Impavid

Legs trembling, I collapsed, sitting down. I had walked for an hour, thirsty, somewhat lost and concerned about Finnick with every step that I took. Sitting down on my knees in front of a tree, I grabbed a knife, stabbing the tree and carving out a hole. The spile was with Katniss, but it didn’t mean that the trees didn’t have water. I carved a deep hole in it. Grabbing a leaf, I shoved it in there to act as a gutter.

For a moment, I waited, sweating and dying of thirst. Then water came out, bending the brim of the leaf. Holding it with the flat of my palm as support, I drank from the tip of the leaf, gulping large amounts of water until I felt bloated. When thirst wasn’t clawing at me, hunger was.

Grabbing my trident, I was able to stick a rat that looked about as unappetizing as it did smelling bad. In fact, I had wished I could find the bugs that I kept hearing, much rather wanting to eat those than to skin the rat. It was red, gamey meat, but all the same I cut it into strips before skewering it on the tip of stick, walking up to the force field a few yards away, singing the meet on it.

The first attempt caused my arm to bounce backwards when I touched the rat meat to the barrier. For the second time I smacked myself in the face, except this time with charred food. Wiping the grime from my face, I dumbly noted that there was still a knot on my forehead.

Cooking the strips by throwing it at the force field, I ate in silence, careful not to disturb the scab from my split lip. It tasted gamey, but it was better than nothing, my stomach pleased with being fed. Picking up my trident, I tried to decide what to do. I needed to find Finnick. That much was absolutely obvious. My biggest problem was going to be how to do that.

Walking down to the beach wasn’t an option. The careers would either be on the edge of the forest near the beach or on the beach itself, waiting for others to show their face. The arena was too small not to be seen by walking onto the white sand, and being solo, I couldn’t do that. No, I needed to figure out how to stay in the jungle, but find my friends.

Finnick was smart, though. Finnick would know that I wouldn’t come down to the beach alone, not when I was one of the few people in the arena who seem to be outnumbered. All considering, there were only a few people who I could run in to and not have to kill. That thought lead me to wonder if I would run into Johanna anywhere. After an hour, even her face would be a sight to see.

A step forward was as far as I got before a scream pierced through the air. It was a scream unlike anything else I ever heard, one that was almost foreign, because the last time he screamed like that, it was because I was leaving for the games. “Cain!” I screamed out to him, turning every which way. I suddenly didn’t care who could hear me. “Cain! Caindon!”

“Lana!” Cain screamed. Running, I followed the voice. Already there were tears in my eyes, my heart racing. Falling seemed to be my new best talent, as I tried to locate the sound of my brother screaming my name. I was panicking so bad that I could barely get my legs to work, falling down over and over again, scraping my palms. “Lana!”

I pulled up short. Cain was no where to be seen, but the voice was so incredibly close that I was trembling with terror as I looked around for him every which way, trying to figure out how it was that they could get my brother into the arena and what they’ve done to him. “Lana!” I looked up at the sound of the voice, my eyes falling on a bird. It was black with sleek feathers, something I had never seen before, but I read about. Sure enough, it opened it’s beak and screamed, “Lana! Help!”

Every ounce of me hated the capitol. I felt such a burning pain that I let out a savage scream, feeling the tissue in my throat tear, burning as I threw a knife at the bird, hitting it. It fell to the ground, feathers floating delicately. It hardly felt like anything because I began crying then, tasting blood in my mouth from damaging the tissue in my throat and from cracking the scab on my lip by screaming wildly.

The torture did not stop there. More screams filled the air around me and I cried harder, folding in on myself as I listened to them. Finnick. Cain. Mags. Both of my parents. That’s when I knew it wasn’t real, that it was just jabberjays who were twisted sounds. When I heard my parents voice, I knew that I was being manipulated. They would never have screamed for me.

