❝ it is sometimes an
appropriate response to
reality to go insane ❞
──⭒─⭑─⭒──
In which an innocent girl finds herself
trapped in an arena with monsters and
her only hope is to claw her way out.
──...
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ℑ spew the berries from my mouth, wiping my tongue with the end of my shirt to make sure no juice remains. Cato pulls me to the lake where we both flush our mouths with water and then collapse into each other's arms.
"You didn't swallow any?" I question, tilting his head back and forth as he laughs.
"No. You?"
"I'd be dead." I can see his lips moving in reply, but I can't hear him over the roar of the crowd in the Capitol that they're playing live over the speakers.
The hovercraft materializes overhead and two ladders drop, only there's no way I'm letting go of Cato. We each place a foot on the first rung of the ladder. The electric current freezes us in place, and this time I'm glad because I'm not really sure Cato or I can hang on for the whole ride. Especially not with a dislocated shoulder and a cut up arm.
Sure enough, the minute the door closes behind us and the current stops, he slumps to the floor unconscious.
My fingers are still gripping the back of his jacket so tightly that when they take him away it tears leaving me with a fistful of fabric. Doctors in sterile white, masked and gloved, already prepped to operate, go into action. Cato's so pale and still on a silver table, tubes and wires springing out of him every which way, and for a moment I forget we're out of the Games and I see the doctors as just one more threat, one more pack of mutts designed to kill him.
Petrified, I lunge for him, but I'm caught and thrust back into another room, and a glass door seals between us. I pound on the glass, screaming my head off. Everyone ignores me except for some Capitol attendant who appears behind me and offers me a beverage.
I slump down on the floor, my face against the door, staring uncomprehendingly at the crystal glass in my hand. Icy cold, filled with orange juice, a straw with a frilly white collar. How wrong it looks in my bloody, filthy hand with its dirt-caked nails and scars. My mouth waters at the smell, but I place it carefully on the floor, not trusting anything so clean and pretty.
Through the glass, I see the doctors working feverishly on Cato, their brows creased in concentration. I see the flow of liquids, pumping through the tubes, watch a wall of dials and lights that mean nothing to me. I'm not sure, but at one point, I think I watch him die.
I hate it.
I startle when I catch someone staring at me from only a few inches away and then realize it's my own face reflecting back in the glass. Wild eyes, hollow cheeks, my hair in a tangled mat. Rabid. Feral. Mad. No wonder everyone is keeping a safe distance from me.
