You’re going to die
in your best friend’s arms.
And you play along because it’s funny, because it’s written down,
you’ve memorized it,
it’s all you know.
Richard Siken, “Planet of Love”
You could tell your tale differently this time, I suppose. But you won’t. Your name will always be Ivan Nikolayevich. You will always go into that tent. You will see her scar, below her eye, and wonder where she got it. You will always be amazed at how one woman can have so much black hair. You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast. You will always run away with her. You will always lose her. You will always be a fool. You will always be dead, in a city of ice, snow falling into your ear. You have already done all of this and will do it again. I am only here to make sure it happens.
Series summary: When you are unexpectedly reaped in the 47th Annual Hunger Games, your only hope of survival is your mentor, Aemond Targaryen, who won his Games a decade ago. Aemond is very good at his job, and he’s your only friend here in the luxurious and depraved Capitol. But this professional partnership might be turning into something personal…and forbidden…and dangerous.
Series warnings: Language, blood and violence, serious injury, sexual content (18+ readers only), prostitution, references to noncon/dubcon, character deaths (obvi), bugs, cakes, drugs, drinking, smoking, references to suicide, survivor’s guilt, desert trivia, mentions of pregnancy/children, a special Targaryen guest star, the curse of the pharaohs 🐪
Word count: 6.3k
Dividers were made by the wonderful @saradika-graphics 🎨
⏳ Character list can be found HERE! ⌛
⏳ All of my writing can be found HERE! ⌛
"The desert takes our dreams away from us, and they don’t always return." - Paulo Coelho
Here are the tributes who perished on the second day of the 47th Annual Hunger Games: Hawk from District 1, Kista from District 3, Noria from District 5, Rhiannon from District 6, Oakellen from District 7, Bobcat from District 9, and Jet and Pluto from District 12. You know this because their faces, some grim, some smiling, all so painfully young, are shown in a halo of light above the tall obsidian obelisk in the center of the arena after dusk. Monty and Isla are still alive, which must mean that whatever the pyramid does to people takes time.
Or Aemond is wrong.
You shake your head as you sit alone by the tiny oasis, a reflective puddle in a sand ocean. You hiked south at dusk for water and to put more distance between you and the remaining tributes, but now you’re wondering how you’re going to keep warm with no fresh bloody camel skin and no friend to huddle against for warmth. Dimly—not daring to hope for it too much—you had wondered if Roosevelt might meet you here again, but there’s no sign of him.
Aemond can’t be wrong. Aemond is never wrong.
He’s right about the curse of the pharaohs, and he’s right about the strategy for you to win, and he’s right about the fact that there’s another world out there beyond Panem and he’s going to find it. And maybe…if you win…in a decade you’ll have your own glass tomb of treasures piled up to the ceiling, and the Capitol will have rubbed off every sparkling fleck of you, and you can flee and cross the ocean and meet Aemond someplace where you can both be free.
You put on poor long-dead Calico’s sweatshirt and shiver under the moonlight as the pyramid calls to you from across the desert, promising you obvious things—warmth, shelter, food, survival—but also riches that cannot be put into words. It is bewitching. It is hungry.
Because of what Aemond once told you, you know that burrowing under the sand will only make you colder. Instead, you rip branches from the low scraggly shrubs that surround the oasis and make a crude cot to sleep on, then stuff a layer of parched greenery into the space between your two sweatshirts for more insulation.
You curl up and tremble as the night wind blows over you, and after a while a vulture delivers you a blanket, thick fleece, blue like a sapphire.
Here’s who is still alive: Brookite from District 1, Roosevelt from District 2, Tendo from District 3, both tributes from District 4, Gotha from District 9, and Montgomery and Isla from District 11. One third of the field is left, but that number will fall precipitously now.
“Get some sleep, Aemond,” Aegon says, yawning. He just woke up from another nap, snoring with a throw blanket covering him up to his chin and his sandals kicked up onto the back of the chair in front of him. “I’ll wake you if anything happens.”
