Wiley had nodded off while Gage kept watch, staring over at her every few minutes to make sure that her chest still rose and fell, that she hadn't died. Wiley just needed to hold out for a little longer. If they could hide until they were the last ones left...it was a strategy that rarely worked, Gage knew, but it was possible.
Then the bombs started.
The crashes grew closer, a strange not-quite-warmth, perhaps just a lack of chill, filling the air. Something was coming, and they couldn't hide any longer.
"Wiley," Gage whispered, shaking the girl slightly as to not jostle her too hard lest she rip her very amateur stitches, "Wiley, love, we have to go."
Denver was running. She had left the Tower as quickly as she could, so afraid of it coming down on top of her, but now she had nowhere to go. Was her apartment even safe? The Peacekeepers didn't believe she was loyal to the Capitol. The rebels would never buy that she was one of them. Denver knew how revolutions worked. She needed to hide, especially now that everything was coming to a head.
She hadn't meant to end up at the Capitol Arena, near the Hunger Games Museum. At least, she thought she hadn't. But there it was, the large imposing structure and the ruins inside, and she knew it better than anyone. If there was anywhere she would be able to hide, it was in there. Loathe as she was to disturb historical artifacts, she broke the glass of a nearby display, grabbed a long, needle-pointed dagger, and entered the Arena.
It had been years since Denver had seen an Arena with snow in it. Most Arenas, if nature-based, tended to feature hot and humid areas. But this...it was a mountain, just like the ones people used to try and climb before the Dark Days. She had to call her father later, and get his reaction. Maybe he'd tell some of his old stories.
And then a gnawing settled in her gut, and Denver looked around, the fairytale excitement fading as the expressions of the others watching the screens didn't match her awe. They were worried instead, and of course they were. So many of those in the Arena this time were friends, were loved ones, were victors who had already sacrificed for the promise of peace. Children and the elderly were expected to fight adult athletes in their prime.
"What do you think?" she asked, quietly, not particularly caring who she was talking to when she was so unsure of every single one of her emotions.
Before the dark days, it was said that bad things come in threes. Well apparently, at least in Denver's situation, so do fugitives. It was an odd band, the three of them, but none could risk long enough in the streets to go home, let alone risk going home. So Cain, Denver, and Monty stayed together, for a few weeks at least, and tried to survive.
The nightclub wasn't one Denver had been to before. BEEF was a gay club, so she wasn't the target audience. Despite presumably having been abandoned in the middle of the night, it was fairly clean, for which Denver was grateful. She didn't know much about cleaning. She also didn't know much about survival. She did, however, know about revolutions. So, in her own mind, though it was never discussed, Denver appointed herself leader, and determined that it was her job to keep her little alliance safe.
They slept in shifts, and went out individually for supply runs. They told stories and played with a deck of cards they found behind the bar. They never forgot where they were, or why they were there. Some days were easier than others.
Cain had the most questions. Denver would have thought she'd been prepared for them all with her years of scholarship, but there were too many flaws in her logic. Nothing made sense anymore. And that wasn't good enough for Cain. He went back to the Tower, to join the Vox, the new regime. Denver didn't hold it against him. She'd probably try to go herself, if her convictions were anything other than a tangled ball of twine, stuck without any direction.
Maybe their "new friend" was the voice of god. Maybe the people of Panem themselves were the gods. Maybe there were no gods. But a god-like wielding of power had created Panem, created Arenas, and a god-like show of force brought it all crashing down. Which side was the right side when both sides had iron fists they brought down on any who disagreed?
Denver didn't know, so she stayed in the bar. She listened to Monty recount his adventures. She took over Cain's watch shift. She went on supply runs. She kept notes of what she saw, so history wouldn't forget. And she waited for answers that part of her knew would never come.
Denver hugged the walls of the city as she tried to keep away from the fighting. The guns, the friends....she wiped away more tears, still not sure where she was going. She was a known loyalist, worked for the damn museum glorifying the damn games. Sure she wasn't high up, but she was in the Tower. She was there, and wasn't that enough? Hadn't that been what Enna had seen when she looked at Denver?
