Sixty.
The Careers all lock eyes, Ruby nodding towards the golden horn and the weapons surrounding it. The twins grin at each other, already sorted on their plan, and ready themselves to sprint, knowing full well that they’re both going to reach the horn at the same time.
Fifty.
Connor looks around, numb with fear, at the odd scramble of jungle and city that surrounds the twilight of the Cornucopia. His knees could be jelly, and he’s terrified that he might fall off the podium.
Forty.
Tyrion can feel his heart trying to escape, hammering unevenly at his ribs, so loud that he can’t concentrate on anything else and he can barely even see the people next to him or register anything about the arena apart from that it’s dark and none of it looks familiar at all.
Thirty.
Thom stares straight ahead, muttering something to himself over and over again, his hand clutched around the scars on his wrist that look black in the gloomy and oppressive half light. Images of home, not all of them pleasant, dash across his mind.
Twenty five.
Benji bobs up and down on the spot, both wanting the clock to speed up and wanting it to stop completely. He doesn’t like the dark and he doesn’t like not knowing and the long shadows could be concealing any number of horrors and the thick, glossy vines look like they could suffocate him just by looking.
Twenty.
Carmen is chewing on the inside of her cheek, her eyes fixed on the clock atop the Cornucopia. Her hair blows across her face in the slight breeze and she flicks it away unconsciously. She doesn’t want to have to do this. She wants her family, her old life. She shakes the thoughts away; there is no place for them here, not now.
Fifteen.
Star glances around for the comfort blanket of the Careers. She’s fiddling with a strand of hair, a piece where the blue dye from the tribute parade still lingers, without really realising it. This still doesn’t feel real. But it’s better than Petra, surely...
Ten.
Byron runs over every swear word he’s ever heard out in the cattle fields, but there’s no relief in them. He could be dead in fifteen seconds; not enough time to go over every memory. He cracks his knuckles and is surprised by the snapping noise in the otherwise frozen silence.
Five.
Jolie has spotted an axe, her speciality, not far from her podium, and her eyes are fixed on it determinedly, so she doesn’t see much of what happens next, other than a flicker from Austin, something shiny spinning through the air and landing right by Sokka’s podium...
Boom!
The shockwave ripples across the tributes; somebody screams and another swears, the yellow and red column of flame ripping a straight line upwards and vanishing as suddenly as it appeared, plunging the Cornucopia back into gloom. Maybe the cannon goes off, but it’s hard to tell through the noise from the explosion.
All that is left of Sokka is a few shreds of bloodstained fabric floating lazily onto the chewed-up turf.
One!
And all of a sudden, everything is movement. For a few seconds, nobody has any sense of what is going on; back in the Capitol the camera struggles to make out anything in the dim light and the view wobbles, trying to look at everything at once. By the time that it adjusts, the screaming has already started.
Vasilissa has her hands around Connor’s head, her face impassive and looking to where Bas is beating her to the throwing knives that are her speciality. Well, she’ll let him win that. She’ll get the first kill out of them both instead.
The screams stop as she twists her hands sharply; another set start up elsewhere but that doesn’t mean anything to her. It’s not her and it’s not Bas and it’s another of the competition down. She wonders for a second if she would really care if it was her brother. Since the reaping, there’s been something odd between them. She shrugs it off, and heads into the melee.
Tyrion’s entire world is a blur, shapes and sounds streaking past but always the screaming somewhere behind him. Someone is dragging on his arm, and through the insistent pulse of his heart he thinks it might be Byron; whoever it is is quick but unarmed and is desperate to get the hell out of there. The person swears - it is Byron - and they veer off to one side, and Tyrion sees a face he can barely recognise vanishing into the vines.
Something glints and whistles past his ear, digging pain into his temple. His vision wobbles and corrects itself in time to see Carmen slash the girl from Four diagonally across the face and throat with her sword. There’s a gush of red, a dithering screech of agony and the girl crumples from his line of vision. Something hot and wet trickles into his eyes, and he takes a swipe at it, his hand coming away reddened with blood.
“This way!” Carmen shouts over the noise. Is she talking to them? He finds himself being pulled that way anyway, and somewhere somebody is still screaming...
The area around the Cornucopia is littered with debris, the discarded pickings from the items that had been stacked in the mouth. To one side of the clearing, Ryan is struggling with Cassidy, their faces contorting and strained in the rapidly fading light.
Ryan’s hands are locked around the girl’s throat, and her fingers claw ineffectively at his face.
