The 25th Hunger Games

The Feast

Crap. I wasn't supposed to fall asleep. There was a feast today.

These were the first jumbled thoughts that came to me after I was fully awake. I had only gotten up this early because I was absolutely freezing and my sleeping bag was suddenly doing nothing for me. Still, I wasn't about to crawl out of it.

The sun wasn't even up yet. I looked around, but it was pretty dark. No fires to guide our way, I supposed. Analyzing the arena, though, I saw something was very different.

There was no water around me, or even at the bottom of the arena. The only thing surrounding the pillar was cold, hard ice. No wonder it was freezing. Or maybe this was a result of the cold. That at least meant the temperature was below freezing. I shivered again, this time more for fear of the future than anything else. I was very unprepared to survive in a tundra.

It was very cold, that was for sure. My fingers were trembling, hardly any help to me at all. My skin was covered in unfamiliar bumps and looked a whitish blue color. My limbs would hardly move as I shoved my sleeping bag into my pack and dug through it for anything else useful. Nothing at all to keep me warm in there. A breeze blew and cut through my thin clothes, like I wasn't wearing them at all.

It took a few more minutes of fruitless searching for me to spot a parachute sporting the Capitol logo laying in a heap on the pillar.

Rushing over to it, I opened the box as quickly as possible. I needed some good news. Something from Sariel would make my day.

Instead, the gift was from the Gamemakers. I would've been more irritated if they hadn't given me something absolutely necessary. A long shirt and a pair of pants. Oh, look at that, they even gave us socks. Can't have your toes falling off from frostbite, can we?

However, I was well aware that toes aren't necessary for walking or balance. Who really needed them?

Maybe I was feeling a little rebellious, or just very cold, but I put the socks over my hands, desperate to return some feeling to them. Still shaking, I put everything else on over my other clothes. It still didn't feel like enough. Would it have killed them to put a jacket in there?

I guess I could add that to the list of reasons I was going to go to this feast. I needed calories to burn if I ever wanted to remember what feeling warm was like. Plus, there was a chance they might have given us some blankets, or something to start a fire with. Or maybe this was all wishful thinking.

As the sun crept its way into the sky, I popped my backpack on and got ready to go. There was only one problem: how to get there. Yesterday, I had planned on swimming, as I always did. That was before the ocean was all ice.

I carefully tested the ice, placing a heavy boot on it. No cracking. I tried pushing down. It seemed to hold well. I tossed my backpack onto it, crossing my fingers it wouldn't end up in the water. It didn't. Without any other sort of trial but moving forward, I took my first step onto the ice.

Whether or not it could hold me up didn't seem to be the issue once I was walking. The problem was not falling on my face with every step. I had never dealt with ice in Two, or even much snow, so this was all new territory. My plan for a quick escape after the feast seemed more and more unrealistic. Still, I was on my way there, and my steps were slowly growing in confidence.

I was still a few hundred feet away when I realized I had been facing the back of the Cornucopia the whole time. So anything I saw last night was the tail end of what was really happening. Which meant my entire stakeout was a failure, and I was walking in totally blind. Awesome.

Strangely, the Cornucopia was totally silent. Did that mean they knew I was coming? Were they expecting me? Or was it really just empty? Just in case, I slipped the socks off my hands and tread a little more carefully.