Speed the Collapse

by SailorGreySparrow

Summary:

Victors are never truly untouchable. They work for their place, fight with everything they have to come home. None of it is enough … not when their salvation brings them face-to-face with a new way to be damned all over again.

At least they are alive; maybe, it is still a better option than being brought home in a wooden coffin. Or, maybe the ones locked up in boxes of oak and pine are the lucky ones.

---

or

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Glimpses into the lives of the ones who came home, the ones who didn’t, and the ones who want to burn it all down.

Chapter 1: What Have You Become?

Notes:

I read Sunrise on the Reaping and, while I don’t rank it highly among my own personal Hunger Games book order, it’s got me writing fic again. That tends to happen with me; I either get angry enough to avoid my fandoms for a while, or a less-than-ideal addition gets me writing.

This short anthology is a companion, more or less, to two longer fics I’ve had in the planning stages for a bit. Mostly, this one lays backstory to some of the characters that appear over there, or serves to showcase tiny aspects of a rebellion that took seventy-five years to build.

I play with writing styles, so that may show up here in different ways. Depends on how creative I get, I suppose.

These will be shown in district order, but might be posted as I write them. So, chapters out of order until I get all twelve written. Then, they’ll be in district sequence.

Prompts are taken from challenges over in the SYOT Verses Discord server for various events.

Palladium Barker: District 1

There has always been something off about Panache. Palladium has seen it … that ugly, monstrous side lurking beneath the surface.

She is eight the first time it happens. He is five, too young to join her in after-school training at the Center, but old enough to understand honor and duty.

“Show me!” He’s fierce and determined when he makes the request, on a March afternoon before dinner. “Show me how to fight someone … like they do on the TV.”

Palladium can but she doesn’t. Her trainers are always saying it’s okay. If you accidentally hurt someone, or if that accident looked more like on-purpose.

It’s okay. One day, they will need to cause harm without a thought.

It’s fine enough practice … letting some year threes take out their feelings on each other. The infirmary’s just down the hall, after all.

But Palladium’s old enough to know there’s a difference. In the Games, hurting people because you want to make your district proud. At the Center, throwing fists to prove you aren’t stupid or a crybaby. Those are vastly different from this … showing someone she cares about how to fight, and maybe—accidentally—causing him pain in the process.

Palladium takes Panache by both hands, the way Mom does when he gets upset about things. “Sorry,” she tells him. “Not now. You could get hurt, and I’m not gonna do that to you.”

Panache can’t get away from Mom’s grip yet, but he does it to Palladium before she can react. Both hands, pulling hers forward. One misstep, and she’s on the ground.

Her brother stares down at her, all red cheeks and balled fists. “I said show me!” When he yells like that, Palladium’s scared of him. At least, she’s as close to scared as someone like her is allowed to be.

---

Two weeks after his ninth birthday, Panache gets a knife in his hand for the first time. Palladium is one year shy of her first Reaping … already in the years of kill tests and battle theory, but she lets Panache talk about his smaller win all the way home.

“I’m gonna be like you now,” he tells her.

Somehow, Palladium knows he will not be. She is small for her age … still encouraged to pursue knives because she’s too little to be good with a sword. Palladium is careful, elegant, and starting to be called beautiful.

Panache is none of those things—arrogant, loud, and always so angry. She is finally old enough to understand those other differences, too. The same last name. Entirely contrasting looks. Her, with her pale skin and silver eyes. Panache … her opposite in every way. The same last name, and separate mothers. Maybe, Panache has figured it out too. Maybe, it’s why he’s stayed so angry for so long, and why she has always done her best to be perfect.

They will never be alike.

She knows this for certain two days later, when she catches him playing target practice with a dead rabbit.

The sight of it—small and flattened against the concrete—brings Palladium’s breathing stuttering to a halt. Cold, prickling electricity runs down her spine, in that treacherous millisecond before her training kicks in.

“Did you do that?” She sweeps out a hand, pointing to the defenseless grey creature.

Panache shrugs, then winds up his knife hand for another throw.

“Panache.” Palladium steps in front of him—careful. She knows better than to move too fast, even if the opponent is a fourth-year kid.

“No.” Panache’s fingers twitch, and he looks down at the silver blade in his left hand. “It … it was already here, okay? But I’m not gonna waste a chance.”

Palladium doesn’t know what chance he’s looking for, and she’s experienced enough to read all of his clearest tells. “Don’t lie to me.” She crosses her arms and plants her feet, refusing to give him an inch. “I know you. You killed it, didn’t you?”

Panache’s unoccupied hand curls into a fist. “What if I did, huh?” He sticks his tongue out at her. “I wanna learn. They won’t teach me right in training. They said I can’t touch real things, but I can’t do it right without something to practice with.”

Palladium glances over her shoulder once … stares open-mouthed at the tiny, bedraggled animal on their sidewalk. Spit begins to collect in her mouth, and she swallows—hard—out of reflex.

“You can’t do that.” She takes a long, uneven breath. “We’re not supposed to practice on living things outside the Center, and you’re too young to do that anyways.”

She’s prepared to give him the same, droning lecture that the coaches do. No kill tests before you’re ten. First animals, and then people, but only when you’re ready.

Panache never gives her a chance. “Move.” He shoves her—forcefully—and scowls when she doesn’t react.

Palladium’s still thin and smaller than some of her peers, but she’s got experience on her side. She squares her shoulders, braces her sneakers, and refuses to move.

Panache’s mouth twists into a half smirk, then carries on into an ugly snarl. He swings once with his right hand … catches her squarely in the mouth. His second swing slices her right cheek through with a beautiful, shiny blade.

The burning pain is immediate; the feeling of her own blood dripping down her face is enough to move her to action.

“What’s wrong with you?” She grabs her brother by the collar, paying no mind to her own tears.

Panache gazes back at her, bewildered. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He says it flatly, with none of the sniffling or I’m sorries that spring forth from most of the younger students at the Center. “You wouldn’t move. You made me do it.”

She finally loses her temper, lets her emotions take over, and shoves him to the ground.

How could he? She presses trembling fingers to her ruined cheek. Victors from One are supposed to be beautiful … just as pretty as they are lethal. Nothing but Capitol medicine can take this away.

She will never be pretty. She will never be chosen for anything important now.

She can never volunteer, not when she looks like this. What will they do with her now?

The screams that escape from her are half rage, half terror. They draw Mom and Dad outside in a hurry, but Panache is the one on the ground.

Dad takes Palladium by the shoulders—sternly—and pays little mind to the side of her face. “What did you do?”

Palladium can’t get her words or her breathing to come out right. She’s never been harmed before, and the blade’s mark might as well be a District Ten branding iron for as searing as it is.

“She … she pushed me.” Panache has no such troubles with his speech. “I … I hurt her—with my knife—I didn’t mean to. But … she … she wouldn’t stop.”

Palladium finally finds her voice, and the words fly without a second thought. “There’s not a mark on you! He started it. It … this is his fault!”

Dad frowns down at Palladium … lets the disappointment show clear as day on his face. “I understand that you’re frustrated.” He wipes gently at the blood that still dribbles down her cheek. “Your brother … Panache is younger than you, and I expect you to have patience with him. Maybe this wouldn’t have happened if you were more careful.”

Palladium can feel a fresh round of tears, hiding just below the surface. She sees it—in the way that Dad looks at her, and the gentle touch Mom uses to help Panache to his feet.

Even with his anger, his destructive streak, and the way he treats other people, Panache will always be the golden child.

---

Palladium never loses again.

She makes the promise to herself that no one will get close enough … no opponent, ally, or sibling will ever have the chance to leave a mark on her.

When she is fourteen, she beats an eighteen-year-old in hand-to-hand. When she is fifteen, she takes Panache to the ground when he swings at her.

She will never be the one her parents want … cannot take the place of their strong, glorious son.

But she is the true golden child … the one with a level temper, a decent head on her shoulders, and silver-blonde hair that gets her labeled beautiful despite the slash on her cheek.

Palladium is Victor material, and even with her imperfect features, the Center sees it.

Palladium Barker is chosen to represent One in the Forty-sixth Hunger Games, and she is unafraid when she shouts those four magnificent words.

“I volunteer as tribute!”

Her parents come to see her first; they are proud, because they must be, but they are also detached.

“Make One proud,” Dad orders. Palladium knows without a doubt that there is a hidden meaning … some combination of don’t make us look bad and don’t die in a stupid way and try to come home.

Panache is much more direct … much crueler in his approach. He walks straight to her and gets a hand beneath her chin. She could swing on him, but for now she lets him have the power.

“I can’t believe they picked you before me.” Panache snarls. “I’m better than you. I always have been.”

Palladium smiles back at him, unbothered. Either she will come back a Victor—untouchable and unafraid—or she will come back in a little wooden box. Either way, Panache will never have another chance to bring her down.

“You’d better come back.” Panache releases her, frowns mutinously at his own inability to get a rise out of her.

“I will,” Palladium says. But not for you.

Not for her parents, or her apathetic brother. Palladium will win for herself, for her district, and for the country she’s worked hard to honor.

She will make her own way—her own name in this world.

They smooth out her scar in the Capitol, and leave behind a straight, pink line. They say that it gives her an edge. She’s memorable … with a mark that forever brands her as imperfect and makes her stand out from all the others in the past.

Maybe, it speaks of cruelty. Did she get into a lot of fights back home?

The truth will destroy her image as the delicate-yet-intimidating Career. She lets them believe their own fantasies.

She earns the most kills in the Forty-sixth Games; seven kids die at her hands. Six to her knives, and the last one vanquished by the blade of an axe. Beautiful … they call it. She made the ugliest parts look like an art form.

On the stage, she smiles; it’s her job to agree. On the train back to One, she does everything she can to forget.

Kill tests prepare you for the act, the million little things that happen between the battle and the victim’s last breath. The breathing grows shallow. Maybe, the eyes close. Somewhere in between inhales, the heart stops.

But nothing has prepared her for the after of it all. The kill test subjects never had names … at least, not ones that she was allowed to know. The seven children whose blood stains her hands had homes, and lives, and a thousand other stories that will never be told.

But her district is proud. They hold a party in her honor, and provide an entire procession to escort her to Victors’ Village.

Her house is too perfect … filled with too much space and too little noise. Her family does not follow her; Panache refuses to move until he can have his own mansion to rival hers, and her parents take the younger sibling’s side.

Palladium does not need them, but a small, persistent part of her wants them.

When she wakes up screaming from a nightmare, because Two girl’s lifeless eyes won’t stop staring at her. When she spills a glass of red wine, and it turns into the blood of Ten boy.

She wants someone to tell her that she’s still whole—still her in all the ways that matter. It has been years since her parents soothed her; those days were gone as soon as they had a son.

Maybe girls in One are cursed with lesser value. Perhaps, two half siblings could never make a whole, and Palladium has been the wrong one since the day she was born. Maybe she did something to earn the fate.

At least she has her mentor right down the street, and an army of Victors to support her. It means something, until it doesn’t.

They tell her on her Victory Tour that she has a new purpose, now that she is out of the arena. A new way to honor her country. This mission is not glorious … not a duty built on years of blood, sweat, and tears.

The Capitol wants to sell her. When the President lays it out for her, Palladium doesn’t understand. When Regal Castellano sits her down and explains all the things they’ve done to him … she finally comprehends it.

Immediately, she wishes she hadn’t.

Victors are never truly untouchable. They work for their place, fight with everything they have to come home. None of it is enough … not when their salvation brings them face-to-face with a new way to be damned all over again.

At least they are alive; maybe, it is still a better option than being brought home in a wooden coffin. Or, maybe the ones locked up in boxes of oak and pine are the lucky ones.

Palladium starts to think that they are.

She spends more time in the Capitol than she does in the Village. Fruity purple drinks become her most frequent confidante; she sees more of them than she does Capitol clients, though both come to her in large quantities.

Sometimes, the obnoxious, artificial grape flavoring is enough to wipe the taste of Ten boy’s blood from her mouth. Sometimes, she remembers that his name was Jersey, and that his blood was still warm when it painted her face.

By the start of the Forty-seventh Games, Palladium doesn’t even look like herself. Her tribute dies, and she spends somewhere between fifteen minutes and ten hours staring into the mirror … at the living ghost who mocks her silently from the other side.

Long, silver-blonde hair. A pale face, with a thin, pink line going diagonally across one side. Dark circles, purple enough to count as bruises. Emotionless grey eyes, turned bloodshot more often than not.

The two people may once have fit together. Now, they’re disparate images, with no chance of forming a whole.

Palladium stares at the spectar in its shiny cage … waits for it to blink first. It never does. What is honorable about watching yourself drift away?

What have they turned you into?

---

The rules for the Second Quarter Quell are simple. Four from each district … two girls and two boys. In One, it means that no one stands in the way of another man’s glory. If you’re trained and your name is called, no one can take that from you.

There will only be volunteers in the event that someone younger or less deserving is called.

The first name pulled is Panache Barker. Palladium watches him climb the steps to the stage … all swagger and arrogance. He has no fear. Palladium wonders if he ever learned how to feel it.

Silka Sharp comes next, then a thirteen-year-old and a fifteen-year-old who get replaced as quickly as they were reaped.

Panache, Silka, Loupe, Carat. Four perfect Center-trained tributes. At least three lambs guaranteed to be sent off to the slaughter. If they are lucky, none of them will make it out.

There are no goodbyes in the Justice Building this year. Something about the Fiftieth Games has thrown the whole process into turmoil. It’s back to the basics, with old train cars, shackled tributes, and flaws that Palladium has never seen before.

She feels just as animalistic as her charges are made to seem, and maybe that is the point.

It is crowded, with all of One’s Victors, the Capitol crew, and these four new tributes gathered together on an outdated train. The proximity brings out the worst in them all.

It never has taken much to bring out Panache’s ugly side.

“I want you,” he complains, when Palladium walks past him on her way to collect Silka. “We’re family, right? I didn’t even get to volunteer. The least you can do is mentor me. What, am I not good enough for you?”

Palladium has lost her own ability to feel things at some point in the last four years. She turns on him without so much as a smile. “You never wanted to claim me when it mattered,” she tells him. “You never cared. Why should I? Besides, you said it yourself, remember? You’re better than me.”

He splutters—open-mouthed—as she turns away.

“Go talk to Bronze.” She throws the remark over her shoulder as she walks away. “He’ll know how to make you look good.”

She doesn’t see the way his mouth twists on one side, or the narrowing of his eyes. She knows the face well enough to imagine it without a backward glance.

He is no Victor.

She has never been sure what exactly Panache is, with his lack of empathy and ferocious temper. As a kid, there may have been hope … before training, and her Games, and the need to be better won out over being human first.

Her brother has been too far gone for a long time now. He never had a chance to be anything different.

Born to kill, bred to die.

He is worse now than he has ever been … taunting and abusing the horses, then coaxing his peers into joining along.

Silka is apologetic after the Tribute Parade, when Palladium sits her down for a talk.

“I shouldn’t have hit the horses.” She says it quietly, with her eyes trained on her hands. “Panache said … and I didn’t think about what I was doing. I’m sorry, Victor Palladium.”

Palladium tries her best not to flinch at the title. “It’s fine. Just … don’t let it happen again.”

Silka is repentant, but Panache makes himself everyone’s problem.

He’s cruel to the other tributes in training … comes back boasting about it at the end of sessions.

He presses Silka against the wall, after returning from a particularly energizing day. “Did you see me?” He gets his hands on her shoulders before Palladium or her fellow Victors can rein him in. “I smashed a D-Nine’s token. Shattered it into a million pieces.”

Silka’s pinned in, but that doesn’t stop her from giving just as much energy in return. “How did you grow up to be so stupid?” she asks him. “You think you’re intimidating them? You’re putting a target on your own back, and you’re making us look just as bad. I hope I’m around to watch an Outlier stab you in the back.”

Panache’s hands move to her face … fingers splayed on each side from ear to jaw. He lifts her chin … pulls her head slightly to one side. “Say that again,” he snarls, “and I’ll make sure you go first.”

He could break her neck in one move, but Silka doesn’t flinch. She smiles, brings her knee up, and sends Panache doubling over in pain.

Palladium returns her tribute’s grin. This one has potential. For a moment, she is glad. Then, she starts hoping for Silka to die.

They will use her … take that sugar-sweet interior and sharp-edged attitude, and they will destroy her. Clients and parties, until she finally dies of old age.

Maybe, the pain of four dead tributes will be better than the horror of watching one survive.

Neither option feels right.

The saving grace is that for once, the clients leave Palladium alone. There have been enough disasters, followed up by Capitol Quell parties, to keep the attention away from the Victors.

Palladium spends her time in Victor Central … alternating between sitting in a corner and running to one of her district’s booths to check the funds. It is a clinical, detached process. Just the way she likes it.

She’s sitting on a plush, sky-blue couch—one of Regal Castellano’s arms wrapped around her shoulder—when Panache is killed.

All four of the central screens are focused on the fight … Careers against the boy from Twelve. Twelve’s holding his own, until he isn’t. Panache has him cornered … moving in for the kill … when Twelve’s other surviving tribute gets the job done.

A poisoned dart. Straight to the throat. Palladium feels nothing.

At least it was fast.

Regal is immediately concerned. He lets his hand move slowly to cradle Palladium’s cheek.

“Do you need a break?” Her former mentor’s thumb draws small, delicate circles against her skin.

“No.” Palladium stares back at him and knows, from the downturned corner of his mouth, that there is something missing from her expression.

She’s supposed to be crying, or screaming. Preferably both at the same time. That’s what normal people do, when someone they call family meets an unfair end.

But Panache hasn’t been family in a long time. He wouldn’t have cried for her, and she’s watched enough children die to know that he is nothing special. Just another name, lost to the history books.

