TAYLOR Treadle- Amberlynn Hyde

How did getting eaten by a frog even kill you? They didn't have teeth. Was the pressure of getting chomped enough? Surely she wasn't still alive when she went down it's throat.

Tillo Peters- District Eight mentor

If Taylor was a goth, did that mean she'd be excited to be in a coffin? That was not the sort of question you could ask at a funeral. Funny, but it was Tommy I'd expected to last longer. He just had so much rage.

District Eight

We may perhaps have been too harsh on Taylor. Funny it took a second child's death for us to move past a first one. Funny again how we said it was so sad two children died but no one stood up for Cairn. Without their brother making life just a little bearable, their condition worsened until in a month they were together again.

Alara Dory Banks- District Four female (17)

"So is it true about the iron thing?"

It was a peaceful moment, as far as the Games could be peaceful. The girl from Eight had died last night. She was the only one. I remembered she was a goth but I hardly knew anything else about her. I just knew we were four days into the Games and I was getting really tired of eating nothing but leaves. I didn't know how Birdie did it.

Birdie had seemed suspicious at the start of my question, but her face went eager at the end. "I thought you were gonna say 'protein'," she said. "So many people ask that. Like, have you never heard of beans? But no, iron's pretty easy. There's spinach, of course. Like Popeye- agagagagag," she laughed in a scratchy voice. 'Or broccoli or kale or pretty much any dark green leaf. It's B-12 that's hard."

"To tell the truth, I didn't even know that was a vitamin," I admitted. I'd probably heard about it in school at some point, but it had gone the same place that the Pythagorean theorem went. There were altogether too many letters in that.

"I take supplements for that one. You know the really stupid thing? A lot of them have gelatin. It's for vegans! Don't put gelatin in it!"

"Isn't there gelatin in things you don't eat, too?" I asked. I'd always been interested in people different from me. In school back in Four there was a Jewish girl. She was ethnically Jewish, not religious, but she had awesome stories about all her people's history.

Birdie rolled her eyes. "Oh, my gosh. Everything! Makeup, soap, detergent, toothpaste. Condoms." She gave a cheeky smile. "They can also be made of sheepskin, but, well." I wondered wistfully if I'd live long enough for that. I was a late bloomer, at the least. I'd been wondering lately if maybe I didn't want it ever. I'd probably never know.

A bumblebee was startled up by our movement and lifted into the air. It was the size of a flying pig, which was disconcerting, and it made a blaring droning noise, which was also disconcerting, but it bumbled off peacefully and disappeared like a passing blimp.

"Wonder if there are honeybees in here," I said. "What's the verdict on honey?"

"Opinions are divided," Birdie said. "I never ate it because I couldn't know what the conditions at the farm were like, but beekeeping is just about the most ethical form of animal farming. If you piss your bees off, they'll just leave. And it's not living flesh. It's essentially barf. In this case they'd be wild bees, and we'd be taking so little. Guess I'll think about it and cross that bridge if we come to it."

The sky flickered like the sun had briefly gone behind a cloud. I looked up, worried it might be a mutt. I'd never noticed how intricate birds' wings were or how quickly they moved. Then I snapped out of the spell as I saw the bird was very quickly descending and that I was close in size to a worm.

I darted sideways as the bird landed, bending grass all around it like a forest had suddenly been felled. I looked behind me and saw I'd run in a different direction than Birdie, who was more sensible than I and had started earlier, judging from how far she was. The bird- a sparrow, maybe? It was brown and not too big- gave a tiny hop and ruffled its wings at having missed us. Its head moved jerkily, looking this way and that as its beady black eyes tracked me.

"No, no, no," I kept up a running chant as I ran between blades of grass, trying to keep some between myself and it. The one advantage of my size was that I was more agile than the bird, which was roughly the size of a tank. I could hide behind grass or seek cover under a clover leaf.

The bird shot its beak down at me. It cratered into the ground a few feet behind me, showering me with bits of dirt. Its skinny feet pattered on the ground as it repeatedly reoriented and tried again.

"Psst! Psst!"

I looked in the direction of the noise and saw Birdie lying on her stomach under a dead leaf and beckoning at me. I darted towards her, zigzagging and hoping desperately I didn't end up tripping myself. I threw myself into my stomach in front of a patch of grass the bird had stomped down in its efforts and scuttled underneath it. From under the canopy I could see the bird hop over to the grass and pause, its head tilting left and right in tiny jerks. It couldn't see me, I could tell, but I wasn't sure if it was going to start poking around and seeing what it could find. I backed deeper into the grass and tried to estimate how fast I could run. But then the bird lifted off the ground so fast I could barely track it. In a wink and a flash, it was gone.

