11. The Magician - Behind You

Ramona Lopez, District 10, Victor of the 72nd Hunger Games

Ever since the bloodbath, the only faces Ramona Lopez had seen were on her wristwatch.

On the very first day if the games, Lopez had found a secret ladder that'd taken her to the very top floor of the abandoned mansion arena. Now it was eight days in. None of the others had been smart enough to find their way up here. Lopez had no idea what was going on on the floors below her but it had to be pretty chaotic.

Something must've happened to the Careers. Yesterday, three cannons had fired in fairly quick succession. Based on the faces of the dead that showed on Lopez's wristwatch every night, they turned out to be half the Career alliance. It seemed unusual for the Careers to turn on each other when there were still a couple of strong outliers alive - including the girl from Three, who had somehow scored a ten despite her knife technique being incredibly sloppy. That just made the games easier for Lopez.

Provided that the thing that'd wiped out half the Careers didn't wipe her out as well.

Four more cannons had fired during the night - the last three coming within minutes of each other. Now Lopez only had three opponents remaining.

What is going on down there? Lopez wondered. At this rate, I could win this without having to kill anyone.

Lopez had always known she was good at hiding. Hide and seek was just about the only game she'd enjoyed playing as a child because it allowed her to sit on her own for an extended period of time. This was different, though. Lopez' opponents had not only failed to find her, a slim, five-foot-three seventeen-year-old girl. They'd failed to find an entire floor of the house. If someone had come up here and started moving around and disturbing Lopez' peace and quiet, she would've noticed. Were they all just stupid?

What's more, the gamemakers hadn't sent any mutts or hazards after Lopez to disturb her either. Perhaps it was because she was quite popular with sponsors. It just so happened that there was a rather popular victor, Ramona Hirose-Snow from District 3, who obviously had the same first name as Lopez, and, according to the fans, looked really similar and also had similar mannerisms.

Lopez wasn't sure what the fans expected of her. Was she supposed to replicate Ramona's strategy of joining the Careers and poisoning them and then go on to marry the president's grandson after her victory? Did they think the Careers were stupid enough to let an outlier girl named Ramona into the alliance after what had happened last time? Were they aware that President Snow only had one grandson, the one who was already married to the other Ramona? All she knew was, as she was a celebrity look-alike, she'd been sponsored a steady supply of food until day five.

Then on Day Five, she'd been sent a set of knives and a vial of poison. Lopez had no idea what she'd done to bring on this sudden surge of sponsors.

After the games, Maia would tell her that it really had nothing to do with her. Alexander Snow, President Snow's only grandson, had died suddenly of heart failure at the age of twenty-two. A bunch of Capitol idiots had decided that, to show their support for the newly-widowed Ramona Hirose-Snow, they would sponsor the tribute with the same first name as her. It might've been a sweet gesture, if the girl from Three, who Ramona had actually been mentoring, hadn't been right there.

On the morning of the eighth day, Lopez woke to the smell of smoke. She began to wonder if the gamemakers were finally sending a hazard after her. If so, that was almost a relief. She was bored. She'd started reciting pi to pass the time, even though she'd only memorised one-hundred-and-sixty-six digits.

"Attention tributes," Claudius Templesmith's voice boomed through the arena. "As many of you may have noticed, the arena is on fire. Because of this, we have decided to host a feast at the Cornucopia. The first tribute to arrive and press the button on the tail of the Cornucopia will activate the sprinkler system. This tribute will receive a special reward. If nobody shows… you'd better hope you're the farthest from the flames. See you at the feast, tributes!"

Well, that's a shame, Lopez thought. Given that she was two storeys higher than the Cornucopia, it'd likely take her the longest to get there. Still, it was possible that her opponents were too stupid to reach the Cornucopia, or that all three of them would fight when they got there and Lopez could simply pick off whoever won that fight. She started making her way back to the ladder, noticing that the air was getting hotter and increasingly smoky.

When she reached the upper landing, Lopez couldn't believe her ears. There was a cannon. And then, a few moments later, a second.

They're actually doing it, Lopez thought. They're killing each other!

The air was full of smoke when Lopez made her way to the Cornucopia. She spotted the figure of one of her opponents move through the smoke - her final opponent. Lopez hung back as the figure made their way towards the tail of the Cornucopia. Lopez would let them press the button.

