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Chapter Text

District 1

As a special “courtesy” from Luster Lancaster, Lady Delacroix was watching mandatory viewing on the reaping stage in the same chair that her daughter would sit in to listen to the Treaty of Treason and watch the tributes get reaped on a normal year. She looked like she has aged half a decade a day since her two youngest children boarded the train to the Capitol. As she stared up at the screens scattered throughout time square at every angle, watching the cornucopia spin and their bodies fall into the lake, she felt too tired to scream, weep, or even move at all. This was her fault, hers and her late husband’s, for wanting a child of theirs as a Victor in the first place. She knew it, and it was killing her as surely as Everdeen and Mason had just killed her sweet, beautiful, oh-so broken and hurting twins.

Cashmere had given her a hug before leaving, but no words. Nothing meaningful, anyway. Gloss, always such a bad liar around his mother, had seen her right afterward and let slip that Cashmere didn’t plan on coming back, but that he would do everything he could to survive and keep her memory alive. She’d only had that excuse for a hope for an hour and twenty-five minutes before her eldest son Gusto had told her-not in so many words-that Gloss wouldn’t be coming home either. Lady Delacroix knew that the Games had brought out a darkness in Gloss, but she’d never realized how long-lasting it was until Gusto relayed the awful things Cashmere had confided in him. Things that meant Gloss couldn’t go on living without Cashmere without becoming as brutal and wrathful as Luster Lancaster himself.

Speaking of the district’s senior (in status if not in age) Victor, he was staring at the screen with undisguised contempt, like a horse farmer whose prized jumper couldn’t clear a low hurdle. Next to him, Song Nuo and Gleam Cobble were weeping, while Brilliance Rosencrantz had his fist clenched in rage, and Ermine Butler was looking at the ground, refusing to meet anyone’s eye. His fellow Victors' displays of emotion did nothing to shame the unofficial ruler of District 1 out of his irrevence toward the dead twins. Nor did his own niece Luscious Lancaster-Kenning, lightly elbowing him with a concerned look. The glare he shot at her made Luscious take five steps back and publicly confirmed half a book full of rumors about how Luster treated the remaining members of the house he once claimed to seek honor on behalf of.

Slowly, Luster’s eyes turned to Gusto, surrounded by his brother Zircon, two second cousins of Jade Boleyn, Lord St. Martin’s three bastard sons, the current St. James matriarch, a Rosencrantz daughter-in-law, Lord Canterville’s granddaughter, and Majesty Gillvray Jr.’s bloc of guild masters. The same crowd who had been meeting Gusto behind closed doors at the kinds of meetings that Lady Delacroix has been unequivocally barred from for reasons she never understood before and now felt grimly appreciative of. Luster gestured at several camera crews who had been conspicuously avoiding him with their lenses until getting this signal. Now, their devices moved toward Luster, as he took a glass of brandy from an Avox President Snow gave him as a birthday gift. Luster shed a few crocodile tears and called for a toast to whichever tributes or gamemaker traps would kill Katniss Everdeen and Johanna Mason and avenge the Delacroix twins by the end of the Games.

Luster paused for just a second to stare at Gusto and the others, who nodded wearily and took glasses of champagne from a nearby table. Theyed lift them up in the air on sync with Luster. A few Capitolitian camera operators smiled at the powerful imagery, but those smiles didn't last long. Luster was beginning to bring his glass down to his lips when Gusto moved his glass away from his lips, pouring the champagne on Luster’s shoes with a malevolent glare.

Everyone around both men moved backward. Luster looked down angrily and seemed like he is about to unleash the cruelty and power that made him Victor of the 30th Hunger Games on the Delacroix heir. The impulse was rising, then was gone in a flash as Luster glanced at the bulging muscles the younger man hasn’t let shrink since his Peacekeeper tour. More than that though, he paused because of the anger in Gusto’s eyes, anger not directed toward the Girl on Fire in the slightest. Luster settled for screaming for Peacekeepers. Several white-clad figures marched up to grab Gusto Delacroix. The cameras quickly shut down or move to other parts of the crowd, but the image had already gone out.

Lady Delacroix almost felt a heart attack coming on. Then she saw something that made her fight down a wicked smile: the boots one of the Peacekeepers was wearing. Sequined boots that she and Zircon's wife had given Cousin Amythest’s granddaughter Caisha for her birthday. Ten minutes later, Snow’s lapdog in District 1 was just getting into his limo when an official raced up to him with news that the Peacekeepers who escorted Gusto Delacroix away had been disguised infiltrators and that the man who publicly defied Luster was loose in the district. Hands uncharacteristically trembling for just for a moment, Luster turned on his videophone to call Coriolanus and ask the president for Peacekeeper reinforcements. Lady Delacroix and Zircon heard President Snow’s angry screams through the closed window of Luster’s limousine, halfway down the street from them. The smile they shared was cold as a District 12 winter, and more self-assured than Luster Lancaster would ever be able to make again if they had anything to say about it.

District 2

Brutus Barsetti’s neck broke, Peeta Mellark hurried forward, and the (all in plainclothes, given the official illegal status of Career training) faculty and students from Boudicca’s academy let out a roar of chatter they couldn't have held back for all the money in the First Bank of Pompey. In that sea of wildly gesturing bodies, no one consciously noticed Ursa Pagano quickly yet apparently casually walking toward a trashcan and suddenly leaning over it to be sick.

Recovering quickly, she grabbed a damp napkin from a corner of the can her puke missed and used it to wipe her mouth. Her face feels even more disgusting than ever after that kind of wipe-down, but it looks pristine. She was fast from her training: her cousins like to compare to someone from their bootleg comic collection (which Ursa had long resisted the increasingly powerful temptations to read herself) called the Flash. Six seconds after she reached that trash can, she was already five feet away from it, still unnoticed as far as she could tell. Father had died cursing and choking in his own blood right after the Quell reaping, but his brothers, the men who stood by throughout a childhood of training from Hell, were still alive, and Ursa knew they’ll beat her bloody if they learn how weak she just was in one of District 2's darkest hours.

She couldn't help it though. That could have been her brother Lupus in there. It could have been her or Canus in a normal year against normal tributes in that arena born from a sadist’s nightmares. Not once in her seventeen years of life had she seen Lupus look half as terrified as he did there at the reaping before Brutus volunteered for him. Even in his forties, Brutus was stronger and faster than Lupus could hope to be after another straight year of training. But Brutus, the gentle giant of the Victors Village, was dead. Something about that arena had taken away his skill and drive and left him easy prey for the opponent who so many had once dismissed as just Katniss Everdeen’s boy toy.

She thought about all the news footage of Brutus palling around with his future fellow Quell tributes over the years. He’d been one of the best friends any of them could have had, outliers included. She didn’t know if going back to kill so many of his friends like that made him a bit more of a monster than the outliers thought or the bravest and most self-sacrificing of the Victors. Just watching clips of their games over and over again throughout her years of training would have made Ursa have a panic attack at the prospect of having to kill such people, and she hadn’t even known them like Brutus did.

Ursa reflected on the way her brother Lupus had been looking at her for the past two years, after she became the best cadet in her year and a shoo-in for tribute. Uncle Caligula had kept telling her it was envy about how she was out to knock him off his perch that came with being the clan’s sole victor. But a cold certainty was developing that it had been fear of losing her mixed with pity at the thought of the pressure she faced from their family.

Loud sounds came from the screens to remind her that Brutus was dead but six tributes remained alive, and the fight was still going strong. She didn’t look up at them, though. At first this was because of Enobaria, the woman once legendary for her easygoing nature, and later far more legendary for her campaign of revenge against the wilderness marauders who had abducted and tortured her and killed her three best friends, then gone through torture nearly as bad before surviving the arena. After going through all that, was it fair that she would die before her fortieth birthday in her second arena?

Ursa also had more personal reasons to worry for Enobaria than most of the people getting increasingly fired up on her behalf. Many of the District 2 victors had treated Lupus’s family with a polite coldness while isolating Lupus himself from them in subtle ways, an attitude Ursa was gradually beginning to accept was more than warranted by her father and uncles’ bloodthirsty behavior. Enobaria was different. She had always been nice to Ursa and Canus, asking about their combat stats while making seemingly light comments about how they needed to think hard about hogging so much glory for their family instead of someone else’s. Losing her wouldn’t be as painful as losing Brutus for most of the district, but it would be for Ursa.

Ursa became conscious of distinctive figures hurrying away from the town square where thousands had gathered to watch the climax. Vince Pastier and some other coaches from the schools were kids who didn’t want anything do with the Games went. Slate Taner III and a few other youthful relatives of Lyme and Granyte from the suburban side of their family. The justice hall librarian. One of the mayor’s bodyguards. Lupus’s old friends Ben and Samara. Legendary former cadet Otho Magro, whose team-building skills and record-setting bladed weapons stats might have let the Careers endure the arctic arena of the 55th Hunger Games if he hadn’t failed the Trial of Blood before the games. Several teenagers who’d come down from Redfern.

All of them were people she’d seen visiting Lyme’s house since her family moved into the Victors Village. All of them coming together to a waiting jeep and speeding away from the town, or even from Redfern and the other outlying villages, towards a maze of canyons to the south. Something about the climax of the Games didn’t just have them confused, angry, or upset, but frantic to make themselves scarce.

Feeling like she might have to throw up again, only for very different reasons than before, Ursa looked up at the screens again. She was just in time to see Katniss aiming at Enobaria, only to pause, mouth the words “remember who the real enemy is,” and turn to attach her arrow to wire and fire it at the forcefield. The footage in the arena went dead, and the uproar which had followed Brutus’s death seemed small compared to the one that Ursa found herself joining in now.

There were voices calling Katniss Everdeen a bitch, a lunatic, butcher, a traitor, and far, far worse. Those voices represented the minority, though. Drowning them out was a far bigger number of voices demanding something else. Answers for what had happened to Enobaria. Demands that someone say she was okay and get her out of that arena where it seemed like rules and traditions were flying out the window. For about ten seconds, the voices of District 2’s diehard loyalists were drowned out by voices crying for the survival of a tribute they had sent off to potentially die in the Quell.

Head Peacekeeper Wildbrook pulled a gun out of his holster and Ursa felt herself going pale at the thought that her words may have led to District 2 killing District 2. Fortunately, Wildbrook merely fired three consecutive shots in the air, angled so that the bullets would come down in the one part of the square without any people in it. Those three shots were enough to silence the crowd. But the citizenry of District 2 had just experienced a reaction unlike anything the Capitol had seen from them before.
As Ursa looked around at the mix of expressions on people’s faces and thought about how Lyme’s friends had vanished before this happened, Ursa suspected that Wildbrook might soon find himself regretting wasting those three bullets in the face of the strife to come. And she wasn’t sure whether to feel dread about that, or joy. Not yet.

To be continued....

Chapter Text

District 3

In most of the districts, the most pivotal reactions came with the death of a Victor-tribute. District 12 was one exception, given the survival of both Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, while District 3 was another, despite only being half as fortunate at preserving its Victors. That wasn’t to say District 3 was anything but devastated by the death of Wiress. They loved the constantly underestimated genius who gave 70% of her Victors salary to the community home every year, refused to let the Capitol have groundbreaking new medical technology until they signed a contract it would also be used in the districts. While these deeds would only widely resonate outside of District 3 for the first few hundred years after the rebellion, the legend of how she had manipulated the arena environment to win a precarious Hunger Games and worked as tirelessly to help other outlier tributes as she did District 3’s own reaped children guaranteed her immortal legacy.

District 3 still bore the pain and trauma of having half their population slaughtered during the Dark Days, and the story about how their population numbers still hovered below what they were in those days were almost always repeated through angry tears by the descendants of the people who went through it. The last few survivors of those days couldn’t even talk about them without risking a stroke anymore.

But, if there was one silver lining to that story, it was that the smaller population let news spread fast. The death of Wiress was no less a tragedy than the loss of Gloss, Cashmere, or Brutus. But, by the time of mandatory viewing and the reaction shots, every last soul in District 3 already knew what had happened to her. Her brother, nieces, mother, uncle, and cousins had all been glued to the TV even before mandatory viewing. So had the mayor and every other rebel leader in the district. Phone lines had lit up and kids had run past houses or into factories shouting the news. Everyone in District 3 knew that their greatest hero of the last quarter-century wouldn’t be coming back except maybe in a box.

So, when the nightly recap showed Wiress falling to Gloss’s knife, no one was surprised. But what flummoxed the Capitol was how almost half the crowd weren’t even paying attention. They were far too busy.

The moment Katniss Everdeen grasped the meaning of Wiress’s “tick tock” ramblings as meaning that the arena was a clock, a ragged cheer went up through the crowd. Then, before it had even died down, almost three hundred people were breaking off into groups ranging from five to almost two dozen people to whisper about the significance of this, keeping the cameras from having a view of anyone’s mouth for lip reading. In most districts, electronic listening devices would have picked all of this up. But there were none installed in 3. The bean counters in the Capitol had put their feet down about wasting so much money replacing devices that the gadgeteer citizens always, always found and dismantled within a matter of days.

Not everyone in District 3 knew about the arena breakout, but there were cell leaders, radio operators, quartermasters for the district’s underground bunkers, wives and children of all those people, and more who had a rough idea of the timeline. They knew that something would be happening within 36 hours or less of the tributes figuring out the twist. And the tributes had just made that realization. More than a few people let their eyes sweep over the Peacekeepers standing throughout the district. President Snow was just as ruthless as his Dark Days predecessor. He was ready to kill the best and brightest of District 3 before they could utter a single useful word into rebel ears.

The third largest gathering was a family group known for having no last name. Their great-grandfather had destroyed all records and issued a tradition of only giving new babies giving names to make it harder for escorts and Peacekeepers to identify them at reapings. That had gotten the great-grandfather and several other family members executed soon after, but the family tradition endured out of respect for their losses, with family members now picking the first letter of their first names as their placeholder last names on the reaping slips.

More than half of the Capitol cameras found themselves gravitating toward that family. Partially because of the size, but also because of who two of the members were. Last year’s District 3 boy, Neutron N, had quickly become the family’s second most famous scion. Neutron had died just before making it to the final eight, but his strategy of reactivating landmines had been engaging enough for some people to start asking interviews back home about that strategy a bit early. They had talked a bit with Neutron’s widowed mother, sisters, a few classmates, and his favorite cousins Onissey O, Byte B, and Mouse M, the other family breadwinners, who’d had the most to say. Onissey O and those three cousins had all been eighteen that year, and each had been taking tesserae for 6-12 parents, grandparents, and siblings for the past six years, with the cumulative reaping slips making the odds very much not in their favor.

