Chapter Text
What will it take? For me to win?
[What was it that Aphrodite lacked?]
…
Was it willpower, or dignity? Was it passion, or purpose?
Or was it just too fitting for a One Girl to die by suicide?
…
That has to be it, right? We’re all just cursed?
[Wasn’t she supposed to redeem us all?]
…
Kani?
…
I don’t have any inspiring words for you, child. I have only one thing to give you, now that I’m out of well wishes.
…
Then give it! For fuck’s sake, we’re running out of time, here.
…
As you wish. Let me tell you a story, then. About a girl doomed to half-death.
The story begins with thrashing and screaming. It begins in The Forges, the home of the metalgods. The home of the steel and iron that swallowed Kani Fairchild alive.
It is the story of a girl emerging from her Arena with haunted eyes, desperate for water and disoriented, her tongue as dry as sandpaper in her mouth. A girl with carrion beetles fastened to her skin, for when she’d been rescued, she was so close to death that the insects mistook her for a corpse.
The story continues with Kani Fairchild teaching Althea Ivory the art of forgetting how to breathe. It takes an intermission when Althea dies, choking on barbed wire at the hands of Kiernan Alcraiz.
It picks up in the Capitol’s BioLab, with Kani Fairchild asking what’s in it for me , and Levine Saros returning her question with an assurance of Resurgence. It picks up when that word tangles itself up in her head, when it spells out revenge instead.
Ophelia listens, entranced, to sordid tales of Belladonna Tapes and Hezediah Zenkovah spilling the BioLab’s secrets on live television. Kani tells her about Aphrodite, Variable Three, Jade Somerset’s other blood sacrifice. How Aphrodite was nothing more than a genetically-engineered embryo left cryofrozen in a chamber until Kani volunteered to be her carrier.
I didn’t do that with the others, of course. The risk of dying in childbirth was too great, and then who’d have carried on my empire?
But you did for Aphrodite? Who wasn’t even your own flesh and blood?
I did. Childbirth was horrendous. I thought she’d be worth it.
The unspoken lies between them. Aphrodite was not worth it.
Because Variable Two won the Games instead.
I don’t understand. You said the story was about a girl half-dead. It sounds like you lived, to me.
I wasn't talking about me.
What?
Your mother has it out for us. If I were you, I’d keep your head on straight and hope like hell you don’t carry on her legacy.
Her…legacy?
Don’t you know, Ophelia? It may have skipped a generation, but don’t be fooled. Your mother’s on a witchhunt. Don’t be the next Rendevez to die by fire.
I’m not a Rendevez, Ophelia says, pointing at the ring on her left hand. My marriage to your daughter still stands. I’ll carry the Fairchild legacy until the day I die. And it won’t be anytime soon. I’ll be the one burning them. I swear. I swear. I swear.
“I swear, you remind me of someone. I don’t know if it’s just my mind playing tricks on me, but you just have this look about you. I don’t know how to place it, but,”
Two Girl’s useless district partner prattles on, and on, and on. It takes everything Ophelia has not to put a knife in his neck right then and there, but that’d be against the rules , and it’s her job to pull the true Careers back into order.
None of this District Eight supremacy bullshit, now. They can keep their atmokinesis. We don’t need storms. We’ve got metal.
[Kani didn’t mention that metal attracts lightning, but who cares about that. She’ll be damned to let another trash rat outlier pollute her lover’s name.]
“Fuck , do you ever stop talking? ” Four Girl asks.
Ophelia meets her eyes. “We’re going to be civil. There will be no Career pack traitorism in my Arena. Not this time.”
“Who says we’re the Careers anymore?” says Two Girl, as she gestures over in the direction of the pack of arrogant peacocks on the other side of the Training Room.
“I do.”
Ophelia nocks an arrow into her bow. Shoots it just past the not-Careers, like she’s scaring off a flock of birds from the Scrapyard.
Fuckin’ crows have been carying away all our palladium. Will you scare them off, Lia?
What’s it matter if the crows take the palladium?
Are you kidding? It matters a ton! That’s what Miss Kani’s gonna make my crown out of. When I win, y’know? Can’t have the crows taking away all the shiny things. It’s what I’ll make your ring out of, too.
I’ll scare them away, 'Dite. Course I will.
“You can keep your arrows.” Eleven Girl says, loading the arrow into her own bow and shooting it back in her direction. It lands in the wall just behind Ophelia’s head, and she just rolls her eyes, but Four Girl’s nostrils flare.
“You fuckers must really have a death wish, huh?” Four Girl asks, strolling up to Eleven Girl’s pack. Ophelia wouldn’t be caught dead having a pissing contest with these imbeciles, but she can’t even pretend she’s not entertained. She crosses her arms, leans back against the wall, watches as Four Girl wages war with a pack of arrogant atmokinests who are all at least a head taller than her.
“You don’t scare us, Four. Quite the opposite, in fact.” leers Eight Boy. He encroaches into Four Girl’s personal space, but to her credit, she stands her ground. Keeps her eyes trained on his and her chest puffed out instead of shrinking away.
“Really? ‘Cause after what Ariou did to Eight and his dumbshit allies last year, I’d think it would serve you right to be afraid.” Four Girl snaps back.
“That was a fluke.” Eleven Girl says. “We’re here to win this time.”
“Keep tellin’ yourself that.” Four Girl replies, turning back to her weapons like she’s already grown bored of the conversation.
Ophelia stares at Four awhile. Analyzing her.
She’s a dead-ringer for Hezediah Zenkovah. Fire-red hair, a snarky attitude to match. Her eyes shine with audacity,
Ophelia begins to wonder if she’ll make a formidable ally after all, despite her indeterminate stupidity.
“What’s your name?” Ophelia asks, as the pack of broody not-Careers goes back to their preposterous preening.
“Samara.” she says, extending her hand. “And yours?”
“Ophelia.”
Samara reaches forward. Grabs her left hand. Holds it in the light, so she can squint at the gemstone in the center.
“She’s a lucky woman. Your wife is.” Samara says.
“She’s dead.” Ophelia responds. “So yeah. I’d guess she is. Luckier than them, anyhow.”
They both look over at the group of not-Careers, who are still off in the corner, laughing as loud as humanly possible and acting like they’re not all doomed to die by Ophelia’s hand.
“Luckier than us too, I’d reckon.” Samara says. “I really am sorry to hear about that, though.”
“It’s whatever. No use crying about it now.”
Ophelia hands her a dagger. Takes one into her own hand.
“Wanna fight?”
“What, right now?” Samara asks.
Ophelia nods.
“Yeah. Right now. Let’s show these fuckers they’re not the only ones who can preen.”
“Jesus Christ .” Ophelia huffs, fighting for breath on the sparring mat. “Who trained you?”
“Who d’ya think?” Samara asks, swiping her dagger at Ophelia’s face. Ophelia narrowly dodges it, flips over onto her side.
“Careful now, Four. The viewers will have a hissy fit if you destroy a One Girl’s pretty face before the Games even start.”
God, they couldn’t have even had the decency to fix her face before they sent her back. What a fucking shame.
I still think she’s beautiful.
She’s dead. Don’t taunt yourself with a fantasy.
“Lia?”
Ophelia flinches. Draws away.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Okay, okay. Sorry.”
Samara sits back. Sets her dagger on the ground.
“What happened? You got…faraway, for a second.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Ophelia replies. Looks around at the Training Room.
Most of the others have dispersed by now, deciding they’d prefer eating lunch over watching the disgraced Career pack try to stumble back into the Gamemaker’s graces with their flare-fights and falsities.
“What do you say we ditch this place? They’ve got nothing to teach us that we don’t already know.”
“What about the Gamemakers?” Samara asks.
Ophelia glances up, finds Eris’s brown eyes trained on her from the top of the viewing platform.
“Fuck them.” Ophelia replies. “They’ve got all week to watch the show.”
