Survivor: The Forty-Seventh Hunger Games

Chapter 24

Cross Spaulding, D8

Lancia and I were the only specific, devoted allies I knew of on Heilala. I thought it would be an advantage, of course, or I wouldn't have offered. I was, however, uneasy about meeting with only Lancia to discuss strategy. The others were bound to think we were plotting, and I didn't want them to feel threatened. As a result, we talked strategy during meals, when it might possibly look like we were just sitting together out of convenience.

"All right. We work together on challenges and do our best to talk each other up without sounding suspicious. If we find anything useful, we tell each other so we can both bring some back to camp. And obviously we don't vote against each other," I said.

"Right," Lancia said. She glanced at me, then at the table, then back at me nervously, then across the room, fiddling with her fingers. We both knew what we were both thinking about. I broke the ice.

"You can vote for whoever you want. I won't judge you or anything. We don't have to tell," I said.

"I have no idea what to do. I guess I'll figure it out when it happens," she said. "What about you?"

"I thought about it. I think the only thing I can do is cast a throwaway vote every time. Since we can't vote for ourselves," I said, not that I was sure I could have done it.

"This must be especially weird for you," Lancia said. "You're one of... those people." She glanced nervously around for invisible cameras.

"Pretty sure I'm already on the hit list. It can't get any worse," I said. "And it's not as bad as it could be. The Bible talks a lot about Jesus loving kids. I always thought all children went to Heaven."

"That's nice," Lancia said.

"It was the only good thing about the Games. Maybe some of them who died wouldn't have gone the same way if they grew up. It's still bad, but it always gave me a little hope," I said.

"That's a nice way to look at it," Lancia said. "I don't know much about that sort of stuff, but I hope you're right."

Trent Buchanan, D6

I wasn't allowed to leave the Games building and run around the Capitol. I also wasn't allowed to run across the banisters, as I discovered after doing so and getting yelled at. I wandered around the training room, but it was hard to get enthusiastic about it. This year, the Games was all about intangible things. Charisma and duplicity and luck weren't things you could learn. Our fates this year were even more sealed than normal. Any action I took could butterfly out in a million different ways, and I had no idea what the chain that led to victory was. More or less, training was a waste of time.

Life was short. Probably a lot shorter than normal, for me. I could spend most likely my last few days on Earth working in the training room for maybe a 1/23 instead of a 1/24 chance, or I could make them mean something. I left the training room behind and explored the Games building, poking into all the stores and seeing where every staircase led (and sliding down an empty staircase once, since no one was there to tell me not to). I tried some weird rainbow soda and bought a shirt just because I'd never in my life bought a brand-new shirt. In short, I lived it up.

After I got back to my room, I took a black marker and lay on the floor with my head squeezed underneath the wardrobe by my bed. I wrote my name on its wooden bottom and wondered if it would ever be discovered, even in a hundred years. I reclined on top of my bed watching a Capitol extreme sports competition on the television that covered nearly an entire wall while idly flipping through the different pictures the window could project.

Will the Games be like this too? Planning and preparing didn't mean much this time. Anything could happen. All I knew for sure was that I'd be on a tropical island. There would be trees to climb and exotic new fruit to eat, and I would never know what was coming next. Instead of fretting all night and trying to divine the labyrinthine plots of everyone around me, maybe I should just things happen as they happened. If I had no control, I might as well enjoy the ride. Someone would win. It might be me. Otherwise, I would die in paradise.

Sparkil Maclein, D3

I was in a bit of a pickle. There wasn't going to be any technology in the Arena. Most years, if the people saw a Tribute could do cool things with it, they'd send wire or batteries or whatever. There were no sponsors this year, and Survivor was a primitive show. I was under strict orders not to take apart my arm for components, under penalty of Titian "popping it off my shoulder and tossing it into the fire to see if it would swell like a marshmallow". He was a strange man.

While I was under orders not to use my arm for its bionics, I was totally allowed to use my arm as an arm. To that end, I crawled into one of the VR pods that usually moldered unused against the wall of the training room. I fiddled around with the buttons and switches until I felt the wires stimulating my brain and the dark interior of the pod brightened into a virtual arena.

The first exercise I'd dialed in was a mutt fight. I'd specified that I wanted one of the monkey mutts from the rainforest Games. They were big enough to do damage, but small enough that I could fight a single one and get detailed info. When the monkey screeched and jumped out of a tree at me, I swung my bionic arm up so it would hit that first. The monkey bounced off initially, then jumped back up and grabbed on. When he chomped down, the metal casing cracked and sparks started to shoot from my arm, which became sluggish and hard to move. I pictured the termination phrase in my head and moved to the next simulation.

Simulation two was an endless rock wall. I was roped in, and I started to climb. At the point where my real arm got tired, my bionic one started to give me trouble. I jumped off the wall and exited the simulation.

The last simulation was the simplest. It was just me and a rock the size of a table. I reared back and punched the rock full blast. My bionic hand glanced off with a thunk, but when I examined my fingers, they were cracked and battered. When I punched again, my hand crumpled and shut itself down with the failsafe that made sure I didn't electrocute myself.

I exited the machine after that. I got what I went in for. As it turned out, and as I'd expected, my arm behaved exactly like a normal arm. In a most annoying use of planned obsolescence and under-utilization of resources, my arm was built to fail at the same point a real arm would. Unfortunately, it meant I couldn't punch through a mountain or go all Darth Vader on someone I didn't like. On the bright side, I still had an arm, and I did appreciate that.

I went ahead and assumed Cross had the same opinion about dead children that I do. I also assumed Star Wars was famous enough to still be remembered. Like we remember Beowulf and that's about one billion years old.