Clover Nguyen- District Eleven male (18)

We were all starting to think that man did not live by vegetables alone. Technically in our case we were right. I was pretty sure it wasn't possible to survive long-term on only clover, dandelion greens, and the handful of other plants we knew between the three of us. Veganism was totally sustainable but you needed more than just leaf greens. We were definitely low on protein and probably on other vitamins I didn't know much about. It wouldn't kill us- not even in the longest of Games, I was pretty sure- but it made its mark in other ways. I was always just a little bit hungry. Judging from the bickering and complaining in our camp for the last few days, so were Enzo and Persi. It didn't help that we were all itching at welts from trying to get far away enough from camp that our upset stomachs wouldn't stink the place up.

"So." I said as we gathered around our campfire. I'd been uncertain when Enzo wanted to build one. If any of the nettles had caught fire, I couldn't imagine that would be good for our lungs. But he'd proven my initial impression wrong by how cautious and precise he was with his firebug streak. Our little fire never left the hollow he scraped for it, and it really was nice to have on the chilly nights. "We've got a get out of here eventually."

"Seconded." Persi raised a finger.

"Let's go over our assets." I dumped out our fanny pack. We have iodine, a canteen, this pocketknife, an aluminum foil blanket, and the pack itself. But what else?"

"Fire," Persi pointed out. Enzo grinned toothily.

"Also nettles. Lots of nettles," he added. "We could thread them through our clothes so we're like porcupines and the Careers won't be able to touch us."

Persi gave him a disapproving look. "Kallik uses a harpoon."

"Oh. Right." Enzo said.

"No, no, we could do SOMETHING with that," I said. "It just wouldn't work for everything." I tried to think back to battles I'd never fought, told to me by grandparents who hadn't been there either, told to them by grandparents telling it secondhand. I seemed to remember something about poison from the sky.

"How precise can you be with fire?" I asked Enzo.

"Funny you should ask." His initial excitement simmered down into concentration as his brow furrowed. "I can get pretty precise with the burn area. If we do a series of small controlled burns I could eliminate the fuel in that area and there would be nothing left to burn. We'd have to find a way around breathing in the fumes, but I bet we could. It's the direction of the fire I can't control. That depends on the wind."

"Right." So the first question was if we could fashion a filter for ourselves that would keep out the venom from is burning nettles. To solve that problem, we had… I went over possible things we could use or make. Grass and vegetation. Ash from our fire. Iodine- maybe it reacted chemically with some stuff, I didn't know. Fabric. Hair. The spongy pulp underneath the outside surface of the nettles. Dirt. There had to be something in there that would work, or some combination.

"If we got that far, we'd need to get Kallik and Dorian into the line of fire." Persi didn't comment on her pun.

"A lure, maybe, or a diversion," I thought out loud.

"I can climb again and look. I just won't know how long they're going to stay there, you know?" Enzo said.

"Not right away," I said. "Look a lot of times. See which way they're patrolling and how fast they move. We won't have an exact spot but we'll be able to calculate a range."

"What's the plan here?" Persi asked. "Are we trying to distract them so we can get away, or are we trying to kill them?"

"Either is better than nothing, but if we hit them dead-on I can't imagine it will take long to do a lot of damage." It was a bad way to go. Just brushing an arm against a drop of venom burned like I'd been in the sun all day in the desert. It was awful to think of that in your lungs and throat. I was pretty sure they'd swell up just like my outside skin did. That couldn't be survivable for long.

"That's rough," Enzo said, thinking the same. "But, you know, they started this."

"That's assuming it even works," I said. There was a lot we'd have to line up for this to be remotely possible. I thought suddenly of something I'd missed. It wouldn't be just their lungs and throats that would suffer. We'd essentially be spraying stinging nettles into their eyes. On the bright side, that gave us a far larger attack range. Even mild eye irritation would prevent them from chasing us. Eye pain brings anyone to their knees.

"Let's give it a shot," Enzo said. "Worst the can happen is we die horribly."

