The quarry basin had almost filled. Floodwater crept up the lower rock shelves, swallowing the stone inch by inch, turning it murky as it disappeared and trailing red where bodies had fallen. Above them, the conveyor belts groaned. They lurched forward in uneven, bone-tired bursts. A crane arm jerked once against the gray sky and then went still again, like a dying limb.

  But Lyme stood on higher ground. Eighteen years old, and a volunteer from District 2.

  The mining pick in her hand had been forged for splitting stone rather than flesh, though the distinction had ceased to matter hours ago. The handle was wrapped in industrial grip tape, worn smooth in two places where her palms had settled. The head was stained dark from earlier.

  Across from her stood a boy from District 9, backed against a face of fractured rock. The last tribute.

  She had watched him work the arena with a patient ingenuity she hadn't expected. He had mapped the tunnels when everyone else clawed toward the center. He had timed the floodwater releases to the minute, and let the stronger tributes find the ledges on their own. He had even come close to drowning her once, a fact she had filed away and carried with her ever since.

  Yet there was nowhere left for him to retreat now. The ledge behind him was no wider than a windowsill, and below it the floodwater surged and sucked against the stone with a sound like slow breathing. His arm burned at the joint; the blade trembled at its tip despite him.

  “Please,” he said. The word was small against the size of the quarry. Lyme said nothing, of course.

  “You volunteered,” he continued, his eyes tracking the ledge, the drop, the water below, and then back to her. “You chose this, I didn’t. This isn’t fair!”

  The cameras hummed softly, she could feel them on her face, but she kept her eyes on his chest, on the rise and fall of it, the way she'd been taught. Watch the body, not the face, the face will lie to you, the body always tells you what's coming.

  “If we stop,” he swallowed. “If we all stopped. If you stop. If we just put the weapons down.”

  A pause. His voice dropped to something almost wondering, as if the idea surprised even him.

  “They couldn’t kill both of us.” His voice cracked, then steadied. “I don’t want to be their example, and I don’t want you to be either. It might be too late for the others, maybe for us too… But I'll tell you this, if I could be back in that building again, with all of them, I'd run toward them…”

  Her grip shifted on the handle. She made herself stop; moved her thumb back to where it had been.

  The water surged below. Lyme's eyes went to it without her permission, just for a second, and she pulled them back.

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  “And I’d be fighting these bastards!”

  The word came out torn, dragged up from somewhere deep in his chest, and it landed in the quarry air like a section of cliff breaking loose into still water. She flinched, she couldn't help it. Her jaw tightened. She felt the pick in her hand as if for the first time; the weight of it, the specific heaviness of the head.

  “Please,” he whispered. “Fight with me!”

  One of her feet shifted. A small, involuntary thing. She caught it, held herself still, and in the silence that followed she was aware of the cameras moving closer and the sound of the water and the fact that she had not yet moved toward him.

  And then he lunged.

  Lyme moved forward on instinct, stepping inside his reach before he could extend the blade. Her shoulder drove hard into his chest. The knife glanced off her upper arm, a bright cold sting, and then she had him pinned against the quarry wall with her full weight and the pick coming up between them.

  The first strike hit bone. The sound was wrongly thick. He gasped.

  The second blow drove the pointed end beneath his collarbone with a force that ran all the way up her arms. Blood came fast, sheeting down the pale stone. He slid down the rock face as she ripped the pick free, his legs folding beneath him, and then he was still.

  The cannon fired. The echo moved through the quarry in a long, rolling wave; off rock, off water, off the silent machinery, and then it was gone, and there was nothing left in its place.

  For a moment Lyme stood over him, breathing hard, the pick loose in her hand, sweat cooling on her face. She threw her head back and laughed. It came out sharp and fierce and victorious. She raised the pick above her shoulder and shouted into the open air of the quarry, a raw and wordless cry that bounced off the rock walls and came back to her amplified and doubled, the stone itself answering. She had done it. After everything, she had finally done it.

  She imagined the Capitol. She imagined the people rising to their feet in crowded viewing rooms with their raised glasses, the commentators stumbling over each other to describe her ferocity, her composure and her absolute dominance. She imagined her face on every screen in Panem.

  The anthem began. The Capitol seal blazed gold across the artificial sky, burning bright against the grey stone walls of the quarry.

  But then she stopped thinking, and the quarry felt enormous now. Incredibly, almost unbearably still.

  She looked down. The boy lay twisted at the base of the wall, one arm bent at an angle that made no anatomical sense, the other stretched out across the stone. The pick marks were visible. Blood had spread across the pale rock in a wide, dark map. One of his eyes remained half open, fixed on the middle distance, watching nothing.

  Lyme's hands were steady. She had not hesitated. The hovercraft light descended from above, white and even.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of Panem,” the announcer declared warmly, filling the place from every speaker at once, “we present the victor of the Fifty-Second Hunger Games.”

  She looked back one last time. The floodwater was still rising, patient and indifferent, spreading slowly across the rock floor toward the boy's outstretched hand. The machinery had fallen quiet. There was no sound now but the water and her own breathing.

  She had not hesitated.

  The hovercraft doors sealed shut. The anthem cut off mid-note. The quarry, and everything left in it, disappeared below her.