Hunger Games: Lyme's First Tribute [2/4]
Title: Nobody Decent
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Violence, character death, torture
Characters: Lyme, Brutus, D2 OCs (Nero, Callista, Artemisia, Jasper)
Summary: District 2 Victor Lyme, two years fresh from the Arena, gets her first tribute to mentor. Her vow to remain aloof to avoid getting attached lasts until she finds Artemisia: wicked, irreverent, blase and a little unhinged, whose childhood photos showed bruises her Games training never put there.
Chapter Summary: The Arena goes live and the stakes are high. Just like with the Games themselves, training for mentoring and actually doing it are two very different animals.
Author's Notes: "I'm not sure I'll have enough for a whole Arena chapter", I said. One week later, 12k in and not done yet, I gave up and split it in half.
When she sits down in her chair at mentor central, Lyme can't stop the idiotic thought that she expected everything to be bigger. There's a fuzzy maybe-memory in the back of her mind of sitting at the kitchen table, propped up by a stack of books on her chair but still barely tall enough to see over the top. It's stupid but she'd half expected the consoles to be the same, the screen too high for her to reach, the headset sliding comically down over her ears like an oversized hat.
But no, the chair fits her fine -- a little small, almost -- and the keyboard sits dead even with the centre of her torso. There's even a mug for coffee or booze or whatever her poison of choice might be, sitting at the corner of her station and made for her big, broad District 2 hands. Brutus settles down in the chair next to her, and Lyme lets the strange thoughts skitter away.
The lights go up on the Arena. It's a ruined cityscape; the Gamemakers like that one, returning to it every decade or so. Broken pipes lie exposed in the streets, trickling water down the cracked paving stones, and that's a good sign in an environment without natural streams or vegetation except -- maybe not, not this year.
Last month Lyme met a Gamemaker's son at a party, took him home and fucked him in her Capitol apartment. She tied him down and worked him over until he begged her to let him come, but Lyme just fisted her hand in his hair and told him not unless he gave her a secret. He'd gasped out that she should expect to pay a lot of water this year, and Lyme let him finish and stroked his hair and drugged the glass of water she brought him so in the morning he'd remember nothing but a happy daze.
There's no reason to pay for water when the Arena is full of it, except -- oh, fuck.
Lyme hits her console while the countdown is still running, paging through the lists of supplies and tallying them against her initial sponsor reserves. It's not a lot -- she's a first-year mentor, not too much brand loyalty from the get-go -- but it's enough for a bottle of water. Brutus touches her arm and makes a hand signal, and Lyme is still learning the Two mentor-signs but she knows that one well enough: What are you doing?
She holds up one hand, palm out and fingers raised. Wait.
Brutus frowns, but advantage is everything, and the less the other mentors notice, the better. By now the countdown is in the final five seconds, and Artemisia has her eyes on the Cornucopia, knees bent and posture leaning forward as she readies to run. The gong sounds -- Artemisia dashes without waiting, and Lyme's breath turns hot and painful in her chest because that's what they were taught but she would've died her year if she had, what if there are mines this year too -- but then it's fine, they're clear. Artemisia reaches the mouth of the horn and grabs the nearest sword, spinning and slicing it straight across the chest of the Seven boy who went for a pack at the edge of the pile.
Six, meanwhile, grabs a knapsack from the perimeter, then carries the little boy from Ten past the danger zone before saluting and disappearing into the gap between two buildings. Lyme puts him out of her mind.
Artemisia takes out two more by the time the last of the outlying tributes have either died or fled, and she jogs back to the supplies to meet the rest of the Careers.
"There's plenty of water, at least," says Four Boy, glancing around. "We should take a drink and then wash off the blood before it starts stinking. Nothing like guts in the sun."
"You'd know, fisher boy," snickers the One girl, and her district partner gives her an appreciative snort.
Lyme's fingers hover over the button to summon the water canister, except how is she going to do it? Mentors are allowed to give their tributes hints, but there's a line, and she was never clear in training where it was. The last thing she wants to do is mark Artemisia for death by giving her a suggestion too soon.
Artemisia holds up a hand. "Wait," she says, voice sharpening, and Lyme lowers her hand. "Wait, there's something here, it looks like a camp stove."
"So?" Jasper nudges her out of the way and pokes at it with his foot.
"All the food in here is ready to eat rations," Artemisia says, rolling her eyes. "Are you going to boil your jerky, I don't think so. I think it's for the water."
Four Girl narrows her eyes, and she stalks the field for any tributes who are bleeding out but not dead. She finds one, the girl from Eleven, wide-eyed and gasping, and drags her over to one of the water pipes. "Have a drink," she says, and kicks the pipe with her foot until water runs over Eleven's face and into her mouth.
In less than a minute Eleven is dead, her lips purple and eyes bloodshot, throat bleeding from her fingernails as she clawed at her neck when her windpipe closed. "Shit," says Four Girl. "Okay guys, don't drink the water. Dammit."
Artemisia runs a hand through her hair, untangling the strands matted with the other tributes' blood. "Didn't burn her skin, so we're probably fine to wash with it as long as we keep it away from wounds," she says.
"She's smart," Brutus says with grudging approval. "That's good."
Lyme could snap at him that of course she's smart, she's brilliant and amazing, but keeps her mouth shut. Onscreen, Artemisia squabbles with One Boy over who gets custody of the only bottle of water found in the Cornucopia, while the others roll their eyes and sort through the packs as the cannons begin to fire.
That night, the Pack settle in around the campfire, arguing amiably over supplies and teasing each other for sloppy technique or exaggerated showing off in their earlier fights. The Four boy, a non-Volunteer eighteen-year-old named Luca who's a little saner and a little more disturbed by casual talk of carnage than the others, steps away from the fire to check his weapons, sitting on a pile of rubble and sharpening the tip of his harpoon.
Artemisia strolls over, hands in her pockets, and she's scrubbed the blood from her skin but a few patches remain on the side of her neck and under her fingernails. "Hey," she says. "Not gonna join the party?"
"I'm a little partied out after all that excitement," Luca says dryly, and it's a good mix of gallows humour with a touch of self-deprecation that works for Four but rarely for the other Careers. "You guys have fun."
Artemisia rocks back on her heels, then she reaches down and takes the harpoon, laying it aside. Four has just opened his mouth to protest when she slides sideways into his lap, presses him back against the broken concrete wall and kisses him full on the mouth. "You looked good out there," she says, sliding one hand up into his hair and curling the other lightly around his throat.
Four's pupils are blown and a flush invades his golden-tanned skin, and he grabs her hard around the waist and kisses back.
The main feed going out to the districts is angled best to catch the action, showing two kids so overcome by adrenaline and lust that they just can't help themselves, but Lyme cycles through the various cameras available to her console. And yeah, there it is -- even as Artemisia arches her spine into Four's touch and drags her nails across his scalp, her fingers twitch to check the positions of her wrist-sheathed knives, and every few seconds she slits one eye open toward the rest of the pack. It's an unnecessary precaution this soon in the game but it's a good sign that she's not getting complacent.
"Save some for tomorrow," calls out Skye, the male tribute from One, picking up a pebble of asphalt and lobbing it at them.
It hits Artemisia in the shoulder, and she leans back and grins at him, slow and obscene with the dancing firelight turning her face into something from a nightmare. "Good point," Artemisia says, getting to her feet and patting Luca on the cheek. "You assholes better not have eaten all the canned pears."
"Hey Luca, why don't you stand up and get us some more water?" One Girl guffaws, and Luca glares at her but doesn't move from his spot.
"I'm up for an orgy if you guys are jealous," Artemisia says, sprawling on her side by the fire and stretching out to show off her lanky frame to its best advantage. She's built lithe and boyish with none of Camphor from One's stunning curves, but she knows how to work what she has.
It's a testament to the Centre and its three years of intensive image training that the Pack actually exchanges furtive glances before Jasper snorts and tosses a crumpled newspaper onto the fire. "You're all perverts," he scoffs, and fields the accusing HEY! tossed at him by half the others by flinging up a rude gesture.
"Just because we don't get hard-ons at the sight of blood," Artemisia shoots back. Jasper aims a half-hearted kick at her, she pulls a face at him, but then the anthem sounds in preparation for the parade of the fallen. "Keep your hands out of your pants, speaking of sick," she says to Jasper, voice tinged with mocking. "Have respect for the dead."
"Oh, I'll have respect all right --"
"Shut up!" Four Girl snaps. She goes by Lyssa, and the sponsors already keep fumbling her and Luca's names. "It's starting."
