𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐘'𝐋𝐋 𝐉𝐔𝐌𝐏 𝐎𝐅𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐋𝐄𝐃𝐆𝐄 𝐓𝐎𝐆𝐄𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑.
What District 2 victor, Saffron Creek, and prodigy, Finnick Odair, share is the very antithesis of what has been stolen from them. They test the edges of the rules that construct t...
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one sixty and seven ones . . . . .
On the good days, her memories become hidden beneath fog under which the details are sanded until they are smooth and indistinguishable. But other times she remembers the events of the 67th Hunger Games so clearly it's like they're carved into her brain matter. That is what keeps her awake tonight.
And the memories always come with phantom pains.
For the days while she was in the arena, she did not speak.
"Goodbye," she said to Lyme, her mentor and fellow District 2 victor, who had come to send her off. Then, the glass tube lifted her into the arena and that was the last word she said until she won.
It had felt like a flash grenade had detonated right in front of her eyes. She blinked the tears and light away while her head throbbed. Devilishly, her heart lurched. It became profoundly apparent that she was not fearless.
The arena was a series of rings. In the center was the Cornucopia. It lay on an island of rock that was only accessible by six wooden bridges that swayed in the burning mist. Then there was the abyss, surrounded by terrifyingly steep cliff faces, among which were semi-hidden mine shafts half-collapsed. That was the mass that she stood on. And behind her? A completely exposed field where insects hopped from wheat stems for a few hundred feet before it all collapsed into roaring waterfalls.
Her ears ached. The starting cannon fired. She made split-second calculations, like her mentors had drilled, and ran towards the groaning bridges. It swung terribly beneath her feet, so she clutched the rope railing until her fingers hurt. Narrowly, she dodged a hand reaching towards her scalp. Sudden movements launched the bridge into unpredictable motion.
The island couldn't support the number of tributes on it, it was simply too small. Already, bodies were pushed off the ledges. They screamed as they fell through the fog, hearts jammed between their ears. Cannon after cannon.
She doesn't really remember how she emerged from that chaos, even now. She grabbed at whatever was closest: a thin dagger and a weighted chain, neither of which she had experience with. Her fingers were nearly crushed several times. And then she was on a bridge, again. She had nearly crossed it before it lurched violently, and she was falling.
She thinks that she will always know the face of the girl that looked down on her, tipping her broadsword at Saffron teasingly.
Fear ran circuits up her back as she clawed at the wooden slats. Beneath her, her legs thrashed in the air before she brutally crashed into the opposite cliff. Her knees wailed. Her lungs were relieved of air. In quick succession, an arrow was fired from an unseen crossbow, it nicked her shoulder, and pinned her braid against the wood. She fumbled for the dagger and slid it unevenly across her hair, then scrambled down what remained of the bridge.
She hid under the fog in a small and damp cave. Sounds seemed to surround her—laughter, snarls—though she couldn't see anything. All night, she toed the line of sleep. She would jerk awake every time her head began to slip towards her shoulder.
For three days she skulked in the mineshafts, venturing deeper into the darkness at every cannon. Ultimately, it was the desperation of hunger and the impatience of the Capitol that drove her to the surface. The 67th Hunger Games demanded a resolution.
By then, there were four left.
Sweat pooled on her skin and congealed under her nose and the nape of her neck. In the middle of the artificial day, the arena baked in dry heat. But at night, everything was so cold that frost spread over every surface. She prowled the grasslands, then, though her time was limited as the cliffs had begun to fall into the water in chunks. The arena was shrinking.
By the fourth day all of the bridges had been cut, leaving behind perilous ropes hanging as tests of strength to access the Cornucopia. Those, and the hidden jump pads discovered by an unfortunate tribute who stumbled upon one and snapped his neck after the fall. They looked marginally different from simple rock.
Unsurprisingly, a male tribute from District 1 sat like a bastion at the Cornucopia, and Saffron was considering her options when she was attacked from the right.
