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HUNGER IS THE DEADLIEST WEAPON.
It makes no sound. It doesn't shoot or burn. It waits. Silent. Patient.

It seeps in slowly, clawing at your guts. Hunger is a parasite that consumes your thoughts, your strength, your pride.

It takes everything—until there's nothing left but an empty ache inside your ribs and a cold that settles deep into your bones.

War taught her this hunger. She learned to live with it. To act as if it were a friend.

She learned to survive on less than nothing.

She remembered the months, the years. The tremble in her cousin's hands as she passed around the last canned mushrooms no one dared eat.

Nothing had changed for her since the Hunger Games. Not like for her neighbors.

The Capitol had wrapped itself back in luxury and excess after years of hell.

But Dido still felt a sharp bitterness when she thought of those dark days. The things she'd seen made her stomach turn.

Still, she hated the Hunger Games.

How could she not? A monstrous display paraded for the Capitol's amusement—children forced to their deaths, masked as tradition, dressed in lies.

No one deserved to die like that. Not the tributes, not their families, not even the Capitol itself.

Dido knew hunger—real hunger. No one deserved that either.

The Games were meant to bring order. Peace. Control.

But they were not.

To her, they were an extra wound carved deep into the heart of the city.

Still, despite everything—the war, the hunger, the cruelty—she could not despise the Capitol.

This cracked, desperate city was home.

And somewhere beneath the broken glass and fading light, she believed something could survive.

Maybe not the Capitol as it was.

But something else.

A flicker. A spark.

A future.

Then Reaping Day comes.

Names are called out like sealed fates.

Every year, a cold weight settling in Dido's chest.

There was something horrific about hunger.

About war.

About watching innocents being sent to their deaths again and again—entirely powerless to stop it.

The thought clawed at her, relentless and sharp.