Val Vella- District Two male (18)

I wanted to hurt something. Destroying things had always lifted my mood, unfortunate as that sounded. Plenty of us looked back on memories, so old they'd lost their edges and so dark we'd just as well not tease out the details, of pulling the wings off of flies or breaking something belonging to a person who'd made us angry. The difference was, I'd never grown out of that. I still felt that surge of gratification and power that came from asserting the frank truth that my needs simply outweighed the needs of others. It was absurd how so many people simpered and preached that we were a team, that we should work together, that the needs of the many were more important than our own. Bullshit, all of it. There was no God. There was no reward for cutting yourself down to raise someone else up. There was only yourself and how you could make this world serve that.

Octavia had been my one tie to any thought of morality. I'd always thought of her as naive for her insistence that effort and self-denial could make a better world for everyone. What did I care if the tesserae rate went down or if education rates went up? I didn't need those things. And what did it ever get her? She'd been fated to eighteen years of life and she'd used them in service to others. Maybe I would die tonight. If I had hours left or if I had days, I devoted them in service to myself. Anyway, Octavia was gone now, and without her angelic voice on my shoulder, I could admit something. I wasn't angry she was dead. That was something that had happened to HER. I was angry that she'd been taken from ME. She was MY sister, MY favorite person in the world. She wasn't feeling anything anymore, but I was still hurting. I'd do right by Drusus because I chose to promise her and because it pleased me to, but aside from that, I cared only for myself. Or maybe it was because some part of him was me. Octavia was my sister, part and parcel of my DNA. Drusus was contaminated by his father's wretched genes, but some glimmer of him was her and some glimmer of him was me, and that gave him some glimmer of value.

I almost missed it when my chance finally came. I'd walked halfway past the wooden playset, which to me was as tall as a castle, before I saw the foot dangling from the gap between the walls and the floor. It gave me pause that whoever was up there had done nothing at my approach. From their angle I would have been visible for multiple minutes. Were they asleep? What kind of moron would sleep with their foot exposed? Were they just so tough they didn't care? It merited investigation.

"Someone up there?" I called in one of those rhetorical questions meant merely to spark a discussion.

The foot slid back a little but didn't disappear. "Yeah, I'm here." A voice called down after a long pause.

"What gives? You dying or something?" I didn't see any blood on the foot or the outer wall of the playground.

"Kind of," the voice responded.

"What kind of answer is that?" I called back up. I was torn. The bizarre calmness of the voice gave me the fear that perhaps some venomous mutt had drugged the Tribute- was he unmoving because his foot was the only part of him not caught in a spider's web, perhaps?- and impatience to start the fight and commence with the hurting and killing.

"Just waiting to die." The Tribute still hadn't moved. He had a hickish accent that suggested a rural District. I tried to think of which of us fit that description and weren't allied.

"We'll come down here and get on with it," I called up. "Or I'll come up there and we can get on with it."

"Either way."

"Dude, seriously, what is your problem?" By then I was just confused.

"I failed my allies. They're all dead. It's over. I'm waiting here until I die."

I paused. "You okay up there?"

There was no answer.

I sighed and walked over to the ladder. "Bro, you're bumming me out. I'm coming up."

Robbie Emmers- District Nine male (18)

There was a tiny vibration every few seconds as the boy grabbed a ladder rung and hauled himself up. A face appeared at the top of the ladder and I sluggishly recognized Val.

"Mind if I come in?"

I let my apathy answer for me. Val scooted away from the edge of the playground and slid up next to me.

"You wanna talk about it?"

"What is there to talk about? They're gone." I'd thought I could get past it, or at least pretend to. It had come crashing down on me, though. The grief was so heavy it weighed down my chest with each breath. It was like being buried alive, I thought. What use was there in fighting when there was no hope of digging yourself out?

"Yeah. It sucks." I hadn't remembered until then that Val had a sister. Her absence, and Val's continuing, gave the glimmer of kinship that spurred me to give Val a chance. "I know it seems like nothing can be right again. Small comfort, but people get through this. It seems like the end of everything, but things can be good again."

"I'm not sure." It took so much energy just to speak. I hadn't eaten since I climbed up to second story of the playground. I only drank, licking dew and raindrops off the wooden walls, because the pain of dehydration had outweighed my torpor.