Not even Jasper will talk through the parade, and they fall silent and tilt their heads up to watch the faces of the dead.
After the anthem, the Careers play five-finger fillet to see who stays behind with the supplies while the others take the first hunt. Lyssa's knife slips first, and she sighs and flings it down on the ground; the others cackle as she sticks her bleeding finger in her mouth. "Fine, fine," she grouses around her knuckle. "Bring me back something good if you find anything." Jasper grins, and she drops her hand, shaking it out and examining the cut. "And not a scalp or a body part, all right, don't be gross."
"I like to call it 'creative'," he says, picking up a sword with a curved, serrated blade and strapping it around his waist.
"Your boy is quite the charmer," calls over Dexter, this year's male mentor from One, and Callista smiles and inclines her head, swooping her hand out in an elaborate bow.
Brutus touches Lyme's shoulder. "You're gonna want to go down to the floor," he says in a low voice, and Lyme swallows a protest because she can't chase the fear that someone will run Artemisia through as soon as she turns her back on the screens. It's ridiculously unfounded on the first day, but still, stranger things. "This is the best time to get used to the sponsor den. Your girl's got three kills and they'll be hunting for another all night. Now's the time to lock in deals for later, when everyone's hopped up on the blood."
"They're also nicely intoxicated to celebrate a successful opening day," Callista adds, having wheeled her chair over without Lyme noticing. "He's right, this is a good inauguration for you."
Lyme frowns. "You're not coming?" she asks, since Callista is making no move to get up from her chair, instead popping one of her special mints into her mouth.
"My dear girl, I look at the sponsors and they practically murder each other in their attempts to throw money at me," Callista says airily, and in the background one of the outlying mentors gives them all a disgusted glare before turning back to his console. "I don't need the advantage, so you go and I'll watch the screens."
"I'm gonna grab a couple hours of sleep," Brutus says, and Lyme wouldn't have expected that from him except she learned about staggering shifts in training. Apparently regulation trumps Brutus' workaholic tendencies, at least sometimes. "Sucks to have graveyard your first night, but this is the best time for you to wrangle out a few promises."
Callista nods. "It also won't matter if you fail today, since the tributes aren't in need. You don't want your first attempt to be desperate."
Lyme nods. She'll be in the sponsor den all on her own, and Lyme has played the flirting game with them at parties before with neither side actually saying out loud what they're really discussing, but those were parties. Practice.
Nobody wins the Games from the platform, as they say, and Lyme nods. "All right," she says, and she leaves her headset on her console and exchanges it for the earpiece mentors wear while in the ring so their partner can contact them in case of emergencies.
"I'll contact you when they settle down, and then we can sleep," Callista says, which usually is around four. The Careers tend to hunt at night and rest through the pre-dawn and into the morning.
Brutus claps Lyme on the shoulder on his way out, and Lyme pauses in the doorway to glance back into the room. Most of the seats are empty; the mentors whose districts disqualified in the bloodbath have left, to sleep or drink or shoot up or whatever they do, and Lyme hopes she never, ever has to know. Others have slipped out to catch a nap while their tributes sleep. Callista leans back in her chair and draws a slim knife from nowhere, using it to shape the edges of her already perfect nails, and the Ones are watching the screens and commenting on the Pack's mandatory for-the-cameras banter.
The exception is Phillips, from Six, whose girl is dead and whose boy is sound asleep, curled up on the roof of a building far away from the Pack's current hunting grounds. Phillips sits rigid in his chair, hands curled around a mug of coffee large enough to brain someone with, ignoring the entire room. As Lyme watches he lifts one hand and presses his fingertips to the screen.
Lyme's mouth tightens and she turns away, hurrying down the corridor. Maybe if she walks fast enough she'll outrun Phillips laying a hand on the image of his boy's head.
Callista was right about the sponsors. A few of the other mentors are there, drinks in hand and mingling with the flock of brightly-coloured party-goers; most of the Capitol citizens are weaving on their feet, leaning on each other or the Victors and laughing far too loudly at their own terrible jokes. Lyme stops by the bar and orders herself a brandy; the Capitol-preferred vintages tend to be a little cloying and leave her mouth feeling fuzzy, but at least even overenthusiastic Capitolians tend to recognize it's meant to be drunk slowly. At her Victory Tour Nero had to half-carry Lyme back to her room after too many fizzy pink drinks were pressed into her hands. Turns out tasting like shitty fruit mixed with fairy farts doesn't stop something from being blindingly alcoholic out here.
Brandy is also not something a twenty-year-old usually orders, and right now, surrounded by veterans, the last thing Lyme wants them to remember is that she's only two years older than the girl she's trying to save.
Lyme has never liked people as a group; she mostly stayed away from the other kids at the Centre to focus on her training, and now in the Village she's still getting used to living with a bunch of other people that she doesn't actually hate or even prefer to ignore. Sponsors on the other hand are everything Lyme can't stand about humanity; they're loud, pushy, demanding and entitled, as well as stupid and frivolous with no connection to the real world or how life actually works. But these people, like it or not, saved her life, and any tribute she manages to pull will owe the same debt. Lyme puts on her best smile -- charming with a hint of danger -- and wades in.
The good news is, initial investment in Artemisia is high. Her nonchalance and laid-back attitude at the Reaping didn't earn her any favours in the pre-Arena polls, but her showing from the moment the countdown finished have put her near the top. Jasper, with his outright bloodlust and irreverence to life and decency and taste, has first place, but Lyme isn't worried about that, not yet.
Callista, historically, has done exactly what Lyme and Brutus feared this year: she chooses the villains for someone else's hero to defeat. Jasper has started too high, built his bar of crazy at a level where his most outrageous today will be commonplace tomorrow. Lyme's advisors drilled this into her in training, just like the trainers did when she was on the other side of the Arena forcefield; always leave room to build. Jasper started his Games from the top of the cliff, and there's nowhere to go but a long, hard fall to the bottom.
Jasper isn't the worry, from a sponsor perspective; he'll flame out, and Artemisia will outlast him. Six, though. Phillips' boy has nothing but potential, and the ties back home give him a context that Artemisia can't match. No Career can, since the Centre is their family and officially the Centre doesn't exist. No manufactured anecdotes will compare to Six and his bright-eyed, wistful smiles as he talked about the day he and Freddy (short for Winifred) kissed for the first time in the pouring rain.
Capitol citizens can be incredibly romantic for a group of people who sit around eating popcorn as children bleed to death in high definition.
"It was just such a beautiful story," says a blue-skinned woman whose name Lyme has instantly forgotten, and she secretly prays she won't be asked to repeat it. Lyme has files on all of them but after a while they bleed together. "I cried in his interviews, you know, when he gave that message to his future son? So incredibly touching! I'm sure that footage will be a family heirloom for years to come."
(Lyme had watched Six's interview backstage -- he'd proposed to Freddy from the stage, promised to buy her a ring with his winnings, then told their unborn baby he was proud -- and imagined the influx of sponsor funds over a bunch of sentimental drivel. Onstage Artemisia had kept her Career mask, a careful blend of boredom and mild scoffing, but backstage afterward she'd snarled and skewered a chair with her high-heeled shoe. "For fuck's sake," Artemisia had said, carving a stick figure into the upholstery and then slicing it straight through the middle, "I could talk about all the imaginary babies I'm going to have, how the fuck is that supposed to help?")
Now, Lyme nods and affects an expression of understanding. "It is very touching," she says. "I'm sure you're not the only one who feels that way. But these aren't the Feelings Games. They're not the Hugging Games. If this were a competition to see who could make the most people cry, then yes, Six would have the advantage, but it's not. These are the Hunger Games. It's not enough to have a reason to win, the tributes have to show they have the ability to do it. Artemisia can bring it home, and you don't have to watch her for more than a few minutes to get that."
The woman purses her lips, though her forehead doesn't move because she's altered it to remove the ability to wrinkle. "Are you sure you're giving the boy enough credit? You never know, those outlying districts can be quite resourceful. He could be holding something back, waiting to surprise us."
"That's what mentors say when they know they've got nothing," Lyme says bluntly. It's not exactly true -- tributes have come from behind at the last minute to win with a secret skill or hidden talent, like Beetee Latier and his electricity death trap -- but statistically it's not likely. "Maybe in two weeks he'll surprise everyone and do something exciting, I'm not saying I can tell the future. But just think back to your favourite Games, your favourite moments." She pauses for emphasis. "Your favourite Victors. Chances are they're not the ones who hid for weeks. They're the ones who showed everyone what they could do right from the start and never let you down."
