Filed To Story: Sunrise on the Reaping Book PDF Free
Ladybug, ladybug fly away home.
Your house is on fire, your children are gone.
All except one, who answers to Nan.
She’s hiding under the frying pan.
I join in as I continue to burn a door in the bushes, sweeping the flame from side to side.
The stench of fried insects, chemicals, and burnt sugar surrounds us as the crackling of the holly leaves and bug shells underscores our song. The hedge puts off a prohibitive amount of heat, but we keep on, carving a tunnel through it. A few yards in, daylight peeks through from the other side.
“Almost there!” I shout to Maysilee.
My flame has begun to sputter. I lay on the trigger and the last layer of prickly leaves dissolves into ash. I drop the empty blowtorch to the ground and step out onto an even stretch of parched ground that leads to a dropoff. Maysilee emerges beside me, running her torch around the interior of our tunnel and tossing it in to scorch the last handful of bugs. She beats out the sparks on her shirt.
“So, did we reach the end?”
I walk to the edge of what turns out to be a cliff. A sheer drop of around a hundred feet meets a carpet of pointy rocks. Nestled among them sits a gigantic machine, purring like a contented cat. The generator. Only a stone’s throw away, but it might as well be on the moon. A sound leaves my body, something between a moan and a sigh.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “This is the end of the road.”
Maysilee joins me at the cliff’s edge and stares down into the canyon. “That’s all there is to the arena, Haymitch. Let’s go back.”
My latest scheme to disable the generator has led to yet another dead end. Of course it has. The absurdity of it all, the Games, the two failed arena plots, life in general, overwhelms me. Is there a third way to break the arena that I am missing? Maybe. Probably. But I can’t think of it at the moment.
The biggest form of resistance I can come up with now is to refuse to go back through that hedge. Maysilee’s wrong: This stretch of ground is not the arena; it’s not pretty in the least. If the Gamemakers want me dead, they will have to follow me out here into the real world, which would be a victory of a sort. I will have outsmarted them in some small fashion. And at least the air is fresh and the sun is in the right spot. At any rate, I’m not going back into their poisonous cage.
“No. I’m staying here,” I tell Maysilee.
There’s a long pause. “All right, there’s only five of us left. May as well say good-bye now anyway. I don’t want it to come down to you and me.”
Me neither. And the idea that I would be helping Maysilee or Wellie by continuing to participate in the Games seems laughable. All my allies die while the Gamemakers, apparently, are safe as houses with me. “Okay,” I say.
I hear her footsteps return to the hedge.
A cannon fires. My head jerks around, as does hers. We each expected the other to be dead, and neither of us have time to hide the anguish on our faces.
Maysilee swallows hard. “Four of us now.”
She looks so lost it totals me. Maybe we two should stick it out together. How do I know? I feel like I constantly demonstrate poor judgment. I don’t feel qualified to choose between fried or scrambled eggs. Nothing makes sense in the face of the forty-four dead tributes plus Lou Lou and Woodbine gone from this world.
“You sure you want to split up?” I ask.
She doesn’t know either. I can tell, deep down, she’s as clueless as me. There’s no good rule book on what to do in our situation. No brilliant strategy.
“The only thing I’m sure about right now is I don’t want anyone to steal our potatoes,” she admits. “I’ll get them. Then we’ll weigh our options, all right?”
I lift my hands in defeat. “Well, if you’re going to drag the potatoes into it, how can I say no?”
Maysilee shrugs and disappears into the hedge. I walk along the cliff, wondering if there’s any way I might be able to climb down and reach the generator. My foot inadvertently knocks a reddish pebble over the side, and I listen for how long it takes to hit rock bottom. Too long. I’d never make it. I step away and plunk down on my butt, another plan busted, when suddenly the pebble flies back over the edge and bounces to a stop beside me.
