Filed To Story: Sunrise on the Reaping Book PDF Free
What would Beetee do? For starters, he’d get me to the generator. He said it was at the top of the arena, and I must be close. The first thing will be to make it all the way north and find some way to break through the arena wall. I don’t even know if that’s made of cement or metal or some kind of force field, but I guess I’ll deal with that when I get there.
After consulting the sun, I get my bearings and head north. My whole body’s stiff and sore and the straps on my backpack rub my bat scratches raw. I’d be quite a sight if District 12 had been dressed in yellow, but the black conceals the bloodstains fairly well. Even though I’m still starving and thirsty, I can’t afford to use any more of my meager supplies. If I find the generator, maybe I’ll celebrate with a slice of potato.
The woods have patches of life – songbirds singing and insects buzzing – and sections of complete silence. I don’t see any sign of the other tributes, and it’s quite likely that I’m the only one who’s traveled this far north. That means the mutt berms will be fully loaded, but they might also be disabled. Nothing to do but keep putting one foot in front of the other.
After a couple of miles, I hear a pattering in the trees and a gentle rain begins to fall. I open my mouth and catch a few drops on my tongue. It tastes clean, like the fresh water, not the poison. Where did the Gamemakers find it with the tank blown wide open? Do they have a reserve tank? Pipes that reach this far from the Capitol? I placed the explosive chest-high; maybe the bottom foot or two of the tank remained intact and they’re accessing that. At any rate, I’ve got fresh water and I better not take it for granted.
Quickly, I unscrew the caps of my water jugs and set them in the center of a clearing. I know it’s not ideal, catching stray drops, but it’s the best I can do at the moment. Then I strip down to my skivvies and wash off the blood. I notice the grit under my finger-nails dissolving like sugar crystals, and survey the trees. Sure enough, even the light shower melts the volcanic ash off the branches, and the runoff soaks into the ground. In a half hour, the rain stops, leaving the forest as fresh and pristine as the morning I entered it.
It’s a relief to have the ash gone, but I can’t have caught more than a couple of tablespoons of water. A wasted opportunity. One of Wyatt’s tarps would’ve come in real handy – a mesh hammock isn’t worth diddly for rain collection. You work with what you get.
What I get when I reach the end of the forest is not a brick or a steel or an electrified barrier, but a tall hedge that comes to a point like a V and stretches as far as the eye can see in both directions. On closer inspection, the plants appear to be some kind of holly, loaded with clusters of red berries and sporting prickly green leaves. It’s not unlike what people in 12 use to decorate at New Year’s, although these berries have little black dots on their skins. Even the regular ones are poisonous, so I ignore these. I walk along the hedge, pondering how to approach it. The boughs don’t look like they’d support my weight and digging under the mulch at the base doesn’t seem like an option. Then I spy a slight opening, turn sideways, and manage to slip through the foliage without getting scratched. A narrow path leads about ten feet in, then curves farther into the hedge, which appears to be quite deep. Cautiously, I begin to weave my way through the greenery on the twisty-turny path, feeling I’m headed north but sometimes forced to diverge right or left out of necessity.
It can’t go on forever, I think.
Eventually, I will reach the end of the arena.
But I don’t. The path winds this way and that, sometimes reaching a dead end or coming to a fork, which requires me to make a choice. Too late, I realize I should have been notching trunks or making little piles of mulch or something to mark my path because I’m hopelessly lost. I try to use the sun to orient myself, but I swear the Gamemakers are shifting the thing around in the sky just to confuse me further. Trapped in a dense maze of holly, I start panicking, plowing down paths recklessly, without any real plan but with a rising sense of claustrophobia. Forget the northern wall – I just need to get out of this place. Perspiration pours down my face and I’m dying of thirst, but I certainly don’t think I deserve a drink, given how easily I’ve been duped into this predicament. If the Gamemakers decide to unleash a mutt on me, and why not, I won’t stand a chance of escaping. This is not how I want Ma and Sid and Lenore Dove to see me die. So very foolishly.
This goes on for hours, with me driven by a fear of taking my last breath in this spiky holiday hallucination, desperate for any change of scenery. Finally, exhausted and frazzled, I sink down onto my knees and try to collect my thoughts. The hedge has muffled the forest sounds, so just the faintest notes of birdsong reach my ears. A breeze is too much to hope for, but if I sit very still, I can catch the slight movement of air. I weigh my options: give up, continue to bumble around, or try to hack my way through the hedge with the ax. The last seems to have the most potential, but there’s something almost sinister about the hedge that stays my hand. With it towering about me, at least several feet thick, I feel diminished by its size, frightened by what it might harbor. Resigned to my fate, I rise to my feet and reach for the ax.
As I do, a movement ahead of me catches my attention. I look up to see a gray rabbit watching me. I don’t know if it’s really the same one I shared the apple with, but it comforts me to think it is.
“Hey, my friend,” I say. “How you doing?”
After a few ear twitches, it turns and darts away from me. Without thinking, I follow. Maybe it can use its nose to get us out? I stay on its trail, tracking that white cottontail at every turn, and after a minute or two, I see the forest at the end of a stretch. I give a whoop and sprint for the trees. The rabbit shoots out the opening and I’m a few yards behind it.
