I'm writing here because I'm waiting a few days to let everyone get their questions in for the final tribal council in Clatniss' Games. If you're reading this and are involved in that story, send in some questions (you can send more than one, because it's fun) and get your final votes ready!

ROWENA ASPEN- Cactus Cleo

Good, my District partner was gone. Everyone in Seven would send me sponsor gifts instead of her. Of course Leo would anyway, but more is better.

JOSIE STONE- Enzo Charmont

She was so little. She was a little girl. Plenty of girls her age weren't even allowed to wear makeup yet. Would that be her first time with makeup? A mortician painting her bloodless cheeks?

AI LATIER- Robbie Emmers

I forced myself to look at the sky. Let it be my last respect to them. I looked at every one of them. I looked at Ai's smiling face and thought of his father.

TOMMY JUTE- Taylor Treadle

The good side of me felt guilty I hadn't said more to him. We were partners, after all. Maybe if I'd reached out he wouldn't be dead. The horrible part of me felt perverse satisfaction. I'd lasted longer than him. Even if I died, at least I wasn't the first to go from Eight. Somehow that felt like an achievement.

YARROW VENUS- Dorian Sargasso

There was someone in the sky I'd never spoken to. I didn't know her name. I wasn't even sure that, given a lineup, I could have picked her out as a fellow competitor. There was someone in the sky who had once been alive and never would be again.

VIRGO CASPIAN- Alara Banks

Birdie and I said nothing as her face went by. Probably she felt the same way I did. I wanted to make it mean something. I wanted to share a memory or say something in her honor. I just didn't know what to say. You'd think someone like me would be more used to death.

KENDALL DELANCEY- Kallik

There were no ants on his picture. His skin was clear and not angry red. He couldn't have known, when they took it, what he would look like in the end.

Dorian Sargasso- District Four male (18)

There was no skin. There were only ants. They skittered and jabbed across my body, pressing me down, bits of my flesh pulling off when their prickly feet raised. Their acid smell coated me and I knew they were calling more to come. If I raised my arms to bat them away, they would know I was alive. Their mouths would open and the fire would pour onto me and if I screamed they would go in my mouth-

I sat up, looking around to find where the scream had come from. They'd gotten someone else. It was so close, the scream. They'd be coming for us.

"It's okay! Dorian! It's okay!"

I lurched forward and shoved the shape backwards. It was only when Kallik hit the ground that she winked into existence where a monster had been before. I stared at her blankly, wondering how she'd appeared from nowhere and what miracle had saved me from the thousand ants.

"It was a dream!" Kallik said, still lying down, her palms up to show she wasn't attacking.

"Oh, my god." My voice felt like it was coming from somewhere else. "Oh my god, I'm so sorry."

"It's okay." Kallik sat up. I noticed the shadows under her eyes even in the twilight of the approaching morning. I'd thought she wasn't sleeping when I'd been watching. She kept alternating between pulling grass over her head to be hidden and throwing it off to be able to see her surroundings. She looked like the mess I felt like.

"That was so messed up." I didn't need to say what. I didn't think either of us had stopped thinking about it since it happened. How could we possibly sleep when there were things like that? Somewhere out there, the ants were there. There were thousands of them in their tunnels and nests. I could not, no matter how much I tried to, stop thinking that if they wanted, they could carry someone there alive.

"Let's just get out of here as quickly as we can." Kallik's words chilled me. She hadn't volunteered for this. She wasn't a killer. But what we'd seen was enough to make her want to do what it took to be out of this place. I wasn't crazy. This really was as bad as I thought.

"I don't want to do this anymore," I said. I hated how whiny it sounded. I fought for this. I fought for the chance to be here. There were a hundred people back home who would have killed for my spot. But none of them knew. No one should ever know what this was.

"I don't want to either," Kallik said. Her voice went thin and caught on the last words. She was shaking, I saw- or maybe I was. I had to be shaking. The way my heart was pulsing so strong it hurt my chest, the way my skin kept prickling until I slapped away nonexistent insects, the way even the sky seemed to shimmer with the blood pounding in my eyes.

"This is messed up," Kallik whispered. "This is messed up. This is messed up."

I should make a joke. I should say it's no big deal. I should talk about going with the flow. That was gone now. That person was gone now. There was only the Arena and what it took to get out of it. I would have tried to kill Kallik right then if I hadn't thought together we could clear the Arena more quickly. I knew she was thinking the same.

Kallik scooted closer to me. I scooted closer to her. Before we knew it we were pressed against each other side-by-side, pretending we were twice as big and twice as hard to carry away. I could feel her racing heartbeat mirroring mine. She could feel my little jerks as I thought I heard something and peered out into the light growing so much more slowly than I wished. I was no Career anymore. I had never in all my life known how very little and very easy to kill I was. I should have been trying to hide it from the cameras, but that time had passed. I didn't care who knew. I didn't care what anyone thought. I cared about staying away from what was in this place. Kallik and I weren't even hugging each other for comfort. What I was thinking, and what I knew she was too, was that if the ants came, maybe we could shove the other one and run.

Octavia Jacobs- District Two female (18)

Training didn't prepare you for what it felt like to live in the Arena. I felt like I hadn't slept at all when I woke up. I barely had- between waking up for watch and the cold hardness of the ground, even with the grass, I just hadn't been tired enough yet. Maybe in a few days I'd be ready. As it was, I was sore in a way I'd never been before. I had the disquieting thought that this was what it was like to be old, and the more disquieting thought that this might be all I ever knew of that.

Val sat on a rock, hunched over an open brown packet. He looked up guiltily as I rose.

"Are they any good?" I asked of the prepackaged Peacekeeper meals we'd gotten from the Cornucopia and which Val was so eager to eat that he couldn't wait for me.

