Four Weeks to Live

I saw several tributes trying to stay hidden in the trees. They failed miserably, due to the grey color of their outfits contrasting with the deep green of the leaves. I pretended not to notice them. I didn’t want to kill them, and if they didn’t try to kill me, I wouldn’t have to. Even though I’d resigned myself to dying before the games, my mindset had changed. I’d gone from focusing on my happiness to focusing on living. I hiked along, looking for a place I could stay hidden in when the sun rose. Maybe I’d find something useful dropped by someone in their scramble up the trees. They looked quite easy to climb. There were lots of branches lining the trunks, many of them thick. I spotted an animal and figured I’d try to hunt it. I had to get food some way, and I wasn’t sure about which plants were edible and which were poison. At the training center, Moss had been much better at it than I was. I slowly approached what seemed to be a little grass-eating thing. My mother once told me about things like it. I remembered her calling it a rabbit. We didn’t have any in District 6, but I was pretty sure it was edible. I threw a knife at it, but missed completely and scared it away. I guess I would have to rely on plants. Speaking of which, the rabbit was eating the grass, so I guessed it couldn’t be all bad. It probably contained some water as well, which was always a good thing. I sat there, silently chewing on it, and listened to the sounds around me. There was a bird hooting in the distance, a stream gurgling nearby, the sound of a few rocks falling down the mountain, and footsteps from somewhere behind me. I then realized that, despite the fact I had never been in one before, human footsteps probably weren’t a natural forest sound. I turned around to face the person sneaking up behind me and waved my knife around, hoping I would injure it enough to make it run in the opposite direction. I felt my knife slice into something and get yanked away from my hand. I took out the blade I’d gotten from the girl I’d killed and hoped that I’d injure the person even more. I already felt the person’s hands on my neck as we both kicked an struggled, moving close to a ledge neither of us knew was there. We started tumbling down, body over body, still trying desperately to live. I felt my body getting scraped up by everything we were rolling down. We were both getting each other’s blood all over. By the time we landed, I could tell the person was male. With my knife raised above his head, his knees pinning me down, I thought I was going to die. I started thinking over my entire life and how I’d lived it, when he spoke.

“Ivory?” He asked, confused. I recognized the voice.

“Hello Moss.”