“Are you even watching the show?” Samara asks.
“Not really. Shitty Capitol TV on District Fourteen sceens isn’t my idea of a good time.” Ophelia responds, rolling her eyes as she takes another bite of her popcorn.
“Well then, what is? I mean, surely you had something fun to do over in One, right?”
Lia, are you here to feel the plants? Wanna spar in the Vineyard? Let’s go dance where metal goes to die. Kiss me. Yes, right here, right in this bar bathroom. Who cares? It’s romantic if we say it is. We’re gods, remember? Isn’t it fun, flying? Isn’t it fun being invincible? Yeah, sure, the only fun thing to do in One is drugs, but I’m fucking flying, Lia. Fly with me. Sure, the fall’s brutal, but everyone oughta experience flying once, right?
“I haven’t dealt in anything as fleeting as fun in a long time.” Ophelia says.
“Yeah, obviously. Loosen up a bit, huh? Not like we’ve got forever."
“You don’t.”
“Right! So humor me then, would ya?”
She leans in, the redhead does. Doesn’t quite kiss her. Just gets close enough to. So close Ophelia can taste the coffee and sea-salt on her breath.
“Hitting on a widow. Real classy, Sam.” Ophelia says.
Then, after she kisses her back, “I hope you’re not expecting me to fall in love with you. Because I’ve done about enough of that for a lifetime. I’m here to win.”
“Easy now, One. I’m not tryin’ to fall in love either. Just here for a good time, that’s all.” Samara replies.
Her kisses are lazy. Open-mouthed and gentle over her skin, down her shoulder. Nothing like Aphrodite’s.
[Aphrodite kissed like fantasy and fire, kissed like she truly believed they were living in a dream, cause we are, Lia! We just gotta reach up and grab it, you know? Right outta the air. ]
“Your last lover. She dealt in fantasy, didn’t she?” Samara asks. She’s still pressing kisses over Ophelia’s collarbone, still tugging at the buttons of her shirt, impatient.
“Isn’t it bad form to talk about exes in bed?”
“Wouldn’t know. Never had one.” Samara responds.
“Wait. Like, never had one at all? ” Ophelia asks.
“Yeah. Is that so surprising?”
Ophelia rolls her eyes.
“Goddamn, you Fours are awfully good at fishing for compliments. That said, your District Partner—”
Samara kisses her again.
“Shut up about Adrian, would you? He’s insufferable.”
“He’s hot and I’m problematic.” Ophelia responds.
“Well, then you can go fuck him next time! But as of right now, it’s my turn to kiss you!”
And she does. Right there on the bed in District Fourteen’s Tribute Quarters, with shitty Capitol TV playing the same sitcoms on loop, she kisses her, over and over until they’re both wrapped up in the blankets and heaving for breath.
“Aphrodite, like Fairchild? Holy shit. I didn’t know you were married to her. I mean, I guess I shoulda figured it out by the last name and all, but—”
“How—How the hell do you know that?” Ophelia asks.
“You said her name.” Samara responds.
Ophelia flushes, looking away.
“I didn’t mean to.” she says.
“That’s fine. We’ve all got our issues. Moaning a dead girl’s name isn’t the worst thing anyone’s ever done in bed with me.”
“I thought you didn’t have any exes.”
“Exes? Hell no. I’m a commitment-phobe with several layers of trust issues. Doesn’t mean I can’t play the field a bit.”
Ophelia laughs. She can’t help it. Samara’s so fucking honest.
“You really don’t have a filter, do you?”
“Of course not.” Samara responds. “I’m not scared what anyone thinks of me.”
“You’re something else.” Ophelia says, shaking her head.
“Yeah, maybe so. But you like it, don’t you?”
“Sure.” Ophelia says, running her hand through Ophelia’s hair. “You can tell yourself that.”
And Samara just smirks right back at her.
They fall asleep, right there in broad daylight. Skip the mentor meetings and dinners and everything. As Samara falls asleep, she whispers you an’ me. We’re gonna take the Games by storm.
And Ophelia is still a dreamer, even so. She can do nothing more than agree.
Yeah. By storm. Sounds like a fitting end.
“Quite a fall, there.” Adrian says, extending his hand to help her up.
Ophelia huffs, pushing herself up from the ground.
“No shit, Four.”
“Ooh, we’re feisty today, are we? Thought you were the one saying we should play civil and stuff.” He says, falling into step beside her.
“I already gave up. On the whole lot of you. Who knows, maybe I’ll run off on the first day. Then you’re all fucked.” Ophelia says, positioning herself at the bottom of the climbing wall yet again.
“Oh, but you wouldn’t do that. Cause then you’d be leaving Sammy to fend for herself.”
“What do I care about Samara?” she asks, starting her climb.
“Must care a good bit. You know. Since you’re still calling the rest of us by our district numbers and all.”
Ophelia takes a breath before pressing her foot to the edge of a jagged rock so she can push herself up to the next foothold.
“You won’t make it to the top.” he says. “You’re too scared.”
“How much you wanna bet?” she replies. Keeps pushing herself further, even when her arms shake, even when her legs start to burn.
Because the other option would be to fall.
[To fall, like Aphrodite did when she was scaling the garden walls to try to escape the acid rain. She can’t fall. She can’t. ]
“It didn’t hurt? When you fell?”
[And oh, she’d felt like she was falling from the Heavens when they played her lover’s death onscreen. She’d felt like the ground slipped out from under her, leaving her breathless and gasping and sobbing , and she ran out to the vineyards and tore the vines from the ground, one after the other until her hands were full of prickled pin-marks and brush thorns, and when that didn’t work she ran further, further, out to the Scrapyards, tossed metal around while she screamed and cried and the clangng echoed in the air, bounced off the skies and it wasn’t enough, she couldn’t scream Aphrodite back to life, and— ]
“I’m a Forgeborn.” she responds. “Nothing hurts now.”
“That so? Cause for a second I almost swore you had tears in your eyes.” he says.
“Fuck you. I told you, it didn’t,” The top’s right there now. All she’s gotta do is one more climb, find one more foothold. “It didn’t hurt.”
She reaches the top. She taps the highest rock, grins with pride as she scurries back down the wall.
“Suck on that, Four.”
“See? I knew you could do it.”
Ophelia just rolls her eyes. Leans back against the wall, scans the Training Room with flickering eyes.
“We’ve got company.” she mumbles, nodding her head towards the viewing platform. A group of Gamemakers have their eyes trained on her, jotting down notes on their little glowing screens. She watches as her face fills a hologram, a short clip of her driving her knife into a target in District One interspersed with information about the metal gleaming on her arms.
She crosses her arms. Turns away. Tries not to linger too long on the thought of the brown eyes in the middle, tracking her like prey, like a hawk about to swoop down and tear its talons into her neck.
What does it matter if Eris watches her from the rafters?
She’ll show them all, when she wins. She’ll show them all.
In her private sessions with the Gamemakers, she shows them poison arrows and incendiary flame, lit up at the points and shot into her all-too-willing targets. She shows them how she can baptize the world in fire, like a good Rendevez does.
[She imagines each target is the glowering Eight Boy who ambushed her lover with lightning and the Eleven who spit poison at her skin and she wants to imagine that one of them is Maya Ariou, too, but she can’t. She can’t, because all that’s left of her lover are the lies in her sister’s eyes.]
When she’s done showing them all, when she’s shot so many burning arrows that the Gamemakers have to come down and extinguish the flames of their smoking targets, she walks away. Back to her room, where she’ll await Samara or Adrian, whoever gets there first. Where she’ll lose herself in a night of shitty TV that she’s only half-watching and try to forget about the death match that awaits her a few sunsets from now.
She’s jolted from her thoughts by a knock at her door.
“Come in.” she says.
But it is not either of her District Four lovers who enters the room. It's Eris who closes the door behind her. Who leans against the wall with crossed arms.
