Birdie Seguaro- District Seven female (14)

I didn't want to wake up. That sounded super ominous, so I should clarify I didn't want to wake up because of where I was. I loved life, which was precisely why I didn't want to find myself waking up in a place like this. Even as I sat up, my skin was crawling.

"Goose walk across your grave?" Alara asked.

"What?" I asked

"My grandma used to say that. It's just something people said when someone shivered," she explained.

"Oh," I said. "I was just thinking about…" it seemed like a creepy thing to say, but I'd already halfway said it, so there wasn't much way out. "You know. How big ant nests are."

"Yeah, I could hardly sleep, too." Alara looked at the ground like she might be able to see through and check if there had been ants marching under us all night long. There seemed to be a taboo, almost, about mentioning Virgo. I didn't want to think about it. Probably Alara felt the same. I felt bad we were trying to forget about her, but if it had been one of us who died like that, she would have done the same.

"I guess we should look for food," Alara said, looking most unenthusiastically out into the tall grass surrounding us.

"At last, my annoying veganness is desirable." It was nice to be able to joke about something. If there was one thing I knew a lot about, it was plants. I even knew about the ones that didn't grow in Five, since I loved reading about plants I'd never seen.

I rose and stretched out my stiff back. "We shouldn't even have to go very far. There's probably clover everywhere."

"There were a few dandelions, too," Alara said. "Though I tried eating one once after I heard they were edible, and it was HORRIBLE. It was like I bit a stink bug."

"Yeah, you gotta really work with the milk. It's the leaves that are way easier to eat," I said. I tried to clear my mind and think about likely plants to look for. Plants were nice and soothing.

The first noteworthy thing we passed was a mushroom. Neither Alara and I were certain what it was, so we passed it by. It looked like a morel, but "it looked like" were famous last words for mushroom foragers.

I'd never gone so long without food. It was only one night, but still. We'd gotten so much stuff at the Bloodbath but somehow none of it was food. Probably there hadn't been much since there was so much to forage. Surely we'd come across some really soon.

There was a clean scent in the air, I noticed. It was faint, and it was muddied by other scents, but it was there. I wasn't able to pinpoint it by scent before I saw the plant itself. It would have been tiny- not even up past - but this was the giant Arena, and here it looked like a short but wide tree, or perhaps a very large shrub. As soon as I saw it, I gasped and ran towards it.

"That's not clover," Alara said as she trotted after me, half confused and half intrigued. "That's just a plant."

"That's no plant!" I couldn't shout in volume, but the shout was clear from my tone. I reached the plant and grabbed onto one of the fuzzy, elliptical leaves and yanked. "Well, it IS, but not JUST a plant." I rubbed the chunk of torn leaf in my hand and released an invisible cloud of perfume. "THIS is a MINT plant!"

"Oh, it IS, isn't it?" Alara said. Even a non-plant nerd would recognize the image from every mint ice cream carton ever. She rubbed two fingers on a leaf and sniffed them. "That seems like a lot of flavor to eat raw. Better than starving and all, but it's like eating toothpaste. Yuck."

"This is even better than food." My smile was a little shaky with my delight and relief. I would have gone without food all day to get a mint plant. It was like the sun shining through dark clouds.

"Why?" Alara asked.

I grinned as I looked down at the leaf draped over my hands. "Ants. Hate. Mint."

Clover Nguyen- District Eleven male (18)

The first thing we needed to do was set up a base. Whoever first gained familiarity with an area gained a staggering advantage. We could identify places to hide or barricade to thwart Career attacks. If everything went well, we could eventually identify areas to launch attacks and easy paths back to our home base.

The best home base was somewhere no one outside the group wanted to be. Back in fifth grade or so I'd read The Hound of the Baskervilles. I hadn't known then how relevant it would be later in my life. I just knew it was really cool how the bad guy and his sister knew the one path that would take them through the moors without sinking in the quagmire. I also remembered what happened at the end when someone forgot that rule. There didn't seem to be any quagmires here, though the edge of the pond might carry some danger. There wasn't a cesspool either. There were likely plenty of animals around here, both muttation and natural, and no doubt they would leave piles unattractive to most people but attractive to me. Or perhaps there were other options.

As we'd hoped, the vine on the tree was festooned with grapes. It was like something out of a movie to hold a grape as big as my head.

"It's like a giant eyeball," Enzo had said as he started to peel one.

"Ew, why are you peeling it, then?" Persi had wrinkled her nose. They turned out to be super sour- "wine grapes", I'd identified them to the others- but they were edible. I could already think of other possibilities as well- insect bait, glue substitute, bluish dye.

I didn't want our base to be directly at the tree. It was too obvious and too attractive. I wanted it to be close, though. Close enough we had access to the food and hydration from the grapes, but far enough our presence wouldn't be obvious if the Careers came. We started patrolling the area before the sun was even up on the first full day in the arena. Most of the ground terrain was grass ranging from thigh-high to just overhead, interspersed with various other ground plants. I quickly noticed that the biodiversity was less than it would have been in an average section of grass. It was an unexpected mercy. People don't like to think about how very many spiders live in any given section of their yard- spiders that would, to us, be dog-sized to tiger-sized. I was just thankful the climate here was much cooler than home. They weren't too common, but we did have tarantulas back home. And spiders were just the most stereotypical fear. What about ants, or beetles, or birds, or raccoons, or rodents? We didn't see any on our patrol, but they were out there. Somewhere in the arena, they were moving.

"Look out," Enzo said, pointing ahead. He said it casually enough that Persi and I weren't alarmed. I looked ahead and saw he was pointing at what looked like an overgrown jungle. Just like that, we'd found what we were looking for.

