It's hard for Embelia to recall much of anything when she comes to with a pounding headache and what seems to be a soft pillow under her head. Though it's the pillow that strikes her more than the headache.
She groans softly as she sits up, pressing her fists to her eyes but jumping when a hand touches her shoulder. She whips her head toward the person but relaxes when she sees it's Korren.
"Don't push yourself," he says, offering her a smile. God, Embelia hadn't realised how much she missed that smile. "Here, lay back down. No rush."
Embelia lets him guide her, groaning again when a pang of pain shoots through her head. She's only a little surprised to see Korren. She knows he found her last night, seeing him is just confirmation that she hadn't hallucinated it.
"Where-" she rasps before realising she feels like she has a mouth full of cotton. She smacks her lips and soon after there's the cool rim of a bottle at her mouth. Without thinking, she takes a sip and takes a moment to let her mouth rehydrate before speaking. "Where did you get a pillow?"
Korren laughs softly, gently poking the pillow beneath her head. As Embelia shifts, she hears the material swish against her ear, some kind of plasticy fabric she's never worn. "It's a bunch of leaves wrapped in a poncho," he says. "I've been using it to sleep on, mostly, but it seems like you needed it more than me."
"Innovative," she murmurs, looking up at him and blinking slowly. He looks well. Uninjured but for a few cuts and scrapes, and seems healthy too. Part of her had been terrified that she'd find him barely alive, bleeding out or dying slowly of an infection. But here he sits, looking as she last remembers him looking– if a little bit dirtier. "I spent so long looking for you."
"Me too. Well… I probably could have looked a bit harder," Korren says with a sheepish smile, leaning back against a tree trunk. Embelia squints her eyes when she realises that beneath him is not the damp underbrush of the forest, but worn planks of wood. She lifts her head, frowning. It finally occurs to her that they're not on the ground, but high above it on a small platform.
"Did you build a treehouse?" She asks. "Is that why you weren't looking that hard?"
"Oh, god, no," he laughs, reaching over to a backpack. "This was already here. I've just been hiding out here, basically the whole time."
"And you managed to get me up here while I was hallucinating?"
"Oh, it wasn't easy," he says, rummaging through the bag before pulling out a knife and a green fruit, shaped a bit like a pear. Embelia sits up slowly, stomach rumbling. "You fought like crazy– kept talking about the monsters in the river and wisps."
Embelia groans. "Oh my god," she mumbles, feeling her cheeks warm. "That's so embarrassing, I'm sorry."
"You weren't yourself," Korren dismisses, slicing off a bit of the fruit and handing it out to Embelia. "Here."
Embelia takes it, thumbing at the green outside before turning it over to be met with the pink, sweet smelling meat of it. Her eyebrows pinch together, her brain flying through well worn book pages. "Do you know what this is?"
She glances up at Korren, who pales like he's been faced with the barrel of a gun. "Well, no," he says. "Oh, man, is it poisonous? I was trying to follow the rules you taught me, about what fruit is safe– I've been eating this for days. I think it's fine."
"No, no, it's safe," she assures, lifting it to her nose and sniffing. She smiles, meeting his eyes. "It's guava."
Korren meets her with a blank look for a moment before his face lights up. "Oh!" He cries. "The one you talked about, right?"
Embelia nods before taking a languid bite of the fruit. A laugh bubbles past her lips as she chews, taking in the sweet, tart flavour. The novelty of it surpasses for a moment all the numbness she feels. All the horror she's seen and inflicted dulls down to a distant ebbing ache and for just that moment she's sharing a new experience with Korren. It's lighter than she's felt since… well, since she last saw him.
"Oh, um!" Embelia reaches for her own pack, rummaging through to pull out the bread and cheese. "There's not too much left, but I was saving some of this to share with you. I was feeling sick from eating lots of fruit too."
She opens the container and hands it to him, and he looks in curiously at the slightly stale crescent roll. He smiles wryly. "Sponsor gift?" He asks.
