Elmira fastened the small glass vial around her neck and studied the girl in the mirror. Tomorrow she would stand in the sunken stone arena and answer questions meant to decide if the Capitol remembered her name. Twelve years of tribute footage said the forgettable died first. She needed to win the Games. That meant winning a room before she ever saw the woods. She turned the tiny bottle so the wildflower seeds caught the light. Soft. Rural. A girl who missed home. The pendant told a story her shoulders could not. It said harmless. It said sad. It said look away, and then forget you looked. The next afternoon she climbed the steps into the carved wooden hall and let the tiered benches of painted faces lean down at her. She kept her hands folded over the vial. She spoke slowly. She let her voice catch once, on purpose, when they asked about her family. A woman in the front row pressed a hand to her mouth. When the interviewer dismissed her, the benches were still watching. Tomorrow her face would be on every screen, labeled gentle, labeled small. The story was set now, and she could not take it back. Every tribute in the arena would have seen it too.

The night before the arena, the tributes were locked inside a timber-framed dormitory split by hanging curtains. Elmira walked the central hearth and counted alliances forming in the alcoves. Two districts shared a curtain. Three more whispered around the fire. Her gentle face from the screens had done its job too well. No one looked at her twice. She drifted to the back wall, where a rusted iron cross stood wrapped in vines. The other tributes had marked it as the dead corner, the spot no one wanted. She set her bedroll at its base. Across the room, the strongest tributes had piled wrenches, hammers, and shovels around a leather-strapped post. Their banner hung above it like a claim. She watched them laugh and divide the gear. Elmira knew the math. Alone, she would not last the first morning. She crossed the floor slowly, hands folded over her seed pendant, eyes lowered. She stopped at the edge of their pile and offered the smallest tribute first — a soft voice, a quiet question about water. The largest boy looked down at her. He smiled the way people smile at stray animals. Then he shook his head and turned back to his wrench. She walked back to the vined cross without hurrying. She lay down beneath it and listened to the hearth crackle. The persona had locked. No alliance would take her. Tomorrow she would step into the woods with no one at her back, and every plan she had built would have to be rebuilt around that single, fixed fact.

Dawn pushed Elmira into the woods with empty hands. The cannon faded behind her, and she ran low until the trees thickened. Her plan was simple. Find a weapon before anyone found her. She smelled the clearing before she saw it. A painted stone stood at its center, crossed sticks laid neat at its base. The careful sticks told her everything. Someone had already swept this ground clean and marked it as taken. She crouched and breathed slow. Moving meant being seen. She needed cover. A huge hollow tree leaned at the clearing's edge, its black opening wide enough to swallow her. She slipped inside and pressed her back to the rotted wood. Through a split in the trunk she watched the painted stone. Nothing moved. She turned her eyes down to the dirt at her feet, then to the rib bones tangled in the roots — small animal, picked clean, sharp at the broken end. She worked fast. A straight branch from the floor of the hollow. Green vine stripped and wound tight around the longest rib. Her fingers ached by the time the binding held. She tested the point against the bark. It bit. Elmira crawled out of the tree with a spear in her fist. She was still alone, still hunted, still behind. But now her hands could kill.

Elmira moved through the trees with the spear tight in her fist. She kept low and listened. The woods opened ahead to a creek choked with a fallen oak, its trunk bridging the water like a sleeping animal. She crouched in the brush and waited. Watching was deferred debt. She could afford it a little longer. A boy climbed onto the log from the far side. He was thin, scraped, empty-handed. He sat down on the trunk and pulled something from inside his shirt. A brass ring, green stone catching light. He turned it in his fingers and pressed it to his mouth. Someone's mother. Someone's promise. Elmira's stomach turned over. She lifted the spear to her shoulder. Distance. Terrain. The shot was clean. Her arm would not move. She drew back again. Her grip tightened until the green wood shaft creaked and split along its grain, a thin crack opening under her thumb. The boy looked up. His eyes found her. He did not run. He just closed his hand around the ring. Elmira lowered the broken spear and stumbled back into the brush. No cannon sounded. He had seen her face. He had seen her freeze. She ran until her lungs burned, and the one thing she could not fake was already showing — every breath ragged, every step heavier. She had kept her life and given away her secret. Someone in the woods now knew exactly what she was.

Elmira slowed at a heat-blackened boulder in a small clearing. A melted sword jutted from its center, blade fused into the stone. She dropped the cracked spear at its base. The wood was finished. So was the plan that came with it. She needed steel, and she needed it before the boy told anyone what he had seen. She remembered the squat building near the arena's edge — barred windows, swords racked behind wood beams. Tributes called it the armory. Going in first was weak. Going in unarmed was worse. She moved. Halfway there, she froze. Pale birch trunks ahead were wrapped in torn cloth strips, each one soaked dark and still dripping. Someone was marking a path, and the blood was fresh. Not hers. Not yet. She crouched, counted her breaths, and slipped wide around the trail. Her lungs were already shaking. Fatigue was showing. She could not stop now. She reached the armory at dusk and found the door splintered open. Most racks were stripped. One short blade remained, wedged behind a bent bar. She worked it free, cut her palm doing it, and held it tight. It was hers. She had a real weapon again — and she had just walked into the place every armed tribute had already left. Whoever set that bloody trail knew exactly where she would come.