**It all started, as these things often do, with a request: kill the others. **

****

**The “others” harbored various states of defiance on the eve of the opening ceremony—some promised death upon their competitors by training harder and with more might than I’d ever seen back in my hometown of Angelina, where we hunted squirrels and rats; some entailed mutterings or outright shrieks to avenge their lives and the lives stolen by generations of measured genocide; others did not reveal their motivations quite so freely, but one could see it in their eyes, all save for one person, a girl—****_this _****girl—who had hunted for fourteen hours without sleep. In all that time I **wished for the gallantry of Stormsbriar to wash away with an overpoured riptide sent by whatever gods had grown bored of their monopoly on murder, and instead a deep-seated melancholy overtook the higher faculties of my mind, portobello-bloated with instinctual longing for a diamond age yet to come.

Whatever contraction of muscle those instincts demanded I crystallized to a fine point in the center of my vision so as not to make a sound and awaken the other seventeen year-old girl who slumbered beneath my tree, wherein I’d taken root thirty feet above her. The day prior she took a crossbow from one of the party favors dropped by boomerang helicopters curtesy of the Stormsbiar elite. No arrows, of course, but this girl spent her fourteen hours gathering sticks and whittling them into arrows ultimately finer and deadlier than any the counsel would have sent. All arrows pointed here. **All winds fell here. All tides ended here, at the base of an old birch tree, with my mother’s soft-baked ginger snap cookie in my hand while the other propped me against the trunk to keep from falling. **

****

**Until something cracked and fell. In my perusing of residual memories I’d failed to notice a leaf severe from its branch above me and flutter in the breeze to land right atop the forehead of the girl below, right between her eyes, which followed suit and fluttered open to settle on my gaze. **

****

**“Fucking coward,” she hissed, and leapt to her feet as she readied her bow. **

****

**It was now or never. I tossed my mother’s cookie to the ground. **

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**“What do we have here?” She asked, seeing I was armed with little else. “A distraction? Poison?” **

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**I said, “Food.” **

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**“Bullshit,” she spat, but while I could see in those same eyes the anger and violence in which we all reveled in such circumstances, another betrayal of the senses accompanied it: she was hungry. **

****

**I asked, “What do you hunger for?” **

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**She looked to her crossbow, to the cookie, and back to me. After a pause as bloated as the thoughts in my head and the fear in my heart, she picked up the cookie with a marked precision and put it to her lips. “It’s my choice,” she said. **

****

**I nodded. “It’s your choice.” **

****

**She sank her teeth into the desert. All at once the rage from her eyes, the hatred and violence she’d built up since birth in a place such as this, all of it melted like butter, and what was left of her was not a killer, or a tool of the wealthy, or a performer for the masses, or an “other” of any sort. She became what she always was: a seventeen year-old girl who knew not how to mend the broken pieces of this world. “Oh, God,” she breathed, and took another bite. “Oh…God…” **