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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a commanding of fate . . . . .
The girl lunged at Saffron, blade curving towards her neck, dried blood on her forehead. Saffron threw herself to the ground and rolled dangerously close to the cliff's edge. She launched the chain from around her wrist towards her attacker and it wrapped around the girl's weapon. Saffron pulled sharply and the girl was disarmed. She cried out and rolled her arm in its socket.
She ran and barreled into Saffron's waist. Both girls flew over the edge and were falling faster and faster until they hit the ground and were in the air once more. They wrestled mid-air without abandon or honor, with fingers plunging towards eye sockets and elbows lodged in abdomens. The Cornucopia approached rapidly. Below, the boy smiled like a wolf.
Then, suddenly, an arrow, like the one that nearly struck Saffron during the Bloodbath, pierced the girl's skull. She did not even have time to scream before she dropped out of the air and crashed to the ground in a slurry of acute angles. Saffron knew that one would probably be so lucky only once in life.
By the time she reoriented herself after being sprawled out on the stone, a defined throbbing in her joints, two boys stood before her. One with the crossbow. One with a sickle.
Saffron acted first.
Her chain coiled around the boy with the crossbow's ankle. She yanked it, hard, and he collapsed backwards. With the dagger in the other hand, she tried to rush the boy on the floor, but a blade arced just inches from her nose.
The other tribute held out his sickle in warning then helped the boy up. They grinned at her together, carnally, as if to say, "this is how you put on a show."
They gave chase.
The butte was still tragically small, and she was suddenly trapped. One demise behind her and another tragedy before her. An arrow nocked and a blade creeping closer. She fled into the silver body of the Cornucopia, tipping over bins in her wake. Spears clattered to the floor; bags of food tumbled over themselves.
The mess did not slow the boys.
A jug was dislodged, its cap fell off, the air reeked of gasoline.
Saffron got lucky twice in one day.
She crouched in the lightless space and her calves cramped, but she did not move as she waited for her hunters to prowl closer. In that week she had grown so tired and malnourished that it felt like exhaustion was bred alongside her cells, breathed alongside oxygen. After that first night she wondered each morning, as she woke, if it would be easier to give up because this was hard. And this hardship was not her fault and not something she had intended. But, then again, those in District 2 had never been strangers to difficulty.
Absurdly, she feared that they would be able to find her by the sound of her heart alone.
Perhaps what she was about to do would kill her, too. But at the time, she hadn't found that proposition so terrible.
They had nearly reached her, and she was so afraid her entire body shook.
When they were close enough, Saffron burst forwards. Her ears wept as she scraped her blade on the metal wall. It sparked. The gasoline caught fire; the fumes ignited. She fell backwards. The flames consumed what was closest first. The boys screamed. The air smelled charred.
One cannon and then another.
Then, her back felt so hot it was simultaneously cold.
"Congratulations!" they yelled. But she was not awake to hear it.
