Rory and Saiyyad weren’t responding to his texts and he didn’t know what to do. It had only been a few minutes since the notification from the Gazette that had listed those they’d found to be missing so far, and the names that stood out to him more than the others, as if illuminated on the screen in brighter letters than the others, were those of his friends.
Already in the span of just five minutes he had sent them both a handful of panicked texts and left a voicemail on each of their phones. Rory, she was one of his closest friends and while yes, she was technically interning with the Gamemakers, he couldn’t see a reason why anyone would want to harm her. She was good, plain and simple, would never harm anything if she could help it. It wasn’t her fault that she’d wound up with this job and Satchel knew she didn’t even like it. Anyone who met her, who took the chance to talk to her even a little bit, would see that she wasn’t the guiltiest among them, not by a long-shot.
And Saiyyad, he considered the position in a different light than any of the other Gamemakers he’d met since arriving at the Tower. He was thoughtful and philosophical; he thought about the tributes, the Victors, everything. More than once Satchel had questioned where his loyalties might actually lie. He was more likely to get mixed up in something bad, but still...
He didn’t want to wish harm on anyone else, but he could only hope that if a member of the Gamemaking team had been killed, that it had been some type of justice. That it wasn’t someone innocent who had been caught in the crossfire like Rory or Saiyyad. He tried to suppress as many rebellious thoughts as he could, unsure where he would be able to help in a Rebellion anyway, telling himself all kinds of excuses... but this time, he hoped, he really, really hoped, that whoever had died had deserved it. That they had been playing a game they shouldn’t have been playing.
The irony wasn’t lost on him, of course, that all of them, everyone in the Tower, was playing the same Game, and that in the end, none of them could ever win.
