I can tell I'm not awake anymore. Everything forming the atmosphere around me has a certain feel to it; as if all the threads that hold it together are strung tight. The blank canvas of this dream is vibrating with energy, humming as if waiting to be unleashed. The only reason it's empty is because it's lying in wait. It only needs for me to fill in the blank spaces with something new. In other words, my mind's imaginative cooperation.

Eventually, cooperate, it does. Unfortunately, what comes is neither comforting nor convenient, and like all other dreams I've had in the past week, it isn't tame or quiet, either.

The white disappears with a sudden flow of dark, like water washing over a rock face. It crawls over the pale eternity around me, until it feels like a confined, musty vise. Empty, but incredibly heavy. Pitch-black. Cold fingers of uncertainty snake over my chest, under my skin. I breathe hard, trying to free myself of the feeling. Suddenly, it's as if a match has been struck. The puff of air from my lungs appears in front of me, moist and full; in grey clouds of steam. My eyes follow the trail of my breath, the pale wisps fading into the darkness.

Suddenly, a ripple of cold dances through my leg, and I find my foot buried in snow. I stand transfixed, gazing at the tiny, cold crystals gathered around my foot like glowing white ants. My toes wiggle, already heavy and numb, and I step forth with my other foot. A similar reaction falls into effect, so that now both my feet are encrusted in the frozen crystals.

My line of focus expands, and the darkness melts from beneath me, so that the snow now forms a patch, and then an island, of glowing, pure white. My breath steams out again, and following it is a flow of light. The darkness transforms, making way for a wave of grey, falling away from a milky sky. Soon, there is not only snow and sky, but jagged black mountains, rising from the earth like fractured bones slippery with ice. My breath turns to the mist surrounding the mountains, becoming the long trail of perspiration weaving around the mountaintops.

I'm back in Ash's arena, and I couldn't be more confused.

I scan my surroundings, trying to find something among the cold, jaggedly sculpted landscape around me that might explain why I'm here. All I see at first is a sea of slate and mist, rising sharply into the air. There is no other life here. No bird or wild animal nested in the hooks of stone and ice around me. No plants. No Ash.

So why am I here?

I look around again, paying so much attention to everything that my eyes blur out with the concentration. Snow. Stone. Mountaintop. Mist. Around, then to my own mountain.

Snow with a slight rise in elevation. Ice, slippery and cold. Stone as black as night. A grim, sweeping peak. A figure in a long, dark cloak.

A figure in a long, dark cloak.

My eyes stop on the silhouette, and I hesitate, still watching for something. The figure is unmoving, the cloak blowing with the wind. Partially buried in mist, I can't tell much about what or who I'm looking at.

Ash?

I creep closer, and mist moves in front of me like a wall, suddenly solidifying to an opaque silver cloud. It inches by, and then blows away with the wind. The figure seems to have moved closer, and now it seems that they're coming in my direction.

The cloak fans out, spanning the air; opening like dragons' wings, curling in like scorched paper. For a fraction of a second, there's an empty spot among the mist, and I finally see something beyond the expanse of dark cloth- a hanging wooden bead.

If the figure was farther away, I would think this to be Ash, for sure. But no, as the person comes closer, the cloak envelops their compact frame easily, and it suddenly seems that the figure is much too small to be Ash, anyway. Too small to be anyone in his Hunger Games, in fact.

I squint, craning my neck to see more of the silhouette through the frozen air, shivering in thin nightclothes. The wind catches the folds in the flimsy fabric, shifting me as if my ice-pick feet aren't holding me to the ground. Yet they are. When I look to the snow, I feel the wind shift me, but my body moves only at my command. It's a strange idea, that I never see my body move out of sync with my mind. But the suspicion is impossible to ignore.

I look up to find the figure standing three feet from my face.

No, not standing. Hovering.

How long I stand here like this, I cannot say, but all I feel is the sensation of standing frozen, startled, in front of this strange being suspended before me from invisible strings. The world has frozen in sync with me, snowflakes hanging in midair like frostbitten wind. The figure is two feet off the ground, cloak hanging over its feet, its perfectly smooth hands extended at either sides.

Finally, I dare to move. I tentatively step forward, and when the figure doesn't respond, I step again. "Hello?" I venture, stepping a little closer to the long black cloak, just close enough to brush against it. "By any chance do you-"

The figure's head whips up suddenly, glaring at me, and I stumble back in surprise, cursing under my breath. I get my bearings, but for the millisecond I regain them, I lose them again.

The figure before me, I know. Yet somehow, I know I couldn't possibly have known her whatsoever. The figure is the female tribute Ash killed. The black hair done up in pigtails is the same, the malnourished olive skin is the same, the thin eyebrows and unusually high cheekbones are exactly the same.

But it's too small to be her. And her eyes- her eyes- they're clearly not hers. The frighteningly angry sheen is, but the green irises are Maggie's and Maggies's alone.

And the beads, rotted wood stained with blood, are Ash's.

I forget myself at the first pinch of fearful anger, the same kind that makes it impossible for me to shut up. "What did you do with Ash?" I demand, stepping close so I'm inches away from the floating girl. "What have you done with him?"

