Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The real danger of the Rebellion wasn’t any of that nonsense about saboteurs and wreckers. Irma doubted anyone with half a brain believed that. It wasn’t anything nearly so big - or, indeed, easy to catch. It wasn’t District people just waiting for the chance to raze the Capitol to the ground, it wasn’t mysterious inciters in the Capitol, and it most definitely wasn’t Thirteen with the nukes it would never use.

The real danger was the lack of trust in the government among the average Capitolites. The person who watched the Games faithfully, looked around nervously at the slightest hint of unrest in the DIstricts, and praised Snow without a hint of irony still told political jokes about particularly odious individuals, and when someone, no matter how obvious their Rebel sympathies, was arrested for a joke, they also began to worry.

Irma looked around before pressing ‘Play’. An assistant of hers had brought in a thumb drive with a file of a song that was making the rounds in the Capitol’s kitchens. The search for the author and distributors was consuming the National Committee for Internal Affairs, though not quite at the levels of a true purge. The song was about Irma’s least favourite colleague, and the jaunty guitar lifted her spirits even before the singing started.

All my life, I’ve been roaming the streets here

And I’m ready to wander some more

And everyone here, they live their own life

And won’t tell you how to live yours.

But there is a place in the heart of the city

Lit so bright, it will draw any gaze.

There, any and all will be taught what is what

And quickly rethink all their ways.

The evening loudmouth speaks!
The heroic worker of our time now arises!

The evening loudmouth speaks!

More truthful, more honest, and better than all-

That is him!

The evening loudmouth speaks!

Whatever he’s told, he will tell the crowds

Any question, the answer will stun

The nation’s in danger, and so are our mores,

Our traditions: the whip and the gun.

He shines like a freshly made dollar

He drips condescension and scorn

And when children die at the hands of the state,

He’ll explain that more will be born!

The evening loudmouth speaks!

When the truth is required, he’ll define what it is.

The evening loudmouth speaks!

A symbol of a nation, epoch, and era -

That is him!

The evening loudmouth speaks!

For a minute, Irma was too stunned to react.

Irma’s assistant, Joy, had told her that people were joking that Lark and Jellicoe, the two most notorious talk-show hosts, were secretly arguing over whom the song actually referred to. Lark himself had been the only person from the Ministry of Information to react to the song, claiming alternately that it referred to Rebel propagandists or to Irma herself. His reasoning was a mystery he never explained.

Now that she had listened to the song, it was obvious that it referred to Lark. Not only was he the symbol of Capitol mass media, second perhaps only to Flickerman (who only dealt with the Games), but his daily talk-show was in the evenings. Irma’s news show was weekly, and aired in the afternoons. It was more of a side-gig, her real job was putting together the District feed.

It was actually just half an hour before she was due to appear on screen. Irma closed the audio player and took out her earbuds. She left the thumb drive in, as Joy had promised to deal with everything. Irma walked briskly down the corridors to the studio, marveling at the audacity of the anonymous songwriter. She’d have to show her uncle when she saw him next. Her parents would just start fretting about how this could affect her, so she’d have to play it down as much as possible when she talked to them.

Decision made, she walked into the studio and went about the last-minute preparations. Her show was for the people who didn’t care about the Games or the glitter. Irma explained scandals without degenerating into a gossip-fest and talked about the Districts without spit and bile. When Rebels were caught, Irma didn’t start stirring up panic, as some others did. Making a fuss about a criminal was counterproductive, after all.

Irma checked her appearance in the mirror as she stole the pens from the drawer (she really didn’t need them, but it was a habit she couldn’t break). Makeup unsmudged, braids in place, blouse sitting properly - good. Irma wore extremely elaborate makeup for her program that she simply didn’t have the energy to put on every day. Usually, she stuck with a very simple look, not this elaborate, though very beautiful, full face of makeup with detailed patterns growing out of the black eyeliner and a full spectrum of colours on her eyelids.

Taking a deep breath, Irma became the mask. Talking to a camera was exhausting, but for her show, she pretended to be someone who found it easy. She turned back around to face the cameras. It was almost time now. The teleprompter was on, in case she forgot her place. The producer gave a thumbs-up.

“Here speaks Irma Slice,” she began as always. “The news I’m sure most of you are the most desperate to hear about are the arrests made during the past week of several individuals who have allegedly been spreading Rebel propaganda. So far, the NCIA has not given any updates, but NCIA Head Talvian will give a press conference in six days, where she will provide information about the case.” After briefly elaborating on what the NCIA had done so far, she talked about the surprise retirement of one of its high-ranking leaders. Even Irma didn’t know what had been the real reason for that.

After that, Irma described the capture of several defectors near Two, the execution of a local rebel in Eleven, and the finishing of the Arena of the upcoming Games several days ahead of time. Then, she went into news from the fields and factories. She only gave the good news, of course. Someone else would handle the bad news appropriately, most likely Lark.

As the Games approached the average person forgot about the “evening loudmouth”, which was fortunate for Irma. She was beginning to worry that at this rate, Talvian would start poking around Lark’s ill-wishers, a category that included every single media personality in the Capitol. Irma had never met the NCIA head, and had no desire to do so.

Neither had she ever met the people she was reading about as she sat on her office couch and waited for a meeting she was supposed to have in ten minutes. Odd, to think that thousands of people trusted her to tell them about individuals she had never had a single interaction with. Irma read the transcript of an interview with Coll, the Minister of Resources, who was describing the alleged increased milk production in Ten with the same boring words as before. Having been promoted at just twenty-nine, everyone knew that the reason for his early success had been the sauna.

At least the next interview was shorter. In fact, it was nonexistent. What had been supposed to be an interview the Head Engineer of the Hunger Games gave to Flickerman was in reality Flickerman monologuing about the previous year’s Arena as the Head Engineer stared off into space. Next to the immaculately coiffed Flickerman, Blues looked like the sort of engineering student who couldn’t be bothered to wash their face in the morning, much less apply makeup. She shrugged when asked to give an insight into this year’s Arena, and when she shook hands and left, it was clear that she was very relieved. It didn’t seem fair to Irma that this socially incompetent individual was happily married with five children (the last one born just weeks ago) while Irma couldn’t maintain a relationship for longer than a few months.

Irma’s phone chimed. Joy was claiming to have juicy gossip about Blues of the who-is-the-father variety. Irma politely told him to focus on a more plausible target, like Dovek. The wife of the Minister of Internal Affairs was about as unlikely to have cheated, but at least their lifestyle made it within the realm of the even halfway imaginable. Irma flicked through the newsfeed. Finding nothing substantial, she turned to the Games speculation, wishing that she could be in the gym and not here. She didn’t dare leave, though. After all, the Reapings would be the day before she went on air, and that was exactly what the upcoming meeting would be about.

Irma waved to her gym friends as she walked over the soft floor, holding her harness in one hand. Shnur and Laila were about her age, Kim and Claudius were in their fifties or sixties, and old Bob had to be pushing eighty, which didn’t stop him from being better than any of them. Irma put down her harness, did her stretches, and lined up for the obstacle course.

The obstacle course was simultaneously her favourite and least favourite part. It was designed to be challenging to everyone no matter their size or shape, which meant that doing it properly was insanely difficult. Irma could do it without falling, but at the cost of going extremely slowly on some parts. When her turn came, she scrambled up the vertical wall easily, using the thin blocks of wood provided as handholds. Someone with large hands would have struggled, but most people with such hands could simply jump, reach the bar jutting out of the platform, and climb up that way.

Irma reached it, hoisted herself up, and got down on her hands and knees to crawl across the monkey bars, which were very wide apart. She’d work on walking across them later, but now, she was focused on not falling. The cold metal soothed her fingertips, which stung from gripping the small holds. She was already breathing heavily, though she wasn’t tired.

Irma ended up on a narrow platform, nets three metres below her to catch her if she fell. She took a running leap to reach the next one, savouring the all-too-brief sensation of flight. This was the hardest part. A small person simply couldn’t jump as far. Her joy was short-lived, as she botched the next jump and ended up with only her upper body on the platform, stomach aching from the impact. That wasn’t too bad, though. If she had ended up dangling by her hands, she would have had to either do the impossible and perform a muscle-up, or jump down and climb back up on a rope ladder it was impossible to stay on. Irma braced her hands against the platform and pushed against it with all her might. It took less effort than last time. Just a second or two later, she was swinging one leg over the platform and standing up.

That was followed by a slackline (it had taken her months to be able to walk across without falling and needing to climb a very difficult boulder up to the next platform), several other platforms that tested her strength and balance, and then finally the last part. Irma walked to the back end of the platform, took a running leap, and grabbed the rope with hands and legs. Cringing at the pain in her palms, Irma climbed up as fast as she could despite her exhaustion, slapped the button on the ceiling, and fell down the six metres onto netting, positioning herself carefully so as to not give herself a concussion with a knee to the jaw. As soon as she hit the ground, the timer stopped. Six minutes, thirty-seven seconds. Not her best time, but not too far off it, either.

“Nice job,” Laila said. She could do it thirty seconds faster.

“I messed up that platform,” Irma replied as she shook out her hands. Her forearms were feeling slightly tight, and she massaged them with her fingers.

“Maybe next time. Are you going to go again?”

Her midsection still hurt from the collision, and she was breathing heavily. “I’ll go get warmed up on the autobelays,” Irma said, putting on her harness. “Then, I’ll see if I can get that blue one with the overhang.” She shook out her hands again so that her forearms didn’t stiffen when she climbed.

After getting warmed up on the easier routes, Irma went to the top rope section to try that route. It took her three times, but she finally sent it. She belayed Laila as the younger woman tackled a particularly unpleasant route that had a relatively low grade, but had nasty gaps between holds both women were too short to transverse easily. Shnur, of course, flew up the route like it was a ladder.

Irma and Laila went around trying various routes they hadn’t done successfully yet until the clock said she only had half an hour left. Irma went over to the weights section, did some finger work and body weight exercises (accidentally impressing a young man by doing ten pull ups along the way), lifted weights, and finished it off by working on her flexibility.

