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Blood fell like bullets against her skin, sticking to every centimeter of her skin and body. For a moment, she stood in shock, staring as the red engulfed her. The world around her was no longer black but shrouded in a sheen of bloody mist that pattered off of the leaves and trees, pooling in thick puddles in the dirt and sinking into every orifice she could imagine. Her sinuses stung with the scent of iron. She blinked away the blood, but it fell in waves, obscuring her vision and stinging her eyes.
Her ears rang. Her pulse thrummed deep within her chest, and for the first time since she entered the arena, she felt the familiar sensation of her soul tearing from her body. Her mind focused on the nothing, her head turned to mush. She stared at her hands, and then she stared some more. The blood had already seeped under her fingernails and into the cracks on her skin. Was she really there? Was this a dream? Her body felt fuzzy, and she could feel her consciousness slipping as seconds passed. She was disassociating. It was disorienting. Her brain was trying to protect herself from this blood rain. A part of her wanted, needed, to return to a stable state of mind so that she could assess her surroundings and come up with a plan. But, the majority of her brain was concerned with how the blood pierced her nostrils and dripped into her mouth, and how similar it was to the blood seven years ago.
The sound of a knife opening flesh filled the open air. From the boy's throat, a red waterfall, escaping as if it had been waiting its whole life to taint the hands of his attacker. Against her tongue, the iron tasted sweet, leaking around her teeth and mixing with stale saliva. Blood clotted to her clothes and adhered to any surface it could.
No. Plume shook her head, somehow pulling herself from it. She couldn't disappear into her past. Through the ringing in her ears and the gunfire of blood on the canopy above, Johanna was yelling. Plume couldn't make out words. She wiped a hand over her eye to remove the blood, but it continued to drip down her face.
Her hands had been cleaned when she woke up in the Capitol, but they never did fell pure. Every so often, if her hands caught the light in just the right way, Plume could swear she saw a swipe of crimson against her fingers. Try as she might, she could never wash it away.
A hand grappled for Plume's arm, and she jumped, momentarily ripped from the memory. She turned, her eyes wild with the past and her face stained scarlet. She must have looked like a murderess, she assumed. A female devil dripping with the blood of... God, whose blood even was this? Plume pictured a mountain of corpses, their bodies drained of iron to entertain the Capitol. The thought was enough to make a wave of nausea fill her stomach as she faced Johanna.
Johanna spoke, but her words were lost to the rain. She waved her ax over her head frantically, her brown eyes squinting to avoid catching droplets of blood. Her voice was louder now, her nails squeezing into Plume's arm. "We have to go! We have to get out of here, Plume!"