I crawled on my stomach and elbows to the edge of the grass and looked at Birdie. Her wide eyes and slightly open mouth must have mirrored mine.

"Did we just almost die?" I'd been so focused on running I hadn't even thought of it. All the fear and panic flooded up in me.

"I think so." Her voice had the nervous quaver of a brain deciding either to laugh or to cry.

"I'm gonna throw up." It wasn't completely literal, but I did feel like everything in my stomach wanted to go either one way or the other.

"There's a joke in here somewhere about bee barf," Birdie said, and that made up our minds. We were alive, and however stupid Birdie's joke was, we chose laughing.

Dorian Sargasso- District Four male (18)

Not gonna lie, it had been a real crappy last few days. If I didn't know better- and this was a very rude thing to think and I would never say it out loud- I would think I'd gotten my period. I was just SO PISSED at everything. Probably it was because I hadn't been sleeping pretty much at all- Kallik either, judging from her baggy eyes and the frizzed hair she hadn't even smoothed down with a hand. She didn't seem to be feeling quite slightly either, but at least she wasn't as pissy as I was. Everything just seemed personal. The crickets that chirped at night were doing it because they knew it annoyed me. They spaced out their chirps on purpose so that just when it had quieted down long enough I could start to rest, one jarred me back up. It was personal that a dewdrop fell on the back of my head like a light but very annoying tap. I found myself breathing deeply almost constantly, trying to keep from just losing my entire mind.

"We should get going." Kallik got to her feet, tossing her MRE wrapper into the grass. It felt so intimately wrong to be littering all the time. It was one of those things impressed on you so early and so hard it felt like a law of the universe. Smoking is bad. Drugs rot your brain and you die. Dont litter. But what could we do? There were no garbage cans. We'd thought about burning our garbage, but a lot of it had plastic or other stuff. Burning it would have been worse littering.

"You're eager lately." Truth be told, Kallik was creeping me out. Something had come over her when we found Persi. Ever since then she'd been rabid about patrolling the nettle thicket and trying to find them. Her arms were covered in angry red lines from the scratches she'd gotten trying to find a way in. And where I was a ball of nerves ever since the thing I didn't like talking about, it seemed like it had erased Kallik. She snapped back whenever I lashed out at her, but most of the time, she didn't seem to be feeling anything at all. Whenever I happened to look her in the face, she might as well have been dead.

She sparked back into life at my needling. "I'm trying to get out of here, okay?"

"Bro, I didn't mean to fight." I put up my hands.

"Then you shouldn't have started one."

I grumbled but didn't dare let it become a real sentence. Kallik charged off and I followed a few steps behind her.

There had to be a way into the thicket. Persi wasn't magically immune to stinging nettles. Or maybe she was. I'd heard some people weren't allergic. But she was in an alliance, last I knew. What were the odds they all were?

Kallik moved out a little from the thicket to make a wider circle, seeing if maybe the new angle would let us see the path. I followed along, still too surly to pull up alongside her. We came to a patch of short, bent-over grass like a springy mat under our feet. It was a little unbalancing, the way the grass dipped when I stepped onto it. It made me uneasy, too. I wasn't sure why, but I didn't ignore the feeling. The Academy trainers swore by a student's "sixth sense".

Something moved under my feet. But it wasn't really a move. It was a faint rumble, like something below the ground. I looked ahead and noticed a little seam in the ground in front of Kallik, almost hidden by the grass. The uneasiness switched at once into adrenaline. I'd seen holes like that before. I'd seen them right in my yard, the day I learned a painful lesson.

"Kallik." Kallik froze at the measured alarm in my voice before I even told her not to move.

"Is it ants?" She was too scared to even look back.

"I think we're by a ground wasp nest."

"Okay." Kallik's tone was measured. "Let's just back up. They didn't attack us coming in."

Images of wasps filled my mind as we gently stepped backwards. It had been one of the first real pains in my life when, at four years old, I innocently went to let the pretty little bug crawl on my hand. That was the day I learned bees only sting once, and generally try not to, while wasps are just straight-up dicks who will chase down a fleeing, screaming little boy. Wasps will start a fight and they will end one.