Irma left the gym rubbing her hands together so that the hand cream would absorb faster. Her gym bag was slung over one shoulder, her work bag - over the other. Trying to squeeze in three long gym sessions per week, as well as her jogging, was a tough task, but she needed it to stay sane among all the news being dumped on her head daily. While most of the gym goers were the sort to watch her program, they either didn’t recognize her without her makeup or were willing to leave her alone. Probably the former, given how a few of her colleagues were treated when they tried to go grocery shopping.

She walked to the subway and rode in a different direction than usual. Today was her uncle’s birthday, and all the relatives were getting together at his place.

“Happy birthday!” Irma said as she walked through the door. Her parents weren’t there yet, but Uncle Antonius was. His apartment was much smaller than her, but then again, he couldn’t afford anything bigger, as he worked construction in the same firm as Irma’s mom, his sister. Offers of a better place had been soundly rejected. Kicking off her shoes, Irma handed her uncle the present she had gotten for him, a generic, though expensive, box of chocolates. She never knew what to get for anyone, and after all, everyone likes chocolate.

“Thank you!” he said, walking into the kitchen to put the package on the table. “You shouldn’t have, though. The hot water is present enough.” Through her connections, Irma had managed to get the hot water turned back on in the building. It had been scheduled to be off for two weeks due to “repairs”, but Irma wasn’t going to let Uncle Ant wash out of his cookpots. What was the point of being the successful niece if she couldn’t do something as simple as that? “Do you want some tea?”

“Sure!” Irma walked over to the couch and sat down, placing her bags onto the floor. Next to her on a rickety table was a porcelain figurine Irma had stolen at a market and gifted to him at the age of twelve. As always, she winced when she saw it, a part of her still afraid she’d be caught and punished for it. “Also, I have some tea for you,” she said, taking a handful of bags out of a pocket of her work bag. There was always free tea for the important people, and Irma always pocketed it.

Her uncle walked over and took the tea bags from her. “Ooh, herbal tea!” he exclaimed. “My friends at work are going to be so jealous.” He walked back to the kitchen and turned on the kettle. “And how’s your work?”

“Kren’s on the verge of a panic attack, but that’s Games season for you.”

For a few seconds, her uncle stood silently, blinking. Then he shook his head. “I still can’t believe the Minister of Information is your direct boss,” he said.

“I’ve had my position for half a year now!”

“Still.” He smiled at her. “I just cannot believe that my niece is stealing Kren’s tea.”

Irma winced at the choice of words. “He doesn’t drink tea,” she said to cover up her awkwardness. Realizing the comedic potential she added, “It’s not quite strong enough for him.” Sure enough, her uncle laughed until tears were pouring from his eyes. Irma smiled. She wasn’t a very witty person by nature, so making a good quip was always something to be proud of.

“Any fresh gossip?” he asked, wiping his eyes. “How’s the evening loudmouth?”

“Same as always,” Irma replied with a shrug. “He’s stopped complaining to Kren every other day, at least.”

“You want to give the program a listen?” Uncle Ant asked.

Irma glared at him. “I’ll throw the television out the window if you do.”

Before he could reply, her parents walked into the apartment. A flurry of greetings and congratulations followed, and it was a solid five minutes before they were helping Uncle Ant get the food out of the fridge. He wasn’t much of a cook, but he could follow a recipe. Irma herself never had the time to make anything more substantial than toast.

“Ant, is that the fancy tea?” Mom asked, noticing the pile of bags.

Uncle Ant smiled. “Courtesy of Irma here.”

“It’s free,” she rushed to explain for the millionth time. “And Uncle likes it.”

Dad shrugged. “Free stuff is free stuff,” he said, twirling a braid around his finger. Irma had picked up the habit from him.

“Well, if you say so,” Mom conceded. She was probably afraid Kren would fire her over the tea, or worse. Irma suspected that deep down, Mom was still afraid that she’s do something wrong and end up in prison. Irma didn’t have the heart to explain to her that if she actually fell afoul of Kren, prison would be the least of her worries. “Have you talked to him recently?”

Irma nodded, shoving a roll into her mouth. Eating nicely just didn’t come naturally to her; work dinners and galas were a time of play-acting for her for that reason as well. “This is the first time I work during the Games in this position,” she explained after swallowing a mouthful. “He just wanted to micromanage everything.”

“Sounds like my principal,” Dad dismissively said. He worked as an elementary school teacher. “Just watch. The slightest thing goes wrong, and he’ll look for scapegoats.”

“I know,” Irma placated him. “My predecessor prepared me.” Her predecessor had quit to become a stay-at-home father, so at least she didn’t have to deal with the fallout of taking over someone’s job amidst some sort of conflict. “And I actually have less things to worry about now that I’m in charge of the District feed. I just need to approve everything.”

“But still, this is the Games!” Mom exclaimed.

Irma shook her head. “I won’t even be allowed to breathe a word about them. That privilege is restricted to certain individuals.”

There was another knock on the door, and Aunts Aemilia and Claudia arrived, their six kids in tow. They both worked in a munitions factory. “Happy birthday, Ant!” Aemilia exclaimed as Claudia handed her brother-in-law a large bag. “Are the others here yet?”

“You’re not even fifteen minutes late,” Uncle Ant replied as the kids started running around. “We’ll wait another half hour.”

With a sigh, Irma flopped down on a couch. She really should have been used to it by now, but it always drove her insane when her relatives just couldn’t arrive on time for anything.

“I’m glad I don’t have to deal with this,” Irma told Joy in a rare moment of relaxation. They were sitting in her office, Joy scrolling through his phone. The television was showing the Games, of course. To do otherwise would have been unpatriotic.

“I don’t like that rule change,” Joy said, taking a sip of his coffee. “Looks bad. You change one thing, and then they all pile in asking for more favours.”

Irma thought along similar lines. She looked at the screen, where the girl from Five was walking around aimlessly. “I hope the boy dies. That way, there won’t be any fallout to clean up.” She swung her feet onto the table and picked up her own coffee mug.

“The viewers won’t like it.”

“And Kren won’t like it if he has to explain why there’s two Victors all of a sudden.” She gulped the bitter drink, wishing that it still had the power to wake her up. “Neither will the Games bunch. I don’t know what Crane was thinking.”

The girl from Five looked up to the sky, and the image switched to the boy from Two, who was eating. Irma wondered what she had been about to say. The feed was officially live, but everyone knew that it was actually five minutes delayed, so that the editors had time to remove shots of the Tributes talking treason. “He should be happy, too,” Joy said. “Doesn’t this mean that they can also both come home?”

“They didn’t show that part to us on purpose,” Irma speculated, twirling a braid around a finger. “Draws away from the love story.”

“Fuck the love story with a pitchfork,” Joy snapped, drinking more coffee. “Who knows what the Districts will do in response? Certainly not whatever genius cooked up this scheme. This will backfire. I can feel it.”

“Maybe one or both of them will still lose.” It made sense that they’d stack the deck against them to prevent an actual double victory from happening.

“Maybe. And if they don’t?”

“Then we will have two Victors, and next year is the Quarter Quell, and hopefully everyone will forget about it by the time the Seventy-Sixth rolls around.” Irma checked her phone. Nothing. She put it back into her pocket and looked at the television, which was now showing the boy from Ten. “Why aren’t they showing the lovebirds?” she complained, even though she knew the answer herself. “This is boring as hell.”

“Because-”

“I know it’s because they’ll want to edit it down and show it during mandatory,” Irma sighed. “You don’t have to tell me. I’m just stressed.”

Joy sighed as well, tapping his screen with a thumb. “Do you want to see a funny photo of Templesmith with Lark?” he asked.

In response, Irma started humming Evening Loudmouth. Joy giggled and passed her his phone.

Inwardly grinning at how frantic Kren was about that near-brush with having no Victors at all and the resulting mini-upheaval, Irma gave the command to keep anything even tangentially related to unrest from appearing on the District feed. Of course, the most potentially dangerous people didn’t have access to anything other than the mandatory viewings, but the sort of people to plan rebellion were also the sort to have access to information.

“But what if they think this is a deliberate attempt to suppress information? They’ll be able to look out the window and see what’s going on, after all,” one of her coworkers pointed out.

“It’s too late for those Districts,” Irma retorted, twirling a braid around a finger. “The Peacekeepers can take care of them. We need to stop still-unaffected areas from exploding.”

Next to her, Joy was scrolling through something on his phone at a frantic pace. “Lark is calling for tougher measures,” he suddenly said.Irma looked around at the handful of people sitting around the table. Nobody looked surprised at the news.

“My assistant brings up an important point,” she said. “In light of this, I believe we should wait for the Minister’s press briefing and see what he wants.” Every day, Kren had a conference where he told journalists what to write.

They continued discussing the District feed, and Irma wondered who would be promoted to Head Gamemaker to replace Crane. An assistant Gamemaker had already been promoted to fill the empty spot, a rather young man by the name of Hryb who owed his new post to his familial connections with several experienced Gamemakers, the most influential of those being Heavensbee. Perhaps that was a sign?

The conversation soon switched to speculating about what the twist for the upcoming Quarter Quell would be. This was completely off-topic, but Irma still had fifteen minutes until she had another meeting to go to, so she stayed. When the conversation shifted to conspiracy theories about Thirteen and its alleged influence, though, Irma decided it was more prudent to leave. About these sorts of matters, it was wiser to know nothing.

Chapter Text

“Is that really all you know?” the interrogator asked. “You still haven’t told me everything.”

Taken aback, Irma didn’t reply for a while. “What do you mean? You can put me on the television, I’ll tell everyone to surrender. Everyone knows me,” she said desperately. If they didn’t need her, then what would they do to her?

The interrogator just looked at her. She was a woman of around fifty, with light-brown skin, short black hair, and dark, round eyes. Irma couldn’t quite place where she was probably from. Her accent was typical Thirteen, as far as she could tell. In the month or so she had spent in the basement of what had once been an expensive cottage, the interrogator had revealed nothing about herself. “Come with me,” she said in that flat voice.