"Hm," she says, tilting her head to one side, and for the first time a flash of shrewdness filters through the gossamer. Sponsors, Lyme's instructors drilled into her, are people with money, and no matter how they spend it, they always want to know it's worth it. They're not rich because they throw everything away on the first tribute they're asked to represent. "I suppose you have a point, but you get so many sponsors already, you know. I like to feel like my contribution is making a difference."
Lyme inhales a breath and holds it halfway, letting the building pressure in her head ground her. "So wait," she says. "Don't donate now. Let's give it five days; if Six hasn't done anything interesting -- he hasn't killed anyone, he hasn't shown any hidden talents -- then you sponsor Artemisia. If he does, then I'll be happy to admit that there's more to Six than he's showing."
The woman nods. "I will agree to that," she says, and she reaches into her purse -- shaped like one of the carnivorous squirrel mutts from the 50th, why for the love of rocks and mountains would anyone do that -- and pulls out her electronic thumbprint. Lyme hands her the device she carries that acts as her personal sponsor bank, and the woman keys in her donation, the timeframe, and seals it with her key. "Five days. We shall see."
Lyme smiles and presses the woman's hand, dialling back her strength so she barely grasps the soft, polished fingers rather than crushing them in a show of dominance like she was taught back at the Centre. "I hope we can be friends," she says. Never call it 'doing business' or the sponsors will treat it just as impersonally, her training module said. Build relationships. Make connections.
This time the woman smiles and inclines her head. "I hope so too," she says, then drifts away toward the tray of sugared desserts.
'Maybe' is not a 'yes', but at least it's something. All Six has to do is stay quiet for five days, and as far as the numbers go, dark horse outliers tend to lie low for the first week. Statistically it's a good shot.
There's a knot of younger men in the corner of the room, throwing darts haphazardly at a board, and Lyme rolls her shoulders, shaking off her polite negotiator mode and putting herself into her competitive headspace. Young men are stupid, they like to gamble, and Lyme isn't pretty enough that beating them will be seen as an affront to their masculinity. She can at least wrangle a tinderbox or anti-venom kit out of winning a competition.
Young men also don't drink brandy, and so Lyme abandons her drink at the corner and snags a bottle of beer. She lets her stance loosen and saunters up to the group. "Hey boys," she calls out, flashing them a sharp smile. "What'll you give me if I hit ten in a row?"
Two tributes -- the boy from Ten that Six carried to safety, and the girl from Five -- die the second day from drinking the poisoned water. By now the other mentors have sent water or a boiling pot or at least some kind of hint, and the remaining tributes know to stay away. The next day the Pack runs into the girl from Eight, and she's used to both the environment and casually starving enough that she made it past the second-day hump, but that isn't enough to save her. Artemisia takes the kill, bringing her total up to four, and the resulting feast from the sponsors placates Jasper when he complains that she didn't let him slice the girl up first.
"If you fuck how you fight, remind me to be glad we never did it," Artemisia says, licking a spot of lamb stew from the side of her thumb. "I'd probably fall asleep by the time you were done."
"Oh, really?" Jasper takes it in good humour, for him, which means skewering a piece of meat on the end of his dagger and eating it that way. Callista pinches the bridge of her nose and mutters something about manners. "I thought girls were supposed to like it better when it's not over in two minutes."
"Maybe he takes so long to kill because he's compensating," Camphor hypothesizes, shooting Artemisia a knowing grin that's impressively filthy given rumours that all female tributes from One have to be virgins going in. "Though if we're talking about compensating, maybe we should be looking at Luca and his spears."
They all eye the Four boy critically, and he rolls his eyes and takes another helping of stew while saying no comment. Artemisia just winks and says she has a pretty good idea, making him splutter on his next bite and spill all over himself.
Lyme's year, she was the butt of most of the sexual banter that the Pack is all but obligated to participate in. Her group had been a little less fake-friendly than this one, the Ones obviously in it to kill the other rather than providing a unified front, and she'd sat stone-faced through joke after joke about how her physique and looks and style obviously meant she went for women. When she had enough she'd made it stop, and as pack leader they'd listened to her even if they still shot jibes under their breath.
Artemisia walks the line well, kidding Jasper without undermining his authority as the one who gives the orders for the Careers, sticking him without turning all his wrath on her. At the end of the night she drops into Luca's lap again, and they kiss with his blade pressed against her ribs and hers pointed at his throat. This time both of them angle themselves for the cameras.
Brutus made out with the One girl his year, and Lyme has not and will never ask him if he's glad an earthquake took her out and he didn't have to kill her.
On Day Seven, there's what the live commentators like to call an 'upset'; at the recap they'll tease viewers with the promise of an exciting turn of events. The girl from Nine, quiet and sullen in her interviews, spends the early morning hours using a self-rigged pulley system to haul an enormous block of concrete up onto the roof above where the Career Pack is sleeping. They're just starting to stir when she pushes the chunk of stone over the edge, where it lands on Four's Lyssa and splatters her skull before she ever wakes.
The noise wakes the others before the cannon sounds, but Nine Girl dodges Luca's spear and scrambles away over the rooftops, disappearing into the maze of alleyways before the others can follow.
"Shit," mutters Skye, and he takes a few steps back and tosses his sword from hand to hand in a twitchy gesture. "Shit, that sucks. Do you think we should --" He waves one hand at the mess.
"It'll just look worse if we try to move anything," says his district partner. "She's from Four, she's got family watching. Let's don't."
Even Jasper licks his lips in distaste, hopping out of the way to avoid the growing puddle of blood. "What a coward way to off somebody, dropping a fucking rock. I hate outliers."
Artemisia just shrugs and shoulders her pack, lashing her sword to her waist. "They can't collect her if we're still here," she says. "We should get out of the way and let them take her."
They move out and watch the hovercraft descend from a distance. Once it disappears back up into the sky, Luca grits his teeth and hefts his spear. "You guys go ahead," he says. "I've got something I need to do."
Skye punches him in the arm. "Good hunting," he says, and Artemisia tosses a bag of dried fruit at Luca as he passes.
"Think he'll get her?" Camphor muses, watching them as he heads around a corner.
Artemisia makes a knife appear and disappear, flipping it between her fingers before hiding it in her jacket sleeve. "Bet you an apple he's back before tomorrow sunset."
A cannon goes off the next afternoon, and Luca finds the Pack a few hours later as they're playing cards while waiting for the water to boil. "Deal me in," he says, dropping to the ground between Artemisia and Camphor.
"Is it done?" Skye asks, sliding over the cards.
"It's done," Luca says, and picks up his hand without another word.
Camphor fishes an apple out of her bag and tosses it over his head to Artemisia, who takes a triumphant bite before offering to Luca. He shakes his head, and she shrugs and eats the rest of it herself.
Ten days in, the Pack runs into the thirteen-year-old from Twelve, a stick-thin boy who only managed to escape the bloodbath because all the Careers were busy killing someone else. The boy is hollow-eyed and skeletal, lips cracked and white and eyes rimmed with red from dehydration; unlike the others, he'd survived by sipping just enough of the toxic water to keep himself alive without being poisoned. Desperate, he'd tried to sneak into the Cornucopia to steal the Pack's canteen.
"Dibs," Jasper calls out, and before any of the others can complain, he hurls his knife through the air and catches the boy right in the stomach.
"You know that 'dibs' aren't actually a real thing," Artemisia says, hauling out the camp stove and gesturing at Camphor to bring over a pail of water. "We're not five."
"Okay then, in this case 'dibs' means 'if any of you touch him I'll peel your fucking eyes out'," Jasper says, cheerfully enough, and the others exchange rolled eyes behind his back.
Lyme barely registers the conversation, and the viewing figures show that the audience isn't paying attention, either. Most of the Capitol are tuned into the Six feed, where the boy has crammed himself into the mouth of a giant sewer pipe high enough off the ground that he can rest without worrying about being killed before the sound of approach wakes him up. He's talking to his girl, and Lyme refuses to switch on the audio but his expression is wistful, a soft smile playing on his face. It doesn't matter what he's saying; what matters is that support for him is climbing, and he's still alive after this long despite having no kills to his name.
If Six wins, desperate tributes will be pretending for years to have a baby back home in an attempt to cash in on the sympathy. Except he won't win, he can't, and Lyme turns her attention back to Artemisia and her crew.