The figure's eyes change from angry to furious to scalding, and I suddenly back up, the words in my brain and throat jumbled. I open my mouth and close it, my jaw a puppet's in terms of usefulness. The girl tilts her head in what should have appeared to be a cute, twelve-year-old-girl kind of gesture, but the movement is so sudden and sharp that it communicates just the opposite. I take another step back, but the sharpness of the snow crunching makes me step forward again.

I clear my throat quietly, the effort it takes to make the sound unthreatening making me crane my neck forward. "Mag-" I begin to say, but her eyes flash in such a way that I know that the identity of whatever she has turned into is not the living, breathing girl whose eyes she's stolen.

I try again. "Ba- Becca." Her green eyes are bone-sharp, focused only on me. I continue, the words scraping against my throat until they sound raw. "Where did they go?"

No answer. The anger sitting there in molten green pools doesn't evaporate. I slowly allow myself to relax, not realizing until now how hard my heart was beating under my skin. I slide forward on my bare toes, which are too numb to feel the icy stone underneath them.

Then Becca screams.

It's a strange sound, like she's screaming at the very back of her throat, letting her voice bounce and crack at an unnatural rhythm, keening toward the line where sanity stops and who knows what starts. The sound has so much substance that I swear that it's like her body keens with it if I stare too long. She never ceases, and for an entire minute she steadily voices the haunting pitch, the sound of oblivion and jagged hysteria.

Her eyes travel to me, and they flicker with lightning, a grey and green insanity that dances with her creepy song. I am frozen, unable to move, as her mouth begins to open and close over the sound, crookedly chopping, chopping, chopping. From her throat she sings lower, spiraling and spiraling until I bend to my knees, my hands clenched over my ears. Inside my head, the song echoes and frets along my bones until I reciprocate, screaming until I can't breathe. Then she tears my hands off my ears with a screech, her fingers turning into yellowed claws, tearing fire into my skin. I stumble back, shielding myself with my arms, but my feet are too ice-numbed to move on their own. She claws at me with a howl, ripping through skin and flesh until I can see my bones, my heart clattering against my rib cage.

Becca brings my face close to hers and howls again, her green eyes flint and her teeth white fangs; and then she dangles me over the cliff that I almost fell from merely one dream ago. The skin of my neck frays like old threads, and I fall away screaming, grabbing at the empty air; until the only things I see are Ash's beads and Maggie's eyes and Becca's gaping maw, and the large red sores that splotch her throat.

The same sores that had danced along her throat as Ash killed her, her keening wail cut off into silence.

. . .

I never hit the ground. I know because surely I would have done so by now, surely I would have felt my body if it had collided at the bottom of the cavern. I've had so many dreams of falling that I've memorized their ending. Most people never hit, but I always do. The feeling of splitting open post-collision and your thoughts scattering into red ribbons isn't exactly one that leaves you easily.

I also know I haven't collided with the bottom of the cavern because of the ringing in my ears. I'd heard myself screaming last time I checked, my voice bouncing crookedly off the cavern walls.

Where am I?

My brain stays confused and pretty much in the dark until I become aware of three things.

One, I'm not dreaming anymore.

Two, I'm in a Hunger Games arena with my brother and at least ten people who might be trying to kill us.

Three, somewhere in this background of sounds, someone screams out as if they're being murdered.

The ringing in my ears intensifies as my body transitions from sleep to wakefulness, reintroducing itself to the heat. My back arches against hard wood, and I eventually feel the strain of muscle running from my stomach to my jaw. Something's over my mouth, and I can't breathe. I bite it hard away from my face, tasting copper, and the thing goes away. When the sound comes back a second later, the yelling gets louder and louder until, finally, I think I know who's-

It's me screaming.

And from what I'm able to tell, I'm making a heck of a lot of noise.

I shut my mouth just as something presses hard on top of it again. My eyes snap open and I see the glint of the metal axe in the sun, my brother's hand under my nose, and his very uncalm face staring down at me.

I give him a confused look, but before I can say something, Eli gives me a pained look and whispers, "Excuse me for this, but maybe can you try to, um- shut up?"

He scoots out of the tree and gives me room to stretch outside. I open and close my mouth, before asking in a carefully measured voice, "Was I asleep?"

"Yes."

"Was I having a nightmare?"

"Yes."

I inhale some air into my lungs and breathe it out again. I have a very bad feeling. "Was I just screaming out loud, and did I just give away our position to the last ten or so people who are probably going to come pay us a visit if they're within screaming distance?"

A pause. Then, simply, "Yes."

More of the bad feeling. I feel a prickle at my back, the intensity of it so strong that I can almost swear I feel fingers running down my spine, a whisper in my ears that it's time to die.

"Eli, do we need to go?"

Eli stares at something behind me, and the green of his eyes falters. He shivers almost imperceptibly, and whispers without moving his lips.

"Yes."

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Hey, guys! Sorry for the late update, but I hope that you enjoyed this chapter anyhow!

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