Filed To Story: Sunrise on the Reaping Book PDF Free
Silka seems stunned into inertia as well. “What’d you do? Did you kill Gamemakers? They’ll never let us win now!”
Maysilee’s voice drips honey. “Still chasing that sad little dream, Silka?” She deftly loads another dart and glances at Maritte. “I’m almost sorry to kill you now, Maritte. What’s the deal with District Four, anyway? Hooking up with a bunch of Capitol toadies? Seems like you should be on our side.”
Maritte hesitates, eyeing her trident with longing, then pulls her knife and begins to back away as Maysilee raises her blowgun.
The hovercraft appears out of nowhere, dropping a bomb into the clearing that explodes in a cloud of dirt and tear gas. I grab Maysilee and we flounder through the woods, branches snapping our faces, stumbling over logs, as we try to escape the stuff. More bombs rain down, releasing more gas, causing our eyes to burn and stream so badly, they’re useless. After a while, I can hear the explosions fade a bit. My guess is that the hovercraft could only track one set of tributes, and the Careers drew the short straw.
Some inner compass leads me north and we outdistance the tear gas at the entrance of the hedge. I rip open one of the packs and alternate pouring water in Maysilee’s and my eyes.
She’s so furious with me she’s spitting. “What the hell, Haymitch! Where were you? Why was Maritte the only one who had my back?”
She’s right. I froze. Caught off guard by the unexpected encounter, intimidated by the white uniforms, whatever. I choked.
“I don’t know what happened, Maysilee. Everything was coming at me so fast and I’m covered in slime and -“
“You’re supposed to be my ally! Not her! Not that fish-eating, bootlicking, wished-she-could-pull-off-pin-curls piece of trash! You are!”
Well, I feel terrible, and utterly lack a defense. My knife was in hand, the Gamemakers in easy reach. No one better positioned to kill them. Plutarch’s voice taunts me.
“The question is, why didn’t you?” I can’t say I’m not a killer anymore. That leaves brainwashed or cowardly. Boy, I sure hope Sid didn’t see that. No, of course he didn’t. That’s one bit of action the audience will never view. They’ve surely been following Wellie, wherever she is.
“You’re right,” I tell Maysilee. “You’re one hundred percent right and I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” she sneers. “Maybe you should be the victor, Haymitch. That would give you some time to grow a backbone.”
Hello again, meanest girl in town. It only hurts because it’s true.
She pulls out the can of sardines and yanks off the lid. “I’m eating this whole can. They’re mine.” She selects a fish and slurps it into her mouth. Boy, she really is mad, to be eating with her fingers.
I let her hog the sardines, even though they smell delicious and my stomach’s growling. I’ve let her down and I need her help with the hedge. Would it matter if she knew about my bombing the tank and the mission to break the arena? Or would my feckless response to having the Gamemakers at our mercy erase it all? I don’t know, I just hope that once she has a belly full of fish, she’ll give me a hand.
After a few minutes, the slurping stops. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch the can slide into view. Three fish remain. I shake my head. She gives them a nudge in my direction. I’m so hungry I take them.
“Was it because of your poster?” she asks, her voice still tight.
She means, I think, was I avoiding confronting the Gamemakers because of the fabulous statement I’m planning to make. “I wish I could say it was, but no, I don’t think it was that. I don’t know what it was. Just programmed to be walked all over, I guess. You nailed it.”
“No, what I said wasn’t fair. You’ve done your part. With Louella in the chariot. Getting a one in training. And, I suspect, whatever it is you’ve been up to that you’re so cagey about.” She dampens a handkerchief and cleans her hands. “You know, if we’d started picking off the Gamemakers before we got in here, we might’ve stood a chance.”
I think of the moment with the knives in training, of the country as a whole, and how we just keep submitting to the Capitol’s rule. Why? It’s not a conversation I can have in front of the cameras, so I just concentrate on wiping the last bit of oil out of the can. Then I go about scraping the slime off my pants. At least it doesn’t smell bad, or burn my skin, or harden, which makes it one of the more benign things I’ve encountered in here.
Maysilee’s breathing has returned to normal. I decide to give her five more minutes to recover before I push for the hedge. I watch as she traces a spiderweb on a bush. “Look at the craftsman-ship. Best weavers on the planet.”
“Surprised to see you touching that.”
“Oh, I love anything silk.” She rubs the threads between her fingers. “Soft as silk, like my grandmother’s skin.” She pops open a locket at her neck and shows me the photo inside. “Here she is, just a year before she died. Isn’t she beautiful?”
I take in the smiling eyes, full of mischief, peering out of their own spiderweb of wrinkles. “She is. She was a kind lady. Used to sneak me candies sometimes.”
Maysilee laughs. “You weren’t the only one. She got chewed out for that.” She cups the locket in her hands and examines her. “No one ever loved me more. I always hoped I’d look like her one day. Never going to see myself grow old, I guess.”
“Maybe.”
“Oh, no. Not after today.” She bites her lip. “She used to say, if I was afraid, ‘It’s okay, Maysilee, nothing they can take from you was ever worth keeping.'”
“I know that song. Lenore Dove sings it.”
“It’s a song?” Maysilee smiles. “Well, your gal’s full of surprises. Guess she got the jump on us after all.”
“Doing what?”
“Doing nothing.” She snaps the locket closed and stands. “Let’s visit your hedge, Mr. Abernathy.”
“Well, okay, then, Miss Donner.” I break a branch that looks familiar off a nearby tree. “Hold this.”
“What do I do?”
I whip out the blowtorch, light her up, and nod at the hedge. “You’re my wingman. Anything with wings, you burn. Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
I charge through the hedge, making a beeline for the site of our previous breakout attempt. Firing up the blowtorch, I cut a straight line from my shoulder to the ground. Ladybugs begin to swarm as the greenery catches fire. Maysilee steps right in, waving her torch over the infestation. The mutts ignite, inflate, and burst open like dried corn kernels in hot grease. I carve another line parallel to the first, a couple of feet to the right. More bugs emerge from along the hedge and fly at us. Maysilee circles her torch, singing as she exterminates them:
New Book: Returned To Make Them Pay
On her wedding anniversary, Alicia is drugged and stumbles into the wrong room—straight into the arms of the powerful Caden Ward, a man rumored never to touch women. Their night of passion shocks even him, especially when he discovers she’s still a virgin after two years of marriage to Joshua Yates.