“So. Ophelia. Did you make your own name, or did Kani Fairchild give it to you?” Eris asks.
“What does it matter to you?” Ophelia responds.
“It doesn’t.” Eris says, shrugging. “I just thought it was curious, how far you’ve removed yourself from your home.”
“Thirteen was never home, Eris. Not for me.”
“And not for me, either.” Eris replies. “Are you surprised? That I’ve chosen this?”
Ophelia looks at her a moment, sizing her up.
“I always knew you’d take the first foothold you could get.” she says. “I think you’d step on anyone’s back to get to Heaven. I think you’d use the carcasses of angels as parachutes to Hell if it meant you could fuck somebody over in the process. You’re a snake, Eris.”
“Of course you’d think so. You know me better than anyone, right?” Eris asks. She leans in, so close Ophelia can taste the coffee on her breath. Embarrassingly enough, she still weakens at the closeness. Still winces, still flinches as she waits for Eris to pull away.
Except she doesn’t pull away, this time. She leans in. She kisses her.
Ophelia’s heart thrums. It aches, like the entirety of her soul is pulling her in Eris’s direction. In another life, another world, even, this would be a lurid dream-haze motion picture of a love that refuses to die. In this one, it is nothing more than the reverberation of Aphrodite’s face, swimming before her as she closes her eyes.
“Oh, darling.” she whispers. And with everything in her, she clings to this moment, submerges herself in a fantasy where her lover has come back to life instead of haunting her from beyond the grave.
Like every good fantasy, it shatters before her. Her eyes open and Aphrodite’s gentle gaze morphs back into Eris’s cold stare.
“Nevermind, then.” Eris says, her lips pressed to Ophelia’s ear in a whisper. “The Arena is yours. I’d only hope you’ll do well with it, if you wish for Kani Fairchild to live.”
A cold chill runs through her, a clattering of ice into a basin of sunshine, replacing all of Aphrodite’s warmth.
“Wha—What do you mean?” she asks.
Eris reaches over. Trails a hand through her hair with fingers that snake over her scalp like the metal embedded in her bones, bringing pain with every traipse, with every stilting of her touch.
“I mean that you need not worry about Victory. Yours is sealed. Fated in the skies, if you would.”
Eris gestures out the window of Ophelia’s room, but Ophelia does not follow the motion of her hand. Ophelia has never been a big fan of heights, and the view from that window is nauseating .
District Fourteen is situated in altitude. It levitates above the towers and towns, the trees and the heights, the birds and the billowing clouds. It is a platform city, floating in the skies so arrogantly, saying touch us if you dare.
It is nothing like the Capitol. Ophelia sees her mother’s influence in the utilitarian architecture, the sterile light of the city that glares back at her though she’d be fein to chase it.
With every day that passes, Ophelia wants less and less to do with this whole thing. A part of her, a selfish part, wishes she’d never found the Vineyard. Wishes she’d never had anything to do with Kani Fairchild. But then she’d never have met Aphrodite, and where would that leave her?
In a District she despises. Waiting to wither away. It’d leave her exactly where she is right now.
How bleak.
“Then why threaten my mentor’s life? If my Victory’s sealed?” Ophelia asks.
“Because you owe me.”
“Owe you what ?” Ophelia scoffs.
Eris reaches forward and wrests Ophelia’s left hand into her own. Seizes the wedding ring from her finger, tucks it into her pocket despite Ophelia’s many protests. She shoves a new ring, heavy and titan, down the slopes and ridges of her ring finger, past her knuckles.
“Isn’t this what you always wanted?” Eris asks, and Ophelia just glares.
Eris leans over. Presses a kiss to her forehead, ignores her flinch.
“I’ll see you after the Games, Aeleni.”
Samara’s situated in bed, on Ophelia’s right side. Adrian’s to her left, reaching over to steal popcorn from the bowl in her lap. A shitty re-run of some low-budget Capitol film plays in the background. The Living Undead.
She only knows the title because it had flashed across the screen in bloody letters at the beginning, and Ophelia had rolled her eyes, said damn, was Rendevez’s first act as president to have all the graphic designers executed at the stake?
Ophelia watches, disinterested, as some thing with sickly skin and a razor-thin, lipstilted grin lurches forward, tackling the screaming protagonist to the ground and sinking its teeth into her shoulder.
“I can’t believe you two can stand this shit.” Ophelia says. “Shouldn’t we be trying to preserve our braincells a bit?”
“Eh, who needs ‘em? We’ve got plenty of brawn to make up for it.” Adrian replies, flexing his muscle only to put his arm down, defeated, as Samara bursts into a peal of laughter.
“Yeah, yeah. Leave the showing off to Ophelia.” Samara says.
“What? Since when am I a show-off?”
“Since you scaled a 12-foot wall like it was nothing and took me down in a sparring match right after.” Adrian replies.
Ophelia ponders this and concedes.
“Okay, yeah, fair enough.”
They curl up in front of the flickering TV screen, Ophelia wrapping an arm around each of them, pulling them in close. This is not something they talk about, something they acknowledge, something they put words to.
What’s the point in affixing a label to something that’ll die in a week’s time?
“What’ll you do? After the Games?” Samara asks, her head perched on Ophelia’s shoulder as if she’s oblivious to the metal that swirls over her skin.
“I don’t know.” Ophelia replies, shrugging non-commitally as she tries not to think about her and Eris’s conversation. “I never really thought of it.”
[Never really thought of a world beyond the one her and Aphrodite created, pinned down like a feltcraft on a vision board, here’s the dream. All you gotta do is reach up and take it. If you dare. Don’t you dare, Lia? ]
“What do you mean, never thought of it! Ha! Victory’s the dream, my dear.” Adrian says, from her left side. His hands swirl over her skin, stumbling and tripping over her metal. If she looked closely enough at his face, she’d say he looked a little sad.
Is it, Adrian? Is it the dream?
I don’t think it’s the dream.
“Well, if you’re so sure of that. What’s your dream?” Ophelia asks.
He sighs. Leans his head back against the headboard.
“I wanna be like McNamara. Fucker’s got it made. Playing guitar over in the Hove all the time. Never gotta worry about money or a damn thing ‘cause sugar mommy Hezediah’s got his ass covered.”
Ophelia raises her eyebrows.
“Heze run into some money?”
“You kidding? She’s got a guest house in damn near every district. Keeps it on the down-low, but she’s always in the Hove throwing money at the bartenders.”
She’s a bartender! My sister is.
That so, ‘Dite?
Yeah! Or least that’s what she told me the other night. She works at the Hove, in Four. She doesn’t know who I am yet, but. That’s okay! Once I’m a Victor, I’ll be rich enough to fly out to Four and see her every week. She’ll have no choice but to know me. It’ll be…real family. Not that Kani’s not real family! I mean, she birthed me after all, but…I’m rambling, huh?
“Didn’t realize the Hove survived the bombings.” Ophelia says.
“Course it did! Reckon I’ll be dead ‘fore the Hove ever dies.” Samara says. “Me and Adrian play darts over there all the time. With Maya Ariou, nonetheless. She’s a badass, that one.”
“More so than Hezediah?”
“Please. Hezediah’s unbeatable. But Ariou comes close. I wish she could’ve trained us both.” Samara says.
“She didn’t?”
“Course not. She hasn’t been all the way there, since her Games. And…everything. With her mom.” Adrian says.
He doesn’t have to elaborate. They all know what became of Maya Ariou’s mother.
[They played it in the papers, ran it on the screens. The gossip filled the streets with tales of Madison Saros’ martyrdom. Wouldja look at that? The Girl Who Won’t Die took a blade to her neck. Long as there’s necks, the guillotine drinks. Ha. Wonder which lover she’ll meet in the afterlife. You know she used to fuck the president? No, not Rendevez, stupid. Before her. It’s just too bad Alcraiz escaped with the kid. Say, aren’t Ones supposed to kill themselves first? Guess not, I mean, suppose she might as well have. Got her head lopped off for a kid that can’t remember her name. Ha. Ha ha ha. What was that they used’ta say about familiar ends?]
