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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37. what it means to be human
It takes June a while until she’s able to process it all. Within not even five minutes, so many things happened that it takes her until after lunch to grasp them completely.
Lamina is dead. Tanner is dead. Treech ditched the alliance and is on his own now. And it’s only day three.
It all weighs her down heavily, and she’s mostly silent, passing on her leftovers to the other mentors that dig in happily. But while they’re eating and chatting, she can’t help but wonder about something else.
While Coral and Mizzen were going after Lamina, the camera didn’t show the rest of the arena. All they saw were various angles of Lamina being ganged up on, with some shots of Treech collecting the water bottles and lining them up in the background. But after everything, there was only one bottle left when they returned.
It must’ve been Lucy Gray. June doesn’t understand it, but there had to be a reason why that bottle was left out in the open while the others were poured out. She took one with her when she went into hiding. Did she do something to it? But what?
All June knows is that she doesn’t trust it. Perhaps she’s not the only one who snuck something into the arena. She knows it’s hypocritical to get agitated over someone else cheating when she’s doing the same, but at least she has the decency not to make it too obvious. Or is it not obvious at all?
She can’t tell if the others aren’t paying enough attention or if she might be reading too much into things. Either way, she thinks it’s fishy, and when she saw Treech approaching the bottle, she immediately sent him a fresh one. Just to be safe. It could just be her imagination, but she doesn’t trust it.
And, thankfully, with the way he immediately turned his back on the bottle when he received one from the drone, it seems Treech doesn’t either.
The sight of him next to Lamina’s body, saying something the cameras couldn’t catch, doesn’t leave her mind. He sat with her, adjusted her position, and spoke to her. Did he apologize? That’s her best guess.
Truth be told, after nothing happened yesterday — Jessup’s rabies incident aside — it feels almost like too much has happened in such a short amount of time today. She can’t imagine what it must be like for Treech.
Not much happens afterwards, though. After such an exhausting morning, it seems even the tributes are getting tired. A few of them leave their hiding spots to get food from their mentors, and aside from Teslee disappearing with another drone she managed to get ahold of, the open area remains untouched.
