Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Magnolia had grown up West Seam, poorest of the poor down at the bottom of the hill, with all that implied. It meant no grandfolks to claim because most Westers were of community home stock, three siblings dead too young for her to know them, her pa slowly coughing up his lungs in sticky black chunks, and a ma whose thin and tired body finally gave out with a last unexpected baby when she was fourteen. It meant too little of everything—coal, soap, fabric, food, hope. Even with tesserae, even with what she got from slipping up to the merchie square or Peacekeeper’s Row now and again, it was never enough. The only thing she’d got enough of back then was love, the simple innocent love of a child. She’d done her best to give her boys that much at least, when she couldn’t give them anything fine, or even give them a father.

She couldn’t imagine the house up the hill in Victors’ Village. The books of fabrics they’d sent on that train with Haymitch were too much. She couldn’t flip through them for more than a few minutes at a time, overwhelmed by the choices. She couldn’t bear it either, thinking of his eyes, that smile he forced on his face, the way he claimed he was just fine. She knew that smile and those empty eyes. She’d seen them in the mirror, practicing so that when her pa tried to whisper breathless apologies, she could tell him it wasn’t so bad. She could ignore the shame because what it bought was worth it.

Now she understood how Tad Dearborn must have felt looking at her, putting a few coins in the old lard can after slipping in late and avoiding his eyes, or trying to hide a bruise from where she’d pissed Blair Abernathy off, because any boyfriend at all was better than being twenty-two and still single because nobody really wanted to marry a mouthy bit of West Seam trash. She looked at Haymitch, and she wanted to lash out and hurt everyone who’d made this shitty world the way it was.

So chances were she overworked the biscuit dough in the vigor of her anger—not to mention she wasn’t used to such fine white flour—the gritty feel of tesserae grain or cornmeal between her fingers was more the like of things. Briar hadn’t said much, but if she saw the shame on Haymitch’s face, she saw the silence in Briar’s. Not the look of a girl overjoyed that her boyfriend had survived the Second Quell and come back alive. “All right, honey?” she said softly, seeing the stiffness in Briar’s right wrist.

Briar’s eyes met hers, deep grey and miserable, and it was like a dam burst. “I just forgot,” she said. “I came up behind him, gave him a hug and he just panicked and threw me right down. The look on his face...when he did it, and then it was even worse when he saw what he did...” Her voice wavered, thick with tears. “I didn’t tell him I tweaked my wrist when I fell. He looked…”

Blair had never looked at her with regret, through all the blows and slaps and “corrections”. Always a drunk or angry mumble that she’d better not piss him off again. She’d seen that look on Haymitch’s face too, the one of regret and panic. It reminded her of Phineas, of some nights where his hand had been forced and he wrestled with the reality of things—funny thing to find a Peacekeeper whose secret heart held a bit of an idealist. “Are you afraid of him now?”

“I think he’s afraid of himself.” Briar sounded on the edge of breaking down crying. She put an arm around the girl’s shoulders, mindless of leaving white flour prints on the blue shoulder of Briar’s good Sunday blouse, and pulled her in for the hug Haymitch hadn’t been able to give. But right then there was a knock at the door.

Brow furrowed, she dusted her hands off on her apron as best she could and headed for the door. Haymitch wouldn’t knock, would he? He ought to be back soon—Ash already sat in the corner quietly reading, having brought the rabbits back from the woods, and saying Haymitch needed some time to himself.

She opened the door and there stood Phineas Fog, with three Peacekeepers accompanying him. The look on his face—that look, the one on her son’s face now too, the one that left her some nights trying to tell him that he was a good man in an imperfect world, and he did the best he could.

“Magnolia Abernathy?” As if he didn’t know; as if he hadn’t called her Nola, that voice in her ear soft and low as he pressed her back into the mattress, or the rare times they could steal a moment alone in some abandoned shed just to talk like two people.

“Yes.” She kept up the polite fiction.

“Briar Wainwright and Ashford Abernathy are also present?” As if he didn’t know about them either—a son he could only acknowledge in brusque politeness now and again. Those golden brown eyes looked only at her, full of a pleading apology.

“Yes.”

He nodded then. “On behalf of the treasonous actions of Haymitch Abernathy, President Snow has ordered your execution.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Hidden in the old Gentry house two doors down, waiting for a new tenant, she’d hear Haymitch screaming for the three of them in a grief-stricken agony until the day she died. She hugged Briar close, both of them aching to go to him, not looking through the faded curtains. They smelled the smoke and heard the crackle of the flames as they huddled together in the corner. Finally after the ruckus died down, now Briar did cry, face buried in Magnolia’s shoulder. “What’s gonna happen now?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, smoothing the girl’s hair down. “I don’t know.” Phin had taken Ash somewhere, and told her and Briar to stay put here until he came for them, or else it really would be their lives cut short in a spray of gunfire. I can’t keep you two alive unless you trust me on this, he’d said lowly to her.

She stayed staring at a spider weaving delicate strands of web over a corner of the window, worn out with all her questions and her fear for both her boys. If it had been only her, maybe she would have risked it to go find them. But she looked down at Briar’s exhausted face, the heart shape of it, the slight cleft of her chin. She looked so young finally sleeping now with her head in Magnolia’s lap, and she couldn’t condemn this girl. Blood was blood, but for Briar to die only because she’d chosen to love a boy, that was something Magnolia wouldn’t take on. She’d look after Briar as best she could now.

It must have been well after midnight when the door creaked open and she saw Phin standing there. “Ash? Haymitch?” she demanded anxiously, trying to keep her voice down, carefully slipping Briar’s head off her lap and standing, moving away to let the girl continue sleeping in peace.

Phineas shook his head wearily. In that moment he looked tired and old, every line in his face etched deep with the shadow of dim lantern light. “Haymitch is with the apothecary. Burned his hands pretty badly trying to get into the house. Ash…” He took in a deep breath. “I called the president. I begged him. He’d only spare Ash, and only if he was taken away somewhere, kept secret so that—Snow said he might need leverage again someday if Haymitch didn’t behave.”

“Phin,” she said, anger and shock stirring within her, “where is my boy?”

“He’s on his way to District Two. They’ll make a Peacekeeper out of him. Standard for the children of traitors.” He laughed, a broken and twisted sound, and Briar finally stirred. “Second generation, must be in the blood, eh?” He’d told her about his own history, an orphan child caught in the flotsam of the Dark Days and sent to Two to become a Peacekeeper, so young he only had a few impressions of the place he’d come from—probably Seven, if his looks were any indication. “And if he’s smart as I know he is, he’ll never mention Haymitch, or you, or her.” He nodded to Briar. “He’ll keep his mouth shut and take the name they give him, do what they tell him, and be thankful he isn’t dead because his kin defied the Capitol.”

He might as well have been speaking about himself from that dark and painful edge to his words, and from experience, he clearly understood exactly what was in store for Ash. She wanted in that moment both to claw his eyes out for taking her son from her, and to hug him for saving him, taking on the grave risk of contacting the president directly. “What did it cost you?”

“I’ll find out later,” he said grimly. “He knows about you and me.” All the care they’d taken over nearly two decades now to keep it secret from both the Peacekeepers and the Seam, pretending it was mere lust on his part and brutal economic necessity on hers—blown. “He’ll make me twist for it later, I’m sure.”

“And what happens to us? You only mentioned Ash.”

“I was supposed to order you two executed, and to make it look like Ash was in it too.” He gave a dry smile. “Good thing is I’ve got some Peacekeepers who aren’t big on the idea of shooting people for the imagined slights of their family members. They’ll keep their mouths shut that you two aren’t dead. But I have to get you out of here as well.”

“To where?” But even as she said it, she already knew.

“Two. Briar’ll go to the Peacehome. Just another orphan sent to the Corps rather than the community home. Happens often enough.” He exhaled quickly, in a sharp sigh. “You, that’s a little tougher. We’re going to have to make a life for you. I’ve made some calls. A few people owe me some favors to get some records inserted. Congratulations—you’re now Nikoleta Law. Have been for years. You were born in Twelve but got sent to Two when you were ten as an orphan. You’re a veteran fifth-tour Peacekeeper working in District Eleven, and one who’s about to retire early courtesy of an unfortunate head injury as a result of a little ruckus with a local. Sadly, it’s going to leave you with very little memory of your past, and people in Two don’t talk much about their service years to start, plus wouldn’t be polite for them to badger you about things you don’t recall and about an injury sustained on-duty.”

She absorbed that, some part of her noting how neatly he’d tied up the ends, but her heart felt paralyzed. “I’ll never see them again, will I?” Not Haymitch, Briar, or Ash. Even Phineas had to stay here in Twelve. She was almost forty now—too old to move somewhere and start all over.

He shook his head. “No. Haymitch can never know about this, or else Snow might find out. Or if you see Ash or Briar, you won’t know them. You’ll have to be careful how close you get to them.”

What he offered didn’t sound like much of a life—a bunch of lies, stripped of everyone she loved, sent to an unfamiliar place where she’d have to play a part until the end of her days. Well, she’d spent her life acting, hiding things even from her friends and her own children. She ought to be able to handle this. She looked at his face—he’d taken the risks because he couldn’t bear to order her dead, and this was the only way to do it. Yelling defiance at the president only would have gotten them all executed, and more people besides. So maybe Haymitch had inherited something from this man in the end—that cleverness to come up with a big plan in a hurry. “I wish you’d asked,” she said softly.

“I’m sorry. There was no time.” He reached out, his hand lightly touching hers, coming close enough that even the dim glow of the lantern now finally lit his face in full. “Is dying really better than—“

“No.” She shook her head, throat a tight lump. “And I know it would have been easiest for everyone to just do what Snow wanted. But don’t ask me to be happy I’m losing everything that gave anything any meaning.”

“You’re strong. Always have been. And so long as you’re alive…there’s always some hope.” His voice went even softer, as if he was afraid to even say the words. “Maybe it won’t always be this way.”

Here she was, the one expected to be executed for treason, and instead it was him saying the words. “Maybe. But we’ll make the best of it for now.” She looked at Briar, looked out at the curtain drawn over the window, thought of her two sons: the one at the apothecary, alone and hurt, and the one on a train to District Two, alone and terrified. Maybe it could all be undone someday, but only if she stayed alive. But it hurt to consciously try to walk away from both of them, everything within her crying instinctively to go to them. Stepping back from that was like lopping off a hand, or cutting out her heart. “Do you need to give me the look of a nice head injury?” He flinched, looking appalled. She laughed without humor. “I know where to get hit, you know.”

“You’ll head out on the train late next week,” he told her. “Long enough for your supposed bruises to have healed. Long enough that you won’t arrive right on Ash’s footsteps either.” He picked up the lantern, indicated a basket. “There’s food and water in there. It’s not much, but…I’ll bring some every night. You both stay quiet, stay out of sight, and I’ll get you both out of here.”

He held up his hands as it he wanted to embrace her, comfort her. Long years of habit were hard to break, though, and she saw that he gave a questioning glance at Briar, whose eyes were now open, watching the two of them carefully. Presumably she’d overheard more than her share of things. At least that saved explanation, and she had enough sense to keep quiet about it too. Phineas abruptly jerked back as if stung. Magnolia just shook her head. “Doesn’t matter that she knows, does it? She’s part of this too.” Truth was, in that moment she needed that embrace as much as anything. Much as she hated that damn white uniform he was wearing, she closed her eyes, put her head on his shoulder so she wouldn’t have to look at it, focused on the solid warmth of him and the steady beat of his heart. She’d already lost Haymitch and Ash. Her life was crumbling around her and she’d have to rebuild something new, this Nikoleta Law, from the fragments. Before she lost him and Briar as well, she’d treasure these last lingering moments.

Chapter Text

The only train rides she’d ever had before were to the anthracite mines in August, when she was young, the years between the end of her reaping days and Haymitch coming along. Her little boy, he’d accompanied her down into the deep, deep anthracite mines that final year, tucked snug inside her womb—she’d felt the first pangs of nausea down there in the tunnels. Blair had been sent there along with her, so it was easy enough to seduce him one hot summer night in his rickety cot, as he’d been after her back in their school days. Easy enough for him to believe that a woman getting on the shelf would finally fall for him out of desperation, a man known far more for his good looks than for a sweet temper or good work ethic.

She could do the math easily enough for Haymitch, her April baby. She’d gone to Phin during the Games that previous summer, the 33rd. Poppy Lowry from Six survived in the end, but Leesa MacQuarry was the female tribute. The MacQuarrys were West Seam, had lost their son Calum seven years before. She’d been classmates with Calum and friends with his older sister Pelly. She’d braided little Leesa’s hair after school. They’d reaped Leesa and that was that. The MacQuarrys would lose another one. Looking at the house that night and her father’s slow dying, she’d wanted to feel something that night besides sorrow, so she’d gone back to Peacekeepers’ Row, to the man who seemed, strangely enough, to offer kindness, even sympathy. A bit of an island himself, Phineas Fog—she’d seen that much about him. He thought too much, felt too much.

Nine months after that, a son. Maybe that conception meant the Games were always in Haymitch’s fate. Maybe what she’d stolen from the Capitol, making Phin her man instead of theirs, had been taken back. But she couldn’t think about that now. She had no sons. She was Nikoleta Law now, and she had no clear memories of Twelve or anywhere else, for that matter.

She spent the train ride keeping to herself, whispering words and practicing shaving just a little edge off her Twelve accent. Phin had thought ahead well. She’d supposedly been orphaned old enough that it was reasonable she’d still sound like she was from Twelve, rather than being sent to Two young enough to pick up their native accent. He’d left her that much of herself. It was more than he’d gotten. She thought sometimes she could still pick up a faint hint of the rounded lilt of Seven here and there in his voice, mostly in unguarded or emotional moments, but mostly it was the evenness of Two.

The trains to the anthracite mines had no windows. The train that carried her to District Two did, but it moved quickly enough that the countryside was largely a blur. Besides, heartsick as she was, she didn’t want to watch where she was going. Her mind and soul were with two boys—one left alone in Twelve, the other sent alone to Two, both of them presuming their mother was dead. Magnolia Abernathy was dead. She had to be. But it still hurt like hell, and so practicing being Nikoleta in that week of hiding, and the trip to Two, occupied her mind well enough so that she could forget her aching heart. She was Seam. That meant knowing a thing or two about tough choices for survival came with the territory.

When she finally stepped out of the train in Two’s district center, sore and stiff after the long ride stuffed into an upright seat, she saw the mountains of District Two were formidable, naked dark crags of stone thrust up high into the sky, tipped with snow like the powdered sugar-dusted confections that the Mellarks made in their bakery. But she didn’t know the Mellarks, did she?

