drapetomonia - the overwhelming urge to run away.
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When Junia Beaumont, her brother and their classmates get a last assignment before the end of the school year, she doesn't know just how quickly things will change for her.
Who would have thought t...
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18. wounds
After that, Junia doesn't sleep much.
The nurses stick to their words and bring her more of that fizzy lemon drink she had in the evening along with some nutritional crackers, check her vitals and she's left alone again. Cas wakes up briefly but he's too exhausted so she decides to let him rest.
The image of Clemmie writhing in pain with scales almost all over her upper body just won't leave Junia's mind. At first it was Arachne, her blood and the way her body fell limp at the zoo, and now it's Clemmie. The Games haven't even started yet and so far, the casualties on both sides have been extreme.
And yet the Capitol persists. Her father claims it's about not showing any weakness but Junia - and she's sure her classmates know it, too - knows that the bombs were placed in the arena. After what she did to Clemmie, it wouldn't surprise Junia if Dr. Gaul was also behind the bombings.
Anything to make the Games more interesting. Anything to get people to watch. By spreading the rumor that rebels bombed the arena, she's also stirring up the anger within the Capitol citizens once again. This year is different but in every catastrophic way possible.
It's frightening. To think that her own mother is involved in the gamemaking process leaves her feeling surprisingly numb. For such an educated woman, it seems her mother is abandoning her own humanity just to push the Games further. She has heard of Avoxes being experimented on at the Citadel which is horrifying in its own right, but Academy students?
Is she really that blinded by the trauma of the war and the anger at the rebels that followed that she's more than happily working on creating these muttations? Junia has always known her mother was left horribly traumatized by the war but seeing the way it manifests within her is terrifying.
How can she be coddling Max in the morning and then help create muttations that will be used to hurt children? Junia's head hurts and the more she thinks about it, the more disgusted she feels with her own mother.
When the sun rises and her brother begins to stir, she hasn't slept much. The drowsiness of her medication has worn off by now and it'll be another three hours until breakfast is served. Once he's awake, she tells him everything.
About Clemmie, about the way she was (presumably) tricked into getting bit by a snake, how the scales are spreading, how she doesn't have any control over her body, the way her eyeballs are the color of egg yolk. But, and she mentions this last, also how the vials their mother has been bringing home are samples of the antidote they've been giving to Clemmie.
