𝐂𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐅𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐬 [𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐤 - 𝐇𝐮𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐆𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬]

6 | 𝐂𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐩𝐬𝐞

Content warning at the end notes: please skip down and check if you feel like you should!

N E O

— IT'S BEEN THREE OR NINE DAYS. Inside the arena, the exhaustion's turning bone-deep in a creeping way that implies it's been building for a while. I lie in my tent — it's almost too small, a cocoon against the storm of dust howling around me. I imagine that from a distance we look like coiled up crustaceans, shivering in the splitting wind. We've reached a stale-mate, where nothing's changing and no one can make a move worth anything. With Bryony's death came the final desperate drive to reach the little town, the alliance between us growing weak already, knowing there's an enemy amongst us, that someone disrespected the accepted agreement. Never mind that every single one of us was itching to be rid of her. The injury she sustained was a mild one, mild enough to inspire bitterness over sympathy when all she'd done was misstep, like a fool. Careers don't make those kinds of mistakes, and certainly not Victors.

And then the storm set in. A brief reprise from the heat, the artificial days, the company of one another. But it's been too long, and we all sense the need for action now, lest the worst is orchestrated for us. There are crowds to entertain.

On the ninth sunrise, the ninth day despite the passing of seventy-two hours since the Bloodbath, the storm wanes enough that we have to move. I poke my head out the tent to an onslaught of sand, dust, and stone collapsing over the flap of the door, and I cough through it, brutally aware of my own dehydration.

"You can drink piss, right?" Seth asks from his own tent, struggling to stand upright in the stiff gales and squinting at his empty flask.

"Gotta filter it." I reply. We don't have the resources for that. I consider it, though, my throat aching, voice raspy and hardly there, carried off in the wind.

"We've got to move." Hazel insists, crawling from her own tent half naked as she tries to removed the grit from her boots and bra. "Think if I give 'em a show someone will send us water?" She mumbles in passing, humour falling flat on ears too miserable to fabricate a laugh.

Tilsee sits in isolation, counting through arrows with a feverish mania, muttering under her breath. Deckard's still in his tent, peeking out from the gloom of the shell like he'd rather lay down and die there, looking flushed and pale in the wrong places.

"Deckard," I say it softly, crouching in front of him and feeling at his cheeks with the back of my hand. "You feel dizzy? Sick?"

"G'na puke." Is the only warning I get before he doubles over. I flinch away and pat his back. It's nothing but bile and the salty cured meat we pilfered from the Cornucopia. I stopped eating around the start of our shut-in, knowing the salt would make the dehydration worse. You can survive longer without food that you can without water, after all.