She looked around at those mountains, sterile and imposing, and wished desperately for that old Seam house with the floorboards she could never get fully clean, for the comfortably familiar surround of the gently rolling mountains all prickleback with the lively green of the trees. Stop it, she told herself. She was near to forty years old. Her boys were going through a worse ordeal than this. Haymitch had endured the arena besides with all its horrors, a child with sudden burdens that would easily break a grown man. She would stay alive and keep alive that small spark of hope that someday, she’d be able to reclaim them.

Eagle Mountain, the place was called, for the larger of the two peaks shadowing the valley, and they pointed to a smaller mountain—Victors’ Mountain. Two uniformed Peacekeepers met her at the station, asking for her by name. It took her a moment to answer that she was Colonel Nikoleta Law. The name was nowhere near instinctive yet. But they were young, these two boys, a pair of puppies barely older than the fresh-minted miners back home, childish frames not quite filling out their uniforms with full adult bulk.

They spoke with pride and awe about their victors, these Two boys. She smiled and nodded, thinking that these people would be flabbergasted to know that if things had gone a bit different, she would have moved into a house like that herself right about now.

The bunkhouse they left her at was clean, albeit impersonal. But the kindness there once again surprised her. “Welcome back, Colonel Law,” a woman said, offering Magnolia—Nikoleta—her hand. She was about forty herself, with skin the color of the good strong tea they used to give them in winter in the mines. No, Nikoleta had never worked the mines, had she?

Her greeter’s grey-streaked brown hair was twisted tightly into a bun at the nape of her neck, the severe hairstyle framing features that looked like a slight mismatch of the genetic soup of her two parents—jaw a little too square for that delicate nose, lovely dark eyes a tad too closely spaced so that those beautifully thick lashes looked a bit too heavy. It was a memorable face, if not beautiful.

“I’m Julilla Law—Burnt Tree as well. Came to escort you out, and be your first welcome committee back to the district. Train out there unfortunately doesn’t leave for another two days, but—I know you don’t remember the details, but were you in Nine your second tour? You look familiar.”

She shook her head. “Second tour in Eight, so they tell me,” she said. She knew her service file supposedly said she’d been assigned to Eleven, Eight, Ten, and Three, before returning to Eleven for a fifth tour. Good thing she didn’t have to know the first damn thing about any of them in terms of details. She shrugged dismissively. “You probably had some other ga—woman born in Twelve that you served with?”

If nothing else, hiding things from Phin from everyone for the better part of two decades gave her an ability to think ahead, to deflect an inquiry in a way that wouldn’t attract more suspicion. “True enough,” Julilla said. “Anyway, let’s go get you some chow. I doubt you got much to eat on the train.”

“Some ration bars and bottled water.” Loaded thickly with fruit and nuts, sticky with honey, they’d still tasted richer than most anything she’d eaten in her life, up until those few days after Haymitch’s homecoming. Richer and more calorie-dense even than the fruit-and-nut bread for a toasting—no, she wouldn’t think about that. Blair was one thing she’d be glad to cut free from her supposedly lost past. If she’d ever needed an object lesson to not make assumptions, being smacked around by the Seam man she’d grown up with and then saved by the Capitol-sent man who could easily have seen her dead rather than risk so much for her, proved it cleanly enough.

It was a bittersweet proof of love. She’d never really let herself wonder exactly what he’d do for her if push came to shove, if they were exposed and it might benefit him to throw her to the wolves to save his own skin with the Capitol. She’d have been ruined in Twelve, no question. But was it so much to ask to have one thing for herself? Even only part of it—she’d never had him for a husband the way other Seam women took for granted with their men. But he’d saved her, saved Ash, saved Briar. Paid whatever cost it would demand. If that was the quality of some of these Peacekeepers, she wouldn’t hurry to condemn them all.

Besides, Julilla’s friendly face was a welcome sight for sore eyes. She’d almost grown used to the distant looks of people in the Seam, when they realized that she’d be moving up the hill, retiring from the mines—no longer one of them. To be welcomed was a seductive thing.

Jullila clucked her tongue. “You could do with a good feeding. There’s duty-fit, but you’re thin as a chisel.” Nikoleta tried to not be embarrassed by the spare flesh of her miner’s body, knowing that the curves of her bones made the lack of softness stand out all the clearer compared to the women with naturally slimmer builds. Phin had sighed over it sometimes too, seeing her in his bed and the look of gentle concern on his face, slipping her what extra food he could. But she always gave them to the boys, hungry and growing as they were.

“I was laid up in bed a while after my, uh…my injury,” she tapped her temple with her fingertips.

“Ah.” Julilla clapped her on the back. “We’ll get you fed. Get some meat back on those bones of yours. You did more than your duty, Nikoleta, so now’s the time for you to enjoy your retirement here. Find a man, have a kid or two if you can.”

Nikoleta did her level best to remember the fact that she was a Peacekeeper just now retired. So she had neither a man she’d left behind, nor two sons. She’d tell herself that until it was instinctive certainty. By the time she got to Burnt Tree, a village in the south central district, near one of the Peacekeeper training camps as all the villages apparently were, she’d become fast friends with Julilla—Lil.

They gave her a house of her own, a small one that strangely comforted her with its shabby hominess in a way that mansion in Victors’ Village never could have. The house came stocked with linens, kitchen utensils, and the like. But with the first installment of her Peacekeeper’s pension, she bought the necessities of setting up a house: staples for the pantry, toiletries, some plain but good-quality clothing. Setting everything up took most of the rest of the afternoon, and then she cooked a chicken cutlet and fresh vegetables that night, marveling at the quality—carrots that weren’t the shriveled remnants bought cheap.

As she washed the dishes, she tried to not dwell on the fact that it was far too quiet in the house. She’d never lived alone. Gone right from her father’s house to Blair’s, and by the time Blair died, there was Haymitch. She’d been raising two sons, and so to truly be alone…now it was truly real that her old life was over. She cried herself to sleep that night, huddled up in the fresh, crisp-smelling new sheets of her bed. The rain drumming steadily on the roof and windows seemed only to match her tears.

Three of her neighbors, including Lil, brought her coffee and doughnuts the next morning and kept her company, gabbing and yarning in a way that would have been impossible in Twelve. Even on Sunday there was far too much housework to do. She didn’t have many personal stories to add, due to her supposed amnesia, so the playing cards came out and they played poker for buttons until stopping for a lunch of cold sandwiches that Aeolus had brought. He was a squat, powerfully compact man of about fifty with craggy features, snow-pale skin and a shock of grizzled bone-straight hair that had been as strikingly black as hers in his youth, a grey eyepatch over his missing left eye. That intimidating face wasn’t lightened by ready smiles, but there was a careful watchfulness in that one remaining ale-brown eye, and an answering thoughtfulness in little gestures and things he did to make her feel included. She’d have wondered if he was after her, but for the fact that his wife Zena accompanied him, a tall and dignified woman with elegant, almost severe features and skin, eyes and hair seemingly all of the same deep, lustrous coal-black. What smiles he did have were clearly for her, and she returned them.

After lunch they showed her more of the village, and climbing the path up to an overlook hanging above the training camp. “Well, you’re still in good shape, even if you were laid up for a while,” Lil commented admiringly.

The thought that she was fit because a month ago she’d still been toiling in the mines rose to mind only reluctantly, as if the wall she was building between those old truths and her new life was starting to hold. They watched the cadets doing their exercises in a field left a churned-up mess of mud from last night’s rain shower. “Eager little kittens. Don’t know what’s in store for them,” Zena said, shaking her head with a wry grin. “At least we’ve all gotten through it.”

By the time Aeolus and Zena invited her over for dinner, she’d long since clued in that they were making sure she wasn’t left by herself. Lil’s remarks about mess halls and bunkhouses made more sense now. Peacekeepers probably hadn’t been alone at all either in almost all their adult lives, and she had the sense that like the very rare retired folk in the Seam who weren’t three quarters to dead already, they didn’t much know what to do with themselves given so much time with nothing to do after a lifetime of staying busy.

The days started to slip by, other neighbors coming by to introduce themselves and help tie her into their community. There were virtually no young adults in Burnt Tree, aside from a bare handful of active-duty Peacekeepers on assignment there, senior officers anticipating retirement themselves who’d earned home duty with years of long service, who mostly kept to themselves and nodded respectfully to her and all the other veterans, knowing they hadn’t quite earned that place yet. There were only the eighteen-year-old cadets doing their two months of boot camp before being sent out on assignment, and the middle-aged and elderly men and women retired from the service. For the Peacekeeper families, all the people between eighteen and thirty-eight were out in the other districts. The quarry families down south were another matter, almost a separate world from theirs. Nobody talked about them much.

It was a strange thing, seeing so many different types of people. Back in Twelve there was merchie and Seam, but now there were any number of combinations of skin, eye, and hair color. Here among the retirees, there was any number of disparate origins, and a spectrum of district accents or remaining fragments of them. Most of them were orphans or Peacekeeper bastards who hadn’t seen their birth districts since childhood, relics of all the districts of Panem swept up together to be dumped in a single cart labeled “Peacekeeper” that drew them together as something more than unwanted flotsam.

The orphans had no living kin and the bastards none they knew or could openly claim, which amounted to the same thing. She was given to understand that many in that position became lifers or took the exams for Head Peacekeeper, simply to have some continuing place or purpose. But for those that retired, or got mustered out for injury, they were assigned to a village and became each other’s kin now. Even the Peacekeepers who were Two-born had come back to this, their native village, but “family” was a loose-knit concept even for them. Born to parents near forty or older upon their own retirement, for most of the Two natives, their parents were either dead or quite frail by the time they’d returned.

From Phin’s stories about how he’d come to wear the uniform, and her early days hearing tales from her new neighbors, she’d wondered incredulously how they could so easily abandon who they’d been and embrace this place and its harsh ideals, the Capitol service and obedience. But her pa’s stories about the community home came to mind, and how a community home family remained the most miserable and poor of the lot—look at what it had meant for her life. A sense of purpose, honor, and dignity could be utterly seductive to a child facing nothing but rejection and worthlessness.

She found herself being seduced too, not by Capitol loyalty—she would never, ever forget or forgive what they’d torn away from her. But the kindness and community they showed her lured her, in spite of herself. Being raised West Seam and then married to a man who thought with a whiskey bottle and his fists, then a known Peacekeeper-whore—oh, the stigma was subtle, and people knew tough things were done to survive and accepted that, but she’d felt some of them looking at her and almost heard them thinking, Trash. Good thing they hadn’t known the whole truth. Everybody needed someone to look down upon. Perhaps the lowest folk needed it even more so, to make it feel like their own lives were less desperate and hard.

She caught herself thinking bitterly that wherever they’d sent him, Ash would be accepted rather than mocked as a “Peacekeeper brat”, with Haymitch bringing disciplinary notes from school for getting into fights for people bullying his brother. They’d accept Ash here, educated that hungry mind of his, and he’d be more than just another trash West Seam boy no good girl would want to marry, more than just arena bait. Two had volunteers, every single year. Ash would be safe.

Haymitch would never have to worry about mentoring his brother either. She only hoped he’d move past the memory of Briar in time and find some girl to marry, someone who’d see the sweetness in him that he’d buried deep taking on too much responsibility too young, someone to help him forget it all and find joy. Maybe a merchie girl—he’d be able to pick any girl in the district now.

Both her boys were now safe from the misery of a life in Twelve. The price had been almost unbearable, and when she dreamed of them she still woke up aching, the echoes of their names on her lips. But what more could a mother want for her children than to know they wouldn’t suffer the same shitty life that she had?

Days, weeks, months—the people and the rugged mountains began to feel familiar. The cadets left right after New Year for their new assignments. She slipped the graduates a silver coin as the traditional symbol of good luck, and gave them some advice for the road.

The first Peacekeeper she’d lain with was a boy who’d been there barely a month when the harsh bite of February and an empty pantry sent him to her door. He’d seemed kind enough at the Hob that day, young and shy, pleasant in a non-descript way with his light brown skin and dishwater blond hair. She’d hoped with a boy only a few years older than her, it would seem less mercenary. But once she was there and the bargain was struck, she’d seen clearly that there was no way to pretend. Desperate to just get it over with, she hadn’t done more than hike her skirt and slip off her underwear. His belt buckle had scratched her stomach as he lay on top of her. Unprepared as she was, it had hurt badly, but she’d gritted her teeth, thankful he was quick. He’d apologized in a shaking voice that told her he was as nervous as she was. She’d learned since coming here that they encouraged the cadets to go ahead and get it out of their systems early, facing twenty years of service, freely gave them condoms at training camp. If that boy wasn’t a virgin when he got to Twelve, he’d been barely past it. She didn’t even remember his name now. He’d paid her generously, and she’d sworn she’d never do it again. But necessity overrode principle in time. The boy had been too embarrassed or too ashamed to fuck her the next time. The middle-aged man next door, Tiberius, hadn’t been so particular. At least he was straightforward about it, and she’d known enough that time to prepare herself better before she left the house to help ease things.

She looked at those bright young cadets, and thought of herself huddled in the dark on the way back from Peacekeepers’ Row, her thighs still sticky with blood and semen, mildly ashamed but far more relieved at those precious coins clutched in her fist. It had happened on her terms, not the Capitol’s terms of grinding her life away in the mines. Poverty would make that system keep on turning. If Peacekeepers would pay for a few hours of company, artificially deprived of love as they were for so many of their adult years, some men and women out there would make a better living for it. She wouldn’t take that from them. She hadn’t seen it then, young as she was, fooled by the uniform and all it had represented to her, but the payment for sex usually masked a longing for a normalcy denied. For more than a few, they didn’t want a whore so much as they wanted a few hours of a lover. All those years ago, Phin had paid her triple simply to stay and eat dinner with him, talk with him. They’d talked hesitantly about books. That was the start.

So for her piece of advice, she told them to be kind when it came to fraternizing with the locals, in all ways. “They live hard lives already, so if you treat them like people, they’ll make your lives a lot easier,” she said, seeing some eyes disbelieving, some dismissive, some compassionate, some thoughtful.

Winter blasted raw through the mountains, shrieking through the crags and seeping into the houses. The Victory Tour went through Eagle Mountain and she was glad they hadn’t assigned her there, because she wouldn’t have been able to resist going to Haymitch. She made sure to keep busy in the kitchen those nights—“mandatory viewing” meant only that the television couldn’t be shut off or muted. But even if she couldn’t look at Haymitch yet, the sound of that familiar voice drifted into the kitchen and haunted her, especially when they talked about his tragically dead family.