Dragging myself to sit in the roots of a tree, I clutched my tridents. I covered my ears with my hands, closing my eyes and tucking my face into my knees, begging for the sounds to stop. But they kept going, louder and louder, a panoply of voices screaming my name, asking me to help them when they didn’t exist, when they weren’t there.

“My bonnie lies over the ocean,” I sang shakily to myself, lips trembling as I tried to recall the lullaby my brother used to sing to himself, “my bonnie lies over the sea. My bonnie lies over the ocean, oh bring back my bonnie to me.”

As the birds continued, my singing got louder until I was drowning them out with the lyrics, imaging that Cain was listening to my singing as he tried to sleep. I could see him in my minds eye, laying in bed with his blue eyes fluttering shut, a small pout to his lips as I brushed his brown hair back.

When the birds stopped, I was still singing. It was shaky and quiet, but it was hard to figure out how to stop. But when I finally shut my mouth and looked up, I wasn't so sure that I did. Just like before, I was alone. Licking my lips, I could taste the dried blood.

Sniffing I stood up. Positive that the viewers had one hell of a time watching me totally break down, I cut a vine, fashioning a strap. Tying it around each end of my extra trident, I put it on my back and began walking, no sense of direction guiding me other than trying to get out of the part of the forest where jabberjays existed.

As I walked, my mind began doing the math. So the fog stayed in it’s own part of the forest, and the jabberjays seemed to only be located where I was currently. No where else in the jungle had I seen or heard them. I knew there was a pattern. But I had no idea what that pattern was, other than it seemed different parts of the forest held different things. Problem was, I didn’t know which parts held what things.

Weighed down by thirst again, I stopped raising my knife to carve another hole into the tree. The canopy above me started moving then. I looked up, curious. The trees limbs started moving- no, they were growing. They were stretching out, moving and intertwining together.

It took me a minute to realize what was happening as the early morning sky that the sun had not yet touched began vanishing. Turning, I began to run back towards the jabberjay trees, not wanting to get stuck with whatever was happening to the forest around me.

Something knocked into my entire body. The wind escaped from my lungs and I coughed hard, spitting up blood that came from the wounds in my throat. My entire body was jarred but I rolled to my feet, slamming my fists against the invisible barrier. But it was no use, the section of jungle I was in was getting darker and darker, and the light was fading rapidly. Suddenly, the invisible barrier was no longer invisible, but turned a solid black color.

On a whim, I made the decision to turn around, tangling my trident in the strap of my other one, grabbing vines tightly and hauling myself into the tree. I kept going as quickly as I could. Just when I could not see anything around me, I sat in a pocket of the tree where four branches protruded, a small area that almost seemed like a burrow forming.

Digging myself in it, I pulled my knees into my chest. Complete blackness settled in on me. It weighed down on me and I got the sensation that I was passing out. It was so dark that I was seeing colors splash in front of my eyes from straining my eyes. After several minutes of trying to see but to no avail, I closed my eyes.

Without a primary sense, I sat in the tree, keeping my breathing even. Anxiety sat like a rock at the bottom of my stomach, but I kept breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. Long breaths helped keep my heart rate down. The dark would not kill me; it was simply a means of getting lost and walking into the force field or walking into something that could kill me.

After fifteen minutes of sitting and making up images in my head, something down below made me open my eyes. I rolled my eyes at myself, realizing I couldn’t see whatever it was that was walking heavily on the forest floor. Something told me it was another tribute from the quick, heavy steps and the lack of care to make less noise. No predator walked that loudly.

When the walking was right below the tree I was in, I could hear the frantic breathing and how uneven and stumbling the footsteps sounded. All at once, I stopped breathing. I wasn’t sure how I knew, or how I could feel it, but there was a presence above me. It was like there was a warm body over head, something coming lower and lower on the branches.

My heart began beating so fast that I was swallowing down the urge to vomit, still holding my breath. The blood rushing in my ears drowned out the sound of the walking below me. Something walked over me, barely missing my head as it crept onto the lower branches.

