[.}/Alone\.and.W a i t i n g{.]

A small pixie-like figure tore through the woods at top speed. She ran so fast it looked as if she was flying, and she liked it that way. Her long dark braids flew out behind her, but no matter how much they flipped and spun, they never seemed to get caught in the branches that split every which way from the trees that were their origin.

Kiara was built very small for her age, which gave her a kind of speed that she had discovered at a young age. She loved running, and often used it as a way to get rid of everything and just...go. Sometimes she came back, sometimes she didn't. Sometimes she would stay out in the woods for days, just sitting, waiting...waiting for a sudden thought to send her speeding back home to her small house in District Eleven.

Today she had no plans to stop. She was not tired, not thirsty, not sweaty. All she wanted to do was run.

The fourteen-year-old had a small knife in her belt, more as a precaution than anything. She was not particularly handy with it, but she knew a few tricks. Her brother Colton had taught them to her...before he had been snatched away by the Capitol and thrown into the arena to be killed.

With a jolt, she felt a tear forming in her eye. She stopped herself in her tracks and brushed it away. She did not cry. She was beyond crying. Crying was for three years ago; now that Colton was dead, all she wanted was vengeance. Against the Capitol. She would give anything for one of them to turn up, with their dyed hair and painted bodies and damned singsong accents so she could plunge her blade into them for bringing the Hunger Games into their already hard lives...

But no. She shook the thought away. She was not a violent person, and never had been. She spent her life in the orchards of her district, jumping from tree to tree and singing along with the mockingjays that made their nests there. She did not go around knifing people, no matter how much they annoyed her.

She wished Cadence and Ember were here. Well, actually, she didn't, because despite the fact that they were her best friends, she didn't feel like talking to anyone at the moment. But Cadence and Ember understood that sort of stuff. That was why, when Kiara had let her other friends drift away, she had held on to them.

Suddenly she heard a noise. Her arms automatically reached up and swung her into a tree as they always did in the orchards. Her father always joked and said she was a squirrel; but Kiara always denied it and said she'd rather be a cheetah.

Once she was perched on a thick branch, she peered down and, to her mild surprise, saw another girl. Her dark, deep green eyes gleamed as she watched, wondering what she would do.

She had been born somewhere else? Well, that wasn't the usual. How had her past district allowed her to leave, whichever one it had been?

Why did she ask? Well, Kiara had been curious. "I was just...wondering," she answered, kind of holding off on the real reason. But whast was the harm in saying it? "I noticed...you don't really look much like the rest of us."

Kiara flinched at her own words, sure she had worded and arranged them the wrong way. For she herself did not resemble her fellow citizens of District Eleven; her hair matched some of theirs, yes, but her pale skin was so different from nearly all of the rest of them; with their dark, sun-tanned complexions. She often gathered stares for it, which she ignored most of the time. But the fact was, she didn't know why she was different...she just was.

Farther up in the tree the fourteen-year-old caught the movement of a bushy-tailed squirrel. She considered climbing up farther and killing it; she could do with meat after eating mostly vegetables the entire length of Harvest. But with only a knife and no trapping net or snares, it would be hard to catch. Squirells could run as fast as possible down the trunk of a tree; Kiara, much as she wanted to, couldn't. It was too risky, not that high up. She let the animal go.

About a decade ago, it would have been practically suicidal to move into a district when you came from a different one. The Capitol was watching, always watching. Since then, those laws had lightened up some, because present-day Panem was growing farther and farther away from the rebellion that had once aroused. The Capitol was becoming more negligent as the years went on; now it was possible for people to switch districts without having their tongue chopped off. And Kiara knew that, somewhere in her ancestry, was someone who had not come from Eleven. How else would she look like this? The strange thing was, though, even her parents were nowhere near this pale.

"Well...I dunno." She shrugged. "I do burn easily. That's why I stay with the trees," she said. "Well, not with them. Like, in their shade. I spend a lot of time in the Orchards."

By now, the squirrel had all but left the pixie-like girl's mind. Disputes with animals like that happened often. But obviously this girl had seen her start after it, and then give up.

"You're not desperate like some."

Well, she wasn't. Her family always had enough to get by. It was just her and her parents right now, and since she fed herself from the wild and was rarely in the house, they only needed food for two. She knew what it felt like to be hungry, yes, but never starving. She'd never felt that terrible pang in her stomach, preventing her from thinking about anything else besides a heaping plate of food. And she didn't want to feel that. Not ever. If she was going to die, she wanted to die quickly.

"I guess I'm not," she admitted.