A/N: Thank you, KenJ, for the description of escrima sticks.
Chapter Nine
The first faint light of dawn found Lois and Clark still high in the tree. Both were asleep, secured to the tree with their belts to prevent them from falling.
After the Careers had fled the night before, the woods had mostly been silent — except for the scream, about two hours later, of a tribute who had fallen asleep in a tree and fallen. In the silent woods, everyone could hear the branches breaking as the tribute fell. There had been a dull thud as the tribute had hit the ground, followed shortly by the sound of a cannon.
The noise had sent Lois and Clark, who had both been growing drowsy, searching frantically for a way to keep themselves in the tree if they fell asleep. Falling from sixty feet up was likely to be fatal, or at least cause severe injury, but it wasn’t safe to sleep on the ground — not with a hungry predator roaming the forest.
It was Lois who had come up with the idea to use their belts to secure themselves to the branches they were sitting on, and shortly thereafter, both battered, exhausted tributes had fallen asleep.
For Clark, the need to secure himself while he slept had been twofold — if he fell from the tree while vulnerable, he was likely to be killed, while if he regained his invulnerability while he slept and then fell, he would be hard-pressed to explain why he was completely uninjured. Even more worrisome was the possibility that he would regain his ability to fly and float out of the tree, something that he wouldn’t be able to explain away by any stretch of the imagination.
Clark awoke first, shivering slightly in the chilly morning air. He realized immediately that his extraordinary abilities had not yet returned — the cold wouldn’t have bothered him if they had. Unbelting himself from the tree, he looked around carefully, listening for any sign of danger. He heard the river running and birds singing, but nothing that indicated a threat.
He climbed down slowly, feeling stiff and sore from all the bruises and from the exertion of the day before. He had heard his parents complain about stiff muscles after long days in the fields, but had never quite understood what they meant until now.
Clark looked up into the tree and saw that Lois was still asleep, but was beginning to stir. Another look around assured him that they were reasonably safe for the moment, so he turned in the direction of the river, seeking water and perhaps a few more berries and cattails to go with the rabbit. The little food he had gathered the afternoon before had been shared with Lois during the night, along with a few pine nuts that Lois had found.
When Clark returned, he found Lois standing beneath the tree, squinting at the sunlight and grumbling to herself about the ludicrousness of the Gamemakers making the sun rise so early.
Clark stifled a laugh when he heard her — he doubted she’d appreciate him chuckling at her remarks. He was reasonably certain that the sunrise was perfectly natural, but didn’t think that was what she wanted to hear.
He held out the cleaned rabbit. “Hungry?”
Lois stared at the carcass, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t suppose you’ve managed to forage any coffee?”
“No, but I did find more cattails and some wild grapes.”
Lois sighed. “Water it is, I suppose.” She turned in the direction of the river, yawning.
“Wait.” Clark held out the knife. “It seems safe enough, but just in case …”
Lois looked at him suspiciously. “You’re not afraid I’ll stab you?”
“Are you planning to?”
“No. I keep my promises.”
“Well, then …” Clark handed her the knife. Giving it to her was more than a way of ensuring her safety — it was also a gesture of trust.
Lois looked at the knife for a moment before taking it. She slid it into her belt and met Clark’s eyes for a moment before turning and heading in the direction of the river.
By the time Lois returned, her hair wet from where she’d plunged her head into the river to wake herself up, Clark had collected some wood and cleared an area of dry leaves and grass. He was trying to make a fire using the drill and platform from the day before — and was once again not having much success.
“It’ll help if we work together,” Lois told him, sitting on the other side of the platform and putting her hands near the top of the drill.
Clark nodded. He’d practiced making a fire with Becky, keeping the stick moving until his hands were nearly to the platform and then letting her start at the top. Ideally, the drill would never stop moving, as one person would take over at the top as soon as the other person reached the platform, but Becky had never been able to keep the stick spinning long enough for the friction to build up and create a burning coal. Even with Clark’s help, Becky had been unable to start a fire without a match.
Lois was much stronger than Becky had been, though, and before too long smoke rose from the notch in the platform, encouraging them to redouble their efforts. Not long after, a small, smoldering chunk of the platform burned through and landed on the small pile of dry moss and grass.
Clark shoved the drill and platform aside and blew gently on the coal, feeding bits of dry grass and leaves to the tiny flames until they grew. Next he added small sticks, then larger ones, until a small fire blazed in the tiny clearing. He made no effort to build it larger — the sunlight helped to hide the light of the fire from a distance, and the early hour made it less likely that other tributes would come looking for the source of the smoke, but he wasn’t about to take unnecessary chances.