She was glad when that was all done. Even retired Peacekeepers didn’t get blatant luxuries. The sweater and coat she wore were far less threadbare, but it wasn’t as though she could throw as much wood on the fire as she liked. They all quietly gave some of their firewood and food to the handful of lonely elderly members of the village anyway, the ones for whom the cold bit hardest, whose children were away on duty or who’d been too old to have them or perhaps never wed at all. She was thirty-nine now. By Seam reckoning, she was already getting up on being an old woman. By Burnt Tree’s standards, she was a woman just starting her own life. But like the Seam, life would be lived fast, like a bright-streaking comet, because they all knew their years were limited.

Still, when some of the few unmarried men of Burnt Tree came to call that winter, once Lil explained it to her, she couldn’t give them what they wanted. She looked at them across the well-scrubbed kitchen table, eating soup and bread with her, hesitant with their words. Deeply lonely men who looked at her with that expression of longing she’d seen in the eyes of Peacekeepers’ Row, the look she’d seen on Phin’s face when she came to him, and again when she had to leave only hours later. Men in their middle years, but awkward and shy as schoolboys because they’d never courted a woman.

“Are you waiting for still someone out on tour?” one of them finally asked her with a perceptive glint in his eye. Of all of them, she liked Augustus Law—Gus, they called him— the best. He had a lively wit and handsome grey eyes, had given up and shaved bald as an egg to concede a losing battle with his hairline. Maybe there was some Seam in his blood. But she had too many things she’d never be able to tell him, or any other man. She understood them, though. That same longing was in her too. She’d spent the last seventeen years with only small slivers of time with the man she loved. There was the same loneliness to that, and the frustrated need to be touched, to laugh with someone.

“Maybe,” she said, thinking of Phin. Less than two years and he’d be done in Twelve. Surely he’d come see her then? Then she looked down at her soup bowl and admitted, “I don’t know. It’s…it’s gone, you know.” At least nobody asked her about her duty years. It was politely understood that to volunteer information was fine, but to ask was rude. And given that she supposedly had lost all those years, most of her friends politely refrained from getting too much into the old duty stories around her.

He nodded at that and gave her a sympathetic smile as he bundled up to head home, wrapping his bright red scarf around his neck. “You’ll always have us either way, Nika.” He kissed her as he left, but on the cheek as a brother or friend might.

When Gus and Lil married that next May, she couldn’t say she was surprised, or unhappy. Looking at the two of them, it looked like it was one of the happier matches as well, rather than a pleasant but more pragmatic one.

She watched the Games that year, as they all did. There was something almost like reverence in these people, a respect for their tributes who’d trained so hard and offered up their lives in payment for the well-being of their district. Rather than the sense of victimization in Twelve, here in Two they seemed to come at it from a cooler, more rational place of having made the best of a bad bargain. Though they still lied to themselves and said it was all in the interest of keeping the peace and prosperity. Brutus Allamand was from Peacekeeper blood as well, so it was like they were watching one of their own.

But she had eyes only for Haymitch. He looked older in those fancy new clothes, definitely had grown a good bit taller, features a little stronger. Her son—eleven months since she’d seen him, and she felt like she barely knew that seventeen-year-old boy on the screen. She felt it even more keenly when they showed him rubbing elbows with the Capitol elite. “Smart kid,” Zena said. “Always thought he was a smart one. He’s learning the game of working the sponsors, even if he’s got no senior mentor to teach him. Not that it’ll do much for Twelve.”

Bizarre as it seemed, they actually admired Haymitch here in Two for being a fighter who could stand up against their best and win. You didn’t hear him, she thought silently, watching Haymitch giving an interview about his two tributes. Waking up yelling at things that weren’t even there, crying, saying their names. Sixteen years old and those nights, Haymitch had clung to her like he hadn’t since he was in kindergarten.

After the nightly recap where they saw the One girl kill Haymitch’s girl tribute—Larkspur Taylor, the tailor’s daughter, but the Taylors seemed like the relic of someone else’s life by now—she found Lil puking her guts out in the toilet. Made her some tea and dry toast, sat her down in the kitchen. Lil looked at her miserably. “Tell me it gets better.” She swallowed a sip of tea gingerly. “I’ve seen you in the steamhouse,” she said, eyes meeting Nikoleta’s. “You had a kid of your own, didn’t you? I know they took them from you right after they were born.”

The communal steamhouses—much like people didn’t ask questions, nobody had remarked on the stretch marks on her belly. But of course they must have noted them.

“Two,” she said, looking away, adding hurriedly, “so they tell me.” She ought to claim just one, far less suspicious, but she couldn’t bring herself to deny Haymitch now. “One who went to the arena, and one who must be at the Peacehome right now.”

“A tribute?” Lil reached out and grabbed her hand. “Do you know…”

“No.” Her voice cracked on the single word. No, she couldn’t talk about Haymitch, and couldn’t bear to spin lies and make him into a Two boy who’d died in the arena either. Stupid—she should have left him out of it entirely. “No, they wouldn’t tell me more than that. But…don’t tell anyone,” she pleaded, heart hammering inside her ribs now with the terror of possibly having tripped herself up.

“Oh, Nika,” Lil said, squeezing her hand tighter. “I won’t. Your son—daughter?—may have died for us all, but…” Her own voice went unsteady. “I can’t think of letting this one go.” Her hand dropped to her belly, protectively covering it. “But I’ll have to, won’t I? Never knew who my parents were—I’ve got some south Nine blood, that much is clear, but I’m just another Law, another bastard. At least I’ll get to raise this one for a while. But either they’ll go into the Institute at six or they’ll go to boot camp at eighteen, and they’ll serve. Everyone in Two, they serve—quarries, Institute, or the Corps. My own child isn’t really mine. I’m just raising them for the Capitol.”

The terror was alive and well in those eyes, and the raging anger of a mother wanting to protect her child but helpless to do so. Nika reached out and hugged her, wanting desperately in that moment to tell her everything. Maybe she’d understand, maybe she’d be as outraged. But instead all she said was, “I know. It’s not fair.”

Brutus survived the Games, albeit without a particularly flashy victory. They didn’t bother to show Haymitch heading home with two coffins. Alone—he’d claimed he had no sweetheart back home, covering it with some sly charm remarking on pretty Capitol girls.

Julilla was fast on her way to becoming the sister Nikoleta had never had, and little Millea, born that next March, tentatively bridged a gap in her heart, even if those sweet, gummy smiles and delighted gurgles couldn’t fill it.

More pictures of Haymitch being friendly with the Capitol, another two dead kids. Two and a half years in, her Twelve life felt more and more like it receded like a distant daydream. Some part of her was aware that was in part defensive, but with nobody to feed that memory except the unbearable images of the Games and Haymitch in the summer, the immediacy of this new life had scabbed over the wound, and now it left the still-healing scar.

But then that autumn, a new class of cadets came to Burnt Tree for their boot camp training. Watching them arrive, Nikoleta would have known her anywhere—her black hair was cropped short to her collar, her features more defined by growing two years closer to womanhood, but she’d seen that face often enough over the dinner table that last winter and spring to never forget it. It took everything she had to keep herself still and not react.

So when the cadets had Sunday liberty in the village, she found the girl arguing over the price of boot laces. That Twelve accent was still sharp as anything. “You’re not Decius Warrender’s girl Tridia, are you?” she asked, racking her brains for some plausible excuse. “I met a man back in the bunkhouse in Eagle Mountain getting his leg looked at, headed back to Icewind Peak, told me had a daughter about your age—you look a lot like her picture.”

Briar Wainwright turned to her, eyes wide with surprise, but recovered quickly. “No, afraid not, ma’am. I’m Apollonia Law—Polly.”

She reached out and offered Apollonia her hand. “Pleasure to meet you, then.”

One advantage of having lived in the village was awareness of good places to steal a few moments alone. It would have to be fast—cadets only got two hours of village liberty. Hiking up the path was second nature by now, Apollonia close at her heels. She didn’t waste time once they were at the small cluster of boulders that made for a good resting place. “You’re well, child?” she asked.

The fierce hug she got almost knocked the breath from her. “It’s good to still see you safe, Mrs. Aber—Colonel Law,” she corrected herself. She let go, sat down on one of the boulders. “I’m OK,” she said. “The Peacehome wasn’t…they were…it was crowded, and we all knew what we were heading for, but they were kind folk.” She chewed her lower lip. “I’ve seen Ash, Mrs. A,” she admitted. “They call him Theodosius now. Theo. I…I don’t know what they did to him, but he doesn’t recognize me. He’s not just playing along to keep safe. I went and tried to talk to him and called him ‘Ash’ and asked if he remembered me, and he looked at me like I was just crazy. So I acted like I was just mistaken. He’s all right, he’s doing well, but…”

But if he saw me, he wouldn’t know me. Was that part of Snow’s price for saving Ash’s life? If he’d agreed to keep her and Briar alive too, rather than Phin sneaking it through, would that have been their fate as well? It was like a blow to her heart—what had they done to her baby? “I don’t know what they’re doing to Haymitch either,” Briar continued defiantly, “but what he is on that camera, it’s not him.”

She stayed silent a long time, sitting there with the chill of the stone seeping through her jeans. Glad beyond words to have someone to share this burden with for the first time in over two years, and to see that Briar was all right, but left with questions and no answers. “I think he’s playing what games he thinks he has to do to bring Twelve kids home,” she said, shaking her head. But Briar was right. That slick, arrogant boy on the television admiring of the luxury of the Capitol wasn’t her son. “It’s not like here.” Numerous living victors, a firm training program, guaranteed sponsors every year. “He’s got only himself.” That wasn’t true of only the Games either.

“I still miss Hay,” Briar said, hugging her arms tightly around her chest. Her voice broke on her next words. “I slept with a boy at the Peacehome, right after the reaping. It’s going to be twenty years—no marriage, no kids. They tell us that, all the time. He was…he had black hair, he looked a little like…and I thought it would be enough. Just to feel something. We’d have gotten married by now, you know?”

She understood. Chances were the two of them would have made love for the first time that night, safe from the reaping. She would have welcomed Briar into the house overnight. They’d have married after the Games were over—by this point, Magnolia Abernathy might have been expecting a grandchild. Briar had tried to steal back a small bit of what had been taken from her, and instead only made the misery cut deeper. There would be no man who could replace Haymitch for her for years to come, stripped the chance to fall in love without it being nothing but pain from denial of happiness. She reached out and now she was the one who caught Briar up in a fierce, crushing hug. “I know, baby,” she said simply. “I know.”

It was a lucky thing that cadets were encouraged to mingle with the retired Peacekeepers and glean wisdom from them. Most cadets were “adopted” by local families on Sundays, having the last taste of home and the warmth of something like family before going off to their long years of duty. So nobody questioned Nikoleta and Apollonia spending some of those Sunday liberties together. When she gave Polly her coin on graduation in late December, she leaned in close and told her, “Don’t you give up, Briar. You don’t mourn what’s gone, but you take what happiness where you can, and you remember who you are.”

Polly looked at her and nodded. “Thanks, Colonel Law, for everything you’ve done for me. Chances are they’ll send me to Burnt Tree when I retire,” she said simply. Retirees usually went back to village of their old training camp, after all. With that, Nika understood the implied promise—if she survived long enough and Briar came back, at least they’d piece together a small remnant of the family they should have been.

She didn’t know whether to pray they sent Ash to Burnt Tree as well, or if having him come here and not know her would kill her.

New Years’ came, and the fifty cadets moved out to their assignments. Polly would go first to District Seven. Twenty-two new retirees came in—apparently this was a year where they preferred to make a clean break entirely rather than move to light duty, apply for Head, or to become a Gameskeeper. She greeted them and tried to smile warmly at the hopeful newly-arriving unmarried men, but not give them too much encouragement.

She was prepared. They’d heard about her ahead of her arrival. Every year they got to hear about who’d put in their paperwork and would be returning, so they could go ready the house and everything. Burnt Tree was to be particularly honored this year with the return of one of its long-ago former trainees, who’d put in forty years of faithful service and had concluded twenty years in District Twelve. Forty years of service, maybe, she thought. But as for “faithful”, he’d proven amply to her where his loyalties stood, and it wasn’t with President Snow and the Capitol.

He arrived a few days behind the others, and she volunteered to go to Eagle Mountain and be his escort. As he stepped off the train, he held his bag, dressed in a plain black overcoat—out of the white uniform for the first time in all the years she’d known him. She looked at his face. He looked tired, shoulders a bit stooped, suddenly looking older than his years. He looked…almost haunted. Those golden brown eyes met hers, tired and anxious. So maybe the two and a half years since they’d met had been harsh on him as well. What price had Snow demanded of him?

She swallowed hard, stepped forward, wanting to embrace him. But Nikoleta Law had probably never met this man. Certainly she’d never served in District Twelve, being born and raised there for most of her childhood. Conscious of the eyes and ears around them, she offered him her hand and said, “Hello, Phineas Fog? I’m Nikoleta Law. Burnt Tree sent me to escort you. The next train’s in three days, so we’ve got space in the bunkhouse tonight.”

He looked at it, confusion creasing his brow. Then he smiled wearily and said, “Sorry. I’m far too used to salutes.” That was normal. It took all of them a little while to stop instinctively saluting everyone older than them. Everybody teased and joked about it, but while the respect for the service was there, the barriers of rank and military formality broke down quickly. That chronic loneliness seemed to assure it. All they needed was someone who could greet them kindly and show them that it was OK to finally unbend after all those years. She’d seen that with Lil on that very first day.

She laughed. “You’ll get used to it. Would you prefer I call you ‘General’ for a while?”

That half-hearted smile got broader and more genuine, and the look of a drowning man left him as he looked at her as if she was the first fine thing he’d seen in a long, long time. He clasped his hand in hers, shaking it. They were both wearing winter gloves, but to so openly hold his hand like this in front of everyone, even for a few fleeting moments, set her heart racing like she was a green girl. “No, call me ‘Phin’, if you like. It’s good to be home.”

There was a heavy air to him; she could tell he wasn’t yet ready to talk about what his last years in Twelve had been like. Maybe she wasn’t ready to tell him everything yet about her time in Burnt Tree and the rest of it. That would come in time. They’d have time now. But over dinner in the bunkhouse, he brightened up again, and even if his hair had gone greyer, he was still Phineas Fog, still the man who’d loved her, who’d given her two children, who’d risked so much simply to keep her and hers alive.

She couldn’t keep away from him. Unlike in Twelve, people here would understand finally giving in to that all-too-human ache. People would readily believe it was a whirlwind spark between them. More than once folks had come back from the wait for the train in Eagle Mountain already a snug couple, whether it was two retirees hitting it off or the escort finally meeting the right one. When they’d all waited so long for love, some wasted absolutely no time. She’d spent the better part of seventeen years permitted only scraps of the man, and two and a half years without anything at all.

