kill for your love - the hunger games

(073) they really fucked us up, didn't they?

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KILL FOR YOUR LOVE.

act three.

(chapter seventy-three, they really fucked us up, didn't they?)

training / the block / hospital ward, 75 ADD.

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BUT KATNISS WAS NOT a drag. Instead, she threw herself into training with a vengeance that caused the two older Victors' to eye her. She ate, lived, and breathed the workouts, drills, weapons practice, lectures on tactics. The girl was so determined to make Snow pay for what he did to Peeta that it even caused Johanna and Juniper to become more inspired than before. 

A handful of them were moved into an additional class because of their readiness and eagerness, which gave them hope of being contenders for the actual war. The soldiers called it the Block, but the tattoos that showed their schedules on their forearms listed it as S.S.C, short for Simulated Street Combat. 

Deep in Thirteen, they had built an artificial Capitol city block. The instructor broke them into squads of eight and they would attempt to carry out missions. Gaining positions. Destroying targets. Searching a home. It was as if they were truly storming the Capitol, for everything was rigged. What could go wrong did go wrong. A false step triggers a land mine. A sniper appears on a rooftop. The gun jams. A crying child leads them into an ambush. Their squadron leader gets hit by a mortar and they have to figure out what to do without orders. And whilst they knew it was fake, that they weren't actually going to die, it seemed ever so real with the enemy dressed in Peacekeepers' uniforms, the confusion of a smoke bomb. The trainers even gassed them with the three Victors' being the only ones to get their masks on properly. The rest of the squad were knocked out for ten minutes. 

The camera crew who filmed Finnick and Annie's wedding came down as well to tape the trio on the firing range as a part of a new propos series to show the rebels preparing for the Capitol invasion. All of it suddenly felt real to Juniper. She could actually be going into the Capitol. She could actually help kill Snow. 

And as the three weeks they were given dwindled down, they all watched anxiously as Thirteen prepared for invasion. Equipment and provisions were being readied. Divisions were being assembled. Juniper could tell who got their orders as they were given a very short haircut, the mark of someone going into battle. And there were even talks of the opening offensive, which would be securing the train tunnel that fed up into the Capitol. 

However, despite her eagerness, Juniper was filled with paranoia as she watched Thirteen prepare, even more so when Soldier York told her and the two other women that she had recommended them for the exam and that they were to report immediately. The exam in question had four parts: an obstacle course to assess the person's physical condition, a written tactics exam, a test of weapons proficiency, and a simulated combat situation in the Block. And as Juniper, Katniss, and Johanna flew through the first three sections with ease, there was a wait until the fourth. There was some technical bug in the Block that they were trying to work out and as the group of soldiers waited for it to be resolved, information was passed around that they would go in there alone, that there was no predicting what would happen. Juniper was quite confident until she heard one say, under his breath, that he heard it was designed to target each individual's weaknesses.