Nothing Personal

Calm - 12

Skyler's arm stung badly. She was also soaking wet and stunned with horror. She'd barely got a look at the scene in the church but it was enough to make her feel sick. She'd seen horrible things back home; starved babies, children horrifically deformed, bodies splattered where they'd fallen out of trees or been brutally assaulted by the Peacekeepers and were now rotten and covered in flies, but the vicious murder of the twins was the worst. They hadn't been hurting anyone or breaking any rules. They'd only been trying to make the most of their lot. Nobody in Panem could blame them for that.

With a dull feeling in her stomach, she realised that this was what the Games were about. Take the innocents and make them suffer. The guilty will think twice.

Oak had a point. Where was he? That cannon hadn't been him, had it? Had the Capitol finally got to him? She hoped it hadn't been painful. Knowing the Capitol, she doubted it.

She had nowhere to go. She wasn't sure she could fend for herself but even if Oak wouldn't dead he would be impossible to track down. She didn't know who else was still alive either. It was just her on her own, with blood trickling down her arm and water down her back, not that she could feel it properly through her soaking wet clothes.

"Are you happy now?" she yelled at the sky, startling herself, "Is this fun?"

As soon as she said it she knew she'd just done something very stupid. She clapped a hand to her mouth in horror but it was too late to take it back. She felt like she was staring down the barrel of a Peacekeeper's gun and had kicked him in the shins. That sort of foolish.

A gentle woosh drifted over her head. Something glittered above her. Expecting a Capitol bomb, she darted out of the way and hid behind a gravestone; how had she ended up in a graveyard? The package didn't explode.

She threw a rock at it.

It just sat there, gazing quizzically at her. A little golden box with a number eleven on the side and a note pinned to the top. A tiny silver parachute vanished with a pop.

The sponsors must have sent it before her little outburst. Quickly, she snatched it up, in case they could change their minds. It rattled teasingly. It also smelt very strongly of alcohol. But why would they send her drink? She was fairly sure she didn't look like a drinker. Unless...

She ripped the packaging off. Inside was a little tub, stuffed with a yellow cream. It had to be a kind of healing lotion. The note ruffled in the breeze and she grabbed at it, wincing as her arm protested.

'Skyler', it read, in neat writing that was so small she could barely read it, 'This is for your arm. Just dab some over the scratch and repeat every hour. Don't use too much; you might need it later.'

It took her a few minutes to get her head around it. She'd been taught to read, like every Eleven child, but as soon as she was old enough she'd been shoved out into the fields and never had the time to continue. She could barely recognise her own name, and one of the sentences had a funny kind of double squiggle in the middle of it for no real reason. The writing didn't help either. It was smudged, like it had been written quickly. Still, it was like a little bubble of hope inflated inside her. She had sponsors. People had liked her.

Not now they wouldn't, she reminded herself, now you're on your own.

On your own. Skyler had never been on her own before. She'd always had her fellow workers, even if she wasn't allowed to talk to them, or Vintage. Now she was miles away from any of them, and without any way to talk to them.

Wait. She could talk to them. She just couldn't guarantee that it would get through and she knew she wouldn't get a reply.

"Ma. Dad. Vintage. I love you, okay?" she whispered. Nobody replied. She could imagine them, curled up around the screen in the middle of their little village, dry eyed but sad, surrounded by the comfort of the other families. Then the Peacekeepers would come around and threaten them with whipping, even carry it out if someone had annoyed them.