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.
The problem wasn't that the corpse was ugly, although it was—the bridge of its ashen nose had been split by whoever had killed it (and Kalyd had no idea what had killed it, or even if the corpse had roamed this arena as a tribute once), and its silently-screaming lips were curled downward into a perpetual scowl. The problem wasn't that the corpse was dead, either, although its rancid stench hung over the room like a shroud, repelling every sensible gecko within a thirty-foot radius. No, Kalyd's problem was the way in which that rotting corpse looked at him. When he closed his eyes, he could picture it still, its face twisted into a horrific mask and its aura foreboding; when he opened his eyes and checked again, he cringed involuntarily, because the corpse's expression appeared worse in the physical world than it did in his mind. Something about it seemed angry, Kalyd thought at first, furious for having been disturbed. And then that something didn't seem so much angry as it did accusatory, and the half of its face that remained began to look a little too much like Kalyd—
—and suddenly Kalyd's half-readiness made perfect sense, and a pit opened in the center of his stomach.
Unsteadily, he laid a hand on the cave wall to brace himself, his breaths now issuing just as quickly as his thoughts. He'd been foolish again, hadn't he? He didn't lack confidence because of some insufficient desire to seize the future—he lacked confidence because he did not know how much he'd sacrifice to claim that future. His ambition as a builder had begun without cost, but the Gamemaker's trial had introduced that cost with burning clarity. Here he'd been presented with an opportunity to make the ultimate sacrifice, to trade the wholeness of his body for the wholeness of his future, and he'd balked at the prospect, too newly-enamored with his own well-being to consider maiming himself for any reward; here he'd been allowed to offer his own payment for that lofty, lovely future, and he'd forced a corpse to pay that price for him.
When the arena began to crumble and the blood of tributes began to stain these rocky walls, what would Kalyd give to build something beautiful? What of himself would he offer, and what would he steal from others if he found his determination lacking? How much of Kalyd—his identity, his ideals—would he compromise?
As Kalyd's stomach began to drop, a great booming resounded through the sacrificial chamber, forcing Kalyd to grasp the walls with both hands as the foundation of the cavern trembled. Greenish clouds of dust billowed from the ceiling, and, in the aftermath of the amplified noise—a cannon's blast, louder now that he'd climbed closer to the surface—Kalyd's ears discerned the distant sounds of screaming and clanking and a battle that promised his own death if he did not enter it soon.
A shiver rippled through him like an electrical current, and his hands moved to the spear on his left side and the dagger on his right before he comprehended his own actions. His mind was still half-ready, weak in its lack of conviction and unsteady in its understanding of sacrifice, but his body, driven solely by the fear of death, seemed to have become ready of its own accord. It heaved and trembled in the brilliant light of the coming battle, but it stood firmly on two legs, and it leaned toward the shining corridor in a way that might have appeared courageous had a mind commanded it; when it advanced, its first steps into the radiant channel did not falter, and the residual signs of fear began to dissolve. Halfway through the corridor, engulfed in a blaze of illuminated rock, Kalyd's hands no longer trembled; three-quarters of the way through, his breaths came quickly but evenly, and his half-ready mind began to clear. Powerful terror, he knew, could resemble excitement, confidence, bravery, and so Kalyd decided to pretend that the adrenaline coursed through his veins for all of these reasons, that his insides vibrated from sheer eagerness to live rather than the prospects of death or sacrifice.
When Kalyd entered the Gamemakers' final battle, he was still not quite ready for it. But the part of him that was ready decided not to care, and suddenly his fear truly did become excitement and confidence and bravery, and Kalyd stepped into a future of his own design with one foot followed by another.
The final cave was vast, lovely, and completely dissimilar to the battlefield that Kalyd had anticipated. In his mind, he'd constructed the last cavern to resemble a graveyard, with bones littering the floor and stalactites jutting from the ceiling like fangs. The imagined battlefield had featured at least ten tributes smeared with blood (Kalyd did not trust his own ability to count cannons), three tributes that had either died or were actively bleeding out onto the bone pile, and a tiny sliver of sky peeking through a cracked cave's roof, just enough for the dying to gaze upon the reward they'd failed to achieve. This battlefield had reflected the ruthlessness of the sacrificial chamber, the cruelty of a set of Gamemakers who would sentence twenty-eight tributes to two deaths instead of one; it had appeared barren, empty, reminiscent of the dark places from which the last tributes had crawled.
But the true final cave did not reflect the tributes' skeletal past. Instead, it tilted toward the future, in essence if not in orientation; no cracks of light streamed through the ceiling, but the cave itself seemed to emanate a strange hopefulness that made the lack of a true glimpse into the future unnecessary. This is what waits for you beyond these walls, the cavern seemed to whisper, its walls adorned with verdant moss and its floor padded with dirt and grass and more flowers than Kalyd had ever seen in his life. In every corner of the battlefield, daffodils and tulips poked their delicate heads from the soil, craning their necks toward iridescent orbs that dangled from strings tied to the ceiling; in the very center, a massive cherry tree thrust through the ground, branches adorned with pale-pink petals. All of these factors combined caused a fragile optimism to swell inside of Kalyd, an awe combined with determination, and only the rapid heartbeat in his chest reminded him that a snake lurked somewhere inside of the Gamemakers' garden, that death crouched where he could not see.
