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“Coryo! Coryo!” Sejanus Plinth waved his arms with enough enthusiasm that water doused Maude and Lucy Gray, both of whom ducked immediately and returned the melee.
Coriolanus stood on the edge of the dock, poised to jump, a frown set upon his face as he watched them frolic through the water
It was nice here. Of course it was. It was a warm day, not too scalding, with a mild breeze that tickled each treetop and snatched at his hair. They could be the only people in the world alive right now, and Coriolanus would not know the difference. He found he hated it.
But they were watching, and he was standing, and he was never one for poor manners. He leapt in, submerging down into the icy waters, and found he could see a green forest at the bottom, twisted with some kind of plant.
It was a snaky sort of plant, and he had to tear a tendril off his ankle before it pulled him into the depths.
Resurfacing, he tried to resist the undignified urge to splash Lucy Gray in the face, and then found that he didn’t care.
“Coriolanus Snow!” Lucy Gray used his full name with a soaking grin, arms brought up too late to shield the full force of his wave. “Oh, I’ll make you regret that, I’m sure.”
She chased after him, sending small splashes his way until Sejanus joined in, and the waves turned roiling. “Traitor!” He called, a glint in his eye as he dove under the waves and pulled Sejanus down with him.
It was dark down here, and cold. It was like a well, deep and empty and mourning, and Coriolanus could only think of the bedtime story Tigris had told him when he was young, on the nights when the bombs weren’t so loud and the ghost stories came out, of the girl who had fallen into a well and screamed for help, clawing at the walls, but everyone else around her could only hear an echo.
He resurfaced, gasping, dragging Sejanus after him as they both heaved for air. He found himself wishing he’d left him down there.
“Boys!” Lucy Gray chastened, though there was a hint of worry in her eyes.
“Did you know?” Sejanus turned to him, a challenging look crossing his face.
Coriolanus stepped back. When had the lake become so shallow? He didn’t know.
“Did you know?” Sejanus repeated, and now Lucy Gray was watching him too, wondering. He wanted to wipe this moment out of her mind, to stop Sejanus from speaking before he ruined anything else. He wanted to leave, to flee, to run far from here to where the name Snow meant something besides a frozen wasteland.
“Did I know?” Coriolanus shrugged. He’d always known, in the end. He’d always known. It was in their blood.
“Did you know? Did you know? Did you know?” Sejanus and Lucy chorused, and little Maude was there too now, and Barb Azure and her lady from down the road, and Tam Amber and Clerk Carmine, and they drew closer to him, their arms splashing through the water, their faces glaring and fearless, and he retreated further, and Billy Taupe was there too now, a bloody bullet hole on his forehead, and they wouldn’t quiet, no matter how Coriolanus wished they would hush.
“Did you know? Did you know? Did you know?” And there were nameless strangers there too, faces he’d lost to poison, friends he’d left behind, Clemenstra, Highbottom, the Plinth’s, all of them.
It was like a mockery of the jabberjays, a mockery of his glorious moment, when he seized his own fate and stopped waiting for someone else to fix it, and in the frightening din his eyes rose to the sky and there hung Sejanus, a rope around his throat, and Sejanus’ eyes fixed on his, wide and full of fear and horror and betrayal, because he knew now, he knew the sound it made when the platform fell and his neck snapped and the rope went taught and there was nothing left of him in the world, and his once almost-brother was too coward to watch. He knew.
That’s the sound of Snow rising.
”Coryo! Coryo! Coryo!”
Coriolanus’s eyes snapped open in the dark. He had not dreamed of that portion of his youth in perhaps twenty years, and it did not bode well on the eve of the reaping.
It had been sixty four years since Lucy Gray and Sejanus both looked into his eyes and knew, too late, what he was. What they all could be, if they dared to seize it.
Great.
A monster.
All great men were monsters, in truth, because all great men had walked into the belly of the beast and lost the chains that bound them to civilized nature, found what it meant to be unstrung, and walked away knowing that each human, in the end, could become either predator or prey.
But for Lucy Grey to make an appearance now, he loathed it. She had played him for the fool, to wander into the woods and die a starving death, and even if he knew now that District Thirteen remained, they never would have made it that far. Would have died in the woods, lived without meaning or purpose.
There have been stirrings of rebellion in the districts recently. They would need to be put down, just as she had.
The Games would be the perfect chance to do it. The spectacle of next year's Quarter Quell would stamp out the sparks, but there was much to be done this year too. Rebellion was a cycle, the rise and fall of memories as the districts forgot the consequences of trying to rise above their stations.
He lit a candle, and sat down to read in its dying light, preferring the flare of a flame to the electric glare of synthetic light.
Fire was catching. He would have to stamp it out.