She nods, rubbing at her eyes as a headache continues to throb behind her head. "From Chaff. It was a reward for killing the careers, I guess."
Korren's eyes dart upward, and his eyebrows are soon to follow. "You killed the careers?" He says carefully.
She nods again, taking another bite of the guava in order to avoid his gaze. "Half of them, at least. I tried to get Venus, too, but she survived somehow…"
"I don't understand," he says. "How did you manage that? They didn't hurt you, did they?"
She shakes her head. "I poisoned them. They had no idea."
Korren stares at her in wonder. "I… have so many questions."
Embelia smiles shyly. "Can they wait until my head stops pounding?"
Korren adjusts the way he sits, crossing his legs and nodding in agreement before gesturing with the container in his hand. "Can I have the rest of this?"
Embelia nods her head, watching him as he gratefully digs into the remnants of the food. As she eats her own food, she blinks slowly and tries to recall the night before. Oddly, it's the finer details she recalls most, rather than the whole event. Red lights and the mud of the riverbank between her fingers, the careful guidance of a calloused hand placing her feet into knots in a tree trunk, wisps of blue light. The worst part is not knowing what was real. It should be logical, right? Logically, she should know there weren't gaseous wisps or red lights, but it's hard to say.
She definitely remembers screaming. That was…. stupid. Monumentally so. But there was something more, between the terror that made her scream.
"I said something last night," she eventually says, causing Korren to tear his gaze away from the slivers of brown river water they can see through the leaves. "Something I thought I should remember."
"You said a lot of things," he says. "A lot of them didn't make sense."
"What parts did make sense?"
He purses his lips, nibbling at the cheese contemplatively. "There was a bit in there you seemed pretty serious about. About a trumpet flower."
"Trumpet flower," she murmurs, brows furrowing before they shoot up. "Yes! Okay, so the reason I was hallucinating was because I ingested the nectar of a flower that looked like a trumpet. If we can find it again, we can use it. I got the tiniest bit of nectar from a dew drop, imagine if we used more of it? It would kill, surely."
Korren nods along. "How are we going to convince anyone to ingest it though?"
Embelia bites her lip, gnawing at it gently. He's right. There's no way she could trick anyone the same way again– no one else left in the arena would trust her to provide food for them except Korren. "We can't," she admits. "But there's got to be another way to get it into their system."
Korren looks out at the river again, and Embelia follows his gaze like the answer might be there. "Darts," he murmurs. "A few years ago, a kid used a blowgun. He didn't win, but… it could work. Do you know if there were any at the cornucopia?"
She shakes her head, opening her mouth to speak when something cracks in the distance. Both of them freeze and stiffen up, instinctively ducking low. Korren leans toward the edge of the platform, gently pulling down a branch to get a better look at the river. He nods toward something. Embelia follows his gaze again to see a girl on the opposite bank of the river, collecting bits of twisted roots from the mud. They crack as she pulls them loose, her muscular arms straining with the effort.
"Is she stupid?" Embelia whispers, barely loud enough to be heard. "Imagine if we had ranged weapons?"
"It's not us she needs to worry about," Korren murmurs. As soon as he stops speaking, his point is proven when an arrow whizzes out of nowhere and buries itself into the girl's shoulder. She cries out, stumbling back. Another arrow flies at her, slicing through the meat of her bicep and into a tree behind her, trapping her against it.
Embelia watches with wide eyes as someone on a raft appears from down the river, paddling rapidly toward the struggling girl. Even from the back, it's not hard to recognise the boy from Four's hulking figure. He leaps off the raft and moves toward the terrified girl. Wordlessly, he pulls a knife from his belt. While the girl begs and babbles for her life, he steps up to her and puts the knife to her neck. From the front, he pushes the tip forward into her throat. He babbling tapers off and blood bubbles up her throat, coughed right onto Four's face. He doesn't stop or falter. He continues his slow pace, plunging the knife through her until it comes out the other side. As soon as it must clear the back of her neck, the girl goes limp and a cannon booms through the arena.