Aemond ignores this and stares intently at the screen, his elbows on his knees, his chin resting on his long, interlaced fingers.
“It’s going very quickly,” Charm muses as she sips champagne. With her other hand, she twists absentmindedly at the silver Loch Ness Monster pin fastened to her dress. She’s had a few outfit changes; she is currently wearing a short gown made of gold lace starfish, glittering fabric, large cutouts revealing perfectly tanned skin. Her earrings are fishhooks speared through live brittle stars that wriggle and slap at her throat with their skinny arms. Charm pretends not to notice. It’s the only way to survive here; learn how to sparkle, and do it without complaint. She always gives the District 4 tributes the same advice: You could waste your time being bitter about the cards you’ve been dealt. Or you could have a good attitude about it. Work hard. Be productive. Be grateful.
“Aemond, go to sleep!” Aegon says again. He waves for a servant to bring him dinner. A young man approaches with two plates to choose from: prime rib and a potato or a whole lobster and a corncob, served with a ramekin of melted butter. “None of the other kids are anywhere near her, she’s fine!”
“They won’t let her stay there,” Aemond murmurs, still gazing at the screen as it rotates between the remaining tributes. Presently, Isla is stalking the slight District 9 girl, Gotha, as they both approach the pyramid. If any of the other mentors have realized that it’s the tomb that is killing those who enter—the black marks that appear on a victim’s fingertips and slowly spread upwards, the rot, the curse—they haven’t figured out how to communicate that to their tributes in a way they can understand.
Aegon has opted for the prime rib; he gets lobster at home. The servant begins to leave when Charm calls out: “I’ll take the lobster, boy. Yes, thank you. And another round of champagne for everybody, please. And more popcorn. And napkins. And do I see that Citadella has lovely plump maraschino cherries bobbing around in her champagne? Why does she get those and not us? Fetch me some too...”
“I think she’s okay until morning,” Aegon tells Aemond, his meat bleeding as he cuts it.
“They need to force her towards the pyramid. They need a show. She’s made herself a main character, the audience will expect a full arc. And they need to do it while there are still competitors alive for her to fight. So they’ll do it soon. I’m just trying to figure out how.”
The cannon fires; Isla has caught Gotha and slit her throat with her short curved sword. Under the moonlight of the arena, the blood is black instead of red as it soaks into the sand. Across the Amphitheater, the District 9 team rises from their chairs, sighing and somber. They leave in defeat, taking their plates of lobster and prime rib with them. Briefly, Aemond scans the rest of the seats; Jack catches his gaze and grins, cold eyes and shark teeth. Commodore is still alive, and healthy, and he has a spear. Aemond turns away.
“You’re lucky that Roosevelt kid isn’t still hanging around her,” Aegon says. “Or she’d be spilling all your secrets again.”
Aemond shakes his head. “No. Not now. Not anymore.” The end is near, and she wants to live.
Charm says brightly: “I’m just relieved Hawk finally dropped dead. Thank God for his lousy kidneys. I was worried Commodore was going to carry him all the way to the finish line, and then play rock paper scissors to decide who gets to win.”
On the green display screen mounted beneath the landline phone that connects each team to the Control Center, Aemond observes that her funds are running low. He was too generous with the gifts, probably. He couldn’t help it; he couldn’t stand to see her suffer. “I need to get her more money,” Aemond says.
“Do you?” Charm replies, her voice slurred with champagne and soft with sympathy.
“Yes.” He takes the red mobile phone out of the pocket hidden inside his black suit jacket. He begins scrolling through his contacts, deciding who to ask first. He does not consider the debt that will be incurred, the cost that will come due later, flesh and moans instead of gems and gold. He’ll pay anything.
“The blanket was a bit extravagant,” Charm mutters. A servant brings a fresh round of champagne—Aemond does not partake, but Charm and Aegon always drink his share without complaint—and she fishes out two glistening cherries from the gilded carbonated sea. She eats them, delicately dabs red juice from her lips with a napkin, tugs at her Loch Ness Monster pin again. Charm notices that Aemond is watching and smiles ruefully. “I always say I won’t get attached.”