No point mourning a half brother … not when he’s been less than that for most of her life.

Palladium pulls herself from Regal’s hold … marches to the booths to check on Silka.

In this moment, she is alive.

A few days later, she is dead. Finally, Palladium is relieved of her duties.

If they knew what awaited them—nightmares, broken reflections, and a lifetime’s worth of suffering—no child from One would ever volunteer. None of them would want this.

Palladium watches her fellow mentors mourn their charges … like it’s something new … like this won’t happen again and again for the rest of their lives. They had so much potential. Palladium wants nothing to do with it. She finds herself a bottle of some light blue concoction, and spends most of her time refusing to speak.

Bronze sneaks odd, narrow-eyed glances at her. Regal finds too many excuses to lay a hand on her back.

“I’m so sorry, Pal.” He repeats it, over and over. He wasn’t Panache’s mentor, and she isn’t sorry.

“Don’t be,” she tells him, when the endless recitation starts to grate against her nerves. She presses her cheek to his shoulder … tries to at least pretend that there are feelings left somewhere inside of her.

All that remains is an ugly, terrifying coldness.

Someone should pay. Not the districts, not the victors. The people who chose this.

Who sat down and decided that children should die, year after year, for a war they’re too young to remember? Those people should pay, but Palladium knows they never will.

Palladium curls herself tightly against her former mentor’s side … tries to forget about coffins and honor, and the dead brother she’s delivering back home.

“I’m sorry,” Regal says again, and Palladium wants to throttle him.

“Don’t you understand?” She forces her head up, tilts her chin until she can meet his eyes. “It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.”

Regal frowns back at her, dumbfounded. “What—” He shakes his head, clears his throat, and starts over. “What happened to you? When you came out … you used to care.”

Palladium laughs in his face. “What’s the point?”

She despises the words as much as he must, but at least she knows they are true.

Regal shifts away from her, then rises in search of a drink. Palladium doesn’t bother to follow. She remains right where he left her, staring down at her hands and trying to remember what it felt like to be a person.

What have you become?

She tries to remember when it happened, the exact moment she went from untouchable to meaningless.

Even if she could plant her finger on it … separate out the before from the after … there is nothing to be done.

There are too many missing pieces for her to ever be whole again.

Notes:

I’m a recovering English major. My chapters are long, even when I don’t intend them to be. The words take control of me, and I am merely the messenger.

Palladium is mentioned as a relative of Panache in SotR and something about the name screams girl with a masculine name to me.

Another fun fact … Palladium won four years before the Second Quarter Quell, so Forty-six. Palladium as a metal has the atomic number 46. So … connection there.

I also imagine Palladium being named for her appearance … silver-blonde hair, going along with a silvery-white metal. I love tiny little details like that.

Kudos and comments, they’re what’s for breakfast. I welcome, read, and appreciate them all. If you feel so inclined, please feed a starving writer. ;)

If you have an interest in Hunger Games fanfiction, or the things that go down in canon, consider joining me and the other folks over at the SYOT Verses discord server. It’s a fun little corner of the world, where we yell about our characters, chat about life, and occasionally do challenges. Most of the people there don’t bite.

Chapter 2: Make a Choice

Notes:

I thought last chapter was wordy. This one’s got it beat by a mile. That happens a lot, when the words possess me. ;)

Quartz Striker: District 2

It’s unimaginable, admitting that you’re poor in Two. That side of the tracks isn’t pretty … all dressed up in gold and royal purple, presented to the Capitol crowds when the Victory Tour rolls through.

Those people are few and far between. Tiny stone houses. Grey on grey, on more grey. No heat in the winter, and no cool air in the summer. They are few and far between, but Quartz has always known that his is one of those families.

The accident doesn’t help things. On a Monday in October, Pa goes off to the quarries, whistling like he always does. That night, he does not come back.

It takes a twelve-hour search party to finally pull him out of the collapse, and when he returns home, it is with the help of a crutch. He is lucky not to lose the leg entirely, the doctors say.

Pa never whistles again.

He never works, either. Quartz can understand it; Pa was a proud man, and now he’s reduced to pitying glances and unashamed stares when he ventures out of their village.

Quartz can comprehend it, but that does not make his own life any easier.

He’s twelve that winter, when he finally reaches the age to work himself. He signs up for shifts in the same stone quarry that nearly killed his pa … pulls out tesserae so maybe his little sister won’t suffer the way he has.

Most of his meal portions go to her anyway; he could never spare himself from the pain, but he will do anything to make sure she remembers only warmth and safety.

It is manageable, for three and a half years at least. Then the wages are slashed … the youngest let go. Quartz is strong and useful—always doing what is asked of him. Still, he is only fifteen, and the kids are the first to go. Liabilities, they say. Children require more training, for less output in the long term.

So, Quartz returns home, watches May bleed into June, and learns just how insufficient tesserae grain is on its own.

Pa is filled with bitterness and I told you sos, and Mica has nothing to say. She is old enough now to know that it’s bad—still too young to do anything about it.

Quartz imagines another winter like the first one, filled with sunken cheeks and dried-up emotions. He will not watch his sister go through that again.

He dreams of money, stability, and security—never for himself, always for her.

Then, he locks on to his solution. A fulll Peacekeeper’s stipend, for six months after the Games. All of Two’s volunteers earn the prize, even if they don’t win the Games. If they do come out in one piece, the financial gain is far and away greater than any other occupation in Two.

Quartz will never win, but he has enough nerve to volunteer. One less mouth to feed, in exchange for six months’ worth of checks. Mica will be twelve by then. At least, it will buy her time to make a plan … or give Pa a chance to step up again.

His district will despise him, but his family will be safe.

When Julius Vance is called in the Reaping, Quartz throws his fist into the air, shouts the magic words, and beats the designated volunteer to the punch.

No take-backs. Once those words are out, there is no changing course. Quartz just happens to be the quicker one.

The square is dead quiet. None of the usual cheers and applause. Even Two’s escort has the sense to read the mood. Quartz doesn’t react. He made his choice; now, he has to live with it.

He’s sentenced himself to a slow and brutal death, either at the hands of his district partner or another member of the pack. He doesn’t have a chance.

He searches for Pa and Mica in the crowd … can’t make them out among the thousands and thousands of nameless faces. I’m sorry, he thinks it as forcefully as he can. Sorry for leaving, but not sorry for the decision.

He stands with his chin high and shoulders squared, waiting for his executioner to volunteer.

Flavia Rhys. A blue-eyed girl with a Capitol name. The chosen girl has scarcely left her section when Flavia takes her place.

She is fifteen, the same as Quartz, but they’re nothing alike. She is all sharp eyes and downturned lips. Her anger is nearly as strong as her determination.

She grabs Quartz roughly by the wrist … pulls him in close while they shake hands. “You’re dead,” she snarls. “My axe, in the bloodbath. You hear me?”

Quartz stares back at her, stone-faced.

His torment continues after the visitations.

“What’s wrong with you?” Flavia demands, once the two of them are herded onto the train.

Quartz has heard ancient tales of goddesses and avenging angels, and right now, Flavia Rhys could pass for one. Flushed cheeks. Wild, auburn curls. Royal purple nail polish to match her dress. And, at the center of it all, unbridled fury.

Quartz shrugs. “I wanted the money,” he tells her, because he’s dead either way. “For my family. You would never understand that.”

She glares back at him … curls her hands into fists at her sides. “This,” she spits, “is the nation’s highest honor. You took that from someone who deserved it. You disgust me.”

Quartz slides his hands into the pockets of his old work overalls. “Okay.”

She has already promised him an immediate death; why should he care that his killer has appointed herself judge and jury, too?

Flavia spins on her heel, storms away, and refuses to speak to him for the rest of the train ride.

---

Mica is eight, the first time they show her class the Games.

It’s only been nine months since the accident, and when his sister comes home in tears, Quartz is certain that someone has been using Pa’s disability to bully her.

“What did they say this time?” he demands, sitting her down at the kitchen table with an apple and a slice of bread.

He’s big enough to beat up any of the kids at Mica’s primary school. He’d do it, too, if they’ve started up those comments again.

Mica shakes her head. Her frizzy, raven-black curls have escaped their elastic … stick determinedly to the sides of her face. “Nobody said mean things about Pa.”

It’s all she’ll give him. Quartz lets her eat without pressing it, but tries again when she digs out her homework.

“What happened?”

She slides the paper across to him, and a slow, dreadful understanding comes over him. Questions about honor and duty and the final, most damning one of them all.

Why are the Games important to you? Why are they a good thing for the districts?

Written out there, in perfectly typed, black ink. No option to say no … only the insistence that she agree.

“They showed you?” Quartz asks slowly. Mica nods.

Of course they would. Even if you’re not an Academy kid, you’re going to be asked to sit down and watch as soon as you start year three. It’s preparation; the wannabe volunteers watch to learn what their duty is, and the rest of the district learns what it means to be afraid.

At eight years old, everyone in Two makes a choice. Are you going to be the type of person who puts your boot on someone else’s throat, or are you going to be the one who spends the rest of your life with that pressure on your own neck?

Quartz knows that he and Mica are in the second group.

“Are they gonna take me away?” Mica asks him, terrified. “Are they gonna make me hurt kids?”

“Don’t talk like that, Mica.” Quartz slides the worksheet back to her. “It’s an honor here. Do you hear me? The volunteers are the only ones who ever go in from Two.”

He hopes she’s smart enough to catch the undercurrents … that hidden combination of you don’t have to go if you don’t want to and you can’t say things like this out loud and I’ll never let anything happen to you.

Mica frowns, but she doesn’t offer up a protest. Quartz is grateful. Maybe, when more of her classmates sign up for training, and more understanding comes with age … then they will have to have a deeper conversation. But now Quartz can find a pencil, and help her answer the questions without a fight.

“What did Teacher say about the Games?” he asks her. “Why did she say they were good?”

His sister straightens up, placing both hands on the table in front of her. “Because the Capitol is merciful,” she recites. “They take twenty-four kids, because the districts did bad things in the war. We need to remember that, but we’re supposed to remember that the Capitol is good. The Capitol wants us to have hope, too. They want us to want nice things. When we have a Victor, that’s one of the nice things that the Capitol does for us.”

Control. One life in exchange for twenty-three dead children, year after year, for a cause none of them will ever remember. Paying for sins that came long before their time.

The Capitol will never let them forget. Mercy,, they call it. A pretty word for you should be grateful, or we could have crushed you all, or you will never be good enough to stand up to us.

Quartz sees it all, but he speaks none of those deadly truths out loud.

“Okay,” Quartz says. “Now, how can we use that to answer these questions?”

Mica picks up her pencil, and Quartz breathes out on a sigh.

---

The arena for the Forty-fourth Games is a labyrinth … high, stone mountains rising up around the pedestals, with a latticework of caves built in. Quartz almost has a shot.

They’re arranged in district order, though, which means he has earned himself a spot directly to Flavia’s left. She won’t even need to use her axe. He’ll be killed by her empty fists as soon as the clock hits zero.

He angles his feet away from her, in the direction of the girl from Three. Maybe, if he cuts diagonally in front of her, it will buy him enough time.

Time to find supplies. Time to think. Time to make his death as palatable as it can be for his sister.

The gong sounds. Quartz runs. He is not tackled from the side.

Three girl shies away from him as he passes; his district number is still enough to earn him fear. He skirts the edges … collects a pale blue backapck from the ground. The weight of it is substantial, but not enough to slow him significantly.

He hears Three scream from somewhere behind him. Maybe, he gets greedy. Perhaps, he’s just scared. He takes the risk and goes in for a spear. Just in case.

More screams. The clang of metal on metal. When Quartz turns with his weapon in hand, he comes face-to-face with Flavia Rhys.

The blade of her axe is coated in blood. Quartz can smell it too—hanging thick and heavy in the air. How many are already dead? How many did she kill?

Wide, blue eyes stare back at him. His district partner is pale—too pale—and it takes a moment for Quartz to realize that she’s afraid.

Flavia drops her weapon to her side. Her free hand reaches out to shove him in the shoulder.

“Go!” she yells at him. “Get out of here. Now!”

He gapes back at her, trying to figure out how they went from you’re dead to get out of here with both of them still in one piece.

Flavia shoves him again, and this time, Quartz has the good sense to move.

The mountains claim him. He runs higher, faster, deeper into the hills until his breaths grow too shallow and his legs begin to burn.

He sits down on a ledge to sort through his pack. Not terrible.

A flashlight and batteries, a small first aid kit. A loaf of bread, and three packets of dried fruit. Two water bottles. A couple days’ worth, if he’s careful.

He reorganizes the supplies, and rises to his feet. Then, he finds a cave.

It is cool inside … sheltered enough from the elements, and out of sight of anyone who has thought to search for him. The further in he goes, the more the ground begins to slope downward.

Maybe, it is a dead end. Maybe, it will lead him into the heart of the mountain, without requiring him to set foot outside again.

This could be his ticket out. A chance at more than just six months of getting by for his family. People survive these Games by hiding. That lady from Eleven, years and years ago. And the one from Six, when he was small. Waiting for everyone to starve, or coming out to kill the last opponent in the end.

Quartz moves in, far enough inside to avoid detection, and not quite deep enough to start down the slope. The silence is disconcerting … a dangerous sort of false security that threatens to lull him in.

Ten cannons bring him back to reality. The faces greet him a few hours later, when the anthem finally plays.

The girl from Three. Surprisingly followed by the boy from Four. Both from Seven—the tiny, blonde-haired girl, and the boy who smiled once at Quartz in training. One each from Eight and Nine. Both little kids from Eleven. Both of the malnourished set from Twelve.

Ten down. Thirteen still out there somewhere. Quartz watches the Capitol seal fade into nothing, settles back into his cave, and tries to sleep.

The cold stone reminds him of Two—of home—and the haunting, beautiful grey that seemed to swallow the world whole.

Will I go back into the rocks when I die?

---

Quartz is fourteen when the flu sweeps through the district. It comes just as quickly as the snow does, and proves to be nearly as deadly in the worst of times.

He and Pa are spared, but Mica is cursed with bad luck. His sister’s illness means that Quartz is out of work; even if he could make it in through the snow, he wouldn’t leave her here on one of Pa’s bad days.

Even on the best of occasions, Pa’s not fit to take on a sick kid. The depression never really lets up for him; Quartz can’t risk making that worse.

The money goes much shorter distances in early January, but it stretches far enough to buy seven little pills. One per day. For the ones who’ve got the strength to fight, that’s usually enough.

Mica is thin and small for her age, but she’s not a quitter. By the fifth day in, Quartz can see her coming back to herself.

“Tell me a story,” the ten-year-old begs. Most nights, Quartz wouldn’t have the time. Today is a good one, though. Pa’s feeling up to making dinner, so one small thing has been taken off the plate.

“Sure.” Quartz settles in beside her at the fireplace, and tries not to flinch at the heat still radiating from Mica’s forehead. “Which one do you wanna hear?”

Mica moves her head to Quartz’s lap, and he runs his fingers lightly through her hair.

“Give me something about Ma,” she tells him.

There are a million things that Quartz could say. That Ma’s face has started blurring in his mind. That he can’t quite remember how her voice sounds. That she died from the same flu that Mica has now.

Quartz may be a pessimist, but he knows that Mica only wants to hear the good parts.

“Ma was superstitious,” Quartz says. “Did I ever tell you that?”

Mica shakes her head. Quartz sweeps a curl off her cheek and behind her ear.

“She used to paint stones sometimes. All different colors. It was before things got bad. She’d paint them, and she would sell them, too.”

Mica burrows into her blanket. “What colors?”

“All colors,” Quartz says again. “I think her favorite was pink. Maybe it’s because you liked pink then. She liked whatever we did. I think it just made her happy to see us laughing. She said the colors meant different things, too. Some of them were good luck … or, Ma thought they were.”

“What else did she say?”

Quartz closes his eyes … tries to remember the important things. Eight years, and it might as well be fifty. He’s already forgotten so much.

“Ma … she used to tell me stories about the rocks. She said we had to be respectful of them. I used to think it was some silly excuse, to keep me from playing rough with the ones she painted for me.”

“But that’s not it?” Mica asks, curious.

Quartz shrugs. “I don’t think so.” He moves away … throws a fresh log on the fire. “Ma said the rocks were the spirits of our ancestors.”

“Like dead people?”

“Yeah.” He stares into the leaping sparks of orange and gold. “She said we go back into the rocks when we die. Earth to stone, stone to earth. That’s what she always used to say.”

This is one memory he hasn’t forgotten. Night after night, asking Ma the same questions. Is that right? Do we really go back into the rocks?

Quartz waits—knowingly—for his sister to inquire the same.

“Is it true?” She doesn’t disappoint.

Quartz draws up Ma’s words, the patience and the gentleness that she used to treat him with. It is if you choose to believe it, she’d say.

“If you want it to be,” Quartz tells Mica now. “All you need to do is believe it.”

All you need to do is make that choice.

---

On the second day, Quartz wanders down the slope and into the tunnel system. On the third day, he finds an underground stream. Two cannons greet him, but he doesn’t return to the outside world to view the fallen.

Here is safe. Here is peaceful. Until it isn’t.

On the fifth day, he finds Flavia.

He nearly trips over the pack before his flashlight finds her—alone, and sprawled out in the middle of a bend.

Her breathing is entirely wrong. Too quick, and too irregular. There is no fresh blood visible on her, but one side of her uniform is dark and crusty with the history of it. Quartz steals the backpack from her side, then kneels to investigate his district partner’s condition up close.

Hair plastered to her cheeks. Drenched in sweat from the fever.

Who did this to you?