"'Asian beef sticks' was a big bust, but the cornbread's okay," Val said.

I rummaged through our little pile. "I'll go with 'maple pork patty'. Sounds breakfast-y."

After sampling each others' packets, we agreed that mine was far better. Maybe it was because sausage patties were naturally a weird, cobbled-together food that a low-quality version didn't taste much different. I took great care with the syrup packet, not wanting to get it on myself when I wouldn't get a proper shower for weeks.

"So. Eat breakfast, then go out and kill people?" Val asked.

"Guess so," I said. At moments like this, I envied my brother's callousness. I was cold when I needed to be, but only when I needed to be. It was an armor I put on to face the world, not a skin I was born with. I would do what it took to get back to Drusus and I would never count it as my fault, since I hadn't asked for this, but I knew it would stay with me. Val, though? He could kill someone and not care at all. "They were alive. Now they're dead," he'd say, and shrug, and not think about it anymore. Sometimes he even seemed to enjoy it. He'd never killed anyone, of course, but he'd done things to people who'd gotten on his bad side that most people wouldn't think of. Not that they were unthinkable things, but that most people didn't want to hurt people, even people they hated. Val? He did what he liked. If he ever liked to kill someone, he would, and this was the place to find that out about himself.

"Lucky break about Kendall," Val remarked as I was spreading dodgy cheese spread on a dodgy cracker. I grunted in response. Out of all of the Career Districts, he was the only one who was really a solid, classical Career. I wondered if Kallik and Dorian had banded up against him or if it was just a stroke of bad luck. Anything could happen in a place like this. He could have been carried off by a passing songbird for all we knew. It was a stroke of luck, though. With him gone, it was mostly Kallik and Dorian we had to worry about, and neither of them were particularly enthusiastic about this. I did have a bad feeling about Cactus, though. He had an air about him I'd seen a lot in fellow politicians. It was the kind of air that said they'd smile at you and kiss your baby if you were in Panem's good graces, and just as quickly order your execution if you weren't.

"At least there's plenty of water." Beads of condensation, some of them fist-sized, perched on blades of grass around us. Val poked at one of them to break its surface tension and watch it spill down the grass. We wouldn't have to worry about water, and if I remembered right, condensation was pretty clean. The downside was how damp it made everything. It wasn't cold enough at the moment to freeze us, but I didn't trust that not to change.

A giant noise like the roaring of an incomprehensibly large dragon jarred both me and Val. I jumped up, cracker crumbs falling from my lap, and looked to Val. He was looking back at me with the same questioning expression. My brain cycled through a million horrible possibilities. The smallest, most inconsequential animals could be deadly here, and that wasn't even getting into muttations. Did spiders scream when you were up this close to them? No, they didn't have lungs. Unless they were muttations… Or was it a raccoon? A weasel? A badger? Any number of animals could eat us like popcorn at this size.

The sound came again, closer this time. I wanted to cry in relief that we'd picked a patch of grass that went up to our heads. Maybe it wouldn't see us. Even so, we had to hide. We had to hide now. A shadow fell across us so quickly it was like the sun had turned off. But no, not turned off. Blotted out.

Val Vella- District Two male (18)

It was like watching a movie and slowing it down to frame-by-frame. There was a frame of Octavia, looking to where the grass grew thicker and would hide us better. Then there was a frame filled with nothing but a monstrous, cataclysmically large leg. No Octavia. Gone. There was tawny fur and blunt black claws. Somehow my brain registered the lump halfway up the back of the leg as a dog's dew claw. My brain recognized it faster than my mind. My mind saw only an instant of leg and then a stirring in the dirt as the paw pressed down and raised to keep running. The sky over me, as far as I could see, filled with white fur and pinkish skin as the dog's underbelly passed over. By the time my mind had put together the sentence- it's a dog- the dog had passed, and in the distance I heard it keep going. I heard it keep going as I looked down at where it had been.

It was over. Faster than human thought, Octavia was gone. What I saw on the ground was torn remains. I had the perverse thought of a gingerbread cookie, shaped to look like a girl, decorated with a human face, then clenched in a fist to make it powder and pieces. I couldn't speak. I couldn't move. I was as paralyzed as if someone had reached into me and torn out a piece of my soul- something I had never imagined could be taken, something so violent to rip away from me, something I could not live without.

I started walking.

I was on my knees when the world made sense again. Blades of grass, short enough I could see over them, were swaying in a breeze. I turned to look for Octavia. There was no Octavia. The sun was overhead. How was it shining? There was no Octavia. Something had wiped her away with the dispassionate coldness of bleach poured on bacteria. I tried to scream, but nothing came out. There were no words to say this, no action to make it right, no pleasure that would blot it from my mind. There was no Octavia.

There was Drusus.

It was Drusus that got me to my feet. There was one thing I could do. It would not make this right. It would not make me whole. But it was what Octavia would have wanted, and so I would do it. Octavia would have given anything for her son to live a life without Cassius. My life had been nothing but pleasure and leisure. For once, I would let it have a purpose. I would do this for her. I would do whatever it took. Let everyone else in here with me die. Let me kill every one of them.

17th place: Octavia Jacobs- stepped on by dog

Hah, bet you all thought she'd last a long time since I'm a softie, right? That is entirely correct. I killed Octavia early this time for a very particular reason that will be clearer the longer this story goes on. It's not because she did well in Clatniss' Games, btw. It's something else... As you all probably knew, I liked Octavia and she would have lasted a long time were not for a quirk about this particular story. It royally sucks losing her here and letting Cassius pretty much win, but that's the beauty of having two Chaos Reigns stories.