PLATINUM • THE HUNGER GAMES ²

| 25. LOST IN MY/THE/OUR PAST

BOOK TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

( LOST IN MY/THE/OUR PAST )

"JAMES."

     Through the coarse breaths sizzling fiercely through the callous cage of my body and my lungs stretching against the restraints of my rib cage, my feet grazed across the flowered floor in hesitation. Before me stood an anomaly of the human race and the jump between life and death itself. He was a collage of scars, a face hardly recognizable and a frame wilting at the essence of the light. His ghostly eyes bore through me in a spiteful rage of revenge, or perhaps even in the mistreatment of his actions long ago. Burns rippled up his body as if he himself was heating up the room, boiling me in the cauldron of surprise.

     But, by the time his disappearing strength had found enough effort to lift his head and allow himself to reveal the damage that stretched deviously over his skin, there was no passion in his eyes. He radiated neither happiness nor protection like his past self. The boy was a carcass of hate, bound the confinement of the black room that surrounded us and powered by the blood that endlessly pained his veins.

     His voice cracked, a deeper sound escaping it than what I was used to hearing leave his lips. He seemed older too like time had aged him well just as it had treated me, and his hair was somehow well-kept despite the possibilities that raced through my mind that searched for the reasoning behind this event. How was he still here? Who brought this shell of a boy back to me? Why wasn't he dead?

     "You've grown." A slight regret burned in his speech. Though there was no spite in his words, instead there was only sadness.

     "And so have you," I said, a smile creeping onto my lips like a lost memory regaining a place in my mind. I took a step, tilting my head in an attempt to see his more effectively, but he snapped back, frightened at my wish to walk nearer.

     His voice screamed of urgency. "Stay back. Don't look at me —"

     "It's been a long time since I have, James," I replied, a little laughter escaping also. "Are you hurt? Can I help?"

     "Stay back!" He cried. "I'm a monster, Silver! Don't come nearer; don't touch me."

     "You're not a monster." My voice cracked in between the struggle of moving onto the next couple of words. The shock of his arrival had caused my head to fizz with uncapped anxiety; the kind which required draining from the source directly to weed out the anomalies. "If anything, you're the one who should be watching their back."