As I barrel out of the hedge, a sword blade whistles by my head, just catching the tip of my ear. I cry out and trip backward over a dead branch. After days of isolation broken only by allies, I’ve all but forgotten about the threat of the Careers. Now they’ve caught me completely off guard.
Nothing that happens in the next minute is premeditated, only reflexive. As a girl tribute from District 4 lunges with her trident pointed at my neck, I clumsily deflect it with my left arm and whip out my knife just in time to drive it into her gut. Rolling to the side, I encounter a leg and hamstring it, leaving her district partner writhing on the ground. Scrabbling to my feet, I pull out the ax and cleave open his neck with a single adrenaline-fueled blow, then turn to take on the owner of the sword: Panache.
For a moment we face off, me, my knife, and the ax against him, his sword, and his shield. With the terrible groans from the wounded girl accompanying us, we circle each other slowly. I take in the burns along his arms and legs, the cracked lips, the mad-dog look in his eyes. A sense of dread fills me. He’s much bigger, better armed, and crazed with pain. My eyes flick to the nearby woods, seeking an escape route.
“Uh-uh,” says Panache.
With a single swoop, he knocks the ax from my hand, his blade drawing blood, and then slams the shield into my chest so hard I lose my grip on my knife. Gasping for breath, I back away, hands lifted, with only my words to defend me.
I start talking fast. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Panache, think about this. Looks bad, killing an unarmed man. Especially me being from Twelve and all. I mean, I got a one in training. Seems cowardly. On your part. Think about your image. You don’t want to do something stupid.” I am not making the world’s strongest argument, but the word gives him pause; I guess I have Caesar to thank for that. I jabber on, saying anything, trying to buy time. “Listen, I know you’re not a meathead – that chariot idea was brilliant, sorry I swiped it – but you need to play this smart, am I right? Else it could affect your sponsor gifts. How you making out with those anyway? Me, I’ve been doing pretty well. Turns out, some people love a loser. But you, everybody knows you’re going to win. You always win. Come on, at least slide my knife over here so we can give the people a show.”
Panache gives his head a shake, like he’s clearing my words from his brain. “No! We already fought. You lost. Now you die!” He draws back his sword, eyes locked on my throat, and I brace myself for the blow, trying to look brave and defiant and proud, staring him down so hard he has to admit that even if he kills me, he hasn’t defeated me. In my last moment, I need to see recognition of that.
What I see instead is the surprise that transforms his face as the dart pierces his throat.
Panache’s sword thuds to the earth and he collapses, senseless. I whip around to see Maysilee emerge from behind a tree. A blowgun balances delicately in her fingers, the mouthpiece attached to a braided vine around her neck. Her latest necklace. Emotionless, she watches Panache expire.
“We’d live longer with two of us,” she says.
“Guess you just proved that.” I rub my neck where the dart entered Panache’s. “Allies?”
She thinks it over, nods, and pats a pouch at her hip. “But I’ve got a dozen poison darts left if you’re still feeling exclusive.”
“Noted. It sure is good to see you, Miss Donner.” The cannon fires three times, shutting me up. I take in the dead bodies around us, for the first time recognizing that I’ve killed someone. Two someones. Brutally. It was self-defense, no question, but I know I can never go back to five minutes ago. Having taken their lives . . . in that way . . . it’s undoable. I pick up my weapons. “Let’s get out of here.”
Maysilee considers the dead Careers and relieves the District 4 girl of her dagger. “Want anything else?”
“No.” I can’t use a trident and the idea of claiming Panache’s sword, stained with Newcomer blood, creeps me out. I’m not his heir, the new leader of the pack, nor do I want to present myself as such.
We walk away from the hedge, deeper into the woods. After a minute, the hovercraft flies over us, en route to collecting the bodies. The giant claw descends, lifting them, one, two, three into the sky as the craft swallows them up. We stop when they’ve all been retrieved. There’s nothing to walk away from anymore.
“You’re bleeding,” Maysilee points out.
Two gashes. One from deflecting the trident, one from Panache’s sword.
“Sit down,” she orders. I sink onto a fallen log and she pulls a first-aid kit from her black backpack. “I got this off a dead Career. The burn cream kept me from going off my head.” Her shirtsleeves have been cut off at the shoulder, and I note the burn marks on her arms, competing for space with the riding crop welts and a range of cuts and bruises, her skin a map of the abuse she’s suffered since the reaping. Who would’ve ever believed that coddled Maysilee Donner, of the nail polish and velvet bows, would come to this? And face it with such fortitude? Mamaw used to say you never really knew who’d swim in a flood.
“I guess the lava just burned up everything in its path?”
“No, it wasn’t even hot. It was some sort of gel that gave you chemical burns if it got under your clothes, then turned hard and slippery as ice on the ground.”
Guess that’s why there was no smoke and I didn’t burn up.
Methodically, Maysilee cleans the wounds and closes them with neat, even stitches. I’m not surprised really, after watching her create those artful tokens out of spit and string. When I’m sealed up again, she sits across from me and clocks my pack. “Any food?”
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