Irma stood up, linking her wrists behind her back. A soldier who had been standing behind her put on handcuffs. The interrogator led her outside. What was happening? When Irma saw that they were headed towards a hovercraft, her legs nearly gave out. “Come on,” she begged, “I could be useful!” They were taking her to Thirteen, she knew it. “Please!”

Neither the interrogator nor the two soldiers batted an eye. Irma was practically dragged into the hovercraft, which was full of severely injured soldiers and a few medical personnel, and cuffed to the floor. She tried to curl up against the wall, which was almost impossible to do with her hands cuffed behind her back. What did they want with her? Surely if they wanted her dead she’d have been shot weeks ago. What could happen in Thirteen but not in the semi-rural outskirts of the Capitol? Irma shivered from the cold as well as fear.

When they arrived, she had a bag placed over her head. That gave Irma hope. If there had been no plans for her to ever leave, they wouldn’t have needed to take that precaution. They got into an elevator and went down until her ears hurt. Down a corridor, a left turn, a right turn, so many turns she soon lost track. Finally, though, she was made to sit down, and the bag was removed from her head. Irma blinked as the bright light hit her eyes. Across from her sat a young and colourless man. Despite being in his mid-thirties at the absolute latest his curly hair was completely white, and his eyes were a nearly transparent shade of blue.

“Sign this,” he said, shoving a document into her hands. Irma glanced down at it, and blanched. It was asking her to practically sign her own death warrant!

“But I had nothing to do with any of that!” she wailed. “How can you accuse me of conspiring to commit the Hunger Games? Or firebomb Twelve?!?” The accusations were total nonsense, and Irma started to worry that maybe they were planning to have her never leave this basement. She felt sick.

The man looked at her for a few seconds. “Take her to the bottom floor,” he said off-handedly to the soldier who was hovering in the door frame. The bottom floor? Irma knew that in most jails, the bottom floor was where the torture chambers were.

“I don’t understand!” she tried to protest. The soldier pushed her into the corridor and put the bag back over her head. Once again, she was walked to the elevator, then down, and then down a maze of corridors. When the bag was taken off, Irma nearly had a heart attack. She was standing less than a metre away from a tiny door that wasn’t even as tall as her. “Please!” she begged. “Don’t!”

“Sign the confession, and everything will be fine,” the soldier said, unlocking her handcuffs and taking off her sweater. “Take off your shoes and socks.”

Irma rushed to obey. “But then you’ll just shoot me!” she protested, placing her socks inside her shoes on the cold floor. The soldier shrugged. He forced her into the tiny cell, locking the door behind her. No matter how hard Irma hammered on the door, there was no reaction. She sat down on a thin blanket at one end of the cell, if this tiny cupboard could be called a cell, and cradled her bruised hands against her chest.

From a sitting position, her elbows could touch both sides. It was too short to stretch out in fully, and likewise the ceiling was too low to stand in. The only thing in the cell besides the blanket was a large hole in the floor on the other end, which Irma supposed was a crude toilet. In the ceiling there were a few vents, though they were too thin to stick as much as a pinky into, and also a lightbulb. Irma ran her hands down the walls, feeling like they were going to crush her.

As she sat and sat, the feeling became worse. When she fell asleep, she dreamt that the walls were slowly creeping in towards her, and woke up crying and flailing around, hitting her hands on the constricting walls. Not having anything better to do, she adjusted the blanket around her – she was freezing cold in her thin shirt and bare feet – and tried to fall asleep again. She woke up when a rattling sound made her look up. A flap was open in the door, and a cup of water was handed through. “Please, let me out of here!” Irma begged, trying to reach through the flap. A painful smack to the fingers made her withdraw her hands.

“Sign the confession, and we’ll let you out.”

“But I’m innocent of all that!”

The flap closed with a sound of finality. Irma fell back against the wall, not thirsty anymore, but very hungry. Some time later, the flap opened again, and this time, the cup was full of not water but a strange, viscous liquid that had the texture of tea with half a kilo of sugar in it, but without the sweetness. Irma handed back the cup, leaned back, and fell asleep again, blanket over her face to keep out the glare of the lightbulb.

Irma knew she was suffering from depression. Knowing didn’t help her, though. She sat on the floor, staring at the opposite wall. Half the time, she dumped the viscous drink into the hole, but nobody did anything, even though they could obviously see that she was extremely skinny. Irma raised a hand that felt like it weighed a million kilos and ran it over her chest. She could see every one of her ribs clearly when she looked down her shirt, which she seldom had the energy to do. Maybe she would die soon. That would be nice.

“Please,” she told the person giving her water. “I’ll confess to anything. Just get me out of here.” Her voice was weak from disuse.

The sheet, as well as a pen, were immediately produced. With difficulty, Irma scrawled her signature. It looked completely wrong, but her fingers, covered in blood from fruitless banging on the door, were refusing to obey. She was lying on the floor in a fetal position, blanket under her head. When the door opened, bringing with it a gust of fresh air, she did not stir.

“You look terrible,” the man said in a gentle tone. He crouched down and carefully shifted her to a sitting position with her back against the wall. “Why haven’t you been drinking the nutrient sludge?”

Irma said nothing. Suddenly, she burst into tears. The man gave her a cup of the nutrient sludge, which she drank, nearly choking on it. “You know what?” he said. “I’m sure you’ll feel much better once you clean yourself up a bit. Can you stand?” Irma slowly crawled out of the cell and got to her feet, feeling like gravity had quadrupled. The man led her down the corridor and opened up another door, a tall one. Inside was a basic shower.

Before letting her undress, the man shaved her bald. Not much of a loss, that. Her hair would need hours and hours of care to get back to normal from the state it was in. With lethargic movements, Irma undressed and stepped under the shower, not caring that the man was standing less than a metre from her. The water was warm, which made her start crying all over again.

When she turned around to step out, her old clothes were gone, replaced with a dark-grey outfit. She was taken to an interrogation that was more like a friendly conversation, the interrogator even offering her tea.

This strange interrogation lasted for a week or so. Irma slept in her old cell, but with the door open, and got more nutrient sludge to drink, though the interrogator often offered her tea, coffee, and MRE’s. The stews and porridges tasted overwhelming after the weeks of tasteless sludge, and she often found herself unable to eat. Psychologically, at least, she was doing quite well, according to the interrogator.

“Do you know why you’re here?” she asked one day.

Irma shook her head.

“They want you in the Capitol.”

Irma tried not to outwardly panic. “What?” she asked. “But why?”

“You are to be a defendant at the trial of the key criminals.”

It took a while for the information to sink in. “What? But I- I wasn’t-” A horrible suspicion struck her. “Kren’s dead, isn’t he?”

The interrogator nodded.

“I will not be a replacement for Kren! He was two levels above me!”

“You said you were his deputy.”

“There were sixteen deputies!” Irma exclaimed. “My actual role was a second-rate news show, surely you can find someone better from the Ministry of Information?”

The interrogator just stared at her for a while. “No,” she said eventually. “We have Lark, and we have you.” Irma sighed. Lark would be representing Lark, not the ministry. Would they seriously pin everything on her? “Read this.” Irma took the thick document and nearly had a heart attack when she saw the first page. A group indictment? What was happening? She read the names. She had only met two of those people before, though she knew of nearly all of them. Her own name was at the very end. Was that a good sign or a bad one? “Please write down on the back what you think of this once you’re done.”

There were five counts on which they were indicted. The last four made some sense. The implementation of the Hunger Games, war crimes, other crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace or aggression. She had never heard of three of them before, but Irma understood what they were supposed to be about, even if the idea of war being a crime made scant sense. Irma was vaguely aware that before the Dark Days, Snow’s predecessor had signed an international treaty banning aggressive war, but would that really apply here? The first charge, though, terrified Irma even as she struggled to understand it. A common plan or conspiracy...

Irma glanced down the list of names. It was absurd. How could she be accused of conspiring with all of these people like some sort of gangster? They had all been on such a higher level than her! Besides Count One, Irma was only being accused of Count Four, while a few of the others were being charged on all five, and others still - on only two, like her.

On the hovercraft to the Capitol, Irma wrote down ‘I am not guilty of any of this’ on the copy of the indictment provided to her by the psychologist, Dr. Aurelius, who must have gone on this trip just for that purpose. Others had written on it before her, saying anything from ‘Is this some kind of bad joke?’ to ‘For a soldier, orders are orders’ to ‘I see reason behind all of these accusations’.

“Interesting,” said Dr. Aurelius, smiling strangely. He was reading a book with a plain fabric cover. “I thought you’d be more unsettled by the charges of conspiracy.”
Irma ran a hand over her bald head. “I think that there was some sort of conspiracy,” she admitted. “I just had no part in any of that. It’s absurd to imagine me conspiring with the leader of the NCIA and the Head Engineer of the Hunger Games.”

“Interesting.” Dr. Aurelius looked at his book, then to her, then back to his book. “Now, what do you think about the charges against your co-defendants?”

“I don’t quite understand that bit about aggressive war,” Irma said. “I get why they think that what happened after the Dark Days was an unprovoked invasion and occupation, but that ended long before any of us had any sort of meaningful role. Why did they include it when the Rebellion already fits the criteria?” If the interrogators had told the truth, it was the Capitol who had fired the first shots without provocation.

Dr. Aurelius closed his book, marking the page with a finger. “One of the legal historians working on the trial actually wrote a pamphlet on it,” he said as he dug around in his bag and took out a small stapled booklet. “Would you like to read it?”

“Of course,” Irma replied, taking the pamphlet. She needed to know what to defend herself against. Her mind spun at the thought of how much effort it would take to prove her innocence. Would they even be allowed to request documents? Odds were, this pamphlet would be the only information she got before the trial started, and that scared her.

Once the hovercraft landed, Irma was tossed into the back of a windowless van, which immediately sped off, bouncing badly over the potholes. After what felt like an eternity, the van stopped, Irma was dragged off to some room to be searched, and soon found herself standing before two soldiers.

