Navya Sachdeva Rhodes // [District Eleven] [CB]

Navya's life before her eighth year is a haze of orange and green. As a toddler, she learned to walk, barefoot in the Sachdeva orchards, trailing behind her pack of older siblings. It was years before she could match names with faces but she knew each of them in her own: Kiara with her soft hands, Aryan swinging his axe, Veer who never talked but tickled her ribs, Sai who tattled on her, Pranav cleaning her cuts and scrapes. It was her siblings and the ranch hands that raised her. Memories of her parents inside of their drafty farmhouse are hazy at best.

At eight, her memories become fully formed. She is sent with her older sister's dresses to the local tailor, Mrs. Miristioma. There, she meets a boy named Kirito, a month before the passing over his father. When she returns to gather the dresses, she find the home broken with grief. She takes the tailored clothes and her new best friend, back to the orchard. They sit in the arm of an apricot tree and eat almost rotten fruit.

When she is ten, her best friend disappears for a year. When she is eleven, he returns an orphan. Together they blossom like the orchard trees, the branches of their lives intertwining, until she is seventeen, and he is only fifteen. He is taken, hauled off by his name.

When he returns, there are ghosts following him, but only one has taken up residence in his eyes. "Kirito?" She asks, and to her ears, it sounds like Kiri.