Dead Trees

Chapter 8

Kit was a natural when sewing up my arm, the stitches were clean and even. I supposed that's a skill that spending your life working on textiles might give you. With two of us it was much easier to gather food, my lizard killing skills paired excellently with the fruit Kit had found that was much more appealing that the bumpy oranges, we also had a much better chance at defending ourselves from the eight remaining tributes left.

The night after we had become allies, we discussed how our time in the arena had been leading up to our meeting. I found out that he had paired up with his district partner and they had been relatively safe until the career patrol had found them.

"So that blood on the District Two kid?"

"Yep, that was Elena's."

There was some sorrow in his voice, of course Maple's death had shaken me but it seemed like Kit and Elena's relationship went deeper.

"Did you know her, before the games I mean?"

"Our moms were friends; we grew up together." I decided not to press him for any more information.

At the conclusion of our conversation, I assembled a primitive hammock for whichever one of us would not be on watch during the night, I was glad I did not skip the hammock station in training, I would have rather spent the night in a tree again but with my jacket torn and my new companion that seemed very unlikely.

We were shown the dead from the day, first the boy kit had speared and then Talon, then Elena, Kit's expression went sour before he said "get some sleep I'll take first watch." I trusted that he would not kill me in my slumber after he spent the effort stitching my arm. I had a restless sleep dreaming of Maple being stabbed by Cove, reliving the moment the blood from the District Two boy sprayed onto my face and catching blurry glimpses of Talon's mangled head, when Kit woke me for my watch, I was exhausted. It did not take long before I started losing the battle with my tiredness, I wanted to wake Kit but he had a much more physically demanding day and had saved my life, it seemed ungrateful to give him the night's watch so soon.

As I began to doze off, I was alerted by a drop of rain on my hand, it took some time to come to my sense and realize it was raining again, I grabbed my bottle and held it out to collect the water, Kit joined me and all though he had no bottle he collected rain water in his hands. I was glad to have the rain wash off the palette of blood I had collected during the day but the rain shower was much shorter than it had been last time and my bottle was only half full.

"We can't survive on this," I said, resisting the urge to drink. It would be hard enough for me alone to make this last longer than two days at best, I definitely could not ration this between two people, "How have the careers not died of thirst yet?"

"Sponsors?" Kit guessed.

I had no idea how six careers and the girl from District Three were able to all sustain themselves off sponsor gifts, those gifts would be reduced now that those six careers had been reduced to four. Then I remembered the container that the District Three girl had been attending. "Do you think they might be drinking the lake water?"

"Did you see how those guys today moved; I don't think they'd be so active if they were drinking that water," He replied.

"What if they found a way to clean it?"

His eyes widened, "have you seen their camp?"

I told him about my theory about the water purifier and the tribute from Three. Kit now wide awake, filled me in what he had noticed about the careers, how they would roam the arena in groups of two, I told him I had only seen one tribute guarding the purifier with the District Three girl. With the whereabouts of the final career a mystery we decided we might be able to steal or destroy the purifier thus making them struggle for water as much as the rest of us. Both tired we decided we would try to get as much sleep as we could, our plan consisted of running in and taking the guarding tributes by surprise and then running off with the purifier before the patrols came back, not something we wanted to do tired.