Lois looked from Clark to the rabbit uncertainly. Finally, she said, “Well, since you went to all the trouble of getting everything for the fire, I guess I can cook the rabbit.”
Clark offered the rabbit to her. When she still hesitated, he asked, “Do you know how to cook it?”
Lois looked at him challengingly. “How hard can it be?”
Within a short time, it became apparent that Lois didn’t know how to cook over an open fire. She had no idea what the sharpened oak branch Clark handed her was for, and after he showed her how to skewer the meat and extend it over the fire, she neglected to turn it, resulting in one side quickly overcooking and then catching fire.
Startled, Lois dropped both skewer and meat into the flames. Clark, forgetting for a moment both where he was and the fact that he wasn’t invulnerable, tried to retrieve them and burned himself.
“Ow!” Clark put his burned fingers in his mouth.
Lois rolled her eyes at him. “I may not be a great cook, Farmboy, but at least I know better than to put my hand in a fire.” Taking the broken spear from him, she used it to take the meat from the fire and dropped it on a nearby flat boulder. Clark helped her put out the remaining flames, and then they both stared at the charred meat in dismay.
Taking the spear from Lois, Clark poked at the rabbit, remembering this time not to touch it, and said, “I think it’s still edible.”
The meat was burnt on the outside and still slightly undercooked on the inside, but neither tribute had eaten much in the past day. Lois had been too nervous to eat much before entering the arena, and Clark too sick from the Kryptonite poisoning. Both had expended a lot of energy in the hours that followed, and Clark’s body was demanding more strongly than ever that he replenish the energy it had burned recovering from the exposure to Kryptonite.
Lois took the knife from her belt and set about dividing the meat. As she hacked at it, she snapped at Clark, “I do know how to cook!”
Clark glanced at the charred rabbit, then back at Lois, his face showing his skepticism. “I can!” she insisted. “Okay, so it’s only four things, and only one of them without chocolate, but it’s still cooking.”
“I guess the one without chocolate isn’t rabbit.”
“I didn’t think it would be that hard! It’s just a piece of meat.” Lois finished cutting the rabbit into pieces. Shoving half of the meat in Clark’s direction, she knelt down next to the rock, grabbed a piece of her share, and took a bite.
Clark picked up a piece of rabbit, bit into it, and chewed it slowly. It was terrible, but he was too polite to say so and too hungry to really care.
Lois made a face, but kept eating. “Claude said he loved my cooking. I guess that’s just one more thing he lied about.”
“Maybe what you made for him was good.”
“I didn’t make it for him! He just assumed it was his, and I was dumb enough to fall for his charm. He was a waste of perfectly good chocolate.” Lois flung a bone into the brush and went on. “He just wanted my project. At the end of eleventh grade, everyone in District 3 does an end-of-year project, working on some new technology or looking for ways to improve an old technology. Then they write a paper about it, and the best ideas are put into use and used to help develop new things.
“Claude and I were both working with my father on the prosthetics he designs — did you know that they can actually make a person stronger than they were before? But Claude wasn’t doing a very good job at writing up his project, so he stole mine. He tricked me and then stole my paper, so he got the top score and all the accolades while I got a failing grade. He was pressuring me into having sex and I just wasn’t sure I wanted to. He just kept pressuring me and pressuring me and finally I just ran to my room and locked the door. When I finally came out, he was gone, and so was my paper. Then that scum spread a rumor that I was frigid, so I got a reputation, too. And when I told my father what Claude had done, he just said that it wouldn’t have happened if I’d been born a boy like he wanted.”
“Lois, I —“ Clark began, but Lois kept going as if she hadn’t heard him.
“I couldn’t believe it when both Claude and I were Reaped. I told him that if he came anywhere near me, I’d kill him. He just laughed at me. And to think I thought I loved him for a while! I’m glad he’s not going to be victor — he’d be even more insufferable if he was! Still, what the Careers did wasn’t right. You don’t pretend to be someone’s friend and then turn on them, even if that person would turn on you, but I guess that’s what the Careers always do, and …” She trailed off, looking up at Clark. “I’m babbling, aren’t I?”
“It’s okay,” Clark assured her. “What he did to you was awful. It’s no wonder you two were always fighting.”
“I hated him, but what the Careers did still wasn’t fair. He was a lying, cheating scumbag, but still …” It dawned on Lois how much she’d just revealed to Clark, someone she barely knew. Looking at him fiercely, she demanded, “You’d better not breathe a word of this to anyone!”
Clark thought it prudent not to point out that she’d just told everyone in Panem about what had happened with Claude. “I won’t say anything.” He couldn’t speak for everyone else in Panem, though. Changing the subject, he asked, “Where did you learn to fight? I’ve never seen anyone fight like you do.”
