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Evening Tide
by Fox in the Starsbased on The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
1: Reaping Day
I'm in my nightmare again.I'm a little way out to sea, on what must be a shallow rock because I'm standing in water up to my chest, looking shoreward at District 4 where it slopes down to the ocean in the moonlight. The flashes from the lighthouse catch in the ghostly smoke from the Cannery behind the hill and pick out the silhouette of the Justice Building. Further along the crest are the outlines of the mayor's mansion, the shops on the square, and Mags' house at the top of the Victor's Village. There are lights in her windows and in the windows of the other victors' houses where they zigzag down toward the beach, but they look like a few lonely candles off to the side of the crowded orange lights in the fishermen's houses that spill down the slope to the sea. The glow shimmers off the water, catching in between itself and its reflection the shadows of the docks, the black shapes of the boats all in for the night. I can pick out the light from the window of my parents' house and the shadow of their boat. I can even find my own house in the Victor's Village even though there's no light there.There's no sound except the waves and the distant echoes from shore, but I'm not alone. Below the surface, there are other bodies in the water with me; I can feel them brush against me and just barely see them as pale shadows silently circling. If I try to move, one of them nudges me back. If I start to float up, one of them gently anchors me. If the current pushes at me, they hold me up against it. I can't count them, but I know there are exactly twenty-three of them. I can't see their faces, but I know who they are. They of all people ought to be attacking me. They ought to pull me under and drown me, but they never do. They just hold me here while I look toward home.Eventually I wake up feeling vaguely-but-deeply disturbed, just like every other time I've had this nightmare in the past three years — since I won the Sixty-Fifth Hunger Games.I know I'm supposed to have better nightmares than that. The trainers used to take us — one at a time, no reason to rub it in the Peacekeepers' faces with a group tour — for interviews with the victors, and if we were left alone together some of them would tell me about spending every night trapped in the arena and waking up screaming. But no, I just have this. If they could put it on television, no one would even know it was about the Games except me. Some of the details change, like how much light is on the shore, how choppy the water is or how high — sometimes it's as low as my knees, sometimes like just now it's as high as my chest — but mostly it's always the same, nothing to scream about. At first I didn't even know why it bothered me. Usually it comes a few times a week. Lately it's been almost every night, but I've come to expect that when the Reaping gets close.Today is the day. The first blue light of morning is showing through the window. Between the nightmare and whatever I'm feeling about the Reaping, it's no use trying to go back to sleep.I get up, open the window, take a deep breath that smells like dew and brine, and look out at the opposite view from the one in my nightmare — not in toward shore but out to sea, not clear moonlight but thick haze that gives the lighthouse a soft, pulsing halo. If I lean out and look to the side I can see the waterfront scattered with tiny, distant figures of people, fewer than on a normal day but going about some kind of business. The young "dock rats" are already combing the beaches and shallows for anything that will get them a few coins, begging the few fishermen out this morning for handouts or odd jobs. Two Peacekeepers stand guard by the gibbets, but the nooses and hanging cages are empty; the Reaping is enough excitement for today, and they'd rather show the television audience a pretty seaside where everyone is behaving.Some boats are on the way out, fading into the fog. Out further than I can see this morning they can do some fishing and make it back in time. Out further than I can see on a clear day, the fishing is better, but even without the Reaping to get back to, you wouldn't go too far. Somewhere out there is the Line, the minefield the Capitol built to keep us from sailing away in search of some better place across the sea. In thick fog it would be dangerous even if they kept it marked the way they're supposed to, but the warning buoys are constantly coming loose and washing ashore and are never replaced unless we win the Games; three years after my victory, most of it is an invisible deathtrap in any weather.And if there's something to the stories people tell about the Sirens, if there really are beautiful fish-tailed women out there beyond the Line singing to lure people to their deaths, then I think this silence, where every lonely seabird's cry rings through the damp air... I think this morning it would be too easy to hear them.I see the familiar silhouette of my parents' boat among the ones heading out. I haven't spoken to my parents in almost a year, but I always look for them and for the boat that was half my home growing up. This window doesn't offer a view of the other half, the neat little house halfway up the slope.Halfway up the slope wasn't only our literal address, but also where my family stood in District 4 — and where District 4 stands in Panem altogether. Not so poor you can't afford to have pride, not so rich you can afford not to have it. In our own case, we had our own boat and could keep it in trim. The food was simple but always enough; Mother would even bring home a bottle of wine at New Years and a small cake for my birthday. And there was enough left over for the friendly "loans" people like us were always trading back and forth to keep each other out of the clutches of the bankers — or of my parents' specially-chosen enemy, the Boatman.I grew up seeing what he did to people. End up renting one of his floating coffins and you'd never catch enough to bail yourself out of the bills, let alone the repairs that you did for him at your own expense because your whole family would be held liable if the thing sank. You'd just keep struggling in false hope until you went under and he owned you. Sometimes he'd come walking along the docks to lord it over his victims and taunt the independent owners with "business propositions." My father never answered him with anything but a scowl and utterly forbade me to speak to him.I grew up seeing all the alternatives to our place on the slope, because down at the docks everyone was mixed together. I knew the people further up from us, who could afford sonar for their boats and didn't have to worry so much about the Line. I knew a lot more people further down, the ones who didn't eat so well, who had to risk putting off repairs or struggle with shoddy nets, who fell into bank debts or ended up renting. When I heard that unmistakable khoom from over the horizon, I knew who it was that didn't come back, and sometimes I'd seen them starting to founder in debt, seen something in their face as if they could hear the Sirens all the way from shore. I even knew the dock rats who lived right at the water's edge. According to my parents, you were allowed to feed them if they were small and well-behaved or hire the larger well-behaved ones for odd jobs as long as you didn't pay them too much. I wasn't supposed to hang around with them, trading jokes and diving for a few extra coins' worth of shellfish, but I still did, and I knew their names, too — the ones who vanished to the Cannery or worse, got old enough to be targets when the Peacekeepers got bored and picked some poor, hungry person from the water's edge to hang for poaching.The trainers always wanted us in the front row at hangings. They didn't make us kill poor kids for practice like I've heard they do in District 2, but they wanted us to get used to watching people die. "Don't close your eyes," mine would tell me. "Don't look away." And I didn't, but sometimes my own throat felt sore for days.And my parents would just shake their heads. They might have been the only people in the district who could honestly say they were innocent of poaching, just catching a fish and eating it. We were well enough off to safely get away with it — unless we went too far and kept a swordshark or something — but that way, even as they resented the Peacekeepers like everyone else, they could still shake their heads at the condemned.We could even afford that kind of halfway-up-the-slope pride and its odd rules. You never took anything more at the dock than was due for your catch as weighed, even if you knew the scales were rigged. You never asked to be given anything, even by people who owed you. Those friendly loans could never be called "gifts," but there was never more than a token expectation of repayment; help in kind was expected, but you asked for it as a loan rather than asking to be paid back. In fact, if someone made a point of settling accounts with you it was practically a snub, as if you were a banker and they wanted rid of you.My parents would never even ask for anything from the trainers, who would have been happy to give them whatever they wanted in the name of keeping me well-fed and who were "borrowing" the most precious thing in the world, or at least they would have said so at the time. When the trainers came asking for their only child, no one would have blamed them for refusing. They didn't need to accept as a ticket out of financial ruin, and they looked down on anyone who would. But it was a proud thing, and for my parents, pride was everything. I was six years old, old enough to admire the victors and the older trainees but too young to understand the danger.Reaping Day feels much more complicated now than it did then, when I was innocent enough to be taken in by the pageantry and applause. It might be more complicated even than in the years after that, when I came to grasp the whole strange mix of hope and dread, resentment and pride, and to realize that I was headed straight into its jaws.Then the year I was fourteen, it wasn't complicated at all; it was terrifying. I wasn't one of the eager ones to begin with — although looking back, I tried so hard to be a good sport that everyone might have thought I was — and then my trainer took me aside and told me to volunteer that year, even though we usually don't put people up until they're sixteen. I knew I couldn't argue; the whole district turns its back on a "refuser" who takes the training and the promise of food and then doesn't raise their hand when told. When I told my parents, they were proud that I was apparently so skilled for my age. They didn't realize that the trainers were banking on my good looks and didn't want to risk losing them in the next growth spurt. And they didn't realize that I might as well have told them I was going to the arena. Tully — our Capitol escort, Catullus Seabright — always makes a show of putting all the volunteers' names into his hat and pulling one out, but you can tell it isn't really random. Anyone different or special is all but certain to be picked, and for a "Career" district to send a fourteen-year-old with a pretty face and a voice that hadn't changed yet? I suppose it was irresistible.What happened after that everyone's seen in reruns; they seem to replay my Games more than most. But there's one thing they never show, although I'm sure it's on tape somewhere — the first thing Mags told me when she started coaching me:
"There's a way I can give you a good chance, but you'll pay for it as long as you live."
I've never forgotten the exact words I agreed to.My parents have disappeared into the haze. They could even make a full day of it. If they weren't at the Reaping, the Peacekeepers would surely let it slide, but I imagine they'll be there on principle.I can't just stare out the window forever.After morning exercise and a bath, I gel my hair into the carefully-disheveled look my stylist loves and lay out the clothes he sent along for today. They're not so shameless as to be inappropriate for the occasion, but the neck is cut low to offer a tantalizing glimpse of my chest, the pants are conspicuously fitted... It reminds me of what I wore for that first interview with Caesar Flickerman. Back then, we knew what we were going for, but at fourteen, you had to be careful — "alluring, willing, yet innocent" was the angle. "Innocent" is long gone, but today "dignified" is standing in its place.I put the outfit on, then cover it up with a robe. At first I tell myself it's to protect the clothes over breakfast, but it also makes it easier to look in the mirror. It's strange; in the Capitol, or in a television interview, I wouldn't think twice about wearing this — or rather I would and I'd be sure to make the most of it. Yesterday when the camera crew came to my house for a pre-Reaping interview, I showed them the new indoor swimming pool and invited the audience to my "fishbowl" wearing practically nothing. It's the thought of standing in front of District 4 dressed this way. Really, there's nothing left to lose, but I'd rather put on a robe and not think about it.If the fog holds, I'll have an excuse to wear a coat until we're on the train. I take out a bridge coat: dark blue, double-breasted wool, mid-thigh length. If the fog doesn't hold — and it probably won't — I'll be baked like a clam, but that seems like an acceptable price. I could just put on something else, but I have to pick my battles with my stylist; a reveal on the train should be enough to appease him, and he could have done a lot worse...The clock strikes seven, time to start breakfast. While I'm cooking, I hear the familiar sound of Mags unlocking my door and letting herself in. She's already in her chair when I bring out two plates of our district bread with smoked fish, eggs, and sliced oranges — the same breakfast she used to send me in the arena. This is the routine we've fallen into in the past year, even though my house is out of her way.At least it's not as far out of her way as it might have been; usually the houses are given out in order from the top of the hill downward, but I got one further up — halfway up the slope is still the literal address — because the victor who lived here before me had committed suicide. Both of them had, in fact; I'm the third tenant, because of course the Capitol wouldn't listen to anyone's pleas to leave it empty. When I first moved in, some of the other victors warned me about the "curse." Back then, they kept asking if I was all right and telling me to call them if I ever started feeling depressed, but those days are long gone."Looking forward to seeing everyone?" I ask as I sit down with Mags."Some of 'em," she says, smiling.I haven't had much time to get to know the other districts' victors, but already I see them as a wider version of our own Victor's Village. A few are almost normal. Some have problems with drugs or alcohol. Most are somehow off, but not so bad, even friendly. Then there are the ones everyone warns new victors about and tries to cover for — but Mags doesn't mean them, she's smiling at what a mismatched bunch her friends are. They talk on the telephone sometimes, but we can't visit other districts, so this is the only time in the year she gets to see them.The rest of breakfast passes quietly; the two of us have been doing this for so long we don't need to say much. When it's time to leave, Mags obviously notices me exchanging the robe for the coat, but she still doesn't say anything. She doesn't have to.Outside, the fog has nearly burned off; I'm baking in the coat, but I've endured worse. I carry all our bags to the train, where the porters have to insist on taking them from me, then we walk back along the side of the already-crowded square. The shops are all decked with banners and bunting, the band is practicing in their pavilion, and people are already selling funnel cakes, cotton candy, grilled eel with a special sweet-salty-spicy sauce, and deep-fried everything. Reaping Day here isn't as spectacular as it is in 1 and 2, but it's not dreary like in the Outer districts; in them it must be terrifying for everyone, with no trainees shielding the other kids.The chairs, the microphone, and the Reaping Balls are all standing ready on the platform that extends out from the steps of the Justice Building. The cameramen are setting up; the massive main camera is in place, and they're testing out the hovercameras before turning the eye-shielding on. I don't see Tully yet. Behind the stage, a dark teal curtain has been hung up, and behind that is where the victors wait for their cues; this might be the only time in the year all of us are together in one place, too, and we're not the first to arrive and sit down.My upslope neighbor, Old Killian, is already holding forth to anyone who'll listen. He's the reason they put people's portraits in the sky now. In his Games, almost forty years ago, he faked his own death and did it so convincingly that he had his last opponent convinced they were being stalked by a vengeful ghost. It was such a good show that the Gamemakers let him toy with the poor kid for days, but then they made sure the trick would never work again. These days, he's what you might call "a legend in his own mind." He can be fun to listen to sometimes, but getting a word in edgewise is a grueling and thankless task.My downslope neighbor, Stella, is sitting quietly off to the side with her husband. She broke a nine-year dry spell for us when she won a sword-duel with an ogre of a guy from District 2. When I moved in, several people took me aside and whispered that she had murdered someone a few years after her Games. No one turned her in because of how it would reflect on our district, but some of the more functional victors sat her down and told her that if a second body turned up, the third would be hers. Since then she's gotten married and raised two children — one died in the Games, the other moved out and has their own fishing boat — but she still has a drinking problem, and everyone still locks their doors and warns new neighbors about her.Killian's previous audience wanders off and he turns in our direction. "So, Mags, what do you think of this year's crop?""Best take 'em as they come, I find," she says. She never pays much attention to the trainees until they're chosen.But Killian does, because he's always betting. Mags has been mentoring our tributes for sixty years, but he knows just how she should do her job this time and starts weighing up my old classmates for her. I only trained with them until three years ago; I'd be beneath notice even if he weren't refusing to acknowledge me for other reasons."I'm going to have a look at the square. Do you want anything?" I ask Mags."Funnel cake sounds good. Been a long time," she says, and starts to get up."No, I'll get it."She nods in understanding and sits back down. Mags doesn't need any rescue from Killian. She was offering to come for my sake — the routine we've fallen into in the past year.But that's where today is complicated in a way that Reaping Day never was. The square is full of cameras — some of them flitting around invisible, some of them surely on me every possible moment. Even if I'm not sheltering in the lea of everyone's respect for Mags, they'll all have to keep up appearances. It's pathetic. My old classmates' lives are at stake, and I'm worried about walking around my own hometown without an elderly woman to protect me, but that's what I've come to. I've been looking forward to it and dreading it. I have to at least try it.As I cross the square, everyone gives me space, but that would be expected. Some of them even wish me Happy Hunger Games. I only hear one child who's too young to understand the rules."Mommy, it's him!""Oh, shush.""But Mommy, you said he—""Shush, I said!"The kid whines as his mother cuffs him.The one place I decided to go while looking forward to it and dreading it was the grocery my mother always goes to. Walking through it by myself feels both familiar and strange. I linger for a while in the cool air by the seaweed and fish on their beds of ice. The fish still looks expensive, even now when I can buy all of it I want. At the counter, the owner's mouth twists up strangely, as if she knows she has to keep up appearances but is so disgusted she almost can't do it — especially when I smile.While she's getting me some of the butterscotch candy in the window, I try my doomed strategy. "Have you talked to my mother lately?""She's in here all the time. Why?""Just thought I'd ask. I think sometimes she doesn't tell me things because she doesn't want me to worry.""No, you let your mother do all the worrying."That wasn't advice. There's some kind of hook in it, and I'll be better off if I can manage to put it out of my mind and not bite. For a little revenge, I hold out my hand for my change. The grocer sprinkles the coins onto my palm from six inches up so she doesn't have to touch me.The funnel cake is relatively painless; the woman selling them just looks through me and acts like I was someone else. The man selling grilled eel, on the other hand, gives me a sunny voice and a wide smile so strenuously, cringingly fake that it's worse than the grocer, and standing next to the grill, the heat is starting to go to my head...With that, I'm sick of my adventure, and the sight of Tully getting ready on the stage is a good excuse to end it.I know things are bad when I'm going to Tully to find something genuine. I like him and I know he means well, but he does have a bad case of Capitol, and even beyond that, he's hard to pin down. He's one of those people like Caesar Flickerman who doesn't look old but has been there so long that he must be; I have no idea what his real age is. His hair is the old familiar wig, long and flowing like a woman's hair, and I'm sure the color said something about the ocean on the label. In some ways he's painfully oblivious; I once saw him hear an explosion on the Line and go looking for invisible stormclouds, where no one from District 4 would ever mistake that sound for thunder. In other ways, though, he's surprisingly clever, and with him there are always uncomfortable moments of not knowing which is which. I know this much, though: he doesn't have to pretend to be civil to me."Finnick!" he calls out when he sees me, and as soon as I've put the food aside he catches my hand in a firm shake. "You get taller every year — more handsome, too. Some ocean-going Siren is going to catch you soon, I'm sure, make all the girls in the Capitol cry." He's racking up points for oblivious already. In particular, someone should really explain Sirens to him before he foretells anyone else's immanent death.But not right now. "Oh, you don't have to worry about that," I tell him with an assuring smile.He smiles back like a co-conspirator. "Not so easy to catch, eh? I should have known. But what's this?" He looks at my coat. "Some new 'Man of Mystery' look? Very unseasonable, I should think; you look like you're broiling.""No, I'm fine, really." This just gets me a look that's so bemused and skeptical and pitying that I rush not to leave it at that. "I'd hate to get anything on my clothes, you know." I realize too late that I've cornered myself into taking the coat off sooner or later.Sooner. "Oh, don't stand there and suffer. I'll have someone fetch you a towel." There. Just like that, I'm defeated, and I think he realized it was a fight, but I'm not sure. If he did, he was probably just trying to put me at ease — another point for oblivious. In any case, there's nothing to do but unbutton the coat.Tully helps me out of it and takes it over his arm. "Oh, my!" he says when he sees what's underneath. "You look positively ravishing!""Why, thank you." I reflexively reach for the coat."Oh!" He finds the main camera already on us. "I've ruined the reveal, haven't I? Terribly sorry!""No, it's all right. Don't worry about it." I finally get the coat back, but there's no point in putting it on again now, so I just throw it over the back of my assigned chair. I shouldn't have bothered with it. If I'd left the house like this I could have told myself it wasn't so bad, but now I feel like I've been stripped naked. My stylist always makes certain that sweat won't ruin the look, but it makes the breeze blow right through me.Behind the curtain, someone does bring a towel and some damp cloths. Mags breaks off chunks of funnel cake for me, and I pull off bites of eel for her. Maybe I really have been spoiled in the Capitol; none of it is as good as I remember.The band starts up and plays sea shanties for the television audience, then finally the national anthem, timed to end at the stroke of eleven. The mayor reads the treaty, then the names of our previous victors, and when our names are read, each of us emerges from the curtain, accepts applause from the crowd and a riff from the band, and takes our seat. Mags is the very first name; no one can see me yet, but I join in the applause for her. One by one we're called forward, in mostly the same order that our houses run down the hill. Scattered among us in three places are names with no people left attached to them; they're read out and answered with a mournful pause for the victors we've lost, including the two who lived in my house before I did.One of them is only third from last. I spend the moment of silence alone behind the curtain with Hendrick, the victor before me. The neighbors try to warn women away from him. When that doesn't work, they pay the woman to keep quiet, partly to keep up appearances and partly because it's much better for her that way than it would be if she said anything. He flicks his eyes over me disdainfully.Hendrick is called, and I'm left alone listening to the ovation for him until the mayor comes to the end of the list."Finnick Odair."I go out with my heart pounding at the thought that maybe no one will clap, but they all do. They know to keep up appearances for the cameras — and so do I. I take a bow in my "positively ravishing" outfit and strike a pose in my chair with the wool coat cushioning against my back. I scan the crowd for my parents, but if they're here I can't find them.It's Tully's turn now, and he gets up and gives his speech about how much he loves our district. I like to think he means it, but he's too oblivious and he's trying too hard.Then he comes to the two Reaping Balls. The names inside them are practically meaningless here, as they will be every year unless the Peacekeepers decide to hang all the trainers. Or unless for the third Quarter Quell they decide to "remind the rebels that they left the Capitol no choice" and disallow volunteers, but why antagonize 1 and 2, the only districts that come close to liking them? The Outer districts might not even notice, and the Capitol is sure to come up with something that hurts everyone...Tully begins the way he always does — "Who wants to go first? Ladies? Gentlemen? Show of hands?" This is clever, whether he realizes it or not. It gives any nervous trainees a little practice raising their hands; I admit it helped me. I don't think he really counts, he just declares a winning side — usually the boys, but this year he decides to change it up. "Oh, the ladies! Not to be outdone, eh?"He reaches into the ball and pulls out a name. It's a shipwright's daughter, twelve years old, and she comes bounding happily up to the stage for her lucky moment of stardom. Everyone knows she's perfectly safe. Tully asks her a few friendly questions — her favorite school subject, her favorite fish, what she plans to do with the money when she wins the Games — and then he calls for volunteers.The sixteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-year-old trainees answer in chorus, and this is when the Reaping really begins. I remember all these girls from from training, and I remember which were the eager ones. You can usually tell anyway — their voices ring out clearer, their hands stretch impatiently toward the sky — and I just hope it's one of them who goes. We seem to win about every five years, and even if we win, only one of our tributes can survive; even as a "Career" district, anyone we send has maybe one chance in ten. It's better than, say, District 12 gets, but the odds still aren't in your favor.Tully brings all seven girls who have volunteered onto the stage and writes down all their names, making a point of remembering which ones have volunteered before. Then, he puts the newly-made slips in his hat and pulls one out. Maybe it really is random this time; the girl he picks is eighteen, a year ahead of me, and I remember her as a good fighter but very quiet and serious, not someone you'd intentionally pick to put on television. Everyone applauds her. Tully tells the sixteens and seventeens to look forward to next year, apologizes to the one remaining eighteen because she won't get another chance but promises never to forget her courage. I like to think he's just acting.Then it's the boys' turn. The name Tully pulls from the Reaping Ball belongs to a sixteen-year-old dock rat who mounts the stage clearly terrified that by some fluke no one will volunteer, or maybe just from standing in front of the whole district in his shabby clothes; I can't help but feel sympathetic. Tully tries a question on him, gets an unintelligible mumble, declares the boy speechless with excitement, then calls for volunteers.One voice rings out louder than the rest. When Tully gets them all on the stage, the same guy practically bellows his name. I remember him. He's just my age, from further down the slope. He was always one of the eager ones, but this is something special — and Tully must be impressed, because that's the name he pulls out of his hat.The guy gets his applause, the others are sent off with condolences, and then there's one last fanfare for this year's tributes with everyone clapping and cheering and the band playing out loud. The victors all stand and applaud and hope one of these two will have a chair beside us next year.As they're led back through the curtain and into the Justice Building to say goodbye to their friends and families, the girl just looks straight ahead with determination, but the guy makes a point of catching my eye. His gaze flashes fire at me. The message is crystal clear.
"I am going to win and erase the shame you brought on us."
I give him a smile to say "good luck." I really hope he does it.But nobody here likes it when I smile anymore. As he passes close to me, he breathes a word just loudly enough for me to hear.
"Whore."