The cousins had spent almost five years planning what to do in case they were reaped, and the landmines scheme was something they’d come up with together and spent three years perfecting. They’d been hoping none of them would ever have to use it, but that hope had been in vain. Onissey O, Byte B, and Mouse M had been very careful about how they worded things, making it sound like the cousins were honored and grateful that the Capitol had given them a tool to use like this, and were baffled that no tributes before them had understood how to best accept this generous opportunity.

It would have been enough to save Neutron from being punished for using landmines in an unauthorized way if he’d made it home. But he hadn’t, and any warmth and sincerity the cousins he’d made that plan alongside might have had for the camera crews had died with the cousin who they all felt could have been the victor if he’d allied with the fox-faced girl from District 5 instead of the Careers. Byte seemed ignorant of the reporters’ presence, while Onissey and Mouse stared at the camera unblinkingly for a moment, then when back to the talk.

Even without Onissey O, the presence of his father, Ratchet R, might have drawn some attention. For the past nine years, Cannon Magazine had been publishing an annual list of the five most well-known non-Victors in each District. Ratchet R had been on the District 3 list every one of those years, and had been #1 for six of them, having been briefly overshadowed by inventors two years, and Wiress’s youngest nephew-who had been reaped for the 71st Hunger Games but saved by a volunteer-a third. Ratchet R’s claim to fame came from a combination of brilliant artistic imagination and expert computer skills for editing and improving the visual quality.

In fifteen years, Ratchet R had been singlehandedly responsible for re-releases of eighty-three movies from either the Golden Age of the Capitol or the world before the Dark Days. His work had made the Capitol investors he was working for more money than the nation’s wealthiest mine investor, casino mogul, and porn czar put together. But even 9/10ths of the people who made money from his movies (even three of the five people with the biggest returns) could sincerely say that seeing the sheer artistic brilliance of what Rachet R and his handpicked actors and technicians did could feel even better than counting the money he made. It said something about how true that was that he had been banned from making any more movies since shortly after the 69th Games, yet almost every Capitolian old enough to talk still knew his name, his face, or-more often than not-both.

The story behind why he had gone so long without making a movie was the same story that explained why his son, favorite niece, and two of his nephews had been taking tesserae. His epic re-release of a movie known as Final Destination: Bloodlines mixed in with almost three hours’ worth of footage and characters taken from other movies in the franchise, in addition to thirty minutes of new footage set in the realm of Death himself, as Guardian Angels fought to force him to undo all of his arbitrary murders of the protagonists and so many others in their situations.

Final Destination: Bloodlines had been Ratchet R’s biggest hit, with thousands upon thousands of district citizens and members of the Capitol underclass crowding around what TVs thay had to watch and rewatch it that year. There’d been talk of actually granting Ratchet Capitol citizenship as investors and government officials marveled over the film’s success. Even the presence of the angels had been forgiven in spite of President Snow’s infamously diehard atheism (it was rumored that he had once been planning on dialing back on the prosecution of underground churches, only to double down on them after a captive prophet told him his father, grandmother, and gamemaker mentor were all burning in Hell and that he would soon join them), as Ratchet R’s movie had them be born from the belief of “special” people rather than coming from any God or Heaven.

But, eight months after the film’s first release, the government’s perception of it underwent an abrupt shift, and Ratchet R found himself dragged to the Capitol for the most aggressive and public trial of a district citizen since Mayor Lourdes of District 7 had been called to answer for hundreds of unauthorized hunts during a hard winter. Once you got past the gore, resourceful escapes, T&A, and adorable non-sexual relationships, Ratchet R’s version of Final Destination: Bloodlines had condemned the senseless, preventable, and hauntingly dogmatic killing of innocent young people with so much love and productivity ahead of them and had seen Death forced to re-evaluate and alter his longtime bloodletting practices. Conscious or unconscious parallels between the Hunger Games were drawn in all sorts of circles, and empathy for the tributes began reaching disturbing highs.

Ratchet R had narrowly escaped execution or avoxxing with an impassioned speech claiming that his work had actually been a defense of the Hunger Games, with evil Death being meant to resemble the districts that had spent so long killing the Capitol before accepting its governance and abandoning their bloody rebellions for good. He’d been lying through his teeth, but most of the Capitol had believed him, although even the dullest district viewer of his trial knew the truth. The Capitol had settled for making a speech about how dangerous Ratchet R’s visions were if they were so badly misconstrued even when he was trying to convey loyal messages.

Ratchet R had been fined 99% of his bank account and banned from ever making another movie. Behind the scenes, Snow had also planned a much deeper revenge, arranging for a hard fix to condemn the next generation of Ratchet R’s family to the Hunger Games. He was specifically letting them all reach the age of eighteen, to give the family maximum hope that they were safe, before taking them away on their eighteenth birthdays. Ratchet R having four relatives who’d turned eighteen during the year of the 74th Hunger Games had been a complication, but a study of the family tree showing there would never be more than two children or nieces/nephews eligible at a time in subsequent years had made Snow decide to spare Byte B and Onissey O (after all, letting them live would give their younger relatives even more false hope that some of them might also be spared) while sending Mouse M and Neutron N into the Hunger Games.

Luckily for the family and unluckily for Snow, the escort had a thick accent that made it sound like she had called Mouse “Emmett.” She hadn’t known Mouse M by sight and didn’t realize that the wrong girl was stepping up to the podium until they were already on the train and she got an angry call from Snow (who’d been at a doctor’s appointment during the reaping and hadn’t known to call in time to do anything about the mistake). Snow had settled for sending the escort to join Illythia Bitter in the stables, having her replacement memorize pictures of the two family members he planned to send into the 76th Hunger Games, and ordering a private DVD of every image of Neutron N in fear or pain, from the moment his pedestal entered the arena to when Cato broke his neck.

Ratchet R and (to a much lesser degree) Onissey’s fame were the reason the family got singled out by so many camera crews. The Capitol reporters craned their necks eagerly, certain that the district’s most 2nd (3rd until recently) most famous living citizen might be acting at least a little different. But he was just a random face in a crowd. Everyone paused to lower their heads for a moment as the screen showed Wiress actually dying at Gloss’s hands, but then they went back to their optimistic-looking chatter. Capitol technicians and viewers alike were beginning to uncomfortably realize that the death of one of their own tributes wasn’t crushing District 3’s sense of hope for Victors not even born in their boundaries. That wasn’t how the Games were supposed to work.

Then, suddenly they had another angle to focus on, as the groups began to disperse, and Ratchet R pulled out a notebook and began scribbling in it, pausing to take a jawbreaker from his pocket, unwrap them, and pop it into his mouth to roll from one side to the other. All across Panem, thousands of people recognized a longtime, well-publicized ritual Ratchet R undertook every time he was working on a new movie outline. Even the long years he had spent blacklisted hadn’t crushed memories of the image. District 3 cared more about the survival of other district’s tributes.

But, in mansions, offices, and military barracks across the country, those people who knew better felt their stomachs stiffening, as it began to dawn on them that perhaps Ratchet R was confident about making another movie not because he expected the current regime’s forgiveness, but because he doubted its prospects. One of those people who knew better was the Head Peacekeeper of District 3, and his angry, frightened rant on the subject to his adjutant was overheard by several lower-ranking grunts and spread rapidly. Debates about how big a massacre Snow would order, or whether District 3 was expecting it and prepared to retaliate, spread even faster.

When the Capitol reporters were hustled away the moment Katniss’s arrows fire, twenty Peacekeepers stowed away on the train with them, a mixture of kids who don’t want to kill anyone, and smart veterans who didn’t want to die. It was speculated that they might have ended up being the only District 3 peacekeepers still alive a week later. They were also the first deserters of the war, but far, far from the last.

District 4

District 4 had four times the population of District 3, but word about what happened to Mags spread through their district in barely 1/3rd of the time it took District 3 to learn about Wiress several hours later. People everywhere spent the next hour weeping for the greatest hero and surrogate mother their district has ever known. Then, her surviving three sisters made a call, and rebels at the train station start breaking open boxes that Mags and Finnick insisted the district rebellion smuggle in from District 3 and use in the event one or both of them died in the arena. Once those boxes are open, people go racing across the district to deliver them to every house. A few were stopped by suspicious Peacekeepers but then allowed to go on their way (before anyone could get a look at what they were carrying) after displaying special permits from Deputy Head Peacekeeper Tiberias Lockwood.

The man with the dubious distinction of making the most deliveries was Harris Greaves, and he stood at the front of the crowd in the square during mandatory viewing. Harris would soon go on to personally kill forty-nine Peacekeepers in the fight for the district and contribute to the deaths of almost two hundred more in his capacity of giving orders to a platoon’s worth of hard-fighting soldiers marching toward the Capitol. Not once throughout that Hellish war would Harris sweat from anything besides heat or the weight of a heavy pack carried over too many miles. But he was sweating right now. Enough to fill a bucket, as he watched Finnick and Mags join the District 12 tributes in a frantic flight from the poison fog.

He was sweating because that could have been him there instead of Finnick. Harris had been the presumptive volunteer for the 59th Hunger Games until a week before the reaping. He’d always had his doubts about the morality and wisdom of going into an arena and trying to win over 23 young corpses, but the final straw had been the suicide of a man whose eldest son had died in the 58th Hunger Games. That man still had a wife and three other kids, but the loss had broken him. Harris’s mother had a dying, comatose husband who not even Capitol medicine could save and no other kids. The thought of what losing him would due to her had been too unpalatable to overcome.

He had watched those Games and felt there was a 50-50 chance that someone with his tracking skills and combat stats could have found killed Circe Montoya before she poisoned half her competitors. But to survive that arena to end up in this one was not a fun thing to imagine. Bad enough that he had to wonder if the Capitol predators would have been so relentless toward Finnick if he’d been there to divert away at least a little of their lust.

Then, he watched Mags kiss Finnick and walk back into the mist as the others looked back at her, agonizingly, and ran. Harris had known what was coming, but even so, more water began pouring from his tear ducts than all his pores combined. Compared to the rest of the crowd’s weeping, he was rather reserved. Some of the Capitol camera crews joined in the grieving process as they reflected on the woman who, district-born or not, they’d loved and idolized for so long, while others merely smirked and zoomed in on some of the most distraught faces. Then, Brises’ Barrington’s surviving cousins and their children straightened up and begin pulling their shirts over their heads. Minnow Carr and her orphaned charges were simultaneously doing the same thing several hundred feet away, and almost as one Harris and the others did the same thing.

The camera crews and nearby Peacekeepers (those not on the list of reliables Tiberias Lockwood recently entrusted to the Rebellion, anyway) thought they were about to be fired on at first and started to jerk backward of reach for weapons. Then they saw that the crowd wasn’t drawing weapons but instead taking off their shirts to reveal that every one of them, man, woman, and child, wore a second shirt underneath. A shirt with beautiful pictures of Mags and Finnick printed on it. For a few seconds, sighs of relief, and nods of appreciation came from the Capitol visitors and Peacekeepers as they took in the sight.

Then, their contentment was replaced by shocked gasps, scowls, or sad nods of agreement as lines of text below the pictures of Mags and Finnick began to register with the observers. They were dates, the years Mags and Finnick had been born, each with a line drawn to the current year. Like a cemetery marker. It sunk in to the visitors that District 4 appeared to have written off Finnick Odair as doomed to remember him. Almost every reporter in the town square whose sexual orientation permitted attraction to the god in human form that was Finnick Odair found themselves screaming, fainting, vomiting, or at least going pale.

Back in the Capitol, almost enough people to make up the population of District 4 three times over were doing the same thing. That was exactly what Mags and Finnick made been hoping for when they ordered those shirts. Most of the people of their hometown didn’t think that Finnick was doomed for an instant. But acting like they did was one of the easiest, most public ways possible to keep anyone from thinking Finnick might be in on an escape plan, and to really put the screws to the Capitol at the same time.

When President Snow awoke on the morning of the third day, one of the first things his ministers had to tell him was about the sobbing interviews, lucrative gambling speculation, and three suicides in the Capitol that stemmed from District 4’s apparent pessimism about Finnick. He ordered the suicides to be buried as far outside the Capitol as possible, furious at the thought of any of his citizens daring to kill themselves over a mere child of the districts. It was another four hours before he stopped getting a new update about the Capitol’s panic and premature mourning over Finnick Odair. The president was soon plagued by the worst headache he’d had since Katniss Everdeen and her berries had forced Seneca Crane’s hand. He bitterly wished for something to take his mind of those cursed shirts in District 4.

When Katniss’s arrow fired and the cameras went dark, Snow had just enough presence of mind to remember the adage about being careful what you wished for.

Chapter Text

District 5

The people of District 5 were stereotyped as constant survivors in the Capitol, slow to form sincere and lasting alliances in the arena, slow to rebel, and fast to fill their work quotas and keep from feeling the day of the Jackboot. No one expected much different when their youngest Victor was swept away by the tidal wave while letting loose with the only scream of terror the composed and brilliant woman ever made in all her adult life.

But if the people of District 5 were survivors (except in all but three of the first 74 Hunger Games), they were also people who knew how to respect the exceptional. The Donovan girl who died of nightlock poisoning in the 74th Hunger Games had been voted “most likely to be mayor” by her senior class two weeks before she was reaped. Matty Fletcher-now dead at Finnick Odair’s hands-may not have made many friends in the district after they watched him flay a Career alive, but all but the dumbest of his neighbors can recognize how few people could have kept themselves hydrated on that barren island arena long enough to outlast the rest of the field with only two kills, both before the final eight. And Emrys Avery with his firebombs and Circe Montoya and her poison earned even more admiration than him. Every head in the square lowered as they realize that their brilliant, motherly Witch of the Woods was never coming home.

If it had stopped there-not exactly screaming “Hosana” in support of the Quell, but not doing anything out of the ordinary- that would have been it. But then, right as mandatory viewing ended young Miles Donovan and a few dozen other kids began trekking away from the town square, and away from their homes, in the direction of Camp Kalderash, the little neighborhood the Campers built with their own two hands after the Dark Days rebellion quarantined them in District 5. They didn’t break away all together, in a group, either, but rather individually or in groups of two or three from across the crowd. Necks craned to follow them, then a few more kids started following them, and within another minute, every district child older than six and younger than nineteen is walking toward Camp Kalderash. A minute after that, half of the district’s adults were following in their wake. The Capitol reporters were there in the mix. Oddly enough, the Camper adults were among the last to join the exodus, and most had nervous expressions as they did, but no one would notice that until they were reviewing video images of that night over a week later.

Miles and the others were going to pay their respects to Circe Montoya’s family (her parents, husband, daughter, two sons, stepsister, brother-in-law, nephew, widowed aunt, three first cousins, one surviving cousin by marriage, and five first cousins once removed) had been conspicuously absent from mandatory viewing that night. Circe’s aunt, Darcy Amaranth Clade, had collapsed from what her son and physician Turbine Lapis Clade had diagnosed as a stroke during the previous night’s mandatory viewing, right after Matty Fletcher’s death.

