the girl who played with knives || clato ✔️

22

Cato

My body naturally wakes me early, escaping from a plague of nightmares. The sun is just starting to rise and I hear a bird somewhere in the concrete jungle that is the Capitol.

I rise unsteadily out of bed, throw on some clothes, and over to the door. Clove's door. I take I final look backwards to where she sleeps still, then crack the door and slip through, then make my way down the quiet hallway. I end up in the dining room, where Freya and Spencer are sitting, talking in hushed voices.

"Hey!" I shout. When the stylists hear me, they stop talking immediately. Apparently whatever they're discussing is not for younger ears.

"Cato... Come, sit, we were just about to wake you," Freya says.

"I'll get the girl," Spencer whispers.

"No!" Everyone looks a bit surprised by my urgency, even me. "I mean... I'll go. I-well, I wouldn't want to trouble you."

"Fine. Go," Freya says. And so I do.

When I get to Clove's room, the door is shut tight and the room is silent. I crack it open and peek in to see Clove sprawled on her bed asleep.

I walk over as quietly as I can and lean over her. She looks so... Young. She looks much more innocent, and carefree too, when she's asleep. Then her eyebrows crinkle and her straight face turns to a scowl, and I can't stand to see her in pain so I press my lips to hers and kiss her awake. When I pull away, her eyes are open wide.

"One more," I say. She nods and we go out into the dining room. Freya and Spencer get right down to business, leading us up to the roof where a hovercraft is waiting. I begin to climb the ladder, only to find that once I've stepped onto the first rung I'm frozen in place by an electric current so I can't possibly fall.

Once I'm inside the hovercraft, the ladder's current doesn't release me. First, a woman in a white coat carrying a syringe walks up and tells me, "This is your tracker" before plunging the needle in my forearm. I cringe at the pain of the small metal device makes its way deep down under my skin. Then the ladder frees me and I make my way to a seat at the far end of the hovercraft. That's when I notice it's full of tributes.

I end up sitting with my arms crossed on my knees between Glimmer and the boy from 3, across from Thresh, Marvel, Marina, and Jonah. I notice Katniss sitting between Jonah and Clove, who's all the way at the other end from me looking anywhere but at me. I suppose maybe it's too painful to be close right now.

I avert my eyes from Clove and study the rest of the tributes. It's a mixed dozen, Glimmer and Marvel, Clove and I, the boy from 3, Marina and Jonah, a girl with sleek, red hair and another boy who I don't recognize. I suppose I'd seen them around training, but hadn't paid much attention. Then there's the little girl from 11: Rue, Jonah's friend. Thresh is there looking as fierce as ever, but also uncomfortable, the same with Katniss. I guess the rest of the tributes and the stylists are in other hovercrafts.

After about a half hour we arrive at the arena. When we go down the ladder this time, it leads deep underground, to the catacombs under the arena. I shower and brush my teeth in a room called the Launch Room, then Freya helps me into my outfit for the arena. It's made up of forest green pants, a rusty orange tee shirt, boots made from supple black leather, and a brown jacket that falls to my thighs.

The thin chain of the locket Kimber gave me can be just barely seen, and before I can cover it up, Freya pulls at it and studies the locket in her fingers. I silently will her not to open it, and she doesn't thankfully. She just tucks it back into my shirt and guides me to a circular metal plate in the floor. There is a pleasant female voice counting down the seconds until I'm launched into the arena.

A glass cylinder lowers around me just as Freya says something.

"What?" I shout through the glass. I hear a muffled voice but can't make it out. I try to read her lips as she repeats the phrase over and over. Maybe ask for water. What? Does this mean she wants me to find water. No. No. I get it just as the cylinder starts to rise. She's saying, "May the odds be ever in your favor."

I'm in complete darkness for about fifteen seconds, then I feel the metal plate pushing me out of the cylinder and into open air. I'm blinded by the bright morning sun and am only aware of a strong wind and the smell of trees, pine, I think.

Then I hear the legendary Hunger Games announcer Claudius Templesmith's voice boom all around me.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" He bellows, his voice coming from everywhere at once. "Let the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games begin!"