Flooding Panem: The Hunger Games

Chapter Twenty-One: Drifting

Beep.  

Beep.  

Beep.  

My eyelids flicker open slowly as I roll my head. I'm in a room that I don't recognise, with white walls and a huge window that spans an entire wall. I stare past the Capitol skyline at the stars and sky that seem to go on forever.   

I won the Hunger Games. The phrase seems foreign. I never thought that it would be true. Congratulations to me.  

I shift slightly underneath the duvet. My entire body feels heavy and pathetic. I can see how skinny my arms are above the covers. They've both been covered with needles that are pumping different fluids into my body. I lift one arm slowly and watch as a clear liquid flows into my vein and sends me to sleep.  

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"You're clueless, Lilia. So clueless."  

Who needs clues? We have the Peacekeepers to solve mysteries for us.  

"I've read about this in books, I know about this!"  

How to Find Clues by Lilia Brooks. Step one: sit back and forget the truth.  

"Lilia, you're as much use as a dead squirrel when it comes to fighting."  

"I'd just kill you in half a minute."  

How would you kill a squirrel? Slice it up the belly like with fish? I know lots about fish from all my ichthyology books. To kill a fish slice its belly. To kill a teenage boy, cut horizontally across the stomach to weaken target, then cut throat.  

"I'm dying, you know. It's not like you had anything to do with it."  

Alternatively, be careless and someone will end up dead anyway. Bonus points if no one finds out that you're responsible.  

"Oh my gosh... Ladies and gentleman, I can, erm, confirm that our Victor-"  

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Waking, sleeping, waking sleeping. It's awfully dull, this recovery process.  

I stare at the ends of my hair that lie spread out on the duvet. It seems longer than it was. Waiver too. I must've been in the Arena a while.   

I stare up at the ceiling, at the snow white paint. It's too smooth to be anything real. It's like snow before anyone has touched it. Until you break an untouched surface, you don't know whether it's a hologram or if it's real. Like this tube in my arm. I can't know if the liquid will send me to sleep until I test it.   

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The sky turns red when the sun sets. It's all science. The light shifts from the short blue end of the spectrum to the longer red end. It skips the green bit.

Bodies aren't red when they die. Lives start out all multi coloured because everything is new and exciting. Soon you learn some stuff, but the world doesn't get darker. Depending on what you've learnt it can go blue or green or pink, but it stays bright. For the really lucky people it becomes white and shining.  

The colours of the world are too complex for even a dream. But I know that for the one moment before a life ends the world becomes clearer than ever before. There's no colour to you, but there's colour to everything else. Because you finally understand. And while your blood dries up in your vein or falls onto the ground you fade away into something without colour because, let's be honest, red is everything. The blood in your body controls everything- it rushes to your face when you're embarrassed and drains away from it when you're scared.