Circe’s family, both those who lived in the Victors Village with her and the Camp Kalderash dwellers, had their share of practices that many found strange, but the way they’d practically adopted Matty and Emrys had been what truly baffled District 5, especially when Darcy Amaranth went on four dates with him one winter. The pair had decided to stop seeing each other with surprising amicability (especially on Matty’s part), and it had often been whispered that they’d only started dating to humor Circe and her mother’s matchmaking efforts, but the way she reacted to his death suggested a connection much more than anyone had realized. While some people whispered it was odd that she had taken so long to have that stroke after having reportedly been watching live, most agreed that the effect on the big screen must have certainly been different.

The entire family had asked to be excused from mandatory viewing for the rest of the Hunger Games to attend to their sick relative. President Snow had hastily given his blessings, recognizing that the less time grieving relatives spent on camera, the more chance he had of easing the backlash against these Games. He was about to regret that decision, although only the Campers in the crowd had any idea of this.
Snow was watching the feed from district 5 simultaneously with those from the other districts at that moment. He felt a stab of annoyance at the reporters who were about to negate his whole effort to keep the Montoya Family out of the spotlight. He was worrying for the wrong reason, and he was about to simultaneously learn why and give his hand a nasty cut by squeezing it tight on a glass of Bourbon he was having.

The house in Camp Kalderash was empty. Circe’s family was gone, not just from the house, not just from the neighborhood, but from all of District 5. Their grief over Matty had been real, but it provided a convenient pretext to fake Darcy Amaranth’s stroke and isolate them right before their big escape. Amidst the uproar and failed pursuit, no one heard the fateful words uttered by Tesla Corven, the most eldest and respected of the Campers. One camera caught him mouthing those words, but no one paid close enough transcription to transcribe them until two and a half weeks later, well after Katniss had fired her arrow, and the rest of the Campers had decamped just as efficiently as the Montoyas and their extended family.

What was it that old Tesla said? “Hip hip for the scouts.”

District 6

On the screen Everdeen and Finnick Odair stared solemnly at Maeve Collins’ last painting, Peeta Mellark’s and the bloody flower on them that was Maeve Collins’ last painting. Back in District 6, Berenice Morrow lifted up Maeve’s first painting for the cameras as tears came poured from her eyes. The rest of the group who had come down from the Victors’ Village for mandatory viewing were seconds behind her in holding up other paintings from the home of the first Morphling to win the Hunger Games.

The group was made up of relatives of Chevy Anderson, the first (and, with Maeve’s death, the last living) Victor of District 6. Some of the more ignorant Games commentators talked about the lack of families Mitt and Maeve had left behind to downplay the tragedy of the Quell, only to quickly recive mocking or angry calls from various Games’ afficionados who knew better. Maeve’s parents had been made avoxes when she was a young girl. They had been dealers, not traitors, but it had been a bad year for ferreting out traitors and the work the Capitol needed avoxes for wasn’t getting done, so standards had been loosened. Two years before being reaped, Maeve had given birth to twin girls. She’d stayed clean of morphling for part of her pregnancy, but not all of it, and one of her children had been stillborn due to her morphling addiction, and the other had been born with a skeletal condition that wouldn’t have meant too much in the Capitol but could have killed her with the poor healthcare in the districts if not for Maeve’s victory the following year. Maeve’s addiction had clearly made her an unfit parent, so Chevy and his wife had adopted her surviving daughter and raised her in their household.

Maeve’s fellow morphling, Mitt Compton, had been reaped because of the heavy tesserae his gambling-addicted father made him take out for the family to compensate for his own squandered earnings. On the first anniversary of Mitt’s reaping, Mr. Compton killed himself out of grief and remorse over what the arctic arena had done to his wisecracking firstborn son. The rest of the family had taken the loss hard, but it had motivated them to work hard to try and get Mitt clean of drugs. One small success after another led to hopes that eventually, they might build up to guiding Mitt through eight sober months out of every year. The Hunger Games and the Victory Tour would always be too big of triggers, and two months was the best-case scenario for how long it would take someone with Mitt’s degree of willpower to stop once he’d started.

Then, after the Victors had all been gathered to the Capitol for questioning during the Victory Tour for the girl from 2 who shared a name and little else with Chevy’s grandniece Berenice. Mitt, who had done the poorest job of redirecting or evading Snow’s questions, had gone home to find his mother had been found with a slit throat and a rose by her side. After that, he was lucky to have ten sober weeks a year. With his mother dead, Mitt’s family was reduced to his two brothers, one younger, one older. Both were married to granddaughters of Chevy (one biological, while the one who’d just married the baby of the Compton Boys had been born to Maeve’s daughter/Chevy’s ward out of a teen pregnancy).

So, while everyone in that group was family to Chevy by blood, marriage, or adoption, Mitt and Maeve were also represented. Even if they hadn’t been, the Anderson Clan’s grief would have been just as public and powerful. Chevy had only let his family make supervised visits with Mitt and Maeve, less they lead anyone down the path to addiction, but during those supervised visits, Mitt and Maeve were at their best, and had loved playing with the younger Anderson children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and second or third cousins, painting their portraits, or teaching the kids how to fingerpaint.

After the previous night’s recap of Mitt’s death in the bloodbath, they had known at once how to honor him and simultaneously stir the embers of support for the Mockingjay. Peacekeepers around the district had arrived at three separate sites to find abandoned bonfires let next to murals of Mitt Compton struggling to keep warm in the 55th Hunger Games. Maeve’s tribute seemed less dangerous than Mitt’s, so they do it with the public eye on them.

The Capitol news crews had mixed feelings about what they were seeing at first. Plenty of them didn’t even want to be there and wondered how and why so many camera crews were being sent to monitor every districts reactions instead of waiting for the final eight. Snow himself would go on to spend two hours trying to decipher the memo that had led to one of his ministers approving it before both the minister and the analyst who’d drafted it solved that mystery by fleeing to District 13 on the heels of Plutarch Heavensbee, Cressida, and their respective entourages. The grime, smoldering violence, and smog of the district made the visit a miserable one, and even the reporters who felt the most pity for Mitt and Maeve were at least a little relieved that they would soon be leaving this place behind.

The paintings being held up were a mixture of surrealistically colored landscapes, splatter art, and evil monsters framed in fire and shadows. It would be another nine days before analysts reviewing camera footage began picking up on the pattern of how many of those monsters bore subtle physical resemblances to President Snow, who began grinding his teeth hard enough to need a dentist after someone told him. Like the fires made for both Mitt and the Girl on Fire, the paintings were both propaganda imagery and a genuine tribute to the district’s own victors. If they had stopped there, things would have been fine. But Chevy’s eldest son didn’t stop there.

Jagg was also the father-in-law of Mitt’s brother, Kurt Compton, and he took a strong fatherly role toward both Kurt, as well as Kurt’s brother Vert and sister-in-law Mavis, whose father had been reaped as a tribute, and whose fifteen-year-old mother had died giving birth to her. Mavis had meant the whole world to Maeve, and Mavis was crying buckets out for her grandmother. When the family had first heard Maeve was dead, Jagg had encouraged Mavis to deal with her grief by writing a very specific, very biting speech to bring home Maeve’s tragedy to the Capitol. She hadn’t expected anyone to actually read it out loud, and was in fact gazing in horror, but Jagg had loved Maeve too, like an honorary brother, and he would not be stopped.

“I’d like to thank the Capitol on Maeve’s behalf,” he called out to the cameras, who instantly began focusing on him out of curiosity. “Thank them for the Quell. Maeve…she wasn’t a happy person. Anyone who ever saw how she lived on the news knows that. Part of her died in that arena thirty-one years ago, and a bit more has died every year since. So, thank you for this Quell, President Snow. Going back into the arena put an end to all that pain, and let her die with a dignity and purpose so few of us get. She might not have always seemed like she wanted to go back in there, especially not when she broke down in the interviews, but if she had enough time to think about it, I’m sure she would have agreed that this Quell, this year of all years, was pure serendipity.”

Jagg was a long-time star of District 6’s small community theater community. Not a month didn’t go by without someone praising him for how good he was at faking words and emotions on the stage. But that praise had given him unrealistic assessments of his own skills. The stage of District 6 was nothing compared to the operas, cinemas, and political backrooms of the Capitol, and Jagg had never been half as invested in all of that as he was in the unfairness of what had happened to Maeve.

He might have started out looking and sounding sincerely grateful to the Capitol, but his real feeling had begun showing through by the end of the second sentence, and not even the dimmest of the Capitol reporters present didn’t know what he really meant. So some of them smiled vindictively and others looked away with guilt and shame as two burly Peacekeepers marched up to throw Jagg to the ground and deliver him twenty lashes there on the spot, while several of their comrades held the rest of the family at gunpoint with glares warning them not to intervene.

They would have kept going until he was dead, if not for the angry roars of agreement from the crowd of people who still remembered the food that Maeve had gotten them or their parents for a year after clawing her way out of an arena with the most brutal assortment of mutts since the 24th Hunger Games. Whether factory worker or gangland veteran, few of them could ever watch replays of that Games without feeling at least some respect for their home's only female Victor. Memories of how the Capitol had rewarded her for that victory with decades of abuse, ridicule, lack of addiction treatment, and an early death inflamed even some of District 6's coldest hearts. This was the district where the rebellion would be more against the gangs than the Capitol. There was no big riot. No one chanted the Mockingjay's name to divert the Peacekeepers to them. But their voices grew louder with every lash of the whip. By the thirteenth, the men punishing Jagg found their arms shaking and their blows only landing with a fraction of their impact. By the twentieth, they knew that if they had to stay and listen to those roars and see those angry faces much longer, they might find themselves sweating and puking in front of the cameras and the people they needed to fear them. So they dropped Jagg to the ground and walked away with as much dignity as they could assume, as crowds wasted no time in hurrying to help him.
Jagg barely survived the trip to the apothecary. If he hadn’t been taken there, he might have been one of the many hostages taken hostage (often with ultimately fatal results) by the morphling cartels seizing to dominate the district in the chaos of the Rebellion. One year and one day later, he spoke again before cameras once more. A much smaller crowd of Anderson relatives were standing behind him: his daughters and their husbands, Vert, the heavily pregnant Mavis, a sister, a brother-in-law, Berenice and six other nieces or nephews, and four of the cousins. Together, they finished dedicating the artists’ haunt that would become known as the Garden of Maeve.

Chapter Text

District 7

Just a few hours after mandatory viewing for the first night, the people of District 7 had gone to bed when they were rudely awoken by loudspeakers blaring out announcements that they were to come to the town square for special mandatory viewing. Prominent district Rebels like Mack and Evelyn Murray, Blane Gavin, the widowed Lees Mellark and her children, Jack Anderson, Eloise Tate, Lightfingers Tylos, and Snag Nakamura tucked weapons under their shirts before replying, fearful that this was some pretext to purge district rebels or otherwise undermine their plans.

They arrived to find only a few cameras there. Not regular Capitol reporters-who were being kept away from this-but teams recording footage of them back to the Capitol for President Snow and his ministers to watch later on. One of those ministers, a third-tier policy advisor named, Phaedra Monahan was there on a podium, standing next to some microphones and giving the crowd a cold, yet smug glare. She played a tape for them. A tape of Blight Gavin entertaining Johanna Mason and the late Jason Mellark with the story of how he had dictated demands to President Snow in exchange for Blight playing along with the narrative Snow of the Games Snow was presenting. Blight had even mentioned how he carried out the terms of their agreement. Next came a second tape, letting the people of District 7 know exactly how Johanna Mason had fought back the first time the Capitol tried to pimp her out, and the profanities she had screamed in Snow’s face after her family (save her eldest brother’s twin boys from a one-night stand, unbeknownst to Snow and his flunkies) had died for her defiance.

With her job done, Monahan stepped back to watch in silence. The sadistic smile on her face displayed the Capitol’s complete confidence that what happened next would get across the point she had in mind.

The people of District 7 found themselves watching live video footage of the arena that was being broadcast nationwide. They watched the Gamemakers force a random jabberjay to fly into the electric field and kill itself so that the audiences would know about the danger ahead of what was coming. The cameras focused on Blight, Johanna, Wiress, and Beetee-all tired, thirsty, and on the edge-glancing up at the clouds with hopeful eyes until the blood rain started falling.

The people of District 7 spent the next fifteen agonizing minutes watching their tributes and the Threes stagger through that awful pouring torrent, with repeated camera cutaways making it clear that they were moving in a line toward the electrical field, and that, as the stronger members of the quartet, Blight, Johanna, or both were constantly at the front of the pack and one of them would hit it first. The meaning behind the Capitol’s reminder of how Blight and Johanna had crossed Snow was perfectly clear. Some in 7 felt twisted pride that Snow feared their district so much that he was willing to intimidate them all in such a conspicuous fashion. But even those feeling such pride felt far more fear and grief.

Some people cried out warnings, as if there was a way for Blight and Johanna to hear them through the screen. Others just cried. Or screamed, or glared, or muttered discreet prayers to the gods Blight swore by. And then there was one man-middle-aged, mustached, and big as an ox- who seemed to be feeling some kind of inner conflict and changing opinions every few seconds. Connell Murphy.

As he watched Blight move closer and closer to a trap, Connell knew that he and his friends had killed Blight after all when they arranged for him to get volunteered for the 52nd Hunger Games against his will. His survival that year had just delayed the inevitable. Of those most responsible, Ercole had made some (initially halfhearted) efforts at tolerance and public apology before dying in the same plague as Jason Mellark, former Mayor Lourdes, and so many others. Eamon Sullivan was an avox in the Capitol. Blight’s brother Abel and his friend Tobin had joined the Peacekeepers due to their gambling debts. Burgen Gavin was laid up in bed, slowly dying from liver poisoning. His son’s last letter absolving his crimes had brought him some peace, but not enough to bring him back from the edge of death. Burgen’s third son, Jonnell and his friend Ram had gone to work as cemetery caretakers, putting special care and focus into the tribute grave markers, as their own way of atoning for putting Blight on the path to the Games.

Only Connell remained fairly unchanged except in age. He still worked in the same lumber crew, drank himself into the odd stupor without killing himself like Burgen, and was slow to show respect to people like Mack Murray and Johanna Mason. He had never apologized until four years later, when he was begging Blight to save his brother Connor after the younger Murphy was reaped for the 56th Hunger Games. Blight bringing Connor back alive had prompted real and long-lasting gratitude from Connor and the other Murphys. But the kind of homophobia that could make someone wish a teenage boy dead didn’t entirely die overnight.

