ghosts of us.— [cricket/peter]

[Deleted]

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P E T E R    W E B S T E R - V Ă D U V A

Cricket's presence seemed to put everyone a bit on edge. It made sense, she was going to try to start killing 23 of us any day now. I thought back to Teddy on the train, how serious he looked. I had never seen him like that, even when he had to lecture me about this or that. That was the only time when he ever really intimidated me. Yet looking at Cricket, she didn't look like he did on the train. But she scared me a hell of a lot more.

I tried telling myself she was just like Teddy or Flynn. I didn't know Flynn nearly as well as I knew Teddy, but he seemed nice enough when we got coffee together a few weeks before the reaping. Though in hindsight, maybe we never should've gotten coffee. Maybe this would have been prevented if we didn't. But it's too late for that now. What's done is done, and there's nothing else to it.

Now I just had to do what I could to live, and try to get on the Gamemakers good side.

So when I saw Cricket observing everything one day, I decided to approach her. Maybe I should have ran my plan by Teddy first. But he was kind of a buzzkill sometimes. Like the time when he gave me a lecture about not chasing down that dude who stole someone's purse because it's dangerous. I'm still alive, aren't I? At least for now. And this might keep me alive.

I put away the spear I had been practicing with and made my way over to her. I was smiling, and I'm pretty sure the smile was genuine, but damn I was nervous. I was jittery and I couldn't tell if it was all the adrenaline from training, nervousness, excitement, or a cocktail of all three. In my head I systematically started making bullet notes of what I knew about Cricket Antoinette, breaking it down into nearly a science. That's just how my brain works.

But people aren't a science, they aren't predictable - as much as I wished they could be. No amount of experimentation and data collection will ever explain so much about human existence. As soon as you think you see a trend, outliers start appearing en masse. So as much as I believed I had written the perfect equation for a good outcome, I knew I had to be prepared for shit to hit the fan.

"Ms. Antoinette, if you don't mind me asking you, is it normal for Gamemakers to be in the Training Center like this? Flynn and Teddy never mentioned anything about that before."

I wasn't sure why I bothered mentioning them by name. She was a Victor itself, it wasn't like I was going to get any street cred by knowing them. Everyone knew their mentors, at least I assumed they did. It also made me wonder how much she knew. Trainers here were really shit at looking out for eavesdroppers when the gossiped.

I heard them talk about pretty much every single tribute. I had to keep an ear out, make sure that the rumors about Flynn and I never  escaped the borders of District Six. And it seemed they were at least partially contained. I did hear one or two say that me being friends with Teddy and Flynn is why I was picked, but they didn't seem to know the full story. Which was good, because she probably didn't know either.

[ table by fox ]
[ 578 words ]