“I know the feeling,” he replies, and begins making calls.
Through thin shivering dreams of the rumbling of the ocean and the gentle bobbing of fishing boats, you hear the cannon and know that now there are seven tributes left. You clutch the blanket around you and think, only half-conscious: How did I get here? Why can’t I go home?
Something thumps against your hip, and you startle awake. The vulture is already vanishing into the starlit indigo sky, its parcel delivered. You open the burlap sack to find not food or water or pineapple juice, which was both your expectation and your preference, but swim goggles.
You stretch the thick rubber strap and peer through the small transparent lenses, bewildered. “Aemond, why goggles?” you whisper.
You won’t be doing any swimming here, which means he must think you’ll need eye protection.
You stare out into the barren expanse to the south, flat and endless. You look back to the pyramid that beckons you with a radiant silver beam that streaks across the sky like the tail of a comet. The Gamemakers won’t let you stay here, not until the very end. What kind of a finale would that be? Six more booms of the cannon and then you are triumphant, sitting beside your miniscule oasis or cowering within the ruins? No, there must be a show. They are offering a mirage, the same sold to countless children before and after you: wealth, fame, safety, freedom, power, love. You won’t get it for free. You have to sparkle for them. You have to kill for them.
Jack killed many tributes in his arena, and he did it gladly. Sirena had to kill a Career. Aemond had to kill Sapphire. And you will have to kill whoever is left at the end.
Roosevelt? you think, heartsick, horrified. Brookie? Commodore?
The breeze is frigid as you stay cocooned in the blue fleece blanket Aemond sent you, shivering, bits of dust and sand stinging in your eyes.
How will they force me north towards the pyramid?
You contemplate the goggles, and you think you know.
I can’t escape the pyramid. But however it devours people, it must do it slowly. I don’t have to resist it forever. I just have to be the last one inside.
The cannon booms through the night. Six tributes left. At the very edge of the horizon, the sky is just beginning to lighten to lilac. You hang the goggles around your neck like the chain that holds your filleting knife. You drink as much water as you can from the oasis, scooping it up to your lips with cupped hands; the rubber band is still knotted around your ring finger. You go to roll it off, then decide not to. It might be the closest thing to a wedding ring you ever get. You begin to trek northeast towards the ruins, where there will be shade.
As you walk, the sky turning from hues of wildflowers to shades of blood, still clutching the blanket around your shoulders until the air is again stifling and golden, you hear voices following you like a shadow across the bluffs.
Baby screaming as he lunges with his hammer: I have to, or I can’t leave!
Monty asking: Will you stay with him?
Roosevelt shaking you awake beside the oasis: Don’t fall back asleep. I won’t be here.
Isla smiling: Good luck.
Pluto clasping your hand as he hemorrhages from his lungs flayed raw by underworlds of coal and sand: I won?
But no one ever really wins. They survive, they don’t win.
“That’s enough for me,” you pant as the heat makes you wilt and sweat, as you leave the blanket to the wilderness because you’re too weak to keep dragging it.
The first words you ever said to Aemond: How do I win? I don’t want to die. How do I win?
Roosevelt’s voice again, sly and grinning: You have to want to live more than you want anything else.
You pass a cactus, and you know you can’t cut it open and drink its noxious juice, but there is a hole in it with dry sprigs of shrubs sticking out. You check the hollow and find three eggs, each a little smaller than your palm. With the hilt of your knife, you crack an egg open and lift away the top of the shell to find a quivering lake of white albumen and a lush yellow yolk. You slurp it down—thick and warm and mineral-tasting—and force yourself not to lose it, digging your fingernails into your forearm to distract your brain from the slime that clings stubbornly to your tongue and your throat. You do the same with the second egg, and while your stomach is nauseous your mind is sharper, and you feel less afraid, and your muscles are withstanding the punishing heat.