“I was just defending myself. It was nothing special.”
“You managed to flip me over your head, even though I’m bigger than you. You threw Platinum —“ Clark stopped when he saw the stony look on Lois’s face.
“Those were dance moves. It’s not my fault if you weren’t expecting them!”
“I don’t think I’d like to go to dances in your district.”
“You don’t use those moves at dances. They’re for performances. District 3 has a long tradition of that kind of performing arts. It isn’t for fighting.”
Clark suddenly understood what Lois was saying — and what she wasn’t saying. The Capitol let the residents of District 3 get away with fighting moves disguised as dance as long as they weren’t too obvious about it. As long as it didn’t threaten the Capitol — and provided a good show in the arena — it was acceptable, but the moment anyone openly acknowledged that District 3’s dance moves could be used for fighting, there would be a crackdown. The technology developed in District 3 made it popular with the Capitol, but the slightest hint of rebellion would bring unpleasant consequences.
“In District 9, we have a tradition of square dancing. It’s used at dances, but some people are so good at it that everybody gathers around to watch. I guess people like to watch a good show everywhere.”
Lois nodded, acknowledging that she understood what he was saying — that he knew that no one should admit that her defensive moves were anything other than an art form, in spite of their usefulness in the arena. After all, if an art form such as flower arranging gave a tribute the ability to identify plants, or a game that involved throwing a ball taught a tribute to aim a spear or rock, then certainly the ability to dance might give a tribute the strength to win a fight. Training for the Games was forbidden, though overlooked in the Career districts, but tributes with survival skills gained through the everyday work of their districts made the Games more interesting to the viewers in the Capitol, and the added excitement of special skills learned through harmless games or art forms kept the Capitolites watching and gave the Gamemakers the ratings they craved.
*****
After finishing their meal, Lois and Clark put out the fire and left the stand of oaks behind. Staying in one place was too dangerous, especially with thirteen tributes left. The Career pack had been reduced by a third, but was still dangerous — especially since they’d almost found them the night before, and might be back for a second look — and the other tributes were also a threat. Though most of them wouldn’t consider killing under normal circumstances, all of them were aware that surviving the Hunger Games meant being the last one alive, and every competitor killed increased a tribute’s chances of survival.
Clark was an especially attractive target because of his high training score. It meant that he had strength and skills, unknown though they were to the other tributes, which made him a deadly threat. Eliminating him would, in the minds of his competitors, make them much safer.
Lois, too, was regarded as a threat. Her training score, though not as high as Clark’s, was still higher than most non-Career females scored. Those who had witnessed her fight with Platinum knew that she could be dangerous — and so she was, therefore, a prime target. In almost all Games, the low-scoring tributes who survived the bloodbath were ignored until later, while the high-scoring tributes who weren’t part of the Career pack were hunted down. The Careers themselves were almost always high-scoring, so their practice of banding together helped keep them safe from other tributes who saw them as threats to be eliminated.
Neither Lois nor Clark had the slightest desire to kill anyone, and both wanted to avoid confrontations if at all possible. They spent the day exploring the arena, keeping their distance from the Cornucopia and avoiding the other tributes. There was safety in numbers — few tributes without allies would confront the two of them directly — but that didn’t rule out the possibility of an ambush.
Clark wondered when his unusual abilities would return. By the time twenty-four hours had passed since he was first exposed to the Kryptonite, they still had not returned. When he had been exposed to Kryptonite at age sixteen, he had been without his strange abilities for three days, but it had been a much larger piece of stone than Platinum’s pendant, and he had been exposed for quite a while before his parents had found him. It stood to reason, though, that even if Platinum’s pendant had been smaller, he’d had closer contact with it, if only for the short time that she’d been attacking him. The pendant had brushed against his neck when she’d tackled him, burning as painfully as the hottest flame.
At the time of his last exposure, he hadn’t yet developed all of the abilities that he now possessed, and in fact hadn’t even fully developed the ones that he did have. This was his first exposure to Kryptonite since he had learned to fly, and the amount of time it would take for him to fully recover was unknown. Though the lack of his unusual talents did ensure that no one would catch on that he had them, he wasn’t used to being vulnerable to attack and injury, and the knowledge that someone else could kill him — and probably would, given the chance — was scary.
Clark didn’t know if there was any Kryptonite left in the arena. He was reasonably certain that Platinum’s pendant was gone, since anything a tribute had with them when the hovercraft picked up their body was also removed from the arena. There was an old, unspoken rule that stealing another tribute’s token was forbidden, a rule developed by the Career tributes decades earlier after one had stolen the token from the body of another, resulting in a fight that had wound up wiping out the Career pack, ultimately resulting in the first of the only two victories District 12 had ever had.