What Kalyd could see was a dead body, its chest torn open by a blade already removed and the ends of its tangled hair matted with blood. Mia Circuit, he noted dully, and the sight of her corpse restored some of the fear that had driven him toward the cavern in the first place. Some hope for a happy outcome to this battle still lingered, intensified by the loveliness of the cave and the clearheadedness his adrenaline had brought him, but Kalyd's stomach twisted all the same, and his lips screwed up into a grimace as he scanned the battlefield for Mia's attacker.
When a flash of color and the sudden clank of metal caught his attention, Kalyd turned and spotted the remaining four tributes fighting behind the massive cherry tree—this was the source of the screams that Kalyd had heard minutes before. His muscles tensed, and his feet rooted themselves to the ground as he resolved to escape the combatants' notice until the right moment arrived. He would not engage himself unless it was absolutely necessary; the specter of sacrifice loomed in Kalyd's head, and only his conviction that he would not fight, that he would avoid testing his limits, quieted the discomfort in his chest.
As time passed, however, and as Kalyd's keen eyes picked out the clumsy movements of the last four tributes, some of his fear began to dissipate. None of the combatants were Careers, and they dodged and blocked one another's attacks with shaking arms and stricken expressions. Roma Thorne was perhaps the most confident of the four, wielding a rusted sword already stained with blood (Mia's?) and a dented shield that Kalyd could not recall seeing at the bloodbath. (Had she found it in the tunnels? Had hidden supply rooms existed along the network of winding corridors that Kalyd had not discovered?) As she thrust her jagged sword against an iron pole held by Upton Snapper, Roma's teeth were bared in an expression of overt brutality, and her face was perhaps more frightening than the version of this cave that Kalyd had first imagined. Just behind Upton Snapper, American Elm, his face gaunt and grimy and his hair streaked with mud, was fighting hand-to-hand with a red-faced, heavily panting Milo Periander. Neither seemed to approach the battle with much malice, although the distant glint in their bulging eyes seemed to indicate a great deal of fear.
When a second cannon boomed, shaking the boughs of the cherry tree with such fervor that petals showered from the ends, Kalyd's heart practically burst from his chest. Rapidly, his eyes moved from the still-breathing American and Milo to the fight beside them, where oh god, Upton Snapper had just been gored through the abdomen.
The slick sound of metal sliding through wet flesh, audible as Roma retracted her blade from Upton's bloodied torso, nearly drowned out the soft gasp that issued from behind Upton. As Kalyd's hollow gaze returned to American and Milo, Kalyd's own torso feeling as if it, too, had been split by a rusty sword, he located the source of the gasp: American Elm beheld Upton's body with abject horror, his lips parted and his eyes widened in an expression so terrible that Kalyd could hardly bear to look at it.
They'd been friends, or more, or—Kalyd didn't know. The pit in his stomach grew deeper, and a sense of wrongness descended over him as American reached a hand toward Upton's falling body, as he gaped and crumbled.
In a flash of insight, Kalyd realized that the end of the battle was in sight—he he could allow these people to kill themselves as he waited, as he lingered at the fringes of the caves, free from harm. He could watch Roma stab American and Milo but Milo drive the iron pole through Roma's chest, eliminating all of his competition in one swift blow; he could win the Games—seize that beautiful, ever-present future—more smoothly than he'd ever thought possible.
But he'd sacrifice, wouldn't he?
And he suddenly realized what it was that he'd sacrifice, because as American stared at Upton's body—the past this boy had treasured, the future he'd believed that he'd possess—he saw loss, and he saw himself.
Milo reared back his fist, and Roma raised her sword, and American did not see—
"Stop," said Kalyd, his voice and ugly, and suddenly it all stopped.
He would not sacrifice American for victory. He would not sacrifice himself.
Milo's head whipped toward Kalyd in one swift movement, and suddenly Roma was driving the sword through Milo's body in a blinding, startling motion, but—just as he'd predicted, Kalyd was not as foolish as he'd once thought—Milo grasped the iron pole and sunk it into Roma's gut.
Two cannons.
American had not turned to look at Kalyd or Milo or Roma. He stared at the body of Upton Snapper, transfixed with a grief that only Kalyd could understand—his friends had passed, the people he'd loved had died—and suddenly Kalyd's limits had never been clearer.
He could kill American now. But he wouldn't.
His voice burst from his throat again, urgent and hoarse: "I won't take his life. I won't." He gestured toward the boy across the cavern, with one hand the motion weak with the weight of his decision, the notion that he'd just lost everything, he'd lost his future, he'd die if he did not kill this boy first—
—but a series of chimes began to play, and the Games ended with two tributes instead of one, and Kalyd's face fractured with the force of his disbelief.
American wept. Kalyd nearly laughed. The beautiful future that he had constructed for himself loomed in his vision, vibrant and lovely and whole, and he had earned only it because he had sacrificed it, because he had valued himself too much to allow the past to have been in vain.
I'll take both, he thought, past and future. And he started across the cavern with a gait ridden from fear, ready to help American to his feet when he was able to stand, ready to bridge past and future into one glorious, shining whole.