Korren and Embelia watch as he pulls the knife free, then his arrows. When he turns, both of them lurch lower, almost pressed flat to the platform to avoid being seen as they wait for him to finish his sweeping gaze around his surroundings. He mustn't spot them, because he soon makes his way back to his raft and paddles back out onto the river.
When he's finally out of their sight, they still don't move. Embelia feels light headed for holding in a breath without realising, desperate to be still. She exhales slowly, and that seems to break them both from their silence. Korren sits up slowly, releasing his iron grip on the branch to hide away the body of the poor girl from Seven. He looks at Embelia.
"The boy from Four owns the river," he says quietly.
"I see," she says. "And he has the only ranged weapon left in the arena."
"You have a spear," Korren says, smiling hopefully.
"Right," she says. "We could poison the tip of that, I suppose. Given we don't have a blowgun, it may be our best option."
"Not unless someone sponsors us. But I don't know if anyone likes us quite that much."
Embelia looks up at the sky. "Maybe they do. What day is this? Six?"
"Seven."
"Must be way too late in the game. Imagine how much that would cost… the spear is our best bet." Embelia almost feels like pouting as she catches sight of a little bird landing on a branch above and beginning to preen itself. A tiny little thing, a robin maybe. She watches it for a moment. A soft gasp leaves her, then a murmur, "Hollow bones."
Korren looks at her quizzically. "What?"
"Birds have hollow bones."
"Right," he says slowly. "Which would be perfect, I suppose, if there were any birds nearly as big as a blowgun. But there's not."
"There is," Embelia says with a bit of a smile. "Before this– before you found me, I mean, I was with this little girl. Wilona. She–" she swallows thickly. "She died. Of an infection, after she was attacked by a mutt. A giant bird, she said."
Korren frowns as he listens to her. "A mutt? We'd need to kill and skin it to get its bones, there's no way the gamemakers would let us do that."
"The only way they can stop us is by keeping it away from us," she says, headache dissipating with the adrenaline of a new idea. A stupid, overly ambitious idea, she'll admit, but an entertaining one. She knows she's been entertaining the audience so far, surely they'll be keen to let her keep doing just that? "If they want it to happen, they'll send it to us."
"It could kill us, Em," Korren reminds her.
"Or we could kill it. It's worth a shot, isn't it?"
"Not really," he says, smiling wryly despite his words. "But it's better than going out to a deranged career, I suppose."
Before they take on the ambitious task of killing a mutt, Embelia makes sure she can actually find the flower again. It's not easy to retrace the steps she took while in the depths of hallucination, but she thinks she remembers a vague direction. She can't even be sure how far she travelled. Korren walks at her side, a knife in his hands that he grips tightly, so tight his knuckles pale with the vigilance of his grasp. She wants to tell him to relax, to assure him somehow that he'll be okay. But she knows she's not exactly a beacon of protection.
Sure, she protected Wilona, but no active threats came for them then. And Wilona had been a scared little girl, desperate for anyone to show her a bit of mercy. Embelia was bigger, stronger, someone who could actually protect her. Korren is older than Wilona, and anyone would guess that he, bigger and stronger, would do the protecting. Embelia has no idea what he's seen in the arena, what he might feel now. Would an offer to protect him help? Would he even believe that she could?
Knowing him (though it occurs to her she can't really know him all that well), he'd probably laugh politely and accept the offer, complimenting her and saying she's a worthy protector. Or maybe he wouldn't. He's been… solemn, since he found her. Glad to have her back, sure, but… quieter. He says he's spent most of his time in his treehouse, but the way he'd reacted to Four on the river– he must have seen some things. Surely no more than Embelia, right?