It was unlikely that any other tribute had any Kryptonite — Clark would have felt it if they did. That didn’t rule out any existing naturally in the arena, nor did it rule out the possibility that the Gamemakers had had some placed in the arena to see what the tributes would do with it. He hadn’t come across any, but that didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t there.
Clark was still aching from the unaccustomed injuries he’d gotten, and examined his burned fingers so often that Lois commented on it.
“What’s the matter, Farmboy? Don’t tell me you’ve never burned yourself before.”
“I’m usually more careful,” Clark replied. He had burned himself a few times in the past, but it was easy to forget that it hurt when he didn’t have to worry about it.
“You’ll live,” Lois told him, then added, “and your fingers will hurt less if you leave them alone.”
“You should take your own advice and stop poking at the bruises on your face,” Clark informed her crossly, not appreciating being lectured on taking care of himself.
Lois rolled her eyes at him, but after that they both stopped constantly probing their injuries.
Sometime later, when they stopped in the shade of a willow tree to drink from the small spring that kept the tree alive, Clark looked at the cut on his arm and discovered that it was beginning to heal. Wondering if it might heal faster if he got more sunlight, he took his shirt off, tying it around his waist along with his jacket.
Lois made a face. “Trying to impress the ladies, Kent?”
Clark hadn’t thought that it might bother her. In District 9, it was common for men and boys to go without shirts in the heat of summer. He was about to apologize when he noticed that she kept glancing at him, then looking away.
Deciding to tease her a little instead, he asked, “Are you impressed?”
“No!” Lois replied quickly — a little too quickly. “Of course not.”
Clark grinned at her discomfiture. Lois glared at him.
“Men! You’re all alike. You think you can show some muscles and flash a charming smile and the girls will just fall at your feet.”
“You think I have a charming smile?”
“There’s nothing remotely charming about you, Kent, and I’m definitely not impressed. Now, you should put your shirt back on before you get sunburned.”
“No … I like the feeling of the sun on my back.”
“Suit yourself, but don’t complain to me when you burn.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
*****
Late in the afternoon, Lois and Clark made their way to the far side of the lake from where the Cornucopia was. As they made their way up a pine-covered hill, Lois suddenly pulled the knife. Clark looked around apprehensively. Did Lois see or hear something that he had missed? As he watched, she calmly walked over to a pine sapling and started hacking at the trunk. Once she had this tree cut down, she selected another one for the same treatment.
She picked up the one she had just felled and started cutting off the limbs. Once she finished with that one, she did the same to the other. Then she measured a length half again as long as her arm and lopped off the trunk at that length. She cut the second one to the same length.
After stripping the bark off, she whittled one end on each until she had two slightly flattened sides on each. Taking the point of the knife she started to drill a hole an inch or so from the end. Once she had a hole in each, she turned to Clark and asked, “Can I have a piece of the rabbit skin?”
Clark had been watching all of this in wonder. Taking the rabbit hide from his belt, he handed it to her. As he did, he asked, “Mind telling me what you’re making?”
Absently, as she worked cutting the hide into strips, she replied, “Just a little something we use when we dance. They are called streamer sticks. A streamer is attached to the end, and while dancing, you wave the sticks around so that the streamers make patterns. The object is to keep the streamer from hitting the ground. My streamers are twenty feet long. I’m the best in my age group.”
When she finished with the rabbit hide strips, she threaded one each through the hole in the sticks and tied them into loops. She stuck the knife back in her belt and, taking a stick in each hand, demonstrated. The sticks became a blur of motion, describing figure eights intertwining in front and beside her. Clark could see that anyone or anything entering the perimeter created by these moving sticks would be in for a wallop.
Now armed with a weapon that she was intimately familiar with, and leaving the knife in her belt, they moved on.
As they were skirting the crown of a hill, Lois noticed something.
“What’s that?” She pointed to a pile of boulders that appeared to have a cave-like gap in them.
Clark looked at it cautiously. “It might be a cave.”
“Let’s go take a look.” Lois started in the direction of the rock pile.
“Lois, wait …” Clark sighed in resignation and followed her. Lois seemed to test her luck more than anyone he’d ever met. Not only had she earned the ire of the Careers before they entered the arena, picked a fight with Platinum to save his life, and attempted to sneak up on him while he was sleeping the evening before, but earlier in the afternoon she had startled a large rattlesnake and barely missed being bitten and then had come across the District 8 boy, who had pulled a knife before seeing Clark running up to Lois. The boy had decided against confronting both of them and had run away.
