Twenty Four Shades of Blood [A Hunger Games Fanfic]

Lost - 9

“Byron? Tyrion?”

No response, of course. She stifles a sob; she’s probably miles away from them by now. She should have just waited once she’d realised they weren’t there. Because they’ll be looking for her, won’t they? Tyrion might not be, not with whatever’s wrong with him. Last time she saw him he could barely even walk and she’d wondered if he might die. So maybe he won’t be looking. But Byron will be, she’s sure of that.

It feels already like weeks since she last saw them, months since the blurry dance in the courtyard. Now it feels like every shadow hides a tribute, a weapon. The heat is almost unbearable and buildings and trees curve overhead, blotting out the sky and leering in at her, a little girl alone and sweating and lost.

Does this log look familiar? All logs look the same, though. The ground crumbles in airy black rocks under her feet; a road. A street. It looked like this when she lost sight of them, but she’s not sure. She closes her eyes for a second to try and see better but all she remembers is a mush of trees that look like buildings and buildings that look like trees, broken walls and twisted metal shells, and in the background always the rush of the river and the face of the boy from Four looking empty at the sky.

The Glimpty in her hand shivers. She presses it close to her chest with both hands, to warm it up, of course, not because she’s scared. Ellie Flaxseed is never scared. Not of anything. Not of Peacekeepers, not of fires, not of...

Something rustles above her; a tribute? Her muscles freeze up as she peers into the branches but she can’t see anything there.

“I’m not scared of you,” she whispers. It feels wrong to make any noise over a whisper here. Everything is too still. The trees must move because she can hear them talking, and invisible insects buzz in reply. It must be getting up to night because they’re getting louder. Like the crickets back home, singing their song in the evenings. The cue to go home, to dance through the fields and scamper through the grain factories that are spewing workers on the street to talk about grown-up things as soon as the Peacekeepers aren’t looking. But here there’s too many, too loud, and it doesn’t sound like music, it sounds like the furtive whispers of the adults, things the children must not know.

The tree doesn’t reply. Nothing there, she tells herself, and then because the Glimpty is still shaking, she repeats it out loud.

“Nothing there.”

There used to be. This is a street and people used to live here. She can almost see them, layered over the hybrid tree-buildings, walking through the mangled cars. Voices chattering in the accent of home. They vanish when she looks straight at them.

Her voice sounds loud and it fills the air around her, so she tries it again, singing a song that her mother used to sing on the winter nights when intrepid snowflakes slipped through the cracks in the doors. They’d sit in front of the fire, prodding the weak sticks around until a tongue of flame shot up and sent a flickering glow around the room. Her father would sit in the chair making marks on a piece of paper, and her mother would sit on the floor with little Ellie curled up in her lap and the two boys perched at either side, leaning in to share the warmth. And her mother would sing. Her voice is strong for such a small woman, and when she was happy because the tesserae had just come in and was filling the larder, she’d twist some of the notes into pretty little trills and Ellie would smile at how pretty it was. And other times the larder would be empty and she’d hug her children close and stroke Ellie’s hair and stare into the dying fire and sing in a thin, sad voice, and once Ellie looked up and saw her crying.

Her mother sang a lot of songs, but she can only remember the one. Most of them were the same anyway, songs about losing things and people going away and always ending with the person saying they’re coming back. Ellie likes to think that they always came back and the person wrote a happier song, except nobody else was happy so it wasn’t remembered. In the fields scaring birds away from the seed she’d try to write the happy song but every time she got the words right, a butterfly or a bird would appear and she’d watch it and forget.