When she padded to his room, wincing at feeling the cold concrete floor even through her socks, she saw his light was still on, a feeble glow beneath the door. Like old times—she always came to him. She knocked, and listened for his footsteps as he answered the door. Even in his pajamas and tousled hair, with his wire-rimmed reading glasses on, he looked deeply serious. “Do you want me here tonight?” she asked him simply.

“Do I want…?” He reached out tentatively, taking her hands in his. His eyes shone suddenly behind his glasses. “I’ve wanted you with me every fucking night for the last twenty years, Nola,” he whispered, and the tears burned in her eyes at the longing in his voice, an echo to the ache within her. They’d both lost so much already. So many years, the children he’d never been able to acknowledge, the children she’d had taken from her. But she still had this much, this man, and here in Two, she could have more of him than she ever could in Twelve. That was something.

He simply held her that night in his bed, first while they wept, then while they slept. She was so unused to someone else sleeping beside her after the few short years of Blair, and she’d wanted to do anything but cuddle up with him. But it was something to treasure. Always before, she’d had to get up from his bed and hurry back down to the Seam, when all her heart and instincts wanted to do nothing but curl up and linger in the reassuring intimacy of being with him. The feel of him there was unfamiliar, but not at all unwelcome. She closed her eyes and let herself finally, finally relax and be comforted, perhaps for the first time in years.

Chapter Text

She woke up to see him sleeping peacefully in the morning, curled half up with a hand outstretched still to touch her. Marveled at seeing what he looked like, so vulnerable with his features relaxed. She’d never seen it before—he never let himself fall asleep after making love. She’d watched him fight the obvious urge of his own body to nod off, but he’d gruffly said it was because he didn’t want to waste what little time he had with her.

Moving to push herself up from the mattress, she realized there was nowhere to be, nobody to hide this from now. Wanting to be there when he awoke, she lay back down, curling up closer to him again, worn out still and drifting easily back to sleep.

They missed breakfast, but got up in time for lunch, to some knowing chuckles. She shrugged it off easily, slipping her arm around his shoulders. She was far beyond girlish embarrassment. After a moment’s hesitation, his own arm crept around her waist, holding her gingerly as if he still couldn’t believe it. “Good on you, sir, welcome home,” one of the young Peacekeepers serving the chow said teasingly.

After lunch, she went out into the town. The pharmacist eyed her askance when she made her request for a cycle of contraceptive injections. She’d managed to get pregnant twice despite not sleeping with him regularly, taking tonic from the Banners and having her period be erratic as anything due to the physical stress and her thin-fleshed frame. Even past forty, she was taking no chances now, and the injections were the most certain way.

“Are you sure?” he said dubiously. “You know that any children you can still have are essential to the Corps. You should consider doing your duty.”

She wanted to pick up the heavy bottle of rubbing alcohol and brain him with it. After a few years, most of Two’s ways struck her with less dissonance. It helped that the retirees lived quietly away from most of it. But every now and again there was a moment like this that made her wonder how the hell these people could live like this and think it honorable and right. “I’ve done my duty. I’ve had two kids already that’re doing their duty even now,” she said between her teeth, impatient. Most people now assumed she’d had twins to make sense of the single pregnancy exemption an on-duty female Peacekeeper was allowed to help keep kids coming into the Corps in the future. If a female officer got pregnant again, she’d be obliged to have an abortion rather than make herself unavailable for full duty for nine months. That meant a black mark in their record for the inconvenience of needing a flight to Two for the procedure since nobody trusted district herbalists with surgery, so the women were typically rather diligent in taking their injections. Still, it was more reliable than taking Deedre Banner’s black cohosh and pennyroyal tonic.

“And I almost died doing it.” It was actually Haymitch that had half-killed her, starving and exhausted as she was after that long winter, and how Blair kept refusing to send for the midwife because of the cost of it. She could still see him leaning over her, his terror of the cost overriding his terror for her, the fumes of white liquor making her even more nauseated than the contractions. Funny how being a widow with a small child had been less perilous being a wife whose husband drank away most of their mutual wages. “So no, I don’t think I’m required to risk it again. Plus he did his extra twenty years as a Head, and I got mustered out on my fifth tour when some bastard in Eleven attacked me. So do you really want to talk to me about ‘duty’, son?”

She left in triumph with a year’s supply of injections in a neat leather case. Walking with Phin that afternoon up on the mountain, she told him bluntly, “I’m safe now for us to sleep together, you know. I picked up a round of injections.”

He looked at her, puzzled. “You did—“ He shook his head helplessly. “I wish you’d at least asked me,” he murmured, not quite willing to look at her.

She stared at him directly, not flinching, a spark of anger flaring to life within her. Where were you, Phin? “Why? It’s my decision. I was the one who had the raising of two kids because you couldn’t safely claim them,” she reminded him. “I was the one who dealt with the third one because we both knew it couldn’t happen.” Cramping, nauseated, worried she was dying from that damn tonic, she’d desperately wanted someone there to comfort her. But it was Haymitch, nine years old at that point, sitting anxiously by her bedside, wanting desperately to help her.

“And you told me about dealing with it after the fact too,” he said bitterly. “And even then, only to tell me you desperately needed money after paying for the medicine and missing four days of work. You would have let me think it was flu like you claimed on the mine work board if you hadn’t needed the money, wouldn’t you?”

“How was it your decision? It was the only one that could be made, because I could barely raise the two boys I had, even with you helping where you could!” She probably would have kept quiet. He didn’t need to know how brutal it had been, how it left her crying for a few weeks as her hormones readjusted and she also tried to deal with what had happened. She couldn’t regret it. A third mouth to feed would be bringing that baby into a world of misery. To not be born at all was far better than that. Her sorrow was more for the life she lived where accepting such cold realities were necessary, and how alone she’d felt. The neighbors had been kind enough, and cared about her health, but they’d tried to reassure her by saying how ending a Peacekeeper’s spawn was only a good thing for her.

“I know that! Do you think I didn’t look at the way you had to live and I hated every damn moment of it?”

She shook her head, stepping back from him, needing suddenly to have a space between them. “You couldn’t be there for the last twenty years. I took care of myself. So you don’t get to tell me what to do now.”

“I’m not trying to tell…”

But now her fury was roused, so it was difficult for her to throttle it back, for love or any other reason. “We did what we needed to do, Phin. And what do you want from me? You want another kid now?” It poured out of her like pus from an infected wound. “One that I’ll grow and give birth to and in eighteen years, have to hand them over to the Capitol too and probably never see them again? I’ve given them both my sons already, so damn you, no, I’m not letting them have another child of mine!”

He looked at her, brown eyes half-closed as if in pain, turning away slightly. “No,” he said. “No, Nola, I don’t want another child. Chances are I wouldn’t live to see them leave for the Corps, and do you think I’d want to leave you a widow without that one little comfort? They wouldn’t replace Ash and Haymitch anyway. I know you had to do for yourself. But this…it can’t be like it was. Really, if you don’t need me at all, if you can’t let me in, what’s the point of it?”

“It wasn’t your choice to make,” she insisted again, but some of the icy fear in her had melted, hearing that he was on her side in this. She recalled now too—she could trust him. He’d proved himself to her in a way he hadn’t back then.

“No. But you could have at least asked,” he said, voice gone a bit gentler. “You always just told me after it was already done and I couldn’t even try to help you.”

She hugged herself tightly against the winter cold, feeling suddenly insubstantial and hollow, like the brutal winds with their lashing ice crystals could blow right through her. “Maybe. But…” She struggled to explain herself. “I was married to Blair for three years—“

“I’m not Blair Abernathy. And hate me for it if you want, but I’ll say that dying was the best thing that bastard ever did for you,” he said, with a harsh steely edge in his voice, a sudden reminder of who he was and the hard life he’d led for all his adult years.

“You’re right.” She shook her head, tucking her scarf in more tightly as the motion opened a pocket of air that let the chill seep right in. She’d slept beside Blair, lived with him, tried to make a life with him, and when times were good with him, they’d been actually sweet enough. In those times she could see the man he might have been if not for the community home warping and twisting him so that the child who’d entered had come out paranoid and angry, petty and possessive, feeling like the only way he could have security in a thing was to jealously guard and control it. Trouble was that the dark times were far lower than the good times were high. “I can’t be sorry he’s dead. Not even so much for me, but my boys. Either he’d have started to beat the slag out of them too—he never had patience with Haymitch—or they’d have turned out like him.”

“If you can’t be glad he’s dead for your sake, then I’ll damn well be glad for you. I thought about bringing him in more than once. Finding some excuse.”

She’d wondered that, and guiltily kept silent. As Head Peacekeeper it would have been easy to run Blair in one trumped-up charges, or even see him executed. Few people would have mourned Blair Abernathy. But she had never been brave enough to ask why she’d had those dark thoughts. Maybe because she feared it would reveal her to be callous to even contemplate it, or maybe because she feared that Phin would judge her for such a twisted way of thinking about things, really—to demand as proof of love that he deliberately murder a man through corrupting the authority he possessed? But his having brought it up now unstopped her tongue and so she felt free to ask. “Why didn’t you?”

“If he’d tried to fight me that would have been one thing. Bastard was always too clever to cause a scene in public with you. But…I did my best,” he burst out, eyes suddenly hard and angry with a frustration. “All those years I tried to enforce only the laws that actually kept people safe, not the ones that kept them down.”

“I know.” He’d let the Hob run unchecked, didn’t bother dissuading Peacekeepers from being friendly with the people of Twelve, overlooked poaching as much as he could, ignored any number of small offenses that could have been cause for flogging or hanging with any other Head.

“If I ran him in on a lie, I’d be just another bully at best. A murderer, if I got him executed.” Phineas jammed his hands into his coat pockets, shoulders square and tight with tension. “I couldn’t fight him man-to-man, outside the uniform, without exposing us both. And I debated provoking a fight with him, at least having just cause to arrest him, but even that would be abusing my position. So I had to let him beat the hell out of you to save my own damn soul, just so I could sell it to Coriolanus Snow for a far worse price.”

“It bought you three lives,” she said stiffly. “Were our lives worth your pride?”

“That was never in doubt. But you don’t know what I’ve had to do these last years,” he said, words almost lost in the wind as they were voiced in barely more than a whisper. “Suddenly, Snow was watching Twelve, and informing me he had expectations about me doing my duty where clearly I’d been too lax before.”

She could read between the lines, and the horrifying images sprang to mind. “How strictly were you enforcing?”

“Everything, Nola,” he said heavily. “He sent in some new officers specifically to be his eyes and ears. I had to submit a weekly report directly to Snow. I’d have told him to go to hell and do what he wanted to me, I deserved it. But if he got rid of me, how many other innocent officers would I take down with me? How hard would he hit your people just to make a point? And how bad would my replacement be? The man he chose to succeed me is bad enough. When I did the handover, he knew exactly what I’d done, and made it clear that things were going to stay tight.”

She absorbed that, thinking it over, not wanting to think about the way things were left in Twelve. Seeing the thorn of guilt suppurating in him, she couldn’t pull it out with soothing words and telling him that he did the best he could. People had suffered and died because a decent man who’d done his best to run things sanely and humanely had finally been found out and brought to heel. That burden wouldn’t be so easily smoothed away. “Maybe I shouldn’t have been with you to begin,” she said, bitterness lacing her words through. “Or at least, maybe you should have let me go. Done what Snow demanded. You wouldn’t have gotten caught if not for trying to save me.”

He shook his head wearily at that, lashing out and smacking his hand forcefully against the sheer stone face rising alongside the path. “You think I’d have turned out half so decent if you hadn’t forced me to look at things differently? And you know I couldn’t keep my mouth shut when the order came down. If I couldn’t abuse my position to kill your miserable asshole of a husband, do you really think I could stand by and give the order to have you killed? It’s this fucking regime that’s the problem, not you and me. If the whole system is so easily threatened by you and I finding something worth loving in each other that we had to be punished for it, well, that says everything.”

Hearing him so openly speak treason like that terrified her, even as she exulted at it somewhat—finally, someone said it, and seeing the passion sparked in him, she loved him fiercely in that moment. “So what do we do? Keep our mouths shut and simply hope we escape notice again?”

He laughed, emerging in a whip-sharp blast that sounded like half mirth and half pain. “We can’t go back. I was lucky enough to be in the position I’m in, have some friends and some pull, so I could get you and Briar out and cover it up. If I’d been anyone else, you’d have been executed. Very few others are as fortunate as that. They’re at the mercy of the Capitol.”

“So do we pick up some rifles and go start a war?” She said it lightly, but she was only half-joking. The festering wound of having Ash and Haymitch taken from her, her people and her district, had been there all along. Nikoleta had only pretended it away, buried it deep, but it still bled when she dared look at it.

“No. Not now. It’s doomed to fail at this point.” But a glimmer of something entered his expression—like the faintest ray of hope. “But someday, they’ll try again. And I can—“

“We,” she corrected him.

“We,” he amended, giving her a genuine smile, “can do what we can to help that.”

“I’m listening.” What a retired Peacekeeper could do was beyond her—she was one tiny chip of coal from a massive seam, insignificant in the scheme of things. She only became worthy of any notice to the Capitol at all as Haymitch’s mother, but her life still existed with so little worth that Snow would easily sign it away simply to make a point about her son.

“Every district’s got its Peacekeepers that aren’t happy with the way things run. They know better than to run their mouths, though. Nothing can really change. Even as a Head, you can only overlook so much, keep a fine balance, and hope it doesn’t get noticed. But they’re out there. If we could get them together, have them stay quiet about their sympathies but end up passing on information…”

She looked at him, relieved beyond words that the man he’d been hadn’t been entirely crushed by Snow. She could have imagined he’d want to do nothing more than hide here in Two in peaceful retirement, in the idyll of Burnt Tree, and pretend all the horror away. She couldn’t have loved him if he’d tried to deny it all. She would keep silent, but her heart couldn’t be controlled. Haymitch and Ash couldn’t be pretended away, and she wouldn’t let him or anyone else demand it. She couldn’t resist a smile and a black-humored joke. “I’m already under a death sentence for aiding treason, dear. So I might as well do something to earn it.”

He reached out to her then, and she took his hand. “We’ll make this work,” she told him, looking up into his eyes, and both of them knew they were talking about the two of them.

“I’m fifty-eight, Nola, and what I had with you is all I’ve had, in my whole life.”

“Blair wasn’t exactly a good demonstration either,” she said softly. “So maybe we’ve both got some figuring out to do.” She was forty-two now, and as he’d pointed out sharply enough, long set in some of her ways. But maybe they could both learn to bend a bit, and be something real together.