“Hello,” the higher-ranking soldier said. “I’m Lieutenant Vance, or Warden Vance to you.” His affable tone contrasted with the brutal strip-search she had just been subjected to by two bored-looking nurses. The other soldier, a very young woman to whom Irma was cuffed, said nothing. “Now, we’ll just get you settled in, you can have breakfast, and then you can go talk to your lawyer,” the warden continued.

“Wait, I’m getting a lawyer?” Irma asked.

“Of course,” the warden said. He was a slender man of average height, with dark skin and narrow eyes. “Can’t have a trial with no defense lawyers.” He sounded far too friendly for someone from Thirteen. “Now, this is your cell block,” he said, passing through a gate that was locked behind them. Irma looked around, seeing twenty-odd soldiers staring through peepholes in doors. One of the doors was open, and it was there that Irma was led. “Someone will be around with breakfast soon. It’ll be leftovers from yesterday, I’m afraid, it’s still too early for breakfast, but I hope you’ll find it satisfactory.” Irma was uncuffed, and she walked into the cell.

Her first thought was that it was nicer than anything she had been in before. There was a table, though no chair, a small cot that was long enough for her to stretch out on, and a toilet/sink hidden out of the way. So there would be at least some privacy here. On a little shelf above the sink were a flimsy comb (not like she’d need one, as she was completely bald, at least for now), toothbrush, toothpaste, and pads. Irma tried to remember when her last period had been. Back in the basement in the cottage, as far as she could recall. Hopefully there was nothing seriously wrong with her.

A flap in the door opened, and breakfast was pushed through. Bean stew and canned apples, as well as a round little loaf of bread that turned out to be extremely sweet. “Lieutenant Vance got the roll just for you,” the guard explained in a whisper. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen, a lanky dark girl with an accent Irma didn’t recognize. “Also, can I have your autograph? I’ll give you chocolate.”

Faced with such temptation, Irma signed the proffered piece of paper at once. She then began to pace madly, feeling an odd sense of whiplash. Why were they being so friendly all of a sudden? Wardens were suddenly fetching breakfast at some absurd hour of the morning - it was still pitch-black outside - guards wanted autographs, and nobody was even breathing a hint about the confession she had signed. Not to mention the fact that she would be getting a lawyer. What was going on?

Irma ate the chocolate slowly, delighting in the sweetness. There was nothing for her to do, so she continued to pace until the sun rose, enjoying the spaciousness of her new cell.

“Slice?” a soldier said. “Time for you to meet your lawyer.” She was cuffed to the soldier and led down the corridor, down the stairs, and into a small room. Separated from her by a panel of glass was, of all people, the president of the Bar Association.

“Hello,” Irma said, trying to hide her shock. “You’re my lawyer?” She wasn’t sure how to interpret this. Was this being done so that everyone thought that the trial was fair?

Dr. Baer nodded. “I am,” she said, “and your assistant is going to be helping me.” Irma felt some relief. At least Joy was fine. “Now, I’ve already started planning-”

Irma interrupted. “But I signed a confession in Thirteen!”

“Believe me,” Dr. Baer said, “they’re going to do everything they can to pretend that never happened.”

“What?”

Dr. Baer proceeded to fill Irma in on everything that had happened since her arrest. In just five minutes, her head began to spin.

All Irma wanted was to talk to one of her co-defendants. She had hoped that they’d be able to talk while washing, but the deputy warden was having none of that.

“I said, silence!” Tiller shouted. The six women stopped whispering and stared at the floor. The only sounds were breathing and a quiet, distant hum that might have been the pipes. Irma didn’t recognize any of the others, no matter how hard she tried to put names to faces. The only woman she was sure she’d recognize was Talvian, due to her height, but everyone in the washroom was normal-sized. “Now, undress!”

Irma took off her clothing. As soon as she put it down, a guard began to search through it. A few of the others turned out to have contraband hidden under the inner soles of their shoes and where lanyards had once been in hooded sweatshirts. Irma had nothing, though, as always. They were searched every day in their cells (it took hours to clean up afterwards), and Irma always had nothing.

The six of them were also searched. Nothing was found. Once that was done, Irma looked around to everyone. Four of the women were staring at the floor; two who had been pale before were now bright-red. One looked unconcerned. Irma herself didn’t feel too bad, either. While she usually hated being touched, she didn’t mind if it was in a medical context, and it had been easy enough to trick her brain into thinking that the searches were routine examinations.

“Go wash now,” Tiller said.

The water turned out to be cold. Reluctantly, Irma positioned herself under the tall tap and began to scrub herself with her hands, shivering as she did so. The small container of liquid soap was in a small, locked cage. Irma wondered how one was supposed to kill themselves with a bottle of soap.

Just as the water was starting to warm up, Tiller shouted at them that their time was up. Reluctantly, Irma finished washing off the soap. The tap turned off automatically, and a blast of hot air hit Irma. She smiled at the warmth.

“Get dressed!”

Irma wished for clean clothes, but those were only handed out in the evenings. Once everyone was dressed, they were cuffed to guards and taken back to their cells, not allowed to say a word. Everything had been turned inside-out, and when Irma finished putting it in order, Warden Vance turned up and scolded her for being so sloppy.

Weeks later, when they were finally allowed to go for a walk in the concrete cylinder that was called a yard, they had to keep a distance of two metres from each other, and they were prohibited from talking. Irma wondered when she’d ever get to say a word to her co-defendants.

There were twenty-four of them, twelve men and twelve women. The irony wasn’t lost on anyone, and it was obvious that it had been a deliberate choice. And Irma was clearly the odd person out. According to the guards she was only there because Alexandra Chaterhan, owner of the Steelworks conglomerate, was too ill to stand trial together with her grandson, Antonius, who was walking around a few metres away from Irma, dressed in a plaid shirt and denim trousers.

As Irma walked around under the watchful eyes of the guards, she glanced up at the large grille that was their ceiling, and then looked back at her co-defendants, taking them in for the first time. Guards had shown photos with names to her, as had Dr. Baer, and Irma was glad to finally be able to know who was who. For a second, Thread met her gaze before staring at the wall again. He was so stiff and upright, it was hard to imagine him personally whipping poachers and saboteurs or signing the order for the firebombing of Twelve. Even in a plain uniform with no badges of rank and thin canvas shoes, he still acted like the Head Peacekeeper he had been in Eleven and Twelve. His counterpart, dubbed the ‘Butcher of Eight’, likewise maintained her military bearing. She wore a Thirteen military jacket and combat boots without shoelaces (deemed a suicide risk), and rumour had it that Warden Vance had said that Bright would have made an excellent sergeant.

The former head of the Coast Guard and his predecessor were also clad in Thirteen cast-offs. While Best was elderly and the much-younger Verdant still recovering from his botched suicide attempt (he had leapt out a window, shattering one of his legs to pieces), they still walked like they had a steel column in place of a spine. Verdant pretended everything was fine, and his composure had only cracked when suffering from the cluster headaches that had plagued him every year for decades now.

All four of the Peacekeepers still listened to their former commander in everything. Lux didn’t look like the person who had once commanded all of the Peacekeepers. Like the other four he stood at perfect attention whenever addressed by a guard and cleaned his cell with a fanatical neatness every morning, but he wasn’t in the best of health, and constantly looked exhausted. He was also wearing a knit sweater, which made him look distinctly unmilitary.

As Irma looked around, Lark met her eye and glared at her. Irma glared back and continued walking. Coll caught her eyes and raised his eyebrows; Irma shrugged in response. The former Minister of Resources looked very unministerly in a tracksuit and hiking boots, which threatened to fall off at every step due to the lack of shoelaces. He stood next to Blues, who wore a rumpled jacket and cargo trousers. Irma wondered in what dump all of these clothes had even been dug up.

From the back, the diminutive Talvian looked like a child of eleven or twelve, with that bright-orange sweatshirt and running shoes. Next to her, the two-metre-tall Krechet, the most senior of her surviving attack dogs, looked like the sort of younger brother who teased his older sister for being shorter than him. The sleeves of his shabby Thirteen-issue jumpsuit barely reached halfway down his forearm.

If not for the mismatched clothes and buzz-cuts, they could have passed for a ministerial meeting. Blatt, the former Minister of Armaments, stared at the back of Dijksterhuis, the former Minister of Economics. Dovek, former Minister of Internal Affairs, and Oldsmith, Snow’s former secretary, were rumoured to be continuing an old-standing feud about who had really been Snow’s right hand. Everyone was avoiding Cotillion, who had headed the Institute for Genetic Research. While the way that she had rolled up to the Justice Building in a luxury car and surrendered herself was impressive, nobody wanted to be associated with the IGR and its mutts both animal and human.

Ledge, the former Minister of Finances, was hunched over and stared only at the ground. Lee, the former Minister of Health, stared upward, at the small patch of sky that was visible through the bars. Grass, former Minister of Justice, had her hands buried in the pockets of the overcoat that she wore open over a collarless shirt. Even Irma could tell that Kirji, who had headed the Department of Victors’ Affairs, looked simultaneously terrified and resigned, or maybe that was just because that was the only way she could feel.

There were three deputies other than Irma on trial, each one simmering with barely-contained fury at the fact that they had been abandoned to this judicial charade by their bosses. Other than Kren, the Ministers of Education and District Affairs and the Head of the Training Centre had all killed themselves during the last phase of the fighting, along with many others. Brack, Pollman, and Toplak respectively could do nothing about the fact that they were being forced to answer for the actions of a ministry that had not been controlled by them. They were the ones Irma felt sorriest for.

Irma couldn’t get her mind off the clothes they were wearing. Most of them were dressed in some sort of military castoffs from Thirteen or in whatever someone must have had dug up in a charity bin. She looked down at herself, at the neat and well-fitting grey outfit she had been given in Thirteen. It looked like a prison uniform.

“How are you?” Dr. Baer asked.

“Fine. You?”