“So who trained you two, then?” Ophelia asks. “It couldn’t have been Xianrith, else you’d be modded to hell and back.”
“Nope, not Xianrith. We tried. She had no interest in a couple of Havenside strays.” Samara says.
“Well, then who?”
“Who else, other than the best?” Adrian says. “We got trained by the Hurricane herself.”
“Zenkovah trained you?”
“Sure did! And we wouldn’t have it any other way. Right, Sammy?”
Samara nods, her mouth occupied with the last bit of popcorn stolen from Ophelia’s bowl.
“Right! The outliers wanna send in their little chemistry projects? Please. I’ll show those bitches a storm.”
A storm awaits them as they’re raised into the Arena.
Ophelia just scoffs. Please. Try some originality for once, Eris.
The rain falls into her eyes, and Ophelia doesn’t bother to blink it away. It won’t be acid rain; that’d destroy her pretty face, and after last year, no one’s gonna take away a One Girl’s only hope.
[Hollowed out bird-bones, metalmade magnificence, pretty-not-deadly. If blood sprays on your face, stare at your reflection in your knife. Hold still for the cameras, one, two, three. You know they’ll want that shot. To play it after your victory, so the audience wishes it was them who died by your hand. Take them in your thrall . You want them fighting to decide if they want to kill you, kiss you, or become you.]
Ophelia looks up into the skies. Tips her head back. Opens her mouth so the rain falls between her lips.
Her allies stare at her, horrified. Still wary of any Arena-made rain after last year, she reckons.
“What?” she asks. “Better drink up while we can. They’ll drain this thing in a week’s time, mark my words.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Two Girl snaps. “Not everything’s meant to be a parallel.”
“Right. And they sent bargain-brand Heze into a flood last year for the hell of it?” Ophelia asks.
Samaya and Adrian fall over themselves in laughter.
“God, you’re right. Ariou really is a bargain-brand Heze, huh?” Samara says.
“Please. Maya’s not a bargain-brand anything. You’re the knockoff here. Red hair and all.” Adrian replies.
Ophelia can’t help the grin that curves over her lips. Samara and Adrian are kind of precious. Well, when they aren’t acting like they were put on this earth to give her a headache.
Samara’s loud and animated. Nearly too vibrant for an arena so dismal, but she doesn’t seem to care, and Adrian watches her with an amused expression.
Ophelia frowns. Her laughter echoes off the edges of the Arena.
“It’s too quiet.” says Ophelia’s district partner.
Ophelia looks around. He’s right. It’s dead silent, other than the sound of their conversation and the ebbing reverberations of Samaya’s laughter, silenced now by the looming realization
“What the hell?” Samara asks. “It was supposed to be a Bloodbath. Has anyone heard a cannon yet?”
“Nope. Not even one.” Adrian says.
“Ugh.” Samara huffs. “Great. District rats can’t even slaughter each other properly. That’s too bad for them! Means we get to have all the fun.”
“Samara’s right.” Adrian says. “We wanna show the world that we’re the real Careers, right? Be pretty easy if they’re all at a standstill.”
Samara draws her knife, grinning like a fiend, and Ophelia slings her bow over her shoulder, pulls her quiver a little closer to her right side. She smiles as she watches Samara’s fast footsteps recede, a glint of red hair swishing behind her back.
Ophelia’s rain-boots slosh as she wades through the shallow part of the water. Two Girl is struggling, fighting to pick her feet up above the water and keep up with the rest of them. Samara and Adrian lead the charges, and Ophelia imagines wading through water is second nature for them. It must be. They walk through with practiced ease, their feet treading water out to the sides as they kick the currents behind them.
Torrents of cold rain turn the waters into shatterglass. Dewdrops bubble over the reeds, dripping off the sides of the calla lilies and drowning the off-yellow spacklings of papyrus flowers.
Their Arena is not quite a swamp, persay, and neither a marsh. There’s another word, floating at the back of Ophelia’s head, that would describe it better. Something she might’ve learned in French class back in Thirteen. A bayou. Crested in stagnancy by the meandering of a river, risen by rainfall till it inhabited a hollow it was never supposed to fill. A bayou is one of nature’s many anomalies, a testament to the persistence of creation. To the unwillingness of the rain to dissipate without leaving something in its wake, even if something is moss and reeds growing in the bayou banks, life refusing to leave the most desolate places.
“Think that’d be good for a fire later?” Samara asks, gesturing over in the direction of a bald cypress with tattered bark.
“Doubt it.” Ophelia responds. “Those trees are probably so waterlogged we’d be lucky to get them to spark. The branches might, but we’d have to tear the needles off so the smoke doesn’t give our location away.”
Samara hums, already disinterested. She laces her arm through Ophelia’s, purposefully slowing her pace so Ophelia can keep up.
“Where’s everyone at?” Samara asks. “I’m getting bored.”
“Maybe we should try to lure them over.” Adrian responds. “Y’know. Like Heze taught us.”
“She trying to get you both killed?” Ophelia asks.
“Nah, Heze’s brilliant. Always some sort of method to her madness. How do you think she got so many out of her tributes out before?”
Two Girl scoffs, stopping her trek through the water and side-stepping off to a small island of marsh-land.
“Please. The only reason so many Fours made it out last time was because the Xianriths had you all metaled up to hell and back. I can’t believe they even let you two compete.” Two Girl says.
“Oh, and just what do you bring to the table, Two?” Samara asks, following her onto the patch of murky land. “Your pathetic little district partner couldn’t even be bothered to find the rest of his allies.”
It seems Samara’s found a weak spot for Two Girl, because she crumbles . Glares.
“Fuck you. He’s not pathetic. They started us off so far apart I’m surprised we even found each other.”
“Ophelia.” Her district partner nudges her shoulder, points with a shaky hand past a cluster of silver maple trees with glistening bark.
“What the hell…”
There’s a girl, walking towards them. Except it’s less a walk and more a stagger.
It’s a stagger she thinks she recognizes. Reminds her of the parts of One where Kani’s empire fades off into distance, unpaved paths through streets full of houses with rusted bars melded to the windows. The parts where addicts stumble through the streets, muttering to themselves and chewing on their lips as they amble towards their next high.
But the closer the girl comes, the more evident it becomes that she’s not staggering her way through a drug-induced stupor. Ophelia’s heart begins to race.
“Guys.” Ophelia says.
Samara’s too caught up in her argument, bickering loud enough with Two Girl that she doesn’t even register the thing’s presence.
Ophelia nocks an arrow, stepping past her bickering allies until she’s close enough to the thing to send an arrow careening at its heart. The arrow lands in its chest and catapults it to the ground with a sickening slosh.
The first cannon of the 58th Annual Hunger Games fires.
Her allies fall into stunned silence, staring between Ophelia and the thing that was once Thirteen Girl. Samara is the first to walk over, staring down at it with a mix of horror and amusement.
“Well. That’s new.” she says.
“New’s one word for it.” Adrian replies.
The thing’s hollowed out eyes have rolled back into its head, sharp, metallic clumps of clotted blood running down its cheeks in a gruesome blush. Its tombstone teeth jut out of its mouth at all angles.
“How the fuck did she decompose that fast?” Samara asks.
“She didn’t. She looked like that when she started walking towards us. She wasn’t…”
Human, Ophelia wants to say, but she can’t make the word leave her mouth. She tucks a finger under the swirl of metal on her left wrist, looking away from Thirteen Girl’s corpse.
“Do you think it could be some sort of virus? Is it…contagious?” Two Girl asks.
“It’d have to be. I just can’t imagine how. I mean, there would’ve had to be a Patient Zero, right?” Ophelia asks.