But everyone's always found her sort of… melancholy. By nature. Perhaps she's been marked by the incident of her birth, destined to live a melancholy sort of life where seeing and inflicting horrors for television don't change her outward demeanour all that much. Even if inside she feels she's rotting, she thinks she looks and acts the same as she always has.
She wishes he'd talk. Wishes he'd fill the silence like he'd done before the games. The longer he goes without speaking, the longer she thinks, the further down she goes. She should talk. She should say something. Cheer him up somehow.
She likes his smile so much. What if this place has stolen it from her?
"Got any strategies for taking out this mutt?" She asks.
Korren looks jolted out of thoughts of his own, turning his gaze to her with a small, tight, smile. "Yeah," he says, and Embelia almost feels elated to know he's still planning and strategizing. "You probably won't like the one that I'm really considering."
"Uh oh?"
Korren huffs a soft laugh. "I'm trying to put the pieces together for something different, but there's only a few ways I can see good results."
Embelia wants to keep him talking, but… "Maybe only tell me when you're certain?"
He smiles at her again, nodding sharply. "Will do."
Embelia chews on her lip a moment, trying to think of something to say when a sliver of pink flashes in the corner of her vision. She stops, whips round, and squints in search of what she'd seen. "There," she says, back straightening as the trumpet shaped flowers form in her vision, hiding between big green leaves hanging from above. "That's it."
Korren steps up behind her, looking over her shoulder. "You sure?"
She nods, beginning to make her way toward it. "Yeah," she says. "I've never seen anything like it."
Korren tuts softly. "Looks a bit like a squash blossom to me."
Embelia stops in front of it, looking back at him with an amused smile. She looks at the flowers again, then concedes with a nod. "I've been out-botanied," she says, and though it feels unnatural to say, it draws a real, barking laugh from Korren. That was all she'd hoped. "Squash blossoms aren't pink, though."
Korren nods, jumping slightly as he steps. Embelia looks round at him worriedly, finding him crouching down to pick up something he'd stepped on. It's a spear, long and shiny and silver, the one Embelia must have left behind the night before in her frenzy. She can't help but grin a bit, daring to hope that this might just be coming together for them.
Korren was right.
Embelia did not like this plan.
He'd told her, while apologising, that he'd considered all the other options in his head, and nothing was going to work but this. Embelia wants to believe him, but part of her thinks he's put her out as bait for the mutt out of pettiness for making him go through with this.
Maybe it is, and maybe she deserves it in that case. And maybe she agreed to it. But it doesn't make her feel any better.
She glances over to the bushes Korren is crouched between, his brows furrowed together like he's doubting the plan as well. Nice to know he feels confident about putting her in front of a deadly beast.
"Should I be–"
"Shh," he hushes her, meeting her with a fierce gaze.
Embelia huffs, throwing her hands up in frustration. What kind of bait is she if she doesn't make herself look… she doesn't know, tempting? Like an easy target? Do mutts even care about that? She just assumes, because Wilona had been an easy target, that the creature must operate that way. She's not certain how smart it is, if they've engineered it to be clever or just made it driven by animal instinct.
There are too many variables. That's why Korren looks so conflicted, she knows. She's about ready to turn to him and say they don't have to do this, that they can figure something else out, when everything stops.
And the forest goes silent. So silent. Too silent. There are no sounds but her breathing, no chirp of birds and no song from the crickets. It's so silent she can almost hear the soft hum of technology beneath her feet. Then, it comes. the growl, the deep, scraping cawing of the beast that rumbles deep in her chest and rattles around in her skull. It's just as Wilona described, only she couldn't have imagined the way it shakes her bones and wraps haunting tendrils around her heart.
From between trees comes stalking a massive bird, like a five foot tall turkey with a crest of hard bone atop its head. At the end of scaly legs are massive feet with deadly looking talons. It's strange, really, to have seen the damage and horror those claws had inflicted before seeing the things themselves. It's not hard to see how Wilona had gotten so hurt by it. The thing isn't bigger than her or Korren, but it certainly would have been bigger than Wilona.
