hanging by a fraying thread. jacinta. {77th}

She is covered from head to toe in blood when they lift her from the crimson lake she was lying in. A second hovercraft collects Cynthia's body, taking both of the tributes from their bloody grave.

They are both going home, in a way. Jacinta will go back to District Seven in a train after the victor presentation ceremony; Cynthia will return to District One in a cold metal coffin.

Jacinta is not conscious when the claws of the hovercraft slide under her body and pull her out of the pool of blood. She is still breathing, barely, as she is carried into the sky, her blood-matted hair hanging off the edge of the platform along with her head and arms.

Blood drips down from her body, soaking the cold metal platform she lies upon. Once she is inside the hovercraft, the medical attendants immediately begin to work on her, placing her on a table and hooking her up to life support.

She awakens to hands pressing on her chest, trying to force the blood from her lungs. She must have been drowning in all that blood, because her first memory after she collapsed is sitting up and hacking up blood. Jacinta screws up her face in disgust, the metallic taste of the blood coating her tongue. Even worse, she knows the blood is not her own.

She is still in a haze when the pain kicks in. Without the adrenaline to numb her, the agony rips through the nerves, burns through her senses like wildfire. It starts at the side of her head, where her ear once was, and ripples through her face and neck — she frantically places a hand there and screams out of both pain and shock when she finds that there is a raw, bloody hole where her ear should have been.

The medics pull out a syringe and try to bring it towards her arm. Jacinta is breathless and exhausted, but she uses all of her strength to flail at them, smacking the syringe from their hand and sending it shattering on the floor. They try to reassure her that everything is going to be fine, that they just need to sedate her, but she too still stuck in survival mode to listen. All she can see when she looks at them is enemies, other tributes coming to steal her victory from her.

"GET AWAY FROM ME!" she screams. Jacinta is already losing steam, having expended all the energy she has left. She coughs again, and a big glob of blood splatters onto her leg and the table. Black spots bloom in her vision as her surroundings begin to blur and her hearing becomes fuzzy.

Jacinta can just barely make out another syringe in a medic's hand through the blur, but she when she tries to move forward and fight them, she is easily pushed back down onto the table.

"No..." she croaks weakly.

But her protests are no use. The syringe is injected into her arm and her vision goes dark, as if she's falling into that pool of blood all over again under the pitch-black night sky and the burning eclipse.

The next time Jacinta awakens, she is in a white room on a hospital bed. Beside it sits Justice Fray, the Victor from District One. He and his crooked smile are the first thing she sees in this new, strange world.