Samara looks down, a flash of horror running over her face before she sets her features back into an easy grin that doesn’t reach her eyes.
“I think we’re looking at her.” Samara says. “It’d only make sense, right? That someone would’ve had to be damned from the start?”
Damn right! Sweetest there is, this damnation of ours. Don’t you think?
Besides. If we are dead. Death’s not so bad as they make it seem. Not with you, anyways.
Well. If there was ever anything Aphrodite Fairchild was good at, it was eating her words in the end.
“Wait a minute. Does this mean we gotta kill them all twice?” Adrian asks.
“Yep. All 27 of them.” Ophelia says. “Well. 26, now that she’s dead.”
Ophelia can’t help but look back down at Thirteen Girl as the weight of Eris’s words sinks in for the first time. Ophelia replays it in her head, the way the thing glanced at her only to move right past her and towards her allies. Like it couldn’t even see her.
Later that night, as she’s staring over at Adrian and Samara in the light of a blustering fog-fire, Ophelia finally sees the game for what it is.
It was made for her hands. Made for her life, but she imagines Eris would tear her half-dead from a tangle of reeds in the bayou if it mean she could use her as a bargaining chip in Sadie Rendevez’s political poker game.
Ophelia doesn’t want to be a girl half-dead. As she looks around the Arena with dismay, she realizes she doesn’t have much of a choice.
It’s my year, Ophelia. They’ll take my Arena and put it in your hands. They’re not gonna go easy on a Fairchild. Blood-related or not.
Okay? And? I’m not stupid. I know how to swim.
Do you know how to starve?
Truthfully, Ophelia doesn’t know the first thing about starving. Unlike her ragtag band of scrappy Havenside mutts with hunger-hollows under their eyes, Ophelia was a well-fed, treasured house pet.
It’s no wonder Persephone wanted nothing to do with these two, she thinks, looking over at them.
Samara’s warming a marshmallow at the fire, grinning in the light as she pulls it from her fork and smooshes it in Adrian’s face. He tips his head back, laughs so loud that Two Girl unzips her tent to toss a glare in their direction before closing herself back in.
“How the fuck did you two manage to get approved to volunteer?” Ophelia asks
Samara looks over at Adrian with a gleam in her eyes, laughing as he licks the sticky bits of the marshmallow from his lips.
“Sold to the highest bidder, of course!” she replies.
Ophelia raises her eyebrows.
“I’m serious, Sam.”
“So am I, for once. The Xianriths set up a betting ring. Basically let everyone pick their prospective Tribute of their choice and vote them into the Games. So long as they were willing to put their money where their mouth is, of course.”
“You expect me to believe they let District Four have a press conference to decide which pair of vicious metal-gremlins to put in the Games and the rich elites chose you two instead?”
Samara laughs, jabbing Adrian in the side as she does.
“You hearing this shit? Course they didn’t vote us in. Nobody wanted Bargain Brand Heze and Overtalkative Rhodos Lite. The original plan was to stick some metal in Lunaris Nox and put her in here with Persephone’s brother. God, wouldn’t that have been a show? Watching those two metal all the zombies to death. I don’t know about Xianrith, but Nox is killer with a trident.”
“Yeah, yeah, hush about your girl crush on Lunaris, we all know.” Adrian says.
Samara rolls her eyes, smacking his arm with the back of his hand.
“It is not a crush. She’s just magical , okay? I used to watch her and Ariou spar on the beach and I mean, fuck, have you seen her with that trident? Ugh. Anyways, no point wondering what would’ve been, ‘cause Sugar Mommy Heze came to the rescue and voted in a couple of Havenside rats instead.”
“And took the time to train us herself when Persephone turned her nose up at us.” Adrian adds.
Ophelia stares at them, incredulous.
“Wow. Sounds like a chaotic system you have going over there. Surprised they would’ve gone for Nox to begin with, given Ariou’s new position.” Ophelia says, her lips quirking up at the phrase.
“Oh, please. Head Metallurgist’s just a title. Be more accurate to call her Persephone Xianrith’s little housepet. ‘Sides, even if they had sent Lunaris, Ariou’s been so fucked up since her mom died that I doubt she would’ve cared.” Samara says.
Ophelia nods as she kicks another branch into the fire. Maya Ariou’s pensive grasp on sanity has been quite the talking point in the districts lately.
“How come Heze didn’t pay to get you two modded? I mean, surely the Xianriths aren’t so petty as to let their anti-Havenside sentiments prevent District Four from having all the advantage.”
“Have you met the Xianriths?” Adrian asks, and both of them burst out laughing. “No, but in all seriousness. Heze wouldn’t let us. And we begged for it.”
“I mean, we totally begged for it.” Samara continues, finishing Adrian’s sentence. “She used to get so pissed off I thought she was gonna wring our necks and District Four would end up with the trident-wielding moon goddess in the Games after all. But you know Heze! Always some method to her madness. I mean. Guess there’s gotta be, right, Adrian? Else we’d both be chilling in a grave beside Alithyia Essetella and all the other Havenside strays.”
It’s an uncomfortable thought, the two of them dead. One Ophelia doesn’t want to think about. So she pushes it away.
“Maybe she’s got a point, your mentor does. Mixing all these variables together in one Games can’t possibly be the best way to go.”
It is the destiny of the weak to be devoured by the strong. In an Arena full of gods, everyone starves.
“See! Ophelia gets it. Besides. Won’t it be cool to show them all?” Samara asks, looking over at Adrian. “Like Tal and Alithyia did. Havenside strays can be something.”
“Is that really the best comparison to make right now?” Ophelia asks. “I mean…Given how that ended.”
“What, that she died? Yeah. Sure she did. But she died something. And that’s all I ever wanted, really. To be something. ‘Sides, who says I’m the Alithyia here?” Samara asks. “Maybe I’ll be the hero this time.”
Something sad’s shining in both of their eyes, and Ophelia doesn’t like it, so she changes the subject the way she wishes she could change the ending.
[If there’s anything Ophelia has learned by now, it’s that she cannot change the ending. Isn’t that why Aphrodite started the Stolvania curse back up and Maya’s mother died trying to save her and Kona threw himself in front of the hellbeast and Eris became the Reaper?
Isn’t that why Ophelia’s here to begin with? Isn’t a daughter nothing more than a mantle for all her mother’s sins?]
That night, as she’s curled up with Samara in her sleeping bag and listening to the rain patter on the roof of their tent, tears well up in Ophelia’s eyes. Samara’s thumbs sweep her cheekbones, biting them away.
“What is it, beauty? Did something happen?”
“I don’t want you to die.” Ophelia admits, her throat catching on the words.
Samara’s face crumbles a bit, at that. She leans forward. Presses a kiss to the place in her throat where her breath hitched. Pushes a spike of Ophelia’s hair out of her face.
“I know, darling. But it’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
Her murmuring sounds like the stream that flows into the bayou, her words trickling down like a rivulet of rain tangled in the tangents of a tree branch.
It soothes Ophelia, so she lets herself drown in it awhile. Lets Samara’s fingertips brush comfort over her skin.
“You fell, didn’t you?” Samara asks.
“Yeah. I did. Did you?”
“Yeah.” Samara echoes. “I did.”
They look over at Adrian, whose face is even softer in sleep, his features hallowed by the moonbeams that slip through the mesh of their tent.
“Do you think he fell too?” Ophelia asks.
Samara looks over at him with fondness in her eyes, and nods.
“Yeah. He’s still falling. Be good to him after I’m gone, yeah?”
Ophelia frowns.
“Who says it’ll be you first?” she asks.
And Samara just laughs.
Day Two comes in a deluge. First of rain, and then of blood and rot.
It’s astonishing, the number who have turned.
They come in hordes and Ophelia slays them, with arrows through hollow eyes and daggers embedded in matted messes of mushroom-flesh caving under her hands until their brains are no more and their eyes are no more and she can’t help but think this is the most guiltless killing game they ever could’ve placed her in.