To Be Continued...

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Evening Tide

by Fox in the Stars
based on The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

2: Victory

On the train, I decide to just keep to my compartment and order my meals. Mags and Tully belong to this year's tributes from now on. With at least one of the tributes openly loathing me, I'd only be a nuisance, and once we're in the Capitol I probably won't have a spare moment to spend in the control room anyway.
As the train pulls out, I retrieve the candy from my coat pocket. Candy is a running battle that I have every time my stylist sees my mouth move on camera, but sometimes I don't care. I don't even worry about posing as I stare out the window; I'm sure there are cameras all around, but the view isn't worth putting on television.
The last thing you see as you leave is the vast, ugly building behind the hill where they process the fish — the Cannery. It's the lowest you can sink in District 4, at least the lowest this side of the grave, and opinions vary on which is worse. It's the threat the Boatman holds over the people he gets his hooks into. People who can't pay their debts, dock rats who aren't quite slippery enough, children whose parents can't feed them or adults who can't feed themselves — any of them can be taken away there, and all but the youngest are put to work. Those few lucky enough to come back at all come back completely used up, hollowed out by the bare-subsistence rations, sometimes maimed by the machinery, joints invariably crippled from endlessly repeating the same mindless tasks. My parents gave loans to keep the neighbors safe, then shook their heads over vanished dock rats and said something about the dignity of labor.
I idly wonder if there's anything I could possibly do at this point to be sent there, but I don't think there is. Old Killian must be the biggest debtor in the district — he's gambled away everything he won three times over — and no one touches him. We do have to keep up appearances, and besides, the Capitol would be sure to "save" me for some better use.
The fence finally covers the last Cannery smokestack and pivots slowly out of sight, then it's nothing but hills outside the window.
I let my breath out. It comes as a sigh of relief — relief to be leaving District 4 for the Capitol. For the Hunger Games.
I collapse into a chair. What have I come to?
But then, it was a strange sort of relief the first time, when I was fourteen and they were taking me away as a tribute. I couldn't dread being picked anymore, it was already done. I'd said goodbye to my parents and friends. I'd gotten parting advice from my trainer — she was a schoolteacher, so she had an excuse to say goodbye to her student. I knew that before I returned to District 4, my life would have either ended or been completely transformed. Either way, everything I was leaving behind was over and done with. I cut the past adrift. All I had to worry about was the present; it felt strangely light and free.
And that was when I realized that I hadn't inherited my parents' pride.
I'm still not sure why I didn't. The neighbors used to explain the lack of brothers and sisters with a joke, that everything my parents had to make children with had gone into giving me that pretty face; maybe it was all spent there before they got to the pride. Maybe they let me joke around with the dock rats too much. Maybe it was the training — spend eight years being strictly taught not to flinch from stabbing a twelve-year-old girl in the back and maybe the rules of halfway-up-the-slope pride start to look absurd.
Whatever the reason, as they took me away to the Games only one point of pride mattered. I knew that in the coming year, everyone who looked in the cupboard on Parcel Day and everyone who sailed out toward the Line would think of me. If I won they'd be eating better, the money they saved on food would help keep them afloat, they'd be safe in the best fishing grounds for a while, and they'd think I'd done that for them. If I didn't win, they'd think what a failure I was, what a fool to volunteer early, that if I'd waited my turn one of the bigger, stronger guys could have gone and maybe won. I hadn't seen anything like that in my parents' unwritten rule book, but it mattered to me more than life and death. I could be brave about dying, but for my one point of pride I'd have agreed to pay any price — and I did.
"You'll pay for it as long as you live." It's not as if I had no idea what Mags meant. I knew my angle was "alluring, willing, yet innocent," and they told me I played it perfectly — at one point in the interview, after shamelessly draping myself over the chair lamenting that everyone would think I was soft, I admitted that I would regret it if I didn't win because I'd never really been in love. But the innocence was too genuine for me to truly understand where I was headed. If somehow I could have known, I think my answer would still have been the same, even though the Parcel Day packages and warning buoys are fading into thin memories, and the celebrations just seem ironic now...
They weren't at the time, of course. The first half-year was wonderful.
Not flawless — I did have disturbing dreams about the arena for a while, but they all faded until just my one nightmare was left. I knew already from interviews as a trainee that the Victor's Village wasn't an ideal neighborhood, and I was given the whispered warnings about Stella and Hendrick and the apparent curse on our big, beautiful new house; if anyone gave my parents the warnings they never showed it.
But mostly, wonderful. To begin with, I was alive — I'd snatched that one chance in ten. I'd won my single point of pride, and it was everything I'd wished for. The train brought me home to a hero's welcome, to a life completely transformed. From the top of the slope to the water's edge, everyone was proud of me and grateful to me. When I smiled, everyone smiled back — and yes, lots of girls and a few boys fell over themselves to get my attention.
The Parcel Day packages started coming, full of canned fish, even a little shrimp and crab, fruit and vegetables, fine white flour and sugar, and for New Year's everyone would get a bottle of wine. We got sonar for our boat and went out and watched them installing the new buoys on the Line. The old neighbors weren't quite so comfortable taking loans from us anymore — we were suddenly so rich it was harder to keep up the required unspoken illusion that it would all come out even — but when it was important we could talk them into something; after all, it was only neighborly to let us give the Boatman a hard time. When my parents weren't looking, I gave dock rats as much money as I pleased, and sometimes I'd even see them playing with cans of sardines on Parcel Day when so many had come that people didn't want them all.
I felt as if I'd graduated from training, like I might have graduated from school. I never had to kill anyone again. I never had to watch a hanging again. Other trainees, most of them older than me, came to my house excited for interviews with me. The eager ones especially — even the guy we're sending this year — had favorite kills they wanted me to revisit for them, although they always seemed to know more about my tactics than I did. The best advice I actually had to give them was much less exciting. I told them to practice the interview with Tully; he had Caesar Flickerman down so well that the real thing was like déjà vu. Above all, I told them to trust Mags.
Now and then my father or mother would say something like "Did you really have to do that?" — to the girl I betrayed and stabbed in the back, to the starving boy I pinned down and garroted — but I could shrug it off and tell them, very honestly, that everything is different in the arena. I had such a wind at my back, I forgot to worry about things like that — or about the bill that I'd been told would come due.
The Victory Tour was where it all started to go wrong. A few months after the Games, my voice had started breaking, and the "miracle" throat spray Tully had sent me for it wasn't doing much, so I was already worried about getting through my speeches. I wish I could say I was worried for deeper reasons, at the thought of standing in front of the families of the tributes I'd killed — the thought of trying to shrug it off to their parents the way I shrugged it off to mine. More likely I saw it as an extension of the Games themselves, as something the Capitol had set aside that wasn't like real life, where horrible things happened and everyone knew the rules and just endured them. Honestly, I don't know. I can't remember what, if anything, I was thinking about that before the phone call came like a tidal wave and washed it all away.
My mother answered it first, and when she came to tell me the call was for me, I knew something was happening because she was nearly tittering with excitement. My father was waiting in view of the phone, and even he had a rare smile; his face was tense with genuine emotion. My parents held each other's hands and watched from across the room as I picked up the receiver.
"Hello?"
"Hello, Finnick."
The voice was familiar, but somehow I managed not to place it. "Who am I speaking to?" Mother clapped a hand to her head.
"Your mother didn't tell you?"
"No, she didn't."
"This is President Snow."
"Oh." I'd been told he might call before the tour and had thought of points I wanted to bring up, but when the moment came, my mind went completely blank. "I guess you sound different on the phone."
"I hear that occasionally. I wanted to call and congratulate you on your victory. Really, you were quite remarkable — the face that launched a thousand sponsorships."
"Oh, no," I laughed. "I didn't really..."
"Yes, I understand. You don't feel you can take credit for a natural gift, but you mustn't be too modest. It's important that you understand the effect you have on people. For there to have been such an outpouring, they must have been quite smitten with you, wouldn't you agree?"
"I guess so."
"Of course they were. Now that you understand that... There is something I must tell you very frankly." His voice had turned more serious. He waited for me to say something.
"What is it?"
"That natural gift of yours could easily become a curse."
"What do you mean — ?" I caught myself before repeating the word "curse" in front of my parents; suddenly I knew that I couldn't tell them what President Snow was saying to me.
"It could bring a great deal of trouble — for you, for me, for everyone possibly. Now, let me give you some advice. Things will go much more smoothly all around..." He paused, sharpening his next words to a keen edge. "...If the sponsors can expect to get what they've paid for. Do you understand? I would hate to resort to indelicate language."
I glanced at my parents. They were still watching from across the room, still smiling with joy and pride. I had to turn my back so they couldn't see my face. "I think so, but I—" My voice broke with an embarrassing squeak. I tried to think of a way to say it; I'd kissed some girls and a couple of boys but never come close to what he was implying. "I don't really know how that works..."
"Of course you don't. A degree of innocence is expected at your age. That was even part of your persona, as I recall — 'alluring, willing, yet innocent,' isn't that right?" He lifted the phrase right from the tape that they never showed on television but must have had somewhere. "Just add 'obliging' and you'll be fine. Do you think you can do that?"
"I... I think so."
"To be brutally frank, you don't have a choice. Are your parents still in the room?"
I glanced over my shoulder. They were still there, still beaming smiles. "Yes."
"Well then I'll spare you details of the alternatives. I wouldn't want them to see you looking too distressed."
I might have been less distressed if he had given me some details. This way I was left to fear everything my imagination could invent. They could crack down on poaching. They could hang all the trainers and leave us like the Outer districts. Fish isn't the only protein in the world if they wanted to leave us like District 13. Or — somehow the smallest possibility felt most horrible — if everyone heard an explosion over the horizon and a certain boat didn't come back, they would all just blame the Sirens and not ask any questions...
"Catullus has been told to introduce your sponsors on the Victory Tour, at each stop before dinner. I didn't give him any unnecessary details; I thought you might prefer it that way."
I nodded mutely as if he could see it over the phone.
"Is everyone enjoying the Parcel Day gifts?"
It was such an unexpected turn that I actually jumped. It took me a moment to remember that those existed and what they were. "Uh, yeah. They're great."
"Now, Finnick, just for appearances I think you should thank me for calling. Your parents seem to be very traditional about such things."
"Yeah." I struggled to form the words. "Thank you... for calling..."
"Good luck on your tour." With that, he hung up.
As I clumsily put the phone back on the cradle, my parents were set free.
"Ahh!" Mother sighed happily. "Our son got a phone call from the President!"
"Mom, no one likes the President," I said.
"Oh, shush," she told me, a parent's standard counter when the truth crops up where it doesn't belong.
Father clapped me on the back. "Even so, it's a proud thing. A proud thing."
"A little too proud for me," I said. "I think I need to lie down..."
I was still in bed the next day when Mother decided I'd gotten overexcited and made myself sick. When Mags came over to check on me and heard that President Snow had called, I didn't have to explain. She'd seen it coming from the start — and she'd seen past it. I remembered what she'd told me, and I knew that the Victory Tour was only the beginning of the rest of my life.
Before I got on the train, I broke things off with the last girl I'd been kissing. She's the last sweetheart I've ever had, although no one would believe me if I said that.
The first stop on the Victory Tour was District 12, and with one look at the place I knew I was safe at least for one day. Everyone there was just tired and wanted it over with. I had a crazy urge to go up to the microphone in front of their Justice Building and blurt out "Thank you all so much for not sponsoring me! From the heart, I swear!" but as it was, I was lucky just to get through my script. My voice was still breaking and the miracle throat spray still wasn't doing much, so I was already trying not to squeak, and then... I don't know if it's possible to be allergic to coal, but I apparently am, and the dust was everywhere. I rushed through the speech and managed to keep it to a few sniffles that could be passed off as emotion, but by the dinner I was miserable. I could even taste coal dust in the food. I sneezed into my napkin and it came up streaked with black.
After one particularly bad coughing fit, I found their only victor, Haymitch Abernathy, jabbing a finger at me and laughing. "We'll get you yet, you little golden brat!" he bellowed.
Mags laughed, too, and not just to be polite; she already knew him. All I knew was that he was very drunk. A few minutes later he'd passed out in the stuffed potatoes.
All the way through to District 3, it was basically the same, but without the drunken heckling. And thankfully without the coal dust, although the hay in District 10 was almost as bad.
District 2 was different. Until then the resentment had been tempered with resignation, but District 2 wins more than anyone else, and they feel entitled to win every year. They went all out with the festivities as a way to reassert their pride, but every smile and every gesture seethed with barely-controlled hatred of the "little golden brat" who'd snatched away what was rightfully theirs. No one there would have sponsored me — and if they had they wouldn't dare mention it.
I expected more of that in District 1, but they at least like to see District 2 lose, and they have more money to throw around than anyone except the Capitol. When their own tributes were gone and I was the favorite, a few of them had thrown their money behind me.
This despite the fact that I'd killed the girl from their district the very first night. Mags had told me to break away from the Career pack as soon as I could; she wanted me out before the gifts started making the others jealous. When the pack split up to hunt and it was just me and that girl, I waited for the nightly portraits so I'd have the whole second day before they suspected me, then after we killed some poor dock rat who'd probably never seen a dock, I caught her distracted and put a spear through the back of her head.
In her district, for the first time, Tully introduced me to a handful of sponsors. President Snow's words rang in my ears, that I only had to be obliging. Two of them said that killing the District 2 contingent was repayment enough, and a third, a big grim-faced man, insisted firmly that he wanted nothing from me. I wasn't about to argue. Only one, a woman, owned that I was rather fetching and requested a kiss.
"What kind of a kiss?" I asked.
"You decide," she told me.
I gave her the most passionate kiss I'd ever given anyone, just to be safe.
As we were leaving to get ready for dinner, the grim-faced man came over again, looking even grimmer, and tense. He had reconsidered.
"If you want to repay my kindness," he said, "there is one thing you can do."
"Of course!" I said.
His gaze hardened even more. "Close your eyes."
Every instinct told me not to do what he said, and a glance at Mags confirmed that it couldn't be going anywhere good, but I knew I didn't have a choice. I tried to look obliging, took a deep breath, and closed my eyes.
