Twenty Four Shades Darker: The Hunt

(3) Far Beyond the Fences

Cordelia’s feet hurt. Back home she had never had to walk this much. It was her job to shimmy up trees and pick fruit for the quota carts, and when the mockingjays began to sing their closing-of-work song she’d drop down and make her way down the endless rows until she reached the carts. She’d empty her sack into them and then, along with the other pickers, she’d haul herself up and ride on the edge of the cart, dangling her bare feet over the side. Once or twice she’d even got to ride on the horses, but that was only when the supervisors weren't around in the mornings and she hadn't liked it much. In the mornings she rode the empty carts out and started it all again. Apart from that she'd only ever walked to the Core and back. But Jute and Erik had kept them walking almost all of the day and now most of the way through the night.

At first she’d tried to be bright and cheerful. It had been easy. She just reminded herself that she was wearing clothes that fitted her and that hadn’t been handed down and that still smelled clean, and that she had shoes to protect her earth-hardened feet from the broken ground and the night chill, and that she was going to go somewhere where she’d see her family again, which was an improvement on this time yesterday.  But then the hovercrafts had come over and she’d cut her hand trying to climb into the building and now they were actually on the run. And you couldn’t run from the Capitol. She knew this as instinctively as she knew that warmth was good and sickness was bad. She knew people had tried. She’d heard the gunshots, then the mockingjays singing their goodbye song, four low tolling notes, the only mark of passing that traitors got. Four notes rippling across the orchards, a body dumped outside the fences for the birds to peck at and a Peacekeeper knocking on the hut that evening to explain that someone wasn’t coming home. 

It had happened to the people who lived opposite. Her family home was one in hundreds of identical huts all squashed together about an hour’s walk from the Core, and you knew people on sight even if you didn’t get the time to talk to them. There had been a family of eight living there: a mother and father, a grandmamma, an aunt and her daughter and the three sons, of whom the youngest was a baby and the eldest was just over reaping age. He was a picker as well, but assigned to a different segment of the orchard. All the hut children walked together in the mornings to the station where the carts were waiting for them and he was always there, leading his brothers onwards in the same way she dragged Miller. Their carts were always waiting next to each other and they’d travel together in silence for about ten minutes. Then they’d branch off and she’d swivel around to catch one last glimpse of his tangle of hair and slender frame before the day really began.

And then one day not long ago she’d come back, Miller sloping along behind her, on a day the mockingjays had mourned, and there’d been a Peacekeeper outside the opposite hut and she’d never seen him again.

Someone prodded her.

She jolted back into the present, where her feet hurt and the tributes were trekking through a shadowy, disordered forest where the trees whispered as they passed and she was sure the Capitol were just behind them, watching them somehow, just waiting for their moment to pounce. Any ideas about being captured were gone. The destruction of the arena had made it obvious: the Capitol were angry and they were out to kill them.

“I said, is your hand okay?”

She glanced at Blaire and then back to the bandage. It felt as though the bleeding had stopped, though the very idea of the wound slitting straight down the middle of her palm was making her shaky. “It’s fine. Thank you for bandaging it.”

“No problem.”

If the situation was getting to Blaire she didn't show it, though she'd slowed down considerably since the escape from the city. She was striding along with bold, confident steps, her ponytail swinging along in time, looking for all the world as if this was a completely normal situation. She was humming something.