² MANIA ─ catching fire

[ 008 ] one maniac at a time

FEAR EXPLODED FROM THE CORE OF HER SPINE as the boy wrenched him off her and threw her to the ground. Lying on her back, Alecto wasn't frozen from the shock of the impact or the pain of the blow, but from the sheer, paralysing terror as she watched her district partner advance on her. Beneath her, the checkered tiles felt like mallow, like she was sinking into it and no matter how much she fought, no matter how much she writhed and thrashed, it felt like she was stuck in treacle and her limbs wouldn't cooperate. Though she knew the ground was rock solid, made of marble, easily escapable, she was helpless. Trapped.

All she could do was lie there, watch as his tall shadow fell over her like an imposing stain, as something wet and thick trickled from the hole cut into his chest where his heart should've been, dark as a void. As he stood over her, the sword in his hands gleaming, Alecto made the horrific realisation that it was blood pouring down the front of his shirt from the sucking chest wound. And that she couldn't see his face. Couldn't make out the features she'd memorised from years of watching his sure movements, stalking him like a predator in the prairie, as the shadows elapsing over his face obscured everything but the wicked grin like a vicious slash in the darkness. Cold dread clawed at her chest, and Alecto opened her mouth into a scream, at the same time the boy opened his.

All that came out was his voice, that velvet rasp she couldn't shake:

"You'll never be your father."

And then the sword came bearing down on her in a bright arc.

Mouth open in a silent scream, Alecto wrenched herself out of the dark just as the blade made contact with her skull. Outside, the world was still just as dark as the inside of her room, and there was only the silence. Wide awake now, her heart pounding and pounding and pounding away in her chest like a rabid prisoner beating his desperate and manic fists against the bars of her ribcage, Alecto breathes hard, chest heaving, the memory slipping from her head like a smokestack bleeding ghosts. When the fog dissipates, her mind is sharp and reeling. It's not real, it's not real, it's not real, he can't hurt you anymore, it's not real, it's not real, it's not real— that boy is dead. You know it. You've held his stilled heart in your hands, warm flesh proof that you would be going home.

But the fear had remained. And Alecto was trapped there, inside that very last day in that insidious arena that'd sought to drive her off the deep end, like splinters stuck under the skin; inside that very last day like an overturned bowl of blood; inside that very last day that stretched on landslide-heavy and unending. Nobody ever left the Games without leaving something behind, and taking a piece of the arena with them. Her father had taken the stoic cold, the arid tundra freezing up his insides. Iko had taken with her the teeth, the talons, the wild of the old world and the prehistoric preserved in memory, stuck in the past, unable to move on. Alecto had taken the mania, this madness that'd been coursing right through her. In wonderland, the back of the tape that'd captured the 73rd Hunger Games read, the dreams turned sour and the poison rotted the insides. Hallucinations caused by toxins released by white roses in the maze drove the tributes mad. An interview with the Gamemakers of that year disclosed that some of the hallucinations were strong enough to corrupt the mind for nights on end.

Her hands hadn't stopped trembling. Alecto didn't dare close her eyes. Every time she blinked, she saw it. The monster haunting her at every corner of the labyrinth, the twisted maze of her mangled mind. The march hare, a grey silhouette the size of a man cut into fragments by the shadows, the vicious, blood-rusted blade in his hand gleaming like a fang. Every night, he came at her, forcing her deeper and deeper into the arena. Every night that elapsed, his fur looked worse and worse for wear, made patchy and decayed, stained and matted with the red of blood. At every turn, she saw him. Every flicker of movement, every blurry shadow in periphery, every brush against something soft but firm, every whisper of the wind through the rafters and flutter of wings was him, coming after her, stalking her, the slick of his blade against the walls echoing down the corridor of her skull.