Before I even had time to wonder what was coming, he punched me in the stomach so hard it doubled me over. He knocked that deep breath completely out of me and left me gasping like a drowning man. I'd have been flat on the floor if my stylist hadn't caught me.
"That was for Ruby," the man announced, and he stormed away.
The girl I killed the first night. I had to admit it was fair, but I couldn't talk.
"Oh, that's not nice," someone scolded, as if a little boy had called me a name. The woman I'd kissed was laughing. At dinner, people who'd watched the whole scene kept chiding me for only picking at the exquisite food. On second thought, I decided that this place was more hateful than District 2.
Tully of course was scandalized and hastened to assure me that most sponsors weren't such brutes. No, I thought, most of them are probably worse.
The next stop was the Capitol, where the parties were most extravagant, the food was most incredible, and where I knew I was really going to start paying for my victory. When President Snow hosted me at his own mansion — the first time I ever stood close enough to him to smell the blood on his breath — he presented me with an identical twin of the trident I'd been given in the arena, encased in a slab of unbreakable crystal.
"How do I get it back out of here?" I asked him, jokingly scratching at an edge.
"You don't," he told me. "We're all frightened of you."
I wouldn't have thought President Snow had a sense of humor, but he gave it a perfect deadpan delivery, and it would have been a joke to think that the people in that room were frightened of me. They could make me do anything they wanted. This time it was Snow who introduced me to my sponsors, with here and there a well-chosen word or a look to remind me of my eternal gratitude. This time no one considered the debt already paid. They had no favorites, no enmities, no scores they'd already used me to settle; to them all tributes were the same, except as they were alluring and willing. I lost count of the invitations to go out on pleasure boats, to look at art collections... I had to accept them all.
When I sat on a couch for a rest, I was cornered by a few people who had a downright disturbing fascination with knot-tying, and they brought over some curtain cords for me to show them my tricks. One of the women wanted to see how to tie a noose; I'd left a pair of them in a tree once for District 2 to find, which didn't do me any good — I should have known those two were unshakeable — but these viewers at least must have liked it, so I showed it to them, the knot you never use on a boat, but all the kids knew how the Peacekeepers did it...
"Oh," the woman said, taking the finished product from my hands. "And then it slides like this?"
She put the loop over my head and pulled it snug, with the knot below my ear — just the way the Peacekeepers did it. For one moment of panic I wondered if the sponsors were actually allowed to kill me, but I gathered my wits and gave them all the best pleading, puppy-eyed "You wouldn't really hurt me, would you?" look I could muster. It worked. The woman kissed me a few times and let me go.
A little later I was taken to a quiet room in the mansion for the first of the "private appointments." I knew what was coming when I was led off alone, without Mags or Tully or anyone. It was everything President Snow had implied. And it was everything he had said; a degree of innocence was expected at my age, and I only had to do what they told me and keep up the act: alluring, willing, innocent — and obliging.
They kept me in the Capitol for a week of private appointments, punctuated with more parties for appearances. There were only two mercies: first that President Snow himself never touched me, and second that the strangeness of the Capitol and the special strangeness of the encounters made it all seem like just a bad dream. When I got back to our rooms every night and tumbled into bed exhausted and sore, it seemed as if none of it had really happened.
Every night Mags came in and sat beside my bed. Neither of us said anything, but while she was there I felt safe.
Finally, we got on the train for the last stop on the tour, District 4. Home. As we got close to it I stared out the windows for the very first glimpse. I had never imagined that I could be so happy to see the Cannery. All the celebrations we'd had before were just dress rehearsals for this one. The band was playing, expensive imported flowers were everywhere, fireworks burst over the ocean for hours, and people literally danced in the streets.
It was hard seeing Dana's family standing there during my speech. She was the girl who'd gone in with me. All those years of the trainers telling us "Never betray your partner; if your partner wins, you win," and when I split off from the pack, I abandoned her. When the others realized I'd killed Ruby, she unthinkingly tried to defend me, and they turned on her; she just managed to take the guy from District 1 with her. That was the one point in the final recap when I couldn't keep up my act; I already suspected that I'd gotten Dana killed, but it was another thing to see it happen before my eyes. Thankfully my parents had never asked me if I really had to do that — I probably did have to, but I couldn't have shrugged that one off. Her parents and brother and sister are the only one of the other tributes' families I remember. They'd never acted like they blamed me, but when I'd seen them before it was in front of my parents, and this time it was in front of the cameras; both times I couldn't say what I wanted to or beg forgiveness...
After that, I had one last round of sponsor introductions before dinner, and I dared to imagine that I was safe, but I couldn't be sure. Practically the entire district had chipped in money for me, but not many could afford what it took to be ranked as a "sponsor," and in fact, Tully only presented one: the mayor. When I asked him how I could ever thank him enough, he said "Don't be silly! You're the one who deserves all the thanks."
And with that I knew I was safe. Eventually I'd have to get back on the train for another journey through the Capitol's bizarre dream-world, but for the moment — for another half-year, until the next Reaping Day — it was over and I was back in my real life, surrounded by proud, smiling neighbors. The relief of it blotted out everything else I'd been feeling. The dinner was the best thing I'd ever eaten; I shamelessly stuffed myself with lobster in spiced cream sauce, and my mother had to make them stop giving me champagne. Everyone who came to talk to me after the meal was like an old friend I was overjoyed to finally see again. I even smiled and shook the hand of the Boatman, thinking how good it was to be back home with enough money to keep people out of his clutches...
But there was one person I couldn't save. He leaned his fat face close to my ear. "I sponsored you, you know."
My breath froze as if I'd been plunged into icy water. My mind went completely blank except the one fervent wish that somehow lightning would shoot straight through the roof and strike one or the other of us dead before he could touch me.
It didn't, and I couldn't suppress a shudder as he picked a bit of imaginary lint off my chest and grinned. "So surprised? I do have some district pride, you know."
He was telling me yes, I see that look on your face and grinning. That was part of the fun. You Odairs with your pride thought you were too good for me and my money, well, look at you now! This time the invitation was delivered in person, to go out with him on his private boat on Saturday — every Saturday.
When he was gone I went straight to Tully. "Was there a sponsor you didn't tell me about?" I tried to sound calm, but it was my last desperate hope.
"Oh, yes," he said, smiling brightly. "Portly fellow, rents boats. Wanted to tell you himself. Said he was an old family friend, couldn't wait to see the look on your face."
Not even when Tully picked me at the Reaping did I hate him as much as I did in that moment.
"Are you all right?" he asked me. Obliviousness had its limits, but that time it was better than the alternatives. I just told him I had to be more careful with the champagne, and he agreed I was a bit young for it, although his face was still uncharacteristically dark.
The next day Tully and the camera crews got back on the train for the Capitol, and when I saw him off at the station, I let him hug me and managed to smile. I was already trying to forgive him. He meant well. There was nothing he could have done...
When Saturday came, my parents only made it harder. To them, even speaking to the Boatman was a barely-tolerable concession, and they certainly didn't see why I should pay him a visit. More than ever, I couldn't tell them what had been said in that phone call they'd been so proud of, what had been happening since then, what was about to happen... All the way out the door I had to argue. I had to take the side of my own doom.
"He was a sponsor, I have to be nice to him."
My father was unmoved. "I don't think anyone needed his money. I certainly hope no one was asking for it."
It struck a spark of anger that I wasn't used to feeling. Did he mean Mags? Was she even allowed to say "no" to a sponsor? Even if she was, for all I knew, the Boatman might have bought me the trident when I'd lost my other weapons and thought I was done for.
"Look, would you rather—?" I started — then froze.
"Rather what?" Mother asked.
"Nothing. Never mind. I'll be back sometime tonight." I grabbed my coat and hurried out of the house.
I'd caught myself before I finished the question: "Would you rather I was dead?" Especially if they could have known what was about to happen, I didn't really want my parents to answer that.
Outside, a rare, gentle snow was falling. I have a strangely sharp memory of a snowflake falling on my cheek and melting into a tiny, cold drop, how good it felt... I never wanted the walk to end, but it had to, down by the dock.
The boat was beautiful. Its silvery sails reflected the soft, gray sky. Of course the one the Boatman kept for himself would be top-of-the-line, with not just sonar but solar sails and autopilot.
As he took me aboard and out onto the water, I didn't even try to keep up my act. I knew I wasn't allowed to resist, but this time I couldn't be alluring or willing — and those weren't what he wanted from me; once we were out of sight from shore, he was content to skip the pleasantries. From that day forward, every time he went walking along the docks and saw my father's stern, proud face, he would think of me in that moment and smile, and there was nothing I could do about it. Maybe if I had kept up the act, I could have salvaged some small shred of dignity, but no. I took President Snow's advice and gave the sponsor what he'd paid for.
When he was finished with me, he left me alone in the cabin, still trembling and sobbing with my wrists tied to the bed frame. As I lay there, for the first time the idea occurred to me. The knots at my wrists were so shoddy that I could have been free in a minute. It was a kind of fishing boat; he probably had nets and tridents on board somewhere, and I knew intimately how well they worked on people. I could have skewered the Boatman and his hired pilot and steered that beautiful thing into the Line, and then everyone back home would have said I'd heard the song of the Sirens. I was hearing something in my head, but it was certainly not music.
If I had it to do over again, I would be tempted, more than I was then. At the time it was just a wild notion. All I really wanted was to go home.
But when he dropped me off on the dock after nightfall, I realized I couldn't go home. I couldn't face my parents like that. I thought of going to our old house on the slope, but what would I do there? Sit in the dark, all alone — after I won, we'd even sold the chickens out of the back yard. I thought of going to my family's boat where at least our lucky cats would be there and wouldn't ask me any questions... And then I realized where I wanted to go.
I turned up my coat collar and left my flashlight off, hoping that no one would notice or recognize me as I walked up the slope past the fishermen's houses. I'd grown up in those streets and knew them so well I could find my way in the dark, but it felt like I might never get there. When I looked back, the cloudy sky and the ocean merged together into one huge black chasm. Only when I was near the square did I turn toward the Victor's Village, toward the house at the top of the hill.
I went around to Mags' back door and pounded. I'd have pounded on it all night before I went anywhere else, or maybe curled up behind her hedge, but she opened the door so quickly that I still wonder if she was waiting for me. She sat me on the couch, gave me hot chocolate, and sat beside me until I'd calmed down a bit.
When she got up and went to the phone, I was still too dazed to think whose number she was dialing. Instead, my eyes fell on the fireplace mantel. There was a lacy runner — crochet, Mags' official "talent" — a few seashells, and three framed pictures. Mags had never been married or had a family that I knew about; I think her parents died in the Dark Days. The pictures were of the three victors we'd lost. I recognized the curly-haired woman who'd won before Hendrick, who'd been famous for making everyone laugh before she killed herself and left me the house. In the picture, she was smiling...
The beginning of the phone call snapped me out of it. "Mags. Got your boy." She'd called my parents.
I caught her eye and shook my head desperately.
She patted the air to say Don't worry. "Came up through town. Flashlight quit him; saw my window. So tired I put him right to bed. ... No, don't you dare come wake him. I'll have him back tomorrow, evening maybe. Been wanting to go out; he can carry my stuff. ... No trouble at all. You have a good night."
After I'd finished the chocolate, she put me in a hot bath and then to bed, and she sat beside me the way she had in the Capitol.
For the first time, on a night like this, she spoke. "Shouldn't have taken his money."
I shook my head. "No, that's not..." I didn't want her to think like that. I knew she wouldn't rather see me dead. In the Games, she'd done what she had to to give me the best possible chance. That night she'd given me a place I could go to; she'd understood and bought me the time I needed. Tears came into my eyes again, and that time they weren't tears of pain. I thought, This is what it actually feels like to not know how to thank someone enough.
The next day, after breakfast, I did take her stuff down to the victors' private beach. The sky was still cloudy, but it bathed everything in a soft blue light that seemed more gentle and hopeful. The ocean was bracingly frigid, as if I could swim with my whole body immersed in that one sweet snowflake from the day before. As soon as I tested the water, I wanted to be in it, but I helped Mags get a fire going first. Then I went, staying close to shore and looking back at her as she gathered some of the yellow grasses left over from summer and wove them into a basket. I came back to the fire partly to warm up and partly so I could watch her thin, leathery fingers working smoothly and surely.
When she was finished she looked at me. "Ready to go back out?"
"Yeah." More than willing.
She handed me the basket. "Shellfish."
I'd been doing it since I was little, but always before I'd sold them at the docks, and Mother had never bought them except in cans. I knew you were supposed to cook clams until the shells opened up, and I tried putting them as close to the fire as I could without burning my fingers.
Mags, on the other hand, broke one open with a rock and ripped the meat out. "Better fresh," she said. She poked the morsel toward me and I ate it right from her fingers. It was good.
After I swallowed it, I realized what I'd done; as a victor I probably could get away with keeping a swordshark, but there's no exemption on the books. I burst out laughing. "I'm a lawbreaker now! A capital criminal!"
"Worse things to be," she told me. She broke open another clam. "First time? Really?"
I nodded.
"Bli' me, your folks are strait-laced."
I laughed again. "Dad creaks when he walks." I loved my father, and I couldn't recall thinking those words before, but it felt as if I'd had the joke stored somewhere for years and finally had someone to tell it to. She didn't laugh, but the understanding smile was even better.
After we ate, I fetched more of the grass and had her teach me how she'd made the basket. Usually Mags is a woman of few words, but as we worked on those baskets, she told me she'd been making them since she was a little girl, during the Dark Days and right afterward, when District 4 wasn't much more than a pile of rubble. Back then, everyone lived at the water's edge, fishing and gathering with whatever nets and hooks and baskets they could make themselves, always on the lookout for swordsharks and for poisonous creatures the Capitol had brought from other waters and altered enough for them to thrive here.
Then the Capitol themselves decided that the swordsharks in particular were delicious and made attractive trophies. For years we were more servants than fisher-people, and most of what we got was from the Capitol citizens who came out to enjoy the ocean on their pleasure boats and hunt their own mutts for sport. Eventually they built themselves an artificial sea in the mountains and stocked it with the things they liked best to spare themselves the train-ride and keep the money out of our hands, but by then they'd let us become a Career district in the Games and thrown us enough coins that we could start fishing the way we do now.
