Cage me like an animal • F Odair¹ •

XIV

"You didn't die?"

•∘♛∘•

Athena woke to the sensation of something tickling her neck. She opened her eyes, looked down, and saw a large, hairy spider crawling along her neck. With a start and a cry of surprise, she flicked it off her neck, sending it flying across the rather small sitting room. It started crawling back to her at top speed, and she took that time to examine it and realize it wasn't poisonous. Still, it was a rather creepy-looking thing and she had never liked spiders. As it approached her, she stabbed the end of one of its legs with her spear, spearing it to the blade. She then stood up, walked over to the window with the spider still twitching and struggling madly on the end of her spear, and scraped it off the end of her blade, freeing it. It scrambled away from her as quickly as it could move, with an odd sort of limp to it now.

It's like me now, Athena thought, as she watched it move away until it was out of sight, suddenly feeling more alone than ever.

She limped back over to the sofa, collapsing back onto it with a sigh. The rumbling in her stomach made her realize she hadn't eaten all day yesterday. She pulled the food out of her bag and ate a breakfast consisting of a handful of those stale oats. She was running low on food again, but she knew she could make what was left last a few days.

Athena set her focus on checking on her injuries. The swelling on her black eye, swollen wrist, and sprained ankle had indeed gone down greatly. She touched the black eye tentatively. She could see out of her left eye perfectly again, but she could tell the bruising hadn't gone away completely. She shrugged it off. She wasn't going to rebandage the black eye and lose vision in one of her eyes simply because she didn't look very pretty. She rubbed more of the cream onto the bruising, then on her wrist and ankle, before rebandaging the latter two. She moved on to cuts next, which she found were healing rapidly, and beginning to scar. She applied more cream on the cuts, before replacing the used, bloodied bandages with new ones.

With that, she stood and repeated all the exercises she had done the previous day, starting with warmups and stretches, moving around, to fighting. It still pained her to move much at all, but it all felt much easier than it had the previous day. Athena didn't feel completely rejuvenated, but it was still enough to keep her going.

With that, she made her way out of the house and into the open desert air, starting to walk with no real direction. Just an hour of this served as a good reminder that just because she felt better than she did the day before did not mean that she felt good. The pain and soreness from her injuries were still there, and even after being in the arena for so long, she wasn't fully used to the desert heat. Even the hottest summers in District Four were never like this. She was sweating all over, her lips felt dry and cracked, and her throat felt perpetually dry, even immediately after drinking. It was hard not to be overcome with a desire for it all to just end, no matter how it happened.

She continued on the way all the same, sticking to the shadows as much as she could, both to keep out of sight and to keep as cool as she could. After a few hours, however, she could hear panicked shouting and a door slamming. She hastened to hide behind a building, looking around the corner to see what was happening. Two or three tributes were rushing out of a house opposite the building she was hiding behind in a hurry. They left through the back, however, so that she could only get glimpses of them as they started running away, looking back at something behind them and yelling at each other to hurry, apparently too panicked to remember to keep their voices down. Athena looked over to where they were looking to see what was making them lose their cool - and her heart dropped. What seemed to be a swarm of large, scaly lizards were rapidly approaching. They were clearly genetically modified by the Capitol so that they could move faster than any lizard she'd ever seen, and even fly into the air. Occasionally, one of them would spit out some greenish substance, and whatever the substance touched would sizzle and burn, melting away.