The sky was the color of bruised metal, and the air reeked faintly of ozone like the Capitol had scorched the clouds themselves to remind them who owned the skies. District Eleven stood in silence as the train left the station that day, taking its chosen pair toward the arena.

Satoru sat by the window, expression flat, fingers drumming the edge of the glass. He’d been Reaped after years of slipping past the Capitol’s eye, one of the ghosts who lived between fields and fences, a smuggler, a whisper of rebellion no one could quite prove. The Peacekeepers knew his name, but not his face. That anonymity had once been his armor. Now, it meant nothing.

Across from him sat her, the girl from the market. He remembered her faintly, how she’d once traded him a broken watch for a loaf of bread. They hadn’t spoken much that day, but something about her silence had stayed with him. Now, that same silence filled the train car heavy and brittle, like the calm before lightning hits.

She didn’t look frightened. Not exactly. More like someone who’d already accepted the storm.

“Guess this is how the Capitol says thanks,” Satoru muttered.

She didn’t answer. Just turned her face toward the window, her reflection trembling against the rushing dark.

The days before the Games passed in a blur, training, cameras and whispers of bets placed in marble halls. Satoru moved like he’d been here before, his body running on instinct. Knives. Endurance. Silence. He could do all of that. What he couldn’t do was stop thinking about the girl from his district, the one who didn’t look away when the others did.

On the final night, he sat alone in the holding cell below the arena. His reflection in the steel wall looked back at him, pale eyes wide and hollow. The Capitol would make a monster out of him. It always did.

---

Then came the blinding light. The lift and the open sky.

The arena stretched before them like a graveyard made of glass and trees, half forest and half ruin. At the center, the Cornucopia gleamed. Twenty four platforms encircled it, each humming with the electric charge of their countdown.

~~Sixty seconds.~~

Satoru’s pulse thundered in his ears. The girl stood three platforms to his left, still as marble, eyes locked on something far away.

~~Thirty seconds.~~

He thought, absurdly, of that old watch she’d traded him. Wondered if she ever missed it.

~~Ten seconds.~~

The world held its breath.

~~Five.~~

~~Four.~~

~~Three.~~

~~Two.~~

~~One.~~

The air split open with the sound of the cannon. Chaos bloomed like fire. Some ran for weapons. Some fell before they even reached them. Blood hit the sand in ribbons of red.

Satoru didn’t move at first, he watched her instead. She bolted the second the countdown ended, not toward the Cornucopia but straight into the forest’s green black maw. Smart.

He followed, not out of mercy, not out of malice. Just instinct and the slow, cold ache of the hunt settling into his chest.

The woods swallowed them both.

Branches tore at his sleeves as he moved through the undergrowth, breath steady, silent. In the distance, the cannon boomed again. Someone else, gone.

Then he saw her.

She was crouched by a fallen tree, breath shaking, dirt smudged across her cheek. For a moment, neither of them spoke. The forest around them buzzed with insects, electric and alive.

Satoru’s fingers brushed the handle of his knife, in thought, in motion, the quiet reach of a predator in the dark. He took a step forward, slow and soundless, ready to strike if she turned.

He could hear her heartbeat in the quiet. Fast and defiant. She must have felt him there.

The Capitol might have built this arena to turn them into killers, but he didn’t feel like one but he felt nothing at all.