Cage me like an animal • F Odair¹ •

XV

"Are you calling me a liar?"

•∘♛∘•

In the academy, during the Game, the instructors would have everyone watch the Games and then comment on the mistakes the tributes would make; any weak points while fighting, sloppy first-aid, rash decision-making, anything a tribute could possibly have done wrong. Athena wondered if people at the academy, the people she knew and became friends with, were doing that to her right now. She wondered how many mistakes they had found already. If they were pointing out mistakes she hadn't even realized she had made. Iris Dunne, she thought, was probably pointing out her flaws with a particular sort of vigour. Iris Dunne was probably tearing her to shreds in the comfort and safety of the academy. Iris Dunne didn't care about Rowan Lindell or Cara Savera or Marjorie Hopper or anyone, nobody did, their lives were a spectacle and so were their deaths and everything in between.

And if they weren't criticizing her from the comfort of the academy, they were probably having a great big laugh at how she had resorted to eating desert creatures for food, as she was doing now that she had officially run out of food. She had killed one that she had seen crawling around in the house she'd been resting in. After identifying that it wasn't poisonous, she made a fire with her matches, and burnt the creature just enough so that she wouldn't have to really taste what she was eating. It still tasted awful, but she had not expected anything good. Her peers at the academy were probably living it up while watching her, comfortable and safe and with as much food as they wanted, while she had gone from Tessera to rich Capitol food to eating whatever desert creatures she could find that were edible.

Then again, Athena considered, as she finished off her awful meal for the day and washed it down with water, she knew she had surpassed the expectations of many by even making it this far. Iris Dunne probably thought that she would be dead within the first day, and Athena knew she likely was not alone in this sense. Even Athena had doubted her own odds in the arena. But the number of tributes was dwindling down more and more each day. After the two canons that had gone off in the middle of the night last night, she had deduced that only a quarter of the original twenty-four tributes remained, and here Athena was all the same. Even Athena had not thought she would make it this far.

Some people had, though. Hudson, Mags, Finnick, and Tatiana had all seemed convinced that she would be the one to make it out of the arena in one piece. She had never understood why, though, didn't know what it was they thought she had that nobody else did. She still didn't know. But she also supposed it didn't matter. Regardless of how far she had made it, that didn't change that she still had a long way to go before she was crowned victor and she could finally return to her family. A slow victory.

And she could not bring herself to feel very proud of herself for making it this far when, the more she thought about it, the more it felt like she won based purely on her own luck. She would have died three times over had it not been for Marjorie, and yet she was dead and Athena remained. Had Athena not looked so much like Charity Hopper, she would be dead. A striking resemblance and a girl full of grief. That was what it had come down to, in the end. The thought did nothing to help her grief over Marjorie's death.

The number of tributes was dwindling, dwindling, dwindling down, and Athena could only think of the tributes lost rather than the ones remaining, particularly Rowan, Cara, and Marjorie. She thought often of Lumen Flux, stabbed and left to die by his own district partner. The more she thought of it, the less surprised she became, and the more she realized she could not fault Dayta Fuse at all for her actions. There could only be one victor. So what if they had been district partners, if they had possibly known each other before their Reaping? This was the Games, and the Games offered no possibility for mercy. Athena knew this, even as she had allied herself with Rowan, Cara, and Marjorie. Dayta Fuse had evidently known this. And it was likely that her own allies had known this, and perhaps if they had lasted longer, they would have acted on this... perhaps Rowan and Cara would have killed her in her sleep one night when they realized the numbers were down and that if she was dead, that was one less Career tribute they had to worry about defeating. Despite her devotion to her sister, perhaps Marjorie Hopper would have put one of her knives through Athena's chest if that was what would have put her one step closer to her family that remained to her and she decided she did have a chance to win after all. Athena realized that none of this mattered either way because they were all dead anyway and she was the only one between them that still remained, and somehow, it made her feel even worse.