My eyes were fixed on the hole in the ground as we backed away. There could be more. There were probably more- the ground wasps at home had a network of holes until Mom sprayed the inhabitants dead and scuffed a shoed foot over the holes. I kept my eyes peeled for the jittering head that would appear, then draw back as it went for reinforcements a hundred wasps would pour out in a cloud and swarm me. All I could think about was their spindly thin legs scrabbling against my skin.

I didn't even think to look up. As we reached the edge of the bent grass, back to the relative safety of open ground where we could see any holes, the airborne wasp flashed down at me. I saw her coming by her shadow and turned before she hit me. I stabbed out with my sword, missed in my haste, and reached out with my free hand. I hit the wasp at its waist and grabbed on, holding my arm out stiff to keep her at a distance. The wasp was mastiff-sized but lighter than it looked- light enough that it didn't strain me to keep my arm locked. I switched my grip, though, as it twisted to try to bend its stinger into range. The black stinger was sliding in and out like something perverse as the wasp pumped its abdomen. It was the length of a butcher knife and the tip glistened with venom. It pitiless segmented eyes were so close I could see my face reflecting a thousand times. The insectoid drone of its wings were so loud I was certain the others would hear it.

"Look out!" Kallik cried inanely, speaking more about her efforts to get closer with her harpoon than to the stinger. I was somewhat surprised, and even flattered, that she hadn't abandoned me. Just as quickly I concluded that it was because there was only one. Any more and it was everyone for themselves. There was a dark relief in the quietness in mind. Since the ants, not a moment had gone by when I wasn't watching for danger and wondering what it would be. When it finally happened, there was the stark coldness of training and instinct. I would win or I would die. If I lived, I would have time later to wonder how long it would sit stinging my motionless body.

I pulled back my sword arm awkwardly against my side and stuck the blade up into the wasp's midsection. The blade punched through its exoskeleton after a brief resistance and then lodged inside, the guts slowing the momentum enough it didn't penetrate the other side of the carapace. That left me with a wasp on a skewer bucking this way and that as it tried to break free, its stinger clanging off the sword and leaving smears of venom. Its gross legs fluttered over my chest and face and I had no free hand to brush them off. It should be dead, I thought. It was impaled through the chest and spraying fluid as its struggles tore at the wound. But bugs were tough, I remembered from school. They would die from something like this, but they'd keep moving an awfully long time.

"Look out!" Kallik cried again. She ran up beside my left shoulder where she could reach the wasp but its stinger was out of range. She shoved her harpoon into its neck. The length of the harpoon made the movement awkward enough that she sliced the wasp's neck but didn't sever the head. She yanked the harpoon back towards herself and that finished the job. The head fell to the ground, bouncing off my shoe. The wasp's body went into a frenzy. Its wings beat and its stinger spasmodically pistoned. I could not force down the thought that it wanted to take me with it.

I threw my sword and jumped back. The wasp's body landed on the grass and immediately tangled the sword in it by its thrashing. I looked down at its baleful head pointing at me and shivered as I wondered whether perhaps its body still knew where I was. But the thrashing slowed to twitching and at last the body , propped up slightly by the sword.

"Let's go," Kallik whispered sharply.

"Right." I braced my foot on the wasp and yanked my sword free. It came out slick with yellowish guts and venom. I wiped it on a blade of grass.

"You think more will come?" Kallik asked as we ran back toward the nettle thicket.

"If they do, they'll get us." Against a hundred wasps, there was no hope. But none came, and soon we were by the nettles, on ground we'd circled before and knew was safe.

"Guess we don't have to patrol that section," Kallik said, looking in the direction of the wasps. "If they try to escape that way, they'll take care of themselves."

Trayne Treadwell-Lang- District Six male (17)

When I was little I always loved James and the Giant Peach. I still loved it now, but I also did when I was little. How awesome would it be, I thought, to have a peach so big I could chew tunnels into it (and also it could float across the ocean and fly and the pit could be a house and all that)? Giant food in general was the stuff of fairy tales. Now it was real life, and it was just as cool as I'd imagined.

Trydan was content to stick with the peas, since they were the easiest thing to get. I had loftier goals. Or maybe lower goals, since I was trying to dig a potato.

"You're going to be filthy," Trydan said snootily as I laborer.

"It's honest labor, son." I put on an accent I thought a farmer might have. "The Earth, she will love you if you love her."

"Are you just going to eat it raw?" Trydan asked.