"Isn't it worth trying?" Val asked.

"I did try." My mind flashed back to that first day after I watched my friends in the sky. I'd told myself I'd do it for them, that there were other people I could help, that I couldn't just give up. I'd walked to the edge of the wooden platform and I'd looked down the ladder and it just seemed so far. Beyond it, the Arena was impossibly large. What would I do if I started? Kill everyone I saw? Run until someone found me? Over and over I told myself it was time to climb down, and over and over I found I'd stopped listening. "There's no hope," I concluded.

"That's true," Val said. I was too weary to be surprised. "It's true there's no hope of bringing them back. But there are other good things in the world. Isn't there anything you want to do? Anything you want to see again? People you love?"

I closed my eyes. When I did, something took shape behind them. I thought perhaps I'd see my mother hoping she'd see me again. Instead I saw an endless sheet of gold. The thought of it opened something inside me. Not happiness, but the possibility of it.

"I want to see the fields again." Not just to see it. I wanted to put my hand over the wheat and then run my fingers along it. If I could lie on the harvested fields again, if I could know their endless certainty, it could flow into me. If I laid out on it with my back in its arms and my face to the sky, maybe the harvest rains could wash me clean.

"That's it." Val's smile was so bright and encouraging I felt it in my soul. "Just give it a chance. No promises. Just for now."

I thought of the motion of the wheat in the wind. I thought of the birds white against the sky and moving against the clouds. Of the pink sunsets that bled into purple until the black above and the black below were one.

"I'll try," I said.

Val offered me a hand. He stood up and gave a tug. I stood up alongside him. Val pulled me in for a hug.

Pain bloomed in my stomach. I sucked in breath, pulling back. Val's grip went strong and angry. Hos smile hadn't changed as he leaned in toward my ear.

"It's no fun to hurt someone who doesn't care."

I yanked away. Val let me go. I stumbled back towards the ladder, my hands pressing against the warm wetness on my shirt.

Val made no move to follow. "Move fast, Nine," he said, pointing to the ladder. "Maybe you'll make it to the fields."

It was only one stab. People could live through that. If I got to the ground, if I vanished into the grass, there could be hope. I slid my legs over the side and lowered myself onto the top rung. I hissed at the pulling at my would as I reached down a leg for the next rung.

Val settled into his stomach at the top of the ladder. He rested his elbow on the wood form and laid his head in his hand as he watched.

"Making good time. Don't move too fast. Wouldn't want to bleed out," he called down.

I reached the bottom of the ladder, my hands and the rungs smeared with blood. I collapsed to my knees and examined my wound. The blood had soaked my shirt with a terrifyingly large stain. It was halfway down my pants, like I'd wet them. Wet and warm, like a perversion of the ocean, inverted in color and inverted in hope.

I heard a tumbling noise and then Val hopped down from the bottom of the slide on the opposite end of the platform. He stopped to pick something from the grass as he walked under the platform.

I tried to raise myself with my hand against the ground. It slipped on my blood. I forced in a breath that seemed to knife against the edges of my wound. I couldn't escape. Val was going to catch me and he was going to kill me. I would die as far from home as I was from all the friends I couldn't save

Val stood next to me. He tossed something down. A handful of golden grass settled onto the dirt by my head. Val crouched down.

"Pick it up" he said. He was looking at me with the playful delight of a boy opening a present. "Can you smell it? Can you smell the fields?"

I reached out bloody fingers and curled them around the grass. I dragged it through the dirt and nestled it to my face. There was nothing but dead grass.

14th place: Robbie Emmers- stabbed by Val

Robbie was a nice guy. A cool dude. He was the kind of guy I generally favor. His cheeriness and kindness was exactly what I needed to be horribly mean like this. I picked out the best of Val for Survivor, but things are going to be a little different for this story. RIP Robbie, too good for this Games.

Chapter title note (spoilers from 70 years ago): good authors borrow, great authors steal, and I ripped this off exactly from an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents where a hitman does this to a mark.