Twenty Four Shades Darker: The Hunt

(4) A Lecture on the Geography of Panem

Barley woke up to the feeling of rain on his face. It pattered softly all around, splashing on his nose and lips, and he was damp and shivering all over. He remembered little from the night before apart from the endless walking, someone singing and feeling like he was about to keel over. He had no idea how he'd got to sleep or why he'd chosen to do so in the middle of the clearing without any form of shelter. Drops of rain speared into his eyes from the trees above, which crowded out the sky. Judging by the way his clothes were sticking to him, it had been raining for a while. A small square of lurid blue tarpaulin had been draped ineffectively over his shoulders. He wiped his hands on it.

"You're awake!"

The rain on his face stopped briefly as Avery leant over him and grinned. There was a blotch of mud down her face and a few clumps caught in her hair and the bandage on her arm was grubby but she seemed, as always, in good spirits. She reached out a hand and pulled him into a sitting position. He nodded and shook the worst of the sleep from his head, sending globules of rain flying. A few strands of hair, darkened by the rain and the mud, flopped forlornly over his forehead, and when he pushed them out of the way it left a muddy trail across his face. If only they got rain like this in Nine.

The others were collected under the biggest tree in various states of dampness. Lincoln was leaning casually against the trunk, cleaning his nails with the knife. Satine-from-One was crouched at his feet with his hair sticking straight up in rain-soaked gingery spikes. The girl from Two was pacing around, swinging her machete at any particularly threatening branches and squinting at anybody who looked at her, her tiny figure wiry and ready to pounce. Everybody else was clustered around Jute. Propped up next to her was a long white tube with a funnel at one end; he'd seen her assembling it last night and guessed that it was some sort of dart-gun. She was crouched on her toes and her hair was plastered to her face and neck. The rain had washed the blood from her wound, leaving a livid red cut. His stomach turned and he focused on what she was doing instead.

She was scratching at the mud with a stick. He shuffled over to see what she was drawing; it appeared to be little more than a collection of random lines.

"So we know the Capitol is somewhere along this line," she was saying, apparently talking more to herself than to anybody else. "The sun rose over there this morning, which means that that way is east so the Capitol is due south-west. That puts us west of Seven and therefore in the northern wilderness of either Six or Eight. And we know that Thirteen is north-east from the Capitol."

Barley looked around, but nobody looked like they were going to challenge her. Most people seemed dazed, as if they'd been expecting to wake up somewhere else this morning. As if they were hoping they'd dreamed it all. Only Erik and Beau, his green eyes tracing every movement of the stick, seemed to understand exactly what she was talking about.

"So if we carry on heading east, we should hit either Thirteen's fence or Eight's in a matter of days."

Avery waved her hand in the air. "We're inside another district?"

"Probably."

"But we're also in the wilderness?"

"Yes. Look." She turned back to her line drawing and sketched out a rough map around it. Then she looked around, saw that everybody was listening, and raised her voice. "Panem is big, right? There's a lot of space. Not all of it is needed. There used to be millions and millions of people living here and they still had a lot of empty space left over, so imagine how much of it there is now. Okay? So now imagine you're the Capitol."

Avery's face curled up in a sneer of distaste. Lincoln snorted and stalked off, throwing himself into his hammock. A clump of rain dripped down off a leaf and landed on Barley's nose and Cordelia, hovering on the edges of the group, giggled at the look on his face.