Denver couldn't think about that. She just knew she couldn't go home, couldn't return to the Tower, had to keep moving. That was the only thing. Keep moving. And then she saw him. And the clump of Vox soldiers headed in his direction.
"Cain," she cried, her voice little more than a hoarse whisper. "Cain, over here." She gestured him over to the shadows. He couldn't be Vox. He wasn't with them. He didn't have a weapon or any kind of uniform. He had to be safe.
Damien awoke to what sounded like an avalanche. Well, not that he'd had much experience in what an avalanche sounded like, but he imagined if he had it would sound something like this. He scrambled out of the ice cave he was sleeping in, lest he be buried alive, only to see the entire sky ablaze. What was this?
A chunk of the sky - the force field, Damien presumed - fell not twenty feet from Damien, and then he was running. But he didn't get far before he spotted another red suit, and now he was faced with the choice between sky falling and a potential enemy. More shrapnel made the choice for him, and he ran to the suit.
Gage was so struck by the vast expanse of clean snow, something never seen on the dirty streets of her neighborhood in Six, that she nearly missed the countdown, and nearly missed Wiley leaping from the platform in the wrong direction - right into the bloodbath. Oh no. Gage had sworn she would protect Wiley, so she scrambled off the platform after her. But there were too many bodies clashing and Gage ducked around a falling tribute and lost sight of Wiley in the fray.
Gage craned her neck, searching, but Wiley was on the other side of the Cornucopia when Gage spotted her. She was of no use to the girl now. No, she refused to let that be true. If Gage couldn't protect Wiley, perhaps she could aid her, and find something helpful now that she was trapped here. Gage looked quickly down, nothing within arm's reach save a pair of socks - but that could be useful, certainly, in somewhere so cold as this. She bent down to grab them.
As he stumbled through the snow, away from the Cornucopia and away from the Bloodbath, Damien tried to refuse to think about what had just happened, but found he couldn't think of anything else.
Damien's vomit froze before it hit the ground. He considered himself lucky that he had managed to pull his balaclava down in time. She'd been just a child, a child, and he had killed her. For all his work over decades of smuggling, he'd never killed anyone. And his first kill was a child.
He fell to his knees.
For all Damien had been involved in smuggling, for the purposes of general crime or rebellion, he had never been in a fight, not a true one. He'd seen them, of course, in Hunger Games of years past, and the aftermath of them, when compatriots came stumbling into the room where Damien was standing over a map. He'd noted, then, while others tended to the injuries, that he'd need to move the routes he sent his trucks.
Then the wind whipped across his face, the only silence in between a metallic countdown, and true fear gripped his heart for the first time in his life. He wasn't being sent into a fight; he was being sent into a battlefield.
And then he'd been stabbed. Damien had been stabbed, and if he didn't retaliate, he was going to die. He was going to die in seconds or minutes. He needed to act and he needed to act now. He'd lost the firewood. He would not lose his life.
When a figure approached from behind, he pulled the dagger out of his flesh and threw his body around, painfully, screaming, and sank the dagger into --
No.
No, no, no.
It was not Kedzie that stood before him, shocked, a cry tangled in his throat. It was Eve Rest. District Three.
Twelve years old.
Her breaths came fast, the only sounds escaping her while her youthful eyes screamed in agony. Damien hadn't thought about it, had lashed out, had twisted the knife in her gut before he knew who it was he was fighting. Blood poured from the wound, and the warmth of it soaked through Damien's glove. It was the first warmth he'd felt since they zipped him into his snow suit.
Damien stared in horror as tears fell from her eyes, crystalizing on the rim of the balaclava. It would be a slow death, bleeding and in pain, this child struggling to breathe, if Damien didn't act.
He didn't want to. To anyone who could possibly hear him, he didn't want to.
He pulled out the dagger and slashed her throat.
Eve's blood splattered onto Damien's face as she slumped to the ground before him.
What had he done?
He had to keep moving, had to get out of there before someone came for revenge, for opportunity, for anything. It was his life or theirs. He had no choice. He had to run.
He stumbled, fell to his knees, pushed himself up, and kept moving.
