eat your canaries; hotties, day 3

With bitter grit between my teeth, I grind up rage with the minerals. I'm unfamiliar with the feeling, a tingling heat the settled in the top of my chest. Not something that runs deep - like sorrow and grief - nor does it seize my muscles like a tenuous fear. It's a scream that builds, that begs to be heard. I'm frustrated that we've run for what feels like hours and ended up nowhere.

"We need to keep moving." We've barely caught our breath and Inga says it like it's the simplest thing in the world. There's earth on all sides of us and we're closer to dying than we are living. Stealing oxygen from each other's lungs in greedy gulps. She's right, and I'm angry that she's right. That I cannot afford to fall to my knees and bury my face in my hands. To go somewhere else in my mind where none of this bullshit exists.

Armed to the teeth, with wounds weeping blood I look at Inga and for the first time that she is fragile. Like Izzy, like me. There's a good chance that we'll all die down here. Strength doesn't much matter if you're lost to madness and catacombs.

I still think I'll be the first to go. It's a small comfort they might mourn this mediocre girl.

"Dunno how you do it, Sharky." There's a fish in my arms, so I pretend I'm talking to him and not the predator with far more teeth. "Don't you ever just wanna give up? Let your spine curve a little?" Ruined by the collapsing mine, this is the closest I've come to seeing her undone. I drink in the sight, a little greedy.

In spite of my words, I pick a path ahead kicking rubble aside and finding catharsis in the way displaced pebbles cause little avalanches. "The Gamemakers promised treasure, but this is just a load of boring rocks." I laugh hollow, "Hey, Ivan, if you can hear me! Fuck you buddy!"

When Sage starts yelling at Gamemaker Korsch, Inga clocks back in. She squeezes her hand, feels the dark close in a little tighter because they're obviously watching.

She thinks of Gamemaker Hale in that elevator. Her presence had taken up the whole little space and then some. You can all me Maryn. She'd known just where to stick her claws while Inga had burned away in the corner.

She'd said Willem, used it life a knife, and Inga wanted to wrench the doors back open to do something stupid.

So maybe it's a little karmic, the way that Sage trips and Inga pulls her back by the hand, balancing them all through the strange shuffle.

"Thought I told you to stay up." She murmurs.

Another limp down the tunnel, one step closer to hopefully something brighter. Hopefully fresh air. Hopefully they're good little pals. Inga starts up a fantasy of sending darts through the boys' eyes. A vertebrae crunches under her heel.

"We don't know if they made it out alive." She says darkly, voice carrying back to Izzy. "They could still be in here."

Dead or alive. There could be another set of tributes waiting around any of these corners. There could be more traps. Or something even worse.

And their first line of defense -

"Sage," She calls out, quieter now, but still everything seems to echo. She tugs on her hand to bring her back a step, "Let me lead now."