Chapter Ten
By morning, Clark knew for certain that his strength and invulnerability were returning. The injuries of the past couple of days had healed, not leaving the faintest mark. He barely noticed the early morning chill, and wasn’t tired in spite of spending half the night keeping watch while Lois slept. His vision and hearing weren’t yet as sharp as when he was at full strength, but he could hear well enough to hear the Careers talking on the other side of the lake, though he couldn’t make out what they were saying. Enough of his X-ray vision had returned that he could make out the indistinct forms of squirrels in an underground burrow, and when he pulled off his glasses and pretended to rub his eyes tiredly, he focused his heat vision on his hand and felt the warm beams. His heat vision wasn’t powerful enough yet to set anything on fire, but it was definitely returning.
Clark had slept while Lois kept watch for the first half of the night, but after screams and laughter had sounded from the east end of the lake, followed by two cannon booms, they had both taken shelter inside the cave, weapons at the ready, in case the Careers came their way. After an hour, when only the normal sounds of the night could be heard and there was no sign of the flashlight beam, a drowsy Lois had lain down to sleep while Clark took her place at the mouth of the cave.
He’d had plenty of time to think while keeping watch. The shifting patterns of the stars — sometimes resembling actual constellations, other times forming a variety of distinct shapes that left no doubt that they weren’t natural — had reminded Clark of how helpless he was against the Capitol. Once his strange abilities returned, he could easily take care of himself, even if he couldn’t escape from the arena. He could easily hunt down and kill every remaining tribute — it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes, at most. Then, when he was declared victor and the hovercraft came to take him back to the Capitol, he could destroy it and fly away into the wilderness. No one could stop him.
If he did those things, he would be fine — physically, though his conscience would never let him forget what he’d done. Not only would he have the blood of nine other tributes on his hands — and he really couldn’t even think of doing that to Lois — as well as whoever was on the hovercraft, but the Capitol’s retaliation against those he cared about would be swift. His parents, his friends, the Rasens … all of them would suffer for what he had done. Haver and Matilda, though not his favorite people, would also suffer, as would Matilda’s husband, Sid. Even the Capitolites who had spent time with him while he was preparing for the Games might suffer. Marcius was a fool, but he was stupid, not evil. Rosaline had a husband and three children. His prep team, despite how uncomfortable they had made him feel, didn’t deserve to be punished, either, and neither did the Avoxes who had served him in the Training Center.
Even if the way had been clear for him to fly out of the arena, rescuing some of the tributes as he went, where could he have taken them? If he returned them to their homes, they would be punished for escaping the arena, as would their loved ones. If he took them into the wilderness, how would they survive? Few knew any more about wilderness survival than the little they had learned in the Training Center. In addition, it was already the middle of August. Winter would be coming soon to most of Panem, and those who didn’t have shelter and sufficient food stores would die.
For him, it didn’t matter — he could eat anything, drink any water, and sleep anywhere. The cold didn’t bother him, nor did the heat. The sunlight nourished him, rather than burning him. Storms were no threat to him, nor were predators.
The same couldn’t be said for his fellow tributes. The odds of their survival in the wilderness were low — and those odds would be even lower if he brought them back to their home districts. He was the strongest, most physically powerful person in all of Panem — but he was helpless to save the remaining tributes. If he saved them, everyone they cared about would die, and the thousands of people in their districts would suffer as the Capitol cracked down on them in retaliation for his efforts to save those few.
He could fight back against the Capitol, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once, couldn’t detect every possible threat. He had no desire to kill anyone — not Capitolites, not Peacekeepers, not the staunchest supporters of the Hunger Games. Many, perhaps most, were innocent of any wrongdoing under the law, and even if they weren’t, who was he to decide? What gave him the right to be judge, jury, and executioner? If he chose to raise himself above everyone else, to decide who would live and who would die, he would be no better than those who sent children into an arena to die for the Capitol’s entertainment.
There was more to the Capitol’s power than mere brute force — if that had been all there was, the far greater numbers of people in the districts could have overthrown the Capitol long before. What was far more powerful than Peacekeepers was the ability of those in power to make everyone else feel helpless. The Capitol controlled how much food and other basic necessities of life were available to the people in the districts — and whether they could afford what there was. It controlled what people learned in school — and what resources were available for learning outside of school.