They wouldn't live long enough to see their reward.

With a click, water began to pour down from the ceiling. Lopez' final opponent tossed back their hair and whooped. Lopez recognised them now. Based in their height and build, their mop of raven-black hair and obnoxious loud voice. It appeared to be the boy from Three.

That was annoying. Lopez had memorised the heights and weights of all of her opponents instead of their names. Since the boy from One had died yesterday, Three had been the tallest tribute left. He was six feet tall, nine inches taller than Lopez. That meant he was in the ninetieth percentile for boys his age from District 3. That was probably the only interesting thing about him.

Silently, Lopez drew closer to Three. He didn't seem to notice her at all. He didn't even look over his shoulder once. As soon as Lopez was close enough behind Three, she stood on her tiptoes, clapped one hand over his mouth, and used her other hand to slash the knife right through his throat.

Lopez had spent most of her teenage years working in a slaughterhouse. She wasn't shocked by the amount of blood that poured from the boy's throat. She'd sliced right through an artery. She'd done it to countless animals and, while she wasn't disgusted, she also wasn't particularly excited to see what it looked like when it happened to a human.

Trumpets began to blare, signalling the boy's death.

"Ladies and gentleman," Claudius Templesmith announced. "I am pleased to present the victor of the Seventy-Second Hunger Games, Ramona Lopez from District 10!"

Lopez wasn't very good with emotions. She wasn't sure how she was feeling right now. She'd just won the Hunger Games and the only challenge she'd faced was having to stand on her tiptoes to slit the throat of someone taller than her. Was she… disappointed? Had she wanted it to be harder? Not really.

Perhaps it was because the Seventy-Second Hunger Games had taken two weeks out of Ramona Lopez's life that she could've spent doing something actually productive, like managing her family's finances. She'd only agreed to drop out of school and start working at the slaughterhouse if her family had allowed her to be in charge of their budget. She'd needed some mathematics in her life.

Yes, that was it. She was bored. The Seventy-Second Hunger Games were boring.

In the days that followed, as Lopez sat through her victory ceremony and her victor interview and all the other boring Capitol things that further served to waste her time, she watched Caesar Flickerman struggle to sell the arena as a haunted house. The mutt that had killed her district partner wasn't made in a lab earlier this year, it was an 'ancient being'. The TV that the boy from Three had used to spy on his opponents hadn't been connected to the arena's camera systems, it had been 'cursed'. The elevator that'd collapsed during the fire, killing the girls from Two and Five, was not a normal elevator, it was a 'Mystic Elevator'.

Lopez knew why he was doing this. He was trying to compensate for the fact that the victor who'd emerged from this 'exciting new haunted arena' was a girl who didn't believe in ghosts and hadn't even interacted with any of the allegedly haunted things in there. Lopez hadn't even realised that the arena was supposed to be a haunted house until she watched the recap. Caesar asked Lopez what had been the scariest moment of her games and when she replied, truthfully, that she had not been scared once, only bored, there was a noticeable pause before Caesar joked about how Lopez must've known she was the scariest thing in the arena.

She was beginning to get the sense that the Capitol hadn't been expecting her to win. They'd been expecting the obnoxious boy from Three, or someone else who'd play along with all this haunted house nonsense.

It appeared that the boy from Three wasn't the only person Ramona Lopez had snuck up on. She'd snuck up on the entire Capitol.

With this chapter, I carry on my tradition/running joke of having Maia Nuñez, the MVP with no POVs, show up to give other characters vital help or useful information. No, she will not be getting a POV this story.

This chapter was really fun to write. Looking at it from Lopez' perspective made me realise that the Seventy-Second Hunger Games is secretly a comedy. Lopez won because everyone who could've potentially posed a threat to her - Binah, the Careers, the Gamemakers, even Fawkes himself - was so caught up in Fawkes' reign of terror and the pure chaos that ensued that they all kinda forgot that Lopez was just chilling with an entire floor of the arena all to herself. By the time Lopez actually makes it down the stairs, there's only one person left for her to kill and he makes her job a lot easier by not looking over his shoulder.

Also, while Lopez may be regarded as a disappointing victor because she won with such little effort, it's worth mentioning that she mentored Fawkes during the Quell and played a very important role in his victory.

Our next act will be The Fire Walker.