It was only when they stopped coming here that they built the Line. Before that, there were hovercraft patrols, but a few people did slip through and sail away. No one knows whether they made it anywhere, because if they did they were smart enough not to come back.
Except — and here Mags leaned over to show me some trick of the weaving and whispered so quietly that only I could possibly hear her over the surf — just once, there was a woman who vanished for years and then one day reappeared saying that she'd seen a land far, far to the west, full of people who'd never heard of the Capitol. The Peacekeepers quickly shut her up, and then they built the Line so no one else could attempt the voyage, but Mags had been there when she came back and had heard her tell the story.
Naturally, none of that had been in my lessons at school. The last thing they wanted was for us to think that there could really be another land across the sea, or to consider that the Line hadn't always been there, the Hunger Games hadn't always been there, that there was someone alive among us who was older than either of them...
In the end we threw the grass baskets onto the last of the fire — "Not worth cluttering the house with," Mags said, and my first try wasn't very good anyway.
"Ready for your folks?" she asked.
"Ennh...?" I was mostly joking by then.
"Your house," she told me. "Kick 'em out if you have to."
It was funny at the time. Which showed that I was ready, recovered enough to shrug off any head-shaking and make excuses. She and the ocean had brought me back to life.
It became a routine — Saturdays with the Boatman, Sundays with Mags. She couldn't always snap me back so well from what he did to me, and my parents just kept making it harder, but somehow it was tolerable, and five days in the week I had my normal life or something that could pass for it.
I can even say that the Boatman did me a few horrible favors. After the first few Saturdays I usually didn't cry. Before long each appointment was a grim test of wills where I tried to close up inside like a clam and let it all flow over me, and he tried every insult he could think of and every physical attack he dared to get some kind of reaction out of me — but there were lines he wouldn't cross, and not because he didn't want to. Without meaning to, he gradually showed me that there were rules. The sponsors weren't allowed to kill me or leave visible marks; they had to let me walk away "camera-ready."
And when Reaping Day came again and it was time to go back to the Capitol, the scars where my innocence and pride had been were well-used. I'd gotten a lot of practice letting things flow over me. I was ready to start learning to play my part. A degree of innocence was expected at fourteen, but it wouldn't be expected forever, and I knew I'd be paying as long as I lived.
District 2 won that year. Our girl made it right to the end, and maybe with a sword she could have repeated Stella's achievement, but the only weapons to be had were morning stars. I had so many appointments that I never got a chance to see the control room, but I could hardly miss a moment of the Games, no matter how much I wanted to — televisions were tuned to them everywhere.
Before I went home, I was taken to the grand re-opening of my arena as a vacation park. That was when I found out that the trident I'd been given was a replica; the original was in the museum, also encased in crystal to preserve my last opponents' blood and brains on the tines. The crags jutting out of the river that only I'd been able get onto now had retractable walkways so tourists could stand where I'd stood without getting wet and have their pictures taken there. It felt unreal and in odd flashes nostalgic, revisiting the places where I'd killed other tributes and running my fingers over genuine rocks there, hearing genuine leaves and pine needles crunch under my feet. It might not have been so bad — there might even have been something there I wanted or needed to see and feel again if it had just been still and quiet, but I could only take so much of the footage on the monitors they'd installed everywhere.
The restaurant offered a special menu of all the meals Mags had sent me during the Games, with trivia notes on how much they had cost the sponsors. The numbers didn't do anything for my appetite, but at least I knew I hadn't been bought cheaply.
While I was there, I got word from President Snow's office about my "talent." I ostensibly had until I was sixteen to pick one and was leaning toward taking up guitar, but I was informed that I had already decided on trophy fishing, which is better done in the Capitol's artificial sea than in District 4. Having me in the Capitol for the Games wasn't enough, so they created an excuse to invite me there whenever they liked.
From then on, I was away from home for a week most months, usually for fishing, sometimes for media appearances or to film commercials or whatever else they could think of, but always there were appointments. It could still seem like a respite if it kept me away from the Boatman for a Saturday or two; where he was vicious, the Capitol was mostly playful and bizarre, and the "camera-ready" rule spared me their worst. I never would have chosen what I did there for myself, but I could catch a bit of fun now and then. And there, bit by bit, I perfected my act and grew comfortable in it until I could easily slip in and out of that face.
When it was complete, I decided to show it to the Boatman, and I gave him all my best seductive, endlessly-willing lines with a special, mocking edge. I pretended to be the type who loved pain and purringly invited him make good every threat — because I knew by then that I could take more than he could safely do. He broke off our appointments after that. Either it spoiled the fun, or it let him know that he'd completed the work of ruining me.
I still spent Sundays with Mags when I could.
Without the Boatman it was more tolerable. My parents still asked awkward questions about all the trips to the Capitol, but nothing I couldn't handle. I thought I could just keep going on that way. I didn't realize that the most crushing blow was yet to come.
When I went to the next Hunger Games, I'd just turned sixteen — which meant that I was "legal." My youth had failed to protect me from so much, I'd forgotten what it actually did protect me from. The "camera-ready" rule had guarded me from so much, I'd forgotten what a cruel enemy it was keeping me "ready" for.
None of the Careers won that year. Their food was washed away in a flood, and they didn't know how to cope. Even two Feasts weren't enough to save them. I still didn't have a moment to help in the control room. I still couldn't escape the screens. I had to watch day after day as our tributes wasted away and I choked on memories of the meals Mags used to send me, so good they were still there in that arena on a restaurant menu. In the end, the victor was an older red-haired girl from District 5.
Through it all, I kept my face on. Being of legal age brought more invitations and private appointments than ever. I played my part. I caught a bit of fun where I could.
And then, when it was over, that face was reflected back at me from the television, like seeing myself in some viciously warped mirror. The men I'd been sold to were nowhere to be seen — maybe they'd been kept in reserve for a later scandal — but suddenly, all the women I'd been sold to were my sweethearts. With my practiced seductions and stolen moments of fun, suddenly I was the one using them for an evening and then going on my merry way. All of that was included in the Games' wrap-up programming, so strangely that I knew it had been done on purpose. President Snow made sure to package it into a single, brutal punch and put it in the required viewing so everyone back home in District 4 would watch and know that everyone in Panem was watching and seeing their shame. The entire country saw what I'd become: alluring, willing, no longer innocent.
Like my parents' house, District 4 has its own halfway-up-the-slope pride, its own strange, unwritten rules. Highest among them are the rules about the Capitol. You glory in any honors it gives, but you never forget that our ancestors were rebels. You take pride in our trainees and tributes and victors, but you never forget that the Hunger Games are a cruel punishment. If you're respectable, you don't stray too far outside the Capitol's laws, but all the while you despise it for its decadence and resent its domination.
You certainly don't become its alluring, willing toy.
For a second time, I came home from the Hunger Games to a life completely transformed. The instant the cameras were gone, the whole district turned its back on me. No one acknowledged me or spoke to me if they could help it. The more kindhearted ones, old neighbors, quietly lowered their eyes when they saw me and pretended they didn't hear me when I spoke. Others, old classmates, caught my eye only to make certain that I noticed them turning away in disgust. Friendly loans started coming back, hurriedly repaid down to the penny and by courier. Shopkeepers began pushing my change across counters to avoid touching my hands, as if I were literally filthy. Suddenly, even dock rats would rather spit on me than take my money — for once, District 4 ranked someone lower than them. If they lived at the water's edge, I'd been cast into the sea.
It was what they do to refusers, although it would have been easier hearing "coward" whispered loudly behind my back than the things I was hearing. It was what they'd done to the one woman who wouldn't take the money and keep quiet about Hendrick — as if she'd seduced him on purpose to bring shame on the district — but at least with her all the resentment of the Capitol wasn't mixed into it. At least her family took her side and tried to protect her.
As for me, my parents confronted me. My parents, for whom pride was everything. Mother wept. Father was unrelenting. I still couldn't tell them the truth about the phone call from President Snow. Even if I could have, who knows what they would have done? If I told them the truth, I was sure Mother would blame herself and never be happy again, Father would end up hanging on a gibbet down by the docks for sedition or treason or skewering the Boatman — or maybe for skewering me, maybe he really would think that was better...
I couldn't tell them, so I had to argue. It was surprisingly easy to start shouting horrible things at them. It was harder to stop where I should.
"You sent me to eight years of lessons so I could stab twelve-year-old girls in the back for the glory of the district — I guess you thought I'd turn out lily-white and respectable!" I remember shouting that, but I still don't know if I meant it or was really angry about it.
"That has nothing to do with it," Father insisted.
"Maybe you'd like it better if I'd turned out like Stella — or Hendrick!" They could walk through the square and buy groceries. I couldn't.
"Do you think insulting your neighbors will get you out of this!?"
"Oh, I never should have let you go all those times with the Boatman!" Mother sobbed, too distraught to follow any kind of thread. "Was that what it was like with him? I'm sure he could bring along plenty of... Plenty of girls for you!"
She had no idea. Tully had come closer to figuring it out. I still couldn't tell her. "What if it was!?"
"You kept saying he was a sponsor," Father accused. "If this is what sponsors get for their money, then what does that make you?"
I turned on him, forgot to be cautious, and the question spilled out — "Would you rather I was dead!?"
The room went silent. They stared at me. I felt ready to cry boiling tears or tear myself to pieces. Mother said I needed to calm down. Father had the decency to take her and leave rather than answer me. They went back to our old house on the slope.
I did need to calm down. I finally told myself just this once, took sleep syrup and went to bed. My nightmare was waiting for me. The water was high and rough; all the dead tributes had to hold me up while waves kept washing over me. On shore, my parents' house was the only light. That was the night I realized what my nightmare meant and why it disturbed me so much. It was a dream that said, You will always be at sea, always looking toward shore, but you can never go there. You can never go home.
Mother came back the next day to get their things. She was still teary, but calmer, and she hugged me and kissed me and told me they loved me, to take care of myself and to never forget who I was and where I'd come from. And then my parents were gone. It was supposed to be some kind of tough love, to shock me into seeing reason, but after a week to calm down, it was easier without them.
One day I sat tallying everything they had spent on raising me. Rather, I tried for a while, then I calculated how much I could give them without starving before my next payment came and topped it up to that under the heading "Emotional Anguish." I sent the amount by courier with a letter to say that things were even and we were quits, and if they didn't want the money they should deep-six it because that's what I would do if they tried to give it back. I don't know if they kept it or not. I've run into Mother in town a few times this past year, but she only acknowledged me with a quiver of her chin. Father I haven't even seen; according to the loud whispers, he tells people that his son died in the Hunger Games.
But my house was quiet and safe. As it became completely my own, I even found that I enjoyed cooking and cleaning, although I resented that much more having to cover my walls with dead fish; I finally gave them my parents' old room and threw away any that didn't fit.
My house was safe, but everywhere else was unbearable. Going out to buy food was more painful than hunger. When I tried to placate people with a smile, they reacted as if I'd lifted a rock to reveal a dead rat. I reminded myself how well they'd had it the year I won the Games, that there were probably people alive today who would have died on the Line if it hadn't been for me, and it helped a little.
But not enough. I eventually stopped leaving the house without Mags, and we fell into our current routine. After all the years she's mentored our tributes and all the victors she's brought home, she has everyone's complete respect. If I travel in her wake I'm protected from the worst of it, and she can use a strong young pack animal. The only nice thing I've heard about myself in District 4 this past year was a remark made to her about what a "dutiful son" I was.
The money quickly piled up again, and there was nothing really good to do with it. I've built a nice music collection. I bought exercise equipment like I'd seen in the Capitol so at least I could keep myself in trim while living as a pathetic recluse. Last month, I decided that trips to the beach with Mags weren't enough and had a contractor out from the Capitol to rip up my basement and build an indoor swimming pool. That was so extravagant that even as a victor, I needed a friendly loan, but Mags offered it under the old familiar terms, just with dizzyingly large numbers. The pool makes me feel like a fish plucked from the ocean and dropped in a bowl, but it's better than being a fish stranded out of water. I'm sure it does nothing for my image at home, but that's beyond saving.
Really, it's beyond saving... Thinking back to this morning, it strikes me how creepy it must have looked to everyone to see me walking around in a wool coat in summer. I shouldn't have even tried. This evening, I'll be in the Capitol, where everyone would just take it as "some new 'Man of Mystery' look." Sometimes the air indoors is so chilled that a coat in summer wouldn't even be out of place.
I smile thinking of a time there a few months ago when I slipped through the net and went walking around a shopping mall by myself. No one acted like anything about me was out of place. In fact they treated me as if I were perfectly normal. That seemed strange, but it was too sweet a gift to question it. I bought candy. I bought more music. I bought clothes I picked myself just to defy my stylist. I was sitting by a fountain eating crab cakes when I found out why it was happening like that.
"Mom, look, it's him!"
"No, it's not, it's just an imitator."
It was a girl who looked about ten and was painted in tiger stripes, walking along with her mother.
"No, it's really him, I can tell!"
"Don't be silly. The real Finnick Odair wouldn't be sitting around in a place like this."
I couldn't resist going over to them to correct the misimpression. Nothing I said would convince the mother that it was really me. She admitted I had the District 4 accent down but swore my eye-coloring job was overdone and finally stumped me with some odd trivia question about myself, which I couldn't help finding funny.
Just then, Tully came running. Someone had called him to call the President's office to put a trace on me — I still have the tracker from the Games in my arm — and apparently he doesn't have imitators. Everyone could tell he was the real Tully Seabright, and he became my certificate of authenticity.
The mother blushed crimson. I just managed to give the girl a kiss before she fainted. It took us an hour to wade out of the mall through a sea of people hanging on my smile who wanted autographs, pictures with me, kisses that made a few more of the girls and one of the boys faint... It was fun, even if Tully did give me a stern talking-to afterward. I'd like to try it again, but during the Games doesn't seem like the right time...
My face falls at a sudden thought, vaguely-but-deeply disturbing like my nightmare: that time in the mall, was it really me? Or was that part of my act?
I don't know.