The assessment is easy. If he leaves her here, she’s a goner.

For several, terrible seconds, Quartz considers killing her. His spear, through her chest. Maybe it would be a mercy.

Then he sees his sister … eight years old, and asking too many questions. So many hows and whys. Are they gonna make me hurt kids?

“No.” Quartz shakes his head. “They’re not going to get me to hurt her.”

Flavia showed him mercy, instead of tearing him into a million pieces. He might be worthless, rebellious—deserving of all the pain that will befall him. But she is from Two. Whether he wants it to or not, that means something.

The Capitol may hate him, for destroying their image of the killer district. Two will judge him for being weak and dishonorable. His family will see him … the one without a chance, helping the girl with a Capitol name.

Career, quarry kid. Blue collar, silver spoon. None of it matters here, when they’re just two kids in the same age group, trying to do what they’ve been raised for.

Him to protect. Her to serve. Maybe, none of it matters in the end.

Quartz digs through her pack … finds only half a bottle of water and a few rations of food. No weapons. No defenses. Was she running from something?

He sorts through his supplies, until he comes up with the first aid kit. Then, he draws out the bandages and gets to work.

One deep slash on her side. Another across her left leg. Sword. Quartz is smart enough to see it for what it is.

She let him go, and suffered for it at the hands of one of the other Careers.

Quartz paws through the first aid kit, finds the syringe he’s looking for, and presses the needle to the inside of Flavia’s wrist. Antibiotic, the medicine claims. Resolves infections within twenty-four hours.

Quartz knows it is a stupid choice, but it’s the only one he’s allowed to make. He would never forgive himself for killing someone from back home … someone he already owes a debt to.

He settles down next to her, turns off his flashlight, and slips a backpack under Flavia’s head. He smooths back her hair—the way he would with Mica.

The world is still and dark. Time stretches on and away. Flavia whimpers in her sleep, and Quartz shushes her.

Three more cannons fire, spaced out across the course of what must be several hours. The anthem plays for another night. Quartz doesn’t search for a place to watch the faces.

He dozes off, against his best judgement. When he comes to again, Flavia is sitting up, studying him from the other side of his flashlight beam. When did she take that from him?

“You really are stupid, aren’t you?” she asks him.

He pulls himself out of the half-sitting, half-lying position that he slept in, then reaches out to swipe a hand across his district partner’s forehead. Much cooler. He makes a mental note of it, and the fact that she doesn’t pull away.

“You know … I couldn’t—” He hesitates, then pushes on with the admission. “You’re from Two … from home. I couldn’t kill you, and I didn’t feel right leaving you for dead.”

“Why?” Flavia lets her head fall back against the wall behind her. “I let you go. I was supposed to prove myself by killing you. Honor the district, and the alliance, by taking care of the traitor. I didn't do what I was supposed to, so One took care of me. Can’t have weak links in the alliance.”

“I’m not a traitor.” Quartz isn’t sure why this is the thing he latches onto. He knows it’s how his district will see him. “I … I’m loyal, okay? Just … to my family. Not—”

“Not to the right people.”

Quartz closes his eyes, curls his fingers, and lets the air leave him on a sigh. “Maybe not,” he tells her. “But you … how do you know who the right people are?”

He doesn’t have to look at her to imagine the expression … the disgusted look that comes with the quick, forceful words.

“The Capitol protects us. They could have destroyed all of us like they did with Thirteen. But they didn’t. And they gave us this honor.”

If it’s an honor to kill, why didn’t you kill me?

Now, Quartz does look at her. Still shivering with the last of the fever. Too weak to walk for long, let alone fight. And yet, she refuses to give up on the lies that have been drilled into her for years.

“Why’d you let me go … in the bloodbath?”

Flavia shrugs, then winces at the pain it causes. “I already got the girl from Three and—” She drops her head—breathes in—spits the rest of her words out in one exhale. “It scared me, and you weren’t a threat, so I knew I could get you anytime.”

He knows it is a half-truth, whether Flavia intends it to be or not.

“Wouldn’t that make you the stupid one?” Quartz laughs, despite himself. “Scared to honor your district. Letting the mark go, knowing it would cost you your allies. What would you call that?”

Flavia pulls her lower lip between her teeth. “I don’t know.” For a moment, Quartz fears that she may cry.

“Okay.” He reaches out to carefully lay a hand on her shoulder. “I … I think it’s because you’re seeing things. Stuff you don’t want to see. That scares you.”

“Maybe,” Flavia admits. She pauses, considers, and follows through with her question. “Why didn’t you just let the Capitol help you?”

Quartz frowns back at her—bewildered. “Why would they help me?” When the remark only seems to confuse her, he takes the chance and elaborates. “Don’t you know that they only care about the valuable ones? No one there cares if people starve. They don’t care if your mom’s dead, and your dad might as well be, and you have a little sister counting on you. They only want the ones who listen and go along with everything they say.”

Flavia slides herself down the wall—grimacing—until she can lay on the ground. “That’s why you did it?” She nudges the flashlight back in his direction. “You wanted the money?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t disgust me. Not anymore.” Flavia tucks her chin to her chest. She seems to be making herself smaller by the second. “I can’t … I don’t … what are we doing?”

“I don’t know.” Quartz has a lot of things he wants to ask, a thousand hows and whys about what led Flavia to end up here. But he is the traitor. He’s not going to force her into becoming one, too.

“Can you tellme about her?” Flavia asks. “Your sister?”

“Sure.” Quartz ignores the way that his district partner’s voice had cracked at the end, and the way her shoulders have started to shake.

He flicks off the flashlight, makes sure his spear is within reach, and doesn’t comment on the fact that Flavia Rhys is crying. Of course she is. It’s not an easy thing to handle, learning that your whole world is built on lies and disillusionment.

---

Mica is furious when she comes to see him in the Justice Building.

As soon as the Peacekeepers shut the door behind her, she is running to his side. “What’s wrong with you?” She grabs him by the shoulders—hard—and shakes him.

“I’m sorry, okay?” Quartz tells her. “We need the money. You know we do.”

She lets him go, then draws back her hand like she wants to hit him. Eleven years old, and already she is a force of nature.

“That’s not fair!”

“No,” Quartz agrees. “Nobody’s saying that it is.”

“Why does it always have to be you?” She crosses her arms—tightly—and tilts her chin. “Why do you always need to be a hero?”

“Pa’s not going to help us.” Quartz picks at a lose thread in the couch cushion. “And nobody else cares. You’re … I have to. I couldn’t … I’m not gonna let you—”

She sits down beside him, then drives her fist forcefully into his shoulder. “I didn’t tell you to help me,” she snarls. “I don’t care if we’re poor, okay? I—I need you.”

Quartz doesn’t have the right arguments. He’s caught between some combination of this is the way it has to be, and I’d do anything for you, and you know I’ll put you first, even if you tell me not to.

“I made my choice, Mica. You can’t change it.” They’re the only words that make it past his lips.

“I hate you!” She kicks ferociously at the leg of the couch, over and over again.

So much fury trapped inside one so small. If they lived a different life—believed different lies—she could be volunteering to stand on that stage in a few years. She has the strength for it; Mica has enough determination to burn it all down.

Quartz waits her out, until the storm’s run its course and her anger gives way to the tears. He hugs her then, and he doesn’t try to make it better.

There aren’t any magic promises that he can make to fix it. She’ll have the money, but a temporary Peacekeeper’s stipend will never bridge the gap of a dead brother.

“You know … I used to wish you were a boy,” Quartz tells her. “I wanted a baby brother so bad, and you—you were annoying when you were little.”

He’s not sure why it is the thing he confesses. Maybe, he knows she deserves to hear it before he dies. Perhaps, he’s just digging for any sort of distraction.

“No I wasn’t.” Mica falls into the natural, sibling pattern of contesting things. “I’m not annoying.”

“Yes you were.” Quartz brings her head to his shoulder, and holds her captive while he still can. “You wanted everything to be pink. And you asked way too many questions, all of the time. You never used to shut up. But you … you’ve always been so smart, you know that?”

“Yeah,” she sniffles. “I know. You say it too much.”

“Because I mean it. You are.”

“I used to wish you were a sister,” Mica says—slowly. “I wanted one more than anything.”

“Why?”

“Because you hated pink and purple, and you thought fixing my hair was stupid.” Mica pulls back to look at him. “I thought a sister would like the same stuff I did, and we wouldn’t fight all the time.”

“Do you still feel like that?” Quartz wonders.

Mica shrugs. “I dunno.” She smiles. “I still wish I had a sister, but I’m glad I got stuck with you.”

“I’m glad you got stuck with me, too.” Quartz ruffles her curls with one hand. “I like having you around, most of the time.”

She laughs, and he does too. For one, insubstantial moment, they both forget that he is going to his death. Then the Peacekeepers return to pry Mica off of him.

Quartz has made a lot of choices, and at least a few of those have ended in mistakes. He will not allow himself to make one now. He will be certain that his last words to Mica are the ones she needs him to say.

“I love you, kid.”

---

By day ten, both of them are starving. The last of the food rations ran out yesterday, and wandering through the tunnels has not been beneficial.

There’s nothing left to do; they will have to venture out of the mountain. Quartz knows this just as certainly as he believes that the other three remaining tributes will be desperate. Things must be bad for all of them, this far into the Games.

His suspicions are confirmed when the Gamemakers call a feast. Be there by sunset, the announcement had warned. If you aren’t there, you’ll regret it.

Inside the system of caves, Quartz has no way of knowing how close to sundown it is. Already, though, he knows there is no choice to be had.

He passes his spear to Flavia—because out of the two of them, she’ll be better with it in a fight—then he starts to retrace his tracks.

His district partner follows without complaint. Talk is nonexistent; the only comments tossed back and forth between them are directions, escape routes, and observations on the arena layout.

It must take hours for them to reach the outside, and the sunlight is blinding when they do. Glorious, liquid gold. Bathing the entire world in warmth. The mid-afternoon rays cast shadows off the stones … turn the mountains a perfect, eye-catching blue.

If they were back in Two, the sight would easily be beautiful. Here, it’s only a distraction.

There is no time left for loitering.

Down the slope they go. Across the stones, and to the circle of pedestals.

They are the last to arrive.

The girl from One has taken up her position half a dozen platforms down. Ten girl is not far off, with the boy from Five pressed in frantically at her side. No one makes a move on anyone else.

Watching. Waiting. Assessing the threats.

When the table rises from the ground, the peace is shattered. A perfect, royal blue cloth. Covered with baskets of fresh fruit. All five of them lose their composure at the prospect of food.

The girl from One tackles Five boy, then begins to pummel him mercilessly with her fists and a knife.

Quartz knows the kid stands no chance; he doesn’t stop to watch the end.

He and Flavia reach the table together, but Quartz is the first to make a selection. He’s not sure what drives him forward. Greed, hunger, or the knowledge that if he’s not first, he might be last.

Being first means lower odds of being stabbed over a piece of fruit. Being last means you’ll die before you have a chance to have a bite.

Quartz takes up a small, green apple in his hand. Flavia collects half a dozen more. Hers disappear into a backpack. His is firm and chilled against his palm.

A glance over his shoulder confirms that One is still busy with Five. Ten girl has gone to her ally’s aid, but it’s too late for her to be any use to Five boy.

For now, Quartz and Flavia have all the time in the world. No harm in trying their spoils before they move out.

Quartz brings the apple to his lips … revels in the sweet, cool flavor against his tongue. Much nicer than the ones they have in Two.

The swelling doesn’t start until the second bite, and by then, it’s already too late.

Flavia must see it happening in real time, because she grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him.

“Spit it out!” She orders. Quartz wants to tell her that he would, if he could.

His tongue has grown to at least three times its original size. He can feel it choking him … pressing between his teeth and out of his mouth.

Saliva trickles from the corner of his mouth, and he is powerless to stop it.

A snarl from somewhere over his shoulder. A cannon. It feels like this one should be his, but it’s not.

He still has a pulse, even if he can’t swallow, or pull air into his lungs correctly.

Why would they do this? Did the Gamemakers rig the feast against him, or is all of the food deadly? Dinnertime entertainment, aired just in time to pair with a nice glass of wine in the Capitol.

A second cannon shot. His hands instinctively go to his throat—scratching, clawing—in an attempt to undo the damage.

“Don’t.” Flavia grabs his fingers in her own. The next thing Quartz knows, he is sprawling on the ground.

Someone is yelling from above him. He watches his own spear fly across the sky, somewhere a hundred feet overhead. Dark spots swim in the corners of his eyes, then start to creep in towards the center.

Another cannon. This one makes his ears ring. When the sound of the blast dies down, the high-pitched whine continues in his skull.

Two hands move into view, then settle on his cheeks.

“I don’t understand.” The words reach him from a thousand miles away, spoken by a girl with blue eyes and a Capitol-sounding name.

He doesn’t, either. When he tries to tell her so, something hot and metallic dribbles down his chin.

“Shh.” Flavia’s sleeve scratches against the side of his mouth as she wipes at the blood. “I’ve got it. I’ve got you.”

Quartz finds the strength to move his head—back and forth. No. It’s too late for him. It was too late a long time ago, from the moment he sacrificed his life for that dreadful, all-important money.

He would do it again, a million times over. But this … he doesn’t want her to see him go like this.

Pins and needles prickle at the soles of his feet, then travel quickly up his legs. There’s twitching there, too, but he has no control over where it spreads.

His entire body tries to curl off the ground—held captive by some neurological impulse that he can’t understand.

Flavia rolls him onto his side, but never moves her hands from his face. One on the cheek, one on the chin. Her thumbs trace odd little patterns there, like she’s trying to bring a comfort where she can.

“I’ve got you,” she tells him again. “And I … I’ve got her to, okay?”

Quartz is too busy trying to see Flavia’s face to figure out who the her is. It’s getting hard to focus, between the ringing, the twitching, and the blackness closing in.

“We’re the last two, all right? I’ll make sure she’s okay.” Flavia’s fingers are unnaturally cool against his skin. Her voice lulls him into a daze. “She’ll be fine, I promise you.”

Quartz finally thinks he knows who the she is. There’s only one girl in this world that he would care for.

“Mica.” He tries to say it. He must be at least partly successful, because his district partner’s fingers stop tracing circles.

“It’s all right,” she soothes. “I’ll make sure … she’ll be … and she—she’ll finally have a sister.”

Quartz closes his eyes. One of Flavia’s hands moves to the top of his head … strokes the hair back and away from his face.

Just like he did for her. Just like he does for Mica.

His mind separates from his body—shows him a thousand images of things he will never see again.

Perfect, green fields, stretching to meet the mountains in the distance. Grey stone houses, just as ugly as the quarries that birthed them. A ferociously brave little girl, wearing pink and purple stripes.

Earth to stone, stone to earth.

A woman with no face, and a shelf full of painted stones.

Do we really go back into the rocks?

Every color of the rainbow, from scarlet to violet. Smooth, flawless, made beautiful at an artist’s hand.

All you need to do is believe it.

Quartz feels the coolness of stone on all sides. He finally knows what it means to be free.

Notes:

Oh yes, the first non-Victor chapter in this piece. Sometimes, the flame dies with the losers. Sometimes, it gives that year’s Victor something new to fight for.

Sometimes, it’s something in between.

Kudos and comments, they’re such a lovely snack. I welcome, read, and appreciate them all. If you feel so inclined, please feed a starving writer. ;)

If you have an interest in Hunger Games fanfiction, or the things that go down in canon, consider joining me and the other folks over at the SYOT Verses discord server. It’s a fun little corner of the world, where we yell about our characters, chat about life, and occasionally do challenges. Most of the people there don’t bite.

Chapter 3: What Good is Sorry?

Notes:

These always get ten different kinds of out of hand, until they’re way longer than I intend for them to be. At this point, I’m embracing it, and letting my characters lead me by the hand.

Oh Eddie … a common link between a couple of my Games, and a couple of my Victors. If you’ve read my other works, you’ll know which of the two Threes from his year made it out. But his story’s always been one I planned to tell, at least partially, from his side.

So, here you have it!

Edison Louvet: District 3

Eddie’s brain has always been a half-second behind the rest of him. That’s what it feels like, anyway. Thoughts trailing like a string, pulled along after him, while his feet and fingers are already two steps ahead. Maybe that’s just what happens when you can’t stop moving.

Eddie’s always had the need to fidget, and explore, and do … to jump in with both feet in a way that could be called reckless for a Three.

Brilliant, they call him. So smart, if only he would apply himself.

The problem is that Eddie always applies himself. It’s not his fault that the rest of Three can’t always tell it.

He’s fourteen that winter, when it all starts to go wrong. And, at first, he doesn’t see it going wrong at all.

Mr. Newton has finally stopped telling him to sit down in class … letting Eddie wander while he talks about history and voltage and whatever else is on the lesson plan. And now Eddie has the factories, too.

Granted, it’s only a pair of six-hour shifts, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but it’s something to do.

Eddie doesn’t need the money, but he wants the experience. Learning doesn’t always come easy to him, but he still wants to do it … anyway and any time that he can.

It’s another way to keep his mind quiet and his hands busy. Something about it stills his thoughts. And–if he’s lucky–he might make a real friend.

Slowly and surely, he does.

Evelyn Kepler is his line partner. She comes in long before he does, but for his entire shift, Eddie works right alongside her. At first, they sort communication chips in silence … plucking the ones with cracks or flaws out of boxes, and sending the good ones on down the conveyor belt.

Maybe, other kids his age would find it boring. Eddie thinks it’s a challenge.

It takes Eddie nearly a month to understand her. Seventeen years old. A Community Home kid. Quiet and focused. Desperate to make something of herself.

