Grain & Blood | A Hunger Games collection

System Overload: Chapter Nineteen

Iris

When I step onto the platform, I immediately start looking around for Pablo. He's going to get what he deserves. Soon. As soon as I find him, as soon as we're away from the cameras, I'm going to yell at him so much that he'll regret ever winning the Hunger Games.

The cameras click and the lights flash as Kamalyn and I walk past the crowds of cheering citizens. I know that none of them are really happy, I'm the girl that killed their boy, the son of two loving parents and the brother to a younger sister. Janet. I remember screaming at him as Robin died next to me, I smashed the axe into his neck, but not before he told his family that he loved them. I never got to say that kind of goodbye. I just died.

The cheering crowd seems to be everlasting, like most of the District is here, but I know that there's probably many more. I don't want to have to face their families with guilt, but it's what I have to do. For both of them.

At last we reach the end of the cameras, and I try to keep the fake emotion on my face just in case. Not that anyone will care. I'm a victor, not a fake girl from the Capitol. Surely I should be able to express who I am?

A little girl, maybe eight, skips along to where I'm standing, her even younger brother holding her hand, and she passes me a little ball of paper.

"Thank you," I say, a little surprised, but when I turn to look at her, she's gone.

The two of us are bundled into a car, and driven off towards the justice building of District 7, or at least, that's where we're probably going.

"Kamalyn," I say, "a little girl gave me this ball of paper."

I hold it up so she can see it.

"Well, what does it say?"

Carefully, I unfurl the paper, trying not to rip it, and eventually have a somewhat flat sheet of paper.

Dear Iris,

Thank you for trying to keep Ruby alive. She was my older sister, and was always amazing at looking after me, my little brother John, my little sister Lia and my baby brother Tommy when father went out to work. Nothing you did was pointless, I appreciate all of it.

-Rose, age 9

"So that little girl is the oldest one left in her family."

"She's so small and young and innocent and keeping her siblings alive at age 9-" I break off, almost in tears.

"It's fine," Kamalyn says, reaching out to hold my hand.

We both know it's not fine, but I try to calm down anyway. It just reminds me too much of looking after my siblings when my mother cried and refused to do anything after my father was shot and killed. I wasn't old enough to work, my mother wouldn't work, and so each day we would starve and not know if we could eat or not. That went on for a few months, until I was making enough to buy more than a loaf of bread and a small squirrel or rabbit once a week.

Then I met Jonen. She often helped, giving me apples to take home, and often we would hang out at her house after school, of course after I had worked and given my family food, and then I would eat at her house. Finally, two years after my father died, my mother woke up from her depression when I was eight and started working again, which kinda sorted stuff out...

When I open my eyes again, I have a Kamalyn with her head on my lap, and her feet up on the seats. I'm not really going to object, because I like it.

The car pulls to a stop and Kamalyn sits up. I'm surprised to see such a huge crowd again. This many people have come to watch the two of us walk fifty metres into a building? Nobody cared about me before, why should they care now?

I step out and walk around to the front of the vehicle, hold Kamalyn's hand, and walk together to the front of the Justice Building, where we stand for a few seconds so the cameras can eat us up and then we go inside, followed by everyone who matters to our appearance as victors.

There's about 50 of them.