To Be Continued...

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Evening Tide

by Fox in the Stars
based on The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

3: Games

As soon as we arrive in the Capitol, I start getting deliveries. Flowers. Candy — my sweet tooth is famous. Less jewelry this time — my tendency to lose it is also becoming famous; Mags caught me throwing an emerald bracelet into the ocean once and made me start giving the things to her.
And I start getting invitations. All of our deliveries have to go through President Snow's office, so the message is clear: if an invitation makes it this far, I have to accept. I don't even have the first night to rest before they start.
I do get breaks for the opening ceremonies and the interviews. When our tributes come out on their chariots, they're painted an "ocean" green-blue like Tully's wig and dusted with glitter, wearing only thin streaks of fake sea foam for modesty. The girl is pretty in her way, but she can't make the look work. Even if the guy can, he doesn't want to; when the overhead screens show his face, he seems to be taking it as a personal insult. I can't help feeling that the reach for sex appeal is my fault. In the interview, Caesar Flickerman mentions me to the guy by name, pointing out that we must have been classmates. He's quite open about wanting to outdo me and makes some obviously-schooled effort to pass raw hatred off as friendly rivalry. I call out "Good luck!" from the balcony, but I think he takes it as a taunt.
When the Games themselves begin, I'm at what the invitation called a "Viewing Party," so I see it on an enormous screen. The arena this year is garishly colorful. The camera pans across it to give the viewers a first look before the tributes are sent in, and the feeling is of a natural environment bizarrely dyed and shaped into something like a playground, the playgrounds for children that they have in the Capitol and occasionally show on television. The Cornucopia rests on a cherry red platform on an island surrounded by bright blue water — but no one is meant to swim out; the surface practically bristles with the marauding fins of swordsharks. The tributes are supposed to make it to shore by crossing an elaborate network of tubes and ladders and climbing ropes, none of them made to be quick or easy or safe.
When the tributes are raised up on their plates, I find our guy. A new shade of anger clouds his face as he looks around. This is no place to try to salvage your district's dignity.
The gong sounds.
The Gamemakers manage to make the initial bloodbath a whole new kind of chaos. The Cornucopia rotates on its platform to confound everyone who approaches it, buying time for others to escape. Some fall into the water and are cut to pieces by the swordsharks; a few are lucky and manage to swim ashore with only minor wounds. More make it across the obstacle course above, but some of them get tangled in the ropes or can't make it quickly enough, and when the Careers snatch weapons from the Cornucopia they start picking them off. Our quiet, serious girl shouts at the others not to throw spears; they'll fall into the water and be gone for good. Our tributes don't need them; both are used to climbing around rigging and make quick work of the stragglers with swords. In the end, District 4 has the most kills and we're ahead in the odds, for whatever that's worth.
In the days that follow, the Games are inescapable. No matter where I go there's a screen tuned to them. At parties, I actually start inveigling my way into "private appointments" in an attempt to get away from them, which occasionally works the way I want it to. More often there's a television in the bedroom, but at least I have something to distract me from it.
In the arena, the artificial sun never sets. The girl from District 3 takes a calculated risk and starts making alliances, building an Outer district pack to take on the Career pack. Her plan takes off when she gets the boy from District 11; he's only thirteen, but he's fiery, a better talker than she is, and she's content to be usurped. This isn't going to be the usual "Careers pick off the rest and then have it out" scheme — it's going to be a war, and our side is better trained and better equipped but outnumbered.
The tension is building when I have a personal stroke of luck: one of my invitations is canceled at the last minute. For the first time, I have a chance to visit the control room.
It's below the Training Center, down a special elevator I've never seen before. When I open the door marked "4," my first impression is of screens and lights and buttons jumping out of the darkness. Mags is sitting in a chair, sees me and waves, but she's busy talking to another mentor over a speaker. She seems to glow almost brighter than the screens, and I realize that the room is actually well-lit, it's just that except for the screens and lights and buttons, everything from the carpet to the ceiling is a nearly sheenless jet black.
While she's talking, I look around. I see a food dispenser like the ones in the tributes' rooms. In one corner there are two beds behind soundproof glass for when the mentors need a rest. Someone's asleep in there now; it must be one of our other victors, but the blankets are pulled over their head so I don't know who it is. Beside the glass case is an alarm button to wake them if something starts to happen, and I'm sure if the Gamemakers issue an alert to all the premium television subscribers, it'll be heard in there, too.
On the screens are several camera feeds of our tributes; the girl is taking a shift sleeping and the guy is on guard duty. There's a map of the arena showing they and their allies' locations, currently all on the Cornucopia island. I find the screen with the sponsorship totals for our tributes and their allies; in normal life, the numbers would be huge, but when I start mentally dividing them by the trivia facts in my old arena's restaurant menu, they don't come out to much. Below that screen is another one featuring categories of items that can be purchased and sent.
I'm curious, but I'm afraid to touch anything.
Mags finally says goodbye to the other mentor and the speaker cuts out with a little pop. "Free?" she asks me.
"For now." I take another chair. "What are you doing?"
"Nothing to do right now."
"How does it work?"
"Now don't you dare worry about all this," she says decidedly.
"Just curious."
She sees me staring at the ordering screen. "That, you hit 'special order;' nevermind the rest. Do better talking to 'em, I find."
I nod. Usually Mags is a woman of few words, but somehow that seems just like her.
I'm still staring at the screen.
"Can play with it if you want. Hard to mess up."
The curiosity is irresistible. I touch the word "food" and it brings up a menu where all the prices are constantly ticking upward. I see bottles of water, crackers, cheese, dried meat, fruit... The things she sent me aren't even listed. I back up and touch "supplies." After scrolling through matches, rope, flashlights, cookpots, I find something Mags sent me: a waterproof backpack. The price is dizzying. I got it the first night, it wouldn't have been that much... But I don't know how much more of this I can take, and I know what I have to do while I still can. Back up, touch "weapons"... I have to scroll down several screens to find the trident, and when I do I nearly fall out of my chair. At least I know I wasn't bought cheaply...
After a few moments of my head swimming, Mags reaches over and flicks at the screen, scrolls it all the way to the bottom. "Hm. Guess they still make 'em." She points to a bolt-action rifle. "My year, gave us each one of them right at the start. Hid the shells around further out."
The number beside the rifle is so huge it isn't even real anymore; I can't believe that much money exists in the world. Even if you could somehow pay it, the rifle would be useless without bullets, and even blanks cost as much as knives. Hollow-points are more than my trident just for one of them.
She's not lying — tapes of her year are so rare the trainers don't have them, but when you see the "However-Many Years of Hunger Games" montage on television, there's always the clip of Mags with her gun at number seven. She's not lying, but I can see what she's doing. And it works. I don't feel quite so bad now.
There's a knock on the door. An Avox comes in and offers me a gilt white envelope on a silver tray.
"Thank you." It's not her fault I've got a new invitation. Or I don't, not exactly. The party I was scheduled to be at tomorrow is starting early. The hostess must have taken the chance to buy up more of my time.
"Got to go?" Mags asks.
"Yeah..."
She pulls me over with her hand on the back of my neck and gives me a kiss, just a dry, motherly peck on the lips. It's my favorite kiss I've had in years.
But she needs a kiss for good luck more than I do, and I put one in the edge of her wispy hair as I get up to go.
My hostess is a woman named Aquilia with metallic gold hair that flares like a bell to hover over her shoulders and blue gems patterned across her face and nails. We have my talent in common, and that evening I'm lounging on a couch with her hearing all about her pleasure boat and the trophies on her wall when someone shouts "Look, look!" and points to the giant television that she'd be remiss as a hostess not to have playing...
Everyone goes silent and turns toward the screen. The war is starting. I'm within arms' reach of a plate of chocolates and start nervously sucking on one.
The Outer pack has been keeping to the woods on the mainland, hiding their numbers and drawing the Careers into their territory. Now, as the hunting party heads back to the island, they're attacked on the beach, outnumbered two-to-one. The guy from District 2 is mobbed first; he kills one attacker and wounds a second, but he can't withstand them all.
It turns out that our quiet, serious girl is like Dana was — just too decent to be a victor. She could be up the ropes in a second, but instead she covers her allies' escape. As the cannon rings out for the guy from 2, someone throws a rock at her head, and it stuns her just long enough for the mob to get hold of her, drag her down, wrench her own sword out of her hand...
I squeeze my eyes shut; my trainer isn't here anymore to tell me not to. The cannon fires. The sweetness on my tongue burns like an accusation.
Aquilia runs her fingers down my arm. "I'm sorry —" Her hand freezes. "What in the world—!?"
I hear everyone in the room making strange sounds. From the television, screams. Another cannon blast. Another.
When I open my eyes, a new army has joined the war. I see flashes of fur — black and white, brown, buff, gray — bloody rodent teeth — rabbits! The Gamemakers have made mutt-rabbits the size of wolves and sent them bounding out of the candy-painted trees into the midst of the Outer pack, and they're ripping tributes apart in broad fake daylight. The surviving Careers are safe on the island and just watch, dumbfounded.
The images are so absurd that someone sitting near the screen starts laughing — and it catches. The next moment everyone around me is laughing as the tributes fight for their lives, run desperately for the trees — one is so panicked she goes splashing into the water and the swordsharks take her and everyone laughs over the screams and the cannons...
I feel sick. The air in the room is choking me. The chocolate is curdling in my stomach. If I don't get out of here I'm going to throw up.
Everyone's eyes are fixed on the screen, giving me an opening to head for the balcony. I want water but I don't think it's fancy enough to be served here and I can't waste time searching. As I cross paths with an Avox carrying a tray of drinks I mutter an apology, grab a random glass and flee.
The air outside is starting to cool in the night, but it still feels summery, especially after the artificial chill inside. If someone follows me out here, I have no excuse for the way I'm shivering.
When my hands have steadied a bit I rinse my mouth, too distracted to even taste the drink before I've swallowed it. A moment later it fills my throat with a sudden burst of heat and fumes. Coughing, I look at what I got: a shallow pool of amber in a crystal orb of a glass, a fine brandy swirling with flakes of real gold just to make sure everyone understands how rare and valuable it is. I don't like it. I don't like anything that strong, not after seeing what alcohol has done to some of the other victors, but right now it's any port in a storm.
I have to calm down and piece my act back together — let it all wash over me, be playful, smile... All I can manage right now is a bitter twist of my lips. At least I'm allowed to smile here, but I'm only allowed to smile.
That Outer district pack is being crushed as a joke. Half of them were dead before I made it out of the room, and I saw the boy from 11 go down, the one who was holding them all together and stoking their courage. I should have known the Gamemakers would never let them get away with it.
All District 4 has left is our guy, the one who wanted so badly to wipe away our shame and they sent him into the most humiliating Games I've ever seen — the memories of my own arena feel like undeserved blessings. This year, the only possible dignity is to win, and I hope he does it. I really hope he does it...
The view over the balcony is beautiful and dizzying. It's a penthouse in the first ring of skyscrapers that looks down on the heart of the Capitol from higher than a hovercraft flies. Below, lights bathe everything in washes of color. I can see the Training Center framed against the Twelve Towers; somewhere below it, Mags is trying to pick up the pieces while I'm standing here drinking gold. Past that, past the Towers, is the homelike glitter of water — the artifical sea, the Capitol's fishbowl, infinitely more extravagant than mine...
The brandy tastes like it's part lamp oil, but there's a vague kind of richness to it, and the heat inside feels good when it settles. Before long I've sipped it dry. Blame that for the swimming head, the dull tingle I can feel all over... I set the glass on the balcony rail from arm's length. I'm dizzy enough as it is; I don't want to get close to the edge and look down at the plunge to the street. But it does occur to me to nudge the glass over and let it fall.
Temptation has almost won out when I hear the door behind me open and close. It's Aquilia. "I wondered where you'd gone," she says, comes over and hands me another drink, this time a flute of champagne. "I'd hate for you to be the one that got away."
"I wondered who'd be first to come looking for me." I've calmed down enough to slip back into character after all, and I smile at her with half-lidded eyes. "I hoped it would be you."
She rests her arm over my shoulder and holds my gaze.
"Can we see your boat from here?" I ask.
"Mm-hm. That one right — there."
I gaze along her pointing arm just for appearances, leaning in as if to match the angle until my cheek is on the edge of touching her skin. "I'd like to see it closer."
"You will."
"When?"
"When would you like to?" she asks me.
I breathe the words to her ear. "How fast can we get there?"
"Let's find out," she replies, and sweeps back inside to announce it to the guests.
I put the champagne on the balcony rail untouched. With a last fleeting chance for temptation, I jab it with one finger; it gives a musical ting and drops out of sight. I don't wait to see if I can hear it hit.
The party decamps to Aquilia's boat, she and I trading first wit and then kisses in the back of a limousine. The vessel that's waiting for us would make the Boatman gnash his teeth with envy, practically a floating penthouse in itself. Another giant screen is quickly set up in the prow so the guests can keep watching the Games, but in a rare stroke of luck, I can't see or hear it from the stern, where the fishing equipment is.
I vow to give my talent my undivided attention, but it's a lie; I don't have undivided attention to give. I just want to spend the night staring at the water, listening to it wash into the wake... It looks and sounds and even smells a bit like home — like how home used to be. The view over the rail here isn't bad. It's even inviting.
What would happen if I fell overboard? Someone would see it. I don't want the attention.
I never have enough privacy for that, but most of the guests keep watching the Games or retire to cabins, so it's quiet. I get to watch the dawn break over the water, first softening blues and then a blaze of pink that throws long, cold shadows...
Aquilia brings breakfast for the two of us, and once she's there I have to start trying. It's almost noon when I actually do bring something in — and of course, it's a swordshark. Not a particularly big one, but by that time the guests are awake and things are apparently quiet in the arena, so they're all there to applaud it.
"I'll have to have it mounted for you, to remember us by," Aquilia says.
"No." I don't want to remember any of this, and after seeing this year's Games I never want to look at a swordshark again. I can't say any of that, but I have the perfect excuse...
"No?" she asks.
"It's just that I've never had it with cream sauce," I tell her.
Everyone likes this idea; it means they'll get a piece, too.
And it means I've done my job for now and can fall asleep in a deck chair. My nightmare can't get to me; I don't manage more than a doze with the sun beating down and people constantly coming around. They heedlessly gossip about one politician's love life and another's suspicious death. Someone laughs recalling the rabbit attack and comments that "maybe Snow got thirsty," as if that smell on his breath is from dead tributes' blood. Others discuss where I rank among fashionable party entertainments and how long the waiting list is to get me. I hear people remarking on my "sleeping" form and feel their fingers playing with my hair or running over my body. Twice someone even steals a kiss. I just let it flow over me and pretend I'm sound asleep.
There's a fully-stocked kitchen right here on the boat, and my swordshark with cream sauce is ready for dinner. People sitting near me are shocked that I've never had the dish before, being from the fishing district. I can't tell them that hardly anyone in District 4 has money to waste on it, that eating one you caught yourself would get anyone but a victor strung up for poaching. I make the excuse that back home, someone else always gets to it first.
After dinner, the party finally breaks up, the guests disembark, and Aquilia takes me back to her penthouse. We left it so suddenly that she never got a chance to show me her "private collection."
She's still waiting to get what she paid for.
As it turns out, there really is a private collection, a wall of jewel-blue aquaria overlooking the foot of her bed. While Aquilia is getting ready, I look it over for anything I can work into my act and flatter her with.
I start with the large tank at the center, and at first in the dim light I don't see anything alive in it, just rocks, fake broken vases... I lean very close, tap on the glass — and in a cranny among the rocks just inches from my face, blue light flashes in luminescent rings.
I freeze and slowly back away. I know what she's got in there, and she has to be insane.
Blue-ringed octopus. No bigger than your hand, but that blue flash means a bite, and one bite from them will kill you. They taught us all in school what happens: first you feel a tingling around your mouth, then paralysis gradually takes hold of your body and your lungs — but it doesn't touch your mind. You'll be wide awake as you lie helpless and slowly suffocate.
Looking around the tank now, I see the circled patches of their skin here, there... She must have a half-dozen of them at least.
I fall to a seat on the foot of her bed and take in the entire collection. Aquilia is completely insane. I see the floating lace of scorpionfish, the banded blades of lionfish, the cone shell you you don't even dare carry in a sack because it can punch through with a fang like a harpoon, a tank that stretches from floor to ceiling to hold the draping tendrils of a man-o'-war... Everything she has here is absurdly poisonous.
One tank appears empty. Out of morbid curiosity I think I'll ask her what she plans to put in it, but then I see what already is in it: the ugly, unobtrusive lump of a stonefish, over a foot long. The spines on its back will sting at a touch — the more pressure, the more poison. The lightest brush is agony. Get a fatal dose and you'll spend your last hours writhing, out of your mind with pain, until your heart can't take it anymore...
I hear her coming in time to mask my disbelief and put on the proper face.
"I'm beginning to feel at home here," I drawl, leaning back. "I see you have a weakness for charming and deadly things from the sea."
She doesn't even bother tying her silky robe shut, just slides in beside me and leans over me, lips hovering on the edge of a kiss. "How could I resist the most charming and deadly of them all?"
Hours later, we've finally lapsed into quiet cuddling.
Aquilia is lying back with me as her cushion, and I'm toying vaguely with her hair. It's not a wig; she went all the way and actually had it gilded... A lock of it slides suddenly through my fingers as she sits up and checks a clock, then retrieves a remote control from the bedside table and turns on a television that folds down from the ceiling.
When I recognize Claudius Templesmith's voice, I slink around between her and the screen and start kissing her again — kissing and pleading. "You're not bored with me already, are you? What could they possibly put on television that's worth tearing yourself away from me?" Maybe she'll choose me instead and turn it off...
But no. "We have to at least see the midnight recap," she says.
She cuddles me while she watches, and I try to bury myself in her body. It's enough to block out the words — and what's worse, the cruelly humorous music — but I can't help hearing the cannon shot. Someone else died today.
Another cannon shot. Her fingers freeze in my hair. "Oh, Love, I'm sorry."
I already know what it means, but I don't want to admit it to myself.
She gently lifts my head back, enough to kiss my forehead. "I'm sorry your district didn't win this year."
I can't do this anymore. It should be safe, she expects me to be upset... I excuse myself with a muttered apology and sink down on the mattress, finally curling up with my back to her.
The guy who called me a whore is dead. In the end, he couldn't wipe away our district's shame. This year, there won't be any proud celebrations back home, any new buoys to protect people from the Line, any dock rats playing with sardine cans. He died fighting for those things while I was here playing around with the people who laughed at him. I didn't even do him the courtesy of watching; I'm only finding out now in this strange woman's bed.
The pain of the truth bleeds through my bones.

He was right about me.

Mags' job is done. Tomorrow we'll be back on the train to District 4, and then I'll go back to hiding in my house, hiding behind Mags, hiding from everyone's looks and whispered words, and they're all right about me. And next month and next year I'll get back on the train to do this all again...
Aquilia has curled up against my shoulders and is tracing a circle in my hair with her finger. Maybe she even likes the idea of comforting me when I'm in pain, but when my face clenches beyond the point of attractiveness, she can't stay silent. "It'll be all right. There's always next year."
"No, I... I knew him when we were younger..."
"He did very well. The odds just weren't in his favor." She says it as if it's supposed to help.
For a few minutes it's back to the silent caresses.
"What should I do to make it better?" she asks at last.
She asks as if she thinks she can make it better. She can't bring the tributes I trained with back to life. She can't change the truth that I can never really go home again, that I'll just be standing in the shallows forever, looking at the place I love and knowing that everyone there despises me. She can't change the fact that I'm being passed around as a plaything and I hate it and it makes me hate myself but it's starting to feel like the more bearable part of my life...
"Hm?" she presses.
I have to say something. I open my eyes and try to think. She at least turned the television off, so I can just watch the shifting net of light-through-water dancing on the wall, hear the hum and bubble of her insane aquarium...

"You'll pay for it as long as you live."