“Why are you here?” Evelyn asks him one Thursday, at the beginning of March. “You’ve got nice clothes, and you come in from school. That tells me all I need to know about you.”

Eddie turns a blue chip in the light … squinting as he searches for cracks.

“What does that mean?”

“You’re a townie.” She drops a chip onto the belt with a clink. “Come from money. Probably have a university scholarship lined up and waiting.”

He ignores her jab at his status, and the million tiny things that she’s not saying out loud.

“I’m fourteen.” Eddie laughs despite himself. “They don’t even start looking at you for that scholarship stuff until you’re in year ten.”

He sees the way her shoulders rise and notes the hard set of her jaw. Anyone who’s gone to school here knows these things. Maybe she’s like him. Always forgetting stuff if she’s being asked to sit still and listen.

Evelyn huffs. She breathes out a forceful little sigh through her nose, and glares down at her army of chips.

“Well,” she mumbles, “aren’t you something?”

Eddie can’t quite tell what she’s trying to say, so he ignores her. She returns the favor for the rest of the shift; she passes all three hours in silence.

Eddie doesn’t push it. He spends the time half in his head and half in the factory … picturing the constellations from his textbook, and wondering what they would look like up close.

At nine-thirty, Eddie grabs his backpack from his locker and moves out. Evelyn follows him out … through the double doors and into the smog-coated air.

He goes right. She goes left. Two different sectors, and two different worlds.

She apologizes on Tuesday, when Eddie takes his place alongside her.

“I never got to choose,” she tells him. “At the Home … when you turn twelve … you’re told what to do.”

Eddie finally starts to understand. “They made you quit school?”

Evelyn nods.

He watches her … fiddling with a defective chip and spinning it between her fingers. If she was like him, she’d be studying for aptitude exams right now. Hours and hours with her nose in a book, trying to figure out which subject would best suit her as a career.

Eddie will be there, too, in a couple of years. Doors opened wide with opportunity. Lucky enough to have all of the chances that she will never see.

He curls his fingers into the hem of his sleeve. Then he spends a couple of good, long hours thinking.

“Did you want to?” Eddie asks, when his brain has slotted all of the pieces into place. “Did you wanna go to school?”

Evelyn slips a perfect, copper circle onto the belt.

“Yeah.” Her shoulders rise, then drop again with a sigh. “I guess. Anything would have been better than this.”

What Eddie sees as a fun test, she thinks of as a torment. He can’t wrap his mind around it; surely, getting all the extra time in can’t be that bad.

Unless, he realizes, she’s not allowed to keep the money. School. Money. Nothing to her own name, except a tiny little cot in the Community Home. No choice in what’s hers.

“I could teach you,” Eddie offers, half out of pity and half out of boredom. “It would be fun, I think. And … I know a little about a lot of stuff.”

Evelyn’s mouth starts to smile, then turns down fiercely at the corners.

“Are you just saying that because you feel bad?” she demands.

Eddie knows the answer is part yes, but there’s enough no hidden in there to make it believable.

“I just—you should have school too. Y’know, if you want to.” He picks the words carefully. “And—well—you can’t go there. But I’m here. Mr. Newton always says it helps you remember things if you teach it to somebody else, and explain it with your own words.”

Evelyn fusses with with a cracked, rectangular chip.

“So, it’s for both of us?” she asks. “Not just for me, and not just for you?”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“Sure,” she tells him. “It’s not like it can hurt.”

She turns away from him to collect the next batch of chips, but she’s not quite fast enough to hide the small, really-there smile that sneaks through.

Eddie finally starts to learn things about Evelyn Kepler.

She loves to listen to him talk about the stars, and how they’re formed. Her mom died when she was five, in a fire. Evelyn was at school when it happened. She’s a realist, but Eddie thinks she leans more toward everything’s badsometimes, even when it’s not.

She doesn’t understand why the sun became the center of the universe, but she wants to. She used to pretend she was anyone but who she was. A princess, a pirate, someone from the old Capitol magazines. She thinks it would be fun to build a spacecraft … partly so she can get away. If she had a choice, she would go to university for hovercraft design; it’s the closest she could ever come to flying away.

Slowly, Eddie teaches her the constellations … maps them out on breakroom napkins, or diagrams them with defective chips. And–in return–Evelyn shows him who she really is. Eddie finally has a real friend, and it doesn’t even matter that she’s three years older.

It’s late April when the changes begin again.

Eddie always takes the same way home; so does Evelyn. One goes left, and one goes right. On a rainy Thursday night, Evelyn goes straight instead.

“Where’d you go?” Eddie demands, when he sees her again on Tuesday. “You didn’t go straight home on Thursday.”

He hates calling it home, but there aren’t any other words he can use to dress it up.

Evelyn’s mouth turns down on one side, and she glares at the communicuff chip in her hand.

“Yeah I did.” She drops the reject into a box. “What are you talking about?”

Eddie’s not like his little sister, who’s always had a problem understanding that some people prefer lies from the truth. He sees right through Evelyn, and he decides it’s his duty to tell her so.

“I saw you go straight.” He tugs at a thread in his sleeve. “You always go left. You know … down to the stop … so you can catch the nine-forty bus back to Eastside? You didn’t do that last week.”

“Forget about it,” Evelyn commands.

Eddie’s never been good at following instructions like that, especially if the thing he’s meant to forget is a mystery to solve.

“Okay,” he says to Evelyn. She is not the only one who can tell a lie.

He goes back to checking little chunks of metal and plastic, and talking to her about the hunter in the sky, and which stars he has tucked in his belt.

After work, Evelyn goes straight again, and Eddie follows, just close enough to make her out in the almost-dark.

The air smells like rain when Eddie slips into the street. Nothing coming down yet, but it’s clear that it will be before long. The idea of it doesn’t bother Eddie.

Evelyn doesn’t notice him. Or—if she does—she’s pretending not to see him. She keeps walking, then jogging, until Eddie has to pick up his own pace to keep up.

She doesn’t circle back to either of the main streets. She doesn’t seek out a transit stop. She’s definitely not taking the bus.

She’s cutting through side streets, past the beaten-down apartment complexes that Mom’s always telling Eddie to steer clear of.

Eddie doesn’t steer clear.

He follows Evelyn all the way through. The neighborhoods get worse, the further in they go. Fewer working lights to shine down on the concrete. More boarded-up windows, and more rancid smells that he can’t name. The air tastes different, too, and Eddie can’t put his finger on why.

Eddie’s chest squeezes tight, and his mind whirs with questions. Is she meeting someone out here? Does she have a secret boyfriend, like Ada Zuckerberg did for a while? What if she’s doing something illegal?

The last one makes Eddie’s stomach knot up, and makes his palms go all sweaty. People talk. A lot. About the Home kids, and the things they do on the side when no one’s looking. But Evelyn’s not like that.

Eddie knows her.

Evelyn stops outside of a squat, ugly building. The paint might have been white or cream at one point, but it’s going dingy brown-grey in the glow of the nearest streetlight. She looks around—once, twice—then knocks on the door.

Eddie watches from a distance, with his breath caught someplace behind his ribs.

One long, two quick, one more long. The pattern draws somebody’s attention from the inside; the door clicks open. Evelyn disappears into the building.

Eddie hesitates. He counts to sixty, then a hundred and twenty. Then he goes up and repeats the pattern against the wood.

One breath in. Another one out through his mouth. Then an older woman in a blue uniform lets him in.

A crowd’s worth of body heat, pressing in on him from all directions. It is the first thing that Eddie takes in. The second is the smell. Old wood, and rotting things, and the sweat of all the people who have packed into the too-small space.

It’s dim too; it takes Eddie’s eyes a good long second to adjust.

It’s some kind of meeting space. That is abundantly clear. The walls are bare, except for the flaked, crumbling paint. The chairs are crammed in close to one another, and nearly all of them are filled. There are a few teenagers his age, or a little older. A couple more, closer to Evelyn’s age. But there are plenty of adults here; older people, and factory workers, and a stern-faced man in a wheelchair.

They don’t look like they all belong here, mixed up together. Maybe Eddie just thinks that way because he really doesn’t fit in here.

Nobody looks at Eddie at first, when he settles down in a seat near the back. That’s good, because his face is most likely giving away just how uncomfortable he is.

He should get up. He should walk out, and run back towards where he’s supposed to be.

He doesn’t move. He presses his hands against the cool metal of the chair, and lets his knees bounce up and down, down and up. It keeps his brain from getting lost, and leaving the rest of him behind in this building.

The hum of voices spikes, then slows to nothing as a woman at the front of the room clears her throat. No, Eddie realizes, when the redhead climbs onto a platform. Not a woman.

Evelyn.

She’s not slouching, or frowning, or chewing on her lip … the way she does at the conveyor belt. Her head is held high, and her hair falls in wild, fiery waves behind her ears and past her shoulders. She looks taller, too. Louder, Eddie thinks it even before she opens her mouth.

“This isn’t just about the Games.” Evelyn paces back and forth across the platform. “I know … some of you think it is, but it’s really not.”

Her voice slices through the room. Unapologetic. Firm. Eddie nearly flinches at the intensity of it. So much confidence; something in the words frightens him.

“You tell ‘em, Kepler!” Someone in the audience cheers, and a handful of others echo it back.

“It’s about the Capitol, too,” Evelyn continues. “The Capitol, the government, and everything they take from us.”

Eddie frowns. The Games, the Capitol. Everyone talks about them … in small, safe little places. Not in meeting rooms, after shifts at work, where everything feels much scarier than it probably should.

Evelyn keeps going.

“They don’t want us to think.” She steps off her perch … starts moving through the first few rows of seated people. “But we do. I think … all of us have been thinking for a long time. We wouldn’t be showing up here if we weren’t.”

Eddie’s stomach lurches. This is bad. He should go back to the nicer parts of Central Sector, catch the bus, and walk home, where it’s safe and warm.

“Yes ma’am!” the man in the wheelchair exclaims.

The affirmation only seems to give Evelyn more courage.

“They don’t want you thinking about how much you work, and what you get back for it. They don’t want you to think about everybody who’s died in the arenas, or the factories.” She pauses again, pointing at the row of workers to her left. “They want you to listen, and do what they say, so they can keep you right where they want you to be.”

Eddie’s head buzzes. He’s not stupid; he’s piecing it together. This isn’t just some club, like art or drama or coding back at school. This meeting could get people into real trouble. Jail, and whippings, and executions. Eddie’s seen them on the news enough times to have the fear put into him.

He wants to leave. He can’t move.

Evelyn scans the room, like she’s checking to see if her words are landing. She doesn’t catch him, curled in on himself in the back row. Sleeves clutched in his fists. Knees jumping up and down. Eddie doesn’t know if he wants her to or not.

A bulky man near the front of the room is nodding along. Two teenaged girls are whispering to each other, and smile when Evelyn walks past.

Evelyn raises her chin, sweeping back toward the front of the space.

“We can’t fix the Games yet.” Her shoulders are squared like she’s marching into battle. “We can talk about what’s really going on. We don’t have to listen to what they say. We can stop playing along.”

Eddie doesn’t fully understand what she means, but he feels it somewhere deep inside. The air changes … like somebody’s opened a window. People cheer. Someone claps, and it spreads around the room like wildfire.

Evelyn smiles, and it’s a real one … not the half-smirk she gives Eddie sometimes on the line. She looks like she’s happy. She belongs up there.

Eddie exhales hard through his nose. He presses his back against the chair, and tries to understand what he’s thinking.

Quiet Evelyn from the line is leading something bigger than all of them, and he’s followed her straight into it.

---

Eddie follows her again on Thursday, and the next Tuesday, and the Thursday after that. The fourth meeting is the biggest one yet.

It’s standing room only this time, and the room gets hotter the longer Eddie lingers there. He’s as far from the front as he can be; he’s pressed himself against the wall, with both hands fisted at his sides.

Evelyn’s talking from somewhere deep inside herself … a place that makes the words come harder, and faster, and with more conviction than Eddie’s ever heard in anybody before.

“They want us to believe that they care.” She paces across the platform, then doubles back to sweep her gaze over the crowd. “They want us to think that the Games, and the Peacekeepers … all of that is here to keep us safe.”

“You tell ‘em!” the same, broad-shouldered man shouts from the front.

“No Peacekeepers, no peace.” Evelyn points her finger back at him. “That’s what they tell us.”

She hesitates … letting the thought hang heavy in the air. Eddie does his best to force the breaths to come evenly, in and out.

“We know the truth, right?” Evelyn leans forward, like she’s preparing to leap off of her perch. “No Peacekeepers, no chains. No Games, no fear.”

There’s a lull, a low murmur, and then the chant gets picked up and carried.

“No Peacekeepers, no chains. No Games, no fear!”

Eddie’s pulse slams against his ribs. This is the sort of thing that gets people dragged into Central Sector and shot. It’s the sort of thing they say out in Six, and Eight, and Eleven … until the Capitol newscasters report on riot gear and suppression.

It’s terrifying, and dangerous, and beautiful. Eddie can’t make himself turn away.

The big man in front claps. Someone shouts in agreement, and somebody else whistles. People lean forward in their chairs, or tilt their chins up to lock eyes.

Eddie sees a room full of people, all moving toward something much bigger than any of them. He hates how it makes his stomach twist, because some part of him wants it, too.

A treacherous part of him agrees with Evelyn, and thinks she’s right about all of it. The Games. The Peacekeepers. The Capitol control.

What would happen, if they didn’t have any of that?

He doesn’t understand … not really. But he wants to.

Evelyn lifts a hand, and the uproar dies down. She doesn’t even need to raise her voice to quiet them.

“They cut three shifts this week on the South Side,” she says. “Twenty people got told not to come back. You think the Capitol cares? You think the Peacekeepers care about the people they walked out of there?”

A ripple of bitter laughter moves through the crowd.

“No ma’am!” a teenaged boy calls.

Evelyn doesn’t falter. She’s tall, firm, and unbreakable. For half a minute, Eddie forgets she’s only seventeen.

“You know what they call us on the news? Resources. That’s what we are to them. Not people. Just things.” She spits the words out like they’re poison. “But we’re here to show them! We matter too, and it’s time for them to know that.”

“Tell it like it is, Ev!” someone yells, and a wave of cheers rolls forward.

Eddie shrinks into himself.

“Talking isn’t enough!” Another voice pipes up from somewhere near the middle of the crowd. “We should hit them where it hurts. Teach ‘em what happens when they treat us like a kicking dog.”

Murmurs rise up around the room. Excited. Nervous. Electric.

“A strike,” a blonde woman says, like she’s testing the shape of it in her mouth.

The crowd roars with agreement.

Eddie feels sick; his head spins with images of people in white armor storming this very room, dragging people out by their hair. Names read in the square. His face flashing on Capitol screens under a headline about traitors brought to justice.

His fingernails dig into his palms. His tongue lays dry and heavy against the bottom of his mouth. He could leave. He should leave.

But he doesn’t. He watches Evelyn instead, and she doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t ask them to stop. She doesn’t tell them they’re crazy.

“Let’s talk about what it would take.” She smiles.

The crowd surges toward her like water breaking through a dam.

Eddie barely hears the rest. His mind is too loud. They’re really doing this. They’re planning something. This is how people get disappeared.

By the time the meeting ends, Eddie’s whole body feels wound tight. Sweat on his palms. Blood thumping through his skull. An awful, knotted weight sitting inside of his stomach.

He waits for Evelyn, because he can’t leave without saying something to her. She’s his friend, and something about that thought makes him brave enough to try.

“Are you, like, serious about this?” he says when she finally comes down from the platform.

Her expression doesn’t shift.

“You came.”

Eddie doesn’t let the little flash of disappointment show. She hadn’t noticed the other times. He shouldn’t feel anything about that; he hadn’t expected her to.

“That’s not an answer,” he tells her.

“I don’t owe you one.” Evelyn shrugs one shoulder, and quickly steps around him.

It stings, but she’s already walking away, and Eddie’s too spun up about all of it to fight with her.

When he steps out into the night, the rain has started.

It’s late-late … Eddie doesn’t realize it at first. Not until he sees that the streetlights are all out, and the world is way too quiet.

He’s missed the midnight curfew. The last bus is gone.

Damn it. Eddie runs.

The streets blur. Puddles splash up over his shoes and onto his shins, and his backpack thunks against his spine.

He’s dead; Dad will have his ass for this.

He cuts through alleys, past rows of rotten complexes and dripping drainage pipes. His lungs burn. His legs ache.

By the time he bursts through his front door—dripping and shaking—the clock in the entryway says it’s half past one. His parents are waiting.

His mother’s on the couch, her bathrobe pulled tight around her. Her hair is sticking out in frazzled clumps, and any other night, Eddie would laugh.

Dad’s boots are on and laced, and his mouth is set firm in a line. Eddie must have caught him on the way out, right before he went off to start the search.

“Edison Louvet!” his mother snaps, leaping to her feet. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Yes ma’am—I saw—” He’s still gasping. “The bus—”

“You did more than miss the bus, didn’t you?” His father’s voice is like a whip. “In this weather? In this district? Do you have any idea what could’ve happened to you?”

“I’m fine,” Eddie insists. The words trip over themselves on the way out. Too fast, too defensive.

“You’re lucky you’re fine,” Dad says, stepping in close enough to grab Eddie by one, soaked sleeve. “Lucky we didn’t have to call Peacekeepers to drag you out of a ditch.”

The scorching tone hits Eddie like a slap.

He swallows the truth … the urge to say that the Peacekeepers aren’t who he wants anywhere near him. He stares at the floor.

“Your shift ended four hours ago. Where the hell were you?” his father demands.

Eddie’s mouth opens. No words come out. They wouldn’t understand. They can’t.

So he lies.

