doomsday erasure {ines, day 3}

There’s a day coming where the knives in my bag will find a new home – a backdrop of white, of flesh or snow. The matching hilts form a family, but I’ve been careful not to give them the names they’re owed. I never learnt about the Izars when I had the chance to. It feels wrong to begin to honour them only now, when death is inevitable, when I’m closer to them than I’ve ever been.

Unlike the sheath of daggers which burn a hole in my satchel, the bone shard knife in my hand is incessantly cold. There is no warmth to the unknown marrow I shudder in the presence of. In the bone pit, I’d left behind the knife I’d grabbed from the Cornucopia – the very weapon I’d spent my days in the Training Centre clutching tightly to like a lifeline. I had to let it go. The link to the girl I was before the Arena was too strong, too raw to live with. It’s been a game of traded weapons ever since – a glaive handed over to Maggie, where I couldn’t part with the bulking blade fast enough.

I thought where we were going, we would be able to leave the past behind. But on the third day, carrying infected wounds from the collapsed mines we’d somehow managed to escape, I look down at the knife turning through my hands and catch the engraving on the hilt in the dying rays of the day.

Salome Izar.

The irony hits me, punches me in the throat – I’ve been carrying the past with me all along.

Because try as I might to tell myself I’m not like the rest of them – even though there is a lifetime of separation between me and those faceless ghosts – there are too many similarities to pretend that my soul is not forever entwined with all of theirs.

I didn’t know Salome Izar. I never learnt what her face looked like in a sepia photograph in Vasco’s home. But Salome Izar was a girl who shared my bed. A girl who called the same people I do her family. And in the end, Salome Izar was a girl who died.

For the first time in days, the knife warms under my touch.