Using everything but site, I could smell something that told me it was an animal. Whether it was because it was musty, or just smelled like forest, I wasn’t sure. Regardless, I pressed my back into the branches, hearing a very soft purr that reminded me of the stray cats in my district. I remembered that the cats used to make a soft purring noise when they would hunt gulls.

The sound of something leaving the trees and hitting the ground quietly below sounded. Letting out my breath very slowly, I inhaled in slow again, using different breathing techniques to keep my breath as quiet as I possibly could. Holding the air in my lungs wasn’t hard in the slightest.

A blood curdling scream broke the silence, nearly knocking me out of the tree as I covered my ears and squeezed my eyes shut. A vicious snarl followed the screams, some sort of fight going out on the floor below me. I continued to squeeze my eyes shut, terror filled every cavern in my heart, pumping through the chest of my veins with every beat.

Canon fire confirmed my suspicion that whatever crawled over me was lethal. As a predator that lived in darkness, whatever it was had to be blind. In district four there were fish that lived deep down in the water where the sun could not reach. They all had huge eyes that tried to reflect light, but most of the fish were blind, going on other instincts like water currents and electricity. Whatever walked over me must have been going on smell and sound.

Knowing that being silent could only get me so far, I slowly removed my knife. Whatever was eating the tribute below me was still feasting, so I quickly ran the flat of my blade along the expanse of leaves, feeling the first layer of it’s skin peel away, the wet, sticky sap or whatever it was below hitting my fingers.

Pressing the leaves against my face, I cringed. I could smell the leaves juice, whatever it was. It was poignant and earthy, not unpleasant but not something that I preferred to smell like. I repeated the process several times, rubbing my neck, my hands, my suit and even my hair. There was no doubt in my mind that I looked like a jungle creature myself.

Silence down below me made me stop what I was doing. I leaned back against the tree again, completely frozen and breathing shallow. A vibration ran up the tree, signaling that the predator was coming back up. I shut my eyes and continued to level my breathing, not wanting it to hear my panicked breaths.

A warm body moved over me again. It stopped just as it poised itself over my head. I held my breath, knowing that I could go for ten minutes straight without breathing. As I lay there holding my breath, keeping my eyes closed and a hand gripped around the hilt of a knife, I couldn’t help but think back to an elderly man. He was one of the divers and he held the district four record for holding his breath for twenty-two minutes. That was absolutely beyond me when I had first heard of it, but as I lay under the prowling beast, I knew that I could very well set another record if it meant life or death.

As I lay there, completely immobile, three cannon shots went off, one after the other. Terror clawed at my chest, knowing how easily those three shots could be Finnick, Katniss and Peeta. I fought the urge to scream out for Finnick, biting my lip and keeping my breath in.

Three minutes into holding my breath and remaining completely still, the creature moved on. I could heard it slowly slink away, the heat of it’s body moving away from me. To be safe, I waited another two minutes until I slowly let my breath out.

Trying not to go insane, I waited until the darkness began to break up. A sigh of relief slide from my lungs as the canopy began creaking and pulling away, shafts of sunlight falling through the trees. For once, I have the feeling that the sunlight saved my life, though I wait until the darkness fades completely. Watching, I noted that it looked like it was being peeled away from right to left, like someone turning a page in a book.

The sound of something in the distance the opposite way from which I came disturbed me. I couldn't identify the growl, but it sounded like something mechanical mixed with beast, another zone in the jungle going off. “Like clockwork,” I muttered, stopping short in my sentence rolling the word around my mouth. Suddenly I thought of all the spokes- there were twelve. Twelve sounds that started at midnight when the lightning struck the tree, and the fog starting an hour after. “It’s a clock.”

Standing to jump down from the tree and find my friends to share the knowledge I froze, looking down and closing my eyes, not moving. Because right below me, only a few yards down, was half of the career pack, standing below me and looking around. For a moment, I was sure they would look up.