The Hunger Games were an important part of the control the Capitol wielded over the districts. It showed the people of the districts that their children could be taken from them at random and sent away to die. It also divided the districts — people were allowed almost no contact with those in other districts, so most of what they knew of them was what they saw in the days leading up to the Games and in the Games themselves. When people saw their beloved children killed by children from other districts, it hardened their hearts against those who lived outside of theirs, making it far harder to sympathize with them and perhaps join with them against a common enemy.
The Games divided those within the districts, too. Those who were poor and hungry had to allow their children to take the tesserae, the meager rations of grain and oil given by the Capitol in exchange for more entries in the Reaping bowl, in order to keep the family alive — and as such, the children of poor families were far more likely to be put into the Games and killed. This engendered resentment against those who were more well-off, whose children were more likely to live to grow up.
The Capitol was presented to the districts as a place of wealth, luxury, and ease, in great contrast to the hard work and privations of even the most well-off districts. It was a place that victors, unlike most district residents, had access to, and the portrayal of the city as a desirable place full of beautiful, well-off people gave even the more restive districts a reason to support the Hunger Games — their victors might bring home some of that luxury and that excitement.
The propaganda hid much of the darker side of Capitol life — the heavy debt that so many accrued trying to keep up with the latest fashions and technology — all of which were heavily promoted to the point that they were considered necessities by many, the homeless who lived in the shadows of the city, and who were periodically rounded up and made to disappear by those who didn’t want their presence to remind them that not everything was perfect, and the lives of the Avoxes, who were no more than slaves and often subject to abuses against which they had no recourse.
The Capitolites had plenty of food — so much that a sizable proportion was thrown away on a daily basis, even though the districts that produced the food faced starvation and all too frequently had the pitiful amount rationed to them reduced.
The people of the Capitol were kept distracted by the many superficial entertainments available to them — the ever-changing fashions, celebrity and society gossip, sitcoms that favored sex and cheap laughs over substance, and reality television shows that bore little actual resemblance to reality — even the Hunger Games were played out against unnatural disasters, Capitol-designed muttations, and manipulations that pushed tributes into fights and often favored particular tributes who had caught the attention of the Capitol elite. The Capitol had a prolific film industry, but the films were heavily censored to make sure no seditious messages made it to the eyes and ears of Capitolites or to the privileged few in the Capitol’s favorite districts who were able to see some of the films.
The Capitolites had access to more formal education than most district residents, but even there the information was heavily controlled. Potentially thought-provoking lectures and courses at the two universities were marginalized — when permitted at all — and the main focus was on degrees that would allow the students to have careers that would earn them enough to buy the luxuries that so many Capitolites viewed as necessities. The few people from the districts who were permitted to attend the universities were restricted to courses pertaining to the trade they were learning — mostly technology or medicine — and were seldom allowed to leave campus or interact with students from the Capitol.
Clark knew little about politics, or about propaganda or the way that access to the basic necessities of life could be used to control people. He had been raised in an impoverished outer district and given a Capitol-approved education. When he had shown a talent for writing, a few of his teachers and his parents had encouraged him to continue, but his experience had been limited and his mind that of a child. As he had grown older, he had begun to understand some things more, but his world had still been limited. Even after he had learned to fly, he had been able to travel only at night to avoid being seen, and then, only two and a half months after gaining this remarkable ability, he had been Reaped and sent away to fight in the arena.
Though Clark knew the difference between right and wrong and had been given a strong moral compass by his parents, he was young and unsure of himself. He had been thrust, against his will, into a situation that demanded he give up all traces of compassion and all sense of right and wrong if he wanted to stay alive. He didn’t want to harm anyone, directly or indirectly, but even the strongest person in Panem had little power against a system that would destroy everyone associated with him if he dared to step out of line.
*****
By the time Lois awoke it was mid-morning. Clark was in a nearby pine tree, knocking down green cones with a stick so they could dry them by the fire and extract the seeds to eat. His vision and hearing had returned to their full strength, so he could detect any threats coming their way in plenty of time to get down and retreat to the cave to protect Lois.
It took Lois a few minutes to locate him. “Why didn’t you wake me?” she asked.