She'd sent a sign this morning, when the Pack split up for more effective hunting before returning to the Cornucopia to regroup. Lyme used a massive chunk of funds earned from hours upon hours wrangling on the sponsor floor in order to buy Artemisia a bottle of water. Not just the standard canister but one with a built-in purification system, and a strip on the inside that measured the current effectiveness of the filter.
Artemisia took it and slipped it into her pack without even a flicker of recognition, and Lyme hoped her message went through. Now, they all sit in a ring around the fire, exchanging irritated glances as the boy from Twelve continues to whimper at the perimeter of their camp. Luca from Four looks particularly rattled, curling his fingers into fists with every blood-choked cry, and Artemisia reaches over and squeezes his hand.
It's a reassuring gesture that's entirely out of character for the persona she's been playing, and Lyme very carefully does not hold her breath.
They eat mostly in silence, poking at their rations with disinterest since the money for special treats dried up a few days ago. Each time the Twelve boy subsides Jasper leans over and pokes him, bringing him out of his pain-overload daze, and by the time they've finished their meal and are setting up camp and the cannon still hasn't fired, the rest of the Pack wears identical expressions of impatience.
Artemisia breaks the silence. She flings down her bedroll and plants her hands on her hips. "Jasper, if you don't end it, I will," she snaps.
"You just try it, bitch," Jasper snarls, striding over and putting herself in her space, knife bared and gleaming in the firelight. "This one's mine and I'll do him how I want. You stay out of it."
Artemisia narrows her eyes, but he's in between her and the Twelve and his knife is pointed squarely at her gut. "Well I wish someone would just kill him, anyway," she says, her tone turning petulant, almost whining. "I'm tired and I want to sleep, and I can't with the meat crying into my ear all night."
Jasper sneers at her about how to him it's like a lullaby so she may as well suck it, but then behind him, Luca glides to his feet and draws his dagger as the Ones pretend not to notice. He kneels by the boy from Twelve, covers his mouth and nose with one hand and slits his throat in a smooth, practiced motion.
The cannon fires, and Jasper whirls around, hands now bristling with knives. "The fuck?" he shouts, and Artemisia scrambles back and away, snatching up her pack and shoving a few packages of dried meat and fruit into it while the others turn to watch the action. "You asshole, that was mine! You kill-stealing shark-fucking son of a fishwife --"
Luca launches himself at Jasper as the Ones leap to their feet and grab their weapons. Artemisia, meanwhile, has flung her pack over her shoulders and taken off running, muttering 'shit shit shit shit' in a carefully-panicked undertone, looking for all the world like she didn't just orchestrate the whole thing. Lyme's chest swells with pride as her girl widens the distance between her and the Pack until none of them will be able to catch her tonight, even with a direct trail.
Back at the campfire, Luca discovers that whatever training he got at the Athletic Club in his home district is no match for a Two with a head stuffed full of crazy and a taste for blood that was interrupted before it could be slaked. Within minutes Luca has gone from taking on Jasper full-on to scrabbling to defend himself, and at last he throws himself out of reach and takes off running.
"Coward!" Jasper yells after him, eyes wide and mouth flecked with foam, just as the Ones appear behind him and drive their blades straight through his back.
Callista clicks her teeth and lays her headset down on her console as the cannon booms. Jasper collapses in a heap, blood pooling from the twin wounds and mingling with the dusty cement. "Sloppy," she says, her voice calm and even just like the line indicating Jasper's lack of vitals. "Leaving himself wide open like that, he knew better."
Onscreen the Ones drag the bodies out of the way, then return to the camp, laughing as they pick through the bounty that now belongs only to them. "Suckers," Camphor says, delighted, and she tosses her district partner an apple that's only slightly bruised. "Twos, man, bunch of volatile monkeys."
"Did you see how the girl took off as soon as it got messy?" Skye takes a bite of his apple, teeth cutting through the skin in a savage motion. "So much for famous District 2 courage."
Camphor shrugs. "Told you she was all talk, but now she'll see. We've got all the supplies, and she doesn't even have water. We might not even have to kill her."
Lyme runs a hand through her hair, unsurprised when her fingers come back slick with sweat.
That night, something else happens over on the private Six feed, accessible only by the Gamemakers and Phillips at his personal console. Whatever it is, they've decided it's too much for the public channel, and Phillips sucks in hard, wet breaths and fists both hands in his hair. That means a breakdown, and not the pretty, camera-ready ones that fill the audiences with glee and have them reaching for their snacks. It'll be the desperate kind, the kind that might make people stop and consider for a moment that these are just kids who are tired and scared and want to go home. They enjoy the spectacle; not so much the messy, snot-smeared moments that bring reality into focus.
"Shit," Brutus mutters. "This ain't right, I'm gonna let him sleep."
Lyme gives him a sharp look. They help each other out, sure, but Careers don't offer to take shifts for outlying mentors. That's page one in the manual. "You're going soft now?"
Brutus just waves a hand at Phillips, sitting with his head in his hands as the public feed flickers back on, his boy curled into a ball in his hiding place and twitching in a restless sleep. Brutus and Phillips are the same age and came out a year apart, and maybe it's a macho man bonding thing, Lyme will never understand. "It's not like it'll hurt our girl to let Phillips get some shut-eye. The kids all separated and they'll be looking for a place to hunker down and figure out what they're doing. Nothing's happening tonight."
Lyme would argue, but Brutus has his jaw set and his eyebrows furrowed so there's no point. Pacing-wise it wouldn't make sense for the Gamemakers to flood the Arena or send in a pack of mutts tonight, not after two kills in short succession. If Brutus is going to go all noble and stupid over a man who's only in this chair night after night because his fellow mentors are out sticking needles in their skin and can't be trusted not to spend out their sponsor reserves on candy and face paints, well, tonight's the night to do it. He'll get reprimanded if Games Command finds out -- you do not help the competition, ever -- and it's not Lyme's problem.
Brutus ambles over and clasps Phillips' shoulder, and Lyme doesn't bother to watch the exchange. On the Two feed, Artemisia has found herself a building to hole up in for the night, and she goes through her supplies with a determined expression.
"It doesn't make you better," says a voice from across the room, and Lyme whirls to see the male mentor from Ten -- what's his name, Edward, no, Edwin -- staring out at them with narrowed eyes. He's driven Lyme half to distraction all week by drumming two pencils against the console every time he concentrates, and now his face is set in an ugly mask. "You make me sick. You think you're so noble, letting him sleep, when you're all just murderers, and so are your little monsters."
Brutus says nothing, doesn't even move from his spot in Phillips' chair with his back to the room. Lyme would love to start a fight but she's not that stupid, not when that's a one-way ticket to her getting banned from the premises, and so she deliberately turns away and goes back to her station.
Dexter, at Lyme's left, lets out a loud, conspicuous snort. "Right," he drawls, rolling his eyes companionably at Lyme. "Takes one to know one, you hypocritical fuck."
Edwin's chair creaks as he flings himself out of it, and Dexter rises with deliberate, deadly grace, a manic grin twitching on his face. "Oh for fuck's sake," Brutus mutters from across the room, but he's not the reason they back down.
That reason is Mags, whose staccato "Enough!" cuts through the room like a gunshot. Both men startle, and she's half their size and over twice their age and doesn't stand or even bother to look at them, but they sit down. The tension in the room dissipates, replaced by an awkward hum of apology.
Mags doesn't bother to lecture after that, just shakes her head ever so slightly as she scrolls through pages of information on her console.
"Well this was entertaining," Callista says in a mild tone. "Lyme, I'll take over for you in the morning shift."
"Yeah," Lyme says. She's too keyed up to sleep anyway.
Callista glides away, and Dexter glances over. "She's going to go knife someone in an alley," he says at a volume too low for Edwin to hear, and Lyme blinks at him. "She took me out when both of ours went out in the volcano back in the Quell. She does it whenever her kids lose. Doesn't kill him, says she promised her mentor she wouldn't, but it's damn close."
Lyme turns back to stare at the door that Callista exited through. "Oh," she says, sounding like an idiot, but what else is there to say? She's lived in the same village as Callista for two years and didn't know that. Snow only knows what else about her fellow Victors would come as a surprise.
"Yeah, not everyone gets smashed," Dexter says, leaning back and stretching his arms over his head until his joints pop. "You'll get to know everyone's quirks soon enough."
Lyme nods and tugs her headset back on over her ears, and she immerses herself in the real-time polling data now flooding the charts to stop herself from wondering what, in ten years, they'll be whispering to the baby mentors about her.
