Two choices:
Live and die in District 12 like her parents or Run and hide for the rest of her life, leaving everything she has known behind including her only friends.
Carina chose a third option and became someone else, abandoning who she was and...
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Four years before the 74th Games,
The moon cast an eerie glow over the silent night, casting long shadows that seemed to dance menacingly outside her house. Carina sat on the edge of her bed, her gaze fixed on the darkened world outside her window, pressing her hands to the cold glass.
She could smell the heavy scent of rain and dust in the air. Usually, she would've felt comforted by the rain and its scent but it all felt nauseating that night and she felt sick to her bones.
It could've been her.
She could've been in the game that year. That sick feeling of dread and fear, she couldn't forget when she thought her name was called. She hated it.
The Hunger Games was a looming nightmare that hung over her and Roan like a noose but she had always put it in the back of her mind, she'd never envisioned herself in them even though her name was in the reaping pool more times than she'd ever admit.
She could feel the heavy and worried gazes of Gale, Katniss, and Roan on her back but she made no move to even acknowledge their presence.
They'd all been lingering at the door of her bare room since the sun had set and her grandfather had let them in. The weight of her brother's worry, the concern etched into Gale and Katniss's faces, pressed against her, almost suffocating her. They knew. They knew what she had narrowly avoided, but their silence only intensified the gravity of the situation.
She'd prefer their mindless chatter to the numbing silence. She silently begged any of them to say something or do something to take her mind out of the nightmare she felt she was living through.
Her eyes traced the familiar paths through the wooded path into the Seam, the mines that had claimed so many lives including her father's, and the dilapidated houses that lined the streets, nearly hidden by the trees—all of it seemed further than they were. Their house was on the edge of the Seam and the fence that closed them off from the forest that hid the charred remains of Thirteen.
This was her home, a rat cage where the only escape was to be chosen in a doomed lottery and then it was a game of death. No one ever came back alive and the one person who did lost everything he once had. It was a hopeless and bleak reality that she should've been accustomed to but she hadn't.
Her home didn't comfort her anymore.
She tapped her trembling fingers against the half-broken windows and dragged them in a jagged line, a terrible screeching noise following her movements. Katniss flinched at her motions but she said nothing. Hestia wanted someone to speak and break the deafening silence.
"It was...almost me." She said, her voice hoarse and raspy like she hadn't spoken a word in years.
Gale sighed loudly and took a seat on the floor next to her bed. "But it wasn't you, Carin." He said gently as he took her cold hands into his warm ones. "It wasn't you." He repeated. "Your name wasn't in there as many times as last year or the year before."
