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Ben’s leg is still bleeding when she gets to him. She doesn't look back at the career’s body, doesn't listen to the last gurgling choke of breath as blood spills out of chapped lips. All she can focus on is Ben, the boy in front of her doing all he can not to scream in agony.
The makeshift crutches crudly fashioned together with scraps of fabric and branches are snapped into pieces a few feet away from where he lays. His eyes are squeezed shut, face contorted in agony. Nat holds his head, running her fingers through his hair and doing her best to soothe him. No parachutes come from the sky to save him. She knows despite him being alive, despite him being here against all odds, the Capital has written him off.
Finally, Ben’s face relaxes enough for him to open his eyes. Now dry tears leave tracks in the dirt on his face. Despite being in a meadow there is only the scent of sweat and iron.
“Ben,” Nat’s voice is so gentle it barely comes out as a whisper. “We have to go now. They could be coming.”
Ben is shaking his head but Nat doesn't stop to talk. His crutches are irreparable and she doesn't have anything to fix them with. Despite the malnourishment, Ben is too heavy for her to carry. With one leg missing, only the scabbed-over stump with the torn-off shirt sleeve to protect it, and his Achilles savagely slit open on his good leg, walking is out of the question. Nat starts digging through her bag, supplies pulled out with reckless abandon and left in a pile. Desperate for a solution but still cognizant of her situation, everything is kept close and undamaged. At the bottom of her bag is the tarp she’d been using for water. She can’t afford to lose it, the streams were still contaminated with no clean water in sight.
Her eyes wander over to Ben, who hasn’t noticed her reacquired attention; he’s sitting on his elbows and gritting his teeth. His ankle has been gingerly moved, not without grunts of pain, for him to examine. His ankle is slick with blood and dirt, all of it coagulating into clots where it’s heavy and flaking where it’s been left thin. She can’t leave him behind to die, they’ve been through too much together. She also can’t afford to have him exclaim in pain. She’ll have to risk the tarp.
Quiet arguing, voices sharp and hushed, sparks as she attempts to move Ben onto the tarp. Eventually, the threat of another tribute coming into the clearing is enough. The career’s body is long gone, taken by the clawed hand of a drone. Nat had relieved him of his bag and knife but had yet to see what was gained. The canon firing, signaling his last breath, had kept them both on edge.
It’s slow going but Nat continues to slide Ben across the grass, eyes careful to pick out any stray rocks or branches that could lead to tears. After over a mile of tugging and scouting, she’s forced to reckon with Ben’s pain. He’s done his best to swallow any yelps but it’s clear the toll traveling with his injury has caused. She leaves Ben, his back against a tree, with a knife and a promise to find shelter.
There’s a cave not too far from where she left him. It’s not the roomiest and Nat doesn’t trust the game makers not to have tricks up their sleeves for unsuspecting tributes but she can’t afford to think about that now. Not if she wants to save Ben. So she doesn’t, she shuts that part of her brain off and retrieves him. Her aching muscles tug the tarp into the cave, a small tear from a sharp rock being the only casualty. It’s not ideal but the tarp isn’t unusable and will likely continue to offer her salvation in the face of thirst. She wants to clean Ben’s wound but until it rains she can’t afford to risk their water supply. Instead, she tears off a strip of her sleeve and uses it as a makeshift bandage. A hiss forces its way out behind Ben’s teeth, his cheeks puffing up with pain as he struggles to keep quiet. She hopes the cloth is enough, she hopes it can protect the wound until it can be cleaned. She tells herself if Ben lasts long enough, a sponsor will send a disinfectant, a bandage, something. She knows she’s deluding herself but she tries to believe anyway.
Three days later, it finally rains. The games had dragged out and the lack of deaths after the career has her on edge. Still, dehydration is a boring way to go, so Nat is thankful for the Capital’s morbid sense of entertainment for just this moment. She uses the tarp to fill both bottles, the small tear making it almost easier to funnel the liquid in. The career boy, whose name she learns to be Kodi from his picture in the sky, had a bottle and some purifying tablets stashed away in his bag. Between those and the dried jerky, she’d been able to stay close to Ben when hunting for the bare minimum of food. The bag also contained wire, some clothes pins, a rubber balloon, a can, and what looked to be shards of metal. Nat isn’t savvy enough to use them the way Kodi would but she's certain it was part of some sort of trap.
Nat waits for the tarp to fill as much as it can, threading twigs through the holes in each corner of the tarp to maintain its shape. She steadily moves it back into the cave, careful not to spill a drop. She considers trying to heat it over a fire but is afraid of melting the tarp. Ben will have to deal with the cold of the rainwater as she cleans his ankle.
Ben is propped up against the wall of the cave, the sweat sheen coating his skin only more prominent with excess humidity. Dark circles like bruises adorn the skin beneath his eyelids, the dirt that he wears like a second skin not enough to hide it. Nat tries to break him free of whatever dream plagues him with little success. She’ll have to clean his leg and hope it wakes him… or that he remains blissfully unaware in his sleep.
It’s too much to hope for, his eyes shooting open and mouth ripping out a scream as Nat plunges his leg into the water. She gives him the backpack and instructs him to bite down on the shoulder strap. If they’re lucky, his scream will be lost in the torrent of rain.