That day on the mountain was the start of a new life again. Secretly toasted sweet-bread as a nod to her Twelve roots, and equally secret codes and flash-burn paper: marriage and treason became the twin newborn facets of her existence. It seemed like both were as much an exercise in frustration as reward sometimes, and both seemed to involve a hell of a lot of deciphering cryptic things and reading between the lines.

Although at least as a wife she could eventually demand Phineas talk to her openly and honestly, and that got easier as time went on. For their agents in the field, coded messages and untraceable transmitters and telephones were the order of the day. She got used to grabbing the phone when that particular signal rang and taking down a furtive report of seemingly innocuous remarks about missing the taste of apple crisp or joking about local laundry practices.

Peacekeepers weren’t supposed to have telephone privileges, but sitting together in their little front room in front of the fire, Phineas told her it was one of the most flaunted rules out there, since the only people being called were typically back in Two, either parents or sponsors from training camp. “Heads, of all people, would respect those that did their years in the white—they’ve put in over twenty years themselves. It’s all right to call retired officers, since they’ve been there. It’s not telling them anything they don’t know, you know? And it’s keeping them included. Not like they’re calling a lover on assignment in another district. It’s respect, not distraction. So I always told them to keep it to one short call a week and to not do it in front of everyone, or else. Weekly inspection of the phone required, though, to see who’d been called.” He gave a half-shrug at that, as if to say he’d done the best he could to balance all the demands from various factions.

Every autumn they vetted the Burnt Tree cadets, selected the likely ones. Two months wasn’t much time to assess them, recruit them, and train them. But there were always a few that were willing to listen. She looked at faces from every district in Panem and saw that some of them remembered a past they’d been told to forget. Even some of the Two-raised ones asked questions—though only in hushed tones. Two months later, they’d leave for their first field assignment, telephone in hand and basic codes memorized, with quiet instructions to try to recruit others on assignment where they could.

She’d always been good at deflecting suspicion. So when a senior officer insisted on having the phone, or when it rang again and a different voice demanded to know who was on the other end, she was always ready.

Today was one of those days. Cool for August, the 55th Games had finally ended a few days ago with Ten’s Wyandot Ingersoll the last tribute standing. Two had exited unusually early, thanks to bad luck with some man-eating horse mutts that trampled the entire Career pack. As for Haymitch, it didn’t bear thinking about. Two dead Seam children less than an hour into it, and then weeks of him on camera with the same eight or ten Capitolites he’d spent his company with the last couple of years. He wasn’t the popular life of everyone’s party as he had been a few years ago, but as her boy finally became a man, it seemed he still had his steady charmed circle, always on camera with one of them and a witty quip and an arrogant smirk.

The phone rang, and as Phineas was busy writing the coded reports from some of the others, she answered it. “Hector? How are you?” Hector Shaw, fifth-generation Peacekeeper—a surprise to them, but his friend Diana Law had recommended him. Sometimes the passion in those who’d never known anything but Two pride and honor surprised her, but there were always ones smart enough to question things, no matter their origins or upbringing.

“Who is Lieutenant Shaw calling?” The voice was female, soft and light in tone but demanding and sharp in words.

“Oh, hello, this is Colonel Nikoleta Fog out at Burnt Tree,” she’d say cheerfully. “Are you his supervisor? How are things in District Eleven?”

“This is Major Felicia Danforth,” and some of the blade-sharp tension in that voice had relaxed as she heard that her underling had only been talking to a mentor back home rather than a girlfriend or boyfriend, and knowing that it was now a “safe” number. “He hid the phone for months.”

Nikoleta murmured in sympathy, folding her arms and looking out the window towards the granite-and-ice spars of the mountains thrust up into the sky. They still seemed bleak sometimes, but they’d taken on the feel of home, because her friends made it home, and Phin most of all. “Can’t tell you how many times that happened to me. But you know how it is, right? Phones, technically against the rules. Plus they don’t want to look unprofessional on their first tour. And them calling back home for a little advice now and again—they think it looks bad. Young men and their pride are even worse with it than the women. I hope he’s not giving you too much trouble.”

Major Danforth laughed at that on the other end. “No, he’s been a good kid so far. All right, I’ll give his phone back. Weekly inspection, the usual deal.”

"If he's calling someone he shouldn't, I'll help you chew his ass, believe me." She smiled victoriously as she hung up. “Looks like Hector’s still active,” she said, looking over her shoulder at Phin. They were told to hide the phones as much as possible and not risk it being an issue to begin, but they’d lost a few would-be agents due to confiscation of the phones by hardass supervisors.

His answering smile crinkled the corners of his eyes, but as ever, there was something wolfish about it—he was on the game and he loved it. It seemed Coriolanus Snow hadn’t figured on something other than cowing Phineas Fog into submission. Maybe a rebellion wouldn’t happen in their lifetimes, but they would find other people to carry on the work.

It started small in those first years—only a handful of agents scattered across Panem, and as junior officers, they only got assigned to the outer six districts. But patience and subtlety was all it took. The message found root in the right hearts and minds, and it spread.

They kept recruiting from the training camp. But their initial agents recruited others in their districts, and then they all moved into other districts as well, including the inner six. They even found contacts in Two who were of a like mind, and in time, even others in Burnt Tree got quietly referred to them. Lil and Gus were among them—it was a relief to not have to lie to her best friend anymore, though Nola didn’t tell her the full truth. Better for her to not have that burden if this all came crashing down someday.

Training officers down at the camp, people at HQ who helped make assignments and assigned the incoming cadets to one of the six training camps around Two. All the while, the Capitol and the Corps at large had no idea that Burnt Tree had become a quiet hotbed of counter-Capitol intelligence work. Even Icewind Peak, Wolfshead Pass, and Havenford camps ended up with a few people there on the sly.

Good thing they recruited others in Two who could have the excuse of being a familial phone call and not attract attention. By the time Johanna Mason won the 66th Games, there was a ring of several hundred officers spread throughout Panem reporting in. Usually only one called if several were in an area, like in Eight or Twelve, but particularly in far-flung places like Four, Seven, Nine, Ten, and Eleven where one Peacekeeper might be the only one in that particular area, it meant an individual call.

Every year they gleaned more information, and the Two resistance slowly grew. A small portion of the Corps, perhaps, but they’d managed to infiltrate virtually everywhere.

Every year she watched Haymitch on the television and saw a man she didn’t know grown from the boy she’d given birth to and cherished—twenty, twenty-five, thirty. At first it was rubbing elbows cheerfully with the Capitol, presumably desperate to try to get sponsors because it was so hopeless. But then eventually it turned darker, became acting out, drinking to the point the newscasters wondered if he had an addiction problem. Their agents in Twelve kept reporting, as they had for years, that he’d withdrawn from everyone there, and he kept almost entirely to himself. Given that she’d experienced how Twelve was quick to shun, she had the feeling it was mutual withdrawal on both sides.

He’d been her boy, a chubby-cheeked toddler with that mess of dark curls so like hers and inquisitive grey eyes. He’d hugged her tightly as if he’d somehow sensed that she needed it, that she had nobody else she could touch, because Phin was off limits for the most part. A skinny, small child vowing in a high boyish voice that he’d do whatever he could for her, just so she wouldn’t have to go to Peacekeepers’ Row, and she couldn’t explain the truth to him, but that kind of determination and caring in such a little boy—it broke her heart.

She looked back on that boy, sweet and compassionate beneath the layer of awkward bluster, and couldn’t find him. She had the feeling that being left alone, and then watching tributes die, year after year after year, unable to stop it, had finally shattered him. After she transcribed another report onto the datapad about Haymitch drunkenly flipping a Peacekeeper off as he came back from the Games that year with two more coffins, she felt Phin’s hand on her shoulder, and looked up into his face to see the concern there.

“They did this to him,” she said, holding back tears and gritting her teeth. Whatever Haymitch had become, he was her child, and she was damn certain that a cynical alcoholic wasn’t the man he should have become. “Phin...fuck them, they ruin everything they touch.”

“They’ll pay,” he said grimly, gathering her into his arms for a moment. His was a quieter, cold-burning anger compared to hers, but that night, when their lovemaking turned rougher than usual, like they were a good twenty years younger, she felt the rage in him as well.

Ash—Theodosius—had gone to Icewind Peak, and then to Nine, now to Seven. At least the reports told her that he was a quiet, conscientious officer. He did his duty as thoughtfully as a young Ash had done everything. Distinction as a legalist; she couldn’t help but smile that her baby who’d needed to ask “Why?” about everything would turn out like that. They’d taken his memories, but not who he was at heart. “Do you want me to ask someone to approach him?” Phin had asked.

“No. He’s been through enough.” If they’d truly taken all of his memories like Polly said, asking him to get involved with all of this and its risk, simply for her comfort to have him closer—she couldn’t do it. It was far better for him to live his life as quietly as he could, hopefully find some kind of peace at the end of his twenty years, and perhaps even love.

So maybe with both her boys and her desire to protect them, it meant she was still a mother after all.

That next summer, a crisis broke with a report from Seven just as the 67th Games were about to begin. Apparently Johanna Mason had done something to piss Snow off. Nobody seemed to know exactly what. Though even she only knew about Haymitch’s supposed sin with the forcefield because he’d told her about it, babbling in confusion on waking up from a nightmare about how they’d changed the tape by the time of his victor interview. She’d watched that edited broadcast, same as everyone else.

Chances were only Johanna herself could say what she’d done, but it didn’t matter. She looked down at the stark message, reported in by Athena Law, the new head in Seven, who’d been an early recruit back when she was just a captain, a second tour serving in Eight. The words on the page spoke innocuously about cutting lumber, supposedly a novel she was writing for the hell of it. But she couldn’t look away, the real message flashing through her mind: Kill order issued for entire Mason family, orders of President Snow, except for youngest girl to be delivered to Peacehome.

Just like that, it was seventeen years ago and she was in that old house, seeing Phin come in with that faint trace of panic on his face, and Peacekeepers with rifles behind him. She could far too easily place herself in the shoes of the Mason woman—what was her name, Nikoleta hadn’t paid any damn attention to the final eight interviews this year, never did it any year—but she was a mother too. The fear for her children who were to die, her terror for her victor-child left to shoulder the burden alone. “Athena’s ours,” she said, her voice little more than a rasp. “Tell me we can do something.”

Phineas picked up the paper, studied it for a moment, his age-gnarled fingers stark against the white paper. Then with one swift motion he crumpled it, tossed it in the bin. “Shit.”

She had no idea of Johanna’s actual qualities. She was deeply suspicious of the Capitol spin on any victor by this point, true. She doubted few people in Two even believed Enobaria was the bloodthirsty psycho they painted her to be, and she’d heard some irritated rumblings at that—recruitment that year had been particularly good with the temporary disillusionment of an honorable tribute being turned into a clown.

But even if Johanna really was genuinely the sly vicious vixen they painted, her family didn’t deserve it. Haymitch’s howls of grief still haunted her dreams now and again. The youngest girl would become another Ash, a hostage for Snow to keep handy in case of need.

Johanna would have to live thinking they were dead, but the deceit was better than it being a reality. “Can we hide them?” she asked it again bluntly. On this, she’d trust his judgment far better. He’d done it successfully once, and with far fewer resources—mainly pulling a few strings and calling in a few favors, uncertain whether people would lie for him or not.

He leaned on the corner of the desk, arms folded over his chest, head slightly bowed in thought. He looked so tired in that moment, a man of seventy-three with the blemishes and looseness of age on his skin and most of his dark hair gone, and what little there was left had fully faded to white. An old warrior faded and bowed a bit with the passing of years, and yet, he never truly gave up the fight. Those eyes might be surrounded by wrinkles, and he wore glasses all the time now rather than simply to read, but the resolve burning there was undimmed. “The youngest girl’s out of our hands,” he said simply. “She’d have been the easy one to tuck away in the Peacehome. The rest—the boy’s what, twenty or so?”

“I didn’t pay much attention to Johanna’s interviews last summer,” she admitted. He was fully aware she watched the Games as little as possible.

“Yeah, I didn’t either.” He let out an irritated growl. “Never mind. I’ll get the information from Athena. The parents—the parents we could spin as retiring, they’re certainly old enough. But the son? Plus it’s midsummer, not tour change at midwinter. Hell. I can’t pull what I did with you and claim they’re all amnesiac from injury.” He picked up the phone. “But let me call Thea back before she issues any orders.”

She let him handle that one. Better done, Head Peacekeeper to Head Peacekeeper, particularly when he admitted to Thea that this was a trick he’d pulled already years ago and that was why he wanted to do it again.

Two weeks later, an unfortunate young first-term Peacekeeper named Beringarius Law came to Burnt Tree for several months of recuperation after surgery down in Eagle Mountain to repair his shattered left leg. He’d suffered an unfortunate accident down in southern Ten where a fellow Peacekeeper shot him in the leg out on the prairie while aiming at a mutt. “Oh, call me Gary,” he said cheerfully as he hobbled gamely into their house with his thick cast, aided by his crutches. Their new temporary tenant was a big, broad-shouldered young man of twenty-one with the golden skin of Seven’s lumberjacks, and their hazel eyes, all topped off with a thick thatch of dark loam-brown hair.

When she looked at Gary sitting there at the dinner table eating with a young man’s ravenous appetite, and then at Phin with the memory of him as a younger man in her mind’s eyes, now she could see it clearly. Phineas’ skin was a bit darker than Gary’s, almost a match for her own olive, but marriage and who people associated with had been a little more open back before the Dark Days.

Childless couples frequently took in medical recuperation cases, as the small hospital down in Eagle Mountain couldn’t hold them more than a few days. They’d done it before, and turned a few agents out of it.

True enough, this boy—young man—would be with them longer than the usual case of a week or two to recover after measles or an appendectomy. The doctors predicted it would take him months of therapy.

Getting shot in the leg couldn’t be pleasant, but it beat dying. Gary still took it with good humor and without blaming them. If anything, he took everything with too much humor, laughing too loud and finding the jest in anything. Maybe that was fine for a Seven lumberjack, but things were different now. “Joke with your buddies in your down-time, but learn to be more serious,” she told him on the third day as he sat at the table and dried the dishes she handed him. “You’re a Peacekeeper, remember?”

He looked as though he had some smartass remark ready, but then his expression sobered and he nodded. “I’ve probably got a lot to learn before I go back,” he said. Then the look on his face reminded her of nothing so much as an earnestly pleading five-year-old—like Haymitch asking for another spoonful of blueberry jam. “Can I have a coat hanger or something? This cast itches so damn much.”