When Jack Anderson and Linden Jones became the first gay couple after Blight and Jason to officially move in together, Connell had been the only member of his logging crew not to contribute anything to the collection for their housewarming presents. And when his own firstborn son Mitch had started writing love poems for Blane Gavin, Connell had spent the next three weeks swinging his axe like a man possessed, breaking trees in half twice as fast as anyone else at work in the woods. Almost as if he was venting some kind of frustration.

Phaedra Monahan’s camera crews had read through the intelligence files on Connell Murphy. They subtly kept their lenses trained on his face as Blight touched the electrical field and was propelled backward with less life left in his body than one of Katniss Everdeen’s arrows. As people around him cursed, wailed, hugged each other, or clenched their fists in barely suppressed rage, Connell spent fifteen seconds doing none of those things and merely scrunching his brow in thought.

Then he took out his wallet to look at a picture. Peacekeepers searching his pockets would later determine it was a picture of Connell and his brothers celebrating Big Connor Murphy’s first birthday after Blight brought the youngest Murphy Boy home. Lips tightening grimly, Connor tucked down the thumb and pinky fingers on his right hand, brought that hand to his lips, and whistled a familiar tune, eyes suddenly tearing as they fixated on close-ups of Blight’s body, there on the screen. His expression only hardened when the Peacekeepers dragged him out of the crowd to put a bullet through his head as his neighbors watched and tried to surge forward past the batons and cattle prods to help him. The last thing Connell did was to spit on the man about to kill him. The second-to-last thing was to glance around at the crowd rioting on his and Blight’s behalf, and make a serene, unafraid, and unrepentant smile.

Judging that President Snow and the other intended recipients of this spectacle would be far from satisfied by it and might blame things on her, Phaedra Monahan destroyed the tape and told President Snow that it had been hacked and deleted by District 3 rebels. He swallowed this lie at first, but there had been enough witnesses to know otherwise, and it only took two weeks for their reports to leak back to Snow. The furious president let Phaedra Monahan keep her life but chopped away at her various privileges and symbols of status. One of those symbols was a four-man Peacekeeper bodyguard detail. Monahan would feel their absence keenly on the last night of her life. The night of the revenge of Finnick Odair.

District 8

In District 8, the last several months had seen fiercer acts of rebellion than anywhere else but District 11. Occupied factories and tenements had been blown up. The mayor’s staff had arrived to throw him a birthday party and found his servants drugged, and the mayor’s head mounted on a pike right there in the living room, with a white rose stuffed in his mouth. The district’s first female Victor had been dragged off to the Capitol in chains and committed suicide in the face of enhanced interrogation. President Snow doubted that anything short of making everyone in the district wear some kind of explosive collar would be able to suppress reactions of defiance toward the Capitol and solidarity to his victims. The camera crews had orders meant to limit the damage and obfuscate how serious things were to the viewers. Zoom in on the faces of the crowd and keep their bodies off-camera. Only focus on a few faces at a time.

People cried out and looked down here and there as the screens showed Brutus killing Woof. But, as much as they’d loved their eldest Victor, the crowds didn’t dwell on this long, not when the recap instantly cut back to Cecelia in a desperate struggle with Gloss. The months of revolt and crackdowns hadn’t left many working TVs in the district, so word of what had happened to Cecelia hadn’t spread yet. They still had hope for her. Watching her hold her own against one of the most legendary Careers to ever take a train out of District 1 quickly absorbed all of their attention they would have focused on mourning Woof. Just like Snow and his editors had wanted.

Barely a minute later, Brutus and his spear killed enough District 8 dreams to fill a hundred new A Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Cecelia’s corpse kicked up a cloud of sand as it hit the beach, and her hometown’s reaction was everything Snow had expected.

Blunt objects and rotten animal feces went hurling from the crowd at camera crews and Peacekeepers. Flags with mockingjay paintings on them were hastily assembled further back and hoisted high in the air form the safety of the back of the crowds. Children as young as ten screamed out their hopes that Brutus would get eaten from the inside out by insect mutts. As one, Cotton Rivers’ sisters and baby nephew and Woof’s sisters and their children and grandchildren turned their back on the new mayor with cool and complete contempt as he tried to shout out appeasing platitudes about the deaths of the Victors. But it was the center of the circle containing Cecelia’s family that wound up attracting the most smiles from the rebels and glares from the nearby loyalists.

Spindella Rheys was smart enough not to flash the District 12 salute when her stepdaughter died, but fixating on it so much over the last year had made Snow and his soldiers forget about certain others. The V Sign Winston Churchill had popularized in the Twentieth Century hadn’t been widely used since over a century before the last rebellion, but there were pictures of it in banned books tucked away under mattresses or in sheds across Panem. District 8 had almost as many of those pictures as any other two districts combined.

It took the Peacekeepers almost half a minute to get the meaning of the symbol, and by then they were broadcasting almost five hundred people flashing it to the whole nation. After some whispers with his lieutenants, Head Peacekeeper Cominius Carter handed over his gun to one of them and marched toward Spindella Rheys. He took no escort with him. If he had, then the crowd might have rioted in Spindella’s defense, but his isolation and gesture with the gun made it clear he merely wanted to talk. The people of District 8 hated Carter as much as they hated Snow. They had felt that way even before Carter bragged about recommending that Snow order the bombing of whole factories, the Red, the district’s sole retirement home to suppress the Rebels.

The fact that not a single person in the crowd even considered taking advantage of his vulnerability to attack him spoke volumes about how the former District 2 gold tag was even more feared than he was hated. He and Spindella stared each other in the eye for several seconds, while Spindella’s step-grandchildren whimpered and fought the urges to duck behind their respective fathers. Carter looked like a chef deciding the best way to slice up a fish. Finally, he leaned forward to whisper something in Spindella’s ear. It took him almost a minute to do so. She didn’t flinch as she whispered something back at him. Carter recoiled with a glare and stomped off, to the cheers of the crowd.

Once he was out of sight, Carter thought over the exchange and smiled. He had told Spindella “I know about the son you had nine months after your husband died and your stepdaughter made it home. The boy not even Cecelia knows about, because of your precious and oh-so-futile compartmentalization. The boy you named Jakob after your father. The last survivor of your father’s line, or your grandfather’s, for that matter, since his other children died even younger than your sister. If you want him to live, then you give me a Rebel name that I didn’t already know every day for the rest of the Games.”

Spindella’s subdued response had been, “Sequin Orlansky. The headwaiter at your officer’s club. Act like I said something defiant and intimidating when you break away, otherwise they’ll ask questions.”

As pleased as he was by her compliance, Carter was fuming at the treachery of Orlansky, a man he and his officers had hand-picked and always generously tipped. Having to fake weakness in front of the crowd he despised so much didn’t help his mood either. He had Orlansky picked up, waterboarded, and questioned within the hour. He was prepared to put Spindella through even worse if it turned out she had lied. He could get away with it, now that the camera crews were packing up with no more living District 8 tributes to be the focus of reaction shots in their home.

But Orlansky was indeed a Rebel, and he did crack and named two dozen names who were rounded up with little fuss. So, the next morning, Carter’s District 3-trained text expert sent Spindella a teletype message on the TV in her bedroom. Carter demanded that she share some of the sympathy gifts her neighbors were showering on her with other people in the district, and that she give the last one to the second Rebel he wanted identified.

Spindella complied with his orders. Hidden cameras followed her distributions. Once more, Carter felt shock, anger, and skepticism at the man she identified: a young deliveryman named Batten Stone who had spent the last two years as a snitch for Carter in exchange for food and mercy from the whippings for his family. Once again, brief torture confirmed Spindella’s charges. Batten was almost proud to admit that he had been feeding Carter the names of people who’d either fallen out of favor with their Rebel colleagues for acts like rape and theft, or were criminals never involved in resistance in the first place.

More arrests followed as Batten gave the names of genuine Rebels. As one money lender known for his low interest rates and unwillingness to pursue violent methods of loan repayment was hauled off, Spindella and her stepson raced up to try and plead for the Peacekeepers to spare him. In the argument that followed, Spindella slipped one Peacekeeper a note for Carter. It said that she was under suspicion and wanted them to arrest her and take her to headquarters just before midnight on the third day of the Games, and she would tell Carter, his staff, and the mayor everything in exchange for them sending men to pick up her entire family and take them to the Capitol for the duration of any rebellious activity to keep them safe if they were satisfied her information was worth it. She also said that Carl was about to get himself arrested to serve as a hostage for her behavior, and he did indeed defend the money lender enough to be hauled to the stockade himself.

A few quick phone calls to President Snow confirmed that Cecelia had been implicated in enough Rebel activity that her stepmother probably could name quite a few names. Snow and Carter agreed that they wouldn’t send anyone to pick up her family no matter what she said. Instead, they would get every name they could from her, arrest those people, then let her loose on the street and broadcast a recording the meeting on speakers through town square. That way the mobs might shift their anger from the Capitol to Spindella and her family, and maybe even wipe out a hated Victor bloodline in the process.

When the Peacekeepers came for Spindella, her urgent expression motivated them to race her to their headquarters. Carter, his seven highest-ranking subordinates, the mayor, and three Capitol liaisons were all waiting to hear what Spindella had to say, and she didn’t make them wait long.
“My family are all neck-deep in this, but I imagine you already knew that. If anything happens to me, a woman named Paylor takes up where I left off. Mrs. Li, the new principal, and her son and niece are ours. Little Eddy Brophy and his sisters are my best couriers. Cecelia’s friend Dolla runs our infirmary. Willow Harrington and the rest of the track team from the high school have already volunteered as stretcher bearers. Baker at the community home has been training snipers with the few guns we have for over a decade, although he insists on keeping the kids he watches out of our recruiting efforts. Half of the sewer workers are bombmakers of limited skill. Two of our people, Bonnie and Twill, sent word from District 13 that they made it there last month.”

The mayor turned paler with each name, but Carter was smiling grimly, congratulating himself on being the one to make such a rich source of intelligence. Spindella wasn’t done yet, though. “I don’t know as many names in the Capitol, but I know some. Julianna Carew’s sons and their wives. The District 3 stylists and one of their prep workers. Sabinus Snick, the Pandora’s house manager, and his fellow casino mainstay Mendez’s daughter, Goldie. President Snow’s cousin. A Honeypot street fair host named Aurelian Benz and everyone else on his block under the age of thirty. Allana Corwesh, and her choreographer, sound technician, manager, and backup singers. Quite a few avoxes, although the only ones I know are Blight Gavin’s mother, Larissa Silvertree, and the father of Larissa’s new baby. Head Gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee, who earned my internal gratitude by arranging for the painful and not-so accidental overdose of the escort who President Snow told to call my my sweet Kerry’s name for the 62nd Hunger Games.”

Not a single jaw hadn’t dropped as they listened to this speech. “Pity none of that will do you any good,” Spindella added.

“What?” asked the frowning mayor.

“I left out some names of District 8 rebels who aren’t technically from here. Those Redfern-born Peacekeepers Lyme vouched for who make up the entire guard shift at the stockade right now and should be breaking my son, Sequin, Batten, and all the others out right as I speak. I didn’t betray the rebellion for the sake of the little girl I was in labor with for ten hours, and I wouldn’t have betrayed it for my son even if I thought he was in any danger from the likes of the men you think could get past all the protectors I have posted near him. District 8 should be free by the end of the month, and your precious Capitol and Institute will wish that they’d never won the last Rebellion. You’re about feel what it’s like to be caught up in a Hunger Games of your own, squared to the hundredth power. I’m almost tempted to let you live to go through it all. Almost.”

Carter moved like lightning, grabbing her arm and twisting it behind her back, then slamming her against the wall hard enough to break her nose. But Spindella just laughed.

“Open my jacket,” she said with a malicious edge. Carter was too smart to do so before he knew it was a trap, but one of his men, far more panicked by the revelations, did it for him. Under the coat, they saw a communications jamming device that would have prevented anything Spindella said in that room from being recorded or broadcast out. More importantly, they saw a suicide vest loaded with District 3’s best plastic explosives and a timer set to go off ten seconds after midnight, just six seconds away. Outside, they heard frantic cries of shock and fear that, although they would never know it, came from Peacekeepers watching the sudden disruption of the arena feed.

Carter and his companions all knew it was useless to try and outrun the explosion but try they did. The will to survive was a strong thing. The last words any of them ever heard came from Spindella Rheys.

“Let the Games begin.”

Chapter Text

District 9

Old Anthony Morse needed three men standing around him to grab him and help him down to a chair as he watched his sister die. Evelyn never moved from her pedestal. She just sat down, almost like she was meditating, and never screamed, cried, blanched, or shed a drop of sweat as she waited for Cashmere to swim up to her and break her neck. He was the eldest of his three siblings. How could he be the last one left?

Around him, many others were crying as they dealt with the shock of being the first district eliminated from the Quell. Those fixated on Nolan had expressions of confused grief as the man who had once been their leader and hero died at the hands of a fellow rebel. Nolan had made no secret of how his hate for any outlier who spent even a day allied with the Careers extended to Peeta Mellark, but they’d thought it was just for the cameras. Some would insist to their dying days that it had been, and he had been sacrificing himself to make Snow convinced the rebellion was weak, breaking apart, and not plotting anything. Evelyn had outlived him by a mere 73 seconds.

Rivers of snot and tears ran down Anthony’s face as he thought back to the last time he’d spoken to his sister: after their little brother Isaiah’s execution for taking part in a scheme to steal a little bit of grain out of every shipment out of District 9 and distribute it to the poor of the district. Anthony had been in awe when he’d first heard of that plan. He’d always considered himself the rebel of the family, although he’d never progressed beyond spray painting slogans, mouthing off at Peacekeepers, and setting off firecrackers. He’d quit after the 1st Quarter Quell. Being a Victor’s sibling came with increased scrutiny, and he saw too much of himself in the rebellious District 5 boy who’d been voted into the Hunger Games for bringing too much discipline down on his neighbors.

Still, Anthony had never stopped talking about the old days during meals and holidays with his siblings. At one point, without ever meaning to, Anthony had inspired Isaiah and Isaiah’s wife Alice to start doing something besides keeping their heads down like Evelyn. They had been the masterminds of the grain redistribution scheme. Beetee had managed to smuggle most of the culprits to safety out of the district, but Isaiah, Alice, and a few others had elected to stay behind and face the music. They correctly gambled that the Capitol wouldn’t chase the others too far if their bloodlust was already partially satisfied.

