{ Born green in a flawed garden } Laa & Opal Day 4

As the day drew to a close, it was becoming steadily more difficult to see. The fog whirled around the same way it did on the day the water appeared in her containers, falling lower and lower until her vision was obscured almost entirely and the air wrapped around her arms like a damp sheet. The darkness only made matters worse, leaving her stumbling over rocks at best and walking face-first into spiderwebs at worst. At some point in the dimming twilight of evening she could no longer hear the steady footsteps of her allies, though she swore that she saw their shadows moving silently through the forest when she turned her head to look back. How difficult could it really be to keep up and walk in a semi-straight line? Thankfully for her, they still had the majority of their wealth items - walkie talkies included - and if the guys would ever turn the freaking things on she could at least do something to find them.

"You guys? Where are you?" she whispered, no screaming and yelling this time. If she couldn't see her allies through the fog, she sure as hell couldn't see anyone else either, and others might not be so friendly. Who was even left in the arena? Four cannons had already gone off since the last anthem, but none had sounded since her allies presumably got lost in the mess of spiderwebs and fog. Come to think of it, they had gotten lost the last time they ventured into the spider-infested hellhole, though that was more a case of getting stuck than getting the directions turned around. Still, couldn't they at least watch where they were walking? Maybe move a little slower, cut down some of the webs with their extra weapons? It wasn't that difficult. One of these days they would have more to worry about than a simple patch of fog, and then what would they do?

Four dead in one day. The cannons were the worst part by far - every time the deep sound reverberated around the arena and shook the spiders in their webs, her head turned without her control and her heart thumped violently in her chest as if she might see her allies behind her with swords stuck through their throats, or worse, heads rolling in the dirt. A part of her even worried that the cannon was somehow preemptive, accidental, and that a prowling Career was hiding through the fog and was just waiting to take her down. That the Gamemakers themselves would be so sure of her demise that they would prepare a cannon ahead of time, doubting that feral instinct inside of her bones and her blood that screamed at her to just not die, not die, NOT DIE and to keep breathing, keep fighting, keep being Yaa Valarro.

And if she couldn't, she would be too dead to know the difference.

Even with her allies missing, she kept trekking in a straight line to the north, hoping that Mik and Andal had simply fallen behind. Perhaps she was just moving at a faster pace and they were keeping to their course. They obviously weren't close or else she would be hearing them stumbling around, right? They weren't answering her on the walkie, they weren't calling out her name, and their shadows had vanished along with the setting sun. For a fleeting moment it occurred to her that her allies might be dying, might be dead, and there was a good reason they weren't answering her through their walkies. It was that or they were simply too inept to think about answering or too busy trying to avoid being caught in another giant web to become spider food, unless they were caught again. Now that she could believe.

As the last of the light faded from the sky and the dark emerged as its replacement over every corner of the arena, the sound of the anthem burst into her ears, at first sounding so much like the firing of a cannon that she nearly jumped out of her boots. It was as good a time as any to stop to make camp and watch for the faces of the dead, so she threw down her bag and her weapons and used the rucksack as a makeshift pillow, staring up at the Capitol seal with her hands clasped in her lap as if she were staring dreamily at he stars.

The first face to appear in the night sky belonged to the male tribute from District Two, Jaime Lyon. It wasn't a death that she expected - though, to be fair, she expected all of the tributes from Career districts to make it to the end as a collective pack. She hadn't known the boy at all or even talked to him, but she remembered seeing him chatting up a few others to join an alliance. Wherever his group was - if they were even still together and somehow not separated by the fog - they were down a strong Career. And if he couldn't survive to Day Four, what chance did she have? Or maybe it meant something - that she had survived while the boy from Two had met his end. Maybe it meant that she was fully capable of outliving her peers, that she could make it to the end, that she could even win, though a part of her knew that her first few days in the Games had been relatively simple. Those who lost their lives had been given more difficult challenges, challenges that they did not have the ability or the luck to meet.

Three more faces emerged in the sky, faces that were somehow even more shocking. The second face belonged to the girl she had tried to help on the first day who had apparently been a resident of District Nine, the girl who could have easily turned to attack when they met that day in the forest but had stayed back, crouched and cautious, unwilling to approach and looking like a wild animal. Yaa couldn't pretend like she knew anything about the girl, but she still felt a small pang in her chest at the very fact that she recognized the face, that one day the girl from Nine had been wild and alive and kicking until the moment that she wasn't. And then two more faces flashed across the sky, and without really meaning to she cried out at the mere recognition of their faces and the memory of the second day, but also because they were dead, they were both dead, and Deimos's killers had been dealt the fate that they so deserved. If it was cruel to think that way, she didn't care. It was her ally they had killed, her friend, her.. well, whatever it was that Deimos Lasner had been to her. She had every right to be cruel.

When the final notes of the anthem faded into silence and the shimmering light disappeared from the backdrop of the clouds, Yaa set to work on creating a fire with the supplies she took with her from that bizarre forest and soon hung both of her water jugs over it. Condensation might have filtered out anything in the water that could make her sick, but she didn't know enough about the process to truly trust it. So she boiled the water and waited for it to cool before taking a sip and then another, curling up into a ball by her small fire and laying her head against the rucksack, arms folded around her knees and head tucked in to keep warm. She never let herself be more than a few inches away from her weapon, holding onto it just slightly between her fingers as she drifted off to sleep.

Hours passed that way, but there was no way to tell what time it was when her eyes flitted open, because the fog was still hanging low all around and the sun hadn't yet risen above the horizon. It took a good while for her eyes to adjust to the steady darkness, but when they did she found it easier to move about the spiderwebs and duck around the strands of silk. She wandered like that until the sun rose and her visibility improved along with it, finding that the spiderwebs were beginning to thin out, replaced by another forest of trees. They were minuscule compared to the evergreen giants of her home, even small compared to the bendy stalks of the trees on day two, and when she looked closely she saw that some of them even had tiny spots of bright color that were various fruits just waiting to be picked.

Just as she was about to turn away from the plants and direct her attention back to the walkie talkie for another round of calling, she saw a shadow, barely visible in the fog, stalk through the trees.

This is it.

This is it.

She was going to die.

Even with a weapon gripped tightly in her palms, she felt unprepared. One deep breath, one last hard look at the world through the dim light, and she knew that a challenge had arisen out of the mist - her challenge, the one that might just spell her end.

And then she recognized the faces through the fog.

Opal Shore and Locust Lovelace.

Of the two, Opal was - thankfully - the one charging forward. Not that Yaa didn't fully respect the girl's capabilities as a killer, but it would be worlds worse if Locust were the predator in this situation, an extra sting of betrayal added on to the brutality of the attack itself. But it was Opal, not Locust who rushed forward, but a second later Locust was holding her ally back with a deft maneuver and the angriest of all possible angry glares.

Only that didn't stop Opal from charging forward anyways. For a moment Yaa was completely sure that the girl was going to make a move to stab her through the face, but she must have kept Locust's disapproval in mind because she only rushed forward and stopped, a ferocious look in her eyes as if Yaa were some sort of pariah. Her words were meant to be biting and intimidating, a threat that Yaa couldn't quite comprehend. What was she going to do, take down two vicious Careers by herself?

"What, are you afraid of itty bitty me? You're the Careers - I'm harmless," she said, ignoring the girl's harsh gaze and directing her attention towards the prettier eyes of Locust Lovelace. "How've you been? You look good."

[boils two jugs of water, drinks one]