Onscreen, Artemisia settles in for the night, keeping her bag with the precious water bottle tucked in against her side.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Violence, character death, torture
Characters: Lyme, Brutus, D2 OCs (Nero, Callista, Artemisia, Jasper)
Summary: District 2 Victor Lyme, two years fresh from the Arena, gets her first tribute to mentor. Her vow to remain aloof to avoid getting attached lasts until she finds Artemisia: wicked, irreverent, blase and a little unhinged, whose childhood photos showed bruises her Games training never put there.
Chapter Summary: The Arena goes live and the stakes are high. Just like with the Games themselves, training for mentoring and actually doing it are two very different animals.
Author's Notes: "I'm not sure I'll have enough for a whole Arena chapter", I said. One week later, 12k in and not done yet, I gave up and split it in half.
When she sits down in her chair at mentor central, Lyme can't stop the idiotic thought that she expected everything to be bigger. There's a fuzzy maybe-memory in the back of her mind of sitting at the kitchen table, propped up by a stack of books on her chair but still barely tall enough to see over the top. It's stupid but she'd half expected the consoles to be the same, the screen too high for her to reach, the headset sliding comically down over her ears like an oversized hat.
But no, the chair fits her fine -- a little small, almost -- and the keyboard sits dead even with the centre of her torso. There's even a mug for coffee or booze or whatever her poison of choice might be, sitting at the corner of her station and made for her big, broad District 2 hands. Brutus settles down in the chair next to her, and Lyme lets the strange thoughts skitter away.
The lights go up on the Arena. It's a ruined cityscape; the Gamemakers like that one, returning to it every decade or so. Broken pipes lie exposed in the streets, trickling water down the cracked paving stones, and that's a good sign in an environment without natural streams or vegetation except -- maybe not, not this year.
Last month Lyme met a Gamemaker's son at a party, took him home and fucked him in her Capitol apartment. She tied him down and worked him over until he begged her to let him come, but Lyme just fisted her hand in his hair and told him not unless he gave her a secret. He'd gasped out that she should expect to pay a lot of water this year, and Lyme let him finish and stroked his hair and drugged the glass of water she brought him so in the morning he'd remember nothing but a happy daze.
There's no reason to pay for water when the Arena is full of it, except -- oh, fuck.
Lyme hits her console while the countdown is still running, paging through the lists of supplies and tallying them against her initial sponsor reserves. It's not a lot -- she's a first-year mentor, not too much brand loyalty from the get-go -- but it's enough for a bottle of water. Brutus touches her arm and makes a hand signal, and Lyme is still learning the Two mentor-signs but she knows that one well enough: What are you doing?
She holds up one hand, palm out and fingers raised. Wait.
Brutus frowns, but advantage is everything, and the less the other mentors notice, the better. By now the countdown is in the final five seconds, and Artemisia has her eyes on the Cornucopia, knees bent and posture leaning forward as she readies to run. The gong sounds -- Artemisia dashes without waiting, and Lyme's breath turns hot and painful in her chest because that's what they were taught but she would've died her year if she had, what if there are mines this year too -- but then it's fine, they're clear. Artemisia reaches the mouth of the horn and grabs the nearest sword, spinning and slicing it straight across the chest of the Seven boy who went for a pack at the edge of the pile.
Six, meanwhile, grabs a knapsack from the perimeter, then carries the little boy from Ten past the danger zone before saluting and disappearing into the gap between two buildings. Lyme puts him out of her mind.
Artemisia takes out two more by the time the last of the outlying tributes have either died or fled, and she jogs back to the supplies to meet the rest of the Careers.
"There's plenty of water, at least," says Four Boy, glancing around. "We should take a drink and then wash off the blood before it starts stinking. Nothing like guts in the sun."
"You'd know, fisher boy," snickers the One girl, and her district partner gives her an appreciative snort.
Lyme's fingers hover over the button to summon the water canister, except how is she going to do it? Mentors are allowed to give their tributes hints, but there's a line, and she was never clear in training where it was. The last thing she wants to do is mark Artemisia for death by giving her a suggestion too soon.
Artemisia holds up a hand. "Wait," she says, voice sharpening, and Lyme lowers her hand. "Wait, there's something here, it looks like a camp stove."
"So?" Jasper nudges her out of the way and pokes at it with his foot.
"All the food in here is ready to eat rations," Artemisia says, rolling her eyes. "Are you going to boil your jerky, I don't think so. I think it's for the water."
Four Girl narrows her eyes, and she stalks the field for any tributes who are bleeding out but not dead. She finds one, the girl from Eleven, wide-eyed and gasping, and drags her over to one of the water pipes. "Have a drink," she says, and kicks the pipe with her foot until water runs over Eleven's face and into her mouth.
In less than a minute Eleven is dead, her lips purple and eyes bloodshot, throat bleeding from her fingernails as she clawed at her neck when her windpipe closed. "Shit," says Four Girl. "Okay guys, don't drink the water. Dammit."
Artemisia runs a hand through her hair, untangling the strands matted with the other tributes' blood. "Didn't burn her skin, so we're probably fine to wash with it as long as we keep it away from wounds," she says.
"She's smart," Brutus says with grudging approval. "That's good."
Lyme could snap at him that of course she's smart, she's brilliant and amazing, but keeps her mouth shut. Onscreen, Artemisia squabbles with One Boy over who gets custody of the only bottle of water found in the Cornucopia, while the others roll their eyes and sort through the packs as the cannons begin to fire.
That night, the Pack settle in around the campfire, arguing amiably over supplies and teasing each other for sloppy technique or exaggerated showing off in their earlier fights. The Four boy, a non-Volunteer eighteen-year-old named Luca who's a little saner and a little more disturbed by casual talk of carnage than the others, steps away from the fire to check his weapons, sitting on a pile of rubble and sharpening the tip of his harpoon.
Artemisia strolls over, hands in her pockets, and she's scrubbed the blood from her skin but a few patches remain on the side of her neck and under her fingernails. "Hey," she says. "Not gonna join the party?"
"I'm a little partied out after all that excitement," Luca says dryly, and it's a good mix of gallows humour with a touch of self-deprecation that works for Four but rarely for the other Careers. "You guys have fun."
Artemisia rocks back on her heels, then she reaches down and takes the harpoon, laying it aside. Four has just opened his mouth to protest when she slides sideways into his lap, presses him back against the broken concrete wall and kisses him full on the mouth. "You looked good out there," she says, sliding one hand up into his hair and curling the other lightly around his throat.
Four's pupils are blown and a flush invades his golden-tanned skin, and he grabs her hard around the waist and kisses back.
The main feed going out to the districts is angled best to catch the action, showing two kids so overcome by adrenaline and lust that they just can't help themselves, but Lyme cycles through the various cameras available to her console. And yeah, there it is -- even as Artemisia arches her spine into Four's touch and drags her nails across his scalp, her fingers twitch to check the positions of her wrist-sheathed knives, and every few seconds she slits one eye open toward the rest of the pack. It's an unnecessary precaution this soon in the game but it's a good sign that she's not getting complacent.
"Save some for tomorrow," calls out Skye, the male tribute from One, picking up a pebble of asphalt and lobbing it at them.
It hits Artemisia in the shoulder, and she leans back and grins at him, slow and obscene with the dancing firelight turning her face into something from a nightmare. "Good point," Artemisia says, getting to her feet and patting Luca on the cheek. "You assholes better not have eaten all the canned pears."
"Hey Luca, why don't you stand up and get us some more water?" One Girl guffaws, and Luca glares at her but doesn't move from his spot.
"I'm up for an orgy if you guys are jealous," Artemisia says, sprawling on her side by the fire and stretching out to show off her lanky frame to its best advantage. She's built lithe and boyish with none of Camphor from One's stunning curves, but she knows how to work what she has.
It's a testament to the Centre and its three years of intensive image training that the Pack actually exchanges furtive glances before Jasper snorts and tosses a crumpled newspaper onto the fire. "You're all perverts," he scoffs, and fields the accusing HEY! tossed at him by half the others by flinging up a rude gesture.
"Just because we don't get hard-ons at the sight of blood," Artemisia shoots back. Jasper aims a half-hearted kick at her, she pulls a face at him, but then the anthem sounds in preparation for the parade of the fallen. "Keep your hands out of your pants, speaking of sick," she says to Jasper, voice tinged with mocking. "Have respect for the dead."
"Oh, I'll have respect all right --"
"Shut up!" Four Girl snaps. She goes by Lyssa, and the sponsors already keep fumbling her and Luca's names. "It's starting."