A year before their executions, Anthony had stumbled across what they were doing, and, weeping with pride, embraced them in a bear hug and told them to keep it up. Evelyn had blamed Anthony for their deaths, and Anthony didn’t blame her for that. Evelyn had never spoken another word to him after the funeral, no matter how much their orphaned mutual niece tried to persuade her otherwise. She had almost relented after the 71st Hunger Games, only to harden her heart again after hearing from a friend that Anthony was throwing himself into the Rebellion with a fervor. Evelyn was no Eamon Sullivan or Roan Tully, but she wasn’t convinced that the Rebellion had regained enough strength to take action yet. Not without turning her home into a charnel house. Future events would prove her partially right on that matter.

After the reaping, she had given him a look that made it clear she was ready to bury the hatchet and wanted to talk with the last member of her immediate family before her final train ride to the Capitol. But then the smirking Head Peacekeeper had stepped up. He’d always hated that woman, a purple-haired Capitol gambler who’d gone bankrupt and joined the Peacekeepers after betting that a Career would win the 44th Hunger Games. Whippings and dehydration deaths had gone up 30% under her reign, and she had personally uncovered Isaiah and Alice’s charity work and requested a weekend of getting to rape Gloss as a reward for killing them.

Even after all that, her actions at the reaping had been enough to shock even the hardest hearts. Jaws had dropped from one end of the crowd to the other as the Head Peacekeeper had laughingly called out how there would be no post-reaping visits this year. Anthony and Evelyn had tried to shout messages to each other as she was dragged away, but the roar of the crowd had drowned them out.

Anthony’s wet eyes were just clear enough to make out the Head Peacekeeper, smirk wide as ever, whisper something to Mayor Farley, while pointing at Evelyn’s body as the footage showed the hovercrafts removing her from the arena. Mayor Farley’s rumored habits of participating in the Peacekeepers resurrection of the mythological First Night ritual, but Anthony could tell that he was far from the only district citizen whose rage toward Farley was doubling on the spot.

As the recap footage ended, the people of District 9 were about to disperse, when an old man on crutches began hobbling toward the reaping stage with the look of a man on a mission in his eyes. As Anthony moved forward, he began to sing, very slowly, so that he would reach the stage at the same time as the second verse. He was singing an ancient number from a banned play that had inspired a banned movie that Nolan de Naro had showed to Anthony and other highly-placed Rebels once a year. Anthony hoped none of the Peacekeepers would have heard the song before. They hadn’t, and none of them knew to stop him until it was too late.

Anthony was halfway through the first line when he heard other voices from the crowd joining him. Other Rebels Nolan had trusted like Kitty Norton, Honey Swale Swale, Teff Withers, Caramel Mills, Dottie, Mayfield, and Chester. He paused to glance back and saw tears in all of their eyes as they realized what was happening. Caramel, Mayfield, and a few others hurried forward to walk alongside him, their voices rising as they walked.
“There's a grief that can't be spoken
There's a pain goes on and on
Empty chairs at empty tables
Now my friends are dead and gone.”

They were just a few feet away from the confused but not really threatened leading officials and Capitol reporters when they began the damning second verse.
“Here they talked of revolution.
Here it was they lit the flame.-”

Other district citizens further back took up the chant with a fury, but Anthony himself had to stop there as those treasonous words spurred the Head Peacekeeper and her guards to spring into action and reach for their weapons. Unfortunately for them, the Rebels sprang faster. Anthony swung forward his crutch like a lance, smashing the Head Peacekeeper’s expensively maintained, brilliantly white teeth into tiny shards. Her scream of agony was interrupted by a second jab that crushed her nose. She hadn’t even finished falling to her knees before, moving past her, another swing from Anthony caved in Mayor Farley’s trachea, dooming him to a slow death by choking like the many of hanging victims he had refused to pardon over his career.

Around him, Dottie, Chester, Teff, and the others were grappling with more Peacekeepers, as the screaming reporters dropped their cameras and made a dash for the train station. One Peacekeeper levelled a gun at Anthony, but Caramel Mills grabbed his arm and shoved it at the ground as he fired before head-butting him into dreamland.

By the time Katniss Everdeen fired her arrow, the Capitol had launched three costly counterattacks before reclaiming the town square. For a while, anyway. Anthony Morse failed to survive the third counterattack. One enterprising Peacekeeper even started to take a photo of his bullet-ridden corpse to show to President Snow. He thought better of it, though, once he saw the wide smile that Anthony was still making even in death. The smile of a man who knew that freedom wouldn’t come easily or right away, but, nonetheless, would come soon. Very soon.

District 10

The mandatory viewing featuring Elena Perez’s death was the first one in history were the Settler faces in the crowd outnumbered the Anasazi. Every last one of them who didn’t have a spouse, children, or in a few cases an employer, in the settlements had gone charging for the Red Mountains before the train carrying Elena and Roan was halfway out of the station. The few Peacekeepers who’d reacted fast enough to try and stop the exodus were all dead before their bodies hit the ground. The Capitol camera crews had strict instructions to make plenty of close-up images of the few Anasazi faces in the crowd and to avoid many crowd shots, so no one watching would know how much of the district’s population was already in revolt.

The siblings, and cousins of Elena Perez were all safely gone, along with all of their children and grandchildren. The only family she had to watch her die were the brothers and nephew of her late husband Danny. It had been more than fifteen years since Darren Hooley Jr. had a conversation with his aunt by marriage where she’d been sober enough to remember it the next day, but he dropped to his knees, weeping for the woman who’d filled his childhood with hugs, presents, and compliments. Whose children had taught him how to play tag, tug-of-war, kick the can, and charades. Elena had also been the one to introduce him to his future wife, Grace Crowfeather, during Elena’s mother’s birthday party, four months before the Second Quarter Quell took Elena’s children.

Darren had watched his smiling aunt descend into addiction and only fight herself out of it when Darren’s youngest brother Devon was reaped for the 52nd Hunger Games. He’d watched her twitching with withdrawal symptoms on TV but somehow staying sober, articulate, logical, and inspiring as she mentored Devon and drew sponsors to him like flies to honey. He’d seen her vomit, cry, beg, curse, and pray throughout Devon’s seven-hour torture at the hands of Link Westness’s Career pack, and she’d never gone a full three days without taking another drug trip after Devon’s cannon fired. Devon’s grieving girlfriend had tried to join her in her drug trips, starting the month-anniversary of his death, but Elena had managed to summon enough coherency and pathos from her drug haze to talk the poor girl out of ending up in that extra kind of Hell that the addiction allowed no escape from.

Darren Jr. was the last of Danny Hooley’s nephews still in District 10. Devon had died in the Games, his paternal first cousins had died in a wildfire (leaving behind a score of orphaned daughters he and his wife raised with their own four children) and his brother Dalton had fled to District 13. Darren had to fight back a malevolent smile as he thought about the plan that he, Bovina, Earl Bates and his grandsons, Kate Markez and her husband, Matteo TaoTao, Mindwell Larue, Arturo Rainbird, Rowan Reese, Lou Foyle, Felicia Beltran, Lammy Phyronix and her dad, Pasture Gallows and her brothers, Pigtails Chelsea, Toffy Taggart, and Amanda McNulty had talked to Dalton and Boggs about on the radio two weeks before the Quell. The plan that would later see Head Peacekeeper Domitius Thread and his junior butchers feeding the vultures.

Darren’s cries were the loudest, but over a thousand other wailing voices echoed with his when Elena lunged between Gloss and Beetee and took a fatal slash from Gloss’s sword for her trouble. Every one of them felt just a little pride and relief in their hearts as they saw the unexpected courage, power, and passion Elena managed to drag from the depths of her soul in her last moments. But her final look of despair and her last whisper of “Danny” were things that not even the swiftness of her death could mitigate the sorrow of.

Usually, the cabal of Ranchers would have been quick to let out a sadistic cheer at a ‘Sazi’, especially one who dared to romance a Settler, dying in such despair. This time, they remained mostly stone-faced. Most were still watching Roan splash away from the Cornucopia. But, save three senior citizens, even those not fixated on their own neighbor or relative didn’t show any emotion at the death of the woman they’d once seen as a bigger malevolent force than the Victors saw Snow as. The rest of the district had abandoned their segregation and hate, but Elena and her star-crossed love with Danny Hooley had been the spark that started all of that.

One of the three ranchers reveling in Elena’s death was John Calhoun Grimm, son of the former Mayor from the era of Elena’s victory and owner of the most cattle pens in all the district by a 20% margin. Locking smirking gazes with Darren, Grimm began a dramatic walk forward, holding up two jars still covered with frost. Darren’s heart began to beat faster, for he knew all too well what they contained.

Often overlooked in the stories of Elena’s decades of drowning her grief in cloudpowder was her brief awakening on the anniversary of Veala and Charlie’s death, were her depression had transformed into purposeful rage. She and Danny, together in heart again ever so briefly, had run themselves ragged doing whatever they could for Bovina and the other district Ten rebels. They hadn’t been discrete enough and had been dragged out of their bed to the Peacekeeper barracks. President Snow himself had been waiting to personally oversee the forcible extraction of a sufficient amount of Elena’s eggs and Danny’s sperm over the next two days.

He’d then told the pair that he was letting them live, but only with the understanding that the next time any of them made the slightest move to help a Rebel, whether in District 10 or the Capitol itself, then he would combine that sperm and that egg to lab engineer two brand new children, theirs genetically, if not from the womb, and 12 years later, they would lose two more children to the Hunger Games. After the catastrophic relapse Elena had suffered following that threat, Darren and his middle brother Dalton had never respected their aunt more than when she managed to stay sober for Devon less than a year after Snow broke her for the second time.

Snow had handed over that egg and that sperm to John Calhoun Grimm, Elena and Danny’s worst enemy in the district by quite a large margin, with instructions to use all the Capitol technology he and his family needed keep it viable yet on ice for as long as possible, right next to all the cattle sperm at his well-guarded breeding farms. Now, Elena had just died trying to protect Beetee, a rather obvious Rebel Victor, from Career blades, and Grimm clearly considered that grounds to give Snow the genetic material to make good on his long-ago threat.

Commentators babbled cryptic comments about obscure local gestures of contempt and insult as the cameras stayed trained on Grimm, by the personal orders of President Snow. Snow wanted the other districts to see this and know what was happening. Even if most of the other Victors who knew the story were in the arena, this would be a chilling remind of his wrath and power for the ones who weren’t. That was the plan, anyway.

“Hey Pop,” called out Grimm’s youngest son, Gershon (Grimm had given his children Jewish names from old books that had escaped the banned list as odd gesture of spite toward the form of Catholicism the Anasazi still practiced). “What are you doing with those jars of bullshit?”

Blinking in confusion, Grimm put the jars down and scraped hard at the frost with his pocket knife. Sure enough, the first jar contained feces rather than semen, and so did the second. Furiously, he glared at his son before shifting his anger toward the two grandnephews who’d been in charge of security of the vault the past two years.

“Don’t look at us, hoss,” said bushy-haired Rollin Yawzie.

“Your son-in-law Hoof, sky take his soul, must have done that back when he had our job, before his truck flipped over on that turn” added Rollin’s well-combed twin, Rawhide. “Might be that we heard rumors afterward, but they seemed too unbelievable to bother you with.” The look on his face gave way to his lie. Fists clenched, and knife high, John Calhoun started to move toward the three smirking traitors in his family, only to see suddenly the entire bloc of ranchers moving into a protective circle around Gershon, Rollin, and Rawhide. The only exceptions were the man and woman who’d been smiling with him and suddenly found themselves, who found themselves shoved out of group with contemptuous glares by their own relatives.

Some of the now-rebellious ranchers looked apologetic. A few looked scared. Several looked downright disgusted with the situation they were in and the allies they had (such as old Mr. and Mrs. Tully, although their disgust deepened as they glanced at the cameras and imagined Snow watching). But almost half of them looked happy at finally being able to show their true colors. John Calhoun Grimm sputtered for a few seconds, then fund himself having to sit down in the nearest empty chair (of which the mass Anasazi absence ensured there would be many) as he began to feel the beginnings of the stroke that would soon kill him. On the other end of those TV screens, President Snow briefly felt like he might suffer the same fate as he watched one of the last groups of district citizens whose loyalty he’d been taking for granted implicitly cast their lot in with the Rebels.

Darren Jr. watched all of this with satisfaction mixed with surprise. He’d heard rumors about the swap, but hadn’t been sure whether to believe them, and he’d known some Ranchers were falling in with the Settlers but hadn’t realized how many. Then, he noticed a man walking out of the Ranchers bloc toward him. A man carrying a grocery bag. The camera crews kept on filming. Soon, they would only escape avoxxing by shouting desperate reminders that Snow had ordered them to keep doing so and had been too overconfident to lay out circumstances they should stop under.

It was Roan Tully’s nephew Colter, and he reached into the jar and handed Darren and his wife Dolores a loaf of bakery bread and a jar of beef spread. “Just like your grandma gave Elena’s family, back when she was in the arena the first time,” he said, his words taking scores of older Capitol viewers back in time to a love story that had rivaled Katniss and Peeta’s. “Mrs. Hooley knew the right symbol to start a cautious kind of peace that could grow into something more between the Perezes and Hooleys. Maybe this can do the same for both of those clans and my one. Elena’s people may not have shown up for it, but let them know that I’m waiting with some more bread and some more beef spread if they’re interested.” This time it was the viewers in the districts who felt excitement as, completely by accident, Colter let them know how much control the Capitol was losing in District 10.

“How’d you know to bring that now?” asked Dolores.

“Word got around about Bovina’s phone calls. About how Elena had given up, and the other Victors cared enough about all that hand holding to promise her a quick death.” That time, Colter had noticed the cameras on them and was choosing his words-true as they were- to send a deliberate message. It was working, but he wasn’t done yet.

Turning to Dolores, Colter tugged at his collar, looked down, and quietly said, “I’ve heard you were a family friend of Elena’s, back when she was at her best, before the first Quell. I’d see her sometimes, whenever Roan was having the family stay at his house in the Victors Village to save riding time between mandatory viewings. I remember how, whenever she wasn’t too high to notice us, she’d always look a little sad whenever any of us started cal…saying bad things about her. She’d get sad, but not once did she get angry.” Dolores and Darren found themselves nodding at the memory of that side of Elena.

“Then when my mama was having my youngest sister early and there weren’t any doctors around, Elena heard the screaming, and she came over and knew how to stop the bleeding. She was muttering like she thought she was back healing her Danny, the first time they met. I’ve got a mother and a sister still alive because of her. Uncle Roan might have gone back to calling her a Sazi bitch by the time Odair came for his Victory Tour that year, but he still stopped for just a bit after that, for the first and only time in his life. Even at her lowest, Elena never stopped making the rest of us better, and every time none of us ever told her that was another stain on our name.”