They’re only bodies she kills. Bodies that were something once or could’ve been something once, just flesh erupting spores into the open air and Ophelia dodging so she doesn’t breathe them in.
Later that night, when they flash faces in the sky, Ophelia can’t help but feel no sense of remorse. If she justifies it well enough, it almost could’ve been an act of mercy.
[Their faces were so rotted out of proportion she can’t even tell which of them she killed.]
All she knows is that one of them got Two Girl. Sunk its teeth into her wrist. Ophelia had offered to amputate her arm, give her a fighting chance, but Two Girl chickened out at the last second. Turned not too long after that, and Samara had made quite a game of getting just within arm’s reach only to laugh as she hopped out of the way.
“What, you hungry, Two Girl? Damn. Sucks to suck, doesn’t it? We don’t know anything about that, right, Adrian?”
[Adrian just shook his head, rolled his eyes, said c’mon, Sammy, kill her already, and Samara obliged with a knife in her throat.]
As Ophelia’s laying awake that night, tossing and turning in her sleeping bag, she hears Samara start to gasp. Start to choke.
“Sam?”
She sits up in a panic, goes over to her. Samara just gives her a pained smile.
“Just gotta catch my breath, is all. I’m fine.”
But the pallor in her face gives her away, and the look in her eyes tells Ophelia all she needs to know.
Samara’s turning.
“How?” Ophelia asks, grabbing at her hands and scanning up her arms with her eyes, with her fingertips. “You weren’t even bitten.”
“Didn’t have to be.” Samara says, with a shrug. “Two Girl got her revenge after all. I must’ve breathed in the spores.”
“So what do we do? ” Ophelia asks. Her hands shake as she holds Samara’s, her eyes welling up with tears. “What do we do? I can save you, right? There’s gotta be some way, there’s gotta be—”
Ophelia gasps, and gasps, and gasps. Images of Aphrodite fill her head, the helpless feeling that stole the breath from Ophelia’s lungs as she willed her to stand, willed her to rise, willed her to stop making those awful gurgling sounds as she forced her own head down into the water.
“I can’t lose you.” Ophelia breathes.
Samara shushes her, rocks her back and forth.
“You won’t.” she says. “You won’t, it’s okay. It’s okay.”
And she’s breathing lies, she’s breathing falsities and painful reassurances with every breath that crackles through her lungs, but Ophelia clings to them like they’re life itself because she can’t bring herself to imagine a world that Samara’s not in.
Ophelia’s breathless , they both are, now. Samara’s fingertips trace over the metal on Ophelia’s arms and she whispers oh, Ophelia, you showed me one last bit of beauty, and Ophelia sobs, tears shattering down her cheeks like bayou ran breaking the skies.
“S—Sam. I knew you had to die, but I didn’t,” she sniffles, wipes her face with the back of her sleeve. “I didn’t want it to be like this .”
Samara shakes her head. Slips a dagger into Ophelia’s hands.
“It doesn’t have to be.” she whispers. Ophelia takes in a shuddering breath that falls from her lungs in a waterfall of sniffling and hitched gasps.
“Okay.” she says, nodding. “I’ll help you. I’ll help you fix this. Do you want me to wake Adrian?”
Samara shakes her head.
“No. Let him rest, while he still can. He doesn’t need to remember me like this.”
She rises to her feet. Takes Ophelia’s hand in hers, pulls her to her feet. Holds her up when her legs start to give out from under her. Samara unzips their tent, and they both slip out, leaving a sleeping Adrian blissfully unaware of the death march they’re about to undertake.
“Ophelia?” Samara asks, her features shining in the winnowing light that crawls through the Cypress branches above them. “Do you think that since I’m dying, you could spare me some truth?”
Ophelia nods, pressing a kiss to her hand, trying desperately to hold back another rush of tears. The first round still sticks to her face, making her features feel like a plaster cast.
“Yeah. I’ll tell you anything.” she says, her voice still thick with the sobs stuck unshed in her throat.
“Why are you really here? I mean. I know why me and Adrian volunteered, but you could’ve had so much life ahead of you.” Samara says.
Ophelia just shrugs.
“I didn’t want it without Aphrodite.” she says, because she promised her honesty, and she can’t bring herself to lie to a dying girl.
[Isn’t that always how it goes? Freedom from a lie is the last wish of the dead, and deliverance from the truth is the last wish of the living. That's why One Girls carry suicide in their bones, right?]
“Well. I don’t want it without you two. So do you think you could…kill me pretty? Draw a rose, or something?”
“I will.” Ophelia says. “I’ll make it the prettiest death you could imagine.”
Samara nods, satisfied.
“Good. That’s all I could ask for, really.”
As they walk in the direction of a cluster of rotting bayou-shacks, Samara tells her last confessional . When-you-win secrets, dying words and elegies spilled from broken-bird lips. I have five sisters, will you tell them it wasn’t in vain? It’ll probably come down to you and Adrian, close to the end. I don’t care if you two fight for it, long as it’s fair. Otherwise he’ll hate himself for winning. If it comes down to it, please don’t let him win. It’s not that I don’t want him to live, it’s just…you know? Will you tell Heze I said thank you? For mentoring us? I’m not really her knockoff. I was never so brave. God, I wish I coulda been brave. Can you lie to Adrian and tell him I died like a hero? Say I saved you from something? I don’t really care what. Just get creative with it, ya know? But make it believable. He knows I’m not much of a martyr. Can you kiss me? Kiss me again. It’s our last one, make it count. I know this won’t hurt like Aphrodite did, but selfishly, I hope it hurts a little. Just to know I mattered to someone. Make sure you decapitate Adrian, at the end. I don’t want them to turn him into something he never wanted to be. Okay, I’m done. These aren’t very good last words, huh?
“They’re just fine for last words,” Ophelia says, closing the door of the bayou shack and setting her lamp on the ground. “And yes. You hurt like Aphrodite did.”
As she lowers herself to the ground, Ophelia’s stomach jumps inside of her, her entrails tangling together in a mess of dread. Samara settles down onto the wooden floor, too. Lays her head in Ophelia’s lap, and her red curls tumble down the sides of her face, sprawling over the tops of Ophelia’s legs.
“What do you want your last words to be?” Ophelia asks.
Samara shakes her head. Laughs, bitter.
“Nothing. They don’t get anymore of mine.” Samara says, and her eyes train directly on a camera that beams at them from the top of the shack, a robotic and mechanical intruder on a moment that was never theirs to take.
Ophelia nods. It’s as noble a dying wish as any, she supposes.
Ophelia screws her eyes shut as she drives the dagger through her lover’s skull. One Girls are nothing if not patron saints of blood, and Ophelia’s covered in red now, red hair and red blood and red wine sloshing down the side of Aphrodite’s glass in the Well and red grapes spilling down in the Vineyards and red corpses buried under red metal in the red, red ground.
Samara’s eyes are frozen open. Staring at her with conviction, with emptiness. With the dead legacy of a Four Girl who refused to die disgraced.
[With the dead legacy of a One Girl who lived long enough to become the disgrace she couldn’t kill.]
Oh, how the angels tumble. Oh, how they catapult. Oh, how they fly.
The life leaps out of Samara until all that’s left are the hunger-circles brimming her eyes, the forever-tattoos of a Havenside stray.
But as quickly as she dies, half-life flickers back into her irises, tangles itself into something tainted. Samara sits up, snarls, lumbers at her with her quick-lime eyes tossing back into her head. Her teeth smash together like fists on bone as she bites at the air, as she crawls toward Ophelia, closer and closer.
Ophelia does not bother to flinch. She just waits. Waits for Samara’s eyes to trail off, just as all the others did, and amble off in search of better prey.