"Crunchy," I answered. Really it was all a dice roll anyway. I had zero idea how far down potatoes were planted. If it was more than… I wasn't good at math, but I was pretty sure we were less than an inch tall. So if it was more than a quarter-inch deep, it was going to be a steep ask for someone digging barehanded.

The soft dirt under my hands ended in a sudden hardness. I tried to scrape the obstruction clean to see what it was, the efforts hampered by the dirt on my own hands. Eventually I revealed something brown, but not the same brown as the dirt. It was huge, going down and around so far I couldn't budge it, but it was softer than rock when I poked it.

The harvest is bountiful, I thought. So bountiful, in fact, it was clearly far too large to move. I searched around for a sharpish rock and started hacking at the potato like a rock miner in some dark quarry. White flesh peeked out as a sawed at a chunk. I gripped the flap with both hands and yanked. It popped free easily and I tumbled onto my butt, a watermelon wedge-sized slab of potato in hand.

Who's laughing now, I crowed mentally as I headed for our house. I was a generous sort, I preened. I would share my harvest with the doubters.

I meandered towards our house, skipping now and then. As I approached, something looked different about it. Oh, there it is. There was a bit of dirt above the door. It must have always been there and I hadn't noticed it. Different lighting, maybe. Funny it was so regular a shape, though, and so big. It branched off like a star, but with more points than a star. I counted the strangely symmetrical points of just slightly paler brown, invisible unless you looked super close. Eight of them…

I stopped dead ten steps from the house. Distantly, I felt the potato wedge shaking in my grip. The spider was above my head, less than twenty feet away. It was almost exactly my height. Its camouflage was so perfect I could barely see where its legs met the brown of our house. It had two paler brown stripes on its back. I couldn't see its eyes. I knew I should have looked, to see if it was looking at me, but I didn't know if my mind could take it if it was. All I could think, over and over, was how fucking long has that been there?

"Trayne? Why'd you get quiet?"

Oh my God, he's in there. I floundered between options. My throat made the decision for me, snapping shut to prevent me from yelling and maybe spurring the spider to jump, a jump that at this distance would have been directly down on top of my head. My body went cold and all I could do was watch.

Trydan's head appeared just inside our door. I was far enough outside that the angle blocked his view of my face. The door was less than a foot below the spider. Trydan poked his head through the door.

Everything exploded.

The spider leaped into motion, scuttling downwards. Trydan saw the first leg as it swung over his face and onto the bottom edge of our door. He gave a gibbering holler as he spasmodically wiped at his face. He half fell and half launched himself out of the door, landing face first in the dirt, his back arching and his feet going over his head. The spider flashed to the ground nearby him. I jerked as I stood, needing to run but not knowing which way the spider was going. I couldn't outrun it anyway. I just had to pray.

The spider shot off across the dirt. It was disgusting to watch its jointed legs skittering alongside each other. It was a horrible, jittering gajt that made me sick to my stomach. But it was moving away from me.

'Getitoff!" Trydan sobbed. He leaped to his feet, overshot, and fell forwards. He rolled over, smashing his side into our house. He grabbed onto it and hauled himself up. Over his shoulder, I watched the spider go. It was hauling across the open g,.dirt like a scared roach. It didn't make it any less terrifying. I hated how far its belly was up off the ground- high enough I could have crawled under it. I hated the terrible fluidity of its movements. It was monstrous. I struggled to see it as real. It was a nightmare, not a real thing.

"Where's it going?"

I didn't register Trydan's breathy mutter. We were paralyzed, me standing and him holding onto and peering around the edge of our house, as the spider ran. It reached the other side of the garden and disappeared into the grass.

I finally felt the weight of the potato again as I settled back into my body. My heart was pounding in my ears. I felt like I'd been shocked and the electricity was still in my veins. Slowly, the thought filtered in.

Dad always said they were more scared of me than I was of them.

Thought I'd get out some of the horrors inherent in this Arena. No deaths, though, since I knew everyone would think at least one mutt would get a kill. I actually wrote the wasps last but changed the order because the spider was an obvious final boss and people would probably think for sure it would get someone. I know it looks like I'm picking on Trydan but actually it was just Trayne was the last one who needed a POV and with the way I wanted to have this scene where one of the boys unintentionally went RIGHT BY a spider was easier to narrate if Trayne was the witness and not the victim.

For those trying to keep some vague track of scale, these were a small sort of ground wasp who would be about 1/3 of an inch long and the spider was a smallish wolf spider at 1/2 inch

Timeline: this is day 4