Final Reality (THG Fanfic)

Part 2: The Mission // Chapter X

After being aggressively escorted back to our apartment by the peacekeepers once again, Cathal and I shower and change out of our costumes. We expect to see our team back here by the time we’re finished changing, but no one’s there. It’s almost 11PM so we decide to have dinner with the Avoxes. Well, not exactly with the Avoxes, they just stand there and serve us. But we encourage them anyway, even if they don’t respond. We consume at least two sittings of pork casserole and wonton soup before we have a dessert of triple chocolate cake and rice pudding. Even by then, we don’t hear the frustrated shrieks of Liliana or the heavy footsteps of our mentors. Tired of waiting, we decide to distract ourselves with the announcement of scores we acquired through our individual assessments. Neither of us watched it, I think, but Liliana taped it for us.

The first four tributes manage to pull straight tens. Well, it makes sense, being careers and all. Tobee gets a seven, Zara scores a nine, and Deven obviously gets a ten. Jaeda, on the other hand, gets a surprising five. I begin to think of District 7 victor, Johanna Mason, and how she pretended to be a weakling. Maybe Jaeda is just putting on an act. It is a television show; almost anything can happen. The pair from Five I met at lunch the other day is next: Nora, who scored an eight, and Bleeker, who also scored an eight. Bleeker and I hung out during training at the fire-making station. But like most other conversations I had with the younger tribute, we never really mentioned anything about our siblings, or the Quell for that matter. It was mostly about books and technology and vehicles and education. But he always seemed so distracted and usually let his words trail off, leaving me to awkwardly fill in the quiet gap. Nora was really shy and quiet, so she was great if you didn’t want to talk but didn’t want to be completely alone.

Just as Sean and Lorna told us, we both manage to pull elevens from our little stunts. “What did you do?” I ask Cathal.

In return, he looks at me weirdly. We both know that we’re not supposed to tell each other what we did. That information is confidential. But being the rebellious teenagers we are, he tells me anyway. “There was a control box under the gamemakers,” Cathal says. “And so I cracked it open and disabled the force field that separates us from the gamemakers. They were a little disoriented at first, and they were about to release the peacekeepers on me, but I gave them a speech that really shut them up. After that, while switching on the force field again, I found a glass canister full of petrol in the control box. I took it and smashed it in the centre of the gym for you to use for your own advantage.”

I’m stuck speechless for a while, but I see in the corner of my eye that Quent scores a nine and Rion gets a seven. The boy from Eight gets a six, and the girl gets a three. “What was the speech about?” I ask him as the boy from Nine gets a seven.

“That, I can’t tell you,” Cathal says, with a finger to his mouth, “That information is classified, Miss. Ivory.” The girl from Nine gets a seven. “So, what about you? I’m assuming you used the petrol because your hands reeked of it last night.”

“Yeah.” The District 10 tributes score a five and a four. “I burned the Capitol emblem in their faces,” I refrain from telling him about the words I also ignited. We watch the rest of the scores in silence. Boy from Eleven, four; girl from Eleven, two; Yorke from Twelve, six; and Primrose Everdeen, twelve. Twelve! “What the fuck?” I say to the screen as I sit myself up.

Cathal and I look at the television in disbelief. “She either rocked the gamemakers or …” Cathal pauses.

“Or what?!” I persist.

He looks at me with mixed emotions. Grief, fury, and concern are what I see in his eyes. And that’s when I recognize what the gamemakers want to happen in the arena. “Or they really want her to die.” We switch off the television before Claudius Templesmith can wish us a Happy Hunger Games!