You tap the last egg with the mother of pearl hilt of your knife. Instead of opening neatly, it shatters and fills your hand with its grisly cache: clotted blood, tiny dismembered bones and feathers and eyeballs. You yelp and fling it away, wipe your skin as clean as you can with the dead girl Calico’s sweatshirt that is knotted around your waist, resume your expedition towards the ruins.
You have just stumbled into the shade of the columns when the cannon blasts, and the ground beneath your bare feet quakes, and the dust is shaken from the mud bricks and the hieroglyphics and the crouching statues of Anubis.
Five tributes left, you think, leaning against a crumbling column to catch your breath, scanning the sky in vain for the sweeping black wingspan of a vulture. You know you’ve used up a lot of the sponsors’ money, but you can’t silence the fantasy of a bottle of pineapple juice, sweet and ice-cold and slick with condensation.
The reverberation of the cannon fire doesn’t dissolve away but seems to warp, rumble, transform into the baritone growl of ocean waves. Your brow furrows; there are no tides here, no surf, no ships. Still breathing laboredly, you look towards the pyramid and see nothing unusual: only the ever-present silhouette of the structure, the cloudless cerulean sky. You glance back towards the oasis. The sky there is no longer blue but filling up with churning, suffocating sand, a wall that rises through the atmosphere, a monstrous impurity as hostile to your lungs as water or coal.
Sandstorm.
“Please no.” You put on your goggles, still watching the southern horizon, still hoping Aemond might be wrong. The wind is picking up. Shards of sand begin to pelt your face. You spin towards the pyramid and start running.
I’m not going to make it, it’s too far—
You have to make it, you HAVE to.
I don’t want to die. How do I win?
The gales grow stronger, tearing your hair loose from Salem’s handiwork, clawing at your sweatsuit. You careen through the rubble, break out of the shadows and into the sun glare, slide down a shallow embankment and then find your footing again. The roar of the sandstorm is deafening now, swallowing you like the viscera of an egg; it’s getting difficult to see. Without the goggles, you’d be blind. You rip Calico’s sweatshirt off your waist and press the bloodstained cotton to your face to shield your nose and mouth; you gasp through the fabric as you sprint across the desert. You taste copper and salt and decay. You breathe threadbare life and certain death.
It’s too far, it’s too far—
The cannon explodes, so loudly you stagger and almost fall into the dry shifting sand.
Four tributes left.
You regain your balance and chase the ghost of the pyramid, skirting just east of the immense dunes that surround the obsidian obelisk where the Games began. The air is thicker, hotter, an oven, an ocean, and if you don’t reach the shore you will be drowned. There are gusts like riptides, threatening to drag you into a grave, a tomb. In the fierce wind, walls of sand roil and collapse, flooding dune slacks and burying anyone who sought shelter there. The cannon bangs like a drum.
Three tributes left!!!
Who is still alive? Who will you have to fight, who will you have to kill?
Your bare feet slide in sand so dry and so fine it’s like the powder Charm keeps behind the mirror in her glittering gold compact. You swipe manically at your goggles to keep the lenses clear. Even with Calico’s sweatshirt thrust against your face, you are hacking up the sand that steals into your lungs like seawater into the breached hull of a ship. You are dizzy, you are choking—
The soles of your feet hit stone, and you stop for only a second to see where you are, to make sure the next requiem of cannon fire won’t be for you. You are on a long straight walkway of bricks, alternating tan limestone and red clay. The path is perhaps three feet wide; on either side is a drop down into something that is golden like sand but rippling like water. In it, you can just barely glimpse a tangle of human limbs.
Quicksand.
Coughing, gasping, you follow the walkway towards the pyramid. The phantom of it fills your vision now, a dark shadow beyond the spiraling wind and sand. The storm is still strengthening. Squalls yank and shove at you, threatening to wrench you off the path. You think of the walkway in Aemond’s arena, tiles that sank into depths until the water was red with tributes’ blood. You think of narrow aisles of land through the bayou; you think of jetties that stretch out into the sea. You hit steps and crumple down onto them, crawl skyward on your palms and knees, drag yourself like a dying animal into the black mouth of the pyramid.