(The more she imagines how afraid Wilona must have been to face this thing, the less difficult it becomes to imagine killing it.)
It stalks toward Embelia, ceasing its growling a moment to make clicking noises toward her as it comes closer, a rumble rolling in its throat that shakes the ground. Embelia steps back, raising the knife she holds and swiping it at the beast as it gets closer. She wonders if one good plunge into the neck would kill it? She's not certain of its speed yet, not certain of how safe it is to get in closer.
It doesn't seem particularly pleased that she swiped at it, taking a few rapid steps forward and kicking at her. She jumps back just shy of a deep clawing to her gut, the edges of its claws catching her shirt and ripping it open with three slashes, nicking her skin and drawing blood. She gasps, stumbling backward and just to the side a little. It's not deep, a sting closer to a cat scratch than a blinding pain and blood pouring. She can move, she can keep going. She just needs to get Korren right behind it. So she lurches left and backs up. The mutt follows her, still growling with apparent displeasure and charging for her again. She runs back, swiping out at it again and catches its neck this time. Just a nick, not enough to kill it. But certainly enough to piss it off. Now, it screeches at her.
From behind it comes a shouting Korren, the boy lurching forward and driving Embelia's spear into its back. It buries deep into the bird and comes out the other side and the thing roars so loudly Embelia swears it echoes somehow even in the dense forest where sound so likes to get trapped.
(It's been one advantage to this place, to know your sound won't travel far– but then you can't hear anyone sneak up on you either.)
Korren holds on tight to the spear as the bird thrashes and kicks wildly, stubbornly not dying. Korren yelps as it bites at his arm, but refuses to release the spear. Embelia leaps forward, dodging its flailing claws as best she can to aim the knife at its head. She misses, nicking Korren's forearm before pulling back and grabbing the bird's crest, holding it still so she can drive the knife into its eye.
The bird unlocks its beak from Korren's arm and lets out a weak screech, claws catching Embelia's leg and dragging down her flesh as it goes limp. Embelia cries out, releasing the handle of the knife and stumbling back.
Two of them stand, hearts pumping loud and breaths ragged. Embelia can only distantly feel the throbbing gash in her shin, triumph of having beaten such a beast glowing so much brighter than any red hot pain. She crouches down, pulling the knife from its eye.
"Your leg," says Korren, coming closer to her as she wrestles the bird's leg out from under it and sets it across her lap.
"I'm fine," she says, though she's not certain, but she can't feel it now so it can't matter that much, can it? She puts the jagged edge of the knife to the bird's scaly leg, beginning to saw at it, through skin, through bone. "When they say birds have hollow bones, they still sort of have webbing inside, so we'll need to clear all that out of the way. We can use smaller bones as darts, and…"
She trails off as she clears the leg, lifting the bone up to look at what she thought would be bony webbing.
"What?" Korren says, voice wary as he leans over her shoulder.
She gazes down at the severed bone, blood running cold. Suddenly all the pain rushes to her at once, her leg throbbing, her belly stinging, her heart going much, much too fast. The bone is thick and solid, and through the middle is thick marrow. Not hollow at all. Too thick and full to fly, impossible for a blowgun.
"It's not hollow," she murmurs.
A booming chorus of trumpets crackles through the arena, reaching every ear remaining. It sounds so far away for just a moment, but Enbelia closes her eyes in hopes of listening.
Then, speaks Claudius Templesmith. "The remaining tributes are cordially invited to a feast. Each of you needs something, and the Capitol has been generous enough to provide. We hope to see you there, tomorrow at noon. Good luck, and may the odds be ever in your favour."
Embelia looks up at Korren, who immediately meets her eyes and shakes his head. It's a terrible idea. But for some reason Embelia doesn't want to believe that.
Just how much is their poison plan worth?