ACT I, CHAPTER SIXTEEN ❛at the end of the blood trail ❜ content:blood/gore/injury, major character death, violence, heavy angst, dissociation, vomiting/emetophobia.
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A / N this chapter is a particularly sad one. i advise reading it alone/not in public, with tissues ready.
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Madaket can only imagine what the people in the Capitol are thinking as she walks through the desert, following the pull of the butterfly that's tied to her index finger. Maybe they've figured out her plan and are waiting to see if she'll actually achieve it. Perhaps they think she's gone crazy and taken in a butterfly as a new pet, and now she's walking it.
She tries not to think about the fact she's on live television for everyone in her district and Panem to see. It makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand up in alarm. Ignoring the feeling of being watched by cameras, she focuses on putting one unsteady foot in front of the other.
The butterfly had seemed agitated at first when Madaket tied a bit of frayed string around its body to leash it. It spent the first few minutes orbiting Madaket's head in an annoyed fashion, and when it realized that Madaket wasn't going to let it go, it finally gave in and started flying in search of food. Presently, it floats ahead, following a trail that Madaket can't see.
It seems hellbent on going back into the flat desert, outside the safety of the mountains. Now that she's back on the soft ground that sinks beneath her feet, the blisters on her feet ache more than ever. She starts to miss the rocks—despite the throbbing pulse in her hands beneath the bandages—and all their solid, unyielding edges. Out in the desert, there's nothing but a thin layer of sand separating her from the fleshlike ground, and her legs begin to burn from the effort of walking.
The way the earth moves underneath her feet makes her wonder if it caves in because the space underneath it is hollow. The mental image of the sand suddenly opening up, swallowing her into some cavernous underbelly, is enough to send a spear of ice through her heart. She bites again at the raw flesh inside her cheek, coppery blood filling her mouth. She can't afford to think worst case scenario right now.
The butterfly begins to tug on the string a little harder, this time in a northeast direction. Madaket's sure that it's caught a strong trail now, and she watches it carefully.
They walk like that for a long while before she hears the squealing. The frantic, agonized squeals of a dying animal. As she gets closer to the noise, she realizes that they aren't human, rather very reminiscent of a particular muttation. . .
She finds the first hog carcass on its side, blood foaming around its mouth, eyes glazed and still in death. Her eyes only barely graze over the gory cause of death: a single puncture wound to the left chest. Stabbed in the heart. Other dark butterflies sit, drinking from the blood on the hog and pooled around it on the sand. She has to follow the thread on her finger to her butterfly tied at the end, finding it drinking from the pool around the hog's chest, and pinches it gently with her pinkie and thumb. It wriggles in her hand as she steps back and spins in a circle to scan all horizons.