You leave the sandstorm behind you. The howling of the wind fades away. You pass through a narrow dark tunnel and then you are inside, and you take your first deep unobstructed breath of air that tastes stale and cold, and the clock has started.
You snap off the goggles and drop Calico’s sweatshirt, press your spine to the wall so no one can sneak up on you, look and listen with instinctive prey-animal focus. The pyramid is hollow inside, well-lit by golden luminance like sunlight. In the center is a lake of quicksand. To your right is a high wall made of limestone bricks; to your left is a footpath, following the perimeter of the interior of the pyramid, gradually climbing upwards via ramps and staircases, perhaps all the way to the capstone. You can see the underside of the path when you peer up into the structure. You can hear strange noises: stones shifting, metal clanking, thumps and squeals, inanimate machinery, meatgrinders and war hammers.
You don’t see anyone alive, but there is a body sprawled on the platform where you stand, right at the edge where the currents of quicksand lap at the stone. Cautiously, you step towards her, blonde and broken. It’s Brookie, her hair streaked with blood, her eyes glazed, her head twisted nearly all the way around. One of her axes rests by her outstretched hand, still embossed with her initials: B.B. She appears to have fallen from a great height, but you remember how she and Roosevelt raced effortlessly past you on the obstacle course in the gymnasium, always nimble and lightning-swift, never losing their balance.
Again, you scrutinize the pathway that snakes around the inner wall of the pyramid, like how muscles hinge to bones. How’d you fall, Brookie? you think to her ghost. Again, you notice the sounds of stones scraping against each other. Or were you pushed? By someone or something?
Your eyes return to Brookie, one last parting glance, and you see that she’s been cursed. She wears only her sports bra, and so the stripes of rot are stark like the bloodline of a fish. Her hands are black with gangrene, all the way up to her wrists; ropes of decomposition were climbing her like ivy when she died, circling her toned upper arms, scaling her shoulders to strangle her throat. You stare down at your own hands. It’s begun, just barely: the tips of your fingers are dyed pitch black like the meticulous jots of ink in Aemond’s notebook.
Only the Capitol can save me now. The only antidote is to win.
You grip the hilt of your knife and start up the path. You step lightly, cautiously, silently. You stay close to the wall, skimming your empty palm across it. You twirl your knife, making sure your fingers remember how to gut, how to flay. Your bare feet ascend the first set of steps, hesitating on each to test it for a trap of some sort. There is a long level stretch of a pathway, then another staircase, a ramp, a flat section, a third set of steps. You remember Brookie lying broken on the platform below, and you examine the limestone bricks of the wall and the floor, searching for cracks. Somewhere above, rocks are grinding and hissing. Someplace close, you hear a moan.
You crouch low and creep towards the sound, still clutching your knife. The path gapes like a wound—a trapdoor that was triggered, a hatch that sprung open—and had he been healthy, he could have leapt out of the way, you’re sure, because he was always so fast. But he wasn’t healthy. He was already dying. When you peek over the ledge, you see Roosevelt lying on his back, three metal barbs impaled through his belly, each perhaps two feet in length. They are serrated and painted with gore, muscles, blood clots, organs. You climb down to him.
“Don’t come down here, idiot,” Roosevelt rasps, blood on his lips, freckles dark from the sun. His red hair is matted with blood and bleak, futile sweat, the salt of the dead. “Keep the high ground.”
Nonetheless, you kneel beside him in the shadows, examining his injuries. You can’t move him. The barbs will rip him up all over again, but worse from that direction. You smooth back his damp hair from his forehead, touch his cheek. Needle-thin threads of black rot are spreading there. He gazes up at you with his murky eyes, not sharp or cunning but only in pain.
I hate them, you think with fanged viciousness. I hate what they’ve done to my friends. I hate what they’ve done to Aemond. I hate what they’re doing to me.