Not even Jasper will talk through the parade, and they fall silent and tilt their heads up to watch the faces of the dead.
After the anthem, the Careers play five-finger fillet to see who stays behind with the supplies while the others take the first hunt. Lyssa's knife slips first, and she sighs and flings it down on the ground; the others cackle as she sticks her bleeding finger in her mouth. "Fine, fine," she grouses around her knuckle. "Bring me back something good if you find anything." Jasper grins, and she drops her hand, shaking it out and examining the cut. "And not a scalp or a body part, all right, don't be gross."
"I like to call it 'creative'," he says, picking up a sword with a curved, serrated blade and strapping it around his waist.
"Your boy is quite the charmer," calls over Dexter, this year's male mentor from One, and Callista smiles and inclines her head, swooping her hand out in an elaborate bow.
Brutus touches Lyme's shoulder. "You're gonna want to go down to the floor," he says in a low voice, and Lyme swallows a protest because she can't chase the fear that someone will run Artemisia through as soon as she turns her back on the screens. It's ridiculously unfounded on the first day, but still, stranger things. "This is the best time to get used to the sponsor den. Your girl's got three kills and they'll be hunting for another all night. Now's the time to lock in deals for later, when everyone's hopped up on the blood."
"They're also nicely intoxicated to celebrate a successful opening day," Callista adds, having wheeled her chair over without Lyme noticing. "He's right, this is a good inauguration for you."
Lyme frowns. "You're not coming?" she asks, since Callista is making no move to get up from her chair, instead popping one of her special mints into her mouth.
"My dear girl, I look at the sponsors and they practically murder each other in their attempts to throw money at me," Callista says airily, and in the background one of the outlying mentors gives them all a disgusted glare before turning back to his console. "I don't need the advantage, so you go and I'll watch the screens."
"I'm gonna grab a couple hours of sleep," Brutus says, and Lyme wouldn't have expected that from him except she learned about staggering shifts in training. Apparently regulation trumps Brutus' workaholic tendencies, at least sometimes. "Sucks to have graveyard your first night, but this is the best time for you to wrangle out a few promises."
Callista nods. "It also won't matter if you fail today, since the tributes aren't in need. You don't want your first attempt to be desperate."
Lyme nods. She'll be in the sponsor den all on her own, and Lyme has played the flirting game with them at parties before with neither side actually saying out loud what they're really discussing, but those were parties. Practice.
Nobody wins the Games from the platform, as they say, and Lyme nods. "All right," she says, and she leaves her headset on her console and exchanges it for the earpiece mentors wear while in the ring so their partner can contact them in case of emergencies.
"I'll contact you when they settle down, and then we can sleep," Callista says, which usually is around four. The Careers tend to hunt at night and rest through the pre-dawn and into the morning.
Brutus claps Lyme on the shoulder on his way out, and Lyme pauses in the doorway to glance back into the room. Most of the seats are empty; the mentors whose districts disqualified in the bloodbath have left, to sleep or drink or shoot up or whatever they do, and Lyme hopes she never, ever has to know. Others have slipped out to catch a nap while their tributes sleep. Callista leans back in her chair and draws a slim knife from nowhere, using it to shape the edges of her already perfect nails, and the Ones are watching the screens and commenting on the Pack's mandatory for-the-cameras banter.
The exception is Phillips, from Six, whose girl is dead and whose boy is sound asleep, curled up on the roof of a building far away from the Pack's current hunting grounds. Phillips sits rigid in his chair, hands curled around a mug of coffee large enough to brain someone with, ignoring the entire room. As Lyme watches he lifts one hand and presses his fingertips to the screen.
Lyme's mouth tightens and she turns away, hurrying down the corridor. Maybe if she walks fast enough she'll outrun Phillips laying a hand on the image of his boy's head.
Callista was right about the sponsors. A few of the other mentors are there, drinks in hand and mingling with the flock of brightly-coloured party-goers; most of the Capitol citizens are weaving on their feet, leaning on each other or the Victors and laughing far too loudly at their own terrible jokes. Lyme stops by the bar and orders herself a brandy; the Capitol-preferred vintages tend to be a little cloying and leave her mouth feeling fuzzy, but at least even overenthusiastic Capitolians tend to recognize it's meant to be drunk slowly. At her Victory Tour Nero had to half-carry Lyme back to her room after too many fizzy pink drinks were pressed into her hands. Turns out tasting like shitty fruit mixed with fairy farts doesn't stop something from being blindingly alcoholic out here.
Brandy is also not something a twenty-year-old usually orders, and right now, surrounded by veterans, the last thing Lyme wants them to remember is that she's only two years older than the girl she's trying to save.
Lyme has never liked people as a group; she mostly stayed away from the other kids at the Centre to focus on her training, and now in the Village she's still getting used to living with a bunch of other people that she doesn't actually hate or even prefer to ignore. Sponsors on the other hand are everything Lyme can't stand about humanity; they're loud, pushy, demanding and entitled, as well as stupid and frivolous with no connection to the real world or how life actually works. But these people, like it or not, saved her life, and any tribute she manages to pull will owe the same debt. Lyme puts on her best smile -- charming with a hint of danger -- and wades in.
The good news is, initial investment in Artemisia is high. Her nonchalance and laid-back attitude at the Reaping didn't earn her any favours in the pre-Arena polls, but her showing from the moment the countdown finished have put her near the top. Jasper, with his outright bloodlust and irreverence to life and decency and taste, has first place, but Lyme isn't worried about that, not yet.
Callista, historically, has done exactly what Lyme and Brutus feared this year: she chooses the villains for someone else's hero to defeat. Jasper has started too high, built his bar of crazy at a level where his most outrageous today will be commonplace tomorrow. Lyme's advisors drilled this into her in training, just like the trainers did when she was on the other side of the Arena forcefield; always leave room to build. Jasper started his Games from the top of the cliff, and there's nowhere to go but a long, hard fall to the bottom.
Jasper isn't the worry, from a sponsor perspective; he'll flame out, and Artemisia will outlast him. Six, though. Phillips' boy has nothing but potential, and the ties back home give him a context that Artemisia can't match. No Career can, since the Centre is their family and officially the Centre doesn't exist. No manufactured anecdotes will compare to Six and his bright-eyed, wistful smiles as he talked about the day he and Freddy (short for Winifred) kissed for the first time in the pouring rain.
Capitol citizens can be incredibly romantic for a group of people who sit around eating popcorn as children bleed to death in high definition.
"It was just such a beautiful story," says a blue-skinned woman whose name Lyme has instantly forgotten, and she secretly prays she won't be asked to repeat it. Lyme has files on all of them but after a while they bleed together. "I cried in his interviews, you know, when he gave that message to his future son? So incredibly touching! I'm sure that footage will be a family heirloom for years to come."
(Lyme had watched Six's interview backstage -- he'd proposed to Freddy from the stage, promised to buy her a ring with his winnings, then told their unborn baby he was proud -- and imagined the influx of sponsor funds over a bunch of sentimental drivel. Onstage Artemisia had kept her Career mask, a careful blend of boredom and mild scoffing, but backstage afterward she'd snarled and skewered a chair with her high-heeled shoe. "For fuck's sake," Artemisia had said, carving a stick figure into the upholstery and then slicing it straight through the middle, "I could talk about all the imaginary babies I'm going to have, how the fuck is that supposed to help?")
Now, Lyme nods and affects an expression of understanding. "It is very touching," she says. "I'm sure you're not the only one who feels that way. But these aren't the Feelings Games. They're not the Hugging Games. If this were a competition to see who could make the most people cry, then yes, Six would have the advantage, but it's not. These are the Hunger Games. It's not enough to have a reason to win, the tributes have to show they have the ability to do it. Artemisia can bring it home, and you don't have to watch her for more than a few minutes to get that."
The woman purses her lips, though her forehead doesn't move because she's altered it to remove the ability to wrinkle. "Are you sure you're giving the boy enough credit? You never know, those outlying districts can be quite resourceful. He could be holding something back, waiting to surprise us."
"That's what mentors say when they know they've got nothing," Lyme says bluntly. It's not exactly true -- tributes have come from behind at the last minute to win with a secret skill or hidden talent, like Beetee Latier and his electricity death trap -- but statistically it's not likely. "Maybe in two weeks he'll surprise everyone and do something exciting, I'm not saying I can tell the future. But just think back to your favourite Games, your favourite moments." She pauses for emphasis. "Your favourite Victors. Chances are they're not the ones who hid for weeks. They're the ones who showed everyone what they could do right from the start and never let you down."