The water turns cloudy with blood as soon as Nat’s fingers gently rub it away from the skin. Ben is in agony just from the lightest brush so Nat moves as quickly as she can without causing additional pain. As the blood taints the water and the wound becomes clean Nat checks his ankle. It’s swollen around the wound opening, the skin dry and wrinkled where it met the air. The scab is a fetid thing, weeping both clear liquid and traces of pus. Despite the cold water, his skin is still hot to the touch. Natalie can no longer ignore the signs: Ben has an infection.
“Let’s let this get some air, maybe it’ll help.” She knows it won’t but can’t help pretending there is an outcome where he manages to recover.
She dumps the pink water at the mouth of the cave before filling it again. It will take careful maneuvering of the tarp but she thinks she keep it filled with water to keep Ben’s wound clean. She’s just prolonging the inevitable, water isn’t enough to keep Ben well and no sponsor is going to save his life. Not when he’s already got the odds stacked against him. Ben was hard enough to spin as a long shot win when he lost his leg, the Capital would give up on him now that he wasn’t ambulatory. Nat won’t let herself do the same.
It rains for most of the day, Nat eats a strip of jerky and manages to feed Ben some semblance of cold soup made from the bones of the freshest killed Rabbit and what tubers she had managed to find nearby. It was hardly the most appetizing concoction but every bite counted in the arena. After eating enough to satisfy Nat, Ben slips back into a fitful sleep. Nat pretends nothing is going on, I silent agreement they’d long had to save their dignity, or what little of it the Capital left them with. Instead, she watches the rain and waits for it to end. When it does, she’ll likely have another fight on her hands.
On the fifth night of the Capital anthem playing with no deaths, Nat grows antsy. The rain only lets up long enough to allow the image to be clearly viewed in the sky before coming down in sheets again. It’s been two days of nonstop rain and Nat is doing all she can to keep it out of their little cave. Ben cares little about the damp layer covering the ground, he spends most of the day sleeping. When he’s not asleep, Ben is refusing their food. He’s insistent that Nat needs it more, that he has less to replenish because he can’t move. They both know his days are numbered, his clock ticking closer to the infection taking over or a tribute finding them. Ben’s a sitting duck, a liability, but they both pretend what they’re doing isn’t about that.
The next morning Nat attempts to feed Ben the last of their provisions before she’s forced to reckon with hunting in the foul artificial weather. He only manages to swallow a few mouthfuls before it comes back up. He’s sweating profusely despite the chill and he has perpetual tears cresting his eyes, threatening to spill over.
“Nat,” he whispers.
Nat knows what he’s going to ask her, knows that he knows it isn’t fair. Knows that there’s little other choice.
“Natalie, please.” His voice cracks as his tears break the dam. His words are threaded with anguish, he’s begging.
The first few times he’d brought it up Nat had shut him down, hadn’t entertained the thought. But the infection is getting worse and every moment Ben is breathing is agony. The Capital won’t save him.
She can’t find the words to be angry. She can’t ask him how he could request this of her. She can’t find the delusional hope that he could make it out, that somehow he could be the victor.
So, Nat finally listens to his pleas. She does the kindest thing she can do. She takes her knife, tears streaming down her face in violent waves, and she plunges it into his chest.
Ben’s death isn’t messy. He doesn’t scream in agony. There’s no writhing to be had, no spark of life fleeting from his eyes. It’s not like killing any of the other tributes and not just because Ben is her friend, her ally.
Ben dies in an exhale of breath, his eyes contain only relief. His hand, once gripping her knee in anguish and pleading, loses its tension almost immediately. His muscles relax in a way she hasn’t seen since they ended up here. He’s finally found his peace.
Nat doesn’t have hers though, her face sticky with the blood and sweat of her friend as she swipes her hair out of her face. The sound of a canon in the distance barely registers as she mechanically packs her bag. The sound of a drone hovering outside the cave in a mechanical whir is barely perceptible over the pelting of the rain. Nat doesn’t make herself rush though, she removes the chain from his neck- his item from home. The metal ring on it still has the faintest gleam, a piece of Paul he had kept with him since his name was called. Nat fastens the chain around her neck.
She’s going to win this, she has to. She’s going to bring the ring back to Paul, she’s going to yell at Ben’s parents. She’s going to go back and do all the things she wishes she could have done before. After all, what does she have left to lose?
Nat adjusts Ben’s body to look like he’s sleeping. It’s the peaceful-looking kind, not the light and paranoid sleep of the arena or the fitful thrashing of fever. Nat knows the drone will pick him up as soon as she walks away but she takes her time anyway. She wants the last look she has of Ben to be the kind she’d be okay remembering. Not Ben, the dead tribute from Two but Ben, the boy. Ben, her friend who deserved more than this life gave him. Ben, was relaxed and at peace in a way this life never afforded him. She’d remember Ben for all he was and all he could be.
She could fool herself into thinking he was just at rest, pretending to sleep, a smile threatening to crack at any moment as he listened in on a nearby conversation. She does her best to memorize him, his face. She’s certain she’ll never forget anything she’s gone through in the arena but she wants to make sure she especially doesn’t forget Ben.
When the drone starts insistently whirring and beeping at her and Nat feels as if staying any longer will just make her break down again, she picks up her bag and leaves the cave behind.
She has a games to win.