I examine it, confused by its reappearance. Could someone have thrown it back? Doesn’t seem likely. I hop up, collect a nearby rock, and toss it at the generator, tracking its descent. A few yards above the machine, it inexplicably bounces back up to me, reversing its trajectory and landing right in my hand, a little warmer than before. It must be, it has to be, some sort of force field positioned over the generator. Easier than stretching a tarp, I guess. A way of protecting it from the elements, wildlife, and, as it turns out, a rascal of a tribute. I suppose it’s not impossible that a rebel might try to sabotage the thing, but it seems unlikely they’d make their way to the middle of nowhere. Although, here I am. But even if I dropped a boulder down there, I couldn’t touch the thing.
Honestly, my luck’s so bad, I can’t help laughing.
That’s when I hear Maysilee begin to scream. In a flash, I’m on my feet and thrashing through the smoky tunnel in the hedge. I spy bright patches of pink up ahead, hear honking, not unlike Lenore Dove’s geese. My ax is out of my belt, drawn and ready as I leave the holly bushes for a whirlwind of feathers.
The two dozen waterbirds remind me of ones I’ve seen at the lake. Long-legged. Beaks like sword blades – thin, narrow, and deadly. Not cool blue gray, not paper white, but the color of the bubblegum sold at the Donners’ sweetshop. They dive again and again at Maysilee, who’s kneeling on the ground, trying to use a tarp as protection while she vehemently slices at them with her dagger. A couple of dead birds lie on the ground, but they have taken their toll. Blood blossoms from her cheek, her chest, the palm of her hand. Like Ampert’s squirrels, they have no interest in me. Programmed to target Maysilee in a very personal punishment. I hack away at the mutts with my ax, piling up a collection of rosy wings and legs like cattail stems, but they badly outnumber us.
A bird swoops down at a sharp angle, driving its beak through her throat. As it withdraws, I decapitate it, slicing through the skinny neck. I realize Maysilee’s beyond recovery when the flock clears out. Falling to my knees beside her, I reach for her sound hand, which grasps mine like a vise. Her wounded one curls up and rests in her nest of necklaces, which lays in a pool of blood. Through the rasping of her breath, she attempts to speak, but the last mutt silenced her voice with its wicked beak. Mine seems silenced as well, as no words of comfort or hope or apology make it out. I just stare into those burning blue eyes, letting her know she’s not dying alone. She’s with family. She’s with me.
In the last moments, she releases her grip enough to lock her pinkie around mine. Looking, I think, for a final confirmation of the promise we made to each other. I nod so she knows I understand and that I will try my best to bring the Capitol down, although I have never felt so powerless in my entire life.
And then she’s gone to wherever people go when they die.
She hasn’t begged or pleaded; she retained her fury and defiance. Although for me, a person’s desperation at the end is not a measure of their life, I know it mattered to her. Maysilee leaves the world the way she wanted, wounded but not bowed. I think about cleaning her up, but this is her final poster, and I won’t tidy it up to make it easier for those monsters in the Capitol to sleep tonight.
The hovercraft slides into view and the cannon booms. I remove her blowgun and one of her necklaces – the copper medallion with the flower – as a reminder of her strength.
Too numb to do much else, I scoot back about ten feet and prop myself against a tree, clutching her token to my chest. When the Capitol realizes I’m going nowhere, they lower the claw. I imagine the shot: my stricken face, visible through the metal talons as they lift Maysilee’s body up into the sky, leaving me all alone.
If something attacked me right now, I’d let it take me. I know, I know, I just made a deathbed promise to Maysilee to carry on the fight, but I can’t seem to rally. I pat her necklace against my pants to wipe off the blood – these black clothes just never stop giving – and hook the fancy clasp behind my neck to hang there with its friends. I’ve got my own jewelry collection now, what with District 9’s sunflower, Wyatt’s scrip coin, and Lenore Dove’s warring songbird and snake. Why, I’m almost as decorated as Miss Donner herself.
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