nightmare grain rotation / cc v. vrm v. tsr (d11, day3)

The emergency lighting has smeared time.

Day and night dissolves into nothing but watercolors, bleeding into each other to create muddy and strange patterns. I do not remember the last time I slept. I do not remember daylight. The walls are so tall yet so dark, and the shadows that dance across them have been trying to commune with me.

It began an hour ago. Two hours ago? I pretend I do not hear the whispers. I tell myself it is normal, a bout of cabin fever, or it’s coming from the vents, something crawling through it. I do not tell Roe, or even Vin. I keep quiet. But I hear him. Elias. I cannot make out the words, but I know. All the silence of the past years, my father is trying to make up for it now.

And yet the damage is done, irreversible. The scars have settled over it like thin concrete over a festering hole, but they alone do not hide much. I am a boy made out of hollow plaster and drywall. I have emptiness in abundance.

Together with Vin and Roe, we are three blind mice, three boy-shadows.

I climb down from the rafters of the dining hall soon after the two duo has left, wordless in my arrival, nodding only at them. There’s a slow burn under my ribs. I hear the phantom words - the claim the other boy had made about Vin and Roe - and I cannot put a finger on what I feel about it. Jealousy is too simple a word, too wild an accusation, I know better than to be jealous about two half-dead boys. I know this story, my ancestors have lived it over and over, and yet it’s hard to shake off the sensation. It gets under my clothes and skin like black sand, itches.

I pretend I do not feel that, too.

We take the stairs this time. My knives feel solid in each of their holsters and my eyes do not stop roving about. I do not trust this place or the one we enter next. In fact, I trust the Eleven suite the least.

The sunlight is harsh, blinding almost as Roe pushes the door open, and yet the unnaturalness of it is palpable at once.

The fields of gold, aureate under the light, wave in greeting and I am suddenly seven again, but the memory is wrong. There are no other senses, no richness of black olive trees in the breeze or the decay of jacaranda flowers rotting at the base of their trees. No orchards, no overpasses, no alleyways, nothing except a few tractors and endless daylight. It is as if they took a postcard of Eleven and granted it false life. I let loose a shiver when Roe’s hand clasps around my shoulder.

“The crops are dying this time around,” I mutter. “And it ain’t so damn … bright.” I blink. “Keep low.”

Vin takes out the azaleas. I feel a small thrill hum through me, jolted awake at the face of something so beautiful yet deadly. He crushes them to paste carefully, slicks it over Roe’s blade. I begin doing the same to my knives, but with the vial of poison I scavenged. The air smells sweeter all of a sudden, death masked as honey, and I get lost in the daze until Roe declares, “I’m going in.”

I look at the back of his shoulders, sun-blazed. The air suddenly smells like wildfire, ashes, and there is that burn under my ribs again, contagious in its flare.

Then Roe is gone, and so is the heat. I look down at the tube that Vin now holds, then give my knives a slow spin. The stalks sing gently in the wind; when Vin speaks next, their words are woven with the song of the wheat. I nod at the instruction, hold the offered tube.

And, “you aren’t afraid that I’ll let go?” I ask. But I make a point to grip the tube tight.

“Go,” I tell them. “I’ll be right behind.”

Seconds pass. The wheat doesn’t stop waving. I pick up on other sounds, though - footsteps, here and there, dispersed between the stalks, and that’s when the tube goes taut. I free Alfer from its sheath in a flash of silver.

I step into the fields, then become it. The hypnotic waving threatens to overtake my senses, and yet I could pick up on the pattern, attune to it as I glide past each stalk like wind, letting them part before me. The field hides my form. The sunlight may be fake, as well as the air, but I know the grain is real. This, the tall grass and the ghosts within it, is home.

I spot a few faces through gaps between the stalks, but Maia is the first one to stand out. Then, because she jumps out of the field like a very blonde frog: Arcadia, her hair the same shade as the golden whey around us.

Six, seven, eight tributes.

The shadows stretch taller, more gnarled. The world is a playground of light and dark, day and shadow. I am all shadow. I bend low amongst the stalks, taking everything in spades and listening to the exchanged words.

Then I smell it again. Blood on linoleum floor, a glistening puddle of it. Roe’s.

I am not drawn to it, the opposite really as my stomach churns and I stifle a grunt by biting down on my lower lip. But Roe’s in trouble, Vin’s somewhere between the grass, and I am alone.

The Mateo before would have froze, but cabin fever does something to you. It is, after all, a fever. I feel my head burn in a searing, white-hot way and I have no intentions except attack. I let go of the tube. No tether can hold me here, not between the waving stalks of wheat. I could nearly make out a ghost of Alfer between the grass, young but still older than I was back then, and my brother is asking me with an outstretched hand to follow him.

I take a breath, then disappear into the field, into alfalfas, into time itself. Between the grass, three versions of Mateo split: child as he glides past a stalk, boy as he passes another, and finally, ultimately, shadow.

“Maia,” I say and let the grain carry my words, circling her group, zigzagging to keep my movements erratic. “Round,” wind, “two,” rustle, “but no more of that fight club crap.”

There. A shape that does not hold Roe’s or Vin’s outline. He’s tall, he’s handsome, he’s wearing a farmer’s posture but a prince’s looks and he deserves so much better, yet here we are. I look at his lips and kiss the hilt of my poison-coated knife. It smells so cloyingly sweet. That’s death. It has come, always and forever, to harvest the sweetest and the most vibrant.

In the same way he sneaks up on Antigone, I do the same to him, skulking through the stalks, hands white around my knife, and then- “Don’t mind Roe,” I break my stealth. “We just know when to press our advantage.”

And I’m death’s shadow. I do her bidding.