He was not quite ready yet.
He'd been ready, at several shining points throughout his sprawling journey—perched on the craggy walls of the boiling caverns, sloshing softly through this morning's mossy corridor—but in the gaping holes between these events, he'd discovered moments of terrifying unreadiness, as if the courage and wherewithal that had blossomed within him had shriveled or, worse, never truly existed at all. With the ebb and flow of his own drive to escape, the brilliant future that he'd begun to plan had drifted in and out of focus; in his "readier" moments, it had loomed beautiful and pristine, with buildings like District Four's and an array of beaming neighbors and an ever-present, shimmering potential, but in his unready moments, it had winked out of existence so quickly that he'd thought himself foolish for imagining it there in the first place.
Yet today, for the first time in his odyssey through the arena, Kalyd found that he was neither ready nor unready. He'd believed his own will to survive to be bilateral, but between the twin black and white pillars of acceptance and refusal, he'd found a third monument, squat and gray and shaped somewhat like the altar on which he'd nearly sacrificed his own flesh; he'd discovered eagerness andhesitation there in one solid, baffling entity, a yoke that shoved him forward even as its weight forced him to drag his feet. The vision of the future he'd harbored and lost so many times dangled in his head now, but it was half-formed and shoddy, with blank spaces between streets and smudges for faces and its color palette pale and starved-looking. This hadn't happened before, and Kalyd racked his brain for the reason he was half-ready instead of ready, the reason his hands and his head hesitated to embrace the future even though he wanted it today, even though the desire in his chest should have engendered a readiness so great he could barely contain it. But Kalyd found that he could not easily parse his own emotions, and so he waited until he found the ability to do so, one foot reaching for the future and the other planted firmly in the past.
Because of his own indecision, he lingered at the mouth of the sacrificial cavern for about forty minutes. The first five were consumed with unsureness as he squinted into the blinding radiance of the newly-opened channel, discerning the sloping, iridescent walls and sensing that a much larger chamber lay at the corridor's exit. The next five minutes were spent anxiously re-counting the cannons he'd heard throughout the Games—twenty-two? Twenty-three? A handful of cannon shots had torn him from slumber a few nights ago, and he'd stumbled over his own ability to count them properly—and Kalyd wasted the remaining thirty minutes leaning against the walls of the bloody chamber, blowing air through his mouth and covering his face with a suddenly-clammy hand. With six or seven people still remaining, the Gamemakers' plans had become obvious—a final battle lay just beyond that shining corridor, and Kalyd could not stagger into such a battle with half-readiness alone.
Nerves prickled at the ends of his fingers, and speckled geckos darted over his leaden feet. As minutes dissolved within Kalyd's empty chamber, his inner voice whispered that he did want what waited beyond that tunnel, that the battle was a simple trial for someone as motivated as Kalyd. Then, when simply wanting the future failed to dispel his hesitation, Kalyd turned to logic instead—he'd need to pass through that tunnel soon, or the battle would end and the champion would hunt Kalyd down where he stood, in a sealed-off chamber with little room to flee. This failed, too, and the only option left for Kalyd was to lean further against the wall and stare blankly at the sacrificial pedestal, where a naked, half-rotted body sprawled across the bloody stone, its jaw cracked in a silent scream and its deteriorating face resembling the half-formed ones that populated Kalyd's imagined future. He'd been forced to stare at that face for a quarter of an hour as he'd dragged its corpse through the tunnels, and so he'd attempted to desensitize himself to the blatant horror of its appearance; still, its empty eye sockets seemed to pierce Kalyd's affected apathy, and he bit his lip and turned his gaze elsewhere, his gut roiling at the sensation of its invisible stare.