Dolores’s gaze was by no means full of forgiveness or solidarity, but there was water in her eyes. There was also wet liquid around Colter’s forehead, collar and armpits, and it wasn’t the heat making him sweat as he worked up to his next words. “Is there anyone in this crowd? Whose any kin to my uncle’s district partner his first time around?” The silence that followed was long and striking before Dolores-her face now much colder than before- gestured a toward a wiry young man with light eyes and dark skin stepped up. 19-year-old Allan Vaughan Elston Montez (named for a rare pre-Catastrophes Western and mystery author whose entire bibliography-infamously rare at times even before America’s fall-had somehow survived the centuries) quietly identified himself as a first cousin of the girl Roan Tully had betrayed and murdered. Since that dark day, there had been no more mixed marriages involving anyone who claimed direct descent from that girl’s paternal great-great-great grandfather. But those marriages that pre-existed the crime had survived, and Allan had lingered behind when most Anasazi fled to care for his dying father.

“Uncle Roan did, still does, and always will hate Anasazi,” Colter said, with a pained expression. “He’s done things that still might not deserve forgiving if he spent the next half-entry in penance. Things that he’s never even spent a second thinking he needed any forgiveness for. Not a day has gone by since what Elena did for my sister that I haven’t had to admit to myself that Roan is the most sadistic and virulent bigot in a century that has seen more than a few of them.” There were a few angry, defensive hisses at this from the cluster of Tully relatives Colter had stepped out of, but still other relatives looked down in sad acknowledgement.

Sweating even heavier, and coming closer to crying with every word, Colter continued. “If it were up to Roan, the mountain hunts would have never stopped. I’m not sure how he took Elena’s hand in the interviews without wanting to rip it out of her wrist sockets. I’ve seen him spit on the graves of Elena’s children. More than once. But for all that hate, all that cruelty, all those hours and hours he’s spent swearing that the Anasazi are animals who conned their way into being seen as people, there’s one day a year were he gets as drunk as a skunk, from sunup to sundown, and cries and whimpers in his sleep like someone is burning him alive. It took us a long time to realize why, but that day is the anniversary of the day your cousin saved him from drying up of thirst and he repaid her with seventeen stabs from his knife. And somehow, that makes him even worse, in a way. A liar who keeps on taunting, and beating, and worse just because of the way someone looks. He knows good and well deep down that your mother’s people can deserve tears, but he hates you all the more for it and makes all the worst kinds of friends just to spread that hate and act on it any way he feels like.”

Colter’s voice was hard now, as people recognize the implicit criticism of Roan’s long-time collaboration with the Capitol. “So we want you to know that we’re not asking a single person in this district to cheer for Roan, send him a sponsorship pledge, or bow a head for him if he doesn’t make it home. And if he wins, last time, he came home to parades, this time, let it be to silence. No one else should live like him, not anymore.”

President Snow almost had Colter killed for his speeches, that evening. He was actually on the phone, giving the order, when an aide reminded him of how people might take notice if Roan fell and Colter was absent from the reaction shots. That warning stayed his hand. That and daydreams of how fast Colter Tully’s resolution might fall apart after seeing the kind of death this arena might have in store for the uncle who’d taught him how to ride. As Snow mentally wrestled with his options, he saw live footage of Roan babbling about how he would kill Katniss Everdeen if given the chance. Snow began thinking about giving the chance, and about how that would mean giving Roan the crown even if it meant the most blatant rigging since Chevy Anderson’s victory. Roan certainly wouldn’t like hearing what Colter had said, but he had enough familial loyalty that killing his nephew would cost Snow the allegiance of the loyalists’ loyalist among Victors.

Roan didn’t win, not with Plutarch and the avoxes ‘losing’ Snow’s memo to the Gamemakers to start helping him. A few hours later, the nation watched Roan being ripped to pieces by one of the most aggressive mutts in the history of the Hunger Games. Once again, cameras focused heavily on Colter Tully, and the way he quivered when Roan screamed for Bovina to help him from the mentoring quarters and received no reply from her. Darren and Dolores gave each other one of those looks that their years of marriage had perfected, knowing they shared a fear that Colter’s resolve would correct.

After so many years of ignoring Roan’s racism, the Capitol commentators had pounced on emphasizing it for the last few hours. The Capitol had also dredged up as many traumatizing clips as possible of the two Settler children who the Anasazi been voted into the 1st Quarter Quell for the color of their skin and the sins of their fathers. In between all the footage of the ongoing Hunger Games had been poignant interview clips emphasizing how neither Jon Parsons nor Nellie Mills had been bigots themselves but had still been condemned by the Anasazi voting bloc over sketchier alternatives. The Peacekeepers had set up TV sets all over the settlements to make people watch that, and to try and stir up the old hate that had served the Capitol so well generation after generation.

Then, there was a hand on Colter’s arm, and he looked up to see Allan Montez, flanked by every other Anasazi in the square. Two of his companions were the sisters of a worker whose ribs Roan had broken. With them stood the father of another ranch worker who Roan had made clean manure by hand to win a bet on how much he could degrade the man before he quit.

“Husbands and wives have cried over the deaths of partners who beat or cheated on them,” said the former Tully stable hand. “Parents and grandparents for children who raped and sold drugs. Brothers and sisters for borderline terrorists. Grown men for schoolmates who fought on the other side of wars back before cars and phones were even invented. Sometimes, the evil is enough to stamp out any love that once was there, but when it doesn’t, that doesn’t make you evil yourself. Even evil can be loved, and it disrespects the forces of love to try and pretend otherwise. It would be wrong to expect us to share what you feel for a man like Roan dying, but it would also be wrong for us to stop you, or to smile about it ourselves. I’d like to think we’d have been able to be that big about it before you found it in yourself to give that talk of yours yesterday.”

Snow picked up his phone again as he watched the TV screens showing Colter nod gratefully, and then walk off with his own family, everyone’s arms around each other, their faces weary and conflicted. This time, no one objected to Snow’s kill order. It was easier said than done, though. Many of District 10’s famous ranches fell to Capitol raiders in the weeks that followed. The Tully horse farm wasn’t one of them. The Tullys lacked the perfect siege terrain enjoyed by the Gallows and Alecto clans, the sheer mass of fighting manpower that the March Family enjoyed, or the years of preparation that Phyronixes had enjoyed for their death traps. What they didn’t lack was raw strength (it wasn’t a genetic fluke that had let Roan win fights against all three Career boys in the 58th Hunger Games) or motivation, whether in the form of avenging or atoning for their most infamous scion. Colter’s grandparents and father died, along with a cousin and a brother-in-law, but the defenses they’d spent the last three months working on held. Colter was part of the District 10 delegation in the Capitol for Snow’s execution. He was part of the crowd that surged forward after Katniss’s final arrow of the war and showed the tied-up president the same lack of mercy that had marked his own career.

Darren Hooley also had his own little post-script to the saga the nation had seen, as every Perez and Hooley left breathing (even Dalton, all the way back from District 13) gathered at Elena’s grave. The one request in Danny’s suicide note, after all the grief and distance, had been for Elena to be buried next to him if she still wanted to when she died. Elena had given her assent to that before he was even buried, and her wishes were being carried out. Rollin Yawzie (whose twin had fallen in the final battle at the foot of the Red Mountains) and Gershon Grimm arrived, each holding a jar very much like the ones Gershon’s grandfather had brandished in the minutes before his fatal stroke.

“I reckon these are yours,” said Gershon. “Flush them down the toilet. Bury them with Elena and Danny. Put them in a museum of all the worst things that Snow did. Maybe even get the District 3 brainiacs to combine them together to bring a bit more of Elena and Danny back to this world. Either way, you all are their kin, and it’s your choice to make. Not the Capitol’s.”

As the Perez and Hooley families began discussing this strange offer, they seemed almost like one family again. Almost like they had been at Danny and Elena’s best. For just a second, the ground shook, then there was silence. Scientists across the country agreed that it was probably a simple earthquake. But, in the centuries and millennia worth of legends that would follow that day, it was a sign from Danny and Elena in the next life, letting out their exultation at things being right in the world they had never lived to see reach its full potential.

Chapter Text

District 11

By the time Seeder Crue fell to Enobaria, District 11 was 85% lost to rebellion. Chaff Habarti and Seeder had been under 24/7 house arrest and surveillance ever since Wren Lessia’s suicide to keep either from escaping in the literal or figurative sense before the Quell reaping. If President Snow had been a religious man, he might have said a prayer of thanks that he still had just enough crowd of District 11 citizens to pull off a convincing crowd shot if the camera narrowed in on them tightly enough.

It was less than six hundred people. Well over half of them were collaborators, evacuated from all over the district to the most heavily guarded neighborhood in the region. A place where twenty-five of the district’s wealthiest and most collaborationist citizens had already lived. Another 150 people with rebel or neutral learnings had happened to be living within the protection zone and hadn’t gotten out in time, leaving them stuck with the collaborators. Then there were twenty or thirty prisoners locked up for things like missing too many quotas, playing the allegedly rebellious song “Under My Umbrella” at a rave, or writing a controversial essay about Ratchet R’s re-release of the obscure Western movie Red Headed Stranger.

The movie essay’s author had nearly been lynched and had spent eighteen months as a barracks slave in all but name. The Capitol had praised that Western movie much longer and louder than its original audience. Ratchet R’s new scenes had the despicable main villain proudly refer to his rebellious Confederate past in voiceovers and lose the respect, love, and loyalty of his sons after they were shown mercy by the national government rather than simply have them gunned down like in the original version. Audiences had also roared with approval watching how the red-bearded preacher (or rather, the tax collector, given the ban on religious references)’s and his friend the sheriff’s troubled, gun-toting moments all took place in their backstory, years earlier, against newly edited-in characters, while he remained true to his new pacifism and marriage to the kind of woman shallow Capitol film critics found conventionally attractive and relatable in the main story.

District 11’s forty or so Capitol-born Peacekeepers had not been happy to read an essay discussing Ratchet R’s hidden undertones about winning over the children of the embittered, evil, and oppressive generations, the message that government officials taking something from a community should also be hardworking, merciful, self-sacrificing, and outside-the-box when it came to giving back to or even raising up that same community, and the subtle parallels between the Confederacy as the villain remembered it and the Capitol of the modern era.

As for the amateur DJ, even some Peacekeepers had spoke up for him but their superiors were firm that any music number with lyrics about shining together and taking oaths to friends to stick out to the end took on a suspicious meaning to Peacekeepers in these times, no matter how old the song was or how iconic its singer had been to the African-American community.

The Capitol had known it was likely Seeder would die in the bloodbath, given her advanced age and history of pacifism. They’d been working on a script and drilling it through the heads of their crowd since she and Chaff left the station. An efficiency expert who got an air-conditioned house, free new clothes and shoes for his children every year, and some fish from District 4 every week for her policing of the apple orchards would cheer like a Capitol citizen at the first kill. An old man who’d been an informant since before the late Wren Lessia’s victory was dressed up like an overseer and supposed to look at his watch right after Seeder died, as if bored. The Peacekeepers’ favorite carpenter, the one genuine non-Rebel overseer who’d lived to reach the enclave, and the last surviving officers of the loyalist militia formed after the Reaver invasion during the 62nd Hunger Games were supposed to fake beating up a teenager who’d lived in the wrong neighborhood as soon as he started trying to make the District 12 salute at the end of the recap.

Two teenaged sisters with Peacekeeper boyfriends (at least, that was how the men, spiritual reincarnations of the late Brittanicus Romano, saw themselves) were told to focus on breastfeeding their babies, act like they’d been focused more on that than Chaff and Seeder’s struggles, and only look up a few seconds after Seeder died. Burly, bespectacled Swather Brooks (the Rihanna music fan) was as much of a loyalist as Chaff and Seeder, but he had been threatened with being lynched to the point of near-strangulation and then cut down again and put through the whole thing a hundred times over unless he booed and yelled for Seeder to show a spine and fight whenever she inevitably refused to do anything but run away or stand her ground. Young Barry Shiloh, whose father did IT work for the Peacekeepers, hadn’t needed prompting to be seen focusing heavily on how District 3 was doing although he had needed a stern reminder to simultaneously avoid showing any similar concern for his home district’s tributes.

The Peacekeepers’ morphling dealers would trade money with a trio of Booker Boys at the end of the recap and look excited about their bets once Brutus made his first kill. A black sheep cousin of Seeder’s former tribute Abundance hadn’t even needed any coaching to agree to offer to yell out angry curses about how Seeder deserved to be there and should have sent sponsor gifts to his cousin. The new mayor (replacing a woman who’d hastily quit after the winter riots just before Snow could order Enobaria to kill her) would call out for sponsor collections to send Chaff a knife and some bread. Once the mayor did this, a few retired militia officers who’d been given their own orchards in reward for their collaboration had orders to wave their hands dismissively and throw their half-eaten apples at him.

Watching the hurried rehearsal that afternoon, the Deputy Head Peacekeeper had called it the best work of amateur theater District 11 had put on since before the last Quell.

“Are you kidding? It looks like the kind of performances that would be lucky to get a Capitol production very far past opening night,” said his superior, the only Capitol-born Head Peacekeeper outside of District 9 (even the Capitol itself had someone from 2 in that job).

“No reason the two descriptions can’t be mutually exclusive,” the Deputy replied with a smirk.

Once the Games began, the charade started out alright. The efficiency expert cheered on cue when Finnick killed Matty Fletcher. Barry Shiloh watched Beetee and Wiress with intent horror even as Chaff and Seeder went through their own struggles. The morphling dealers and the Booker Boys could have looked more enthusiastic when Brutus killed Woof, but they still exchanged money without looking upset about the old man’s fate. Abundance’s cousin and Swather yelled out their curses, although their voices faltered just a little at the sight of Seeder’s brave and dignified final moments there on screen.

Then Enobaria, the Career whose distant shared blood with District 11 only made many of them hate her more, killed Seeder. That itself wound have been hard enough, on the big screen, but the crowd also had to watch her the older woman refuse Enobaria’s tearful offer of a head start and make her dignified stand. President Snow himself had been the one to idiotically authorize including that in the recap, to begin a subtle media campaign of setting Enobaria apart from the other Careers so he could justify having the arena monsters kill her and make Gloss Delacroix the Victor (a plan that Gloss’s unexpectedly anticlimactic death would throw into chaos less than 24 hours later). The Capitol’s script might as well have been scattered by hurricane-level winds as the prisoners and protectorates saw one of their heroes and legends die and found themselves feeling shamed by a Career’s humanity.

The worst members of the crowd had spent so long intertwined with the Capitol, seeing little but greed and brutality, that they had forgotten how beautiful spirit like Seeder’s could be. Her death moved most of them in a way she never had quite managed to in life. And even the hard-hearted few exceptions saw the crowd’s changing mood and were careful not to stand out against it. The Capitol could kill them, but so could their neighbors, especially with the rapid readjustment of how many allies they had.

