put for a while, she decided, and make future calls along the way.
So that was one problem out of the way, but Twyla had to admit it wasn't the one she worried about most. She genuinely felt that she could survive until at least the Final Eight interviews, but that brought fresh concerns. She was going to have to kill Tom and Beemo, and that frightened her more than any of the Careers she had seen murder Brielle. She loved them way too much for that, but did she love them more than her own life? She was never going to forget the feeling of falling asleep with them in a warm pile. She was a light sleeper, and Beemo wouldn't wake up in the middle of the night unless cold water was being dumped on his face, so for the second time in a row, she'd woken up to Tom crying in his sleep, dreams about Brielle's absence and someone he addressed as sir. It made her chest feel all hollow and she'd considered rousing him both times, but never did. She would never be able to forget Brielle's final screams or separate her name from Tom's lips. Beemo was a dear, dear friend, and he and Twyla had become a dangerously synchronized team. He got her humor, she read his mind, and everything would continue to be perfect until the moment of truth arrived and Twyla would be faced with a difficult choice.
She chewed a cracker methodically and decided that the cool stone floor would feel good. She lay face down, feeling the little ridges underneath her hands and wishing she could stay still forever, the sands of time flowing over and around her, smoothing the tracks she'd left behind like a blanket of fresh snow, with her back pressed against the world and the murky mineral smell enshrined in rock filling her nose like the clean chalky scent of a rat's fur in autumn with the window open. A soft voice undulated in the back of her mind, flickering, waning, billowing again, singing something from the Capitol radio station. She swore she could feel her cot at home under her prone form if she tried hard enough. She might even be able to reach through space and hours of absence and touch the fraying stitches on her pillowcase. She was going to fall through the obelisk into the center of the world where there was always a fresh cup of coffee on her desk and a warm rat nestled against her collarbone while she worked on a practice exam, a girl made of spun joy dreaming of a future she could test into if she studied hard enough. Twyla had never fathomed that she would go insane in the arena, but as the wall inside her brain that separated the think and the feel began to fracture, she heard a voice she held some latent memory of, a woman with caramel curls she'd only ever seen in pictures, the mother who died when she was two years old, screaming for her to fight.
Orpheus Adello, 18
D1M
Southeast of the Cornucopia
8 July 329 AEDD
"Don't be afraid; I'll keep looking at you for ever and ever, without a flutter of my eyelids, and you'll live in my gaze like a mote in a sunbeam."
Orpheus didn't know it was possible to drown in someone's lips until he and Nikita Valeta went hunting to the southeast on the third day of the Hunger Games. Three hours of walking was about Orpheus's limit, especially when there was a gorgeous mountain to frolic atop with a handsome boy.
They stood side by side, shirts tossed aside on a red boulder, sweating after a moderate climb as they surveyed the landscape for signs of tributes. None were visible, so after a search had revealed that they were probably done hunting for the day, it was decided that a little break was in order before they made the trip back to the Cornucopia to rejoin the rest of the Pack. Nikita had set a hand on Orpheus's back with hopeful eyes and it had taken about a millisecond to sweep him into a sweet kiss. Orpheus dipped him like a dancer, leaning over to brush noses, kissing him again, bringing him back upright, but it wasn't enough. Orpheus needed to kiss him more and better. Orpheus needed to kiss him until they dissolved into each other and the stars poured forth from the heavens, dripping down to meet their terrestrial calling and silhouette one flesh against the satin indigo of the night.
Then it got sort of awkward and over-the-top and Orpheus decided he'd been a touch too ambitious. It had been a great makeout session and he was content and had a super hot Career boyfriend. Things were actually really amazing and he couldn't imagine anything going wrong, at least not on his end. The other Careers might have some problems, especially Nathaniel, who was hurt pretty badly. Or Tybalt, who was being suspiciously friendly and good-natured. Orpheus figured he was just performing for the cameras, since he was on film, but he wasn't about to let his guard down.