“Mostly fine, but some youth from the Documents Division beat me at poker at the Witness House yesterday,” she said. “It was us, Meersten, and an NCIA captain.” Irma could only gape at the mental image of the trial’s foremost defense lawyer, a clerk from the Documents Division, Snow’s former photographer and social media expert, and an NCIA captain playing poker together. Although, from what she had heard so far, stranger encounters were had at the Witness House. Irma wanted to ask if that was a conflict of interest, but decided not to. “Now, have you finished the answers for the direct examination?” Dr. Baer had already begun preparing, on the assumption that the trial would be a quick one and there would be no time to prepare once the prosecution began to present its case.

Irma gave the papers to the guard, who leafed through them before passing them on to the guard on the opposite side of the glass. Dr. Baer picked them up and began to read the first page. Feeling uncomfortable, Irma looked down. “What do you think?” she asked.

“You need to stress the show more,” the lawyer said. “Anyone can see that you’re only on the dock so that they can find someone not guilty, but there is always the possibility that they may want to hang all of you.” Irma sighed, running a hand over her head. “The prosecution will build its case on the basis of you having had an official post in the Ministry of Information, trying to tie you to the conspiracy. We need to show that you were the host of a mildly popular show and nothing more, your post being of too junior rank to tie you to Kren himself.”

Having heard that many times already, Irma only nodded as Dr. Baer continued to read. “Do you know when the trial will start?” she asked.

“Less than two weeks.”

“That’s something.”

They discussed possible witnesses until their time ran out. “I’ll write out some suggestions,” Dr. Baer said as she held up the sheaf of papers, “and give them to you tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” Irma said. “Tell the other lawyers I say hi.”

Dr. Baer smiled and nodded. She had told Irma about the café where all the defense lawyers liked to hang out whenever they could find an hour of free time. The building only had three walls and the roof was partially tarp, but the coffee was first-rate and the pastries even better.

The cell door opened, and Dr. Mallow stepped in. The psychiatrist from Eleven was holding a large bag.

“Good morning,” Irma said, stopping in her tracks. Visits from the mental health team were a welcome distraction. “Take a seat. Would you like some sour sticks?”

Dr. Mallow sat down on the backless chair, which had just been returned to Irma for the day, and put her bag on the floor. “That would be lovely, thank you.” Irma took out a few pieces of candy from her pocket and handed them to her.

“Are you doing anything specific today?” Irma asked as she sat down on her cot. Dr. Mallow sometimes made her do strange things. Occasionally it was another psychiatrist, but the key criminals were in the purview of Drs. Aurelius and Mallow, with their assistants dealing mostly will the smaller fry. Irma was visited nearly every other day, but Dr. Mallow spent half the time asking her about Kren, which drove her up the wall. At least the tests were fun.

“Yes,” the psychiatrist replied, taking out a small box. “You will perform a few tests for me.”

Irma’s competitive spirit, long dormant, awoke. “What kind of test?” she asked, wishing her mind wasn’t so foggy from the long time spent in cells. She always did worse than she should have.

“Just a test.” Dr. Mallow opened the box, revealing a stack of cards and nine cubes. “Now, take these cubes and make this image,” she said. Irma complied. It was easy, but the images became more and more complicated until she had to give up, which she did with great reluctance. She recognized the test - this was part of an IQ test - and she really wanted to beat the others.

After that, she was made to do mental math, which was even more difficult. She hadn’t had to calculate if a car going 100 kilometres per hour would travel a distance of 250 kilometres faster than a car going for 150 kilometres at a speed of 75 km/h since highschool, and had to give up shortly after that. Fortunately, the next part was word definitions, which she breezed through. Dr. Mallow actually didn’t know some of the words herself, but that was because Irma was taking the Capitol version of the test, not the Eleven one.

The general knowledge section was also fine, as were the similarities, though Irma struggled because a few of the things mentioned had simply been before her time. After only one of the digit span tests, Irma had a headache from trying to keep all the numbers in her head, and it grew worse and worse. “How much more?” she asked.

“Repeat the following numbers backward. Two, four, three, one, seven, nine, six, zero, eight.”

“Eight, zero, six...uh...” Irma struggled to remember. “Nine?” Dr. Mallow nodded. “I give up. I’m tired.” Her record had been six.

Fortunately, the test ended soon. Dr. Mallow did the calculations right there as a curious guard watched through the slit and Irma sipped lukewarm coffee from a thermos. “How did I do?” she asked as Dr. Mallow began to put away her things.

“One hundred and twenty-seven.”

“But what does that mean?” She knew that one hundred was the average, but wasn’t sure how good her score was. And in any case, the exact number mattered less than scoring higher than the others.

The psychiatrist offered her a sheet of paper on which everyone’s scores were written. Irma was disappointed at having been the last to be tested, but at least it meant she was the first to see everyone’s scores. They were listed in alphabetical order, but Dr. Mallow had penciled in their rank just now. Irma was below average, a measly eighteenth. The winner was, oddly enough, Talvian, with an extremely high score of one hundred forty-five. Dovek had gotten one hundred thirty-seven, and Oldsmith - one hundred thirty-six. “Wow, I did terrible,” Irma said, trying to not show how upset she was. But how could she have done well, given how messed up her brain was?

“Actually,” Dr. Mallow said, “the average score is one hundred, with a standard deviation of fifteen. You are in the ninety-sixth percentile.”

“But everyone else did so much better than me!” Krechet, who hadn’t been educated beyond highschool, got a hundred and twelve, the worst of them all but still an above-average result.

“It would be reasonable to assume that it takes intelligence to claw one’s way to the highest levels of power and stay there, don’t you think?” the psychiatrist asked.

“That’s true,” Irma admitted. It still stung to be eighteenth out of twenty-four.

“Dr. Baer?” Irma asked. It was the evening before the trial was due to begin. “I have a request.”

“What is it?”

“During the morning recess, could you please give us a snack of some kind? It should cheer everyone up.” She had come up with the idea after realizing how desperate all of them were to swap autographs for candy and coffee.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Dr. Baer said.

The next morning, they were woken up at six, as usual. After eating breakfast and cleaning her cell, Irma put on the nice clothes that had been issued to her the previous night. The jacket and trousers were drab, but in good repair, and putting on the dress shoes was enough to switch her into official mode. She walked confidently down the corridor, even though she was handcuffed to a guard. They were led down a corridor, a right turn, another corridor, and they were there.

One by one, they were led through a small door. Irma was at about the three-quarter mark. She waited as the others disappeared through the door, until it was finally her turn. On the other side of the door was a small staircase that led up to another door, as well as a guard. Taking a deep breath, Irma became the sort of person who enjoyed being the centre of attention, and then she was gently shoved through the door.

It was bright in the courtroom, with harsh lights competing with the sound of cameras and conversation to overwhelm her. Irma drifted for a few seconds on the rushing wave, not letting it overpower her senses.

“Sit down there,” a guard said. Irma looked around the dock. Four small benches, arranged two by two, and Irma was in a corner. As she sat down, she realized that the biggest names were all clustered around the opposite corner, not in the middle as would have seemed logical. They were sitting in the order in which they were named in the indictment. To Irma’s side was Grass and then Coll, in front of her was Blues, and diagonally from her was Chaterhan. Irma leaned back against the wall to which the bench was attached. She could already tell that sitting in it would not be enjoyable.

Everyone was enthusiastically talking to each other about their IQ scores and shaking hands, but Irma needed a few minutes to calm down until she was sure that conversation would not overwhelm her. She looked around the courtroom. At the opposite end was an empty table where the judges would sit. To one side was the press, and to the other - the viewing galleries. In the middle were long tables for the prosecution and defense. Irma realized that Dr. Wreath, defense lawyer for Best, was wearing a Peacekeeper dress uniform. “Good morning,” Irma said to Grass, stretching out her hand. “How was Wreath even allowed to dress like this?” The military defendants, except for the retired Best, were likewise wearing their old uniforms, but with holes in the fabric where badges of rank had been unceremoniously torn off.

“Good morning to you, too.” Grass took her hand and shook it with a strong grip. “I don’t know. I’ll ask Best.” The question was passed down the line, and the response soon came. “He was kept on by the Rebellion to clear ocean pods, so he still has a right to wear his uniform.”

“Interesting.”

Less than a metre away from Irma sat Dr. Aurelius, armed with a clipboard and pen. On the opposite side of the dock was Dr. Mallow, who was standing and talking to Brack about something.

“How many numbers could you remember backwards?” Grass asked Irma.

“Six. You?”

“Eight,” Grass said proudly.

“All rise!” sounded a powerful voice. Irma stood up as if pulled by a string as the judges filed in. There were thirteen of them, one from each District. When they sat down, everyone else sat as well.

“I see the judge from Thirteen is right across from me,” Dovek said lightly. “How nice.”

Irma wondered why she was there. Why was she being tried like a common criminal? She had done nothing wrong!

It was announced that the Inter-District Military Tribunal was now in session. The judge from Thirteen, Raymond Sanchez, was introduced as the presiding judge. He made a few brief introductory remarks, saying that the trial was unique in the history of jurisprudence but still had many precedents to draw on, and then announced that they would begin by reading the indictment. According to Dr. Baer, that was expected to last the entire day. Irma tried to sit more comfortably as one of the prosecutors from Eleven, a sturdy middle-aged woman, began to read the words Irma had nearly memorized.

While the audience listened attentively enough, Irma and her co-defendants soon drifted into a stupor. The other side of the dock was busy keeping track of how often everyone’s name was being said; Irma was losing quite badly. She looked at the clock, wishing she had something to do with her hands. After about an hour of mind-numbing boredom, she borrowed a pencil and some paper from Chaterhan and began to doodle. After another hour of this cloying agony, a recess was finally called.

“Yet another reason why holding a group trial is a terrible idea,” Dovek joked. Irma had always known that the slight man had a very expansive personality, but not to that extent. “How is everyone’s morning so far?”

“This is an outrage,” Oldsmith said. “I was Snow’s right-hand person, but I’m only fifth in the rankings!” Irma decided he was probably joking, as Dovek didn’t immediately explode.

“See?” he asked with a smile. “Even the judges accept it. Be grateful, it might yet save you from the noose.”

“In my dreams,” Oldsmith spat. “Can’t you hear? They want our blood!”