His eyebrows go up, just a little bit. “Aemond is good at this.” Then he gets a better look at you. “Aw. You sweated off all your sparkles.”
You manage a smile. “They’ll have to call me something else now.”
“Like your real name? No fucking way. Too normal, too boring. I have a winner’s name.”
“Who’s left?”
“Your monster. Commodore.” He nods towards where the path continues skywards, into the highest point of the pyramid. “Up there somewhere. He went by me, I didn’t see him come back down.” He coughs, spews up crimson and decaying black ruin, moans again.
“He left you like this?”
Roosevelt barks a weak laugh. “What was he gonna do? First aid?”
You ask gently: “How can I help?”
He sighs, then his eyes drift to where your filleting knife swings by its silver chain, flashing blade, iridescent mother of pearl hilt. “You’re still good with that knife, ain’t you?”
“Yeah,” you answer, your voice strangled, tears burning in your eyes.
“Oh, stop,” he scolds you; but he’s smiling, blood on his teeth. “I got it for you, remember? You owe me.”
“Okay,” you whisper.
“I assume Aemond taught you how to find the carotid.”
“He did.”
“Good. I don’t think I could manage that under the present circumstances, being as unfortunate as they are.”
You pick up your knife, but you can’t fathom using it this way. You press your fingers to the putrefying flesh of his throat and locate the spot that is rigid, throbbing, flush with septic blood.
“I can’t believe I chose to volunteer,” Roosevelt says, and he’s not smiling anymore. His eyes are bloodshot and faraway. “I can’t believe I could be at home right now. I should have known my place. I should have known it was too good to be true.”
“You were brave,” you insist.
“Tell my mom she was right. This was a stupid idea.”
You shake your head, and although he said not to you’re crying again, and your lungs are full of blood and death and misery and youth that will never grow content and wise, love that will never be felt, children that will never be born, worlds that will never be marked by the imprints of their footsteps, beautiful things that will never be written or spoken or carved.
“And tell her I love her, okay?”
“I will,” you swear.
“I hope you win, Sparkles.” Roosevelt grins, crooked and clever, and in his last moments he is himself again. “We’ll always be friends.”
You blink your tears away so you can see well enough to place the blade against his throat, but you can’t bring your hands to exert the required pressure.
He closes his eyes and murmurs, like he’s falling asleep: “Do it before I get scared.”
You think of goliath groupers and fillets and bloodlines and scales and bones, and you cut deep and sure. It’s not instant, and it’s not painless; but as Aemond once promised you, it is very quick. You hold Roosevelt as he convulses, drenched in his blood, and within thirty seconds the cannon booms and the pyramid shudders. And then the only sounds are the mechanical entrails of this stone tomb, gnashing and crushing, digesting your skeletons, etching your doomed names into the hieroglyphics.
You look up into the pyramid, your skin covered with blood and dust and sand, your fingers turning rot-black, and you can tell that you’re beginning to lose feeling in them. And you have been infected, but not just by the curse of the pharaohs. There is rage like you’ve never known before in your veins. Your arteries carry vivid oxygenated wrath. And you are certain that you can kill, not just in self-defense, not just by omission, not just as an act of mercy, but cruelly like an animal: you can cut your fangs on flesh, you can put your blade through the vulnerable places Aemond showed you.
You climb out of the pit and follow the stone path. Your deadening fingers probe the wall for cracks; your eyes scan the floor. You stop when you see a small dark crevice in the stone, just a few inches in front of your feet. You go down to the ground, lift the silver chain holding your knife from your neck, and toss the knife like you’re casting a fishing line. As soon as the hilt bangs against false floor, the trapdoor opens, revealing a bed of razor blades underneath.
I hate them, you think, you seethe, seeing faces in your skull like a mirage: Roosevelt, Brookie, Isla, Pluto, Monty, little Babylon forever trapped at twelve years old, Commodore who volunteered so someday people might love him, Jack in the mountains, Sirena in the trees, Aemond stalking Sapphire under rippling blue light that floods red. And I won’t let them kill me.
