Jeopardy: The Fourth Quarter Quell

Spying - Onyx

Onyx

The trees are talking, whispering over my head. I don’t know what they’re saying and can’t hear them properly anyway over the nearby shouting. My leg aches from crouching behind the tree for so long, and my heart is still hammering even though the girl from Seven is long vanished into the trees. I’m just lucky that she wasn’t paying proper attention.

I’m lucky too that I’m used to being uncomfortable. All my nerves are painfully aware that the slightest twitch at the wrong moment could alert the group to my presence, even though they’re making a lot of noise. It’s no different to hiding out back home and trying to get some sleep, only this time I’ll get killed rather than just injured.

If Ami could see me now…

If Ami could see me now, she'd be telling me that I'm not stupid and that I can survive, easily. After all, that's what I've been doing my whole life.

"You've been surviving better than the others," she says, "You've basically been dodging the Careers your whole life."

"Not quite my whole life," I reply, "Before the cave-in..."

"But you can't remember that," she reminds me, "Look, I never had to dodge anybody, did I, and look where it got me!" And then I remember that Ami is dead. I remember her running, and the boy with the curved sword, and then him slicing through her back.

I don't remember her screams, though.

I shake the thoughts of Ami from my head but it doesn’t shake away the stone that settled in my stomach when my name was called out. I don’t even know why I’m doing this, why I’m not limping away for my life. It’s probably a good thing or the girl from Seven would have got me and it wouldn’t have been painless, I’m sure of it. I’m used to pain, but the dull aching kind that comes from inside. Bile burns the inside of my throat at the idea of even a small cut, the thought of a drop of deep red blood trickling wetly down my neck. I had to turn away when the bodies were winched up.

Maybe if I’d been to training I’d be able to cope. But training was never an option, not with my leg. I was laughed out of the door. It’s their fault, their laughing and taunting that left me like this. Luxury, she was one of the worst. How many times have I looked up from the floor, from scraped knees, to see her perfectly structured smile beaming down at me, sneering some insult or another? How many times has she told me I’m weak and should have been left to die at birth?

“She’s a nasty piece of work,” Ami had said the day I met her, as if I hadn’t noticed that myself, “Her and that Diamond both. Shame they hate each other. If they were friends, they’d have ripped each other’s heads off by now and One would be a better place for it.”

And now her and Diamond are parading around the Cornucopia in front of me, talking like friends after what they must have seen as a successful bloodbath. Physical specimens of the finest kind, not a blip in their fitness or an imperfection on their faces. One doesn’t tolerate that sort of nonsense, not for its tributes. And even if you’re not going to be a tribute, you have to at least look like you want to be. There’s no pride in being weak, in not being able to work, in not having the luxury of caring for your appearance. Ami’s freckles were enough to make her stand out. And even Jasper, terrified stiff, made it clear what he thought of me. I’m a waste of time, a waste of somebody’s place in the Games.

Why did nobody volunteer? I’ll never know. Maybe they’d run out of sport teasing me, tired of trying to find whichever empty house or pile of rocks I was sleeping in that night.

This is the bit you don’t get to see on screen, back when I used to watch. Two hours, maybe even two and a half, have passed since the frenzy. Two hours at least that I’ve been crouched here, watching the Careers with the sun trudging across the sky. Time just seems to stretch on and on. Usually they’d be showing bloodbath repeats by now, going over the statistics of those who had died, those who are alive, taking bets. But in the arena, this is the calm, everybody settling down. Elsewhere the other tributes are panicking, crying, running, taking stock. The Careers are stockpiling.