Dovek laughed. “What blood? Clearly, they’re trying to bore us to death.” Everyone joined in the laughter.

At that moment, Dr. Baer began to pass around a box of donut holes, warning that there were two for each of them plus two extra for herself. Irma grinned when it got to her. Jam-filled, her favourite. She savoured the sweetness slowly, licking the powdered sugar off her fingers. Then, there was a mad dash to the bathroom as everyone realized that the next break would be in two more hours, for lunch.

As the audience trickled back in, the endless litany of atrocities began anew. The session had started at 8:00, and the break had been from 10:00 to 10:15. Lunch would be from 12:15 to 13:15, afternoon break from 15:15 to 15:30, and the day would end at 17:30. Following that, they’d eat dinner and be allowed to talk to their lawyers. Saturday would be a half-day if they were running late and needed to catch up, and at least Sundays would be for rest and planning defense strategies. Irma wondered how many hours she’d spend in this overheated courtroom on a hard bench.

“Your lawyer is amazing,” Blues whispered to her.

“Thank you,” Irma said awkwardly. It was an open secret that Dr. Baer, the most skilled and experienced of the lawyers, had taken Irma’s case because it was the only one that had even the slightest chance of being allowed to win. As soon as possible, Dr. Baer would make a statement explaining why the Tribunal had no right to judge any of them, though she had warned Irma that it would never work because there were too many precedents.

When the audience was on the verge of falling asleep, lunch was finally announced. One by one, the twenty-four were taken to a room on the same floor. Irma gasped out loud when she saw the large windows, as did many of the others. They crowded around, eager to get a glimpse of the city.

Irma had been shown photographs before, but to see the rubble with her own eyes was something else. She knew that only a couple of municipalities had been so destroyed, but it was still a sickening sight. No wonder the people wanted justice for those who had brought this all on them.

“Sit down!” came the command from Warden Vance. Everyone sat down, crowding around three small tables, as labelled trays were brought in on a cart. Irma picked the farthest edge, not keen on being crowded in. The middle table was, predictably, being presided over by Dovek, with Blatt and Oldsmith flanking him, and the military people occupied the last one. Irma looked from Cotillion to Brack, wondering who to talk to.

As they dug in, Brack broke the silence. “Good food,” she said. It was indeed quite good, though the portion size was as small as ever.

A dashing young guard leaned in with a slight smile. “You think they’ll feed you even better the day they hang you?” she asked.

Irma barely held back a scream of frustration. Putting on her best imperious airs, she snapped, “And who authorized you to talk to us?”

“Nice,” Cotillion whispered.

The guard leaned over and whispered to another one, “I’m just waiting for one of them to start swinging their fists.”

“No way,” the other guard, a stocky young man, replied. “They’ve got the mental health team drilled. Nobody’s going to try anything, believe me.”

Dovek was trying to rally everyone’s spirits, with the help of Oldsmith. “Our only crime was losing!” he declared. “If we are guilty of anything, then so is the victorious side. They bombed our children!” he said, as if his own children hadn’t been safe and sound at his luxurious cottage.

“Exactly!” Oldsmith said, waving his spoon in the air. “Coin wanted to hold a Hunger Games with our children. Does Thirteen really have the right to judge us?”

“Yes.” Everyone looked towards the source of the sound. Coll was glaring defiantly at Oldsmith. “Look what they did to Coin. Look what they did to their own war criminals. We’re lucky by comparison.” Having proclaimed that, he shoved a spoonful of stew into his mouth and stared at his tray.

The guard behind Irma chuckled. “And here I was thinking that this would be literally Tokyo.”

Confused, Irma turned back to her bean stew.

The next day, Dr. Baer stated her objection, got shot down, everyone pled ‘not guilty’, and Irons, the Chief Prosecutor from Thirteen, stepped up to give the opening argument.

“The privilege of opening this trial,” she began, “is a great burden. No words can do justice to the past seventy-five years.”

It only got worse from there.

“The entirety of Twelve,” the prosecutor said, “was burned up in the attack. This wasn’t a normal bombing, it was the deliberate annihilation of a District. It was genocide.”

Irma was confused for a second by the unfamiliar word, but then she figured it out. She glanced at Thread, who didn’t move a muscle.

“Document 00-23 is the minutes of the conference at which the decision to firebomb Twelve was taken. They were taken by Carolus Netts.” Snow’s other secretary had wisely killed himself rather than face trial. “According to the list, the following defendants were present: Lux, Thread, Blatt, Coll, Oldsmith, and Pollman.” Irma glanced at Pollman, wondering what a deputy had been doing at such a top-secret gathering. “I will now read to you from the minutes.”

The witness was a young woman from Four with a large scar on her face who practically whispered the oath as she took the stand.

“How did you get that scar?” the prosecutor asked. The short man from Thirteen had a voice like steel.

“I turned around when being tied to the whipping block,” the youth said in a dull voice.

“Are these the only scars you have?”

“No. Should I show you?”

Sanchez spoke up. “Unless one of the defense lawyers requests it, the witness need not undress in court.” The defense lawyers looked like they’d rather jump out the window than say a word. Wreath was resting his face on his hand, covering his eyes.

“Why were you whipped?” the prosecutor continued.

“I put up some posters,” the youth said in a dead voice. “Close to the District Peacekeepers’ headquarters. We wanted to warn them. And everyone could read and write in that neighbourhood, so they would also learn.”

The youth explained her background without once raising her eyes. Raised in an upper middle class family in Four’s Centre, she had always liked to read, especially old (and preferably forbidden) books. At the age of twelve, she fell in with a small group of like-minded youths. Two years later, she was whipped for putting up posters critical of the Peacekeepers. All that was said in a sullen monologue, but as soon as the prosecutor held up a poster and asked her to explain it, her eyes lit up and her shoulders straightened out.

“We read a book about Yamashita,” she said in a firm voice, pointing at the projector screen overhead. The image showed two men side-by-side, a Peacekeeper and someone who must have been Yamashita. They did look quite similar. A chart at the bottom listed off crimes, with both of them having tick marks in each category. At the very bottom, it said: ‘Fate’, with the word ‘Death by hanging’ and a question mark in the respective columns. “And we had this one officer, and he kind of reminded us of him. And it’s a bit of an iffy precedent, but all we had was this one book, so we were stuck. Basically, Yamashita was this officer-”
Fortunately, the Chair broke in to say that the Tribunal was fully aware of the Yamashita precedent and its shortcomings, and the witness didn’t need to elaborate any further about that. The youth continued to talk about what happened to her in dull, emotionless sentences. In a few minutes, it was clear to everyone that she had been whipped on orders which had been passed on by Lux, who was working off Snow’s demand to deal with agitation most severely. Bright sat slumped over the low wall, Lux was taking notes, and Thread radiated menace.

“According to Document 10-98, the price of birth control had been kept deliberately high even though less than five percent of the District had been able to afford proper maternity care. According to Document 10-203, maternal mortality in Ten in the last five years of the regime had averaged nearly nine hundred per a hundred thousand live births, even as the figure for the Capitol rounds to zero per a hundred thousand, as per Document 00-9.”

“The defense does not have any copies of Document 00-9,” Dr. Baer spoke up, “or of any documents you have mentioned so far.”

The prosecutor, an old man from Ten, scratched his head. “Uh, you can borrow mine for now?” he said. Irma sat up slightly. She was bored out of her mind, and these sorts of diversions provided some much-needed entertainment, though it was nowhere as funny as the constant mispronunciations of Dijksterhuis’ name.

The Chair broke in to defuse the argument. “When can the Defense be furnished with copies of the documents?” he asked.

Someone from the Documents Division was called up to the stand. “The photocopiers broke, and it took us two days to fix them,” she explained. “The backlog is being dealt with. The documents will be delivered in the next few days.”

“And how many copies does the Prosecution have?”

“Twelve.” Besides the judge, who had been a mere clerk before the Rebellion, Twelve had only sent in one other person, and he worked in the Witness House.

“In that case, five should be given to the Defense for now.”

After a short scramble, the prosecutor continued reading. “Other medications were also priced far beyond the average person’s ability to pay. Out of a hundred children with Type 1 diabetes, three would live to adulthood due to the high price of insulin. In the Capitol, by comparison, insulin was free and accessible.” Irma leaned back against the wall, trying to fight off an intense desire to sleep.

“My parents were arrested for treason,” the boy from Eleven said. He stared dully ahead. “That evening, Head Peacekeeper Thread came to our house. I knew it was him because one of the other Peacekeepers said so.”

“What exactly did they say?” the lawyer for the prosecution asked.

“Something like ‘The Head’s here, now you’ll get yours’.”

“How many Peacekeepers were there?”

“Around five.”

“What did they do?”

The boy stared at the ground, wringing his hands. “Head Peacekeeper Thread told me that my parents were going to die if I didn’t listen,” he said. “He marched around the house until he saw our cat, which had just given birth. Then, he took his pistol, pointed it at me, and told me that my parents would die that evening unless I killed the cat and the kittens.” Irma heard the crowd gasp. “So I did. I wrung the mother cat’s neck and smashed the kittens with a brick.” The boy’s hands were twisting madly; he shoved them under his armpits and hunched over. His tone remained completely dead. “Then, the Peacekeepers laughed and told me to clean it up.”

“Were your parents released?” the lawyer asked.

“Yes, but my mom’s kidneys never recovered after the beatings. And after they saw the bloodstains, they never loved me again.” The boy looked at the dock as if noticing them for the first time. “I never told anyone about this because I was too afraid.”

On cross-examination, the boy described Thread as black-haired, tan-skinned, and ‘a metre eighty tall at least’, but it was scant consolation that the sadist had not, in fact, been Thread himself.

“What happened on the ninth of April, 75?”

“We were ordered to put down a riot on Ranch 82,” the former Peacekeeper replied in an excessively loud voice. “Major Cott cited orders from Head Peacekeeper Bassingwaithe and commanded us to surround the buildings and set fire to them.”

“What?” Thread hissed. “That’s nonsense. The major was just lying to cover up their own tracks. I’d have never stooped to worry about a riot on a single plantation!”

