As Sly as a Fox

 My fingers shuffled from inside my burlap gloves. They are  great protection, but my hands are trapped inside them.  Just like I am trapped in the lab for another hour.

 I sigh.  Everyone else has gone home. I remove my gloves, something that is forbidden, but so is working more than ten hours a day. The pliers cut through the thin rubber insulator, reveling the metal inside. It takes me about ten minutes to get a wire stripped and attached. I do this again and again so that the engineers don’t have to waste there time. Sometimes I wonder where my wires go. Connected to solar panels, and shipped to each district. I like to imagine someone actually looks at the panels, and sees my wiring. 

  How amazing ! How could we possibly overlook such an important job……..

   I chuckle to myself. I’m in no danger.  

 I finish the wire, and begin to strip another one. Tomorrow is the Reaping. I’ll attend, but I made sure  I won’t be in it.  I’m nineteen. According to my birth certificate and ID. See, there is a reason I spend my days doing mindless work. It took a year for me to do it, but it was worth it. 

 When I was thirteen, I had already made my mind up that I wasn’t going to live each day to go to the poor excuse of a school they have here. So I got a job in the solar energy department.  I had been doing this for a while when the radioactivity plant had a break through. And not a scientific one. My older sister was killed. 

 My parents were long gone. Amy got a job working there when she was fourteen. I was eight at the time, and she managed to support both of us. 

  I was devastated when she died. She was a perfect version of what I wanted to be. I cry myself to sleep often thinking about her, although I know she isn’t going to come back. She probably wouldn’t even if she could. 

 I hear footsteps across the hall, and I immediately slip my gloves back on. I glance at the clock. 9:37. Just over twenty minutes until I can leave.

 As I get my last wire, a flash of the girl from last year hits my mind. She was tiny, although she was nearly seventeen. She died within a minute. The girl who killed her was towering over six feet, and probably weighed more than the girl and I combined. The girl who killed her, Bernice, lasted until the final five. It was her and three guys, and a thirteen year old girl from district seven named Kera Mancy. I had secretly been routing for Kera the whole time. She had no skills, and was blind in one eye from an accident in a lumber mill. 

  Kera had disappeared from the first day into the swamp like arena. However, on the sixth day, Bernice heard her crying, and immediately went to finish her off. When she got there, she saw little Kera curled up in a ball, with a squirrel laying beside her. She had killed it, but she was sobbing like crazy for it. When I saw this, I smiled. Bernice ran to her, and began to choke her. Kera laughed. I thought she was just sick or something, then I noticed the squirrel twitching. It lunged on to Bernice, just enough time for Kera to back up and grab the axe from under a rock.

  The final two were Kera and a monstrous boy from district one. Dominick had killed off two of his allies by chopping there limbs off and leaving them to die. I thought Kera was going to win. I wanted her to. She didn’t. The capital killed her off by making the tree she was asleep in collapse. It should had killed her. I wish it did. But she was pinned under that tree for nearly a day. I think she got sick of it. She pulled her axe out from the debris. I thought she was going to chop her leg off. She gave the capital the bird, laughed, and slit her own throat.