No cannons had sounded all day, which wasn't actually very concerning. The Careers had decided to divide and conquer, with Nathaniel and Haylia staying in camp, Tybalt and Odicci searching the southwest quadrant, and he and Nikita taking the southeast. It was not a successful hunt, but it was providing Orpheus with lots of valuable information. Day Four would constitute a similar search of the northern half of the arena within a few hours of the Cornucopia. If they didn't find anyone, that meant the tributes were all farther afield.
This was not a surprise. It could take a few days to reach the limits of the arena, and no tribute worth their salt would stay within a few hours of the Careers' home base if they had a choice. Searching the inner areas first would create a sense of suspense for the audience back home, a traditional technique that dictated the proper hunting method. You always wanted to stay as close to the supply hoard and therefore the other Careers as possible, because half the Career advantage was the Pack itself. Therefore, it was best to save the longer missions for later on in the Games, since it would require the Pack to be split overnight and that was something to avoid. A lone Career sitting on a Cornucopia's worth of lifesaving loot was a tempting target, so you had to leave two or three guards. That meant you had four Careers on the mission max, maybe just three, and that was if the Pack members were all still alive.
Orpheus also had his own variables to contend with. His vision for the alliance's future differed slightly from Nathaniel's in that he thought they needed to focus more on figuring the arena out for themselves than blindly hoping a tribute would stumble into their path. The different areas of the desert had different characteristics, and the mountain he climbed with Nikita indicated that there was something green in the distance. It wasn't like he was talking garbage; experts had long recognized that tributes favored biomes similar to their home districts, whether in temperature or general characteristics like flora density. Orpheus thought that it was common sense, since tributes had a better chance of survival with something familiar than something new. However, Nathaniel wasn't as smart as he liked to think, so Orpehus was willing to let him screw up and take the heat.
District Ten had a desert, so Mare and Fahad would want to stick in the central part of the arena. District Nine was grassy and flat, so the green part seemed more likely. Aspen and Vica were probably either nearby and injured or far, far away after a sponsor rescued them from certain doom. What were the alliances looking like? Those were the questions people should have been asking, not stupid shit like "Why do you like your own reflection, so much, Orpheus?" (Tybalt) or stupider shit like "Who made you Pack Leader anyway?" (Nathaniel). He took the Games seriously, please and thank you, and although he'd be honored to die for Nikita's Victory, he wasn't going to let Nathaniel run the alliance into the ground in the meantime.
So he obviously had some work to do. He needed to turn things around and start putting some outliers in the ground before the Gamemakers got grumpy and decided to intervene. If another two days in the arena passed without a single cannon, a little insubordination might be necessary. He surveyed Nikita and smiled. Yes, he thought, a little insubordination might be enjoyable, perhaps even merry. He hoped it wouldn't come to that but actually, that was a big fat lie. Nathaniel was getting on his last nerve and he sincerely hoped that there would be no cannons, just so he had a reasonable excuse for what he planned to do. Nothing groundbreaking or Pack-shattering, but Orpheus knew how to spice up a story.
ICIXXQS,
BLH RLCC AA NV KRQO HSFLX. WHLENI AK VTB E UGMED. KPJ'A ALVS MW, SVI Q RHGO HWJ BT LS VQXELZQSO ZHTJ IEHWWBEQV QOJ EM. KQJWGPN EAVZBIV HCOE FWB, SEUGY DMEWZKLHN HIDD KFTP WQ EEDD GTC E VRZNKGZ BIRWU EO KWVI VMNKEA S FWYM. MW OFSL JMFL EV HZLDGEX: "WHLENI'K OWWSMQI QOJ XIXARDEST. LJCXB LHT. QODDWB PIU NPAV. KPJ SRRYD MGJM YPEQ CYYGFM. —FVXRPTUK L."
XFVIP VZDSQ, XFVIP VZMGJZTE, TDPPM XGZJDIU.
MLIQS IQJEFQCE
Hey y'all,
We're underway, are we not? This is a very exciting stage of the story as an author, since the plot is thickening and the rebellion snags are beginning to merge with the primary tribute storyline. This chapter's opening quotes are from the play No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre. Next time I see you, we'll be checking up on Fahad, Tom, Nikita, and Tybalt, as well as revisiting Griffin. I hope you enjoyed the chapter, and I will be very impressed if you decode the cipher before it's revealed.
—LC :)