"Awesome!" I said as I started to run ahead. I skirted around a bush and reached the foreboding forest. The nettles were short by nettle standards- only a foot or so high- but to us they were almost like redwoods. At my height I could see the endless lines of needles studding the stems at every angle. As I approached, I found that each was roughly the size of my hand. They were pale green and a little translucent- I could barely see the ominous fluid inside.

"How is this awesome?" Enzo asked as he and Persi caught up with me and lurked apprehensively at the edge of the forest.

"This is our home base," I said. I grabbed a nearby blade of grass and started tearing a chunk loose.

"Uhhhh, not sure on that one," Enzo said.

"Look," I said. Using the grass as a shield for my hand, I took hold of a spine on the nearest stem. I broke off the tip and greenish liquid oozed out. As I'd hoped, the plant's regeneration process was sluggish, so the spine remained nearly empty. I wiped the last bits of ooze off with the grass and looked at the neutered spine.

"See? We'll break off the spines in a pathway and make a clearing. The Careers won't come in here, since it's full of nettles, and we'll have a completely safe base."

"Nice," Persi said with an appreciative nod.

"You think if I just grabbed onto this it would kill me?" Enzo was looking at an intact spine.

"Might," Persi said.

"I better not," Enzo admitted. He tore a chunk of grass loose and broke off the spine to bleed out the venom. Persi followed suit and we started clearing a trail. Soon we'd have our own tiny safe space, and even better, we'd be surrounded by weapons.

Trydan Briod- District Five male (17)

"We have to move eventually."

"Shh!" I hushed Trayne. We'd been huddled in the grass since the Bloodbath. We'd crawled until we thought we were a safe distance away and then we'd been too scared to move. The rustling of the grass gave away any movement. On the bright side, we'd know if the Careers were coming. On the bad side, we were scared to move ourselves.

"We're out of water," Trayne whispered, holding up our empty bottle. In the Games building I'd learned that it was actually a bad idea to ration water. Rescuers would find dead bodies with water still in their bottles since they'd been too afraid of "wasting" it. I'd been hoping that morning would bring condensation. Unfortunately, it seemed our patch of grass was under direct sunlight. There were traces of water on the blades of grass around us, but it would be difficult to harvest any significant amount. Still, it might be possible. I took the bottle and started rubbing it on grass blades.

"They're gonna smell us." That one I couldn't deny. Hanging over the smell of dirt and grass and unidentifiable plants, the unmistakable scent of human waste was very apparent. It would only get worse if we stayed.

"All right," I conceded. Trayne took the lead, crawling in the opposite direction as the Cornucopia, and I followed. Before long my hands were sore with the constant pricking of broken bits of plants and pebbles sticking up from the ground. Neither of us wanted to even say what we were afraid of seeing- there was no way the Gamemakers would make this arena and not add spiders- but the only life we saw was a very unsettling cricket the size of a cat, which chirped at us before moseying away into the grass like it had just been greeting a passing traveler.

"What do you think we'll-" Trayne stopped as he hit the edge of the grass. "Oh, sweet!"

I stuck my head out into the open space behind him and saw we'd hit the stone border of a small garden. To a normal human it would have been maybe nine feet across and five feet wide, and to us it was roughly basketball court-sized. There was a row of peas, a row of what I guessed was carrots, an empty row that probably meant potatoes, and a row on the edge of some sort of brown pumpkin-looking things. A trellis on the far end was covered in morning glories, which were open and purple in the early day sun.

Trayne crawled out into the dirt and rose. He ran to a pea plant and it rustled as he jerked a pea pod loose. He opened it to reveal fist-sized peas.

"Gotta eat my green vegetables," he said, then bit in.

"It's probably not safe to stay," I said. I wished we could, of course, but this place was the jackpot. Anyone who found it would see how valuable it was. We should probably just take some food and go.

"What are these things?" Trayne jogged across the garden to the row of brown things. They were round, roughly soccer ball-sized, and had long swan necks. He tapped a finger on one. "Woah, they're hollow! I wanna see what's inside." He picked up a rock off the ground and pushed it against the hard shell.

"Probably a bunch of goop," I said, just as Trayne's rock broke through. A stream of goop flowed out.

"Yeah, it's goop," Trayne said. He tugged a chunk free from the edge of the hole and looked in. "Not much, though. It's mostly empty in there."

"Really?" I asked. It seemed to good to be true, but it was giving me an idea. "Could we stay in there?"

"Ha, like Peter Pumpkin Eater," Trayne said.

I moved to the next plant in the row. "Let's pick this one up a little if we can and dig a little trench kinda underneath it, so it's hidden. We'll dig the hole on the bottom and no one will be able to see it."

"I love it," Trayne said. Plan A turned out to be a bust, since the pumpkin-y plant was too heavy to lift, but we found a plant that was mostly obscured by leaves that would hide our hole, so Plan B was a go. The dirt was softer than normal, since it was a garden and thus had been tilled, so by noon we were able to dig a little trench in the ground that was just big enough for us to squeeze through. Trayne crawled into the pumpkin- maybe it was a squash?- and started scooping out goop, which I buried nearby so it wouldn't be so obvious.

"It looks pretty good in here," Trayne said eventually. I crawled up in after him and found the inside of the plant was a roughly bathroom-sized space that was damp everywhere but not totally wet. It was very dark, since the only light was a tiny bit seeping from our exit hole. I could barely see past my hand.

"Maybe we could punch out a window?" Trayne asked. It was a risk, but so was living in pitch-darkness with walls blocking the sound of coming Careers. Sometimes a calculated risk is just something you have to take.

Fun fact: Trayne and Trydan are inside a birdhouse gourd.