The Hunger Games

15

Alec entered a nightmare from which he repeatedly woke up only to find greater terrors awaiting him. All the things he dreaded the most, all those he dreaded for others manifested in such vivid detail he couldn't help but think they were real.

Each time he woke up, his first thought was, it's over, but it wasn't. It was only the beginning of a new chapter of torture.

How many ways did he watch Isabelle die? Relive his father's last moments? Feel his own body being ripped apart? That was how tracker jacker venom worked: it targeted the place where fear lived in your brain.

When he finally came to his senses, he lay still, waiting for the next nightmare. But, eventually, he accepted that the poison must have worked its way out of his system, leaving him wrecked and weak. He was lying on his side, on a fetal position.

Lifting a hand to his eyes, he found them completely fine, untouched by the ants that had never existed outside of his mind. Stretching out his limbs took a while. Everything hurt. Very, very slowly, he managed to sit up. He was in a shallow hole on the ground, not filled with orange bubbles, but with old leaves instead.

Alec's clothing was damp but he had no idea why, whether it was pond water, rain or sweat.

For some long minutes, all he managed to do was sip water from his bottle and watch as a beetle crawled up the side of a bush.

How long had he been out? It had been morning when he had lost consciousness. Now it was afternoon. The stiffness in his joints, however, told Alec that he must have been out at least a day; perhaps two. He would have no way of knowing who had died from the tracker jacker attack.

Obviously, Bael and the other girl from District 4, but because Alec had seen them. But there was still the boy from District 1, both tributes from District 2 and Maia. Had they died from the stings? If they had lived, certainly their last days would have been as horrid as Alec's.

And what about Madzie? She was so small, it wouldn't take much venom to end her life. Then again, the tracker jackers would have had to catch her and she had had a good head start.

A rotten taste in his mouth that Alec tried to get rid of by sipping water didn't quite go away. He dragged himself to the bush where the beetle he had been watching was and plucked a honeysuckle flower. He gently pulled the stamen through the blossom and set a droplet of nectar on his tongue.

The sweetness spread through his mouth, down his throat, warming his veins with the feeling of summer and his home woods and Jace's presence next to him.

For some reason, their discussion from that last morning came back to him.

"We could do it, you know."

"What? Swallow before you speak, Jace."

"Leave the district, run off. Live in the woods. You and I, we could make it."

And, suddenly, he wasn't thinking about Jace anymore, but Maia and... Maia! She saved his life! Or, at least, he thought so, because by the time they had met up Alec hadn't been able to tell what was real from what wasn't because of the tracker jacker venom.

But, if she had, and Alec's instincts told him that she had indeed, what for? Was she simply working the Precious Girl angle she had presented herself as in the interviews, for sponsors? Or was she trying to protect him? And, if she was, what was she doing with the Careers in the first place? None of it made any sense.

He decided to stop thinking about all that nonsense and focus instead on the only good thing that had happened to him so far in the arena: he had a bow and arrows! A full dozen arrows, counting the one he had retrieved from the tree after Bael had shot it. They had no trace of the green slime that had come from Bael's body, which made Alec think that perhaps it hadn't been entirely real, but they did have a fair amount of dried blood on them.