Author Games: Trial By Fire

Finally Final Entries - Bobbie Carnine

There are good days, and there are bad days. And I don’t know which this is.

Keep going, Bobbie. You can do it. You’ve done this before.

Vines coil around my legs, trying to trip me; branches rip at my skin, trying to break me down piece by piece. I ignore them. In my head, I run over who is left. Annie. My stomach lurches at the thought of her wandering, alone, her hands pressed over her ears and her eyes far away. Please, whoever kills her, be merciful.

That could be you. Could you do that, Bobbie? Go back and look Finnick in the eyes, knowing that you did that?

“Shut up,” I mutter aloud. It’s probably a bad idea to speak out loud, but I’m making so much noise crashing through the undergrowth that people will be able to hear me coming anyway. Is it just me, or is there a creaking noise and does the ground shake under my feet?

I miss home so much. I want the crowded alleys, the dirty buildings, the chuntering noise. It’s too changeable here. Everything moves, everything whispers. Everything is plotting against me.

My voice won’t leave me alone. Look at the bodies behind you, look at the trail of blood. Their families have lost someone...

I don’t care about their families, I insist to myself. I care about mine.

Something rustles, too big to be anything but a tribute.

“Annie?” I gasp, instantly cursing. How stupid. If they didn’t know I’m here, they do now. And I’m going to have to fight and I can’t.

“Guess again!” purrs a diamond-edged voice.

Oh no. Oh no no no.

My heart leaps so far into my mouth that I think my chattering teeth might bite straight through it, blood bursting all over my tongue. The image distracts me for a moment; I can almost taste the heat, feel the sticky liquid running down my chin, feel the tattered and gooey shreds of my heart stuck between my teeth and strangling my tongue.

But then the rustling noise prickles behind me and I snap back into the real world again.

I hate this. Why can’t she just come and kill me? Why does she have to toy with me? I’ve never done anything wrong to her. It’s the Careers, their pack mentality. They can try and justify it all they want with sob stories, with plaintive pleas of a different upbringing, but in the end they’re just a clique of girls in school. Expecting everything to go their way, fluttering about like they own the place, the odds ever in their favour. Although the girls at school weren’t nearly as deadly.

I catch a glimpse of blonde hair behind a thick green vine, the flash of a weapon.

“Please!” The sob breaks out of my mouth before I can stop it, “Please don’t do this! Just come and fight me!”

The mace, swinging heavy at my side, tangles in a bush and as I pause to wrench it free, she finally moves.

The fight passes by in a blur of panic, my breathing hard in my chest, my muscles straining and creaking with the effort of keeping moving, my heart hammering hammering hammering. In a snap the world no longer exists. No District 8, no Games, no arena. Just me and the woman from 1 who won the year after me. I remember none of that. I was still in shock, still mired in my bad days.

Dodge, fall, pain, breathe, swing, miss, sob...

That’s not my sob. My mouth is firmly closed, tongue sticking out between my lips like always when I’m concentrating. So it must be...

She’s not hurt. I run cold, the soil damp on my back, because the tough and snarling girl from 1 is curled up next to me, and she’s crying.

Crying like her shrivelled, blackened heart is breaking.