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chapter eight: ain't no sun here
Day Four
The second Kore jolted awake, she was aware of only two things. One: her face ached ten times as much as it did last night. And two: a feeling of panicked dread had taken up residence in her chest.
She didn't know whether her head was spinning from the throbbing cut on her face or the panic-induced headspace her erratically beating heart was sending her into, but either way, Kore's instincts forced her to look for a vantage point and take in her surroundings.
Ritchie had woken up ten minutes prior to Kore. Besides the dull ache of thread in her bottom lip, her first welcoming sight of the day was Meta glaring a hole in the side of her head. Ritchie rolled her eyes and met the stubborn boy's gaze, the boy merely taking a sip from his metal thermos in response.
The pair only ceased their stalemate when Kore, who Meta had seen drop and knock out directly after she barricaded the door to the apartment they had settled in, shot up from her spot in the room.
The pair sat up as fast as she did and watched as she stumbled her way across the room and toward the window that faced the cornucopia. She dropped to her knees, wincing as she remembered the bruises that had formed due to her drop the night before.
Meta was across the room in seconds next to Kore, who he just noticed was panting heavily. His blood-soaked gray shirt shined in the sunlight, everyone in the room was too focused on Kore to notice it though.
As his gaze focused back outside, he couldn't believe what he saw.
Their senses were first filled by an ear-splitting scream that could be heard from across the arena. Then half of the mountain on the other side of the arena started to fall. Kore loosely placed the scene before her as an avalanche.
After the snowbank had settled at the base of the mountain, there were two sickening cannons that echoed through the arena. Hovercrafts almost immediately came from the sky to retrieve the bodies buried in layers of snow.
"Holy shit." Meta nervously glanced from Kore to the remnants of the massacre they had just witnessed. Kore finally had enough consciousness to walk over to Richie and check her fever, like she had done every ten minutes before she fell asleep last night.
Her mind clouded over with thoughts about the arena they were trapped in. First the acid rain and then an avalanche, she concluded that these games were going to be brutal. The capital had shown that they weren't afraid to use natural or manmade disasters against the tributes this year, mimicking the 50th games almost exactly. Kore wished she had retained more information from them, only remembering that the winner was a drunkard from 12 with long hair.