Fortunately, Lois’s luck was still holding. The cave was empty except for a single camera wedged in between two small boulders for the best possible view of the rock shelter. There were a few paw prints, but they were old, and it was evident that no tribute had found it before them.
One rock wall was black with centuries’ worth of soot, and another held the artwork of various cultures, all of it centuries old, ranging from the ritual artwork of the native people who had inhabited the area five hundred years before, to the marks left by explorers and pioneers, to an ode written to a long-defunct brand of beer. The front of the cave was wide enough to walk in and out of, though a tall person would need to duck their head, while the back was almost completely enclosed, with just enough of an opening to allow smoke to escape.
“We could hide here,” Lois said when they stepped out of the small space. “We could have a fire in here to keep us warm at night and cook our food, and it would be hard to see outside the cave. The lake isn’t so close that other tributes are likely to stumble over this place, but we can still get water, and there are edible plants nearby, and animals, too. One person could guard the entrance while the other one sleeps, and it would be easy to defend.”
Clark didn’t argue with her. She was right about the cave. It was a relatively safe place, and sleeping there would be more comfortable than sleeping in a tree. They didn’t have much food at the moment, but if they stayed in one place they would have the chance to gather more and to set some snares using their bootlaces. He had still not regained his invulnerability, and didn’t relish the thought of spending another night in the open. The mountain air grew chilly at night, and beyond the discomfort, there was the ever-present threat of other tributes.
“Well?!” Lois demanded.
Clark realized that he’d been lost in thought for a few minutes. “You’re right. We’ll stay here — at least for the night.”
The air was growing cool, so Clark quickly put his shirt and jacket back on. Lois stared at him, arms crossed, obviously annoyed by something.
“What?” Clark asked.
“How did you keep from getting sunburned?” Lois demanded. Her own face was red with sunburn, and that, combined with the pain from the bruises and cuts, was making her uncomfortable and cranky.
“I don’t know,” Clark answered honestly. He didn’t. He wasn’t sure if his body’s ability to make use of sunlight prevented him from burning, or if he was starting to regain his invulnerability. Whatever the reason, he wasn’t sunburned at all. “Maybe it’s all the time I spend working in the sun at home.”
Lois still looked irritated, but didn’t respond. Finally, she said, “We should collect some wood before it gets dark if we’re going to build a fire.”
*****
When they returned with the wood, Clark pulled a handful of willow leaves from his pocket and handed them to Lois. She looked at them for a moment, not knowing what they were for.
“They’re not much,” Clark told her, “but if you chew the leaves — just one at a time, because they’re really bitter — they’ll help your face hurt less.”
“At home, we have medicine for sunburn.”
“If you were at home, you wouldn’t be sunburned like this.”
Lois grimaced, but tried one of the leaves, making exaggerated expressions of disgust over the bitter taste. Clark could only imagine how entertaining the people watching the Games would find her.
Working together, they made another fire, then ate the little food they’d gathered that day. When the national anthem played, they stepped out of the cave, glancing around cautiously, and looked up at the screen to see who had died that day.
There had been two deaths in the past twenty-four hours, that of the tribute who had fallen from the tree and another whose cannon had sounded around noon that day. It was impossible to say which tribute was which, nor did they know what the second tribute had died from. Both dead tributes were girls, one from District 8 and the other from District 10.
Clark picked up a rock and flung it angrily into the darkness. “Yesterday morning, all twenty-four of us were alive. Now … only half of us are.”
He glanced at Lois in surprise when she put a soothing hand on his arm. “At least they aren’t suffering,” she said quietly.
“They shouldn’t have —“ Clark closed his mouth. Protesting against the Capitol’s policies from the arena was a sure way to bring retribution.
He stared up at the night sky, frowning when he realized something — the stars bore no resemblance to anything found in nature. The first night in the arena, his view of the sky had been sufficiently hidden by the foliage of the oak tree that he hadn’t noticed the odd pattern, but now he realized that these stars could only be projected by the Gamemakers.
“How do they do that?” he asked Lois, wondering if she might know. The technology had probably been developed in District 3.
“There’s a force field surrounding the whole arena,” Lois told him, “including above us. It’s so no one can get in and interrupt the Games. The stars look like that so we can’t comment on them and tell anyone where we are.”
As they watched, the star projections changed into the distinct pattern of a heart, then changed again to form a crescent moon shape.
Clark’s heart sank at Lois’s words. In the back of his mind, he’d held out the hope that he might be able to escape the arena, and perhaps rescue some of the other tributes, by flying out of it. The force field made that impossible. He could break through most things, but not force fields.
There was no possibility of getting out of the arena.
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