“You weren’t in Ten!” Coll hissed back.

“It was the same everywhere!”

As they argued, it was revealed that Cott had been working off vague instructions from the Head Peacekeeper to “punish rebellion more severely”.

“Then,” she said, “Major Cott asked for volunteers. We all stepped forward, of course. The ranch was surrounded and set on fire.” She was so loud, it was hurting Irma’s ears. “One person tried to jump out the window, but Cott shot them mid-air.”

“Witness,” Sanchez broke in, “please speak in a quieter voice.”

She quieted down, but that was temporary. Once the cross-examination began (spearheaded by Thread’s and Bright’s lawyers), she was back to shouting as if she was addressing her platoon on the parade ground. Irma could only wince and force herself to not cover her ears.

“This footage was filmed in Nine during the famine of 31-32.” With those words, the middle-aged prosecutor from Four sat down.

“Are we seriously going to be digging through ancient history?” Dovek asked, throwing his hands in the air. “None of us had as much as an unpaid internship at that point!”

Oldsmith disagreed. “Yes, we did. Stop pretending you’re not old.”

The laughter in the dock faded away as the lights dimmed. On the screen, a low-quality black-and-white image appeared. In those days, quality colour film had been reserved for the Games. Irma watched the footage of a small village with trepidation, listening to the crackly sound of footsteps and breathing. Next to her, Dr. Aurelius was facing the dock, pencil hovering over notepad. Irma gulped, heart beating faster.

“Are they all dead?” a female voice asked off-camera.

“Only the ones who couldn’t run off,” a male voice replied. An arm appeared in the video. A Peacekeeper uniform. “Hey, there’s one!” he added in a quiet voice. The two ran towards one dilapidated house. The footage became blurry as they ran inside, and a hundred throats gasped in unison as they saw what was in the shack.

Two children, one maybe twelve and one who couldn’t have been older than five, sat on the floor, licking bones. They themselves were hardly more than skeletons, and the small child had a grotesquely swollen stomach. Irma ran a hand over her head, taking in the huge empty eyes, the rags they were wearing, the protruding bones. The camera panned slightly, and Irma nearly threw up as she realized that they were eating a corpse. Someone next to her gagged. She heard sobbing.

“Hey, little one,” the male Peacekeeper said, offering a bottle of something to the small child, who took it and began to drink greedily. The camera must have been lying on the ground.

“Are you the only ones left?” the female Peacekeeper asked the older child, likewise opening a bottle and handing it to them.

Neither of the children said a word. The footage then cut to the two Peacekeepers standing outside. “Today is the twenty-ninth of June, 32,” the woman said. “Richie and Emma survived for a while because their family had a small stockpile of non-perishable food, but they died in a fight with the other inhabitants. After that, everyone who could walk tried to walk away, and Richie and Emma stayed behind, eating the corpses to survive.” Tears were pouring out of her eyes.

“This year, only the children of the rich will be included in the Reaping in Nine, because McCollum doesn’t want the rest of Panem to know what’s going on here,” the man said. He was cradling the small child with one hand and wiping at his face with the other. “But we are here, and we will bear witness. Panem will know. The world will know, and the guilty will be punished. If you are watching this and wear the white, take it off right now. It is not white. It is red with the blood of these children.”

Before anyone could say a word, the next witness was called, an older man. When he introduced himself as the boy from the video, Irma thought she would pass out. She leaned against the wall, hands over her face.

“Didn’t anyone know anything about any of this?” Dr. Wreath demanded of Best, who had been a young officer in Six at the time.

“I was patrolling the Lakes at the time!” Best hissed back. “How could I have known?”

Irma lowered her hands just in time to see Dr. Wreath crumple and rest his head on his elbow.

“This document, 06-402, shows that the forced labourers working on the Arenas had been fed 1,400 calories daily. I quote the words of Defendant Blues. ‘If they slack off, feed them less. I will not waste resources on them when we’re already struggling to get the tunnel dug in time.’ A passage further down in the memorandum calls for alleged malingerers and saboteurs to be shot without trial.”

“For three years, I worked in the Training Centre during Games season,” a former Avox signed. Her words were translated into verbal speech by an old man. “It was from 72 to 75. During the off-season, I worked in an elite nightclub as a cleaner.”

“When were you turned into an Avox?” the prosecutor asked. The old woman from One had to stand on a box to see over the lectern, which didn’t take away from the weight of her words.

“Early 72. I pled guilty to fomenting Rebellion and expressed remorse, so judge Lophand spared my life and even labelled me as ‘politically reliable’, which resulted in my posting.” Lophand had been the most infamous of the political judges and would have been in the dock with them if not for Grass already representing the justice system. Instead, he was the star defendant of the just-started and aptly nicknamed Judges’ Trial.

“In this capacity, did you ever interact with any of the defendants?”

“I regularly saw Toplak. The Head of the Training Centre had delegated all of their responsibilities to her. She frequently told me herself that she was constantly being forced to deal with every little issue.” Toplak wrote something on a piece of paper and passed it to her lawyer, who appeared to be half-deceased.

“Why would a high-ranking civil servant complain about their job to an Avox?”

“We were viewed as furniture,” she explained. “Some couldn’t imagine us ever being in a position to tell their secrets, while others were very careful and could even order one of us killed, though Snow needed to be persuaded in such a case.”

“And in which category was Defendant Toplak?”

“The first.”

Everyone turned towards Toplak, glad it wasn’t them whose secrets were about to be exposed in front of everyone.

A worn-out man from Six testified about the battle he and his colleagues had waged to stop the downscaling of the only hospital in their town of thirty thousand.

“We were the only place to get a blood transfusion done within a hundred kilometres!” he whispered. “And they still tried to close down the centre.”

“On whose orders was this closure?”

“Our chief doctor told us to not complain, because the order came directly from the Minister of Resources,” the man said, glancing at Coll. “He wanted to achieve more efficiency and less wastage, that’s what the chief doctor said.”

“Was the closure carried out?”

“No,” said the man, standing up straighter. “We went on strike. All of us. Doctors, nurses, technicians, ambulance drivers, janitors - everyone! The mayor sent in the Peacekeepers, but they knew they didn’t want to escalate too far. Everyone knew that the other Districts were rebelling openly, so they didn’t want to provoke us. We were beaten up, of course, but they backed down eventually. Our hospital is still functioning, and the blood bank is providing blood for the entire county!”

An old woman gave a lengthy overview of the suppression of Rebel activity in the Capitol. Fifteen years old when the First Rebellion had begun and seventeen when it ended, she wove an endless tale of fear and anxiety in a quiet voice.

“My wife was born and raised in Eleven,” she began. “She moved to the Capitol to attend university. Things were already bad; she was in the last cohort of District people who were allowed entry into the Capitol. We met and fell in love.” She sighed, adjusting the thick glasses she wore. “As the Rebellion was being crushed, we found out that everyone from the Districts who lived in the Capitol was to be deported.” Irma felt dread at the thought of the witness rehashing what they all already knew from the documents that had been read. “We bribed an official to overlook our ages and got married, which saved my Heather from deportation. Many people did something similar, and as far as I know, ten or so are still alive.”

“We immediately joined a local rebel group, though, in truth, we were nothing more than a small group of confused and angry children. During the first few Games, we participated in the Marches of the Disapproving.” How odd, to hear documents from a bygone age brought to life by this little old woman with thick glasses. “Eventually, it became too dangerous.”

“I did not come here to hear my grandma’s boring stories,” Oldsmith whispered loudly. “Will she ever get to the point?”

Fortunately, the Chair soon broke in to tell the witness that the Tribunal already knew the background. It went smoother from there, though Irma winced every time the propaganda machine was mentioned.

“In April 64, I was unexpectedly forced to retire,” the former deputy Minister of Agriculture finished his thankfully brief testimony about the purge he had lived through. “First, a close personal friend of mine went missing without trace, and then the Minister of Agriculture of the time, Cloelia Radiant, died of a heart attack despite being only fifty-five with no pre-existing heart conditions. I took this to be a sign and handed in my resignation the day of the funeral.”

“Does the prosecution wish to ask any more questions...does the defense wish to ask questions?”

“Were you directly threatened at any point?” Talvian’s lawyer asked.

“No, though to one of my position, disappearances and deaths of friends and close colleagues were warning enough.”

“What sort of pension did you receive?”

“A ministerial one, because Snow wanted to pretend that my retirement had been voluntary.”

“Afterwards, were you invited to state functions?”

“Yes, for the same reason.”

“And what of the others you claim were forcibly retired?”

“They, too, were treated as if the retirements had been voluntary. Of course, the ones arrested-”

“Witness, I ask you only about your own experiences. After your retirement, did you ever appear publicly and give interviews?”

“Yes.” Irma smiled slightly. That particular bit had been cooked up with Dr. Baer’s help, who had done the research. She was by far the ablest of them all, though she did not interfere with the purely military matters, which were Dr. Wreath’s domain.

“And were you allowed to speak out against your retirement?” Digging up that particular segment had taken days.

“Yes, but-”

“And were you allowed to directly state, on the television, that your retirement had not been voluntary?”

“Yes.” The lawyer didn’t let him explain that it had been on the sort of channel where people claimed that there were mesmeric forces controlling the government, continuing the cross-examination with no pause.

Dovek and Oldsmith were miming applause. How could a deputy minister be so clumsy with words? It was a miracle he hadn’t managed to mortally offend Snow at some point, if this was how he composed himself in a difficult conversation. Or had retirement not been too good for him?

The witness was completely covered up. They walked towards the witness stand pulling a black scarf closer around their face with one hand, and held a child of five or six by the hand with another. A folder was under one of their arms. After what looked like a brief argument between them and an MP, the child was handed over to the MP and the young person gracefully took the witness stand. Only a pair of dark glasses could be seen, everything else was loose, black fabric. In an adult, gender-neutral voice, they swore to tell the truth and only the truth. Irma glanced at Cotillion, who looked ready. Dr. Aurelius was hovering nearby with a weird expression on his face.