“School project.” Eddie forces his eyes up, and meets Dad’s glare head-on. “Ev—Evelyn Kepler. My line partner. We … we stayed after shift, to work on my District Geography homework.”

It doesn’t convince anyone, but it ends the shouting. His mother tells him to change into dry clothes. His father makes it clear that he’s in big trouble now.

Grounded. For three weeks. No going to friends’ houses, and staying out late after shift. Straight to school or work, and right back home after. If he steps out of line, the three weeks will turn into six.

Dad’s prison sentence is harsh, but it’s nothing compared to what Eddie finds waiting outside of his bedroom door.

Curie, standing in the hallway, with both hands clasped tight in front of her. Wide, blue eyes that snap up to his face, then back down to her own fingers.

She’s holding her shoulders wrong, and smiling with half her mouth. She only does that when she’s nervous.

Tiny, for nine years old, and distressed by all the yelling. She’s never known how to handle it when people raise their voices.

“Go back to bed,” Eddie coaxes, but his sister doesn’t move.

“You’re going to get in trouble.” The words come out in that high, monotone voice of hers. Then she laughs … the way she always does when she’s afraid. “You … you’re doing something you’re not supposed to.”

Curie holds her own hands in a white-knuckled grip, and Eddie moves in to take her by the shoulders.

“C’mon, Curie. I’m fine,” he tells her. “I’m not causing problems, and I won’t get grounded again.”

He repeats it, three different ways, until she believes him and goes back to her room.

The guilt nearly eats Eddie alive, but he didn’t tell her a lie. He isn’t causing trouble. He won’t get grounded again.

He’s going to be more careful, if he ever goes back to that place.

---

Two weeks later, Eddie’s life is about as close as it can be to back to normal.

He’s still grounded, which means no time alone, unless he’s at school or in the factory. He’s drawn back into the way things used to be … before Evelyn Kepler, and secret meetings, and words he only half understands.

Mom’s hovering, and her constant questions about school and friends. Dad’s favorite Capitol news broadcasts, playing in the background while they eat dinner. Eddie and Curie, doing homework in the living room every night.

It’s safe. It’s proper. It’s what Eddie’s supposed to be focused on.

But the words won’t leave him alone.

No Peacekeepers, no chains. Let’s talk about what it would take. Eddie keeps thinking about that room. All those people. It felt like something was waking up inside them all.

He keeps thinking about how Evelyn stood. How she was strong, and steady, and didn’t flinch. Maybe, she’s been waiting for this for a long time. Maybe they all have.

Then Eddie thinks about the coverage from Six and Eight and Eleven. All the protests last winter, and the people who made too much noise.

Those thoughts knot his stomach every time.

“Eddie,” Curie complains, smacking her pencil down a hair’s length away from his fingers. “You’re not paying attention.”

He blinks back into his body at the sound of that high-pitched, flat-sounding voice. Curie’s half-sprawled across the coffee table, with her English homework and Eddie’s District Geography textbook, one to her left and one to her right.

“I’m listening,” Eddie lies, shifting closer to peer down at her worksheet. “That’s not right. That’s a simile. You’re supposed to be circling the metaphors.”

She turns the page around … pointing down at the paragraph in question.

“I don’t understand those,” she tells him. “The ones with like or as are easy to find, because that’s how you know they’re comparing something.”

Eddie’s breath leaves his nose in a slow, controlled whistle. Brilliant at math and facts, and scientific things. Horrible at finding figurative language, because they wouldn’t call it something if it wasn’t the thing.

“Curie,” Eddie sighs, trying to figure out how to explain metaphors for the nine-thousandth time. “Some of them … they’re just … if it sounds like it doesn’t make sense, then it’s probably figurative, okay?”

“If I can find one, will you teach me some District Geography?”

It’s a fine enough deal for Eddie.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Sure. I’ve gotta do the chapter summary anyway.”

Fifteen minutes later, she’s found one.

“All right.” Eddie looks away from her, watching Dad come in to unmute the television. “Do you wanna hear about Edging Lake?”

Dad walks out again, and Curie nods once.

“Right,” Eddie says, closing the textbook so he can practice reciting it from memory. “Edging Lake used to be called Lake Michigan a long time back. That’s such a weird name, isn’t it?”

His sister doesn’t comment, but she’s watching him closely now.

“They don’t know why it got called that,” Eddie continues. “The historians have been trying to figure out if there used to be other districts here, before Panem, or if it was named for somebody famous. Nobody actually remembers when it was called Michigan, so there aren’t any people around that they can ask about—”

It’s the voice that makes him look up. Three’s Head Peacekeeper, right there … talking on the Capitol news at seven-thirty.

“—unrest here this week in Three,” the woman says. She’s smiling just enough for the cameras, but Eddie can tell she’s not happy in the least. “The factory workers on the South Side staged an unauthorized work stoppage this morning. Protesting, they said. Had a walkout a few hours ago at the communication chip factory here in the middle of Central Sector. They called it a strike. I call it a loss of wages.”

Her mouth twitches, like she wants to frown. Her face is replaced by rolling footage.

Blurry images of the same buildings that Eddie’s walked past a thousand times. A crowd of workers outside, in the mid-day smog. Peacekeepers in white armor, with their batons raised and their visors down.

Curie tilts her head. “Why are they showing Three?”

“Shh,” Eddie orders.

The news anchor’s on now, talking over the footage.

“Swift intervention by the local Peacekeeper regiments has restored order, with minimal disruptions to weekly quotas,” he explains. “Production has resumed, and no injuries among officers has been reported.”

The feed cuts over to a Capitol analyst … a man with too-perfect teeth and too-blue skin. He’s shaking his head back and forth, and lamenting on how distressing these things are. Such a shame, he complains. So ungrateful.

Then the camera switches back to the beaming anchor.

“In other news, there’s a warm front heading for District Nine! Let’s take it over to Remus, with your early evening weather report.”

Eddie doesn’t hear another word.

His ears are ringing. His palms have gone damp and slick from sweat. It’s real. Not just words thrown rapid-fire in a room. Not just Evelyn, running her mouth on that platform.

They did it.

Eddie’s brain conjures the worst. White-gloved hands, gripping Evelyn by the shoulders. A whole army of them, dragging her away. Her face on the six-o’clock news tomorrow, underneath the headline traitor or treason.

“Eddie?”

He blinks. Curie’s staring at him with wide, blue eyes.

“You’re scaring me.”

He forces his face to stop whatever it’s trying to do.

“It’s just the news, sis.” He opens up his textbook, and flips back to the chapter summary page.

“You’re shaking.”

He grabs the pencil out of her hand, and taps firmly at the middle of her worksheet.

“Focus,” he tells her. “We’re supposed to get this done tonight. If you don’t hurry up, we won’t have time for chess.”

Curie studies him, but leans in close over the paper again.

Eddie frowns at his textbook until the letters blur. He doesn’t notice how tight his shoulders are, or how quick his foot’s tapping against the floor.

But Curie does.

A few more breaths, and she lays one hand on top of his.

“Are you okay?”

Eddie turns the page, and tries to get the trembling under control.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah … I’m fine.”

Another lie, but it’s the best he can do.

---

The ball smacks into Eddie’s glove with a pop that makes him wince.

“Too slow,” his dad calls from across the yard. He doesn’t sound mad, just like he’s pointing out a fact that Eddie needs to know.

Eddie shifts his feet. He brings his glove up for the next throw, but it glances off his palm and thuds into the dirt.

“Eyes on it,” Dad says.

“I had my eyes on it,” Eddie mutters, brushing dust from the ball before firing it back.

“You had your eyes near it,” Dad corrects. The words are easy and clipped, and the smile tells Eddie that his father isn’t all that disappointed.

Dad snaps his glove up, catching it one-handed like it’s nothing.

Eddie’s skin feels hot under the midday sun. The yard smells like smog, and leather, and the faint tang of oil from the neighbor’s fence where someone’s been greasing something. Every throw leaves a grit of dust in the creases of his fingers.

Curie’s sitting cross-legged on the back step, gnawing on a strip of dried apple. She calls out commentary every few throws. Higher, Eddie. That one wasn’t even close.

She doesn’t react when he shoots her a look.

“With an arm like that,” his dad remarks, catching the next throw easily, “you’ll never make the neighborhood league.”

“I’m not trying to,” Eddie huffs.

“You should. Gives a kid something to do besides staring at the walls.”

Eddie rolls his eyes, and tries to force the laugh out.

He’s been distracted all week … can’t stop thinking about the broadcast. About Evelyn. About the way the anchor had smiled two days later, while footage showed the strikers being shoved into lines. Rows and rows of people with zip-tied hands. Evelyn wasn’t at work on Thursday.

The ball zooms back at him, fast and hard. Eddie jerks his glove up too late. It bounces off his thumb, and ricochets into the dirt again.

“Damn it!” Eddie swears.

“Language,” Dad warns automatically.

“Sorry.”

“Come on, Eddie!” his dad says, not sharp but finally edging into disappointed territory.

Eddie bites back the urge to kick the ball. He crouches, scoops it up, and feels the sting in his hand lingering. He throws harder than he needs to.

The rhythm comes back; throw, catch, miss, retrieve. Eddie’s stomach is tight. His glove feels like it’s on upside-down and backwards, even though it’s not.

“Dad?” he asks, wiping sweat off his temple with the back of his arm.

“Yeah?”

“Do you ever—” Eddie hesitates.

“Do I ever what?”

The ball comes back; Eddie’s fumbling before he can even grip it. “Do you ever think about what it’d be like without the Games?”

Eddie lets it fly. Dad catches, and his mouth goes tight. For a moment, Dad doesn’t move. He rolls the ball around in his palm.

“Without the Hunger Games, Eddie?”

“Yeah.” Eddie shrugs like it’s nothing, but his chest feels heavy. “Would everybody be happier? If there weren’t Games. Or a Capitol. If Three just … ran itself?”

The words sound bigger once they’re out. They stick in the air, hanging somewhere between him and Dad. Eddie’s forgotten what it feels like to breathe.

Curie perks up on the steps, lifting her chin to study them. Her half-eaten apple slice has been forgotten.

Dad doesn’t throw right away. He stares down at the ball, letting his thumb trace over the stitches like he’s counting them.

Then he hurls it—sharp, quick—in an overhand toss. “You shouldn’t say things like that.”

The ball smacks Eddie’s glove so hard it almost bounces out. He loses his grip, and it drops and rolls into the weeds.

“Why not?” he snaps, jogging after it. “It’s just a question.”

His dad’s voice lowers. “Because people don’t ask questions like that.”

Eddie yanks the ball out of the weeds. Grass and seeds are sticking to his sleeves.

“But why? It’s not like—”

“Edison,” Dad commands. “Not in front of your sister.”

Eddie throws the little white ball back. Too hard. Too wild. His dad steps into it, and catches anyway.

“It’s just—” Eddie’s throat tightens. “I dunno. Seems like people would be happier if we didn’t have to—”

He can’t say watch kids die, not with Curie listening.

“You know … if we didn’t have all that.”

His dad traps the ball against his hip.

“You think too much.” His face and his voice both say I’m tired.

“You didn’t even—”

“Eddie.” His dad cuts him off, firm now. “Enough.”

Curie leans forward, hugging her knees. She’s clicking her tongue … a sure sign something about all of this has gotten to her. Eddie’s scared her; he knows it, without even having to ask.

The silence stretches.

Then his dad tosses the ball again, softer this time.

“Come on, kid,” he coaxes. “Stick with it. Eyes on the ball.”

Eddie catches it—glove stinging—and swallows the rest of his words.

---

Eddie’s never quite sure why the rest of it goes wrong, too.

His name … pulled from a glass bowl on the fourth of July. His shoes, carrying him onto that stage in Central Sector. And Evelyn Kepler’s name, drawn right alongside him.

Maybe there are cameras, or footage, or Peacekeepers keeping track of who went where. Perhaps they caught him, the same way they must have found her. Late-night meetings, in places where nobody has any business going.

Dad’s always been weird about either of them showing feelings that way. And, since his little sister does not cry, Eddie won’t do it either.

Eddie doesn’t cry during any of it.

Not when Beetee Latier refuses to look at him, and takes Evelyn on instead. Not when Wiress sits across from him on the Capitol train, and tries to coax skills and strengths out of him. She reminds him of Curie … in the little ways. Never looking at him head-on, and never saying things for the sake of filling a silence.

Fitful stops and starts, and half-formed sentences. Eddie gives his mentor time, and she tries to give him space to feel. But Eddie can’t afford to do that now.

Evelyn said she’d help him get out; she’s already trying to put his life above her own. Eddie trusts her, but not enough to believe that she’ll follow through.

He trusts Wiress, too, but he’s all too aware of the fact that she’s never gotten a tribute out of that arena. Almost twenty years, and the closest she’s ever come is some boy from Twelve, back in Fifty.

Eddie doesn’t have a shot, but he’s not allowed to feel things about that. He sticks by Evelyn during the Opening Ceremony, and talks to her about his family after. Then, it’s all business again.

No time to think. Just training, and stations, and paying attention to what everybody else in the gym is doing. Private sessions, interview prep, and a night full of Caesar Flickerman’s questions.

Edison Louvet doesn’t cry.

“If you could say one thing to them now,” Caesar asks him, “what would you tell your family? Those parents, and that precious little sister … what do you want them to hear?”

Eddie shuts his eyes. He thinks of lazy Saturdays of catch in the backyard, and Dad’s insistence to stick with it. He imagines Mom making dinner, and asking him about school and friends. He sees Curie … tiny, but smart … and knows she would despise being called precious.

Maybe the PKs will hurt them too, because of Eddie and his short time as a rebel. Maybe they’ll all be fine, and nothing bad will ever befall them again. Eddie’s got no way of knowing for sure.

“I—” Eddie can’t get the words out around the lump in his throat. I want them to know that I’m sorry.

“Yes?” Caesar leans in close. His hair is dyed an ugly, neon yellow. Entirely fake.

Eddie folds his hands in his lap, and decides that the full truth is too personal for anyone in this audience to hear.

“I want them to know that I love them.” Eddie’s breath catches on the way out. “I … I love them, and I miss them. So much.”

The words stick with him, long after the interviews are over, and he’s gone back upstairs with his entourage. Eleven, twelve, one o’clock in the morning. Still, he can’t sleep.

Restlessness drags him up and out of bed … across the room, to grab his token from the desk.

A small ring, with colorful, plastic beads slipped onto the metal. Eddie turns the loop of bronze wire between his fingers as he wanders … two trips around the quarters, then out of his room. Each bead rolls one by one against his thumb. Blue, green, red, yellow, black, white. Always in that order.

He can’t remember when it started, exactly. It was probably back at the beginning of last school year, in Mr. Newton’s classroom, or during study hall. When he needed something to keep his hands busy, Eddie started making things like this. Wire and beads. Old keyboard keys, discarded at the factory. Something to click or spin between his fingers.

Those patterns are a ritual now. A lifeline. The beads are smooth and warm. Their edges are flattened from months of being worked over. He drags his thumb across the black one … presses it hard until it bites against the soft pad of his finger. Then he moves to the white bead.

He keeps them moving. Keeps them moving because if they stop, he’ll start thinking.

The apartment’s sitting room is dim; the only light is coming from a tall lamp in the corner and the glow of the city beyond the massive window. It makes the space feel cavernous, and way too big for Eddie to be alone in.

It takes him a few heartbeats to realize that he’s not.

Wiress is curled up on the couch, with a small wooden box resting in her lap. She doesn’t look up when Eddie walks in. She’s too focused on the tiny pieces in her hands.

She’s sorting something. Quick, efficient, and quiet in her work.

Eddie stops in the doorway.

The chips are small and round, bright like candy. Flatter than the communication chips he used to pull from the lines with Evelyn.

Music chips, Eddie thinks. The kind that his dad keeps in a dusty drawer under the radio player, stacked like coins. These are shinier. Newer, probably. They catch the lamplight and toss it back in little flashes of blue, green, gold, and silver.

Wiress takes them from their box, one by one. Eddie watches her spin them between her fingers … tilting them in the light, and separating out the ones that don’t match up to her standards.

It shouldn’t matter. It’s nothing. But it hits Eddie like a slap in the face.

It’s Evelyn at the conveyor belt, spinning a defective chip while she waited for more to come down the line. Evelyn with that confident, unstoppable fire in her eyes, at the meetings. Evelyn grinning for real—for once—as she traced stars on a napkin while he explained what little he knew about constellations.

It’s shifts, and learning, and taking up a new challenge just for fun. It’s all those days back in the winter, before everything went so wrong.

Before rebels, and meetings. Before a name and a stage, and a district partner who wants to die to get him out.

Eddie freezes, stuck in the doorway with his beads digging into his hand.

Wiress glances up, finally. She catches him right away.

“You’re awake,” she says. Her voice is soft and scratchy, like she’s gone a while without needing it. There’s something odd and lyrical about it. The opposite extreme … at the other end of the spectrum from Curie’s monotone.

Eddie’s mind goes to his sister … his family … and that’s all it takes.

The sob claws out of him before he can stop it. Loud, and ugly, and ripped straight out of his chest. Eddie stumbles forward and collapses into the chair across from his mentor, folding in on himself until his elbows are braced on his knees.

The loop of bronze wire cuts into his palm. The beads leave little circular marks against his skin. Eddie can’t get himself to care.

Wiress doesn’t move at first. She watches him with her head tilted slightly to one side.

Then, when Eddie’s tears threaten to choke him, she slides off the couch and circles around the coffee table until she’s standing right in front of him. She doesn’t reach for him, or try to make him stop.

“Breathe,” she says. The word pitches up at the end, in that same singsong rhythm.

