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RHIANNON HAD BARELY SLEPT DURING THE PAST FEW WEEKS. Every waking moment, her eyes were locked onto a screen broadcasting the Games. Due to the increased number of tributes, this year's bloodbath naturally had one of the largest mortality counts in history — eighteen, to be exact. Haymitch and Maysilee, thankfully, were still holding on strong.
Despite not being a participant, every part of this year's Games had been burned into Rhiannon's memory as if she experienced them herself. The Tribute Parade, in which all of the District 12 tributes were dressed in overalls and covered in coal dust. The interviews, in which Maysilee maintained the same sweet-but-naive demeanor that was consistent with her true self. Rhiannon could argue that Haymitch took a similar approach despite acting very nonchalant about the entire situation. He earned a rather high training score for a tribute from an outlying district, but when Caesar Flickerman inquired about it, Haymitch shrugged it off as if it were an easy feat.
In fact, when asked about his thoughts regarding there being one hundred percent more tributes, Haymitch responded, "I don't see much of a difference. They're still going to be one hundred percent as stupid." Rhiannon presumed Haymitch didn't see a point in trying to be a people pleaser, given District 12 didn't even have a mentor to try and win their tributes sponsors to begin with. However, if Haymitch was using this tactic to garner attention, he was surely succeeding.
At first glance, if one were to forget that it was a place for children to murder children, the arena looked beautiful. Almost dreamlike. The flowers, the vegetation, the animals all seemed surreal.
In fact, they were.
Soon, as the Games continued, it was discovered that nearly everything in the arena, albeit beautiful, was lethal. The fruit dangling from the bushes, the water in the crystalline streams, the flower's pollen when inhaled too directly — all deadly poisonous.
The number of tributes was trickling down, mostly due to the arena itself. Rhiannon wondered if this was the Gamemakers' intention, to include the arena as a dangerous contender. Rhiannon didn't keep count, but she would bet that the arena was responsible for more deaths than all of the tributes combined.
It was at the point in the Games where dehydration and starvation were beginning to take their toll on the tributes. Their desperation led them to eat berries off of bushes and drink from the deceivingly-clear waters, the boom of a cannon left in their wake.
Rhiannon was working her shift at the Mercers', busy with unloading a cardboard crate full of fruits and vegetables. She arranged them on their appropriate shelves, piling the crate along with its empty counterparts in the back room. After finishing unpacking her fourth crate, Rhiannon tuned into the broadcast that she had previously been distracted from.
