SWAN UPON LEDA; hunger games

chapter 4

[act one; chapter four     -     game over]

    She was covered in blood. She could feel it caked against her skin. Her vision was, and had been, tainted red for a while now. She worried she had grown accustomed to it.

    Bloody tracks in the snow told anyone and everyone where she was headed, and Leda, despite any ounce of fear or worry about being followed, didn't seem to care. She couldn't find it within herself, within the heart that stuttered in her chest, to truly worry or ache or mourn. She felt as though the cold had seeped past just her skin and into her heart.

    Leda had killed. She had murdered. Just as President Snow had wanted her to. But she supposed, then, that they had all done exactly what he had wanted. At this point in the game, she assumed most of them had.

    Solace, or what she imagined as such, lay just ahead in the form of trees. A snow-ridden forest like the ones from her home. She stumbled towards them, fighting to break through the snow, the powdered white reaching to her knees.

    She collapsed to the forest floor as she breached the woody area, breath shuttering from her as though she had just submerged from the water in District 4.

    Just as she felt herself start to warm within the sheltering protection of the trees, she heard snow crunch and crumble. She heard it give way beneath someone's feet, and her blood ran as cold as the snow beneath her bare hands.

    Just as it gave way even more beneath the strangers' steps, Leda burst to her feet, spear in hand, pointed at the person who is, no doubt, an enemy. The weapon is braced on her arm, set against her shoulder, fortified, not by her fear, but anger.

    "Two steps back," she spits in the boy's face. He is older than her, the same age as Saylor; only eighteen. Issac Monroe, from District 5, stands before her, skin pale, eyes cold, but his face, his expression...he is plagued by fear. Pure and undoubted. "I said two. Steps. Back."

    She does not repeat herself again. He does not take two steps back. So, she takes two steps forward. She presses the blade of the spear against the plane of his chest, and whispers, "Where are they?"

    Issac hesitates. She sees it in the furrow of his brows, the downturn of his lips. "Who?"

    "Athena, Malachi, Birdie, and Cassius."

    "I—"

    That is when an arrow pierces his throat, blood gushing, crimson spraying upon her face. She can't find it within herself to even flinch.