Jeopardy: The Fourth Quarter Quell

Footprints - Daniel

Daniel

I wish I had a pencil with me, along with my sketchbook. The dimming light is enough to draw by, and the way the sunset falls through the trees is exactly the sort of thing I’d want to draw. Take my mind off things. But apparently the pencil was too much of a weapon. The very idea of me stabbing anybody, let alone with my pencil, practically worn down to a stub with overuse, is horrifying to me and amusing to Alex. Somehow he hasn’t stopped smiling since he’d grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the bloodbath.

Not before I could see Sugar face down on the floor, the blood…

I hate this. I hate the way every tree could hide a tribute, every noise could be someone tracking us, closing in for the kill. After all, we must be targets. Even Alex’s optimism can’t hide that; nobody will be running away from us if they see us coming.

Alex pats me on the shoulder for the third time in an hour, which is probably more reassuring for him than it is for me, so I don’t stop him. I’d rather it were him than another tribute, anyway.

“Relax, Dan,” he drawls, “We’ve been walking for…what, three, four hours now? Look, it’s getting dark.”

He pauses to look up, making his point. The image prints itself onto my mind; Alex peering up through the leaves in a shaft of orange sunlight, one hand theatrically placed above his eyes and the other perched on his hip, not a sag in his clothing. We’ve worn nothing but hand-me-downs since coming here, and the material feels too smooth, too comfortable against my skin. Alex keeps tugging at his collar.

“Hey, are your shoes giving you blisters? Mine aren’t. Weird, with them being so brand new and all. Look, I can see my face in them!”

I wait patiently while he gives his face, half-obscured by mud, a cheeky grin, the same grin that makes Sarah giggle. Something familiar but no less painful stabs straight through my core. I can put a name to it now; jealousy. It burns, of course, but if I show any sign of it, Alex doesn’t note it. But he wouldn’t, anyway. He never has.

He’s right about the shoes. They at least are like the height of luxury, much better than the threadbare sandals that I usually wear in this sort of weather at home. They’ve probably been around the district three times at least, sunk more times than I can count. These ones feel like I’m barely wearing them, flexing with every twitch of my feet despite being thick enough that snakes wouldn’t be able to bite through them. At home boots like this would be bliss. But now I barely even notice them.

“Anyway, Dan, listen up. This place must be massive, right. I mean, we can walk from your house to mine in an hour and that’s something like four miles, right. And we’ve been walking for at least three hours, so that’s at least twelve miles in dia- radius, sorry.”

He says this with the air of somebody who thinks I’ll be bothered that he got one measly word wrong. I’ve never known him do that before and it jars, though that might just be the situation, which jars more than anything. He just continues straight on, ducking under a branch that’s at least a foot above his head, “And if it’s at least twelve miles in radius, that means that – you’re still listening, right? – that’s twenty four in diameter, that’s the right way around. And there’s” – he stops again and counts on his fingers, muttering the numbers aloud – “ten…eleven dead, so that’s fifteen left. So the odds of there being someone around here is…”

“Not much,” I finish, before we end up trying to work out the odds. Numbers make my head swirl and not in a nice way. I’m not very hopeful; there’s nothing else to do here and Alex isn’t one to leave a job unfinished. Unless it absolutely has to be done, of course, in which case he’ll never even start.