We were woken early, before the sun had risen, in order to prepare for the games. The tributes were required to be in their prep rooms at midday, half an hour before the games were to begin.

Martial trudged to the breakfast table with a loud yawn and downcast eyes. For once, the silence was deafening. Lys seemed to be itching to speak, offer some advice, but she would glance at me and look back at her plate. Trix and Gia had yet to show and I could only assume they were elsewhere on mentor business but it did leave the table feeling empty and awkward.

An hour passed and they finally returned, Lys and Martial had moved over to the couch where she could impart advice onto his willing ears.

"How are you feeling?" Gia asked to the room, looking between me and Martial.

He shrugged. I shrugged. Trix sighed.

"Yeah, I feel that." She sat down next to me, peeling a blueberry muffin, "I suggest letting it all out now, you'll want to think clearly once that first canon goes off."

"I think," I mumbled, tapping the edge of my plate and trying to count through my growing frustration, "I'll save it." A wry smile tugs at the edge of my mouth and I glance over at her. "It could be useful."

The next few hours passed by in a blur. The stylists came in with our uniforms, lightweight trousers that zip off at the knees and a skin-tight vest with a loose rain jacket over the top.

As he laid the jacket onto my bed, Nero pinched the material between his fingers and looked up to watch me check myself in the mirror. I scraped my hair out of my face and puffed out my cheeks, holding it up then dropping it around my shoulders again. He came over and tied it with the band around his wrist.

"These clothes are breezy," I observe as a chill comes through my open bedroom door.

"How do you do in the heat? If that jacket was any thinner it wouldn't be waterproof anymore," his hands warmed my arms and his tone was joking but his mouth was pressed into a grim line. Shrugging, I turn away from the mirror and pick up the jacket.

"I cope better than Martial."

He hums, glancing over to the door when Lys knocks faintly on the doorframe. She asks if we're ready and my heart drops into my gut. Heavily, I drag myself over to the door and wonder if this is the last room I will sleep in or will this building be my home for a few weeks each year at the end of all this.

"Terra?"

My eyes come into focus and I settle my gaze on Lys, who I had halted next to in the doorway. Unspeaking, barely feeling, I tentatively wrap my arms around Lys and rest my head against her chest.

She holds me back tighter than my own mother did.

In the departure rooms, I stand before the transportation capsule rubbing at the red welt on my arm where the tracker had been carelessly injected into my forearm. Lys had stayed back at the tribute centre but Trix and Nero followed me to the last moment while Gia and Martial's stylist went with him.

The next time I see my best friend will be when the games begin.

A voice over the intercom announces five minutes until the tributes have to be ready in their capsules, a platform concealed in a clear glass tube.

I'm sitting on the bench, knees bouncing uncontrollably, as I watch Trix pace back and forth in the room. She's mumbling about the careers, how our best survival tactic is staying together, and how I need to survive. She sits next to me suddenly.

"If you get ambushed, try and stay together. You're stronger together, even if the numbers overpower you. And, if you run, don't run alone- got it? Before the final seven, you have to stay together." Her eyes are wild and she hazards a look at the capsule. I am forced to recall the collapse of the pack in her games and I feel a lump rise in my throat. She doesn't mean to worry me, but the warnings are enough, how could they not be? For a moment I wonder if I'm looking at myself in a mirror as she descends into an anxious state transcending anything I have ever experienced before.

The intercom announces the final minute, instructing the tributes to step into their capsule. Nero gives me a tight hug and I slowly approach Trix as she counts her breaths. When we hug I swear her biceps nearly dislocated my shoulder.

"10 seconds"

She sniffles, brushing down the sleeves of my jacket and zipping it up.

"I'm rooting for you," she says quietly as I stand in the capsule.

"Five seconds"

I glance up at a cavern of darkness with a sliver of light peeking through the crack in the hatch opening above me. A wave of heat fills the space as the glass door hisses shut.

The platform beneath me begins to rise and my hot breath fogs up the glass when I look back at my mentor one last time. She waves until she's out of view and, as my head emerges into the sunlit arena, I have to squint and shield my eyes from the light.

Blinking away light spots, I try to regroup and take note of those around me- of what's around me.

"The games will begin in five..."

There's a boy on the platform to my left.

"Four..."

A girl on my right.

"Three..."

Sand at my feet.

"Two..."

Trees at my back.

"One..."

The cornucopia ahead.

A canon goes off and most of the tributes sprint for the cornucopia and the survival packs creating humps in the sand. It takes a moment to register that I should be doing the same thing as I simply watch them attack each other from my platform.

Gemma and Mahi are already at the cornucopia, one stalking into the battlefield with throwing knives in hand, the other standing guard with an arrow docked and ready to fly. Somewhere in the tussle there's Martial with his hands around the throat of a kid much smaller than him. And, yet, I can finally process that I should be out there too.

I glance to the side and the girl next to me, the girl from three I now see, is watching a survival pack lying in the sand a few feet from us. She catches me watching, her eyes widen when I look over at the pack and she fretfully moves from the podium. I hear a familiar voice yell my name and Gemma gestures to the girl with her knife. Forced into action, I propel myself off the platform and shove the girl back onto the ground. She grabs at me, scratching at my face as she tries to throw me off but when her head lifts from the ground she provides the perfect momentum for me to grab her hair and crash her head onto the side of her podium with a cry.