Just like Roosevelt’s trap, there is a narrow aisle of the walkway still intact, right at the edge. You put your chain back on and balance on the shelf, pressing forward, coasting like a shark. As you leave, the trapdoor closes again to await its next victim.
You go up a staircase on all fours, blood drying on your skin, blood coming from somewhere inside as the curse takes hold. You taste metal and salt and catastrophe. Your mind shifts into something animal and innate, but you hold the leash, you can’t let go completely. You have to remember what Aemond taught you so you can win.
You have to want to live more than you want anything else.
And you do.
You find a crack in the wall and stand back, watching. So much time passes—blood running into your eyes, ink-black poison nipping at your palms—that you begin to suspect you’re wrong; then a portion of the wall juts out, sudden enough to knock even an athlete as adept as Brookie off the walkway and down to the death waiting below, pulverized against the platform or drowned in quicksand. You stay where you are so you can count how often the trap springs, and sure enough it’s a set interval, once every 210 seconds. When it recedes again, you steal past it and the demise it had designed for you like a phantom.
There is a ramp, a wall trap timed to strike every 35 seconds, another set for 90 seconds, a staircase, a floor trap filled with whirling hammers, a ramp, a wall trap, a staircase, a hallway, a ramp so steep you couldn’t climb it if not for the metal rungs hammered into the stone. When you glance down at the base of the pyramid now, the ocean of quicksand looks like a puddle. When you gaze up, you can see the individual bricks that form the apex of the tomb. You’re so close. There are ropes of rot ascending your forearms, black pooling in the scar tissue that sealed the wound from Kista’s crossbow. Your lungs fill with thick maroon fluid and ache like you’re dying, because you are.
What if he’s not here, what if Roosevelt was mistaken, what if Commodore is safe and I’m poisoned, I’m cursed, I’ll never leave this place—?
You claw your way up a staircase and there he is, collapsed against the wall with his spear still clutched in his gargantuan, gangrenous fist. He must have been here for a while, because the rot is very bad: up to his face, dark vines and weeping sores, his eyes bleeding, his short flaxen hair falling out.
“Did I count right?” Commodore wheezes when he turns to see you. “Are we the only ones left?”
You don’t know how to answer. He lurches to his feet with a groan rattling with viscid poison, and he’s so big he fills up the earth and the sky, and even if he can barely feel his hands anymore he can still use them well enough to keep hold of the spear.
He jabs at you once—halfheartedly, like he’s warming up—and you duck out of the way, clinging to the wall. You tiptoe backwards down the steps. You are clutching the handle of your knife, but how can you get close enough to use it?
Commodore stabs again, more confidently this time, and you scream as you lunge out of his reach; but he’s approaching rapidly, gaining momentum, pursuing you down the narrow walkway. If he knocks you off the ledge, you’ll die at the base like Brookie.
How did I think I could kill him? I always knew I couldn’t kill him—!
“Only the Capitol can fix me,” he says, low and choked and guttural.
One monstrous sneaker takes a step down the stairs, and you are back in the elevator at the Tribute Center, and Aemond is touching you tenderly, kindly as he teaches you how to win.
You plunge forward and bury your blade in Commodore’s right knee. He roars—thunderous, furious—and grabs the back of your sweatshirt with his free hand. You rip the knife from his muscles and ligaments, slash his Achilles tendon through his clothes, twist out of your sweatshirt as you retreat and leave him holding only the thin bloodstained cotton. Then you understand how to get close enough.
Commodore bellows, looking brainlessly—childishly, helplessly—down at his hemorrhaging wounds as if even now he still can’t believe he’s here, and in the few seconds this takes you yank off your sweatpants and ball them up as tightly as you can, stuffing the legs through the halo of the elastic waistband. Crippled and savage, Commodore reels forward and thrusts his spear at you, his mutilated leg buckling under his weight. You impale your sweatpants on the point, dulling it, gelding it. You follow the length of the spear like the spine of a fish when you’re cutting out the bloodline. Commodore’s massive fingers close around your empty decaying hand, and only an instant before he can break your wrist you bang the mother of pearl hilt against his temple. He is stunned, and then he is spurting blood that bathes you like a hot red surf because your blade slices through his carotid artery. You know exactly where it is. You’ve had practice.