"What will you give me?" I ask her, very quietly.
"Anything," she whispers.
I curl up tighter, play at freezing her out. "You don't mean that."
"I do," she says. "Tell me anything you want."
If I'm too direct, I'm afraid she'll see through me. I reach down to the floor, sit up with my shirt in my hand and throw it the way you'd throw a net, against the side of the octopus tank. Blue rings flash.
She clambers up beside me. "Oh, you don't want one of those!" — but she says it without a drop of concern. Her caring demeanor is falling away, as is any notion of keeping her word. We're haggling now, over the price of her whore.
"I do want one," I insist. "Something charming and deadly... I want something to make me feel like that again. For next year."
"It won't make it to next year. Those things are practically impossible to keep alive."
As a portrait first of myself and then of our district's tributes in general, the likeness becomes more exact. But she doesn't want to give me one.
She gets out of bed, puts the silky robe back on and this time ties it. "What about this one?" She suggests the lionfish. "This one reminds me more of you."
"If that one reminds you of me, it should stay here with you always," I tell her, in a tone I don't think she can argue with. There's no space to make another play for an octopus, so I have to make a second choice, something equally portable and deadly...
"What about him?" I point at the stonefish.
She laughs. "I thought you wanted something charming."
"He is charming. Kind of ugly-cute." I need a better reason. "He reminds me of Mags." That must have been the most horrible thing I could possibly say, and the truth is that I really don't want to be reminded of Mags right now...
But it works. Aquilia can't be jealous of a woman in her seventies. "All right, that one. I'll get him for you in the morning." I can't know if she'll keep her word, but I can't question it.
When she lets me go to sleep, my nightmare is there waiting for me. The water is up to my shoulders; my arms float at my sides. There's a new shadow in the water, swimming faster than the others, bumping against me more aggressively — it's the guy who died today. Even he still doesn't attack me.
I look at the boats in the docks, the lights of the houses on the slope. Home. I'll never see it again with my eyes open.
As I gaze at it, wavelets are coming in toward shore, small ones, but enough for the water to break over my shoulders. I start to shiver when it washes up the nape of my neck — higher than it came at first. Before long it splashes up into my hair, and then comes the wave that doesn't break over my shoulders, because my shoulders are already under. It laps up around my chin...
I wrench myself up. Aquilia is snoring beside me. I stare down at the pillow as if I could stare at the dream itself in disbelief. After three years of having the same nightmare, you'd think I would know what it was about, but only now do I realize.
They don't have to pull me under to have their revenge. It's enough if they just hold me there and wait.
Under my breath, I give the pillow a tragic laugh of understanding and breathe the words to name what's suddenly obvious.
"The evening tide..."

To Be Continued...