"Hm," she says, tilting her head to one side, and for the first time a flash of shrewdness filters through the gossamer. Sponsors, Lyme's instructors drilled into her, are people with money, and no matter how they spend it, they always want to know it's worth it. They're not rich because they throw everything away on the first tribute they're asked to represent. "I suppose you have a point, but you get so many sponsors already, you know. I like to feel like my contribution is making a difference."
Lyme inhales a breath and holds it halfway, letting the building pressure in her head ground her. "So wait," she says. "Don't donate now. Let's give it five days; if Six hasn't done anything interesting -- he hasn't killed anyone, he hasn't shown any hidden talents -- then you sponsor Artemisia. If he does, then I'll be happy to admit that there's more to Six than he's showing."
The woman nods. "I will agree to that," she says, and she reaches into her purse -- shaped like one of the carnivorous squirrel mutts from the 50th, why for the love of rocks and mountains would anyone do that -- and pulls out her electronic thumbprint. Lyme hands her the device she carries that acts as her personal sponsor bank, and the woman keys in her donation, the timeframe, and seals it with her key. "Five days. We shall see."
Lyme smiles and presses the woman's hand, dialling back her strength so she barely grasps the soft, polished fingers rather than crushing them in a show of dominance like she was taught back at the Centre. "I hope we can be friends," she says. Never call it 'doing business' or the sponsors will treat it just as impersonally, her training module said. Build relationships. Make connections.
This time the woman smiles and inclines her head. "I hope so too," she says, then drifts away toward the tray of sugared desserts.
'Maybe' is not a 'yes', but at least it's something. All Six has to do is stay quiet for five days, and as far as the numbers go, dark horse outliers tend to lie low for the first week. Statistically it's a good shot.
There's a knot of younger men in the corner of the room, throwing darts haphazardly at a board, and Lyme rolls her shoulders, shaking off her polite negotiator mode and putting herself into her competitive headspace. Young men are stupid, they like to gamble, and Lyme isn't pretty enough that beating them will be seen as an affront to their masculinity. She can at least wrangle a tinderbox or anti-venom kit out of winning a competition.
Young men also don't drink brandy, and so Lyme abandons her drink at the corner and snags a bottle of beer. She lets her stance loosen and saunters up to the group. "Hey boys," she calls out, flashing them a sharp smile. "What'll you give me if I hit ten in a row?"
Two tributes -- the boy from Ten that Six carried to safety, and the girl from Five -- die the second day from drinking the poisoned water. By now the other mentors have sent water or a boiling pot or at least some kind of hint, and the remaining tributes know to stay away. The next day the Pack runs into the girl from Eight, and she's used to both the environment and casually starving enough that she made it past the second-day hump, but that isn't enough to save her. Artemisia takes the kill, bringing her total up to four, and the resulting feast from the sponsors placates Jasper when he complains that she didn't let him slice the girl up first.
"If you fuck how you fight, remind me to be glad we never did it," Artemisia says, licking a spot of lamb stew from the side of her thumb. "I'd probably fall asleep by the time you were done."
"Oh, really?" Jasper takes it in good humour, for him, which means skewering a piece of meat on the end of his dagger and eating it that way. Callista pinches the bridge of her nose and mutters something about manners. "I thought girls were supposed to like it better when it's not over in two minutes."
"Maybe he takes so long to kill because he's compensating," Camphor hypothesizes, shooting Artemisia a knowing grin that's impressively filthy given rumours that all female tributes from One have to be virgins going in. "Though if we're talking about compensating, maybe we should be looking at Luca and his spears."
They all eye the Four boy critically, and he rolls his eyes and takes another helping of stew while saying no comment. Artemisia just winks and says she has a pretty good idea, making him splutter on his next bite and spill all over himself.
Lyme's year, she was the butt of most of the sexual banter that the Pack is all but obligated to participate in. Her group had been a little less fake-friendly than this one, the Ones obviously in it to kill the other rather than providing a unified front, and she'd sat stone-faced through joke after joke about how her physique and looks and style obviously meant she went for women. When she had enough she'd made it stop, and as pack leader they'd listened to her even if they still shot jibes under their breath.
Artemisia walks the line well, kidding Jasper without undermining his authority as the one who gives the orders for the Careers, sticking him without turning all his wrath on her. At the end of the night she drops into Luca's lap again, and they kiss with his blade pressed against her ribs and hers pointed at his throat. This time both of them angle themselves for the cameras.
Brutus made out with the One girl his year, and Lyme has not and will never ask him if he's glad an earthquake took her out and he didn't have to kill her.
On Day Seven, there's what the live commentators like to call an 'upset'; at the recap they'll tease viewers with the promise of an exciting turn of events. The girl from Nine, quiet and sullen in her interviews, spends the early morning hours using a self-rigged pulley system to haul an enormous block of concrete up onto the roof above where the Career Pack is sleeping. They're just starting to stir when she pushes the chunk of stone over the edge, where it lands on Four's Lyssa and splatters her skull before she ever wakes.
The noise wakes the others before the cannon sounds, but Nine Girl dodges Luca's spear and scrambles away over the rooftops, disappearing into the maze of alleyways before the others can follow.
"Shit," mutters Skye, and he takes a few steps back and tosses his sword from hand to hand in a twitchy gesture. "Shit, that sucks. Do you think we should --" He waves one hand at the mess.
"It'll just look worse if we try to move anything," says his district partner. "She's from Four, she's got family watching. Let's don't."
Even Jasper licks his lips in distaste, hopping out of the way to avoid the growing puddle of blood. "What a coward way to off somebody, dropping a fucking rock. I hate outliers."
Artemisia just shrugs and shoulders her pack, lashing her sword to her waist. "They can't collect her if we're still here," she says. "We should get out of the way and let them take her."
They move out and watch the hovercraft descend from a distance. Once it disappears back up into the sky, Luca grits his teeth and hefts his spear. "You guys go ahead," he says. "I've got something I need to do."
Skye punches him in the arm. "Good hunting," he says, and Artemisia tosses a bag of dried fruit at Luca as he passes.
"Think he'll get her?" Camphor muses, watching them as he heads around a corner.
Artemisia makes a knife appear and disappear, flipping it between her fingers before hiding it in her jacket sleeve. "Bet you an apple he's back before tomorrow sunset."
A cannon goes off the next afternoon, and Luca finds the Pack a few hours later as they're playing cards while waiting for the water to boil. "Deal me in," he says, dropping to the ground between Artemisia and Camphor.
"Is it done?" Skye asks, sliding over the cards.
"It's done," Luca says, and picks up his hand without another word.
Camphor fishes an apple out of her bag and tosses it over his head to Artemisia, who takes a triumphant bite before offering to Luca. He shakes his head, and she shrugs and eats the rest of it herself.
Ten days in, the Pack runs into the thirteen-year-old from Twelve, a stick-thin boy who only managed to escape the bloodbath because all the Careers were busy killing someone else. The boy is hollow-eyed and skeletal, lips cracked and white and eyes rimmed with red from dehydration; unlike the others, he'd survived by sipping just enough of the toxic water to keep himself alive without being poisoned. Desperate, he'd tried to sneak into the Cornucopia to steal the Pack's canteen.
"Dibs," Jasper calls out, and before any of the others can complain, he hurls his knife through the air and catches the boy right in the stomach.
"You know that 'dibs' aren't actually a real thing," Artemisia says, hauling out the camp stove and gesturing at Camphor to bring over a pail of water. "We're not five."
"Okay then, in this case 'dibs' means 'if any of you touch him I'll peel your fucking eyes out'," Jasper says, cheerfully enough, and the others exchange rolled eyes behind his back.
Lyme barely registers the conversation, and the viewing figures show that the audience isn't paying attention, either. Most of the Capitol are tuned into the Six feed, where the boy has crammed himself into the mouth of a giant sewer pipe high enough off the ground that he can rest without worrying about being killed before the sound of approach wakes him up. He's talking to his girl, and Lyme refuses to switch on the audio but his expression is wistful, a soft smile playing on his face. It doesn't matter what he's saying; what matters is that support for him is climbing, and he's still alive after this long despite having no kills to his name.
If Six wins, desperate tributes will be pretending for years to have a baby back home in an attempt to cash in on the sympathy. Except he won't win, he can't, and Lyme turns her attention back to Artemisia and her crew.