He learned rapidly, but he still slipped up sometimes. “My mom and dad?” he asked anxiously on the fourth day, and she could tell he’d been bursting to ask the question.

“Your parents are dead, Beringarius, remember?” Phineas told him coolly. “They died when you were seventeen. Means that you barely spent any time in the Peacehome, so they won’t remember you there. But you were a good candidate. They identified you in Seven as being likely grateful enough to not be in the community home that you’d do well in the Corps.”

But there was steel in him—well, his sister was Seven’s only female victor to date, so she had to get that from somewhere. Gary squared his shoulders, lifted his gaze, and said quietly, “After this I won’t mention it again, General Fog, but you bet you’re gonna tell me what’s happened to them.”

“They’re on an extended camping trip in the borderlands near the Seven winter town,” Phineas told him. “Found an abandoned cabin there, by the sound of it. I get a few people to supply them what I can, when I can. They’ll have to stay there until New Year and then I can bring them here as retiring officers.”

“They’ll be left camping out in the woods?” Gary protested. “In winter? Are you fucking nuts?”

“It’s the only chance they’ve got,” Nikoleta told him, seeing Gary start to bristle and spoil for a fight, body tense with the urge to lash out at something.

Finally he sat back and nodded, jaw still slightly tight. “They’re tough.”

“If any district can make it in the woods for close to six months, it’ll be Seven,” Phin said reassuringly. Though he shot her a worried glance; her own mind was filled with scenarios where it could all go to crap. Woodland survival skills were essential, but bad luck could always happen—a broken leg, a chance encounter with a predator, an illness. Winter in particular, with the fallow months for gathering food, and the cold and deep snow, could be a real killer.

Still, Phin had created a chance for them. That was more than they would have had before, and it was the best that could be done. Gary might have a young man’s towering emotions in play here, but clearly he was smart enough to understand that.

As Gary’s leg healed and the cast came off, the leaves turned into a fire-burst of scarlet and gold, orange and crimson, yellow and amber. With the profusion of color, this was the season that felt most comfortably familiar to her. It gave her something to look at besides the forbidding peaks of the mountains as well.

He progressed through his rehabilitation rapidly, moving from a crutch to a cane to moving unaided, it was clear that the desperate gambit to keep him alive hadn’t cost him the use of his leg. She wouldn’t claim to know much about firearms, but causing a gunshot wound severe enough to require removing him to Two for surgery, but not destroying the leg entirely to the point of amputation or permanent and significant weakness, had to be as much good luck as anything. Gary would always bear the scars on his leg, and she saw a slight limping hitch in his step for a little while in the morning, as the nights grew chillier in the autumn. But he could walk, and run, and climb. He’d be fit to return to full duty.

“All to the good,” he said to that one night when Nikoleta brought it up, eating his second helping of potato soup. “No offense, but years of sitting at a desk…” Yes, for a Seven-raised boy who’d likely been climbing trees and roaming the woods almost from the time he could walk, being sedentary would be difficult. She’d seen him sitting in the front room of an evening, whittling away on something, idleness obviously chafing deeply at him. She and Phin had a full set of checkers already courtesy of their guest. He’d also fixed some of the furniture around the house, and she had the sense that if he’d had access to tools and the like, he’d have done far more than that. He hadn’t spoken much about his former life, but what little he’d said told them that he’d been a journeyman carpenter, not just a simple lumberjack.

Phin gave a snort of amusement at Gary’s chagrined groan. “You’ll be glad for a quieter job in the inner six districts after you’ve put in two tours running your ass off.”

Late October, the new cadets came in for training camp, as usual. She had the sense Gary had been dawdling a bit in hopes of sticking around until New Year’s—so he couldn’t unbind his family ties as neatly as Phin kept urging. She couldn’t blame him for that. If there had been a chance to see Ash again…better that he’d been sent to Icewind Peak.

But the doctor finally pronounced him fit, and Gary left them finally in mid-November. They’d declined to reassign him to District Ten. Presumably, going back to where a coworker had clumsily shot him might cause some friction. Either that, or they worried that it would make the Corps look bad and they didn’t want that reminder to the locals. He went instead to District Twelve to serve the rest of his first tour.

On the day he took his leave, she could sense that both she and Phin were reluctant to let him go. She hadn’t wanted another child, and he’d admitted in the end, he was too old to deal with a baby, and the letting go. This was bad enough, and she felt the pull towards this boy. He was younger than either of her two boys by ten years, and she imagined taller as well given that he towered over Phin by a good three inches. But him standing there in his white uniform, broad-shouldered, young and earnest—it had brought something to her and Phin both. She’d miss his smiles and laughter, the liveliness he’d brought to the house.

“It’s not so bad there in Twelve,” she told him, straightening the collar of his white uniform with the single rank bar of a lieutenant where it was twisted slightly. “But it’s…difficult, poorer than you’re used to. The people think differently.” Some of the outer districts had that odd prideful sense to them, sign of those who worked more independent jobs—Seven and Ten, she’d say, from what she’d seen on their tributes on the television. It would be no easy thing for him to conform, to fit in, to become one of a collective mass. She’d managed it well enough because that was Twelve. People fit in and became part of the community, or they got shunned, because down in the mines, it was everybody living and dying together, dependent utterly on each other. But she believed he could do it. She smiled. “Go buy some stuff at the Hob after you get there—give it a week so you don’t seem like a blatant rule-breaker—and they’ll be nicer to you when they see you you’re the sort that’s all right.”

“Head Cray sounds like he’s pretty easygoing on the rules,” Phin said next. After Dulcet, he’d made it clear to her that the report of the Head being more or less fair in letting things run without interference had been a deep relief to him. “That’ll help make it go easier.” He stuck his hand out for Gary to shake it, and she tried to not laugh when instead, Gary actually hugged him and Phin’s eyes went wide and startled. He grumbled something in the interest of face-saving as Gary stepped back and turned to her, and she gratefully accepted the hug.

“Be careful,” she advised him, “but don’t let it change all of you.” She smiled wistfully, imagining him years in the future. “You come back here to Burnt Tree when you’re done with tours and settle down, all right?”

“I will.” But while he looked sheepish, that shyness she associated with most male cadets wasn’t there. Obviously he was a man who’d had some experience of affection and courting, rather than just fumbling teenage sex.

Gary left with a telephone to report in from Twelve as a new recruit for their ring, and some muffins she’d baked him—only later, grabbing one of the leftover ones to eat it, did she realize they were blueberry, Haymitch’s favorite. She’d baked them without even thinking about it. Not her son, but he was the closest she’d had in so long to the children she’d never been able to see at that age.

At twenty-one, the one son was far away in a white uniform and he didn’t remember her, and the other she saw only whatever veneer he put on for the camera at the Games and he thought she was dead. The house seemed so lonesome now without him, and for the first time in years, the ache of loss was unbearable as it struck home again exactly what was lost—what had been taken from her. She put the muffin down on the granite countertop and turned away, grateful that Phin’s mind seemed to be of an accord with her own, because he was right there, solid and strong, the same loss reflected in his expression. Grateful again that things were different and she could have him with her when she felt weak and sorrowful and overwhelmed, rather than sitting in her kitchen in the Seam to weep alone, trying to keep quiet so the boys wouldn’t wake. But saying goodbye all over again and trying to let go hurt all the same.

“I miss him, I miss him so damn much,” she whispered into his shoulder, and she didn’t know whether she meant Haymitch, Ash, or Bernhard Mason, or perhaps all three.

Chapter Text

For being a barren time for the land, winter was always a season of fresh opportunity in Burnt Tree. The new cadets moved on to their assignments, their existing agents might be making a five-year rotation elsewhere, and new retirees might well join their intelligence ring.

Nola never was fond of winter, though, give that a couple of decades down in the dark and damp of the mines six days a week meant that rheumatism now flared up and attacked her joints whenever it was cold and wet. So she spent roughly half the year mildly ruing the weather in District Two to some extent. Willow bark tea helped a lot, though. Most of the Peacekeepers had been out in the poor districts enough to appreciate herbal remedies where possible rather than spending the money on pricey medications made in Three’s labs. Besides, sipping it, bitter even with a pinch of honey or jam, she could indulge in a little nostalgia. Willow bark tea was something she’d grown up with, after all, for everything from injuries to strained muscles to menstrual cramps.

The winter of 67 turned both cold and wet in December, a bone-aching chill which meant she blew through a good deal of her willow bark in a hurry. Still, even she could have had it worse. A couple came in with the retirees quite late as the calendar changed over to 68, a full week behind the others, as they’d been dealing with some medical issues down in Eagle Mountain. But that was understandable. She was a six-tour and he was a seven—older even than more retiring officers. The constant cold and damp of District Six clearly hadn’t agreed with them. A lot of officers retired from there with some joint complaints, so it seemed, and being ten or fifteen years older than the usual didn’t help.

But they were a charming couple, Parthenia and Gnaeus Law. One glance at them told that they were both Seven blood, golden-skinned and dark-haired. He was tall and broad and she was short and curvaceous, and he readily cracked a joke about them being “the long and short of it”. The way they were around each other, they obviously were one of the lucky couples who’d met while still on duty and decided to make a go of it once they retired—luckier still that it had come so late in life, after they’d obviously decided to stay on for a fifth tour and beyond for lack of better options. “Funniest thing is,” Gnaeus said, grinning like a man who couldn’t believe his good fortune and putting his hand on Parthenia’s knee, “Rita and me, we found out that we knew each other before. Back in Seven, when we were just kids.”

That was fine and good—touchingly sweet, even. She’d blame their being love-starved for so many years, but retired Peacekeepers were, by and large, a bunch of damn unabashed romantics when it came to the love stories of those given a second chance late in life. Though she’d seen they held little interest in the routine flirtations of teenagers—in their minds, the kids hadn’t suffered the deprivation and loneliness to earn it yet. So if the two of them wanted to talk quietly about the old days in Seven now, they’d done their duty and beyond, and nobody would question it.

She should have figured they’d survive their months in the woods. Their son was made of stern enough stuff, and their older daughter had survived the arena when no other Seven girl had. Tough as two old hickory nuts, that pair, and they adjusted to the role they had to play with aplomb. They’d obviously had months to prepare for it, and they’d done so. They comfortable called each other “Rita” and “Nate” and if those were new pet names or ones used for years, she didn’t know.

It was still a few weeks before she felt able to let her guard down. It was something in how Parthenia—Rita—did the dishes after dinner. There was heaviness in her expression as she handed them to Nola to dry, a distant air as if she was trying to not imagine someone who wasn’t there. It had taken her a while to get over that as well, instinctively looking for one or the other of two boys at her elbow—the taller black-haired one who hid everything behind a wry comment, and the shorter brown-haired one with his quiet solemnity.

Wiping a plate dry carefully, she told Rita, “He’s a good boy, you know.” A sudden draft of cool air wafting in from the front door and a chorus of male grumbles and grunts told her that Phin and Nate had brought in yet another load of firewood from the communal pile. She lowered her voice. This was between the two of them. Nate was a father, but things were different for mothers. “Your Bern. He was here a while with Phin and me after the summer.”

“He’s all right?” she asked, voice wavering a little at first but then rapidly steadying.

“He’s all right,” she reassured Rita. “They call him Beringarius—Gary. He’s in District Twelve right now.”

Nola had to admire Rita’s nerves. She didn’t drop the plate on the floor, didn’t even plunk it down in the dishpan half-done. Only after it was clean and rinsed, and she handed it to Nola, did she wipe off her sudsy hands on a dishrag and indicate Nola to a chair. Was that a stolid Seven temperament at work? “I won’t see him again, of course,” she said, folding her hands on the table and staring off into some unutterable distance. “And even if he comes here, I can’t claim him as mine. He’ll never be my son again, not openly.”

That touched a still painfully tender part within Nola and she tried to not wince. “But at least he’ll know who he is, and what happened,” she said. “It may have to be kept to the shadows, but you’ll have your boy back someday, in some way. Your girls…”

Rita nodded almost mechanically. “It was made clear enough that Johanna can never know. As for Heike…”

“They’ll have dosed her with tracker jacker venom to make her memory pliable, induce amnesia. President Snow wants her for leverage against Johanna, but he doesn’t want to take the risk of your daughter remembering what happened and resenting him for it.”

Rita’s gaze flew to hers, eyes the color of Thal Grey’s smoked whiskey suddenly hard with suspicion and something that looked a hell of a lot like anger. “And you know all of this how?” she demanded, fingers clenching into a fist. Looking at her, Nola could easily see that she was a woman who’d made her living with an axe and saw for years, and who probably wasn’t afraid of the rough brutal nature of sheer physicality.

Now she was the one who felt as nervous as a little girl on the first day of kindergarten. Phin had always known but it wasn’t the same for him, limited in his paternity as he had been, and he hadn’t had to fake it with being a Peacekeeper either. Gary had left after a short time. As for Zee and Lil and the rest, she had never dared to tell them the whole truth. It was much safer that way. If the whole thing got blown bad like a mishandled charge in the mines, she’d rather she and Phin be the only ones standing directly under the collapse. Better to not take others even deeper into danger by telling them about Magnolia Abernathy.

But this woman was a dead woman already if Snow ever found her. Petra Mason was already within the circle of this secret. Besides, it was so tiring to lie all the time to everyone, even those she called her friends. If she had one person who understood exactly what it was like, perhaps that would be enough to lessen some of the burden she’d carried now for the better part of two decades.

Even now with the perfect opportunity, her tongue wouldn’t unstick enough to form the words of her true name, as if the weight of all the secrecy kept it bound within her. “You think you’re the first mother who has a victor for a child that Snow targeted because they supposedly misbehaved, Petra?” she asked.

She was clearly bright, Rita, because Nola saw the flash of realization in her eyes, those eyes widening from suspicious cat-like narrowness to a startled look. Though Nola’s obvious Twelve looks and lingering accent probably made it easier, given that Twelve had produced only one victor in the last sixty years. Plus Rita was more than old enough to have seen the Second Quell, and all the melodramatic coverage of the tragedy so suddenly befalling its young victor in the aftermath. “Abernathy,” Rita said the word as little more than a soft exhalation. “Haymitch Abernathy is your son?”

“Magnolia was—is—my name,” she said, giving voice to her name for the first time in years. Even Phin almost never called her by her full name now, though he hadn’t for a long time even back in Twelve after she gave him the right to call her by the nickname. “And yes. They did to my younger boy, Ash, what they did to your younger girl. That’s how I know.”

Now it was like a dam had burst. Rita looked at her, a look of wild, angry desperation on her face for a moment. “I still don’t know what Johanna did to piss Snow off, but, oh for all the lies—the girl they said she was during her Games, the girl they were putting on camera this last summer? The violent little sociopath they keep claiming? That’s not my daughter.”

