Twenty Four Shades Darker: The Hunt

(15) Mirror Phase

Blaire was sick of trees. She was sick of everywhere looking the same, sick of thinking they were walking around in circles, sick of waiting for the inevitable white uniforms of the Peacekeepers to suddenly burst out from the bushes and start firing. Sick of sleeping simply because she was too exhausted to stay awake. Sick of the sight of Holly's scowling face and the sound of Will's reedy, District Three voice, not that the boy said much, but whenever he did...

And she was sick of Lincoln's smug, above-it-all face and of Satine's snide remarks and of the general atmosphere of bad feeling that was starting to settle between them like the smell of shit.

Her stomach was so empty that it made her feel heavy - the food taken from the bloodbath a lifetime ago had run out yesterday and Barley's meager catches were enough to live on but less than she was used to - and her tongue burned. She was sure she was starting to hallucinate the sound of streams. Ignoring Jute's warning about being careful, she slid her canteen from her knapsack and took a long sip. The water had been scooped up from a small pool the day before yesterday and it tasted gritty, but it was no worse than the water the Peacekeepers doled out back home. After she was done she wiped the lip on her sleeve and passed it to Marisa, who rubbed a thumb around it anyway before taking a long drag herself.

"How long have we been out here?"

Marisa peeled back her sleeves absentmindedly to peek at her watch. She had an emotional connection with it, Blaire reckoned, but she always seemed vaguely embarrassed whenever anybody alluded to it, or to her constant checking of the time. The soft light of the flames illuminated a blush making its way into her cheeks. They'd made camp and devoured a few birds that Barley had found out of nowhere and now people were drifting off to sleep. Lincoln was in his hammock, hands behind his head, one leg dangling over the side and swinging gently. Satine was curled up in the sleeping bag but his eyes were sharp and alert. At the opposite side of their little clearing, Will was splayed out and mumbling to himself; the first few times this had happened, Blaire had thought he was awake. Holly was dozing. Erik hovered next to Jute, who was hunched by the fire, sweat prickling her forehead and her eyes looking at nothing. Every so often she shivered.

They were the only two talking and it was hard to shake the feeling that the others were listening in, even though not one of them looked in any way interested. Marisa rolled her sleeve back down and hugged her arms to herself.

"I don't know," she said, frowning. "It stopped the night we found the girl. I wound it up, but..."

And she was still checking it. Forget emotional connection; that was near-obsessive. The dark-haired girl, so far so composed, was starting to crack. Or maybe it was just a habit. Blaire subtly checked her fingernails; they'd been gnawed down into stubs without her even realising.

"Nearly two weeks?" she guessed.

"Maybe. Time doesn't work right here. Could have been weeks since the Peacekeepers found us. It feels like forever since you woke me up in that little apartment thing. Remember?"

"It was an adventure then," she said. "Everything was happening so quickly that there was no time for it to be anything else. Avery helped, bless the girl."

Marisa smiled. When she smiled her face seemed to surface from its usual expression of deep thought and became almost astonishingly pretty, despite the layer of mud and the thinness of her cheekbones. "Do you think she's okay?"

"I hope so. We could have found her..."

"The odds would have been monumentally slim," Marisa said. Blaire's mind added a shade of doubt to her tone. "But I know what you mean. Back in the arena we were just pleased to be alive because we'd thought we were going to die. But now..."