Survivor: The Forty-Seventh Hunger Games

Chapter 5

There are two parts to Cain, since the first part is important but the second part shows that's not all there is to him.

Cain Pander, 16 (D5M)

Ten years ago

It was really hot. I'd just barely gotten to sleep, since the sheets were so sticky they wound around my legs like spaghetti. When Dad's hot, clammy hands wrapped around my arm, I stirred awake and pushed at him.

"Cain! Get up!" he yelled. He pulled me up and into the air like a hot dog, and I noticed how much hotter it was than when I'd gone to bed. It was brighter, too- so bright I thought it was morning. Then I saw the fire on the windowsill and all across the floor, all the way up to the edge of my bed. It was about to burn Prickly the Dinosaur, so I reached out to grab him. As soon as I touched him, the fire burned my hand and my skin got all pink and slimy. I grabbed my hand with my other hand and cried as Dad ran with me out into the hall.

The hallway was even worse. We lived four apartments away from the stairs, and there was smoke and fire everywhere. Even the air was on fire, since it was all wavy. People were screaming, and Dad had to run around the holes in the floor. When I looked up at him, he was scared too, and that was the scariest thing in the world. A piece of ceiling broke off and landed on me. I thought I was going to die, but Dad brushed it away with his bare hand and then squished my head against his chest so I wouldn't get burned again. Even then, the smoke scorched my lungs, and I had trouble breathing at all.

It was hard to remember what happened after that. It wasn't hot anymore, since I was lying on the concrete sidewalk outside our building. Mom was telling me it was going to be okay. A firefighter put a plastic thing on my mouth and then I could breathe again. Other people were still screaming and running around the building. It wasn't going to be okay, though. Not until all the fire was gone and only if it never came back again.

Present

The fire did go away. And it usually didn't ever come back again. I still had a few little pieces of it on my arms and legs, but they didn't hurt anymore. I didn't do any cooking and I was about the only boy I knew who had never played with matches, but mostly it was okay. Our new apartment had a fire escape. It was old and rickety, but I would have tried it anyway.

It was summertime again, but not as hot as it was that year. My neighbors Lily and Lucas were out of school, and that meant we could play. They were ten and I was sixteen, but they didn't mind. They said I wasn't one of the big kids because I was cool.

Mostly we played racing. Lucas was the fastest, but Lily always got second, since I was really slow. Sometimes I was so slow I had to walk. Sometimes I got mixed up and ran the wrong way. Once in a while we mixed up the rules, like Lucas and I had to hop on one foot but Lily could run normally.

A firetruck wailed as it raced somewhere in the distance. It was weird, but I liked hearing firetrucks. It let me know they were still there keeping us all safe. Lucas and Lily ran to the corner of the road to see if it would go by, but it didn't. The fire was far away, just the way I liked it.

Samantha "Sammy" Voltage, 14 (D5F)

A lot of people think Panem is this horrible place where nothing good ever happens and you can't control anything in life. I don't think that way and never will. Life's too short to be sad all the time. Maybe they're right about good things being hard to get, but they'll definitely never make a good life for themselves if they give up trying. There might be a way, and if there wasn't, I was no worse off than before.

For me, the way up was sports. It was easy for me to keep trying, since I genuinely loved sports. Or sport, more accurately. I was a dodgeball fiend. It was an ideal sport for Panem, since all you needed for twenty kids was one ball if you shared it, and if you didn't have a ball, like we didn't for the first few months, you could use wadded up socks. All you needed was a good attitude, fast arms, and a bit of a pain tolerance. It seemed to me that was also what you needed to get ahead in Panem, and I had all three of those in spades.

It was super duper hard for normal District people to go to the Capitol... but it wasn't impossible. Legally, any District citizen could move to the Capitol if they got invited. Normally the Capitol didn't give two thoughts to a bunch of poor, smelly District peasants, but sometimes lightning struck. One time a real pretty girl in our District got scouted by a talent agent and went to the Capitol to be a model. Or so I heard- I never actually met her, and we didn't get many Capitol advertisements here. Every year we had national testing in school, and usually one or two seniors got picked to go to college in the Capitol to be doctors or whatever. It was about as likely as getting hit by a meteor, but people do sometimes get hit by meteors.

If I didn't make it big and become a nationally famous dodgeball player, it wouldn't be the end of the world. I'd stay in Five and be a District-famous dodgeball player. I already was the most famous dodgeball player in the District, since I was about the only dodgeball player in the District. There was me, three of my friends who played with me, and about twenty littler kids we grouped into four leagues and coached. The four of us that were my age didn't play in those games, since we were twice as big as all the other players, but we were the coaches. We swapped players every time so no one had an advantage. I called my team the Supernovas. We were blazing fast and all-around unstoppable. Except when we lost. Then we were sort of fast and a little unstoppable.

"Defence! Watch your flanks!" I cheered as my teammates threw around the bright red rubber balls that Lucina, Hunter, Kyle and me spent weeks working to be able to afford. It was a lot harder to be positive about life when you worked in the service industry, and I was glad that was over. A ball came flying out of bounds next to me and I tossed it underhand back into play.

The Supernovas shone brightly that day. After a valiant battle fiercely contested on both sides, we triumphed 6-4. Us four coaches cleared the field as the players compared bruises and trash talk.

"The Dynamos? More like the DUMBnamos!" I teased Hunter.

"Oooooooh," Lucina said.

"At least I didn't name my team after a dead star," he said.

"Oooooooh," Lucina said.

"Tomorrow is another day," Kyle said, and he shrugged. We'd all have different teams tomorrow, and maybe I'd lose as hard as I won this time. As long as we were still playing, it didn't matter. I just liked hitting people with balls and getting hit with them. That would go on forever. Someday the field would be bigger, though. Someday Five wouldn't be big enough for me. I'd have to take my team and move on to better things. We wouldn't be the Supernovas anymore then. We'd be the Shooting Stars, flying all across the country.