She was enough of a mother to be wryly aware that some parents overlooked every fault in their offspring to the point of being blind stupid, but given what she’d seen with Haymitch over years and years, she had to think Rita was on to something. The anger and anguish was too real. “She’s not your daughter anymore,” she said quietly, well aware it was akin to sawing away at the lingering ties with a dull knife and making them bleed slowly. “And you’ll have to watch what she becomes, and you’ll hurt for it, but you can’t do a good damn thing about it. I’ve had to watch my son become their creature for years and years to keep them happy and try to give his tributes even the barest flicker of hope. And now, it seems like it’s finally becoming too much for him.” There had been nothing in him this last summer, no sass or spark, and that casually tousled look that the announcers used to adore appeared more like he’d just crawled out of bed, and not in a sexually appealing way. That cynical smile on her son’s face was as empty as the glass in his hand, as empty as his eyes.

Rita looked about ready to bite Nola’s head off, but then she sat back, and nodded. Obviously she got the idea that she was hearing wisdom won by hard experience. The silence filled the kitchen for a while as the other woman sat there, mulling it over. Finally, she spoke. “Then maybe sometime if you can,” she said quietly, “your sons, you can tell me about them.” Nola’s eyes prickled with the stinging heat of tears at that small, unexpected bit of grace. Someone would finally let her talk about them, someone who could sympathize with that loss and that grief that ate at her and always would, because it could never properly end. There was no body to bury, to way to gain any kind of closure. It surprised her how freshly it welled up even now, exposed out in the open and acknowledged. It was almost as bad as that first night, huddling there on the dusty floor of that shack with Briar crying into her shoulder.

But she found that now, finally, there could be a bit of peace because it was a pain shared. It took time to dig that pain up and unearth it, and offer it up. It was full into spring by the time she told Rita all about her sons. Rita told her about her daughters, and about Gary as a child. She talked with Nate sometimes too, and she found he was much like his son, a giant and tender heart beneath a bluff, joking exterior, but he seemed to respect this was a thing between two mothers.

Phin squeezed her shoulder as they watched the sunset on the porch one evening as the 68th Games approached. “Rita’s been good for you,” he told her.

She turned to him, reaching up, the back of his neck clasped in one palm, the other hand laid lightly on his cheek. She looked at his face, dear and beloved to her. Funny thing how he seemed to improve with age as a man, steadier and more certain as he forged his own path farther away from the Corps’ expectations, and without the guilt and furtiveness he’d had all those years in Twelve. He’d tried too hard to be the loyal son there and serve two clashing demands that tore him apart, but now she had no doubt that he was entirely hers, and his heart was entirely set against the Capitol. “Not jealous?” she asked.

He smiled at her, that light and gentle smile she wasn’t sure how she’d ever lived without. He’d smiled at her that way once long ago as she left his house, and she’d been appalled with herself for enjoying that, and the tenderness he’d shown her. But even when he’d paid for her, he’d been far kinder to her than the man who’d once claimed to love her. “No.” He took her hand in his, pressed a kiss to her palm. “I’ve always known I couldn’t be everything to you, Nola. Had to accept that long ago. And this is something you’ve obviously needed badly for years.”

She let out an uncomfortable laugh. “I wouldn’t have wished it on any other woman, Phin.”

“But we live in the real world, sweetheart. It happened, and at least you’ve got each other now.” He didn’t ask her if she regretted him saving her life, as a younger or less confident man would have. Maybe long ago he would have asked, but she imagined he hadn’t because he feared the answer, just like she hadn’t asked him if he saved her only because he couldn’t live with the guilt. They’d long since moved beyond that.

“Thank you,” she said, looking into his eyes. She wasn’t sure whether she’d ever said it openly, or if she simply assumed he knew. He obviously didn’t need to ask why she said it, and she turned back away, let him wrap his arms around her, his breath tickling her ear and his hands clasped in hers as they watched the last of the sunset painting the mountains with steadily darkening colors.

Strange to think that when Nikoleta was a girl, the weeks, months, years seemed to stretch out like the mine tunnels, unexplored and dauntingly vast. It would seem forever to the next birthday, the next New Year’s, that final reaping at eighteen. She was past fifty-five, and then past sixty, an age that few in District Twelve could ever imagine, and even if they reached it they were worn and broken and ancient. Sixty in Two, for the retired Peacekeepers, was an entirely different animal, and at her age, it seemed like months went by in the blink of an eye now.

Maybe it was that she’d learned to accept the rhythms of things rather than fighting the flow of it. Every year meant spring, summer, fall, winter, the turn of the seasons bringing a new feel to the mountains, but predictable in their cycle. It meant new cadets, it meant new retirees. It meant weeks and weeks of reports from their agents.

It meant the Hunger Games. Every year, a repeat—the details of the arena didn’t matter much, since the outcome was always the same, with twenty-three dead children, one scarred survivor. She got older, greyer, and slower, but the Games never changed. The kids never got older. Twelve never got any more hopeful, and Haymitch seemed to have reached the bottom of things. They didn’t much show him on camera anymore, which said everything that needed saying, and she wasn’t sure whether that inspired gratitude or grief. But in a way, not having to see him every single year like that meant that after twenty years, she could start to let him go as she had Ash—as much as her heart and soul ever could let her lost boys go.

Having Rita there helped that as well, though watching another woman’s anguish at seeing her child start to fall apart didn’t help. Haymitch had taken the better part of two decades to really start to slip. Johanna had been a victor barely five years and already she was best known for clubbing and acting like a bit of an alley cat. The pictures of her barely dressed, “dancing” with some freakish Capitolite, drunk or high or both, were favorites for the tabloid fodder. They seemed to fit the “bad girl” image far too well. Rita bore it stoically in public as if she was some giant oak tree in a forest, as if Johanna Mason was nothing to her but a mere curiosity. But Nola always heard her rages and her grief later in private. At least people from the district of trees knew a thing or two about sheer endurance. Trees and coal were much akin in that. It was all about the long haul.
Though the Third Quell would be hellish for Nola—as the Second Quell’s victor, they’d bring Haymitch up constantly, and that would break open some of the old scars all over again. Still, she had a few years to brace herself for that. She’d have Phin there, and Rita and Nate as well. She’d get by.

Life had its cycles, but as for the intelligence work, it seemed like an interminable string of waiting. All that information stored on an easily destroyable datapad—though if they were coming for her and Phin, they wouldn’t be bothered with anything as mundane as physical evidence of treason. Still, it was better they not find out what the resistance knew, and who worked for them as agents. If it came to the worst, she’d rather not take anyone down with her.

The information grew, the portrait of everything shaped and refined by each new batch from across Panem. Chances were by this point they had as much information as Snow’s eyes and ears, and that was a dangerous thrill. But there was no use it could be put to as yet—no rebellion in sight. He’d been right in saying that it might well not be in their lifetimes. He was past seventy-five now, her man, and while both of them seemed vigorous enough still, they were getting up in years enough that the end could come at any time. In all likelihood, they’d have to pass the torch on to someone else to carry on their work when she and Phin were both dead.

A potential perfect candidate for that came back to Burnt Tree right as the calendar changed over to 73. After all, she’d been involved since the very beginning, back in District Twelve.

Like a good daughter ought, Apollonia Law came to dinner right after she arrived back from Eagle Mountain. Nikoleta embraced her for a long minute then had to stand back and look at her—pulling up the mental image of the girl she’d been at eighteen against the woman of nearly thirty-nine who’d finally doffed the white uniform. She looked good for her years, a confidence and self-possession in her bearing that she probably wouldn’t have possessed as a coal miner in Twelve. Of course, not being worn out by mining and childbearing helped as well.

Like as not, when Polly was close to sixty, her hands wouldn’t hurt like hell like Nikoleta’s frequently had in the cold for the last twenty years from rheumatism caused by years and years the constant damp down in the mines. Her joints wouldn’t be twisted and gnarled by it either.

She brought a man with her, which was something of a surprise. A fellow Peacekeeper, Rubius Rackham, retiring with her from Four. Their group had recruited Rube eight years ago now on a recommendation from another agent in District Three at the time, but she’d never met him, never worked as his handler, only seen his name on reports. The way the two of them were with each other spoke of an easy intimacy and familiarity that had developed over time. Polly treated her man like he was a comfortable part of her life, rather that staring at him all starry-eyed and giddy like a new lover would. So obviously they’d been serving in the same fishing village, and it was no lightning strike romance between them on the train from Four or down in the stopover at Eagle Mountain.

She looked him over. He had an actual surname rather than “Law”, so he was Two-born, and since he didn’t look like a quarry child, he’d been raised since birth by either parents or the Peacehome to serve the Corps. With that warm maple syrup-shaded skin, that thatch of straight dark reddish hair, and those handsome near-black eyes, it was obvious one parent or another had a pretty full measure of Five blood to their credit. Tall, slender, lean-faced, but with a ready smile that spoke of a sunny nature now that he didn’t have to put a stern face on for the locals—to her relief, she saw nothing at all in his looks or demeanor that reminded her at all of Haymitch. About the only thing they had in common was a smattering of freckles.

Perhaps she didn’t gaze at him with fawning looks, but Polly obviously adored Rube, as she called him, and Nola didn’t see any hesitation or grief there either to mar the affection. The sixteen-year-old who’d been terrified as she had her life and her boyfriend taken from her, the eighteen-year-old who’d wept because she had taken her chance for a last small bit of comfort and instead hurt herself more when she slept with a boy who’d reminded her a little of that lost love; neither of those girls were present in the woman there now, thirty-eight, at ease and in love.

She hadn’t even been aware that there was another part of her heart that had tightly knotted. But with Ash’s binding to the Corps and his loss of knowing her, and how closely Snow was likely watching inquiries about him, she’d lost the chance to know about his life or be involved in any way. Haymitch had obviously long ago chosen to remain unmarried, and it must have been his decision. Even if Twelve believed him a Capitol sellout, and she suspected they did since she was well aware how quickly opinion could turn viciously on a person and shun them, some women would have been smart and brave enough to marry him for sheer security if nothing else. It wasn’t like he was a cruel man, either. She wouldn’t believe that. If anything he seemed to have turned that pain inward and slowly destroyed himself.

So she must have accepted that she’d never see a child of hers married, or find one day that she’d be a grandmother. She hadn’t birthed Briar Wainwright from her womb, but it wasn’t a presumption to say she was the only mother left to Polly now. So she smiled and hugged Rube in welcome, glad that this man had woken up Polly’s heart from where it had obviously been put away for so many years, out of pain and necessity both, glad that Polly herself had been strong enough to love and to seize happiness. “You didn’t tell us you had yourself a man,” she chided Polly teasingly.

“He knows, by the way,” Polly said, casual as if she asked for a cup of coffee. “I told him years ago.” There could be only one thing she referred to by that—she’d told Rube her true name and her story.

Phin let out a low rumble of annoyance at that. “Took a risk by it.”

Polly cocked an eyebrow at him. “No offense, I know what you did for me that day, but it hasn’t exactly been easy keeping my mouth shut around everyone for twenty years.”

Phin nodded at that, expression easing. “Suppose if Snow gets close enough to suspect and ask questions, we’re all pretty fucked anyway.”

“I’m already going to be executed for treason if they catch me,” Rube said with a shrug. “Sorry. You can blame me. I yelled at her because I knew she was keeping some kind of secret and I wouldn’t let it go.”

“All right, let’s not yap about this at length,” Nola said. “What’s done is done, and he’s proven he can handle it. So, dinner?”

“My very practical wife,” Phin said with a slight smirk as he turned towards the kitchen. That smirk was pure Fog, and Haymitch had it. She’d seen it on his face a hundred times or more on camera.

She wondered a few weeks later if Rube had quietly toasted some bread with Polly after the marriage papers were signed. Phin had done that for her after their wedding years ago, and it was one of the surest signs of his love that he wouldn’t ask her to give up all that she was, even if she had to hide it in shadow. She would never tell him explicitly, but that toasting was sweet in more than one way. She’d never had one with Blair. He’d refused to spend the money on sweet-bread, not for her. Instead, of eating toast, she got a busted lip to mark the fact that she’d trapped Blair with the baby growing in her belly. The knowledge that she’d deceived him and that child was no blood of his felt like both a victory and a reason she deserved that punch, and all the others that followed. Blair might have been a bad man, and probably no other woman would have had him, but perhaps even he didn’t deserve the lie she’d spun in her desperation.

The cycle of things crashed to a halt at the 74th Games, and for once, the nation sat up and took notice of Twelve. Katniss Everdeen—probably Burt Everdeen’s girl, and Seam through and through, though that little sister was merchie as anything by her looks. Adopted, perhaps?

From that miracle, another one unfolded. Haymitch, absent from the public eye except as a cautionary tale, suddenly surged back like a comet, bright and fierce. He was everywhere, giving interviews, assessing his two tributes, showing the old wit and charm. If he looked tired and now clearly beyond the blush of youth, those eyes of his were still steady and intent, that smile still that wry, cocky smirk of his. Claudius Templesmith and Caesar Flickerman crowed with joy that perhaps this marked a rebirth for Haymitch Abernathy.

After the interviews and the furor caused by Peeta Mellark, Phin actually laughed long and loud, sitting back in his hair, hands folded across his belly. He looked over at her and gave that same grin she’d seen earlier that day on Haymitch’s face. “Damn me, Nola, if that boy isn’t making a hell of a run of it.”

No, he wasn’t talking about Peeta Mellark. The fact that Haymitch was actually now older than when Phin had fathered him crossed her mind, but never mind. To her, it was easier to call to mind the boy she’d known and loved rather than the distant, occasional figure on the television. “All by himself too,” she replied, “as usual. But maybe he can bring one of them home alive this year.” Maybe that would help him, somehow.

But even Phin’s proud amusement died down as things wore on. “His fingerprints are all over this, aren’t they?” he asked her grimly after the two-victor rule change was announced.

“Not so obvious that Snow realizes it,” she acknowledged. “But yes.” She had to think Haymitch had some hand in it. The Gamemakers were mostly a bunch of morons, and the rules of the Games were practically set in stone. They wouldn’t have come up with the idea themselves.

“He didn’t learn last time to not publicly bend the rules? If this turns into a hell of a mess, I can’t clean it up on the sly,” Phin asked, brows knitting together. She drew in a breath to tell him he had no right to criticize, but let it out again as it dawned on her. Yes, he feared it turning into something bloody, but he didn’t say openly that he was actually afraid for Haymitch.