“You looked like you needed the sleep,” Clark replied, climbing down from the tree. “There wasn’t any danger, anyway.”
“Aren’t you tired?”
“I’m fine,” Clark told her. “On the farm, everyone is an early riser.”
“But you’ve been on guard since the middle of the night!”
Clark just shrugged. He didn’t know how late it had been when he had taken over guard duty, since he couldn’t see the real stars, but he didn’t feel tired in the slightest.
“Can I borrow the knife?” he asked, changing the subject.
Lois looked at him oddly, but handed it to him. “What do you need it for?”
“There are a couple of grooslings in the clearing up the hill. I saw them from the tree.”
“And … you’re going to hunt them with the knife?” Lois had paid more attention to Clark during the training days than she would admit, but she had never seen him practice throwing knives, and the birds weren’t likely to stay still while he crept up on them.
Clark shook his head, walking over to a tree with a branch in roughly the shape he was looking for. After climbing up to it, he cut the branch and brought it back down, then began to strip it of bark and needles. He used the knife to shape it slightly until he had a usable throwing stick. It wasn’t as good as one of the more finely crafted ones used in District 9, but it would have to do.
Lois was still eyeing him skeptically. “You’re going to beat them with a stick?”
“It’s a throwing stick,” Clark explained, “and I hope I’ll be able to hit one with it. We use these in the fields in District 9, where grooslings are pests. If you miss, it comes back to you so that you can try again.”
The groosling was a muttation, developed in a Capitol laboratory, a genetically engineered combination of the grouse and the turkey. Unlike most muttations, which had been developed as weapons, the groosling had been developed as a delicacy for Capitol gourmets. It had soon proven to mature quickly and reproduce rapidly, and had been easy to raise throughout the meat-producing areas of District 10, lowering the price and becoming a common food in the Capitol. Then, as often happened, a few grooslings had escaped into the wild and proven to be highly adaptable. Not long after that, they had become pests in the farming districts.
In District 9, flocks of grooslings descended upon the fields in the spring to eat the freshly planted seeds, then returned in the fall to eat the grain harvest. Though hunting was technically illegal throughout Panem, an exception was made for animals that threatened crops, so the farmers of District 9 hunted them en masse in the spring and fall. Guns were illegal, except for those owned by the Peacekeepers, as were bows and arrows, but throwing sticks were classed as farm implements and were permitted in much the same way that traps for rodents were permitted.
Technically, the pest animals killed by farmers were supposed to be turned over to the Peacekeepers for disposal, ostensibly to keep disease from spreading, but in actual practice they were usually eaten by the farm families or sold in town when they were particularly abundant. Rabbits and squirrels were also hunted under the farm pest exception, and most Peacekeepers in District 9 turned a blind eye to the way the farmers kept the pests they hunted for their tables — in exchange for a few of the tastier specimens.
During Clark’s childhood, he and his parents had eaten most of the animals they caught in the fields. When times were particularly hard, even the vermin caught in traps in the house and barn had wound up on the dinner table, as had snakes, snails, and a variety of insects. Food was food, and squeamishness was soon forgotten in the face of hunger.
Now, after making sure that it was still safe, Clark crept up the hill in pursuit of the grooslings. One would be more than enough for the two of them — they were good-sized birds. Grooslings couldn’t fly, but they had a knack for escaping predators by crashing through the brush and grass and changing direction abruptly. The easiest way to catch them was to sneak up on them and hit them with the throwing stick before they realized what was happening.
When he reached the clearing, Clark stood perfectly still, waiting for the right moment. He had good aim, but that wouldn’t help him if the groosling was no longer where he aimed the stick, and rushing forward at lightning speed to change the throwing stick’s trajectory or simply to grab the bird would reveal things about him he didn’t want anyone to know. Therefore, he had to wait until the time was right.
The smaller of the two birds was pecking at some seeds when Clark took aim and flung the stick at it. His aim was true; the groosling fell over without a squawk, never knowing what hit it.
The other groosling squawked in alarm, crashing through the nearby brush and disappearing into the woods. Clark ignored it. He had what he needed, and he had never seen the point in killing an animal unnecessarily.
By the time Clark returned to the cave, Lois had collected some wood and was using a long stick to push the pitch-covered green pinecones into a pile near the fire. Grabbing her streamer sticks, she whirled around in alarm when she heard Clark’s footsteps, then relaxed when she saw who it was and lowered the sticks.