Eddie tries. His lungs seize. Everything feels too hot. He thinks that his ribs are locked, like someone’s sitting on his chest.

Wiress models it carefully. She breathes in, then exhales, slow and even.

It takes him a few tries to follow her rhythm. The first few breaths come out all mixed up … jagged and wet. Eventually his chest loosens, and he finds enough air to make his ears stop ringing.

Wiress tilts her head again, watching his face, and the way his hands have stayed coiled into too-tight fists. A barely-there frown pulls one corner of her mouth down, and she’s shaking out her fingers.

“Should I get Beetee?”

The question makes Eddie’s stomach flip. Three’s other Victor has kept himself occupied with Evelyn; it would do nobody any favors if Eddie sought him out now. Maybe he’s better with these things, but Eddie doesn’t care.

Beetee hadn’t wanted him before. Eddie doesn’t want his pity now.

He shakes his head fast, wiping at his face with his sleeve. “No.”

“You’d feel better—”

“I don’t want him.” The words fly out of him, so fast that his mentor startles at the force of them. Eddie swallows, hard. “I don’t—”

Wiress nods. Eddie watches her … tracks the way she brings her fingers down to clap against her palm, then straightens them out again. It’s something for him to focus on, aside from the sound of his pulse in his ears.

He squeezes the loop until the wire bites into his fingers again. “I’m gonna die.”

“It’s possible.”

“And it’s—” Eddie’s throat burns, and the tears threaten to escape once more. “It’s my fault. I went to the meetings. I followed her. I stayed. They probably knew. That’s why I’m here. That’s why they pulled my name.”

“Meetings?” Wiress repeats. She’s staring back at him now, full-on. Something’s drawn her chin up, and made her hands go very, very still.

“Yeah.” His voice shakes. “Meetings. People talking about making things better. With the Games … and the Capitol, and—”

“Evelyn.” His mentor taps her fingers together. She must have heard it all by now … the strikes, and the protests, and the seventeen-year-old with impossible dreams who became this year’s female tribute.

Eddie’s breath stutters and hitches inside his chest.

“I just wanted to see. That’s all. Just to see what it was. And then I kept going. And Evelyn—” Her name catches like barbed wire in his throat. “It was scary, but … she was so brave. And I thought if I stayed, maybe I could be too. And now I’m here and I’m gonna die.”

Wiress doesn’t rush to fill the silence. She reaches for him with one hand, planting it lightly on his shoulder while she tries to get him to breathe right.

“You’re sorry.” It’s not a question.

Eddie nods, then cradles his head in his hands. His shoulders are curling tighter, advancing toward his ears. He can still feel his mentor’s palm against the left one.

“I’m… I didn’t know,” Eddie whimpers. He’s not sure which part of it he’s apologizing for. “I … I never wanted any of us to get hurt.”

Wiress tilts her head, staring at some point over Eddie’s shoulder. “Who?”

“Me, Evelyn … my family.” His knees bounce up and down, like they’re trying to run out from under him. “My parents. Curie. My little sister. She’s nine. She wouldn’t—she doesn’t understand. I didn’t even get to tell them. I didn’t get to tell them I’m sorry.”

I didn’t tell them the truth, and now I’m going to die.

Wiress frowns like she’s trying to slot the pieces together.

“You could.”

He lifts his head. “What?”

“You could tell them. You don’t have to give it to them. In a letter, if you wanted to—”

“I could write it down, I guess.” Eddie stares at her.

“You don’t have to—” she tells him. The words drift off at the end. The fingers of her free hand curl down against her palm, then straighten themselves out again.

Eddie wonders if the feelings make her nervous. Maybe, it’s the thought of comforting him, only to watch him die tomorrow, that’s drawn a reaction from his mentor.

Eddie doesn’t have the energy to figure it out, and it wouldn’t matter if he could.

Eddie closes his eyes. The thought of writing it all out makes his stomach twist, but it’s something to do. Something to focus on. Something that isn’t just sitting here waiting to die.

“Okay,” he mutters. “I think … maybe that’ll help.”

“Paper,” Wiress says, like that settles it. “Come on.”

She withdraws her hand from his shoulder, and flicks her fingers lightly toward the hallway.

Eddie feels hollow, and all wrung out, but he pushes himself up anyway. His knees protest, and nearly drop him back into the chair. The beads on his wire loop click softly as he rolls them in their endless pattern. Blue, green, red, yellow, black, white. Always in that order.

Wiress hums as she walks. A careful little tune that loops back around on itself. No words. A simple melody. Eddie thinks it comes from one of the nursery rhymes they sing back in Three; he’s not sure which one it is.

Something inside of it works its way past his ribs, cutting through the leftover static of his crying, and softening the hard edge of the panic that’s still gnawing at his chest. He focuses on it. Counts the pattern of her tune instead of the pounding in his head.

By the time they reach his door, his breathing is almost normal again.

“Sit,” Wiress says, without looking back.

Eddie obeys, sinking into the hard-backed chair at the desk. Too firm, and too straight. It’s nothing like the desk in his room, with the scratched-up wood, and a million little trinkets that he’s built to fidget with.

The memory of it makes his throat tighten again. He digs his nails into his palm until it stings.

Wiress pulls a few sheets of paper from the bottom drawer and sets them in front of him with a pen. The instrument is pale-blue, with courtesy of the Capitol written in silver down one side.

Eddie almost laughs. He wonders if Evelyn’s seen this, too. She’d have a thousand things to say … about irony, or resources, or how daring the Capitol is to make such a mockery of the tributes.

But Evelyn has no one back home to write letters too. No reason for her to be digging around for paper and something to write with.

Eddie picks up the pen, and holds it between his fingers.

Wiress doesn’t sit. She plants herself beside the desk and stares out the massive window. The city stretches out into infinity. Buildings rise higher than anything Eddie’s ever seen back home.

He wonders what Wiress sees when she looks at it … if she’s thinking about her district, or nothing at all. He doesn’t ask her. It’s got to be at least two-thirty by now, and he’s already caused enough trouble, forcing her to babysit him and his fears.

Eddie stares at the blank paper.

The pen feels foreign in his hand, like it might bite if he grips it too hard. He thinks about writing to his parents first, but the words won’t come. So he thinks about Curie. Scared and wide-eyed on that night in the hallway. Smiling with only half her mouth. Clicking her tongue like she does when something feels all wrong.

The lump in his throat swells. But his hand moves.

Dear Curie,

I don’t know where to start. By the time you get this, I’ll probably be dead, you’ll probably already know. I want to tell you anyway, because I don’t want you to only hear it from other people.

When I got in trouble, and came home late, I was at a meeting. I went to more of them, too. Before that. I think it’s where all the problems started.

Those meetings I went to, they weren’t like school clubs or anything safe. People there were talking about dangerous things how unfair the Capitol is, and how maybe we could change things. I don’t think I understood what that really meant. I thought I was just going to watch. I thought it would make me brave.

The stuff they showed on TV, from Three? The people at Evelyn’s the meetings are the ones who made that all happen.

I didn’t tell you, and I should have. I should’ve told you the truth instead of lying when you asked me about it. I’m sorry.

I don’t know if that’s why I got reaped. I think maybe they knew. Maybe they saw me there, and this is what happens.

I’m going to try in the arena, but I’m going to die I probably won’t come back. And if I don’t, I hope you’ll still be you.

I want you to keep working on your metaphors, even if they’re hard. I hope you get into advanced math next year, because I know you can. I hope you’ll still try to make me proud even if I’m not there to see it.

I hope you don’t hate me.

I love you.

P.S.: I’m sorry.

His hand aches from how hard he’s gripping the pen. He sets it down and stares at the paper until the words blur.

Wiress’s hand finds his shoulder again. It’s nearly enough to bring the tears back up and out of him.

So many things that he’s gotten wrong. Maybe, if he never met Evelyn, none of it would have happened. Maybe he’d be home right now, safe in bed. Maybe he’d be trying to play baseball again this weekend, while Dad begged him to keep your eye on it, Eddie.

A million small, treasonous transgressions. A few hours of his life, that he’ll never be able to take back.

He signs the envelope in his best script, then hands the papers over to his mentor.

“If I don’t—” The words catch inside his throat, and he has to clear it twice to set them free. “If I don’t go home, will you give this to her?”

One quick, tiny nod.

It only eases the weight on his chest by a fraction. Maybe, someday, Curie will understand. Maybe, she’ll think he’s a bad person, for not thinking harder or leaving sooner.

He should have turned around, on that first day, and walked out. And now, he’s going to die for that choice.

He closes his eyes … listens to the sound of his mentor pacing behind his chair and out into the hallway. She does not come back.

Maybe she’s sorry, too. Sorry to see him go. Sorry that she decided to help him. Sorry that there’s nothing she can do to get him out of this.

What good is sorry? When the words will do nothing to make up for the actions. When one little thing adds up to ten big mistakes, and you can’t take any of them back.

Eddie can feel it as deeply and strongly as he wants to. Nothing can make it right again.

Notes:

Comments and kudos … always such a delicious treat to find. If you feel so inclined, please feed a starving writer!

If you have an interest in Hunger Games fanfiction, or the things that go down in canon, consider joining me and the other folks over at the SYOT Verses discord server. It’s a fun little corner of the world, where we yell about our characters, chat about life, and occasionally do challenges. Most of the people there don’t bite.

Chapter 4: Find a Way Out

Notes:

So begins my large-scale canon noncompliance. I have an alternate view, and an alternate Victor, from 50. You start to see it here; it’s just relevant enough to notice plot changes, but I’m sure it will come up more down the line.

This line isn’t in one point, white font as requested but … shoutout to Cecelia for giving this chapter a beta-read for the featured concepts. I appreciate it. :)

Sylva Mayleaf: District 9

In Nine, the trouble starts and ends with being different.

If you can keep your head down, and avoid the attention of everyone else, you’ll make it through all right. But, if you have the unfortunate destiny of being irrevocably out of line, then you will face the ire of the district until the day you die.

Sylva Mayleaf never had a chance.

Being merchant class can only do so much to protect her, when she and her twin are so peculiar.

Her, with her hair cropped short to avoid the burning itch of it against her neck, and her claims of hearing colors. Scout, with their chosen name, and their outspoken nature. Both of them … earning stares and side commentary, for several years straight now.

What’s wrong with those Mayleafs? Half of central Nine wants to know. The answer is nothing, but here, everyone needs something to hate.

It’s always so much worse at the Reaping.

Sylva drags Scout behind her … past the Peacekeepers, and into their designated pen.

Traveling as a unit, like always. Sylva, with her green-and-white checkered dress … the same, dull style that half the kids in Nine wear in the summers. And Scout—unafraid as always—with their black tie, matching skirt, and green-and-black button up.

In another district, they might become two in a crowd of thousands. But here—despite Nine’s size—they’re scrutinized from all angles.

The twins might as well have the plague, for the way their peers avoid them. Immediately, the nearest girls shuffle away; a magnetic pull seems to force them back and apart. The usual whispers start up from all sides—queer and unnatural and wrong.

The words are an ugly, ash-baked grey when they pop up in Sylva’s head. This must be the same, terrible color that her classmates see when they hear her and Scout’s names.

Despicable and dangerous and better off going into the Games. The last of these is spat ferociously by Mayor Teff’s daughter, who’s standing just over Scout’s right shoulder. She’s perfect in every way … long hair, light pink ribbons, and a shiny, silver bracelet on one wrist.

Everything about her screams avoid at all costs to Sylva, but Scout has never learned when to back down.

Sylva feels the tug on her hand … notes the shift in pressure a second before Scout lets her go. Her twin spins on their heel—honey-blonde ponytail whipping against their cheek.

Scout never lets go at the Reaping. The weight of her twin’s fingers is immediately missed. Sylva curls her nails against her palm.

“Say it again.” Scout steps toward the mayor’s daughter without a care.

“You’d be better off in those Games, freak.” Oryza Teff makes the mistake of following through.

Scout’s hand seems to move of its own accord; their fingers close around Oryza’s wrist, and two breaths later, they’re holding the perfect, silver chain … cupped in their palm.

“Somebody needs to help you off that high horse,” Scout declares, “before you’re knocked right off of it.”

Scout drops the expensive piece of metal at Oryza’s feet, then turns away.

“Why would you do that?” Sylva demands, when her twin’s fingers are once again linked with her own. “Do you want her to make things harder on—”

Harder on you? Harder on us? Sylva can’t decide which one would be worse.

Scout frowns down at her with wide, brown eyes. “It’s never going to change anyway.” Their unoccupied hand goes to their ponytail … winding the strands tight around their fingers. “You think Nine’s ever gonna give a damn about the girl who hears colors and sees sounds, or the kid who feels wrong in their own body half of the time?”

“Maybe, one day.” Sylva can hear the truth in her own words. She’s never been able to tell a lie, especially one that she doesn’t believe.

“It’s fine.” Scout squeezes Sylva’s hand with bruising force. “One more year, and we’re out of here.”

Sylva nudges her twin in the side; saying something so treacherous could earn anyone in earshot a trip to the whipping post, if they’re lucky. She nods, all the same.

They’ve planned it for years. Take a Peacekeeper position, and hope for a better district. Go north, out of Nine and into the great big nothing up there. Anything to find a way out of here.

All they have to do is turn eighteen. Then, there will be options.

All they have to do is make it one more year … one more Reaping after this.

Sylva lets herself imagine it. She plays out all the scenarios while the Treaty of Treason is recited into the dead air.

Endless fields of green … filled with the same sunflowers that crop up out in rural Nine. Clear, blue skies. No people or cruel words. Nothing but the feeling of being free under the sun. It’s such a vivid picture; she can nearly reach out and touch it.

War, terrible war, declares the Capitol-mandated video. Only thirty more minutes now, give or take.

Scout’s fingers are warm—solid—against Sylva’s. Steadfast, when the escort draws little Harvest Jones. Twelve years old. No chance. Nobody in Nine has the energy to mourn him.

Sylva stares off at the crisp, blue sky. She wonders if it will look the same when she gets to wherever she’ll be going, one year and a couple hours from now.

“Serah Mayleaf!”

The sound of her last name draws Sylva out of her head and back into her body. The words are all wrong, though.

Next to her, Scout’s shoulders rise to their ears, and their grip on Sylva’s fingers grows iron-tight.

“Serah Mayleaf,” the escort calls again. “Where are you, darling? Don’t be shy!”

The meaning finally crystallizes into something concrete. A girl’s name, on a child who despised it. A feminine name, thrown to the wind for one that felt more right to them. Both five little letters, the same length as Sylva’s own.

Two names, for one person. Serah and—

“Scout!” Sylva digs her nails into the back of her twin’s hand and holds them firmly in place. “No, no, you can’t. It can’t—”

Eighty percent of Nine’s tributes die in the bloodbath. Sylva doesn’t know where she learned it, but once she remembers something, she’s hard pressed to forget. Eighty percent. The words swim through her head in bright, eye-scorching red.

“Move, freak.” Oryza Teff shoves Scout from behind. “Nobody wants you here. Go up there. It’s what you deserve, anyway.”

Scout doesn’t move, not toward the stage. They pry their hand from Sylva’s for just long enough to draw her into a hug. Two pieces. One whole. The perfect, imperfect set.

Sylva watches the Peacekeepers descend, from somewhere over her twin’s shoulder. Scout pays them no mind. They have always been the one who could do something with their life. The one who was never afraid. The one with the right words ready at a moment’s notice. The one who could get out … if someone would give them a chance.

Scout has always been the stronger one … the better of the two. They aren’t going to die in the bloodbath. They’re going to find a way out, and be everything that they’re supposed to be.

“I’m sorry,” Sylva whispers, in the heartbeats before she lets her twin go. “I love you, and I’m so sorry.”

One day, I hope you’ll understand.

Scout’s caught somewhere between grief and confusion, and it makes their reflexes slow. Sylva takes a step forward, sweeps Scout behind her with one arm, and lifts her hand straight into the air.

“I volunteer as tribute!”

She could live a thousand more years, and never forget the sound of Scout’s scream.

---

Sylva is not one of the eighty percent. She makes it through the before, with a mentor who is not from her district, and a prep team that’s far north of insufferable.

She gets out of the bloodbath … spends most of her time hiding in the sunflowers. Rows and rows of them, reaching toward the sky.

She survives the Games, then returns to Nine with her district partner’s blood on her hands.

There is no coming back from this. Her district despises her; being sent back in a wooden box is much better than returning as a traitor. Even her parents refuse to follow her to the Village. Too proud, they say. We worked hard for this house and we’re staying in it.

Sylva wants to believe them. She thinks instead that they are afraid of her.

Scout shadows her, though … moves into the too-large house with the too-white walls right alongside Sylva. Two parts, one whole. No longer separated, but never entirely complete.

“I can’t leave,” Sylva tells Scout, one day in the middle of September. “I—it’s not fair. The Capitol—”

Scout hums. They’re smart enough to understand; the Capitol will never let Sylva go now. Dead tributes and distasteful commentary directed her way, for every Games season until she dies.

“I’m not leaving, either.” Scout carefully lays their hand on Sylva’s shoulder, like too much pressure will set off a chain reaction.

“You have to.” Sylva tries to mean it … hopes the emotion in her voice is the right kind of convincing. Scout has always had a plan, always known that they deserved better than harsh words and shoves in the back.

Sylva will not damn them, not in the same way that her country has captured her.

“No,” Scout says, defiant. “We came into Nine together. I’m not leaving it by myself.”

Some terrible, selfish part of Sylva is grateful. When her twin is present, sometimes the boxes in her mind stay closed. Sometimes, it’s possible to breathe for a few, inconsequential hours.

Sometimes, Sylva thinks she can find a way through it. Then, she remembers everything.