A silent Swather Brooks gave a glare worthy of Chaff at the camera. The two nursing mothers (and their babies, for that matter) were unable to take their eyes from Seeder’s last moments. Even Abundance’s cousin burst into tears, dropping to his knees. After a few more awkward minutes of things going that way, the reporters cut off the camera feed and hurried away, feeling no urgency to witness what was coming. The District 11 reaction shots didn’t go too bad for the Capitol. Not compared to districts like 4, 5, 7, 9, and 10. But they didn’t go too good either. After all the years of blatant defiance from District 11, the Capitol had badly needed them to convey something very different for the nation’s eyes during the 3rd Quarter Quell. And they hadn’t.

Swather was nonfatally hung and then cut down once, Abundance’s cousin received twenty lashes, and a blind woman (a militia officer’s sister) was randomly jerked out of the crowd and shot. Trembling with fury, the Deputy Head Peacekeeper yelled about how she wouldn’t have been alone in tasting his bullets if not for the need to preserve a crowd for Chaff’s inevitable doom.

“Tonight, you all sleep in the basement of the mayor’s house,” said the Deputy Head Peacekeeper. “Pack in there together like cattle, and those few of you who manage to get any sleep, know that if you go off-script again, then you’ll also die like cattle. No more quick bullets. I’m putting out orders for machetes.”

His speech carried to a few more ears than originally intended. Thirteen years ago, the man called Matthos had guided District 2 Victors and soldiers through a tunnel in search of the Reaver chieftains who’d emerged from the woods between districts to conquer District 11, hungry for slaves and cannon fodder they tried to get by taking whole schools hostage to make the parents kneel. The tunnel their bloody and potentially racist plans had died in was not the only tunnel Matthos knew about. One of the others that he’d kept secret throughout that campaign led to directly beneath the last enclave of slaves (whether they’d have called themselves that or not) in the district.

Matthos had guided a hit squad there to burst up through the tunnel and open fire as soon as they heard the crowd start disrespecting the Victors and shouting out loyalty or indifference. Instead, they heard something very different. Matthos and his fellow guides had already refused to consent to the plan unless the people they led through only fired in self-defense or at a handful of the worst targets in the enclave. They had refused to sign on with killing families or genuine prisoners in the crossfire. Now, they found themselves watching softening faces of the soldiers who’d argued for hours on that point but suddenly seemed reluctant to kill anyone.

Matthos broke the silence by saying “You know, if I remember my maps correct. This tunnel goes a little further. Right past the basement of the mayor’s big house.” Knowing and suddenly self-satisfied expressions were exchanged among his companions.

The next morning, the Peacekeepers going to rouse the hostages and collaborators in the basement found it empty, with a large and fresh hole in the wall and hundreds of footprints inside the tunnel on the other side. A search party went charging down the tunnel to bring the escapees back but triggered a booby trap and was crushed in a cave-in.

The Deputy Head Peacekeeper’s last morning on Earth would be spent joining a displeased President Snow for a pot of…special tea. Of course, by that point, the arena’s destruction coming so soon after Chaff’s death meant that the mass rescue/defection had no actual impact on the Capitol’s strategies. Snow was too angry to think of that until after the Deputy Head Peacekeeper was dead. He might have felt just a little remorse then, if not for a rebel propo showing all of the people who had left through Matthos’s tunnel saying exactly what had really happened during the last time they’d appeared on film before loyalist camera crews. After that, Snow just wished the Peacekeepers had killed them all on the spot. He would wish it even more when Swather Brooks ripped a chunk of his beard out of his face as the mob swarmed Snow during his last conscious seconds on Earth.

District 12

President Snow had already spent ten-and-a-half months contemplating a severe winnowing or an outright purge of District 12 before the final gong of the Hunger Games sounded. He’d spent hours a week reading energy research reports about how Panem could adapt to its coal supply being cut off for a few years if something happened to District 12 and they had to resettle it with a few hundred surplus workers dragged out of the other districts. Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark had humiliated him and weakened his regime and bombing them and their neighbors into oblivion and claiming that over-mining had made the district collapse into a giant sinkhole had always seemed like the simplest, neatest way to intimidate the Rebellion.

He'd been just hours away from giving that order when reports of Halibut, Finnick, Odysseus, and Cerulea’s roles in the strikes in District 8, Wiress’s figurative fingerprint on the sabotage of District 3 merchandise, and all four District 8 Victors’ participation in the deaths of an infamously brutal Peacekeeper patrol had reached his desk. Later that week, Maeve Collins being caught painting murals of Katniss in District 6, Crystal Flute giving several much-abused DAEYD cadets letters of transit to escape Luster Lancaster’s grasp and Song Nuo half-assing an important speech in District 1, and Wren and Seeder making speeches to bring down the District 11 wall had only increased his rage toward the Victors. So Snow had decided to punish the Victors rather than District 12.

Every deck was stacked against Katniss and Peeta this time. But they’d drawn the most unexpected full houses before, and a small part of his brain realized they could again. Therefore, his bombers remained on standby with orders to take off for District 12 the moment the Games ended if one or both of the District 12 Victor-tributes were still breathing.

Snow didn’t trust himself to watch the District 12 reaction shots live and not do anything rash after everything that had happened last year. Once he watched the recording, and some snippets of the guilt-tripping Haymitch Abernathy was doing in the Capitol, he congratulated himself on that wisdom. He resolved that even if Katniss and Peeta died, District 12 would still need some more punishing. There would certainly be quite the crowd waiting to meet the train bringing their bodies and the Abernathy drunk home. A crowd full of people like the Everdeen slip’s mother, precious little sister, and “cousin” and everyone else willing to publicly turn up their nose at the Capitol. Snow resolved to consult with his railway experts about the best way to stage a derailment so that a train coming into the station would crash and rid him of both Abernathy and the front section of the mourning crowd in a whirlwind of burning and crushing steel. Perhaps he’d forge a suicide note from Haymitch Abernathy claiming that he’d hijacked the train and crashed to punish the district for not matching the generous sponsorship donations from the Capitol. That would send an chillingly clear message to the surviving Victors and leave Snow’s constituency nodding their heads in complacent self-congratulation while deciding it was the districts’ fault that they hadn’t saved Katniss and Peeta.

There were multiple reasons for Snow’s anger. The first came from Mayor Undersee’s announcement that he and his wife would be skipping the gathering in the square. They would instead watch mandatory viewing in their own home (with a Peacekeeper guarding them to ensure compliance) to maintain some privacy given Mrs. Undersee’s feelings about Quells after her sister’s death in the last one. That message had a bit of a jab at the Capitol over the districts’ sense of loss, but the request was reasonable enough that Thread allowed it. He might not have if he hadn’t transferred away all the veteran District 12 Peacekeepers (many of whom were-at that very moment-being recruited by the Redfern-born Peacekeeper Rebels in District 8) who could have told him the significance of Roger Craftsman reading that statement to the crowd.

The Mayor of District 12 was allowed a full-time staff of two: an administrative assistant, and a dogsbody to handle cooking, repairs, errands, gardening, and some cleaning once a week. Roger Craftsman had once been a tenth-generation furniture maker, proud patriarch, and prosperous merchant, until the day his second-youngest son, Drew, was reaped for the 40th Hunger Games, and died while providing the muscle in Nolan de Naro’s anti-Career alliance. Roger had blamed Nolan and his strategies for Drew’s death and bullied his surviving sons into a plot to ambush and kill Nolan during the Victor tour. His daughter Janine, terrified over what would happen to her family and the district, had tipped off the Peacekeepers after getting a signed promise not to use capital or corporal punishment in the case.

Roger’s family had been unceremoniously exiled to the Seam and forced to work in the coal mines. While he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life as house servant to whoever the mayor of District 12 was at the time. Every mayor since had done two things involved Roger. They had fought hard to release him from this service and let him return to his family for more than one day a week, to no avail. More importantly, they had developed a tradition that, whenever he was sent to give an official message in the place of the administrative aide who would normally do that, it was meant to display contempt for the Capitol.

The district had picked up on the subtext of the message Roger read immediately, even if Thread didn’t. Snow got the message as well; due to some friendly chats he’d had about District 12 with Effie Trinket’s predecessor right before he’d poisoned the retired escort. The idiot had made donations to an ambitious and equally ill-fated minister seeking to engineer a recall petition against Snow for his involvement in the illegal Career academies and then run for president himself on a platform of making every Hunger Games have 48 tributes like the Quell instead of 24.

Then, right after Roger Craftsman’s statement, Gale Hawthorne stood up to speak. There was still fifteen minutes before mandatory viewing started, the Capitol reporters having wisely gambled on Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark’s district having plenty to say even before the recap footage started. Gale had a haunted look in his eyes, the look of a man who had been pushed to the brink and wanted to do something about it. After the Mockingjay dress and the holding of hands in the interview, he could no longer hold out much hope Katniss would come home again a second time. Her family had her year of Victors salary money to last them until Prim grew up if they rationed it well enough. They didn’t need him the same way they had when Katniss was leaving for the 74th Hunger Games.

Gale wisely chose to play up how he and Katniss were supposed to be cousins as he talked about a book that had been in his family for over a thousand years, once, before they handed it over to the Capitol not long after the Hunger Games got started. The words “Family Bible” were never said out loud, nor was the fact that it hadn’t been so much handed over as seized, but people with enough context about what a Bible was, in districts like 2, 3,6, 8, and 10.

Gale talked about scribblings in that Bible talking about how the Hawthornes of the long-ago American Civil War had been Unionists, like tens if not hundreds of thousands other Tennesseans, staying loyal to central authority for one reason or another even if history didn’t recognize them for it. On the face of it, it was a speech about staying loyal to your leaders and feeling pride in it even through adversity. But Gale didn’t hide the gleam in his eye as he added in cute little sidebars, like a recap of what he’d heard about the Civil War secessionists his ancestors had fought. Namely, that they’d been pampered and callous elites who spat on the dictated morality of the day to make up their own while never caring who had to bleed, suffer, and have their self-worth degraded just as long as they could keep the entirety of their wealth and avoid being judged over beliefs and actions they badly deserved judgement for. Even worse in Snow’s eyes was a line about how the Confederates had rejected the clear-cut laws governing the president’s authority, given the term limits in Panem’s constitution that Snow and his past eighteen predecessors had spent the last few centuries ignoring.

Hawthorne looked like he could have kept on going for another hour if the screens flicking on with the first shots of the recap hadn’t interrupted him. Snow decided that if Gale Hawthorne somehow survived the train wreck Snow was planning for his district, then, if the brash youth felt such interest in a Bible, why not show him what it felt like to be crucified like the man on the cover.

The recap itself gave Snow his third reason to feel even more anti-District 12 than he’d been in the decades before. He watched an entire town’s population unanimously murmuring in surprise and confusion at the surprise alliance between Districts 4 and 12. At first. Then, Finnick resuscitated Peeta after the forcefield incident. Half the jaws in the square were dropping in bafflement and shock. But then, just before the camera moved away from Finnick and onto other events, Ripper the moonshiner called out two words that she’d heard Odysseus Wheeler and his district partner say on the first day of the 73rd Hunger Games. Words she’d heard in the 57th Hunger Games, replays of the 32nd, and so many others. Words that she’d hated and scorned because of the people that said them, but now found herself calling out to a honor the once hated man who’d killed her youngest cousin’s classmates just a decade earlier.

“Safe voyage!” People glanced at Ripper in shock, hearing her other the District 4 honorific so often uttered when two allies were parting ways for the last time and wished each other well, or at least, as much as you could wish an opponent well in the Hunger Games. Many grimaced and shook their heads at this mark of esteem and concern for a Career, and one who could end up killing their own still-living tributes in just a day or two. But others recognized the debt to be repaid for what Finnick had just done. And still more people remembered the bread District 11 had sent Katniss, or the three-fingered salutes that had gone up for her in 11 and 6 on the victory tour. Other districts had honored 12. They could do the same.

“Safe voyage,” Gale Hawthorne echoed. His voice was joined by Mrs. Everdeen, Prim, Peeta’s brothers, Thom, Bristel, Leevy, the Cartwright boy, Rooba the butcher, the Fiddler and his kin, and close to a thousand others, all defying the Quell’s goal to drive the districts further apart.

Snow’s fourth annoyance started five seconds after the recap ended, when a large group of costumed teenagers began moving past the crowd to stand beneath the TV screens. It was the student drama club. A year ago, it would have been all merchant kids, but twin Chance girls, Rory Hawthorne, Plonia Fisher, and Cayson McCoy Jr. had joined up this year after seeing for how much good playing to an audience had done for Katniss and Peeta. “Attention, everyone,” said Abbalar Hook, club president and youngest son of the only Booker Boy in the last fifteen years to make enough money to buy his way into the merchant district. “We, the District 12 drama club realize that, by long-standing tradition, we would normally wait until exactly one week before the Victory Tour to wow and entertain you.” That particular tradition had been started by one-time club president Maysilee Donner, with a secret purpose of giving the actors time to weave subtle traits or hobbies of the most recent dead tributes into some of the characters they played.

“But this year, we find ourselves forced to break tradition. For, although he urged us to let his genius remain anonymous, the playwright of our latest effort is District 12’s one and only Peeta Mellark, and, even if he will never know it, he deserves the honor of having a play shown in his lifetime.” There was quite the uproar at that. Thread almost lunged forward with whips, clubs, and handcuffs at that revelation. Ultimately, though, he decided to hang back just a bit longer and give the malcontents more rope to hang themselves with.

Abbalar’s words were somewhat misleading. Peeta had begun writing his play to pass the time and angst while Katniss was off with Gale. But even in that conflicted and emotional state, he’d had enough self-preservation for himself and anyone else involved that he’d intended to hide it under his floorboard for a few years before it was safe to play. He’d only been half finished during the Quell announcement. His friends from school had come over to console him not long after his talk with Haymitch, and he’d let slip about his project, causing them to unanimously demand to make it their next play. Peeta had been busy training for the Quell the next three months, but Cyprian Murphy, his mother’s half-sister’s stepson, and Madge Undersee had finished it off for them.

Madge had intended to star, as her aunt Maysilee. When her parents got wind of the content and timing of the play, they had forbidden her from making any performance. A good third of the reason for their absence that evening was so they could make sure she stayed locked down in their house and didn’t sneak out to the square in defiance of their wishes. Her understudy, Jemina Kingery, was filling in. Jemina had gained a lot of recent notoriety as the one girl Peeta had ever dated before Katniss (although her name had come up five times during that date). What she’d felt for them wasn’t love, not really, but, knowing that he wanted to die to bring Katniss home filled her with as much fire as the girl she was playing.

