Rue's Games

Chapter 8: Fire

We slept reasonably well that night. It wasn’t particularly cold and we felt we had less to worry about.

Hours passed in the morning, but nothing happens. We have a feeling something important is happening somewhere else.

Sure enough, about an hour after we have eaten lunch, a cannon goes off.

“Oh well,” I say, “I was sort of hoping Foxface would live longer.”

“It was probably her fault,” Thresh collects water from a tree, taking a few sips every now and then. “She should have stayed away from Clove and Cato.”

“If she had come near us she would have been safe, right? We would have helped her.”

Thresh looks troubled.

“I would have anyway,” I say.

He sighs. “Rue… What do you think would happen if we killed off both the Careers and it was only us and her? We couldn’t be her ally then, but since we had helped her we would feel bad killing her too.”

I look away.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He doesn’t need to, though. I know it’s true.

Thresh decides to go and look for more food. He says he is bored of berries and rabbits, and he is going to see what grains he can bring us from a field he stayed in before we teamed up. While he’s gone, I go back to the Cornucopia to see if there is any food there, but there’s nothing. The table is gone, even the grass were I fell has been trimmed so my blood is no longer visible. I wonder why. But then I start wondering why I’m here at all, why anyone is here, and it scares me so I go back to our cave. I have not been waiting long before I see Thresh, running as fast as he can, dodging the trees.

“Fire!” he shouts to me. “Get as much as you can into the backpack! We have to move!”

I run into the cave and shove everything into the backpacks. I don’t know what to do with the armour, so I put a set of it on. It’s too big, but I decide to bring it in case it’s useful. Thresh grabs the backpack and slings on the other armour.

The two of us run, in what direction we are not sure. Thresh tells me, gasping for breath, that the fire isn’t like the fire we had on one of the first days. It is spreading in a way it couldn’t if the Gamemakers had made it. He thinks a tribute started it.

All the woods are unfamiliar now, and it’s getting colder and darker. But now the fire is catching up with us, so we have to get out of the woods.

The Cornucopia sounds like a good bet, but if someone is trying to flush us out then that’s were they’ll want us: out in the open.

Thresh stops running. I realise he has stopped at the edge of the forest.

“Look,” he says. Stretching out almost to the horizon there is a huge field. There is a slight gap between the field and the trees, so I know that it will not spread and we’ll be safe here. At the horizon, I see green. Maybe trees or grass. I wonder what would happen if we walked to the end of the arena. Could we get out?

We run into the field, and sure enough, the fire cannot reach us. We go further in, and try to set up a sort of camp. I take off the armour because I am hot and sweaty.

We have little food, but we break off a few wheat stalks and chew on them. It makes us less hungry somehow. We still have everything essential, the sleeping bag, the insulin, a bottle of water and the water extractor, though how much use it will be with less trees I’m not sure.

The death review of the day begins and we both look up to the sky. Instead of being greeted with a sneaky grin from Foxface, there is a picture of Cato trying to smile, but failing. I doubt he would smile even if he’d won.

“Cato died. That means Foxface killed him. How did she do that?” I ask.

Thresh shrugs. “It could have been Clove.”

I laugh. “How unlikely is that?” But deep down, I know that they both had it in them to kill each other. I’m surprised they both lived long enough to get into the Games without picking fights at home.

The national anthem plays, and Thresh sings along with alternative words, singing about how our country will fall in a few years because there will be no children left to carry it on. He sings as if it was supposed to be funny, and it probably was if he made it up at home with his friends, but now he sings it bitterly like he believes it.

“There are stars in the sky,” he says when it has finished. “That means we’re still in Panem.”

I laugh. “Not necessarily. We could be in any country except that the hovercraft ride only took a few minutes.”

“Sometimes I forget,” he looks up at the sky.

I know how he feels. We all do.