“Just die already!” he screams, but she continues to struggle under him, her eyes bulging. His foot twists slightly on a chunk of stone, and he sees the pile of rubble just behind Cassidy. She let’s out a strangled choking noise as Ryan pushes her backwards against it, hands still feebly battering at his head and shoulders.
It takes all his strength to pull her up, and for a second their eyes lock, but neither sees anything remotely human in the other. Then Ryan slams her head backwards against the stone, and her body lurches, legs twitching. She’s not dead yet though, and her eyes fix on his again, and he shudders under the baleful gaze. Once, twice more he smashes her down, then something cracks and Cassidy goes limp in his hands.
So much blood for such a small person.
Jolie is crouched in the mouth of the Cornucopia, hidden from sight by a pile of boxes. Why she ran in here, she’s not really sure, but there’s nothing she can do about it now. There’s a crack between two of the boxes, and she presses her eye against it, taking in the scene of carnage outside. Most of the tributes have disappeared; she can see one or two vanishing into the shadows around the edge of the clearing. The screaming has finally stopped. Jolie shudders as she remembers the explosion, watching the bloodied scraps of cloth drift past her as the boy from Eight died. The face of the small boy from Three hangs before her mind’s eye, his face a mask of concentration as he dashed towards his death.
She flinches back as voices sound outside her hiding place.
“Hey! Get her!”
There’s a pounding of feet, the noise of panicked breathing and Jolie sees the girl from Ten dash past the opening of the Cornucopia. She’s holding a small bag in one hand, and her face is wrenched with terror. Then something flashes into her, and she’s thrown forward, the axe sticking out from between her shoulderblades. There’s a laugh in the direction the weapon came from, and the noise of high fives being slapped.
“Nice throw! She was pretty fast - lucky you were faster!”
The group gradually appears in Jolie’s line of vision, four boys and two girls. One of the boys goes over to the dead girl on the ground and pokes her with his shoe.
‘Yeah, definitely dead. Nice work!”
There’s a wet grating noise as he pulls the axe free, carelessly wiping the gore off the blade with the girl’s jacket. Jolie can hear her heart thudding painfully in her chest, so loud, surely they can hear it too? She feels like a trapped rabbit. If only they’d go away, let her run.
She shuffles back, and her hand lands on an arrow, breaking it with a slight crack. Jolie goes cold with fright, eyes swivelling about, looking for a weapon, any weapon. Her whole body is tensing, waiting for the pain, the blow that will end her life.
It doesn’t come.
A minute passes, then another, and another. And still nothing happens. Jolie lets out a long quiet sigh of relief and has just sat forward again when there’s a movement out of the corner of her eye. Even as her head turns to look, she feels the blaze of pain in the side of her neck, and brief wet feeling over her shoulders, then she can’t feel anything, and everything is fading to black, the edges of her vision fraying until it’s all gone, all swallowed by the quiet darkness...
Vasilissa jerks the blade from the girl’s neck, sending a splatter of red drops across the boxes that had hidden her.
“Poor Bas,” she smirks, “still no kills?” She bends down, and cleans the gore off the knife with a clump of Jolie’s hair.
“Just you wait,” he says in reply, spinning briefly on the spot to take in the remainder of the chaos. There’s no other tributes around; the hectic panic of the last minute or so - that short? - is instead replaced by an eerie calm that fails to frighten him.
Both of the twins automatically stand ready, taunt and ready for action.
“She saw you coming, you know,” Bas remarks casually. Vas looks up from digging through the bag to frown at him, her eyes almost disappearing completely. “No she didn’t. She saw you.”
“I wasn’t moving.”
“Yes you were.”
For a second they glare at each other, Bas leaning against the Cornucopia, Vas crouched protectively but elegantly over the bag, and for that moment, despite the similarities in their features, they both get that disorientating feeling of seeing each other for the first time.
If...
“You two coming or not?” The sudden change of voice makes both of them jump. Bas chuckles to himself. “Yes, Ruby,” he drones, and holds out his hand to help his sister to her feet.
After a pause, she takes it, and the pair of them slide out of the Cornucopia and after the rest of the Careers.
Boom, Sokka. Boom, Connor. Boom, Star. Boom, Cassidy. Boom, Dawn. Boom, Jolie.
Six down.
Eighteen to go.
A thick, malevolent night starts to seep into the crumbling city of the arena, as the faces of the dead gaze down on their comrades and fade away into the heavy night sky.