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Evening Tide
by Fox in the Starsbased on The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
4: The Evening Tide
In the morning, Aquilia does give me the stonefish. I insist on an opaque container — to shield it from the disorienting changes of scenery until I get it home, I say — and she finds a large, squat, gold-patterned black vase big enough to put it in and ties a silk scarf over the mouth.While she's doing that, I look at the other tanks again in better light and see why she didn't want to give me an octopus. Their tank is elaborately sealed; it would have been inconvenient to open the thing and get one. It's true that an octopus will crawl into any little gap it can find, and she's at least not insane enough to let them escape, but I'm going to pay dearly for sparing her the trouble. Not that the octopus would have made things pleasant, but I think I would have liked it better...When I get back, there are more invitations waiting for me, but I just can't do it, not on the last day of my life. I try something I've never dared before — I call and beg off. Tully gets me on the phone with whoever it is I need to talk to, and I tell them I'm not feeling well, no I don't need a doctor, I'm just so tired... It can't possibly work; they'll give me drugs I don't want and send me back out. My hands are shaking again. In the end, I sound so pitiful that they actually let me go.Most of the mentors have already lost out like Mags, and I find a lot of them together in the Training Center atrium, taking the chance to catch up with each other. The atmosphere isn't as mournful as I would have imagined. No one's talking about this year's dead tributes. In fact it's surprisingly jovial, with only a few threadbare spots where the grief and horror of it all show through a little. Some of our other victors from District 4 are around, and here in the Capitol they're a bit friendlier. Haymitch from District 12 is roaring drunk again, and this time he has an equally-drunk friend — who's missing a hand; it must be Chaff from District 11. I see the girl from District 5 who won last year. Her mentor is almost as old as Mags, and they don't have enough victors to tell her not to dare worry about it; by the heavy look on her face, I think she started learning the job this year, and she can't put it out of her head and smile like the older victors can.She was seventeen when she won last year, and I've only just turned... I realize that I'm the youngest person in the room. I'm still the youngest victor, at least until this year's Games end. For the rest of my life, probably. It feels sadly ironic.It also feels strangely light and free, like when I was fourteen and they were taking me away... But not quite the same. Both times there was something darker underneath; then it was fear, now it's sorrow, or not quite sorrow... Despair. Light and free, tied to an anchor of despair.Mags is sitting in a chair crocheting, and I pull another chair around right beside her. "I'm sorry... that we didn't win," I tell her."Just a bad year," she says. "You learn not to get attached."I can't help wondering if that will apply to me. I don't know whether to hope so or be crushed by the thought. She'll have a fourth picture on the mantel, but I don't know how she'll feel when she looks at it and I don't want to think about it..."Free?" she asks."Yeah. I'm done." Done for good."Ooh, what are you making...?" comes an unfamiliar voice. It's a wispy woman with too-large eyes leaning over Mags' shoulder.As we sit, other victors come over. Apparently the Outer districts' hatred of "Careers" doesn't extend into the victors' circle, or else we're somehow exempt. As they come to chat with Mags, I notice everything about them in a deep, open way. That wispy woman is from District 6 and obviously has a morphling problem; she gets fascinated by the colors in the yarn basket, and Mags makes her a little pink flower. A fat, loud-voiced woman even older than Mags has an unusually-old Avox trundle her over in a wheelchair; she's from District 7, rails at the no-accounts who stayed home, and fervently hopes for one more victor before she dies, hopefully a girl this time because men are useless. A smallish, middle-aged man with black hair and glasses comes by just long enough to agree to dinner on the train with us, which must mean he's from 3, the only other distict on the same line; after he leaves, Mags tells me his name is Beetee.I don't know why I'm paying such attention. It's not that I want to leave some positive impression of myself behind with them; if that were the case I think I know something about how to charm people, and instead I'm mostly just watching quietly. Maybe I'm looking to them for a distraction from myself. Maybe I'm trying to cling to every moment because so few are left...Whatever the reason, that kind of openness is exhausting, and the sleep I've had in the last two days really wasn't that good. I get such a watery ache in my eyes that I don't care what a ridiculous pose it is and curl up in the chair like a cat with my head on the armrest by Mags. A doze is still all I can manage with everyone coming around, but it's something. Now and then she reaches over and rubs under my hair with her fingertips, almost like I really was a cat and she was scratching my head.The gesture inspires a comment from I think Chaff. "Hey, Mags. You brought the cute little doggie today, huh?"The next voice is definitely Haymitch. "He ain't a cute little doggie, he's the golden brat! Aw, he's faking — he smiled!"Chaff laughs louder than it deserves, but I did smile. That time in District 12 on my Victory Tour is pretty funny in hindsight. I wave at them without opening my eyes. "Come on, I got the day off because I was so tired.""Yeah. Yeah, they'll wear y'out," Haymitch says, as if it isn't funny anymore. Suddenly, I think he knows exactly what they've been doing to wear me out and is just a little too drunk to pretend that he doesn't.Most of them aren't leaving yet, so we say goodbye when we're called away to the train — which happens just in the nick of time. As we leave we pass a crowd of victors from District 2, all of them in a rage about the cowardly backstabbing of District 1. In the arena, the pair from 1 must have turned on their last ally and knocked District 2 out of the Games, but their anger is at having victory snatched away by a hated rival more than it's for the dead girl. It makes us their friends against the common enemy — for now — but thankfully there's no time to commiserate.At the platform, I catch one of the porters with the vase and insist on taking it myself, which draws a question from a reporter. Naturally, the cameras have come to see us off, and I have to put on my face one last time."A gift from my one true love," I declare."And who's that today?" the reporter persists, getting a round of laughter."Oh, that's a secret." I blow a kiss into the nearest lens, not caring what Aquilia will think.I thought I could spare a hand for the gesture, but my palms are sweating, and the vase is heavy with water. It slips. I nearly drop it. The normally-sedentary fish inside splashes at the jostling, and I see that Mags hears it...The reporters laugh. I could never have faced my one true love again.Tully's there to see us off, too, and after the near-miss I can't spare him a handshake. Instead, I give him a kiss on the cheek that smells of fake hair and makeup and leaves him comically flustered. As a last goodbye, I think it's enough.
On the train, it's just us and District 3 — the other district west of the Capitol, the other one in roughly the same halfway-up-the-slope place as us. For the purposes of the Games, though, they're practically an Outer district. Our victors far outnumber theirs; in fact, I don't see anyone from 3 except Beetee and a younger woman named Wiress who tends to get lost in the middle of her sentences. They're so comfortable together and he's so practiced at finishing her thoughts that I take them for a couple, but they say they aren't. Maybe he just took it upon himself to look after her, like Mags did with me.We have dinner together, the two mismatched pairs of us. Beetee is peering at a menu and trying to keep Wiress on the line long enough to figure out what she wants when I give up on it, "hit special order," and just tell the server what I really want. I want the lobster in spiced cream sauce one more time, mint tea, seaweed salad for a taste of home, for dessert I'll want cake like birthday cake... I'm painfully aware of things I'm not ordering, can't order without raising suspicions — never any more fresh shellfish, never another breakfast with eggs and smoked fish... As it is I order so much the others notice, but the pair from 3 decides to join in."After all, we won't get another chance like this before..." Wiress drops off in a particularly bad place."Before next year," Beetee agrees.When the food comes, I try to eat slowly enough to savor every bite, but not so slowly that I let it get cold."Shame about your girl this year," Mags says — the girl from District 3 who started getting the Outer district pack together.Beetee sighs. "I tried to remind her of... all the risk factors.""Maybe thought somebody had to try it just once," Mags supposes.Which seems like a very District 3 way to go out: come up with some innovative scheme and throw your life away just to see if it might work. I wonder if there's a District 4 way. Forgetting your training and defaulting to respectability under pressure, maybe, although if that's it, I missed the boat...Wiress has gone silent. I think maybe she's gotten more permanently lost, but no. Instead, I catch her looking right at me with an air of grave concern that gives me a shudder, as if she can read my mind. It doesn't help when she starts humming nervously to herself.After the cake, Beetee is still talking with Mags, and I can't really follow it. Partly it's over my head, but partly I'm getting more distracted as I realize that there's nothing left to do.There really is nothing left to do... "I'm going to go to bed early," I tell Mags softly.She nods toward me, just a little, very ordinary. "'Night."It ought to be a better goodbye than this, but I don't want to raise suspicions. She at least gets my last kiss. I put it in the edge of her hair, and she pats the hand I've braced on her shoulder.Wiress watches me all the way out the door.Back in my compartment, the black vase is waiting for me. I confront it with the same quickened breath, the same hot ache of dread that I remember from the end of my Games, when all that was left was the fight with District 2, and I already knew back then that there was nothing better to do than march right in and get it over with before the feeling ate away at me. That didn't make it easy. Still doesn't. And this time I know I won't make it out alive... My hands are shaking as I start untying the scarf.The best way would be to pour the vase out as if I'd spilled it, dump the stonefish on the floor, and then stomp on it as hard as I can. Or maybe do it in the bathtub. No one is really going to think it's an accident, at least no one who matters — don't want to think about Mags — so I may as well avoid getting water everywhere.That's the hard part. After that it'll be done, except waiting for the end of the bad part. They say people have hallucinations from the sheer intensity of the pain... They say people scream for someone to cut off their leg where they were stung...
— They say people scream —
I've just gotten the first knot loose, only to cinch it back and throw myself down on the bed, somewhere between relief and frustration.I can't do it. Not here, not now.When I asked Aquilia for an octopus, I had it planned. I'd decided not to make it back to District 4 alive. With the octopus it would have worked; it would have been painful, but quiet. With the stonefish it won't work. With the stonefish I'm going to scream. Everyone will come running. They seem to have everything on these trains, maybe they even have what they'd need to save me. And if they don't...I kept trying not to think about Mags. I'll be lucky if she isn't the one who finds me. I'd at least like it to be over by then.I try to tell myself it's better this way. I get breakfast after all. I can watch the sun set over the ocean. The train is full of cameras; this way at least my agonizing death won't end up on television. This way I can set my house on fire since apparently it really is cursed and they'll just put someone else in it if I leave it there. Before that, maybe I'll take one last walk down by the docks by myself, and when people turn away or hurl insults at my back, I won't have to cling to thin memories of vanished buoys and Parcel Day packages. I can think, Yes, you're right, and I won't bother you anymore. I can tell myself, This is all going to go away...It's not helping. The hot ache isn't dread anymore, but it's just getting worse and sinking deeper into my chest...I finally don't want to deal with it anymore and order sleep syrup — so it's addictive; that hardly seems to matter now. On the train they hand it out one dose at a time, in tiny capsules. It's less of it than I want, but it'll have to do.I don't want to resist the effects, but I can't help it. The stuff is supposed to calm you down, but it doesn't feel like that. It feels like a weight getting heavier and heavier as my mind stuggles to cling to that hot, aching misery. I can't stop it... I can't think... In my head I hear snatches of voices or something but they make no sense... By the time the weight drags me down, I have no idea what's happening...
I'm in my nightmare again.The sleep syrup must be keeping me in it, because it seems to last forever. The tributes from my year, the ones we sent this year, they're circling me as the tide comes in. The sea is unnaturally calm, gentle as a swimming pool. Inch by inch it creeps up over my shoulders. It tickles the back of my neck. It laps around my throat, and I have to tip my head back further and further to keep my face above the surface. The water reaches my ears and I can hear their voices, not speaking but in a kind of song, surprisingly low and gentle.It's not a song of revenge. It's the song of the Sirens. Come with us. You belong with us. The wordless notes mean something like that.The tide closes over my face. Salt fills my mouth, and I wake up not with a scream but with a gasp for air.I blink at the wide band of pink dawn light on the wall. Shadows slide lazily across it. I hear someone moving around in the room and recognize the shuffle of Mags' feet."Nngh. What time is it? Am I late?""No," she says, and the mattress dips where she sits down on the foot of my bed. "Woke up early. Wanted some company."I scrub my face with my hand."Put your fish in a bowl."Her words drift slowly down through the murk in my brain, but they hit bottom with a firm thud. For a moment I try to doubt it, but no, it's Mags. She knows exactly what it is. And she knows exactly why I have it.There's nothing for it but to lever myself up. Over her shoulder I can see the black vase. Beside it, lurking in a crystal-clear glass fishbowl, is the ugly lump Aquilia gave me."Needs sun. And food," Mags tells me. "You end up paying for them as long as they live."
"...You'll pay for it as long as you live..."
"It's no good trying to get off cheap, eh?" We both know what we're really talking about.She draws a deep breath. "It's you has to live with it if you kill it. Funny thing, seventy-odd years killing fish for a living, get one in the house and I always feel bad if it dies."She's really saying "I've gotten attached to you. I would be hurt if you died.""Said it was a present?" She glances back over her shoulder.I nod."Awful waste, I say. You can wheedle presents out of them there, better things to do than drag a fish back to District Four. Ask me next time, give you a shopping list.""What would you put on it?""Have to think about it a while. You think too. You'll come up with something good by next year."The thought of there being a next year curls me up until I'm hugging my knees.Mags notices. She reaches back to clasp my arm — which is what she can reach — and offers something more manageable. "We'll go down to the beach in a few days."I nod in agreement. She deserves that much from me, at least.
