Twenty Four Shades Darker: The Hunt

Teaser - The Sky is Falling

The sky split open.

That, Marisa reflected, was not a good start. Then she ran.

Chaos was breaking out around her. Hexagonal lightning flashed across the sky. There was the sound of something tearing, like ripping up spare clothes for rags, only a million times louder and seemingly coming from overhead. She clamped her hands over her ears and kept on running, aiming for the urban wilderness that surrounded the circle. Someone screamed. A figure crashed into her and she pushed it aside and carried on running, only realising when she put her hands back over her ears that they were now sticky with blood.

She bit back a scream of her own.

At the edge of the circle she ducked behind a fragmented wall and peeked around it. The whole arena was shaking so it was hard to make out exactly what was happening but as far as she could tell it was this: not the bloodbath. She’d seen fourteen bloodbaths in her years of existence and the sky opening up had never been a feature of them. A few bodies lay around, dead or unconscious, because the bloodbath itself had been well underway by the time that the lightning had started, and through the trembling she thought she could make out a cluster of tributes stood by the Cornucopia. One of them, hair a bright blonde speck in the lighting-struck gloom, was shouting. They didn't seem to be fighting.

She checked her watch. It was a tatty thing with fake-leather straps and a face that was worn down by decades of being exposed to the salty sea air but the important thing was that she could still see the time. Or at least, she could see what the time was now relative to what the time was the last time she checked, which had been at the start of the bloodbath. Thirty nine seconds had passed.

With one huge yawn, the sky ripped apart again. The shaking doubled in strength, making her teeth clatter in her skull. If it was a pod, it was a big one. It seemed like the whole arena was about to crumble.

Marisa hugged her tiny bag of supplies to her and tried to remember what she’d been taught in training. In times of danger, get somewhere safe. She looked around. The sky was splitting directly over the circle, over the group of tributes by the Cornucopia, some of whom were armed, so that was definitely not safe. Neither were any of the buildings; the fierce shaking that was rattling her brain was bringing chunks of them toppling to the ground. And, for the same reason, nowhere outside the buildings. Sometimes there were earthquakes in Four but there wasn’t so much infrastructure available and usually she just curled up at the bottom of the family plot of land and that was safe enough.

So. Nowhere in the circle. Nowhere in the buildings. Nowhere outside the buildings. Basically: nowhere.

Forty three seconds.

She couldn’t just stay here.

Lightning burst across the arena, zapping down honeycomb patterns and filling the whole place with a glare that had her squeezing her eyes tight shut and pressing her forehead against the wall. The noise filled her skull. Among the yawning, tearing sound were a series of dull thuds that sounded sort of like explosions and a painful cracking noise, like someone popping their knuckles on a gigantic scale. Someone shouted something inaudible. She pressed herself further into the wall and waited for it to stop.

That was when something very large crashed through the sky, hit the ground between her hiding place and the Cornucopia and exploded. With one last shrieking fracture, the forcefield flickered once and collapsed.

And then the wall toppled in.