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Dexter’s console flickered in warning before the earthquake struck; the handful of others who warranted advanced notice also glanced down, while others dozed in their chairs or argued with sponsors over their headsets. Later Dexter would wonder why send the alert at all; none of them could do anything about it.
Then again, it all happened so fast. By the time the others realized, it was all over. At least Dexter got to watch. Given that it’s the only thing a mentor can ever do, he was glad for that. But still. Fucking — shit.
First, the ground shook, knocking trees, sleeping tributes and piles of supplies sideways. In a heartbeat the Career pack on watch duty scrambled to their feet, eyeing the ground for fissues like the ones who’d killed their compatriots the year before. “Again?” groused one of the boys from Two, dragging a hand down his face and slapping the residual sleep away. “You’d think people would get bored of the same thing.”
“Two boy didn’t die last time,” said Dexter’s girl. “That’s novelty enough.” He bared his teeth at her but she only grinned, sharp-toothed and feral. Those two had not spent the last four days cuddling in sleeping bags or making out under the Arena stars, and Dexter’s chest ached for her but she could bring it home, she could.
“Shut up,” hissed Four girl, uptight version. The one with the better personality choked to death by a stream on the first day, betrayed by her precious water. “Can’t you hear it?”
Dexter held his breath, jammed his hands over the ear cups on his headphones to cut out the ambient sounds of the control room, because the mountain breathed.
It could have been thunder, at first, low and rumbling, in and out like a giant’s snore. Then a plume of cloud rose from that beautiful, picturesque mountaintop, thick and white and climbing. “What the fuck is that,” breathed Two girl, shading her eyes in the dim light of early morning. Drone cameras on the broadcast channel swirled in closer, picking up the rising smoke around the belching summit. And then — a crack at the dome, an odd sagging from underneath.
The mountain collapsed in sickening slow motion.
“Holy shit!” The pack jumped back in reflex as the mountain face slid downward, building up an alarming trail of dust and smoke. Two boy let out a low whistle. “See, that’s why I said we shouldn’t camp out at the base. Nobody likes a rockslide.” At his insistence they’d picked a spot in the trees about ten kilometres out.
“Yes, you’re a genius,” Four girl shot back, dripping with sarcasm, but this time it was Dexter’s girl who cut them off.
“Shut up,” she said, not looking at either of them. She’d turned to face the mountain, expression fixed in stone. “If it’s a landslide, shouldn’t it be … stopping?”
The cloud was not stopping. It wasn’t even slowing down. No longer a single column of white, the mass of ash and dust had thickened into a rising wall that picked up speed and volume as it tore down the mountainside, billowing forward with streaks of jagged lightning cutting through the dark.
A pause for one shared breath, two, three, ragged against the oncoming roar. Dexter’s fingernail sliced off the edge of his thumb, slipping in the hanging cuticle. “Run,” said Two boy, unnecessary, but the word provided the spell they needed to break the pack’s paralysis.
Without another word, the pack splintered in opposite directions. They ran, brilliant, trained athletes in their prime, dodging obstacles and clambering up the sides of trails, skewing off the path in the hopes that it might save them.
Two boy found an outcropping of rock, ducked behind it and curled into a ball to wait out the deadly wave. But this was no avalanche, and his makeshift shelter was buried under 150 feet of molten rock and mud. The girl tore off ahead of the others, but with the apocalypse bearing down on her she stopped, clenched her fists, head down. Then she spun, boots skidding on gravel, dug in her heels, threw back her head and screamed in challenge until the end.
One boy spewed a ragged stream of profanity even as his breath shortened into gasps. Four girl tripped, pushed herself to her feet, hand pressed to her heaving ribs, eyes wide and mouth in a grim line as she studied the approaching cloud, before stumbling off again.
Dexter’s girl kept running and never stopped, never looked back, not once.
In a matter of seconds — seconds — the mountain consumed them all.
Dexter’s console powered down with a low hum, a single message flashing across the screen: THANKS FOR PLAYING!
This was not Dexter’s first loss. He was not stupid, or arrogant — and District 1 is certainly not naive — to think it would be his last. But this marked the first that felt so stupid, so pointless.
Onscreen the rolling ash cloud swept on, moving impossibly, unbelievably fast, outrunning even the district trains. By now Death Command was a buzz of shouts and screams; mentor screens alight with tributes drowning, crushed by rocks, swept away in a tidal wave of mud.
The hunting pack, on the far side of the meadow, stared up at the mountain in horrified awe as arcs of lightning and fire shot from its surface.
“Well,” said their surviving girl, “that makes things easier.”
On the other side of the woods, the boy from Twelve watched through narrowed eyes, then turned and spat onto the grass.
Dexter’s breath stuck in his chest. Behind him, a few of those who just lost everyone in play made plans for dinner. Footsteps approached Dexter’s chair, paused, kept moving.
“You.” He didn’t bother to look. “Pretty one. Do you want to maim something?”
Now he glanced over. One of the women from Two, dark and stunning and dangerous, her screen dark the same as his. She had blood-red nails filed into points and a calm expression, almost serene, except for a glint in her eyes that called to Dexter through a lurch in his gut.
Their districts murder each other every single year. This woman, effortlessly beautiful even with ink-smudges on her palm and dark shadows beneath her eyes, would never know the touch of a hand she can’t refuse.
His screen had not come back online. The scoreboard on the far wall mark District 1’s running tally at 2:2.
Dexter’s breath, unstuck all at once, left him in a rush. “Fuck yes.”
She took him out through one of the back doors, past an Avox who nodded and, of course, said nothing. Callista (Dexter finally remembered) pressed something into his hand as they slipped by.
“Do I want to know?” he asked in an undertone once they reached the alley.
