I was perched in the tallest tree I had managed to find when the first explosion came. I still don't know exactly what came first: the brilliant flash of light that permeated the night, that burned itself into my eyelids, or the searing heat that instantaneously evaporated all the sweat that had beaded up on my forehead. It was, of course, followed by an acrid smoke that stung everything: my nose, my mouth and throat, the gash on my arm, and even my eyes, hidden beneath their lids. This was no fire as I remembered them from my other life back in the district, though it did somehow bring up the memory of the few winters in which we actually received coal to burn. The artificial, acid smell was nothing like the more common, scent of nostalgia that accompanied the spruce branches as they burned in our hearth back in the district.

This, as my life since the Reaping, is different, foreign. The inferno, as it climbs my tree, hungry for everything, is just as the Capitol is: falsely charming while in fact vicious, raging and leaving destruction in its wake, quite artificial and carefully developed by those that call themselves scientists. Both two forces about to swallow me whole.

And I know that there is no escape for me. Perhaps if the tree were a yard closer to its neighbor, perhaps if the wind would have blown the opposite direction with the blast. Perhaps if my name had not been pulled. Perhaps if I had been born a handful of years earlier. I will not allow myself to waste my last thoughts on what-ifs, and maybe I should not have written myself off. But I don't need any further false hopes crushed, and I will certainly not die in disappointment.

I've got three minutes. Tops. The fire was lapping—no, not lapping, gnawing, ravenous, with an inconsolable appetite for anything, and tribute is just one thing among many on the menu—at the tree's midsection when I made the spontaneous decision of how to go. There is no way that those in control are displaying anyone else on the screen, no way that they would change it. Deaths are exciting. Or powerful, anyhow. Mine will be. One can only hope.

"Snow, you vile creature!" I would never shout such a bold thing, had I not been dead. It's possible that I would have been spared by the Gamemakers—unlikely, of course, but possible—but now I have sealed my fate for sure. I hope the president is watching live. "You murderous wretch, you kill me yourself! Only such a coward as yourself would hide behind a wall of flames! Kill me yourself!"

My rant builds in intensity with the flames; doubtless they are turning up the heat. I know I have under two minutes before the flames reach me. Less if the thin pine, skeleton charred and dried out, buckles and snaps under my weight.

"You think we don't know! You can't think we don't know the lies your filthy mouths spout at us all, the heaps of shit you expect us to believe!" Little bits of ash flutter through the air like snowflakes as the fire, a mere six inches from my foot, starts to melt the rubber off the sole of my boot, and I am reminded of the old children's rhyme that predates Panem. Ashes, ashes. It wakens me from my rebellious rant, if only slightly.

I clutch the very tip of the tree to my chest. The loud crack of splitting lumber reminds me of home. "Soon fall Panem!" I shout, but I'm thinking something else. We all fall down, I muse. I did, at least.

---

"Has the sound gone out again, mother?" Though the picture came in even clearer than normal, the only audio was static. The young woman did not respond, but only winced as the burning timber crashed down. As the six-year-old went to tap the side of the old television set, the audio of the all-consuming blaze popped back on. "Oh."