The Hunger Games: Mashup

Chapter Twenty Four

District 9

Holo sat on a hill, overlooking the fields. The crops were a nice golden color, shining like riches in the sunlight. Even if it was one of the lesser districts, Holo was proud of her home because it looked so wealthy. Steeped in culture, everyone was connected in the district, like one big, happy family. Although you were your own top priority, because that was district life, now and then there would be self-sacrificing acts of justice that reminded everyone that a district had to work together to gain success. After all, one less person to work the fields means more work for everyone else, including the ten-years-olds.

Holo watched as parents desperately tried to keep their children alive, friends suffered with their friends, and the old who did survive watched as everyone else died. Holo sighed. It was no fun being immortal. When you lived forever, centuries became minutes to you. Millenniums passed by like weeks should have. No one stayed around to keep her company, and sometimes, they left her even before they began expiring. She grew tired of the lies and deceit that followed her around. She pretended not to notice the Peacekeepers who watched her with their beady, greedy eyes, hungry for more food than she could produce. She hated how if she was forced to make an especially bountiful harvest for one year, the next year would have to be devastatingly weak to keep the balance of nature intact so the soil and weather could recuperate. She hated how if she was forced to make a certain harvest a bad haul, the citizens immediately blamed her, and then she was forced to explain that if she didn't do what she had done, their children would be dead.

Everyone was hungry in District 9. Although the food surrounded them, the rule was harsh. Anyone caught eating the harvest without a receipt for it was killed. Anyone who was seen taking the harvest was shot on sight. Stealing was punishable by death. Arranged marriages were common so that parents could see their children off in well-to-do homes, or at least a home where the food wasn't contaminated with maggots and the like. If not, parents gave birth to children so they could sell them and get money for another few months.

Holo turned from the hill. She stared out at the golden expanse of the field. When she had to leave, what would the villagers do? Hopefully they would be able to supplement their field with enough nutrients to last on their own. She had already given them all of her knowledge to keep their fields bountiful. Still, she knew better than they did. The Capitol wouldn't let her survive much longer.

There was a resistance movement in District 13. The likes of which the Capitol has been ignorant to for a very long time. They had the resources to give out information to the people they believed to need it most. Holo was one of them. She was a main informant to the resistance. She could send her essence out into the world and spy on the Capitol people through her grains. The Capitol would noticed her disappearances eventually. She noticed the tiny specks of dust in the air, floating around, each attached with cameras too small for a human to see. But she saw them with her wolf eyes. They sparkled in the sunlight. They made little whirring sounds when they changed the lens perception. That was how the Capitol saw things happening. She even saw the cameras behind the fence of her district.

There really is no escape from the Capitol, she thought calmly, crumbling up a stalk of grain and letting it blow out of her hand in the wind.

She heard though, from the mouths of President Phantom himself as he ate a salmon sprinkled with wheat grains, that he was issuing a command to all of his Hunger Game hosts to choose names of citizens on a list that he had deemed dangerous. Holo knew she was on that list. She easily controlled the production of grains. She could, to an extent, manipulate the weather conditions and the elements in soil. She didn't know how, but she could turn her abilities against the Capitol with devastating results. Perhaps they just didn't like the idea of having a God in their fields, but Holo knew the time of her death was nigh. There was not a doubt in her mind that she would be in the next Hunger Games. She was centuries old, but she still only looked like a teenager, and she couldn't change that fact. She would be in the Games, and she would die.