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AVANI SAW EXACTLY WHAT JACK SAID IN HER DREAM PLAYING OUT IN FRONT OF HER EYES. Something so beautiful, so inherently good... falling apart.
She was sitting in the back corner of the cornucopia, her spears next to her, hidden away from the view of anyone wandering around in the midnight darkness outside. Ryder's upper body was laid across her lap, his legs curled up so he was nothing more than a tightly wound ball of pain.
Seeing his mentor dead had been near catastrophic — Avani almost heard every wall he'd built up to keep his emotions in check since the Reaping crumble in disastrous fashion. His silent crying had morphed into sobbing, and then sobbing into screaming, and screaming back into sobbing, and then sobbing into nothing. Silence. Staring at his dead mentor with empty eyes until Reese dared to move the corpse away. Until Avani led him into the cornucopia like she was handling porcelain. He just moved where she took him, molding to her will like water.
Now, two hours later, she was carefully carding her fingers through his tousled, dirty-blonde waves. Actual dirty blonde, seeing as it had everything from blood to concrete dust crusted and coating each strand like the neon dyes used in the Capitol. He wasn't asleep. Avani could tell that much from the way he was breathing — not even or steadily, but shallowly, with the occasional deep breath to keep himself from crying, or shudder as a result of his previous sobs. It reminded her that he was barely fifteen, barely fifteen, barely fifteen.
Reese was sitting not ten feet from them, his back pressed up against a stack of metal crates no one could seem to wrench open. Their bags were all piled beside him. He was holding his sword, flipping it occasionally, glancing up at Ryder and Avani with his crystalline eyes even more often. He'd long since ransacked everything in the small shelter, and having only come up with two thermoses of water and three apples, knew they'd have to be on the move come daylight. Avani knew it, too — she just couldn't bear the thought of making Ryder get up and press on right then.
Rockie was sitting on top of a crate right in the mouth of the cornucopia, sharpening her axe with a stone Reese found in a sharpening kit. The repetitive shnnk shnnk of her blade was unsettling, but at the same time, Avani was thankful for the constant sound to keep her from floating away like embers in a dying flame.
Rockie had completely lost her sass-filled, entertaining demeanor, replacing it with something cold and hard like wrought iron. Reese practically had to manhandle her, screaming and all, away from Rye's body. All it earned him was an axe pointed at his throat and the threat of hacking his useless head off that none of them really wanted to test. No one had spoken to her since then. No one had spoken at all.
Avani didn't even know what day it was. She'd lost count already. She'd lost count of other tributes, too; She knew that, for sure, there were five of the original tributes still alive — Joltt, Ayvah, Vixen, Avan, and Henley. Of the mentors, she could assume Katniss, Finnick, and the four remaining Careers.
