sea phoenix [briar]

It isn't a long walk from her house to the docks. The night sky has covered everything in darkness, and there is no moon to shed any light onto the streets of District Four, only dim lamps. This area was once a train wreck, but the Capitol and the district have repaired it so perfectly that Isobel can hardly tell the tsunami ever happened. If she didn't have that memory of almost drowning right about exactly where she is standing right now, she would have forgotten the tsunami altogether. Maybe that is what they wanted.

By the docks, there is a boy sitting there with a cigarette. He seems to be aware of her presence, because he says, "So, have you come to drown me or do you just want a smoke?"

Isobel raises an eyebrow at him. "Drown you?" she inquires. "It's not a fun way to die, trust me." She recalls her lungs screaming for air at the water shoved her under the surface of the black water of the ocean enraged by the tsunami.

"Yeah, I know," says the boy. The smoke trailing from his cigarette disperses in the night air. "I've come close to it, twice now."

"Most of us have, at least once," she tells him. She has, too, but they aren't alone. Almost the entirety of District Four who is older than three can say the same. Isobel still has nightmares about it — the cold water rushing into her lungs and her mouth, suffocating her, drinking all of the oxygen from her body. She couldn't see the sun; there were too many black spots in her vision.

"You shouldn't smoke, you know," she goes on. "You survived drowning, you said, but then you smoke. Give your lungs a rest, would you?" Maybe she's becoming Arissa, but now that she isn't reaping age anymore, she tends to see anyone below nineteen as younger and more naive.

Their lives are just always hanging off such a fragile thread, tsunami or not.