Whenever I lay awake at night pondering the act of taking another life, it had always elicited a disturbed twisting in my gut. But, it wasn't the blood, or the lifeless way her body dropped to the ground or even the mere fact that I had just killed a person that shocked me. It was how quickly she died.

The adrenaline was still coursing through me, I had been pulling her head up for another go before I noticed she was gone, and I froze. I stared at her, watching how her chest didn't rise and fall, how her eyes didn't blink. I stared at her long enough for the adrenaline to ebb away to a ringing in my ears and the sand shifting around me as another body dropped down behind me. I turned and watched as the boy from 5 twitched and groaned face down in the sand.

A knife protruded from his back and his own knife had fallen limp in his hand.

I snatched the weapon away from his reach, looking around to see Gemma march over and yank the blade from his back and help me to my feet.

"You paused," she said bluntly, glancing towards the cornucopia, "you can't pause."

I itched to snap, tell her a piece of my mind, but I couldn't let her think I'm weak so soon. Instead, I forced one foot forward and trudged through the sand towards the survival pack still semi-lodged in the ground. As I make my way towards the cornucopia the hair on the back of my neck tingles under the watchful eyes of my teammate. For all I know, she could be trying to kill me in four hours when the sun goes down.

The sandpit is silent. I try to count the bodies around me but lose count as they all look the same covered in sand. I wonder how many of them died at the hands of the pack.

Beneath the cornucopia, raised above the pit on a concrete slab and pointing northward like a compass, situated between a barricade of supply boxes and weapon racks sat Martial being tended to by Wade.

Sly and Mahi were rummaging through the boxes and, upon seeing the small knife lodged in Martial's arm, I joined them in looking for a med kit.

Gemma took up the bow and arrow, pacing the opening of the cornucopia and watching the copse of trees surrounding the sandpit for anyone dumb enough to attack the careers by themselves.

My hands slowed at rummaging through the survival pack that had been on my back as I caught sight of the blowtorch. Pulling it out, I examined it carefully, testing how easy it was to remove the fuel tank. I looked up at the others, considering taking the tank now but, when Wade mentioned cauterising the wound, I passed it over without risking the confrontation that would come with a faulty blowtorch so early in the games.

As it left my hand, my fingers itched to have it back. To have some control, but surely an attachment to such a small object would raise brows.

Mahi snatched the pack from beside me, narrowing her eyes at me when she rummaged through and pulled out the medical pack and passed it off to Wade. Next, she produced a blow gun, loaded with ten darts and an extra pack of ten. She skipped over to Gemma, offering them up in order to get the bow back,

Looking around, it seemed that there was only one bow or the other had been taking since there was a second pack of arrows scattered across the floor near another opening and on the sand.

In an attempt to be useful, I return to the boxes and begin helping Sly take note of what was in which. When one opened and revealed a goldmine of a fully stocked water cooler, our faces spread into wide grins and we high-fived enthusiastically for the cameras. He took a bottle, opening it and muttering 'jackpot'. I grabbed five more and distributed them among the team before all deciding to protect that box above the rest. It was painfully evident that the cornucopia was situated in the warmest spot of the arena, surrounded by two miles of sand before the trees' shade could protect you from the sun.

We arranged a few boxes to ensure we would get some shade even as the sun rose and set but the cover of the metal cornucopia gave for unrelenting heat.

For the rest of the afternoon, we rejoiced in our water, split a bag of apples between us, and kept a careless eye on the trees with confidence that any testy tributes would reveal themselves in the morning if at all.

When the sun set behind the trees, and the sky turned a navy blue, the Panem anthem played. We moved towards the east opening and looked up at the symbol of Panem projected into the sky and we watched as the faces of the deceased tributes flashed one after the other. The girl from Three smiled down at me, then both from Five, the boys from Six and Nine, the girl from Ten and, finally, the boy from Twelve.

Their faces faded from the sky and we stood in silence for a moment.

"Only seven," Mahi mumbled, crossing her arms.

"This is gonna be a long game," Sly agreed, moving behind the barricade to a pile of sleeping bags to settle for the night.

He was right to sleep now, after tomorrow we would have to start venturing out in the name of the careers to hunt the others, we'd have to protect the cornucopia and assign roles to play best as a team. The safest night to sleep was the first because, even if the plan was to catch the others off guard in the night, every kid in the games hid in terror of themselves or others on night one.

I offered to stay on lookout first, though, as the rest slept. Seven dead at the start of the games, in what is often called 'the First Bloodbath' was too few. Usually, half of the tributes would die in the beginning, leaving roughly twelve tributes left. In cases like these three things were possible:

The game lasts longer.

Tributes get more reckless, more ruthless, through fear of having more competition.

The gamekeepers bring out the mutts early.

I watched the sand, the treeline and, occasionally, my own allies. Any of the remaining tributes could be planning to attack when it's least expected, the sand was the perfect hiding place for mutts. I gripped the handle of the knife in my hand and took extra precautions by having a machete lying by my side as I watched the night unfold.

Quiet. Peaceful. A heartbeat.