Samara’s beautiful for something so cruel, for something so dead. Rot has yet to overtake her. Her hair still tumbles in a river of red down her back, her eyes albino-cold and feverish as they shoot back and forth in her head. She brushes past Ophelia, and Ophelia trembles at the feeling of her still-warm skin, waxy and moonstruck against her own.
Ophelia grabs her dagger, notches it between Samara’s trachea and her tendon and grits her teeth as she tries to force it in, but Samara’s staring at her with this empty look in her whiteblanched eyes and Ophelia can’t, she just can’t.
Ophelia stumbles away from Samara’s corpse, wrests the door of the shack open and slams it behind her. She leans with her back against the splintering wooden door, heaving for breath as she listens to the symphony of breaking glass and shattering wood that shakes the world with sound
And Ophelia breaks her promise, just like she did to Aphrodite, because she’s too selfish to let another lover die her second death. She walks away like a coward and spends the whole night tossing and turning, wondering how she’ll ever be able to look Adrian in the eyes tomorrow.
She replays Samara’s death in her head like a low-budget Capitol film on repeat, and it’s red.
So, so sickeningly red.
Day Three is a day of eyes. Of eyes flitting away and loom-mouths spinning golden lies and hero epics with pyrite-scented silk. Of ocean-drip tassel tears spilling from sea-green bayous and promises of we’ll keep her alive, we’ll keep her memory alive.
[It’s all Ophelia can do not to laugh at that. Samara’s memory is very much alive, foaming at the mouth with rot behind the door of a bayou-shed and begging for bloodshed with its every step.]
Ophelia will not tell Adrian this truth. She is just like her mother, and her mother’s mother, and her mother’s mother’s mother after that. Any lie goes, so long as it’s comforting.
[Any comfort goes, no matter how false.]
“What do you say we ditch him?” Adrian asks, nodding over in the direction of Ophelia’s district partner.
Ophelia looks over at him. He’s sitting atop a fallen log, sharpening his dagger on a stone he found at the edge of the bayou and muttering to no one in particular under his breath.
“No. We can’t. I’ll be damned if I get picked off by a zombie because some outlier rat kept an alliance better than I did.”
“C’mon, where’s your sense of adventure?” Adrian asks, a wry smile curving itself over his lips. It’s not his usual boyish grin, lacks his usual devilish charm. Ophelia can see the tears brimming at the edges of his eyes, gleaming unshed.
“Adventure didn’t get our districts very far last year, did it? We need to stay put until the alliance dissolves on its own.” Ophelia mutters, and her gaze is pointed as she looks over at their not-quite-ally.
For a Career pack, it’s rather pitiful. Two of their allies taken out by the virus within the first three days. Ophelia’s own district partner, silent and brooding, nothing like the overeager scapegoat Kani sent in with Aphrodite last year. And then Adrian and Ophelia, so obviously preferential of each other’s company and both still quietly mourning the loss of Samara.
Ophelia imagines the audience has to be getting bored by now. A few cannons have fired here and there in smatterings of sound, but by and large, the Arena has been silent. On their end of it, that is. She imagines that the Eights and Elevens and Twelves are having an excellent time razing the Arena red.
She rises to her feet with a huff, tossing her bow and quiver over her shoulders.
“Get up.” she says, to her allies. “We’re going hunting. I’m not going to let them find us first.”
“What? Don’t you think it’d be better to stay put? This is just about the only dry area of the Arena.” Her district partner protests.
“We don’t want anyone else taking over our spot while we’re gone.” Adrian adds.
“And? What does it matter? If we come back to someone in our spot, we’ll kill them. Simple as that.”
Her district partner rises with a huff, tucking his dagger into his waistband and the whetstone into the side pocket of his bag.
She supposes he must have some reason for keeping their alliance, though Ophelia can’t imagine what it is. He’s a solitary, sullen type, chosen specifically for his unlikelihood to ally with anyone else even if he’d chosen not to ally with Ophelia.
Truth be told, Ophelia’s not terribly concerned with his motivations. So long as he does his part to keep the alliance going, to prove to the cameras and the viewers and the world that the Career pack never dies, she doesn’t care. He’s dead in the end anyways.
[So is Adrian, but Ophelia doesn’t want to think about that.]
“I think we’re being followed.” Adrian mutters.
Ophelia stops for a moment. Tracks the sounds behind her. Crunching branches, hushed voices, and a low humming sound she just barely registers in the background.
A thought pops into her mind, against her will. We’re following you, Ophelia.
She shivers. Shakes the thought away. Tries to busy herself with planning their next steps.
You think we can’t tell? I hear you, making plans. There’s no escaping us.
Ophelia can’t decide if it’s her adrenaline kicking in or if she truly is going insane, but her thoughts ring in her ears, so loud. So loud, and not in Aphrodite’s voice this time.
“What the fuck. ” she huffs.
Adrian looks over at her with concern for a moment, but she shakes her head.
Look at that, One Girl. I know all of your secrets. I’m in your head. How does that feel?
“Shut up.” she mutters, under her breath.
Adrian and her district partner look over at her with concern, but there’s no time for that now.
“Who are you…talking to?” Adrian asks, weakly.
“I don't...know. Something’s wrong. It’s like my thoughts are being taken over.”
Ophelia dips her head down, feeling self-conscious for a moment. Wonders if she truly is going insane, if she’s breaking like Aphrodite did.
Then, Ophelia’s district partner’s voice rises up, just over the ambient sounds of the bayou.
“I hear it, too.”
“Hear what? ” Adrian asks.
“I don’t know how to explain it.” Ophelia says. “It’s like they’re…”
“In your head?”
Ophelia whirls around, her bow at the ready, an arrow nocked and aimed at Twelve Girl’s throat.
You won’t do it, One. You haven’t killed a single human yet. Well, except your little lover. Say, what was her name, anyways?
“Shut up!” Ophelia exclaims, her fingers shaking as she tries to let the arrow fly, but she can’t , she just can’t. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
Twelve Girl looks at her allies, laughing.
“What, One? Hearing things or something?”
Ophelia lets the arrow fly. It lodges itself in Twelve Girl’s neck, sends a spray of bloodmist into the air around her.
“It’s three against two, now. Who wants to play?” Ophelia asks, pulling out her dagger. But her district partner’s retreating, back behind her and Adrian, and Ophelia’s cursing her luck.
Eleven Girl approaches her. Eight Boy tears towards Adrian in a fit of rage. Ophelia dodges out of Eleven Girl’s way, knowing that she’ll have to kill her in the least bloody way possible.
[The world knows the poisonblood secrets of the Elevens now. Everyone’s seen close-ups of Maya Ariou’s hands, scarred to hell with trembling fingers buried beneath the tulle of her dress, twisted in ribbon as she desperately tried to hold them still for the cameras.]
Ophelia tucks her dagger into her waistband, lunges at Eleven Girl and takes her to the ground. Eleven Girl kicks at her, frantically tries to dislodge herself from Ophelia’s grip. If Ophelia closed her eyes hard enough, if she had the luxury of that, she could be sparring with Aphrodite on the ground of the Vineyard, all tangled up in the vines.
Ophelia presses her forearm to Eleven Girl’s throat, presses in, harder and harder until she hears a snap and the girl’s trachea bursts within her throat.
Blood tumbles from her mouth, bursts in rivulets down the sides of her cheeks. Ophelia fights down the horror and guilt rising in her chest as she moves her arm out of the way of the blood, leaves Eleven Girl to drown in it.
She turns around, watches Adrian and her district partner fight off Eight Boy’s frenzied corpse, already starting to shine with rot. She aims an arrow, pierces his forehead until he collapses to the ground.
“Can’t help but wonder who gets credit for the kill.” she says.
Adrian laughs, wipes the sweat from his forehead. Ophelia’s district partner just stares at the ground. Trembles.
“Eleven Girl turn yet?” Adrian asks, as Eight Boy’s cannon fires.
