Things that Stop Your Dreaming [blitz] {Zoe}

This is all too much. I have suffocated on faces, felt their sorrow seep into my soul and suck all the air from my body, watched their crumpling, angry faces stare until I daren't move - furious that I am standing in the place of their someone. Someone who could be - should be - here instead of me. (Am I selfish to be proud that I am alive, that my mother and my sister don't ever have to look at someone like that? That they don't feel that kind of pain? Maybe I'd feel proud if I could let myself feel anything at all except numbness.) The horrors I would face if I let myself feel aren't worth it for a second.

But I don't deserve to feel numb. I don't deserve to feel selfish either. They, with their fake laughter and empty voices, they think I deserve the world and everything in it. I shut it all off, and I am selfish - but I know that one day, one day I'll feel everything at once. And then maybe I'll snap, break out of this succumbed silence and tear myself to pieces. Would that suffice my guilt? Would that be my price? No. The only price I pay is living whilst the others paid with their lives. I still don't know which one is easiest, but living makes death look far more desirable.

He is small, like her. Cassie, that was her name. The silent girl who looked so much like my sister that I could not harm her. (I couldn't save her, either. But I couldn't save Lucy, or Cerise, or even Ivana - and for that, I will carry their burdens forevermore and never ever forget them.) Her name dances across my tongue with the rest of them, but I daren't say it aloud. Not here, not in front of her family. Instead, I try a smile, and say the words she so desperately tried to speak all that time ago.

"Hello," seems to suffice. And "I'm sorry" too.

But it's not enough. It never will be.

(Tell him, Saffron Lowe. Tell him what he wants to hear.)

But I can't hear anything. I can't hear myself think. I never can. They are silent as they infest me, words long gone from their souls. But I can feel them, all of them, in everything I do and see and hear and touch and taste. Life, life lets them fall through me each and every second of the day. And yet all I can see when I close my eyes is their mangled bodies, the way their limbs bent at odd angles, their blood splattering against my skin as one by one they all fell down. They whirl around my brain and dissolve into rain, threatening to spill from my eyes that once contained a soul that had not killed. But I didn't kill Cassie. I didn't have the heart. (I had no heart left by the time Lucy arrived - and neither did she. I set her free from the Capitol and entrapped my soul instead.) There are tremors in my chest that shake when I think about how I am alive and they are dead and drown out my words before they have time to bubble to the surface. This time, however, I shall be heard.

"It never stops," I say, and with every truth that leaves my lips speaking becomes that much easier. "And no. She was with me - us." (That campfire flickers in the back of my mind, three children with nothing to say, no songs to sing.) "I couldn't - wouldn't - kill her. I think the monster got to her first." (Talking becomes like breathing: second nature and essential. I had forgotten how it felt not to lie through my teeth.)

"When it was over, her body was gone." I do not sound like myself. My voice is a stranger to my own ears, a girl far beyond my years speaking instead. "But in that short space of time, she was my friend. I hope she knew that."