She'd sent a sign this morning, when the Pack split up for more effective hunting before returning to the Cornucopia to regroup. Lyme used a massive chunk of funds earned from hours upon hours wrangling on the sponsor floor in order to buy Artemisia a bottle of water. Not just the standard canister but one with a built-in purification system, and a strip on the inside that measured the current effectiveness of the filter.
Artemisia took it and slipped it into her pack without even a flicker of recognition, and Lyme hoped her message went through. Now, they all sit in a ring around the fire, exchanging irritated glances as the boy from Twelve continues to whimper at the perimeter of their camp. Luca from Four looks particularly rattled, curling his fingers into fists with every blood-choked cry, and Artemisia reaches over and squeezes his hand.
It's a reassuring gesture that's entirely out of character for the persona she's been playing, and Lyme very carefully does not hold her breath.
They eat mostly in silence, poking at their rations with disinterest since the money for special treats dried up a few days ago. Each time the Twelve boy subsides Jasper leans over and pokes him, bringing him out of his pain-overload daze, and by the time they've finished their meal and are setting up camp and the cannon still hasn't fired, the rest of the Pack wears identical expressions of impatience.
Artemisia breaks the silence. She flings down her bedroll and plants her hands on her hips. "Jasper, if you don't end it, I will," she snaps.
"You just try it, bitch," Jasper snarls, striding over and putting herself in her space, knife bared and gleaming in the firelight. "This one's mine and I'll do him how I want. You stay out of it."
Artemisia narrows her eyes, but he's in between her and the Twelve and his knife is pointed squarely at her gut. "Well I wish someone would just kill him, anyway," she says, her tone turning petulant, almost whining. "I'm tired and I want to sleep, and I can't with the meat crying into my ear all night."
Jasper sneers at her about how to him it's like a lullaby so she may as well suck it, but then behind him, Luca glides to his feet and draws his dagger as the Ones pretend not to notice. He kneels by the boy from Twelve, covers his mouth and nose with one hand and slits his throat in a smooth, practiced motion.
The cannon fires, and Jasper whirls around, hands now bristling with knives. "The fuck?" he shouts, and Artemisia scrambles back and away, snatching up her pack and shoving a few packages of dried meat and fruit into it while the others turn to watch the action. "You asshole, that was mine! You kill-stealing shark-fucking son of a fishwife --"
Luca launches himself at Jasper as the Ones leap to their feet and grab their weapons. Artemisia, meanwhile, has flung her pack over her shoulders and taken off running, muttering 'shit shit shit shit' in a carefully-panicked undertone, looking for all the world like she didn't just orchestrate the whole thing. Lyme's chest swells with pride as her girl widens the distance between her and the Pack until none of them will be able to catch her tonight, even with a direct trail.
Back at the campfire, Luca discovers that whatever training he got at the Athletic Club in his home district is no match for a Two with a head stuffed full of crazy and a taste for blood that was interrupted before it could be slaked. Within minutes Luca has gone from taking on Jasper full-on to scrabbling to defend himself, and at last he throws himself out of reach and takes off running.
"Coward!" Jasper yells after him, eyes wide and mouth flecked with foam, just as the Ones appear behind him and drive their blades straight through his back.
Callista clicks her teeth and lays her headset down on her console as the cannon booms. Jasper collapses in a heap, blood pooling from the twin wounds and mingling with the dusty cement. "Sloppy," she says, her voice calm and even just like the line indicating Jasper's lack of vitals. "Leaving himself wide open like that, he knew better."
Onscreen the Ones drag the bodies out of the way, then return to the camp, laughing as they pick through the bounty that now belongs only to them. "Suckers," Camphor says, delighted, and she tosses her district partner an apple that's only slightly bruised. "Twos, man, bunch of volatile monkeys."
"Did you see how the girl took off as soon as it got messy?" Skye takes a bite of his apple, teeth cutting through the skin in a savage motion. "So much for famous District 2 courage."
Camphor shrugs. "Told you she was all talk, but now she'll see. We've got all the supplies, and she doesn't even have water. We might not even have to kill her."
Lyme runs a hand through her hair, unsurprised when her fingers come back slick with sweat.
That night, something else happens over on the private Six feed, accessible only by the Gamemakers and Phillips at his personal console. Whatever it is, they've decided it's too much for the public channel, and Phillips sucks in hard, wet breaths and fists both hands in his hair. That means a breakdown, and not the pretty, camera-ready ones that fill the audiences with glee and have them reaching for their snacks. It'll be the desperate kind, the kind that might make people stop and consider for a moment that these are just kids who are tired and scared and want to go home. They enjoy the spectacle; not so much the messy, snot-smeared moments that bring reality into focus.
"Shit," Brutus mutters. "This ain't right, I'm gonna let him sleep."
Lyme gives him a sharp look. They help each other out, sure, but Careers don't offer to take shifts for outlying mentors. That's page one in the manual. "You're going soft now?"
Brutus just waves a hand at Phillips, sitting with his head in his hands as the public feed flickers back on, his boy curled into a ball in his hiding place and twitching in a restless sleep. Brutus and Phillips are the same age and came out a year apart, and maybe it's a macho man bonding thing, Lyme will never understand. "It's not like it'll hurt our girl to let Phillips get some shut-eye. The kids all separated and they'll be looking for a place to hunker down and figure out what they're doing. Nothing's happening tonight."
Lyme would argue, but Brutus has his jaw set and his eyebrows furrowed so there's no point. Pacing-wise it wouldn't make sense for the Gamemakers to flood the Arena or send in a pack of mutts tonight, not after two kills in short succession. If Brutus is going to go all noble and stupid over a man who's only in this chair night after night because his fellow mentors are out sticking needles in their skin and can't be trusted not to spend out their sponsor reserves on candy and face paints, well, tonight's the night to do it. He'll get reprimanded if Games Command finds out -- you do not help the competition, ever -- and it's not Lyme's problem.
Brutus ambles over and clasps Phillips' shoulder, and Lyme doesn't bother to watch the exchange. On the Two feed, Artemisia has found herself a building to hole up in for the night, and she goes through her supplies with a determined expression.
"It doesn't make you better," says a voice from across the room, and Lyme whirls to see the male mentor from Ten -- what's his name, Edward, no, Edwin -- staring out at them with narrowed eyes. He's driven Lyme half to distraction all week by drumming two pencils against the console every time he concentrates, and now his face is set in an ugly mask. "You make me sick. You think you're so noble, letting him sleep, when you're all just murderers, and so are your little monsters."
Brutus says nothing, doesn't even move from his spot in Phillips' chair with his back to the room. Lyme would love to start a fight but she's not that stupid, not when that's a one-way ticket to her getting banned from the premises, and so she deliberately turns away and goes back to her station.
Dexter, at Lyme's left, lets out a loud, conspicuous snort. "Right," he drawls, rolling his eyes companionably at Lyme. "Takes one to know one, you hypocritical fuck."
Edwin's chair creaks as he flings himself out of it, and Dexter rises with deliberate, deadly grace, a manic grin twitching on his face. "Oh for fuck's sake," Brutus mutters from across the room, but he's not the reason they back down.
That reason is Mags, whose staccato "Enough!" cuts through the room like a gunshot. Both men startle, and she's half their size and over twice their age and doesn't stand or even bother to look at them, but they sit down. The tension in the room dissipates, replaced by an awkward hum of apology.
Mags doesn't bother to lecture after that, just shakes her head ever so slightly as she scrolls through pages of information on her console.
"Well this was entertaining," Callista says in a mild tone. "Lyme, I'll take over for you in the morning shift."
"Yeah," Lyme says. She's too keyed up to sleep anyway.
Callista glides away, and Dexter glances over. "She's going to go knife someone in an alley," he says at a volume too low for Edwin to hear, and Lyme blinks at him. "She took me out when both of ours went out in the volcano back in the Quell. She does it whenever her kids lose. Doesn't kill him, says she promised her mentor she wouldn't, but it's damn close."
Lyme turns back to stare at the door that Callista exited through. "Oh," she says, sounding like an idiot, but what else is there to say? She's lived in the same village as Callista for two years and didn't know that. Snow only knows what else about her fellow Victors would come as a surprise.
"Yeah, not everyone gets smashed," Dexter says, leaning back and stretching his arms over his head until his joints pop. "You'll get to know everyone's quirks soon enough."
Lyme nods and tugs her headset back on over her ears, and she immerses herself in the real-time polling data now flooding the charts to stop herself from wondering what, in ten years, they'll be whispering to the baby mentors about her.
Onscreen, Artemisia settles in for the night, keeping her bag with the precious water bottle tucked in against her side.