Ophelia shakes her head, gestures over at her.
“Nah. Not yet.”
“Well, let’s not wait around for it.” Adrian replies. He walks over to Eleven Girl, heaves a moss-covered rock from the side of the bayou, and drops it on her skull.
Ophelia forces herself to look, even though her district partner looks away. Forces herself to witness the destruction she’s caused.
“Where are the others?” Adrian asks. “You don’t think they split up so soon, do you?”
Ophelia shrugs.
“I don’t know. Seemed pretty friendly when we were in training, but. The Arena changes things.”
“Yeah.” Adrian says, washing his dagger in the bayou and tucking it back into his waistband. “It does, huh?”
Ophelia looks over at him, and he just shakes his head.
“Twelve Girl must’ve been pretty far into your head, to know what actually happened to Samara.”
As if on cue, Twelve Girl sits up. Lumbers at Adrian, snarling.
"Fuck, One. Did you forget something?" Adrian huffs, driving a spear into Twelve Girl's throat and kicking her away so the spores don't creep into his lungs.
"I didn't think she'd turn." Ophelia says. "I thought my arrow was close enough to her head..."
"Well, it wasn't." Adrian replies.
Ophelia looks away, guiltily. Keeps her eyes on the ground ahead of them.
"I'm sorry." she mumbles. And Adrian just sighs. Laces his hand in hers.
"Yeah." he says. "I'm sorry, too."
It’s okay, Adrian whispers, later that night as they’re huddled beside a fire that’s bound to go out soon. Once the next round of rainfall hits the flickering coals. I don’t blame you. Sammy was never much of a martyr.
Wanted to be, though, Ophelia responds, and he takes her hand in his, holds fast.
Adrian’s voice is exhaustion and rainfall when he whispers back, Yeah. Don’t we all.
On the fourth day, the Gamemakers drain the Arena, and whatever was left of their pitiful alliance crumbles to bits. Ophelia can’t even say she’s surprised. It’s hard to have an alliance when trust is a facsimile and there’s a pack of hungry animals trailing just behind your every step.
Her district partner leaves her on amicable enough terms, but Ophelia knows he will not hesitate to put a knife through her back when the time comes, and she’s fine with that. How could she not be?
Her life is a play, and Eris Matthews is pulling the strings. Ophelia is nothing more than a bitter protagonist who refuses to play her part. Her best hope is that someone will kill her off before the sequel begins.
This is not Aphrodite’s mythological Arena, layered in on itself with lurid symbolism and poisoned fruit. It is a barren wasteland full of flesh-eating corpses. A wasteland where Cypress trees die from thirst and cave down in slivers of peeling bark, threadbare tendrils shooting out and yearning for water that will never come.
An unromantic Arena for an unromantic Career pack and an unromantic protagonist who Eris is begging to turn to a tragic hero. Perhaps, Ophelia thinks, this is the myth after all. Not so much a ballad as an epic poem. Perhaps she will be the Achilles of this one, the remorseful hero dragging bodies around a funeral pyre until the world finally relents of its cruelty.
Perhaps, Ophelia thinks, she will not die a tragedy after all. But then she looks over at Adrian, and she realizes this makes him the Patroclus of this story, and suddenly she doesn’t want to be a hero after all.
Ha. Like it matters what Ophelia wants. Like it ever mattered what Ophelia wanted.
[She wanted to marry Aphrodite for real, in front of everyone, not in a quiet exchange of palladium and papers in the Vineyard and a desperate hope Kani would approve. She wanted them to prance around in laurel crowns and listen to the world swoon over the hero lovers and their beautiful storm.
She wanted Samara to live. She wants Adrian to live. She wants to die a hero death since she never got to live a hero life. She never wanted to be a god. All she ever wanted was to be a mortal made eternal by the life in her lover’s eyes.]
[Isn’t that all a One Girl ever wants? Isn’t that all a One Girl never gets?]
Ophelia supposes, then, that she has chosen this legacy for herself. She has left the Rendevez legacy of death by fire for the District One legacy of clinging reluctantly to driftwood and bone until morning light comes to swallow her alive.
She wishes someone would dare to kill her, would burn her at the stake and she’d smile as she died, think damn, I earned my name after all. But then, Samara wanted to die a hero and instead she lives, a walking corpse trapped in a rotting wooden shack and living out her last days just as hungry as she was during life. And Aphrodite wanted to live as a god and she died as a tragic foil to a sister who never could’ve saved her, leaving behind a lover who never even tried.
One thing is certain. Ophelia will never be granted the kindness of a familiar end. She already lives half-dead, a sequel to a story that never should’ve ended how it did.
Huh, Ophelia thinks, a grin curving over her mouth. Maybe I make a pretty good Fairchild after all. Half-dead’s not the worst legacy I could imagine.
Burning, though. That’s gotta be pretty goddamn close.
This is Adrian’s end: Red hair glints from behind the trees, a shack left in ruins. Samara comes back to follow through with the promise that Ophelia never could’ve kept. She walks over to Adrian, and he throws himself into her embrace, sobbing as she sinks her teeth into his neck.
His last words are help me, and it’s already far too late.
Samara and Adrian are almost hungrier in death than they were in life. If Ophelia thinks about it too much, the blood dripping down Adrian’s greying-out face and the exposed hollows of his bone could be marshmallow, sticking to his skin as he savors the sweet taste the way only an underfed stray ever could.
This is when Ophelia snaps. It was long overdue, her spiral.
She fastens chains around the necks of her lovers and clips the other ends to her belt-loop. And she walks, a half-dead girl with two albatrosses chained to herself. One on each side. Hungry for vengeance.
Ophelia does not kill anymore this Games. Her pets do the killing for her. All she does is stand, and watch, with crossed arms and a shaky smile, as her lovers maul what remains of the Career pack to death.
All of them have mottled skin and raised lesions. Ophelia knows now why they didn't hunt with the rest of their pack.
[The bleeding corpses of mosquito-mutts litter their camp with broken-off wings.]
Her pets kill, and they maim, and they destroy, and they feast.
When they are done, they return to her, their rotted eyes gleaming for a sign of her approval. She pats Adrian’s messy curls, matted with blood and mire. She presses a kiss to the hollow of Samaya’s cheek, rotted to bone.
Good job, darlings, she says. You’re not strays anymore, are you?
After they maul her district partner, she cries as she keeps her promise, as she decapitates each of her lovers' corpses.
Good job, darlings, she whispers, a tear leaking down the side of her face, dripping down her neck. You'll never be strays again, will you?
Ophelia is the Victor.
This is neither an achievement nor a triumph. She is lifted sneering and grinning and everyone thinks it’s because she’s thrilled to have gotten out alive.
The reality is, it’s because Samara gave her one last gift, before her cannon fired. A bite mark, pressed into her collarbone, leeching blood and contagion into her skin. And Ophelia had let it happen, all too willing. Hidden herself from the cameras and acted as if she was wrapping her decaying lover in a last embrace.
[Isn’t that a One Girl’s most familiar end? To conquer the Arena and kill herself off before the crown ever touches her head?]
Ophelia thinks it is, anyhow.
This is how Ophelia wishes the Resurgence began.
The reality is, it begins just as the rebellion did, with a half-dead girl picking half-dead locusts from her half-dead skin and being forced back to life by a half-dead machine. They shove antiseptic into her veins and send her off to be victory-crowned by her half-dead lover, her dead-eyed captor.
Isn’t this how it always begins? A One Girl blackmailed back to life with blood money and sold to the highest bidder as a half-price corpse bride with a name she neither wanted nor deserved?
[And sure, they cure her from the virus. Sure, they erase the scar of her suicide-not-quite and sure, she’s still breathing , but there is not a One Girl alive who thinks that equivocates to life.]
Whether they had saved her life or left her to rot in her bloodlust, one thing is certain.
Ophelia was always doomed to half-death.