She was drowning. The feeling was new yet it seemed familiar. The salty water entered through her mouth and nostrils, slid down and filled her lungs. She was choking, something pulling at her foot, not letting her swim back to the surface which her open eyes, stinging with the salt, could see many meters away.

Thrashing around was no use. The grip got tighter and tighter, nails digging into the exposed skin of her ankle. She looked down. It was him, it was him. He wouldn't let her go. Him or the picture of his head floating in the water. And her lungs kept filling up, and she was losing consciousness… Then a cannon sounded, thunderous, ringing into her ears, bringing Annie back to reality.

Annie woke up sucking in a great amount of oxygen, coughing and feeling tears run down her dirty cheeks. She was lying in rough earth by the shore of the lake, her clothes damped with water, her dark hair sticking to her face.

She had barely woken up and the image came back to her mind, tormenting her, staring at her. Annie put her hands to her head and cried out lowly. She couldn't stay there anymore. It was a wicked, terrible lake.

She got up to her feet and found herself surprisingly heavy. Only then she realized she still had her hammer on her belt, which had probably slowed her down when she was swimming to the shore. The rest of the supplies, though, were completely gone. Down in the depths of the lake, if they had not been eaten by the fish mutt or other horrible creatures yet.

Annie felt extremely dirty in those clothes, like his blood clung to the fabric. Disgusted, she took off her flannel shirt, throwing it on the sand and backing away. The air was chilly but she would rather freeze to death than dress blood.

She took her hammer out of the belt, feeling its weight on her right palm. She could still see faint stains of blood on the metal, which made the hammer even heavier. She'd never felt so weak before. It was as if she was under a pile of things, gathering on her head and heart, barely letting her stand.

The sun was starting to set. When she and Meris were attacked by the fish mutt, it was late morning, so Annie supposed she'd slept for many hours. It was a miracle no one had found her.

Teeth chattering, she ran into the forest, always holding her hammer. Her wide open eyes played prank on her: she saw shadows sneaking through the trees, smiling wickedly. Cameras recording her every move, people enjoying her worst nightmare. It was a sick Game.

Meris's voice pronounced her name, right by her ear, echoing into her head. Annie put one hand against a tree and bent down, throwing up anything she had in her stomach, which wasn't much. Only then she realized she was famished, but the thought of food made her even more nauseous.

Annie was dizzy, but stopping now wasn't an option; what if they caught her? Tore her apart like they did with Meris? Only the thought made her breathing quicker. She ran like never before, the trees around her mixing into a twist of greens and browns, her feet automatically dodging trees and pulling her along. Move forward, forward, forward, can't stop, it's a chase, it's a Game, for whom? Forward, can't stop.

When she slowed her pace, not for free will but for her muscles, that couldn't keep on much more, Annie had lost track of time, but it must've been more than an hour: The sky was now dark, the shadows involving her like cold water, freezing her into the unknown territory. What kind of creatures lurked into those shadows, now?

She heard the anthem starting to play. Looking up through the leaves, she spotted Meris's innocent face among the stars, staring right into her eyes. Then the girl from 9, whose cannon woke Annie up earlier. Marcella, Annie, the boys from 6, 8 and 10. It was a surprise minor Districts had made it so far into the Games.

Annie fell to the ground, the fallen twigs crunching under her body. The air was much colder now that the heat from the running had gone away. Hugging herself, Annie bent her knees and pressed her torso against them, trying to stay as small as possible, keep the body heat high enough.

Her mind kept switching thoughts. Home, sea, mother, father, cold, food, Mira, home, heat, Arena, death, Meris, Mira, mother, parachute, darkness, shadows, Finnick, home, Meris, parachute, mutts, cold, sea… parachute?

Her sea-green eyes looked up. Yes, it was a parachute! She got up to her feet quickly, wondering what it'd be. Her feet felt frozen inside the boots, and it took her a few seconds to be able to actually move toward the parachute. It got stuck on a low branch of a tree. Annie threw her hammer at the strings that held the box to the actual parachute, cutting them and letting the content drop on the hard ground with a low thud.

After picking up her hammer, she crouched down next to the box. It was medium-sized, with a black '4' painted on two sides. With fingers swollen from the cold, Annie opened the box. Inside was a thick jacket, covered in brown velvet on the outside and sheep wool on the inside. Annie held it tightly in her hands, mouth open in exasperation. She dressed it, instantly feeling better, a sigh of relief slipping through her dry lips.

Annie wondered how Finnick had managed such a sponsor. It must've been really expensive, and she doubted she still had anyone rooting for her after she broke down. Yet, Finnick was a really famous tribute, with lots of contacts. Maybe he had managed to arrange something. Did that mean he still believed in her?

Closing her eyes with the comfortable heat, Annie whispered loudly enough for the cameras to catch the sound:

"Thank you."

Even with the jacket and not feeling cold, Annie couldn't fall asleep. Every time she came close to it, her brain would bring back memories of Meris and Mira, all the blood and the gore and the death: her heart races and she opens her eyes, scanning her surroundings, waiting for mutts to come out at any second.

But they didn't. The sun crept into the sky too slowly. It seemed to take an eternity, but finally the light rays splattered by Annie, revealing the same stillness of the forest except for a squirrel on top of a branch.

With the terrible hunger thrashing around inside her, Annie instinctively threw the hammer that had rest on her hand all night at the animal. It spun in the air and was quicker than the prey, hitting it right in the head.

With a faint squeak, the squirrel fell directly to the ground. Annie crawled to it like an animal herself, the wildness in her eyes disturbing. She grabbed the dead body of the squirrel with one hand and the hammer with the other. Putting her hammer into the belt and hanging the squirrel from it, too, she proceeded to get up and gather lots of twigs and branches.

It took her minutes to finally get a spark from rubbing a piece of wood against the other, but when she did, the flames were higher than expected. She twisted the squirrel over the flames, letting them lick the body, toasting the flesh. When finished, Annie extinguished the fire and used the back of the hammer's head to cut the squirrel into pieces and cut out the skin. She hid it all behind a bush, the bodiless head reminding her of Meris and making her sick again.

After throwing up, she put the squirrel meat on one of her belt's pocket and ran at full-speed forward, running away from the Lake, from the heads, from the memories of Mira and Meris, that ran along with her, pulling at her clothes, making her trip and sweat.

I want to go home, she thought. But did she, really? Going home meant nightmares and tormenting memories for the rest of her life. It meant suffering, being at the hands of the Capitol, and even worse, watching her own tributes die inside those Games.

No, she corrected herself, I want to die.

It was then that the forest broke apart and finished suddenly. Annie stepped into a large meadow, and faced a huge mountain.