Clark held up the groosling. “This should be enough for a few meals.” He sat down on a low boulder and started plucking the feathers.
Lois stared at him. “So, that’s how you get the feathers off.”
Clark looked at her strangely. “You didn’t know that?”
“No. In District 3, we develop technology, not … slaughter innocent birds.”
“Maybe I’ll just keep it for myself.” Clark chuckled a little at her indignant expression. “Relax. I’m just teasing you.” He pulled out another handful of feathers. “What would you have done if you’d killed that rabbit yourself? Do you have any idea how to clean game?”
“I would have figured it out.” Lois raised her chin resolutely. “I want to help. Pulling feathers doesn’t look so hard.”
Clark scooted over on the boulder, giving Lois a place to sit and putting the groosling between them. After showing her what to do, they worked in a silence for a few minutes.
When the bird was nearly clean, Lois glanced at Clark slyly. Then she scooped up a handful of feathers and flung them at him.
Clark was surprised for a moment, then picked up his own handful of feathers and threw them back at her. For a few minutes, the bird sat forgotten on the boulder as they flung the feathers at each other, laughing like children as they forgot for that brief time what had happened in the past few days and the fact that their lives were still in danger.
Suddenly, Clark stopped their play because he noticed something — a mountain lion crouching in the low growth about fifty feet away. It moved into an attack posture when it saw him watching.
“Lois, we’ve got company. Get behind me,” Clark instructed in a low voice, gesturing in the direction of the mountain lion. He looked at the animal, wondering why he hadn’t noticed its approach. Either his senses weren’t back as fully as he thought — something he doubted — or he’d been distracted by Lois.
Suddenly, the cat charged. Clark moved quickly, running toward the animal in hopes of scaring it off, but to no avail. Though neither tribute knew it, this was the animal that had taken down the District 4 boy the first night in the arena. It wasn’t a muttation, but rather a mother cat with a cub who had been trapped in the arena when the force field had gone up three weeks before the Games began.
The mountain lion and one of her cubs had been trapped inside by the force field. The second cub had tried to run through the force field after them and had been electrocuted. Though the force field used by the Capitol to prevent tributes from jumping off the Training Center building simply gave them a mild jolt and bounced them back onto the roof, the force field surrounding the arena was deadly, with such a strong electrical charge that any person or animal that touched it would be instantly electrocuted.
After the death of one of her cubs, the mountain lion had taken the remaining cub and fled, seeking a safer place as a den. Inside the arena, however, there was little in the way of large prey, and what little there was had soon been killed and eaten, or had grown extremely wary, leaving the cat and her cub hungry. The smaller prey, while more numerous, had also grown wary of the mountain lion, and was therefore increasingly difficult to catch.
On the first night of the Hunger Games, the mountain lion had just returned to her den with a squirrel she had caught when the Career tributes had blundered into her space. The mother cat had leaped to the defense of her cub, and in doing so, had caught her first substantial prey in ten days. Up until then, the cat had never seen a human and thus had never learned to avoid them.
There had been no time to feed on her catch, however, as the hovercraft had quickly descended and picked up the body of the District 4 boy, leaving the angry, frustrated mountain lion as hungry as ever.
Now, less than two days later, the cat had set her sights on two unwary humans. When one had caught sight of her, she had immediately gone into attack mode, charging at them. When one ran at her, she was startled, but undeterred. Having grown so thin that her ribs showed, and with a hungry cub still nursing, the odd behavior of her potential prey wasn’t enough to make her back down.
Clark knew that the predator couldn’t hurt him — though the animal was likely to hurt itself by attacking him. When he picked up on the scent of milk, he knew that the mountain lion had young somewhere, young which would be orphaned and left to die if something happened to the mother.
When the cat leaped at him, he allowed it to knock him over, curling into a semi-fetal position as he fell. This prevented the injury the animal would have incurred by simply slamming into him. He grabbed the mountain lion’s left foreleg, keeping it from clawing at his face, while the claws of the right paw shredded the left shoulders of his jacket and shirt, but didn’t injure him. When the mountain lion tried to bite his face, he grabbed her head, gently enough that he didn’t injure her but firmly enough that she couldn’t get loose, and used his legs to knock her off him, letting go of her head as he did so.