The sound of Ten girl’s screams. The exact shade of crimson that spread across the grass when Two boy stabbed that tiny thing from Six. The way Spelt Martin’s teeth turned pink and his eyes rolled back at the end.

Nine will never let you forget, he had told her. It didn’t matter that they were the final two. It didn’t make a difference that he swung first. Maybe it would have, if the terrified girl at the end of the pitchfork had been someone Nine cared about.

Sylva Mayleaf is cursed with a remarkable memory. Now, she fears it will be the thing that does her in.

There is a lake in Victors’ Village, just behind Sylva’s house. Sometimes—when she can’t get the awful, oily-black screams out of her head—she sits beside it.

How many seconds would it take, to sink to the bottom? Would she pass out before the water filled her lungs? Would it be peaceful?

She may be a Victor, but she is also the worst kind of coward. She spends far too much time staring at her escape, and never dares to take it. Somehow, simply knowing that the option exists is enough to keep her breathing even.

When her tributes die in the bloodbath in Forty, then again in Forty-one. When little Maida Young makes it to day three before the mutts do her in. When Panko begs for mercy on the second day of the Forty-third Games.

Sylva holds her breath, closes her eyes, and imagines how freeing it would be to just sink.

Then year forty-seven rolls around, and Daniel Acres is reaped. A moment of silence. The usual deadness in the air. Then a scream.

A sibling, most likely. It takes Sylva back … reminds her of that terrible, ear-splitting swirl of black and grey.

Scout’s name. Sylva’s choice to volunteer. Immediately, she is watching it all replay inside her skull—frame by frame.

She’s split between two places, with the escort drawing the girl’s name, and her brain looping Thirty-nine ten times over. That is so real that when she hears those same words from the Central Square, she thinks it is part of the mental montage.

“I volunteer!”

The escort never manages to get the reaped girl’s name fully out into the open. The replacement sacrifice is fast; she’s so quick on her feet that she’s made it onstage before anyone in Nine can react.

Rachel Acres. Her hair is blonde to his brown, but her eyes are the same, deep green as Daniel’s. They have the same nose—identical chins and similar facial shapes. An ugly, creeping dread consumes Sylva, even before the escort can ask his question.

“Are you two related?” He seems to find a great deal of entertainment value in the prospect, given his barely-concealed smile. “My dear, I’d bet my bow tie that this one’s your brother.”

The volunteer takes both of Daniel’s hands in her own, then graces the Capitol man with her answer.

“Yeah.” She draws her brother into a hug. “He’s my twin. If one of us goes, we go down together.”

All of the blood leaves Sylva’s head. Her entire body goes cold. The air is hot and oppressive, but suddenly, there is nowhere near enough of it. Maybe—if she holds her breath—the awful, floating feeling will carry her away from here. She can’t. She can’t. She can’t she can’t she can’t.

Thirty seconds, or thirty minutes. She loses track. She moves from the stage … ends up inside the Justice Building. Here, the air is as cool as the ice being pressed into her palms. She doesn’t know where it came from; she doesn’t have the words to ask the Peacekeepers.

She curls in on herself … comes back into her body in pieces.

He’s my twin. Her head is throbbing.

If one of us goes, we go down together. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Anything to make her ears stop ringing.

Eighty percent odds of death within the opening minutes. Two of them—from the same family.

Sylva brings both hands to her face. One to each side. They’re still freezing cold—damp with the remnants of the ice, and half-numb from her attempt to hold her breath. The nausea nearly overwhelms her.

All she can see are two perfect, pine boxes. Golden, in a tiny compartment, near the front of a Capitol train. Both nailed shut, with symmetrical, metal plates fixed to the top. Two names. Two more of Nine’s kids doomed to die.

Somehow, she makes it onto the train. The escort gives her two tiny, pale pink pills. Normally, she would question him … question anyone who tried to offer her a way out. Today is the exception.

“For the nerves,” he tells her, and she believes it.

Half an hour later, Sylva can breathe again; there’s an odd, weightless feeling inside her skull. Light. Airy. Sparkling, liquified lavender. For an afternoon, she remembers nothing. It is the greatest peace she will ever know.

If only they would let her have this escape for more than one night.

“You have to get her out.” Daniel says it the following evening, in the space after the Opening Ceremonies. His twin has retreated to her quarters, but it’s clear that he has no interest in doing the same.

“My job is to give you both the best chances you can have,” Sylva counters. “I’ll be helping you and her equally.”

For all the good that will do. She bites the words back … swallows them down with the last of tonight’s Capitol wine.

“I hear you,” Daniel snarls, stepping in close. “But she—she panicked, okay? Heard my name, and couldn’t think. She’s got an apprenticeship at the bakery. Way better than being in the fields. Loves to make those little cakes … the ones with the jam on top? She’s good at it, too.”

Sylva shrugs one shoulder, and hates herself for it. He’s standing too close … triggering a thousand images of knives and pitchforks and getting out.

One pace backwward, then two. Slowly, she uncoils her fingers, and shakes out her hands.

She counts the stalks of wheat stamped across the wallpaper. “My job is to present you equally, when I can.”

Fourteen wheat stalks. One for every tribute she’s lost … or, maybe, just a trick for the mind.

Something ugly takes over Daniel’s body; she sees it happening in real time. A breath forced out through the nose. Hands balling into fists at his sides. An awful, malicious curl of the mouth.

“You’re just as bad as everybody says, huh?” He steps toward her again, one countermove for every inch she claims for herself. “High and mighty, now that you’re a Capitol lapdog, isn’t that right? You don’t give a damn about us. All you wanna do is make yourself look good.”

Of course he would say that. Everyone in Nine says it, until they’re the one who comes home with nothing but broken dreams.

Nine will never let you forget .

The wall presses against her back. Daniel is nearly spitting in her face. For one, horrible second, Sylva thinks about swinging on him.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she says instead. “Now, please, get out of my face.”

Luckily for the both of them, he listens.

Rachel is much gentler when she makes her plea, at the end of the first day of training.

“He thinks I’m in over my head,” she tells Sylva. “I know he thinks I panicked. But I meant it, you know? If one of us goes, we’re going together. And—well—I volunteered to help get him out. He’s always giving things up for me, and he deserves to have a chance, too.”

Sylva can already see where this is going, but she asks the damning question anyway. “What are you trying to say?”

“Get him out.” Rachel rests her elbows on the table. “If you have to pick one of us … save him. Please.”

“I have to choose both of you,” Sylva says. It is the truth; in a year where the two tributes have equal chances, anything else would be reckless.

She needs to see them in the arena. If one of them dies in the bloodbath, there will be no question of who to save.

An ugly, monstrous part of her hopes that it is the case—quick and simple—and the arena makes her decision for her.

The Forty-seventh Games are not quick, merciful, or simple.

Both of her kids make it out of the bloodbath, and Sylva pulls long hours in Victor Central. She spends most of that time huddled inside of one of District Nine’s booths, with an empty chair to her right and three screens glaring back from across the table. Rachel’s camera feed and vitals on the right. The central Games live feeds in the center. Daniel’s statistics on the left.

She comes to know every angle of all three.

Twenty hours on, and four off. She never strays far; she’s abandoned the thought of going upstairs to Nine’s apartment, and spends her periods of rest half-dozing on one of Victor Central’s couches. It’s what all of the decent Outlier mentors do, when they’ve got no one around to spell them.

The arena this year is a horror. Ugly, brown dirt and high, grey stone. Blandly-colored hills and valleys, with no natural food sources or greenery in sight. A perfect, light-blue sky smiles down on the tributes for ten hours of the day. Then, the entire world goes dark.

It is the darkness that hides the threats. Dozens of fuzzy, black-coated weasels that look otherworldly on the night-vision cameras.

Sometime between the Capitol hours of six at night and eight in the morning, they will all come out to play.

On the first night, they capture no one. On the second, half a dozen mutts rip the face off of the sleeping girl from Five. She awakens for just long enough to scream … has a few, precious moments of realization before even that is taken from her.

So much blood. Nearly black under the grotesque night-vision filters. She  takes fifteen minutes to die from something that could have taken ten seconds.

Where’s the fun in that? The Capitol would never be satisfied with something so fascinating ending so quickly.

Sylva closes her eyes, breathes in slowly, and imagines herself at the bottom of a clear, blue lake. No air, and no wish to inhale it. A slow, peaceful escape.

She puts herself there again two nights later, when the mutts find her pair. Daniel’s on watch, and Rachel is dead to the world. He gets in several good hits, before the mutts take to crawling up his pant legs and nipping at his ankles. She never stands a chance.

He is farmer strong, with the good sense to keep himself from going down. They can’t get to his face if he doesn’t fall, or if he keeps them close to the ground. It’s smart, really.

But she has thin wrists and a baker’s hands. Still sturdy from years of work, but less skilled in endurance and agility. It does her no favors to be woken so abruptly from sleep … not when she is slow and clumsy with the attack.

Four of the biggest weasels take an interest in Rachel. Three of them sniff at her body. One goes for the head.

Fluffy, dark paws. Abnormally sharp teeth. Strange, high-pitched yipping sounds that turn grey and staticky in Sylva’s skull. Both of her tributes disappear somewhere between the glint of silver sickles, and the onslaught of greedy mutts.

Sylva imagines herself sinking, sinking, sinking, while both of her tributes try not to die. Going out together, just like they planned.

Twenty minutes, then thirty. She waits. She breathes. No cannons fire. The sky grows light, and the daytime cameras switch on.

Sylva forces herself to look.

Daniel’s uniform has been ripped to shreds, and what remains of it is coated in blood. Sylva can’t see the worst of it, but she’s got a fine enough view of the fifteen or twenty slashes that snake up his arms. He’s conscious—barely—but the same can’t be said for his sister.

Rachel has taken less hits, but the ones she has been dealt are far worse. A bite through the hand, that nearly took two of her fingers with it. Another through her cheek … taking out all of the skin and muscle, and giving Sylva an awful view of eight back teeth. Her teeth. Her teeth. They’re already turning pink with the blood.

Spelt Martin’s teeth turned pink before he died.

A thousand images, stacked over each other like mismatched photographs. The screaming. The color, red-red-red.

She gasps. The air won’t go in. Her throat closes. It’s a reflex as sure and fast as muscle memory.

Another second, and she’s on her feet. Then she’s not. She falls. Her knees buckle like a string has been cut from behind them.

The carpet burns her palms as she hits the ground.

He’s my twin.

If one of us goes, we go down together.

A million different fragments flicker in her head. Scout’s arms around her back. The crushing pressure of her own hand raised in the air. Scout’s scream. An arena filled with sunflowers. The blood.

She hears it all. She sees the coffins. Two names etched in silver. Not again.  Her ears are ringing. Her skull is splitting.

She claws at the ground, scrapes at her wrist … searching, grasping, reaching for anything real. Her fingers close around the hem of her sleeve. She yanks it to her mouth and bites down—hard.

Fabric between her teeth. Pressure in her jaw. The taste of sweat and metal and dust. It anchors her. Just barely.

She clamps down on her sleeve, her cheek, the tip of her tongue … locks her jaw so tightly that no sound could ever make its way out. There is blood in her mouth, blood on her tongue. Not nearly enough to compensate for the amount on her tributes’ screens.

She needs to stand up.

Her free hand finds the chair, then the table. She curls her fingers tight around the wood. Then, she tries to force herself to think.

The vital statistics stare back at her. Daniel, alive enough to still be in the orange. Rachel, every number on her display scrolling by in horrific, fresh-blood red.

Sylva has time, but she’s running out of it. Two tributes, and only enough funds to help one. Both twins, begging her to save the other.

She spits the sleeve out of her mouth, hovers her left thumb over a keypad, and grants Rachel Acres her wish.

Save him. Sylva does.

---

Daniel Acres never forgives her.

He comes out of Forty-seven a survivor, then spends a concerning amount of time buying alcohol. He wastes even more hours shut away in his house. Curtains drawn. Lights off. Sylva wonders if it reminds him of the weasels—of Rachel—and the last night he spent being a twin. She thinks that maybe, that is the point.

When he is forced into public, it’s a nightmare. For her, and the rest of Nine. The district despises him, but Daniel detests her enough to make up for anything Nine could do.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he snarls at her, on the way back after Forty-eight. “Why didn’t you tell me to just let her die?”

Chia. She had been sixteen, with three younger siblings and a strong fighting spirit. Daniel wanted to send her into the bloodbath. Sylva forced him to give his mentee a chance.

It hadn’t mattered; the girl from One still found her, sleeping at the base of a tree.

“She had a shot.” Sylva walks backwards down the hallway, unwilling to turn away from her former charge. “You’re supposed to give her one. We—we give them the best chance they can have.”

And, maybe, Chia Hughes would have made a decent mentoring partner. Maybe, she would have directed her hatred where it belonged, instead of finding the most accessible scapegoat instead.

Daniel’s mouth twists down on one side, and his arms cross tightly over his chest.

“Yeah? Well, she’s dead now. Guess you’re stuck with me.”

It’s on the lighter end, as far as his commentary goes. Sylva lets it slide.

She becomes good at letting things slide, at least when they come from Daniel. When he yells at her … screams so ferociously that the Peacekeepers show up. When he drinks himself into a rage, and starts throwing empty bottles across the street.

She lets it go, and imagines herself somewhere far, far away. She wanted a mentoring partner, didn’t she? At least she isn’t doing this alone anymore.

Then the Quell arrives, and everything is ten times worse than it normally is.

Back to the basics becomes the theme. Sylva isn’t old enough to remember those days … cuffed tributes and harsh treatments. This year, she’s surrounded by it.

Four children, all from the farming class. All thrown onto an ancient-looking train with dull silver chains around their wrists.

Midge, Clayton, Ryan, Kerna. Sylva splits them down the middle … one young tribute and one older kid for each mentor. She takes Midge and Clayton, and does her best not to picture them both dead.

She’s seventeen. He’s fourteen. Both of them are too angry to listen.

There’s a certain instinct you develop, when you’ve been at the business for long enough. A horrible, bone-deep dread, that says this will not be the year. Sylva recognizes it. She sees the truth, clear as day, in her two chosen tributes. Still, she does everything she can to encourage them. Nothing she says can make them hear her.

So much hate. The same, terrible kind that festers in Nine. The same kind that turned her one surviving tribute into a monster.

Maybe it’s best if she lets these two go.

It is Kerna who comes to find her, at the end of the second training day. She’s the last one to return, nearly fifteen minutes after the others have gone to hide away in their rooms.

Daniel is responsible for her on the books, but the small girl doesn’t try to seek him out. She gets off the elevator, comes into Nine’s apartment, and throws herself at Sylva.

Thirteen years old. Wide, brown eyes filled with tears. Sylva catches her, no questions asked.

Kerna whimpers … a string of wordless nothings that are too mixed up to understand. Sylva guides her to the couch, and sits down with the trembling tribute still half-wrapped in her arms.

“Shh,” Sylva soothes, rubbing a hand up and down Kerna’s back. “You’re okay. I’ve got you. Just breathe for me.”

Kerna does, in quick, choppy intervals. It’s far from what Sylva’s looking for, but it’s a start.

Sylva shifts her gently, so Kerna’s tucked under her arm and not just crumpled in her lap. The girl’s face is damp—flushed—all blotchy cheeks and a bright red nose. Sylva doesn’t push, not yet.

She counts, and Kerna follows.

“Breathe in, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four.”

Kerna shivers, draws her knees up, and—slowly—begins to take deeper breaths.

“There we go,” Sylva murmurs, brushing a strand of hair from the girl’s face. “That’s it. Just keep breathing. Nice and easy.”

Kerna hitches in another sob. Sylva resists the urge to shush her. Some kinds of pain, she’s learned, won’t be soothed out of someone. It has to burn itself through first.

A moment passes. Then another.

When Kerna’s hands finally uncurl, Sylva takes one without ceremony and rests it between them.

She says nothing. Just holds it.

The silence stretches long. The hum of the Capitol air system buzzes faintly behind the walls.

“He smashed it,” Kerna whispers. “Panache. From One.”

Panache Barker. The younger brother of One’s newest Victor. The menacing brother of the broken, dead-eyed girl. All of the mentors have learned everything they need to know about Panache.

Sylva doesn’t flinch, though her fingers tighten around Kerna’s clammy hand.

“What did he do?”

“He ripped it off my neck and—” The girl’s voice cracks. “He told me he’d kill me first.”

Sylva exhales slowly through her nose. She wants to scream, or punch something. But that wouldn’t help Kerna.

“Your token?” Sylva asks softly.

Kerna nods. She reaches up with her free hand … turns the sunflower charm so Sylva can see. A thousand little hairline cracks. Partially filled in with sticky, white paste.

Someone’s clearly tried to fix it, but not well enough to hold for long.

“It was from my sister. She made it for me. She—she’s a little—well, she can’t talk yet. She’s eight, so people think that’s wrong. It—it’s the only thing I have.”

Sylva swallows. She doesn’t dare to say I’m sorry. It sounds too much like pity, and Kerna deserves more than that.

Instead, she leans in and asks, “What’s she like?”

Kerna looks up at her, startled. She’s probably used to Daniel, and his inability to care about anything these days. No wonder it’s hard for her to imagine a mentor wanting to know. Her lip wobbles again.

“She likes animals more than most people. Like, bugs and frogs and stuff. She’s weird.”

“Weird’s good,” Sylva says. “Weird means she’s thinking in ways no one else does.”

Kerna sniffs. She nods.

“The blonde girl from Twelve tried to fix it.” She rubs her thumb over the delicate, yellow clay. “She says I need to ask my mentor for glue and—”

“Do you want Daniel to help with the glue, or—” Sylva sees the answer, even before Kerna’s heard the question.

