By morning, the Capitol called it a "technical failure."
That was the official story.
A glitch. A temporary disruption in Arena feeds. The Gamemakers smiled and lied through their teeth on every broadcast.
But inside the control tower—the real control tower—they weren't smiling.
Because two tributes had vanished.
Not dead.
Not tracked.
Vanished.
Rue stood beside Goo in the dim glow of the control room. Her eyes scanned the feeds again and again, disbelief shifting into something colder.
"Why aren't they fixing it?"
"They're trying," Goo said. "They just don't know where to look."
He had looped the surveillance—three zones worth of recycled footage running endlessly, just enough movement to seem real. Goo's own image flickered briefly across one monitor, a three-second walk cycle that repeated in a different quadrant every hour.
To the Capitol, he was still running.
To the Arena?
He was everywhere.
And nowhere.
"Who else is left?" Rue asked.
Goo tapped one of the terminals.
Cassia appeared—limping less, but not healed. Still alive. Still watching.
Then the boy from District 2. Broad-shouldered. Quiet. He hadn't killed in three days.
And one more: the girl from District 5. Shy. Smart. Unseen.
Four besides them.
Six total.
Almost the end.
But not yet.
Midday brought movement.
A new blip on the map.
Not a tribute.
Not a hovercraft.
Something else.
Goo leaned in.
"Peacekeepers?" Rue asked.
"No."
He squinted at the heat signatures.
Too regular. Too precise.
Then he saw it.
The Sweepers.
The Capitol had crossed another line.
They were mechanical—four-legged constructs built like jungle cats and wolves, stripped down to matte-black steel. No eyes. No breath. Just movement. Swift. Surgical. Brutal.
They weren't designed to watch.
They were designed to erase.
One appeared in the southern zone first.
The boy from District 2 tried to fight it.
The cameras cut before his scream finished.
No cannon.
No anthem.
Just silence.
And then: a message across the screens in the Spire:
Unauthorized use of Capitol infrastructure detected.
Purge protocol: Initiated.
Rue swallowed hard. "They're coming for us."
Goo didn't blink. "They should hurry."
She looked up at him. "Why?"
"Because I'm not done yet."
He moved fast, pulling wires, rerouting feeds. He wasn't just hiding now.
He was infecting the system.
Looped footage became corrupted. Trap controls began to flicker. Automated terrain changes failed mid-sequence, creating jagged, half-glitched forests.
And for the first time since the Games began, the Capitol's systems displayed an error they had never programmed for:
Unknown Variable: Goo Kim.
Meanwhile, across the Arena...
Cassia crouched above a ridge, watching a broken drone burn.
She'd seen the wolf-things. Heard the scream from the ravine.
She knew this wasn't just about surviving anymore.
It was about control.
And she wasn't the one holding the reins.