Tail switching furiously, the cat tried again, but was surprised by a painful blow to her back. Lois had joined the fray.
The first attack had happened so quickly that Lois hadn’t had time to do more than shout Clark’s name and run a few steps in his direction. When she had seen a good-sized fallen branch on the ground, she had grabbed it and rushed in the direction of the embattled cat and tribute. She had other weapons — the knife and the streamer sticks — but the mountain lion’s claws and teeth were formidable weapons, not ones she wanted to face in close combat if she could avoid it.
As Clark scrambled to his feet, Lois rushed forward, holding the branch like a club. She brought it down on the mountain lion’s back, then darted backwards as the animal turned on her. Clark grabbed the cat’s tail, giving Lois a chance to move in again, this time hitting the animal over the head with the branch.
Seeing that the cat now desired nothing so much as escape, Clark let go of the mountain lion’s tail as she turned and ran up the hill. Though the cat was hungry, she’d broken off two claws and fractured the toes they had been attached to on one human, and the other had delivered some unexpectedly painful blows to her back and head. The risks were greater than the potential reward, so she sought easier prey elsewhere.
Lois dropped the branch after the mountain lion had disappeared into the forest and rushed to Clark’s side. “Clark! Are you okay?”
Clark examined the shredded fabric of his shirt and jacket for a moment before replying. “I’m fine. I think I’ll have a few more bruises, but the claws must have gotten caught in my clothes. It didn’t scratch me.” Discreetly, he dropped the two broken claws on the ground, where they would lay hidden amongst the fallen pine cones and needles.
“Maybe we should have thrown the groosling at it,” Lois said, looking at the plucked bird.
Clark shook his head. “It would have come back for more.” He was familiar with predators; they occasionally slipped through breaks in the electric fence surrounding District 9 or tunneled under it. During his nighttime wanderings, he had come across a few predators trying to attack farm animals; he usually dealt with them by grabbing them and carrying them to the fence, then jumping over it and leaving the unhurt but bewildered animals there before they had a chance to make a sound.
He was more shaken by the incident than he wanted to admit. No matter how good his eyesight and hearing were, they were useless if he didn’t pay attention to what was going on around him. This time it had been a mountain lion; next time it might be the Career pack. He had to be more attentive if he wanted to keep Lois and himself alive.
He didn’t say anything to Lois, though. How could he explain that he should have heard the quiet predator creeping up on them? They were alive and unhurt, and the cat would survive, too, so her young wouldn’t be left orphaned. The only thing he could do was keep his ears open, even if it meant hearing sounds better left unheard — like the screams of tributes he couldn’t help without revealing his secret.
Lois kept looking in the direction the mountain lion had gone, afraid that it would come back. Finally, she said, “Well … I got some wood, so we can build up the fire and cook this groosling. We can get the nuts out of the pine cones, too …”
“I’ll cook it,” Clark told her, remembering the previous morning and not eager for a repeat.
“I want to help,” Lois told him. “I learned to pluck the feathers, so I can learn to cook it, too.” She glared at Clark when he still looked skeptical.
“All right.” Clark finally relented. “First, we need to set up a couple of forked sticks on either side of the fire, which will hold the stick the bird is skewered on …”
*****
Some time later, Lois and Clark sat outside the cave, eating pine nuts and pieces of groosling. Lois held up a few pine nuts and turned to Clark.
“If I had some chocolate … and a few other ingredients … I could really make something with these.”
“Like what?”
“Like chocolate pine nut cookies. I may not know much about cooking over an open fire, but I make some of the best chocolate cookies around. Claude was probably telling the truth when he said he liked them.”
“They sound good.”
“They are.” Lois cracked another pine nut shell between her teeth. “These aren’t bad, but still …” She shook her head, then shrugged. “We don’t have an oven here, anyway. If I go home, I’ll be able to bake as many cookies as I want, and —“
“I hope you do go home,” Clark said, stopping when Lois looked at him uncomfortably. “What?”
“Clark, if I go home — it means that you won’t. Not alive, anyway.”
They fell silent after that, realizing the truth of Lois’s words. No matter how good a team they made, only one of them could survive the Hunger Games.
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