Of Victors and Tributes

Chapter 32: Four More Districts

District Eleven, Ten, Nine, and Seven. Different outfits, different days, different make-up, and different emotions. I try my best to get on with the people sharing the train with me, but I feel like such a burden that I just do my best to keep out of their way. Cecelia is friendly and I know she is struggling, that she wants so badly to help me but knows that I need to do these things myself. Woof is out of it mostly, though he does seem to look forward to seeing his fellow victors from the other districts. Our fellow victors.

District Eleven is probably the biggest place I've ever been to. It's massive, filled with orchards and fields and so, so many people. The fence surrounding their district is different from Meadow's and mine. It's taller, belted down with metal plates, and seems to be charged twenty four-seven. As we pass the workers in the orchards, they straighten up and give the train a glance, stretching tired hands and wiping their foreheads. There is no snow here, only heat. In the distance I see their homes, ramshackle things I'd barely call buildings. I try to remember the last time a victor came from District 11. It's been a while.

I find out from Satine as I'm all done up that the girl from here stepped off the pedestal, just like Cole.

"Poor thing, she didn't notice the timer in the fire!" Satine explains, helping me wrap a shawl around my body.

"What was her name? And his? I don't know," I say, feeling bad. The boy went crazy and tried to kill me and Meadow, but ended up dead by Fairlie's darts on the third day. The girl never made it past the bloodbath, like Vestia, like Cole. Was it her blood and skin that I slipped through when running from the Cornucopia, chunks of her body that was scraped from the ground later by a hovercraft?

"I don't know!" Satine replies, sounding annoyed I'd ask such a trivial thing. I recoil away from her.

"Her name was Cerise," Angora says. She gently sets her hands on my shoulders, pulling me back to them.

"And he was Bale," Venus finishes, seemingly delighted that she remembered. I keep their names in my head.

Once on stage, I feel like there must be a million people here. The square is crowded and the entirety of the district isn't even present. Their clothes are taunt, ragged, matching their stressed faces. Cerise has a mother and father, two siblings. Bale has absolutely no one standing on his platform. Well, that makes this a little easier.

I'm not sure what I should say about their tributes when it's my turn to speak, so I mumble something about how they must have been great kids and that their sacrifice was greatly needed. I start to feel sick at the words I'm saying, so I apologize to Bale even though he has no family. I apologize for feeding into his fear of Pearl. I wonder how he could have no family despite the district seeming so large.

I get to meet more victors. There are four from District 11, but at one point I think they had five. Most of them are older except for a girl that's in her 20's from how she looks. They're nice enough, they don't say anything about Bale, who isn't my kill but was extremely close to getting me as his. I wonder if they feel guilty about it or think that I'm mad. For clarity, I'm not. I of all people know that you need to do what you need to do in the Games. Though he was sort of foolish for drawing so much attention to himself.

District 10 has the unlucky loss of one twelve-year-old and a thirteen-year-old. Briar, who I killed, and Colt, who was killed by snake mutts. The place has a pretty small amount of humans, but there must be hundreds of thousands of cattle, goats, sheep, even horses and such. It's a big district, I'm shocked to see that it must be bigger than District 11, which I thought was massive. But it doesn't feel as big as Eleven because there's so few people and so many animals.