“Last year, we had more applause than the last four years before combined,” called out a ponytailed fourteen-year-old named Suza Pike. “This, year, we’ll top that.” The crowd roared with approval at that boast, and the subtext within. The post-70th Hunger Games play, The Legend of Luster, had been special ordered by Damien Cray to make a grand first impression on an incoming new Deputy Head Peacekeeper. The young cast’s performances had been so unenthusiastic and grudging (especially during the scene where Luster and President Snow first meet) that Cray had nearly broken his long-standing rule of never hurting the ones you want to exploit. The actors had perked up real fast out of self-preservation once Cray and his men dangled some whips in plain sight. They hadn’t actually flogged anyone, but they would have if the threat hadn’t worked. But even the best performance of those actors’ lives hadn’t earned any audience enthusiasm for an opera about one of the most hated living men ever born outside of the Capitol.

The next two years had seen impressively-scripted adaptations of Peter Pan and an old cartoon franchise called Ben 10 flounder due to the cast being too small for the number of characters, and a miniscule budget for special effects and costumes. The year after that, a well-staged production about Nolan de Naro and his allies in the 40th Hunger Games had been undermined by the presence of old, booing Roger Craftsman.

Last year, Cyprian, Madge, and the now-graduated Elly Breen had scrapped their original ideas and hurriedly put together made a play about a future pair of tributes winning together like Katniss and Peeta. They’d been careful to avoid too much censorship, explicity setting their play many decades in the future, having the tribute lovers be from 3, and having multiple characters mention how no couple had won together since Katniss and Peeta.

Their protagonists combined brute force and gadgetry to hunt mutts, with one crippling opponents in lightning-fast attacks before her boyfriend fought past the wild defensive blows of immobile enemies to strike the finishing blows. The play had seen every tribute in the field run in terror from the 3’s rather than face a duo so nationally famous for their lethality, with the arena or the Careers killing them all before the couple ever had to transfer their hunting methods to humans in earnest. The parallels with Katniss and Peeta had been subtle but clear, and there hadn’t been a throat in the audience that didn’t need wetting after everyone was done dying themselves up with minutes of roaring applause.

This new play, started out with Cayson Chance playing his father’s old neighbor Haymitch Abernathy and Jemina Kingery unflinchingly replicating the fearless defiance Maysilee Donner had shown. Delly Cartwright’s take on the pitiless escort who Maysilee ran rings around in verbal spats would have had the woman skinning voodoo dolls of her alive if that hateful soul hadn’t been long dead herself. Every biting word of Maysilee’s interview was perfectly recreated. Haymitch’s notorious training score and fast bonding with the other tributes was broadcast to a nation that had all-but forgotten that.

Thread clenched his first at the interview scene, but he stayed put for exactly ten minutes and twenty seconds past that moment. More specifically, he stayed still for exactly the amount of time it took for him to realize that the play was rewriting history so that the rule change that had saved Katniss and Peeta had instead originated in time to bring hope to Haymitch, Maysilee, and their two fellow tributes. Actually, in Peeta’s first draft, it had been for the last pairing of a merchant and mining class duo in the Hunger Games before him and Katniss, but their families had begged him not to (fearing retaliation) after he let his project slip to them ten days before the Quell announcement. He hadn’t actually seen the 2nd Quarter Quell, but he’d heard enough about it to make a lot of the proper changes while still keeping much of his original dialogue before Madge took over and filled in the rest form her own painful memories of the tapes her mother kept in the closet.

Thread and his men flooded onto the impromptu stage, shoving actors away and smashing props. The camera crew had shut down (claiming technical difficulties) a few seconds early after icy warning stares from Thread and strained themselves to look away and not see anything.

The next night, those came camera crews had orders from President Snow himself to shut down and hurry away the second mandatory viewing ended. He had something far darker than merely breaking up the play in mind for that night, and he didn’t want them to see it. Only two cameras remained, discretely hidden behind the crowds of Peacekeepers. They weren’t airing footage live, but rather recording images for Snow’s later viewing pleasure.

The unfortunate actors inadvertently made it all the easier for Thread when they came defiantly marching back up for an encore, thinking the absence of the cameras might keep Thread from caring if they at least put on a show for their own neighbors.

Before, Thread had his men had come as fast, terrorizing, and unstoppable as a flood. This time, they were like lightning. One second, Izzrael Tarpley was about to give his opening speech as the mayor of District 12, the next, there was a black bag over his head, and three Peacekeepers were lifting him off his feet and carrying him away as he thrashed wildly. Jemina Kingery and Cyprian Murphy moved to help him and rapidly got the same treatment, with Cyprian barely having time to give a Peacekeeper a bloody nose with a lucky swing. For just a moment, the rest of the cast froze, then the Peacekeepers black-bagged Cloris Flaherty (playing a District 7 girl), and it became clear that no one was safe. Cayson McCoy stepped between Delly Cartwright and little Suza Pike and desperately whacked at them with his prop sword. He had raw strength, but crude, sweeping strikes with such a light prop were no match against the former Institute trainees who hauled him after the others as Delly and Suza ran like blazes.

Right before he was struck in the face with a truncheon, Abbalar Hook motioned for stage hand Clay Geisler to shine a spotlight from the side of the square into the Peacekeepers eyes. It bought some time for a few more runners to make it clear: Rory Hawthorne, the Chance twins, pimple-faced Darby Hallisey (playing the reptile-obsessed stylist) and Cyprian’s paternal cousin Treena (playing the younger District 12 girl). A merchant named Leonard Blaney (playing a District 1 tribute) threw himself to the ground, hoping his nonresistance might placate the approaching Peacekeepers. Plonia Fisher joined him a second later, closely followed by the remaining six merchant performers, who were too far from the edges of a crowd to have a hope of escape as a Peacekeeper shot the spotlight out.

His use to the others at an end, Clay Geisler went racing in the direction of the Seam himself. The Peacekeeper with the gun who’d shot the spotlight raised his gun for another shot. Before he could finish aiming, he and the two Peacekeepers nearest him were dogpiled by Abbalar’s widowed father and three older siblings, Izzrael Tarpley’s parents and brother, Elly Breen and his girlfriend Lilah Vick, Cloris’s mother, four of Cayson’s cousins, the old goat man, the fiddler’s common law brother-in-law, Katniss's neighbor Leevy, and Gale Hawthorne’s shift mate Bristel. All of them were jerked off in seconds, and black bags were thrown over all of their heads, besides those of Leevy and the Tarpleys. Leevy  managed to wiggle lose, dart under the legs of two Peacekeepers, and vanish into the safety of the crowd, while Tarpleys were shoved to the ground next to Leonard, Plonia, and the others. They did the local tax-collecting (a job Izzrael himself had sworn long and loud that he would never join them in), and it was too close to the end of the quarter to break in replacements without chaos.

In the crowd itself, in the side with a heavier merchant concentration, Delly Cartwright’s little brother also lit off in the direction his sister had vanished, clearly confused but somehow knowing he might never see his sister again if he didn’t. His parents tried to follow, but were grabbed by Peacekeepers, as were Suza Pike’s uncle and Darby’s mother. Clay’s girlfriend Pippa Callahan (a poet whose chronic stage fright had kept her out of the production) and Treena Murphy’s sister, brother-in-law, and boyfriend all ran the gauntlet though, vanishing into a crowd of miners after their loved ones.

Several Peacekeepers who looked on the verge of stopping them were distracted by several rocks hurled with brutal accuracy by the local baseball pitchers, in response to some hurried whispers from Gale Hawthorne the moment he saw the chaos with the actors begin. More weapons came up in response, but the rock throwers were already dispersing, Most got away, but one, Rhododendron ‘Dendron’ Shea, was a bit too slow and had a black bag shoved over his head. His uncle, Clematis Lowe, moved to help him and went down on the ground between Leonard and Abbalar, his shoulder dislocated from the struggle.

Along with Marigold Jaison (an apprentice apothecary making a delivery), a twenty-eight-year-old man going to visit the miner he’d fallen in love with as the district came together over the 74th Hunger Games, and Elly Breen’s former track champion cousin (who got lucky to find a clear line between the first firebombs), Delly and the other runners would be the only District 12 merchants to escape to District 13 when the firebombs fell the next day. Their flight from the Peacekeepers had led to them hiding closer to the fence at just the right time.

However, being the only members of their class to escape the upcoming bombing with the refugees didn’t make them the only merchants alive after it.

Abbalar Hook, Plonia Fisher, the eight other drama club members who Clay hadn’t saved, Clematis, and the Tarpleys were jerked to their feet just long enough to be jostled into a straight line and shoved down again. None of them were black-bagged, though. The Peacekeepers seemed content with the ones they were already dragging away toward the train station. But that didn’t mean they weren’t ready to dish out other punishments. Whips came out, as fourteen backs were ripped apart by fifteen lashes apiece. Then, just as fast as it began, it was almost over. The Peacekeepers marching off with their prisoners, leaving the whipping victims moaning in the dirt. Friends and families raced forward to grab those kids and drag them to soft beds where Mrs. Everdeen could visit with her remedies.

It was barely an hour after she finished up her work on the merchants and haggardly returned home that her daughter fired the last arow ever fired in a Hunger Games arena. Abbalar Hook, Leonard Blaney, and the other eleven wounded merchants all perished in the bombing, too far from the fence to have had much hope of running there even if they hadn’t been bedridden. For years afterward, Mrs. Everdeen would shudder to think about how she might have shared their fate if there’d been a few more of them to treat before she returned home, closer to the fence. Plonia Fisher was luckier than her castmates: she would live to see District 13 and the end of the war. She was a well-muscled girl whose body better withstood the flogging, she lived near the fence, and she had strong parents and neighbors to help keep her on her feet during the exodus.

Clematis Lowe lived as far from the fence as possible in the Seam, but Mrs. Everdeen had him taken over to the Fishers so she treated him and Plonia at once, saving time between visits to their separate houses, and get over to see her merchant patients faster. His wife Raya and son Haoyu were camped outside the Fishers to watch his recovery, and they to were able to support their stumbling loved one between them as they ran all the way to the District 13 hovercraft.

It was not until weeks after Snow and Coin’s death, and Katniss Everdeen’s return to her old home that the survivors of District 12 would learn the fates of Cyprian Murphy, Jemina Kingery, and the others. From the mandatory viewing crowd, they had been taken out of the District, on the fastest route to the Capitol. Mere minutes before the bombs wiped out all of their families except Treena, her sister, and Elly’s cousin, the first of them underwent the “operation” necessary to become an Avox, while the others watched nearby, bound, gagged, and awaiting their turns.

Nor had they been alone. Early the next morning, Peacekeepers had kicked down the door of the mayor’s house. Madge and her parents had been dragged to a hovercraft to join the other future Avoxes, helplessly watching Head Peacekeeper Thread hand the mayor’s sash to a guilty-looking Roger Craftsman, who had been recruited as a spy by Thread shortly after his arrival in the district. He had recognized a man who was equal parts bitter and desperate as he got too old to do his job, even with constant help from the people he was nominally working for.

Roger had overheard the Undersees wondering if there was a way to rescue the black-bagged drama club members and their protectors, assuming they were under guard at the Peacekeeper barracks. He had quickly snuck a message to the Peacekeepers and abruptly found himself appointed to replace the man he had betrayed, with instructions to stay inside and keep this secret until mandatory viewing, so that the discovery would shock and demoralize his new constituency.

For the first hour or two, guilt flooded over Craftsman. Then, as he began to take in the big fancy house he no longer had to clean and repair, satisfaction began to replace that guilt. The arrival of the first three members of the family the Peacekeepers had been able to find, his eldest son, daughter-in-law, and last unmarried granddaughter from that son’s family (all confused by the unexplained summons), quickly transformed him into perhaps the only person in the district who truly loved the Capitol. For a few hours, anyway, until the bombs fell. Ironically, his family members who had already joined him in the mayor’s house (the three whose bodies would later be mistaken for the Undersees during the clean-up of District 12) were the only ones not to survive the ensuing devastation.

The whole group of them would make it through the war together, being recruited by Blight Gavin’s mother and her fellow established Rebel Avoxes to maintain safehouses and move weapons through the tunnels. All of them would gradually drift back to District 12, after a few years of life in the Capitol while the liberated Avoxes listened to scientists from Districts 3 and 13 debate about the ethics and feasibility of giving them tongue transplants from dead Capitol citizens.

But it would be a long time before the other survivors in District 12 knew any of this. Like the Undersees, hey assumed Cyprian, Cayson, and the others were still being held prisoner in District 12. Gale Hawthorne was trying to rally a mob to charge the barracks and free the captives. He had an audience of almost ninety people, but with every inflammatory sentence he uttered, a bit of his soul died as he took in just how few people looked enthusiastic about his plan. His brothers, of course. And a few friends and loved ones of the captives or past victims of the Hunger Games: the Goat Man’s grandson, Mrs. Everdeen and Prim, The Fiddler and five of his kin, three Chances, two McCoys, Clay Geisler, Pippa Callahan, Gale and Bristel’s coworker Thom, Leevy, Mick Cahill’s sisters, and Cole Stanton (whose father had been reaped for the 60th Hunger Games four months after impregnating Cole’s mother).

That sounded like a lot of people when you listed them all one after the other, but they only added up to twenty-two people (counting Gale himself) altogether, barely a fifth of his listeners. One good machine gun marksman could wipe them out with less than a full clip. And even some of the volunteers Gale did have seemed to waver a bit the more they noticed the apologetic pessimism of their less invested neighbors. As Gale paused to take a sip of water, he was surprised to realize that he had been so caught up in his rescue efforts that it had been almost twenty minutes since he had thought about Katniss and whether she was still alive in the arena.

Years later, during his first ventures into spirituality, he described that moment as the main reason he felt open to some force or power beyond what he could see. Because the exact second he had that fought, he heard cries of shock, and then a family came running out of the nearest house, holding up an ancient-looking TV showing Caesar Flickerman and Claudius Templesmith sputtering over monitors to the arena that were only showing static.

In those same conversations recalling that day, Gale would also muse about the irony of Snow’s orders to abduct Avoxes from District 12 and the ways they had benefitted the district. Simple matters of localized geography meant that all of abductees besides the Goat Man and the McCoys would have probably died in the bombing. Not only that, but it was partially because of his failing efforts at gathering forces to rescue the prisoners that Gale already had the attention and respect of dozens of people when the danger they faced became clear.

His mob may have been hesitant to storm the square, but they were faster and more effective when it came to a more feasible and urgent goal that the lives of everyone around them depended on. Storming the fence. Gale Hawthorne would make a personal point to rub it in to Snow after visiting his cell the day before Katniss did. The look on Snow’s face when he heard that almost made up for the look Snow left on Gale’s face when he brought up the double-exploding bombs. Almost.