You stagger backwards until you hit the wall and watch him bleed out. You gasp for air as your dying lungs rattle, still gripping your knife. There’s blood pouring down your face, soaking your bra, painting your belly and your thighs, defiling all the places people will pay to touch you.
Good, you think. Let them see what they’ll buy. Not lust, not love. Death and violence and gore.
The cannon booms one last time. You drop your knife and it swings from its long silver chain. Then you realize what you’ve done, and what you’ll spend the rest of your life sending children into, and you cover your mouth with your bloodstained hands and wail into the empty pyramid, where your voice echoes and multiplies, and scalding tears wash the blood from your eyes.
A great creak like unoiled hinges, an apocalyptic thunderclap, and white light cascades in from above as the capstone of the pyramid is lifted away. You huddle against the wall, nearly naked, drenched in blood, thinking: They can’t be gone. I can’t have done this.
A craft descending into the pyramid in a gale of cold wind, metallic doors opening, people in guiltless white dragging you through the threshold. The doors close with a hiss and a puff of cool fog, scented like vanilla and coconut, perfumes to cover the blood and the rot. Someone drapes a small blanket across your shoulders. Another jams the needle of a syringe into your thigh, and pushes down the plunger, and instantaneously your lungs are clear again and the ink-stain infection vanishes from your skin. People keep touching you—asking you questions, trying to give you something to drink, turning your face towards a camera—and you scream and push them away. They do not relent.
“Stop touching me!” you shriek, you snarl. You’re a killer now, and they shrink away from you because they know it. You try to cover yourself with the blanket, but it’s not big enough. You sob and know the families of those twenty-three other tributes are watching you, that sponsors are toasting champagne, that an auction is being arranged and men are preparing to place their bids. There’s blood in your hair and under your fingernails. There’s blood on your lips, salt and copper, and you know you’ll be bleeding forever.
The craft docks and the doors sigh open, and Peacekeepers seize you like they once did on Reaping Day in District 4 by the seaside. You try to rip your arms free, you try to brace your bare, sand-coated feet against the frigid tile floor. If people don’t stop touching you, your mind will break like glass; but your body isn’t yours anymore, and it never will be again.
The Peacekeepers shove you roughly into a room, and you realize it’s your pod, and the prep team is here with beaming smiles and raucous applause to welcome you back from the valley of death. They haul you onto the table and ignore you when you try to stop them from scrubbing the grime and gore from your skin, and so you’re fighting them and screaming when Aemond comes in wearing his black suit, breathing heavily like he ran here.
“Out,” he commands the prep team, and they hesitate. “Get out!” he roars, and then they disperse, chattering conspiratorially amongst themselves, casting him resentful glares. He comes to where you are trembling on the high metal table, and he grabs the showerhead and tests the water until it’s hot and then begins to clean the ruin from you, and he says in a whisper as he smooths back your hair from your face: “Shh, shh.”
Charm appears in the doorway, her ankles quivering in her gold heels and winded from her sprint through the corridor. She is crying; her left hand clasps at the silver Loch Ness Monster pin affixed to her dress, as if reaching for something she can’t get a grip on. She says, hushed and with great pity: “Aemond, you can’t be alone with her.”
He pitches back: “Then stand in the fucking corner!”
And Charm does, covering her face and weeping softly. The partition stays open, and you see white glimpses of Peacekeepers lurking outside, but now you aren’t thinking about them.
Aemond cuts away your rubber band of a wedding ring, tacky with blood. He rinses the red from your hair, carefully, making sure not to snag his nimble fingers on the knots. He lathers your skin with pearlescent soap, and you watch a river of sand and blood disappear down the drain. He takes off your knife and sets it on the rim of the table, and you begin to sob again, and Aemond stops so he can hold you.
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