As we're getting off the train in District 4, this year's Games come to an end. In front of the cameras, we watch it on the big screen above the station.The pair from District 1 have finished clearing away the few Outer district stragglers. Now they're the last two left alive, although the guy has a nasty wound on his arm. As if this year's Games need one last absurd touch, they declare themselves sick of fighting and decide to end it with three rounds of rock-paper-scissors. The girl loses. She could have taken advantage of her partner's injury and probably won, but if it had been me and Dana at the end, I might have preferred something like that, too. She takes her death bravely.After her partner wins they show his information again, including date of birth. He's seven months older than me. I'm still the youngest victor for another year. Or maybe for the rest of my life.The rest of the day is interviews, and since the vase isn't hiding the stonefish anymore, I go ahead and introduce the audience to my new pet, all the while struggling to come up with a name because all I can think of is my horrible remark to Aquilia and I am absolutely not naming the thing after Mags."Charming and deadly, like District Four," I declare."You call that thing 'Charming'?" The reporter unwittingly comes to my rescue."Yeah, that's his name."I try feeding him a live bait-fish — he doesn't take it, but I promise them he'll have the idea in time for next year — and I make certain to describe his awful poison. Hunger Games viewers love that sort of thing, and I may as well get them ready, put the idea in their heads. Everyone who matters has caught me already, but most of the viewers probably will think it's an accident...That night I make certain to watch the sun set over the ocean. It's enough to take sunsets off any list of dying regrets, a rare and gloriously-cloudscaped blaze of red. Dawn the next morning is fresh and cold, so clear I can watch the shadow of the slope slowly pull itself ashore from somewhere far out at sea.That afternoon, the cameras leave, and Mags takes me to town in her protective wake. It's the bad season for shellfish, so we just get food to carry with us down to the beach. I have a real swim until it starts getting dark, and then we eat and watch the stars come out.The moon is nearly full — nearly a spring tide. While Mags is chewing, I look out over the water, half-wondering if I'll see myself standing out there somewhere surrounded by circling shadows. The evening tide actually is coming in. The waves slowly grow louder as they wash up nearer to us.I've finally stretched out on the blanket when Mags decides it's time to say what she wants to say.She takes her sandal in her hand and slaps it down. "A stonefish! Bli' me! Can understand if you want out of it, but why in the world you want to do that to yourself?""She wouldn't give me the blue-ringed octopus." It's as if I want her to finally give up on me in disgust, but if Mags was ever going to do that, she would have already.She shakes her head. "What happened?"It seems like there should have been something, but what was it that sent me over the edge? We lost in the Games. It happens about four years in five. "Nothing special," I admit.She grimly accepts that as an answer. "Still got it?""I brought it all the way back here. Am I supposed to kill it now?""Yes. Kill it. Then I can sleep," she says decidedly, now that the cameras are gone and we're not talking in code. She looks at me with sharp eyes, silently demanding a response.I won't lie. "I'm still thinking about it."Her sigh is deeper and sharper than the sighing of the waves. "Your life," she says, even so. "Still an awful waste. Awful waste."
Waste of what?
Of me. Somewhere inside I know or at least let myself imagine that what she means is that simple and that deep, but my mind won't accept it and turns to darker things.Everything good that we got for my victory is finished. None of it is going to be taken away if I die. No one here at home wants the money they send me, and there's a rule that I can't even be a sponsor for our tributes. Apparently I can't be a mentor for them either; looking at myself the last few days, maybe Mags knew I wasn't mentally stable enough for it. As soon as I won the Games, I'd served my purpose, and now there's nothing left for me to do — nothing except what the Capitol wants, nothing good or useful. I'm like the dead fish on my wall, just a decoration, a trophy that the owners don't even like..."You know," Mags tries to call me back to her, "somebody didn't mind dying could have some real fun. Lot better than that."It's not helping. I've seen other victors having "fun" going to their graves and I'd rather just get it over with than end up like that."Nothing lasts forever."I don't even know what she means. It won't always be like this, maybe. Refusers are forgiven eventually. People aren't quite so nasty to Hendrick's victim these days. None of them have the Capitol rubbing their crimes in everyone's faces again and again, but the Capitol is fickle. They'll get sick of me eventually. Maybe in ten or twenty years my life will be back to normal — if they don't find some new way to make me pay, and anyway I don't think I can last that long.Ten or twenty years... Mags might not last that long. She won't last forever, and I bury my face in my arms because I have no idea what I'll do...I feel her tough, thin fingers on my shoulder. She leans down low over my ear and whispers so softly that only I could possibly hear her over the surf..."Even Games and Capitols. They don't last forever."I catch my breath and look up at her. She's already sitting back again but she gives me a knowing glance to tell me that I really heard the impossible thing I thought I just heard. For a few minutes all I can do is listen to the waves while the words slowly soak through me.She's talking about rebellion. She's talking about fighting the Capitol.Everyone in District 4 respects our ancestors for fighting them. No one shakes their head when the Peacekeepers punish someone for treason, cut out their tongue so they can't spread any seditious talk and hang them up in a cage until their bones have been picked clean by seabirds and bleached in the sun. The trainers didn't tell us to watch when that happened; instead we were supposed to lower our eyes in respect. It's intended as the ultimate humiliation, but no one is ashamed.No one does anything either. No one says anything like what Mags just said. How could they? To fight the Capitol is only to throw your life away, to risk every horrible punishment your imagination can invent — from becoming a second 13 to hearing a single explosion over the horizon...But Mags did it anyway. From that look in her eye, I think she's been fighting for some time, and suddenly I'm not just a useless trophy but a blind, stupid coward. I never dared think of doing anything myself when all the time, right beside me, she was really fighting — and I know she was fighting for me. All this time she didn't tell me, and I'm sure it's because she wanted to protect me...But now she is telling me. The stonefish must have shown her I'm so broken there's nothing left to protect. Maybe fighting the Capitol would be throwing my life away, but I'm at the point of throwing my life away as it is, and that would at least be a better way, wouldn't it? To toss my hair and smile at the cameras before President Snow gives the order to shoot? Or maybe they'd show everyone how they punish treason in District 4 and hang me up in a cage — but no, I'm sure I'd rate the firing squad televised live from the Capitol. They say they train them specially to aim for a slow, painful death, but it can't be any worse than stonefish venom.What else is left to threaten me with? They have to know that my parents have nothing to do with me anymore, that no one in District 4 will have anything to do with me. What good would it do to punish them? They might even be happier that way. I'm sure my parents at least would rather suffer knowing that I was a rebel than live in comfort thinking I was the Capitol's toy. It would be a prouder thing.And in the meantime, that would be something to tell myself when people turn their backs on me, when I hear the loud whispers: I'm fighting to liberate you from the Capitol, you just don't know it yet — because of course it would be a secret. That might even help.The only person they could threaten to get to me is Mags, because I still have no idea what I'd do without her... But she doesn't need any rescue, and she's already made her decision."Real fun, huh?" I ask her."I find," she says.For someone who "didn't mind dying"... But it's Mags. She wouldn't throw her life — or mine — away on a hopeless scheme. She's spent sixty years sharpening her instincts, doing what has to be done to give us the best possible chance. Maybe it's only one in ten or one in two dozen or one in a hundred, but it has to be possible. And when she says Games and Capitols don't last forever, she of all people would know.Suddenly I'm sure we didn't have dinner on the train with District 3 just to be sociable, that when Beetee was talking over my head he was using some code Mags could understand. I actually smile thinking of her "shopping list." Now I know why she wouldn't talk about it on the train, and now I really want to know what she would put on it.Now, if I think, I can come up with something good. I remember the gossip on the boat, the politician's suspicious death, the idea that President Snow drinks dead tributes' blood... Who knows what I might hear if I found the right place to fall "sound asleep"? Aquilia promised me anything I wanted — she didn't mean it, but who knows what I could have gotten if I'd kept her in that mood instead of haggling? I imagine myself turning toward her, looking into her eyes like what I really want most is just to be closer to her...
"Tell me a secret."
Who knows what she might have told me? I've been doing this long enough to know that people with secrets really long to tell them to someone, that they'll pay incredible amounts of money for someone who'll listen to the secrets their husbands and wives and friends can't know and would never understand..."Stay and try it?" Mags asks me.She catches me smiling like a cat with a fish, but as I come back from my fantasy, the smile falls. Tomorrow and the day after I'll still be hiding in my house because everyone I grew up with despises me. My mother will still be pained by the sight of me; my father will still be telling people his son is dead. Every month I'll get back on the train to be passed around the Capitol as a plaything; every year I'll watch another twenty-three tributes die. I'll still wake up some mornings knowing that I'll always be at sea and can never go home. Before the work is finished, either I'll be dead, or home will be completely transformed...Like when I went to the Games. It's fear underneath again, and it doesn't feel so light and free, but it's something. It gives me one point of pride that really matters to me, one star to steer by that I can look for if I'm in danger of getting lost or forgetting who I am...It's enough. No, more than that — tears well up in my eyes as I realize it — I want it to be enough.I don't want to go on living the life I've had this past year — and somehow I know, now that I've heard the song of the Sirens, I'll never quite have that melody out of my head — but looking back now, it's obvious. If I'd really been resolved to end it, I'd have thought through the flaw in my plan sooner. When I realized the stonefish wouldn't work I'd have looked for another way; just the silk scarf that came with the vase would have done it with the simplest of knots, painful but quiet... Instead, I could barely think past the surface of it; I let myself be thwarted so easily because I didn't — because I don't — really want to do it. I don't want to live like this, but I don't want to die.
I don't want to die.
It echoes in some tender, neglected part of my mind. I actually said those words in my Games once.I don't know how I ever got away with it. A week in, I managed to lose all my weapons. The pair from District 2 had made sure there were none left at the Cornucopia for me to find, and for the rest of the day I kept looking up into a suddenly-empty sky. Even the food stopped coming; there I was in "The Hunger Games," and for the first time I was actually hungry. I couldn't know then that Mags was actually scraping together that impossible sum I saw on the control room screen. I thought the money had run out, that such a stupid mistake had shown the sponsors I didn't deserve to win after all. I thought that that year in District 4, everyone who looked in the cupboard on Parcel Day and everyone who sailed out toward the Line would think of me, how I'd had the best possible chance, better than I deserved, and how I'd blundered it away. I was sure the sponsors would only be more disgusted if I cried or begged, but I finally couldn't keep up the act anymore, couldn't hold back the tears anymore, and I said it aloud to the air: "I don't want to die."And that was when Mags sent the trident.It was the same thing she's doing now. Just when I was sinking into despair, she gave me what I needed — not a rescue, although I'm sure she wished and wishes still that she could just save me. Not a rescue, but enough. A way to fight. A way to go on.When I sniffle and wipe my eyes, Mags lays her hand on my shoulder, but that isn't enough. I pull myself up, out from under her touch, and I wrap my arms around her. I've never done it before. I don't know why I haven't. She's so tiny there's no way to do it except to hold her against my chest, although really she's the one holding me up.She finds my hand, gives it a firm squeeze. "Stay with me?" Her voice is quiet, not quite steady. I've never heard her sound like that.I hold on tighter, not trusting myself to talk.
We finally walk home by flashlights. When we've arrived at my house and I've had a bath, I'm ready to drop under my own weight, but Mags gives me a spoonful of sleep syrup. She doesn't trust me. I do trust her, and I take it without complaint.It keeps me asleep the next morning until the sun is falling strong and hot through the windows. I get out of bed, open the room up for some breeze and lean on the windowsill, savoring the view of the already-busy ocean.I hear someone walking by on the street below. It's my old trainer, leading a vaguely-familiar girl with beautiful brown hair. The girl looks up, and I smile and wave. She of course turns away, but she's kind enough to look just awkward, not disgusted. She's about the same age I was when I went to the Games, and by the look of her, I don't think she's one of the eager ones. I hope they never pick her.When I go downstairs, the first thing I see under the stairway lintel is the hem of Mags' dress by the foot of an accent table — the one where I left the fishbowl. I hear a slosh of water."MAGS, DON'T TOUCH IT!" I'm sprinting down the stairs —A cleaver appears above her shoulder. It falls onto a board with a solid whack."Good eating," she tells me, and shows me my stonefish's ugly head on a meat fork.I totter on my feet. The moment of panic passes, and into the emptiness it leaves behind settles the realization of just how selfish I've been. She cares about me as much as I do about her — by all evidence, more; I have certainly been a high-maintenance pet this past year — and I was terrified just now. She must have felt the same harpoon through the heart when she dumped the black vase into that fishbowl and saw what I had. In the Dark Days, when the Capitol brought those things here, she must have seen people die that way... I don't know where she got the strength not to shake me awake right then and start screaming, to instead just sigh at me and say "It's your life" — because that was strength and nothing less, I'm sure of it...Properly chastened, I shuffle over to her and drape myself over her bony shoulders. "I'm sorry I'm such a pathetic brat.""Only seventeen," she says, and she rubs her fingertips under my hair. "Still growing."I hope she's right.She always is.
THE END