Kerna makes a face. “No.”

“Didn’t think so.”

That gets a tiny, crumpled laugh. A hopeful, springtime yellow. Not entirely solid, but strong enough to come through all the same. Sylva holds onto it like it’s gold … lets it sit between them for a minute.

Oh, Kerna. So gentle, so different from the snarling, furious tributes that have been coming through from Nine. Delicate, pure. Dead in the bloodbath, more likely than not.

Still, Sylva can’t turn off that need to help her.

“You can always come to me.” She brushes a finger gently over Kerna’s knuckle. “I know I’m not your official mentor, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

Kerna leans into her side, wide-eyed and shaking, but finally calmed.

“Okay,” she mumbles.

Sylva lets go of Kerna’s fingers, and offers her a small smile.

“All right,” she declares. “I’m going to go find some glue.”

It takes several minutes, but Sylva fulfills her promise. She comes back with a miniature tube of Capitol-quality glue, far better than the mess of salt, water, and flour that’s used in a pinch.

She nudges Kerna to the dining room … painstakingly helps her fill in the cracks with a tiny, soft-tipped brush.

“You have a sister, don’t you?” The girl asks her, while they’re waiting for the end result to dry.

Sylva considers—hesitates—and decides that Kerna’s soft enough to take the truth in with kindness.

“I have a twin,” she explains. “Scout doesn’t feel right being a sister, but brother doesn’t feel like them, either.”

“Oh, okay.” Kerna nods. She’s caught between several questions; Sylva can see it in her face. She nibbles at her lip, and finally settles on the one that’s most important. “Did … did you write a letter for them? In case—you know—in case you died?”

“No.” Sylva swirls the brush around and around in its paper cup of water, trying to get all of the paste to wash off. “If I could do it all over, I would. Just in case.”

Kerna’s shoulders rise—quick—on a sigh. She glances up, at the wheat stalks on the wallpaper. Then down, at her small, callused hands.

“Would you help me write one … for my sister? She … her name’s Prairie.”

“Course I can.” Sylva could never tell a tribute like Kerna no.

The last of the free time before dinner is spent drafting and rearranging. Too many words from Kerna, and not enough ways to say them. Sylva is reminded why she never wrote a letter for Scout; how do you fit an entire lifetime’s worth of best wishes and hope into such a short space?

Kerna tries, but trying is almost never enough in Nine.

Dinner brings talk of an alliance … nearly thirty tributes strong even without Nine. Midge and Ryan want the safety in numbers. Kerna and Clayton say it shouldn’t be a group choice. Sylva agrees, but Daniel is too much of a threat to the tributes.

“Either you all go together, or you’re all dead,” he tells them. “With this field, either you want the shield, or you want to die. Doesn’t matter either way to me.”

It matters to them … so much so that the younger ones drop their heads, focus on their food, and tell Midge to make the choice for all of them.

Midge says to join the Newcomers.

Two hours later, Sylva’s on her way down to Three’s floor with half a dozen sponsorship papers and an alliance contract.

Beetee Latier takes her contract, and her papers. He completes them promptly … returns them with the boxes checked and the signatures printed. Then, he asks her to go outside.

It’s said in the most unassuming way, but something about it sends an ominous, blue dread settling into Sylva’s bones. Everything about this year feels wrong, though. So, Sylva says yes.

Outside is a small, purple bench facing an eagle-shaped fountain. The sound of it takes Sylva back to Nine … calm, listless waters, and a lake that’s at least twenty feet deep.

She drives her nails into her palm. She can do that later, when the threats are gone and the tributes’ deaths are done and over with.

“My four are with yours, and Twelve’s and the rest of those kids. What else do you want?” The words come out half-clipped, and Sylva forces in a breath. She’s starting to sound like Nine … like Daniel. Something about the Quell, twice as many tributes, and Kerna’s inevitable death is getting to her.

“There is a plan to drown the arena.”

He’s only four years older than she is, but right now, the difference might as well be forty. She can see the cracks in the composure. Shoulders held too tightly. Fingers tapping against one another. The hypervigilant, unsettled look that comes with hours upon hours of being awake.

Sylva has seen it before—in bits and pieces—when Three makes it far in the Games. She’s never seen it quite this bad.

“What are you trying to tell me?” Sylva presses her tongue against her teeth, just hard enough to feel the sting of it. “Drown the arena to save your son?”

If Panache Barker is a headline name, Ampert Latier is a superstar. The Victor’s son. Twelve years old, and undoubtedly reaped to die.

Sylva sees the emotion hit in real time. The weight of unimaginable grief. It forces Beetee’s chin down and his shoulders up.

“It’s far too late for that.” He takes off his glasses … wipes them with a sleeve before returning them to their position. “Ampert’s death is nearly guaranteed.”

“I’m sorry,” Sylva whispers, because she is. She knows how it feels to have year after year of hopeless cases. She can only imagine how it would feel to have one be her child. That might be the thing to do her in.

“I am, too.” Beetee studies his hands, then the fountain. Anything, it seems, to keep him from looking at her.

“What do you want me to do?” Sylva asks again, when the fidgeting and avoidance starts to make her brain itch.

The answer makes her head spin. Replace your tributes’ tokens with explosives. According to Beetee, this part of the plan is essential.

Sylva nearly laughs, because nobody’s ever called a Nine essential for anything. Then, she wants to cry … because the tokens are the last bit of back home that her kids have.

This could be her chance … the first one in a long time … to fight back. Against the Games. Against the Capitol.

Maybe, Nine could be something, without the Games and the statistics and the dozens of dead children.

But one of them has stolen her heart, and earned too much compassion to make this easy. She is upstairs, still breathing and talking and feeling for now.

Deep, brown eyes. A bone-crushing hug, and endless tears.

It was from my sister. A sunflower smashed into a million pieces, and a half-decent repair job.

She made it for me. A little white tube, and an hour’s worth of gentle brushstrokes.

It’s the only thing I have.

She can’t take that last bit of home away from Kerna, because that matters more than a plan that’s doomed to fail.

“I’m sorry.” Sylva’s hand hovers in the air between them, halfway to Beetee’s shoulder. “I can’t. I—I can’t do that to them.”

Not when all of them—Midge, Clayton, Ryan, Kerna, and his Ampert—will die anyway. At least hers can go out with something that’s theirs. She rises from the bench, turns her back to the sleep-deprived Three, and goes back upstairs.

Kerna dies first. Last place. Fifty-two seconds in. Skewed on the blade of Panache’s sword.

At least her body’s in one piece, and her token isn’t splattered with blood. Not like Midge and Clayton, who find their way to death with faces that are hardly recognizable.

All of them, dead. Four more worthless Nines, left behind in the beautiful, green grass.

Sylva will never forget it … four little mounds of yellow, just as vivid as the flowers growing back home. They’ll plant the seeds around their graves, too. If the kids are lucky, sunflowers will rise up around their headstones.

At least, their way out was quick.

Daniel is in a rage all the way back to Nine. He’s always bad, but this year’s the worst that it’s ever been.

Sylva wants to lose her composure, to feel everything that’s trapped inside of her because of this Quell. She can’t do that on the train, with a mentoring partner who requires constant supervision and talking down.

He leaves her to deal with the coffins on her own; he is off and jogging back to the Village as soon as the doors open.

She stands frozen on the platform, staring at the handful of people who cared enough to show up.

An elderly woman, who says she’s here for Clayton. What she really means is she’s here for the coffin.

A tall, brown-eyed man, and a tiny little girl pressed in at his side.

“Did my Kerna really go quick?” he asks her.

The weight of the question nearly chokes her. Most of them don’t come here. Most of them don’t ask.

“Yes.” The word gets trapped halfway up her throat, and Sylva’s forced to clear it to get the sound out. “Yes, she did.”

The small girl wraps both arms around her … holds her tightly in place.

Her name is Prairie.

Sylva strokes the girl’s back, just like she did for Kerna.

“Your sister was so brave, Prairie.” She lets the child stay glued to her waist … brings one hand to the back of her head as a comfort. “She—she wrote you a letter, too. I can … I’ll bring it … to the—”

She sees the word clear as day in her head, in neat, white letters. Funeral. A few days from now, when the grief has had time to settle in. She can bring it then. She can’t do that now.

Kerna’s father draws his surviving child back—carefully—like he’s afraid that moving too fast will harm this one, too.

“Thank you, ma’am.” He meets Sylva’s eyes with something close to respect. “I think … Kerna … you were a good mentor to her.”

Sylva can’t tell him the truth; it does no good to explain technicalities and being on the books.

She shakes his hand, then turns away.

The sun is nearly below the horizon by the time the coffins and final paperwork have let her go. When at last she is free, she runs.

Shoes against pavement, then gravel in the Village. Breaths that stutter and wheeze. Late-summer heat that makes her head pound. The agony of it all is what keeps her on her feet.

She stumbles through her front door, then drops to a half-crouch. Hands on her knees. Breathing so hard it makes her cough.

Maybe, if she had said yes and not no, one of hers would have made it out. Perhaps, they would have been valuable enough to be protected.

Little Kerna might have seen her sister again. Sylva might have finally watched the Capitol pay.

What if this was it? Her one and only chance to give them all a way out?

What if she’s doomed Nine to years, decades, centuries of bloodbath deaths and monstrous survivors?

A blonde head appears from the kitchen. Two strong, familiar arms curl around Sylva’s back.

“I saw.” Scout’s voice is warm as honey; the words wrap around her without judgement. “I watched it all and … Sylvie, I’m so sorry.”

Scout hasn’t called her that since they were eight, and hearing it now steals the last of her resolve.

Horrible, full-body sobs that turn to screaming. A decade of mentoring, and for the first time, she fully lets herself break into pieces.

---

Miller Segal makes it out of the Fifty-seventh Games. Another ugly, raving Victor who would have been better off dead.

His district partner has a limp … weakness on one side of her body from an accident that happened during her birth. Miller cares for her, Sylva can tell.

She tells Miller to do what he can, but to prioritize his safety. Daniel tells the district partner to jump off her platform.

She does it—nice and quick—with fifty-nine left on the countdown clock.

Miller’s standing right next to her; he watches her step off with her strong foot, then her weaker side follows behind. Landmines, set to a remote trigger. One press of a button in Games Control, and she’s blown sky high.

That is the thing that makes Miller Segal stop caring.

When he comes out, he’s always talking about the feeling. The rumble of the ground. The percussive blast that made his ears ring for a good half hour after. The smell. The taste of blood and smoke in the air.

He wishes he never came home, and blames Sylva for showing him how to survive.

Two mentoring partners, and she’s still in this entirely alone. Two mentees who wish they had died. One Victor, who’s got the means and motive, but no courage to do it.

Miller and Daniel spend ten years alternating who is on the job, trying to kill their tributes quickly. Sylva does her best to find one who can handle surviving the arena.

Year after year, death after death. Nine does not see a win, but Sylva sees the movement beneath the surface.

Never from her Victors, but from those in her circle. The Elevens and the Threes. The two surviving mentors from Eight. There is talk of trying again … little acts of rebellion buried deep inside the Games.

A girl from Two in the Sixty-fourth Games, who sprinkles bread crumbs over her district partner’s body. Two years later, a girl from Eleven, who sings a harvest-time nursery rhyme to soothe the Three boy into internal sleep.

Three boy’s district partner makes it out … screaming and raving about how she failed him.

Evelyn. Beetee and Wiress have to sedate her for the interviews, lest she say something to damn them all.

Sylva’s never quite sure if the tributes are growing more human, or if the Games are becoming less routine.

The Capitol edits out the danger … rearranges the footage to hide the singing and the caring and the feeling. The people forget, but the Victors remember.

Quiet meetings. Hushed words in the stairwell. Sylva watches it all. She never asks to be included. Being involved might be even more painful than standing aside.

Seventy-two sees a tribute’s sister drawn from the bowl in Three. Two family members in less than ten years. If hehad been a Victor, maybe her selection would make sense. But he was not.

Evelyn watched her district partner die. This year, she’s trying to save his sister’s life.

And she does.

Curie Louvet. Wicked smart, and branded as the next Finnick Odair solely because of her age. Not trained. Not prepared. Thrown into the darkest side of the Capitol, with little warning of what she’s in for.

Being made an example of, because of her district’s sins, her mentor’s sharp tongue, or giving her opponents an ugly death in a coward’s way. Someone so delicate, paying so severely for trying to survive. Everyone but the Capitol can see through to the truth.

Three’s newest Victor is a ghost by the time the Victory Tour rolls around. Sylva watches her—first in Twelve, then Eleven and Ten—giving monotone speeches with her head bowed over her hands. Not reading from note cards. Perhaps, it would be better if she was.

Evelyn has brought her kids with her. Twins—a boy and a girl—three years old. Watching them nudge and poke each other makes Sylva’s brain go fuzzy around the edges.

It’s a Victory-Tour perk for mentors … the ability to bring your immediate family along. Get a Victor out, and bring your loved ones with you to experience the districts. It’s a terrible cover for the suffering is the same no matter where you go.

“Do you think they’ll get along with Cecelia’s girls?” The twenty-something asks after District Nine’s meager dinner. “I just … they’re so bored on this Tour. Maybe getting to play with someone their own age will help.”

“They’ll be fine,” Sylva assures. “Crewel and Damask are old enough to appreciate the company. You might wanna remind them to be gentle, though.”

Evelyn nods. Sylva feels an awful, humorless laugh bubbling up at her own suggestion.

Be gentle. Why would that matter now, when all of these children will be dead in fifteen years?

“Don’t you ever worry about them?” Sylva demands, watching the matched set of Threes chase each other in a circle. “Ten or twelve more years, and they’ll be up on that stage.”

Evelyn glances over at them; one twin is glued to each of her baby Victor’s hands. “No.”

Sylva shakes her head … wonders, for a moment, how a Three could be so stupid.

“You’ve got one of each.” She does her best to make Evelyn see reason. “I’m sure your mentor has told you what happens to Victors’ kids.”

Both of them, in the same Games. It would be the Capitol’s wildest dream.

Evelyn has the nerve to laugh. “It won’t happen.” She says it as surely as she might speak her own name. “If I can help it, there won’t be a Games in ten years.”

Sylva reaches out slowly … grabs the taller woman fiercely by the wrist. “You can’t say that here.”

Evelyn shrugs. “I can’t?” she counters. “Or they don’t want me to?”

“Both.”

“Fine,” Evelyn draws back, freeing herself from Sylva’s grip. “But … I can say that they want Curie to come up with new toxins for the arenas. I can probably use it to our advantage. Beetee’s been working on Capitol tech for years. We’ve got Victors now. It’s not just a bunch of kids in a Quell. There are more of us … Six, Seven, Eight, Eleven. Twelve, too, and some of Four. We have a chance this time.”

Sylva stares back at her; she remembers what it was like to believe in a way out.

“I wanted to leave Nine once, a long time back.” Sylva spits the words out lowly, while the upbeat dancing song can serve as cover. “My twin and me. Then their name got pulled, and you’ve seen enough to know how that went.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Evelyn nods. “And Beetee tried to get you to help him in Fifty.”

“He asked me to replace the kid’s tokens with explosives.” The defensiveness has not faded, even two decades later.

“And you couldn’t do it.”

“I wouldn’t do it,” Sylva corrects.

“Because it was all they had, right?” Evelyn tilts her head. “Take away the token, and the tributes don’t have anything to remind them where they came from.”

“How did you know—”

Evelyn’s hand finds Sylva’s shoulder—quick—before it’s gone again. “Because I’d do the same thing. It’s not fair to make them give up even more, for a plan that could kill them anyway.”

“What would you have me do?” Sylva wonders.

“Nothing.” Evelyn shrugs. “Well … not exactly. Just … agree to be on the right side, I guess.”

Sylva can see them all; sixty-four dead tributes, and two who might as well be.

Daniel and Miller. Turned into monsters by the weight of their own trauma.

Rachel and Chia. Both fighters, but doomed to lose.

Kerna. Too gentle to ever survive, but smart enough to leave her mentor for one who cared.

Nearly enough District Nine failures to fill three arenas. All following in the footsteps of one who’s too scared to try.

Being standoffish and reluctant has gotten Sylva nowhere … earned her years and years of losing ground.

Crisp, blue water. Imagining how it feels to sink. Maybe, one day, she should consider what it feels like to live.

“Ask me again.” The words come out small—hesitant. The same turbulent sea foam color that’s trapped inside of her. “When you have a plan … and a way to finish it. Then … ask me again.”

Evelyn holds her hand in the space between them, palm up. “I will, if you’ll think about actually saying yes.”

Sylva takes Evelyn’s hand … shakes it firmly. “I will.”

It is the most she can promise.

Maybe, the ghosts of sixty-four children will give her the strength to follow through.

Notes:

Saved my rambly rant for the end … so it wouldn’t keep you from getting at the chapter.

I can’t see Nine … especially with how Kerna reacts to her broken token … going along with the rebel plan we see in SotR. Replacing something that’s clearly cared for? That just feels like using those tributes as plot devices or cannon fodder; one is far worse than the other, but neither felt right to me and my verse.

So … Nine is still the standoffish, angry district, and though they join the alliance, their tributes aren’t used to bring in the explosives.

Just one change in a world that looks a little different over here.

Comments, kudos … such a delectable dessert! I notice and appreciate them all, so don’t be shy. I don’t bite … unless you do first. Feed a starving writer! ;)

If you have an interest in Hunger Games fanfiction, or the things that go down in canon, consider joining me and the other folks over at the SYOT Verses discord server. It’s a fun little corner of the world, where we yell about our characters, chat about life, and occasionally do challenges. Most of the people there don’t bite.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of Speed the Collapse
• Part 1 of StC-Universe Fics