They spent most of the rest of the Games debating whether it would actually happen, and agreeing that the girl gave it her all, but she was a poor actress. “It’ll fool a lot of people, though.” She smiled wryly over at him. “Not everyone’s as suspicious as you and me, dear.”

The end of the Games felt like the slow rumbles before a rockslide, everything not yet seen but giving an instinctive shiver of dread down the spine. Those berries—shit. “They can’t edit this out,” Phin said softly, looking at her with a look of consternation. “There’s nothing they can plug in to cover it.” She nodded, suddenly afraid herself that it would mean blood spilled over this. If Snow had tried to murder everyone Haymitch and Johanna had loved for a lesser offense, what would he do this time?

“I think only the younger sister is safe.” When she saw Rita and Nate the next morning for breakfast, they looked as disturbed as her and Phin. They’d caught the backlash too, and could imagine the worse. But surprisingly enough, nobody died. Maybe it was all too public for Snow to risk it. Maybe the fact they spun it as a lovers’ death pact helped too. But that sense of trepidation wouldn’t go away.

The vicious slow dying of the Two boy tribute, Cato Russer, started its share of ominous rumblings too. “Too fucking busy whining at each other to be decent and give him a quick mercy,” was the general consensus. She might not have quite shared the Two view on the Games, and she kept her mouth shut on her fierce pride in Haymitch. But she understood what they meant. If it had been a slower kill for the sponsors’ bloodlust early on that was one thing, not something she could ever condone but at least logical. But at the end, there was no reason to prolong it except an apparent desire to see Cato suffer. Given how she’d wept over the Eleven girl, obviously it wasn’t that she was entirely unfeeling.

“If anything at all comes of this,” she told Phin when she came back from the store that day, putting the coffee and bread and eggs on the counter, “that girl neatly alienated even the friendly elements of District Two.”

Neither of them dared to breathe the word rebellion. There was a shift in things, and perhaps the right spark had arrived. But she wouldn’t assume anything yet. “Yeah, she did. Twelve reports are that nothing’s changed, though. They’re moving into the Victors’ Village, the two kids are avoiding each other, and Haymitch has holed up in his house again.”
She wasn’t surprised. If the girl couldn’t treat an opponent with mercy, maybe there was no selflessness in her for the man who’d worked so tirelessly to save her life. But there was pity in Nola as well, because she hadn’t yet forgotten those first days back for Haymitch. Maybe Katniss couldn’t handle much of anything yet.

The ripples faded and died. Winter came, and the Victory Tour made its way across Panem, and more ripples began to issue, faster and sharper. Something had been set in motion. It only remained to be seen whether it actually became something or not.

Just before New Year’s, she volunteered to go escort the new retirees up from Eagle Mountain, and make the supply run. “The old man’s being a pain in the ass and I need a break,” she explained with a snort of amusement. Lil in particular laughed at that. Love their spouses as they might, they’d all been alone so long that most of them needed some space occasionally.

So she was there the day in the square that Katniss and Peeta mechanically mouthed sentiments about the two dead Two tributes. The families standing there looked cold and distant as the mountains, and they probably weren’t certain what to feel. Chances were the victors up on Victors’ Mountain mourned those two kids more acutely than the blood kin they hadn’t seen in a dozen years. But she’d bet the families grieved anyway, for the deaths and for all the lost years of family and childhood they’d sacrificed for District Two’s well-being. She ought to know. Twenty-four years hadn’t let things die entirely for her. Look at her, here simply hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

So she stood there among the angrily muttering crowd who didn’t want the empty crap the young victors were selling. She wished she could tell them some things. Given how exhausted Haymitch had looked by the end of his Victory Tour, the kids were probably at the end of their ropes too, simply reading the cards as Haymitch had.

But her eyes were for the man standing beside the stage, out of the view of the cameras, bundled up in his dark winter coat. His own eyes were fixed on the stage, arms folded over his chest. He’d never had a child, her boy. But the way he stood and watched the two kids was familiar. Perhaps they’d be enough for him.

She didn’t dare come any closer to Haymitch than twenty feet or so, staying buried well within the crowd to stay hidden. I love you, son, she thought silently, as he turned to go, hands stuffed in his pockets and shoulders hunched slightly as if he was trying desperately to escape anyone’s notice. I always will.

Even if, like the Capitol predicted, his new surge of popularity at having done the impossible held and his reputation remained washed clean—or at least, cleaner, he might go to the Capitol as some retired victors did to help court sponsors and meet friends. But he’d likely never mentor again—they’d want to see the two young’uns together. He’d never bring another victor to District Two. She’d never see him again, even at a distance. She brought a gloved hand to her mouth, as if yawning, but she surreptitiously touched three fingers to her lips instead.

Then she turned to go, willing her eyes to stay dry. She met the new retirees, brought them back, and immersed herself in the work. There was plenty to be had, given the uprising in Eight, and the new conditions in Twelve.

By April it was clear the tide couldn’t be stopped. People were pissed off, and they were expressing it. Even the reading of the card, dreadful as it was—did they really think that killing a couple dozen victors would somehow stop peoples’ rage? Would they so quickly forget even the memory of hope?

But the hurt of it was far more personal to her. She felt far worse for Parthenia and Nate. Johanna, as Seven’s only female victor, was a sure bet to enter the arena. Haymitch was a 50/50 chance. Maybe worse, if he tried to sacrifice himself for the boy.

Reaping Day came and went, and she breathed a sigh of relief that Peeta volunteered. Bets started flying about who’d take the honors as Victor Among Victors. Those of them involved with the resistance put their heads down and collected even more information in that week. Gary, in the thick of all the shit going on in District Eight, was worth his weight in gold. Quietly, he informed Nola that a certain Theodosius Law had been reassigned there as well after the quashed rebellion. “I think he’s really disturbed by what’s gone on here, Mrs. Fog,” he told her. “But he’s the sort that keeps that in his head and thinks it over rather than impulsively speaking up. Do you want me to approach him?”

Her heart was in her throat. If she couldn’t have Ash back, perhaps she could at least see him brought back to the right side of things. Snow would likely be watching him, though, wanting to see if his precious leverage behaved and did his duty. “Be friendly,” she said. “But don’t ask him. Not quite yet.” She only hoped like hell that Haymitch’s actions hadn’t killed his brother, twenty-five years later.

One good thing came of all of it. Lyme Rathbone had joined them years ago, fed up and disillusioned with the lies about honor and duty and service, and so they got some information on the victors and their dispositions. But she was as surprised as Phin when the phone rang and Lyme was on the other end. “That mad bastard Haymitch has got a plan,” she informed them. “If—when we get out to District Thirteen, I’ll report.” A rebellion, District Thirteen, so much to absorb, but there was no time to panic or reflect on that. They just had to keep moving with it.

There would be a rebellion, if that arena fell and the victors could escape. If. “Well,” she said off-handedly to Phin, “Haymitch, he does like messing around with forcefields.” She had to laugh. If she didn’t, she might break down from the sheer tension of it all and not recover. All the years of waiting for justice, for a reckoning, and it could actually happen. She couldn’t help the surge of pride as well in Haymitch.

It had gone too far now. If Snow threatened to kill Ash, Haymitch wouldn’t, couldn’t back down. Snow must have realized it, or else he had more pressing concerns. Of course, Katniss Everdeen’s death in the arena might have made him think he’d won.

She watched, heart in her throat, as Snow coolly executed others instead. Perulla Everdeen—the apothecary’s daughter. Hazelle Hawthorne and what must have been her oldest boy—Polly must have been screaming inside as she watched that.

Rapid shots fired after that. Johanna stepped forward as the rebellion’s new face, and went to war in Districts Ten and Nine. It was no easier watching Haymitch kill someone now than it had been when he was sixteen, but from how fiercely he protected Johanna, it was obvious he wasn’t going to see her killed like Katniss. Snow countered, bringing up Johanna’s history, offering both threats and gold as incentives to put an end up the rebellion.

“Stupid bastard,” Nate said to her as they shut off the television. Their two families had started spending even more time together, with Haymitch and Johanna in the fight together as they were, and watching broadcasts together became the routine. It was as if they realized they needed each other right there when it happened if it came to the worst. “As if taking her out stops it. It didn’t end with Katniss, did it?” But she saw the glimmer of fear in his hazel eyes nonetheless. Johanna had become a target, and just like her with Haymitch, Gunnar Mason was terrified of the possibility he might have to watch his child executed on national television, and it would be worse than the Games.

There was no assuaging that feeling, because it was honest. Although it got even worse with the next attack over the airwaves from the rebels—no inspiring words, no fierce calls to take up arms and fight.

She heard Rita’s low anguished moan as she buried her face in her hands. For Nola’s part, she stared at the television, seeing and hearing, but caught up in her own head just the same. How had she never guessed? He’d hidden it so completely that even she had assumed he was screwing Capitolites purely for sponsorship. It was whoring himself out, but she understood that necessity and desperation to do it to try and protect the people he wanted to survive. She’d gotten into a sharp argument with Phin about it.

But it was far, far worse. The old flickers of shame and filthiness caught fire again, and she knotted her hands into fists. If she’d endured that for years, at least she’d chosen it. Pressured to the choice by lack of options, yes, but she’d never been threatened into it, never held down and forced. She’d sold herself; she’d never been sold. Peacekeepers had never raped her. But Blair had, more than once, often hissing his whiskey-breath fumes in her ear about how she’d trapped him, and so she damn well understood the difference between prostitution and rape.

She’d felt the humiliation and helplessness. She saw the flickers of shame in Haymitch’s eyes that he couldn’t quite conceal. Now all that alcohol made far more sense, all the pain he’d tried to drown. She would have tried it herself, except for how she associated the smell and taste of alcohol with Blair.

In that moment, she wanted to commit murder more than anything in the world. “I don’t care how he dies or how he does it, but I want Snow dead,” she said quietly. “And if he’s alive at the end of it, I want five minutes alone with him.”

“You’ll get it,” Phin promised her. No questions, no hesitation. Between that support of her vengeance, and how he held her that night while she wept, she loved him more than ever. At least she had the gift of Phin out of her suffering. What did Haymitch have? He had Peeta, perhaps, but also the loss of Katniss.

Another slaughter of children masquerading as a Hunger Games, survived by the Twelve mayor’s daughter, Madge, and then finally Lyme called again. “I’m going to Thirteen,” Phin told Nola that night. “Lyme’s training to come lead operations here and start the fight. They need someone who can handle our network there.”

She put her fork down on her plate, scraped utterly clean of the turnips and beans and cornbread. It was shorter rations everywhere in Two thanks to the disruptions in supply. The Capitol had broadcast inane advertising about every citizen doing their part to make up for the shortages.

She’d eaten starvation rations in Twelve often enough in her life. But she was near to sixty-five now. She felt the hardship of it far more than when she was thirty-five. The older and weaker people in Burnt Tree felt the reductions the most, though. Easy to cut the rations of the retirees, justifying that it was needed for the workers. So the formerly respected retired Peacekeeper officers became simply a government burden. They’d all lost some weight, and she’d seen Phin start to feel it more than her. He was eighty years old now, and working himself far too hard. His body was less resilient than hers. If this keeps up, he could well starve this winter. They all might, but he was one of the oldest still alive.

Better that he go to District Thirteen, then. His gaze on her was sober and worried. “I’ll come back for you as soon as I can,” he promised.

“I know,” she said. “What are you planning?”

“Nobody around here would question a tired old man taking his final walk into the mountains, Nola.”

No, it was common enough that the elderly ex-Peacekeepers often did it, particularly those with no family left. It was a dying with dignity, of a sort, in choosing how they wanted to go out. Quiet. No fuss. There were plenty of crags and caves in those mountains. It was more common to make the trek in winter when cold would kill quicker, but sometimes a person couldn’t wait for months. “You’ve gotten very good at faking deaths, Phin,” she agreed, trying anything to make him smile. He rewarded her with a small one, even with as exhausted as it looked. “So you’re recorded as deceased…”

“And more important, you’ll be the grieving widow and nobody will suspect you.”

“One small hitch to your plan. You’re going to walk up to your son, tell him you’re the new intelligence officer, and hope not only that he doesn’t try to kill you for having supposedly given the orders to murder his entire family, but that he’ll be happy to work with you?”

“Point,” Phin acknowledged, and now that smile was there for real. “What do you suggest? Should I bring him a voice recording? Should I have him call you if he doesn’t stab me on sight?”

She smiled in return at the levity in those last words, but her heart ached. To talk to Haymitch again, hear his voice—the possibility enticed and terrified her all at once. What would she say to him, especially after seeing that last broadcast, now well aware of everything that had been done to him after she’d had to leave. She shook her head. “Voices could be faked. Plus he’ll be suspicious of it after the jabberjays in the arena.”

Phin mulled it over. “Letters,” he said finally. “I assume he’d recognize your handwriting, and that’s hard to fake. I can bring him that, and a picture. Hopefully that will be proof enough.”

“Ask Nate and Rita too,” she said. “And Polly, for that matter.” Perhaps Polly had left Haymitch in her past, but it would be good for her to help him shrug off the yoke of guilt he’d likely carried around for decades. “You’ll have to tell Johanna about her siblings, and Haymitch about his brother.”

A week later, she hugged him goodbye, breathing in the smell of him, so familiar to her—soap and that spicy, fruity tobacco he never could quite give up, even if she’d long ago restricted him to one smoke a week. He had a pouch of letters and pictures in his coat, ready with a quick-destruct mechanism that would fry them in acid if he were somehow caught. But neither of them had to say that if he were caught, she’d be doomed as well. They both simply accepted it. She’d keep things running here as best she could, until she could get to Thirteen as well.

She kissed him goodbye, for the first time in over twenty years not sure whether she’d see him again. They would try to call each other, if they could.

“Do you have any message for him?” Phin asked, lingering in the doorway with his pack slung over his shoulder. She prayed like hell he’d make it over the mountains to the Second Quell arena and his pickup from Thirteen. There was always the chance he wouldn’t.

“Tell him I hope to see him soon,” she answered. Anything more than that she’d sooner say to her son herself. “Be patient with him. It’ll be a lot for him to take in.” He nodded, looked at her one last long moment, and turned to go.

There was a farewell letter on the counter, supposedly his suicide note bidding her goodbye forever and explaining that it was better he stopped being a burden upon things. It’s time we admit the truth, he’d written in those bold penstrokes. He was right, but in a way, letting him go like this and the uncertainty of it all was as painful as the lie.

She watched until she couldn’t see him, a tiny figure faded into the distance up the mountain path, and then turned back into the house. He’d need the intel when he got to Thirteen, and so she had reports to handle. The work wouldn’t wait for her problems. If she survived, she’d take the time for all of it later.