TWISTED // Clato | ✓

Chapter 24: We Don't Belong Here

CATO'S POV:

We sprint out of the apartment and take the stairs instead of the elevator. Leaping down the stairs three at a time, we dash through the lobby past a complaining clerk and out the door into the New York City sunshine. 

People give us weird looks, but I no longer care. Because I'm not one of them, and I like it that way. 

Clove sprints ahead of me. As I see her, so small but so quick, I remember the Clove I knew in the arena. Our surroundings have changed--drastically--but I still see her the same way.

At the same time, I feel like this has changed us. I now regard my past life with very different eyes from how I saw it before. I can't quite explain it, but for once in my life I'm struggling to understand the logic that District 2 used to paint the Games as such a glamorous milestone in every worthy Career's life while it was really this terrible death slaughter.

Not that we didn't know it was a death slaughter. We all perfectly knew what we'd be doing in that arena, and we asked for it. But without living it; actually being in that arena, we did not realize the full extent of the penalty.

It meant life or death. Literally. I don't know what angel took Clove and I out of that arena, but we sure didn't deserve it. We asked for that life, never seeing past the whitewashed illusions that had already determined our future.

But now it's like we have a second chance. To prove that we're good for something else other than killing. I swear it never hit me until what were supposed to be my last moments as I stood on top of the Cornucopia realizing I had been living a lie. How distant and surreal that moment seems now that I've scraped with death and come through alive, lost my memory and found it again, let go of my girl and caught her back.

And now I'm not going to lose her again.

Clove and I walk through Central Park. There's nothing happening in this sleepy hour of day, and Clove turns to me with mischief shining in her eyes.

"Let's do something fun."

What's she got up her sleeve? I raise my eyebrows at her.

"I saw a carnival on the way here. Come on."

She seizes my wrist and takes off across the grass. I almost trip, because she's so fast she almost knocks me off my feet. I fall into step with her and we charge out of the park over to the carnival.

Twenty minutes later, the attendant is seating us on a seat on the Ferris Wheel. He drops the bar over our laps. Clove just sits with her elbows on the sides of the car. 

I look at her. "No hands?"

"No hands."

"OK." Ignoring the handholds on the bar, I rest my arms on the sill. Our hands meet unexpectedly, but then we just both laugh and dangle our arms over the sides.

We lift up into the sky, and Clove raises her hands over her head and screams. She looks so funny doing this that I start laughing.

After a little while, she says softly, "We could stay here, you know."

From our bird's-eye perch, I look down at New York City. It's amazing, but so different from home in District 2. I realize with a chill that it looks an awful lot more like the Capitol.

"Well, I guess we don't really have a choice, do we?" I say. "We got here; there's no apparent way back that I can see... I guess we've got to start over."

"Yeah..." Clove murmurs. "It's just weird, though. I mean, how could somebody send us to a different time? I still feel like we've somehow regenerated--I mean, I know that sounds crazy, but so does this. How do you explain it?"