“Drugs,” Callista said, so matter of fact that Dexter couldn’t help a bark of laughter. It felt like a betrayal but at the same time, a relief. “One of mine. Guaranteed clean, nice and floating with a gentle comedown. Capitol mixes are hard and ugly. Most of them don’t need to work the next day.”
You didn’t need to tell Dexter, but that was not a conversation for a Two. The idea that one of them apparently dealt bespoke happy drugs to Avoxes on the side in exchange for favours felt incredulous enough, he was not about to ask if she can cut him in.
“All of this for nothing.” Callista tipped her head back, face lit by the scattershot glow of the all-night fireworks. “Double the tributes, and for what? To take out half in a single shot? Ridiculous. Amateurs. We being them glory every year and they crush it underfoot. Wasting potential like poetry for shit-paper.”
Dexter laughed again, raw and scraping. God, Twos, never change. “So you could do better as a Gamemaker, that’s what I’m hearing?”
She slitted her eyes at him. “Sacrifice is sacrifice no matter what. Death is death. But this? We give them our children, willingly or not. It should mean something. Their lives should not be wasted.”
For the first time he can remember, Dexter blinked first. He looked away, pressure in his chest. “Not arguing with that.”
The Capitol, like any other, was a city, even with the glitz and glamour of the centre-ville. Once they left the downtown core with the Games complex, the casinos and hotels and twenty-four hour restaurants, blinding lights and promise of nonstop fun fun fun, the Capitol got a little dimmer, a little dingier, and Dexter’s instincts began to prickle.
“It doesn’t take long,” Callista said. She’d transformed into Career mode now, all angles and alert, and Dexter felt himself come alive even being next to her. He’d forgotten what hunting felt like. “This time of night, someone’s always around.”
“And you, what, hope they’re drunk enough to try something, so you know they deserve it?”
He didn’t know why he said it, but he’d never forget the look Callista shot him, part withering, part pity, before casting her gaze back out over the street. “Look around you. Everyone here deserves it.”
Thrill danced across his spine, or maybe it was the morning breeze. “And here I thought you were loyal.”
This time she rounded on him, eyes blazing. “I am loyal. I have more loyalty to this country in one thimbleful of blood than every fool drinking themselves stupid back there. So does each of those children lost, and so, I should think, do you.”
Loyalty would not be how Dexter put it, loyalty was for Twos and their stupid complex, loyalty was — let’s be frank — for suckers. But something pushed Dexter out of bed each morning, something got him into that mentor chair day after day, and something kept him from sticking a syringe into his arm and pushing the plunger all the way down when gritted-teeth stubbornness just wouldn’t cut it anymore.
Was it loyalty? Probably not, he was too damn pragmatic for that. But it sure wasn’t a love of fucking entertainment, either.
“I think I hear something,” he said instead.
Oh, he’d missed the smell of blood. He’d hated it too, the way it crept into his dreams and filled his nostrils, the way the Arena lingered over his shoulder in all the worst ways. But standing over some Capitol asshole, blubbering on the ground while the blood pooled out onto the concrete, a dagger in his hands — fuck, if he didn’t feel seventeen again in all the ways that mattered.
“I don’t need your money,” Callista was saying in a voice of exaggerated patience. “I have my own. What I really want is for you to hurt enough for both of us.” She waved to Dexter. “You remember how to keep them alive, don’t you, darling?”
He laughed. “Don’t worry, we can be here as long as you want to.”
Some time later, Callista’s fingers circled his wrist. “We can’t kill him,” she said, bringing him back from a haze as floating and gentle as the drugs she gave the Avox. “I made a promise, and security tends to look the other way for my little escapades but only so far as I colour within the lines. If you want more we can find someone else.”
Blood coated Dexter’s arms to the elbows, splattered his chest and across his forehead. Callista, meanwhile, could go for brunch at a fancy restaurant, save for a delicate spray of arterial blood across her cheek. “No,” he said, surprised to find he meant it. “I’m good.”
“Good.” She smiled, bright and savage, and she cocked her head and gave him a slow once-over. “Now I do find that sometimes, with the bloodlust sated, other appetites rise to the surface …”
Now that was absurd. Their girls were dead, buried under ash and mud, impossible for the hovercrafts to retrieve until the Games were finished. He and Callista had nearly killed a man together in broad daylight. And yet Callista had a smile that shot warmth down to his toes, and curves that made his mouth water, and they had nearly killed a man together in broad daylight.
But she was Two, untouchable, and Dexter did not have that luxury. “Not really,” he said, stomach twisting. He kept his voice light even as his fingers tightened on the dagger. “Thanks, though.”
Callista nodded, brisk and businesslike, as though he’d turned down an alliance. “Of course. Now let’s get back before someone —“
He could say no. Here, with her, in an alley with a man bleeding out at his feet, Dexter could say no.
He crashed into her, dagger pressed flat to her collarbone, and kissed her so hard he tasted blood. Callista laughed into his mouth, a pleased, if startled, sound, and kissed him back. “I see how it is,” she murmured. “My safe word is Octavius.”
Dexter reared back. “Your what is who?”
Callista paused, fingers tracing patterns on his hip, and he couldn’t tell if he’d disappointed her, made her unexpectedly sad, or both. “Hm,” she said finally, as though that explained everything. “Come home with me. There is much to learn.”
He almost said no again, just because he could, but he had a knife to her throat and she still hadn’t flinched, and she’d brought him out to hunt and her hand was close, so close, and if he said no she would step back and lead him home and that would be it. She wouldn’t pull his hair and call him a tease and demand he finish what he started. The freedom of it, mixed with the scent of blood, made him giddy.
His girl was dead. He was alive. And he’d made some asshole bleed for both.
“Yeah, okay,” Dexter said. Callista showed her canines when she grinned.