“Witness, please state your name, age, and address.” The words were the same as always, but there was a subtle hint of something else in them.

The witness pulled up their scarf where it was threatening to show a part of their face. “I’m Subject 102-43 and I was created on the second of May, sixty-one,” they said in an even voice. “I live in the Institute for Genetic Research, Wing One, Room Three.”

Irma pressed herself into the wall of the dock, away from Cotillion. Blatt and Lux, who flanked her, were also trying to lean away. Subject 102-43? This was a human mutt. The documents had been vague, but this...this was a real person. Real people, if the child the youth had been with was also from the program.

“Witness, do you have any other name you call yourself?” The prosecutor from Thirteen sounded slightly pained.

The youth shimmied around in the witness stand. “Um, no? Should I? Well, Technician Antus calls me ‘PhD’ sometimes, because I’m his PhD - get it? - but that’s a nickname, not a name. Well, he usually calls me ‘Dee’ for short, but that’s also a nickname.”

“That is no issue. Witness, do you recognize any of these people?” Irma exhaled in relief. She had never stepped foot into the Institute, had never even suspected that it was dedicated to anything beyond mutts for the Games or perhaps particularly cruel experiments done on criminals.

“Your Honor,” the youth said, “I can’t perceive things that are at a distance in that level of detail. Could you ask them to speak or something? Even if they just said ‘Hello’, that would be enough.” Irma realized that the youth was either vision-impaired or blind. She had an unpleasant feeling that there was something more sinister to this than an accident or just being born that way.

The request was granted, and the defendants were ordered to go up to the microphone one by one and count to five. They dutifully clambered over each other and did as ordered. The youth’s reaction to Cotillion was terrifying. “Oh!” they said, sitting up straighter and dropping their hands in their lap. “That’s Godmother! Sorry, Your Honor, I meant that’s Director Cotillion!”

“I’m confused,” Dovek said to Cotillion. “You already had six children. Why did you need more?”

The witness recognized Talvian, and said that she had once visited and asked about the program the witness was in. Given what Talvian’s old job had been, Irma was afraid to find out more about the program. The rest of them were not recognized by the youth, and the testimony continued.

“If I may ask, Witness, would you be willing to show your face? It would greatly help in understanding the situation.”

The youth crumpled again. “Um, alright,” they said hesitantly, adjusting the huge shawl they were wearing. In a sudden move, they tore off their veil and sunglasses, and Irma nearly screamed in terror.

The youth was an albino and bald, but Irma barely noticed that. She was staring at the face. The eyeless face. The youth had no eyelids, no eyebrows, nothing whatsoever, only smooth, pale skin where eyes should be, but they still stared. Stared straight at the dock, at Cotillion, who was the only one of the defendants who did not look shocked. Even Talvian looked taken aback. Krechet clung to the wall surrounding the dock so tightly, Irma was afraid he’d break it. Irma heard a collective intake of breath from the crowd. Someone actually cried out in shock.

There was a strange sound. The youth was holding their head in their hands, and was sobbing. “I was supposed to be scary,” they said in a thick voice. Could someone with no tear glands cry? “That’s what they always told me. I strike dread into people with a single glance.” They wiped at their nose with a sleeve and opened up the folder, running their hands down a piece of paper before putting it back. Everyone was awkwardly trying to move away from Cotillion. The youth paused, taking deep breaths.

“There were a hundred of us created,” the youth said in a more confident tone. “Well, not really created, at that point. I don’t know. Anyway, seventy-one were born, ten lived to one year of age, and I was the only one to make it to two, and indeed, the only one who ever left intensive care. So the project was a failure.” The youth sounded extremely calm, but then again, this was just their life to them. Irma had known that experiments were being done on humans, but she had thought they were criminals or something. Not custom-made babies.

“A hundred embryos created - with what characteristics?” How was the prosecutor remaining so calm?

“I do not have eyeballs or optic nerves. Also, I’m bald, albino, and intersex for some reason. I’m not sure what Doctor Dacien was thinking. But I don’t mind being me. Except when people are scared of me. Oh, and I can echolocate, but that wasn’t on purpose. I figured it out when I was little, and the technicians just ran with it.”

But...why? Why mess around with humans like that? Why create a child, a tiny, living, breathing person, just to inspire dread?

Irma felt herself shutting down.

“Do you know the full name of this Doctor Dacien?”

“Yeah. Lucian Dacien. I think he started out with animal mutts and tried to go into hybrids, but they failed as always, so he shifted to human mutts full-time. I think it was because someone committed suicide. Again.”

“Could you describe the involvement of Defendant Talvian in the program?”

“She turned up from time to time, to talk to Director, I mean Defendant - is that right? - Cotillion. She met me a few times, but I always had to wear dark glasses and a scarf to not scare her. I overheard a bunch of their conversations, because they’d go into the Director’s office and leave me on the couch outside. They complained about how all the others died and how I was terrible at fighting and useless. Also, they talked about the animal mutt program a lot, and talked about whether a mutt that did really well in the Games be used for other purposes. I’m not sure what other purposes. Sorry.”

“Do you know if Defendant Blues was aware of the human mutt programs?”

“I don’t know? I think she was only mentioned a few times. She said some sort of animal mutt was needed, or something, and a bunch of technicians were complaining that it was too short-notice.”

“Please describe the responsibilities of Defendant Cotillion.”

“Well, she was the Director of the IGR. She was the godmother of all the human mutts. She was really nice, always brought us candy when we did something well. She’s the first person I remember. Whenever we did something new, she always wanted to know. Everything was recorded. We mostly lived in dorms, and she would visit and tell us stories and about the Games and whatnot. Thing is, she was also the one who decided if someone was useless. Like, the useless Avoxes, they could just be sent on to sewer maintenance or something-”

“What was the role of Avoxes in the program?”

“They were the wombs, and that was basically it. If one miscarried too often, she’d be fired, and nobody wanted to be fired because this was a really good position. Like, they got excellent healthcare, nobody ever died as a result of pregnancy. Well, I mean, that was normal for the Capitol, but the District people probably don’t know. And they were mostly defectors who got caught and Rebels and whatnot, so it must have seemed like a good position. When I was little, I wanted to be an Avox, because they seemed to have nice lives to me, but then I found out I don’t even have external genitalia, only gonads that don’t really work properly. Anyway, it was the interns who raised us. I heard that normal people are birthed and raised by the same person, so I’m just clarifying. I had a really nice intern, his name was Intern Antus. Well, he was only an intern for a few years, he got promoted to Technician. Most of the other human mutts weren’t so lucky, even the special ones who had their own. The interns kept on running away to the Rebellion or quitting or relocating to the plants department. By the way, what happened to Technician Antus? He was really nice. He was never scared of me and always told me I looked pretty, but some of the other human mutts called me creepy.”

“Is that Severus Antus?”

“Yeah.”

“He is currently in custody. Please continue with your description of Defendant Cotillion’s role. You were mentioning how she decided what to do with those individuals considered useless.”

“Really? That’s nice. Can I meet him again? I mean, he’s basically my dad, if I’m understanding what that is correctly. Anyway, the Director would evaluate everyone on their nineteenth birthday and decide what to do with them. If they were special, they had to pass a test, and if they did, they’d be used for something. Basically, there were two types of special - special as in unique, and special as in useful for something. I was both, so it might be confusing. Anyway, if they failed, they would be used for experiments and die, just like the people stolen from hospitals and prisons and the non-special ones. I wasn’t really scared, though, because Doctor Dacien told me once I could be totally useless and still pass because my face is so scary.”

“Does this mean that some human mutts were created to not be useful?”

“Oh, yeah, that was most of them. Doctor Dacien and his friends really liked to mess around and create random crap. I think they started out with mice but moved on to humans even though the gestational period is way longer because they wanted to make cool stuff. All the Doctors just wanted to have fun. The Director was always yelling at them for wasting resources that could have been used on making useful stuff, like more of me. She really wanted to create an actual human-animal intermediary, but the Doctors kinda gave up on that pretty quick. They said they wanted to push the boundary, not beat their heads against it. That was five years ago in the Director’s office, by the way. There should be a record. The officer with the weird voice told me you have all the files. Anyway, the useless mutts would be used in experiments until they died.”

“What was the role of the technicians and interns?”

“Well, I already said that the interns raised the human mutts. They washed and dressed us when we were little and whatnot. Like, Technician Antus raised me pretty much by himself. He was an intern then. Anyway, sometimes they said weird things, and we’d be punished if we repeated them. Like, they told us that the Games were evil and that District Thirteen existed. The Director had one publicly hanged after she put up anti-Snow leaflets everywhere. They were even in Braille, so I could read them. It was nice of her to do it just for me; all the other human mutts could see. The interns were mostly really nice, even if they were sad. The technicians were more important. They were actual professionals, and the interns were mostly PhD students. The technicians worked in the labs and did experiments on us. There was always someone getting fired because they refused to do something, but you had to be politically proper to get hired, so there were less anti-Snow people there. Or maybe they were super-sneaky and sent info to the Rebellion while pretending to be politically proper. The Director was always worried about that.”

“What sort of experiments were performed?”

“Oh, all sorts of stuff. I don’t know much about the experiments done on useless subjects, but it was mostly just killing them slowly and in different ways. The clones would be put in the same painful situation, and they’d see if there was a difference in how they reacted. They liked to take those of us with handicaps and force us to do things that were difficult for us. Like, they made me try to tell where a line drawn with pencil was on a piece of paper. Or they made me run around an unfamiliar room. They were mostly focused on making me some sort of super-soldier, but I was really bad at everything. Like, I couldn’t shoot because I can’t perceive things that are that far away, and it was super-hard for them to make me good at hand-to-hand because I have very little testosterone. More than a normal female, but less than a normal male. Anyway, I’d say I’m pretty good for my size, but not what they wanted. And they wanted to teach me how to skulk around and scare people so I could freak out enemies of the state, but they also didn’t want to let me out of the compound so I just ran around the halls trying to ambush people until I gave the Deputy Director a heart attack when I jumped out of his wardrobe at night. He survived, but I was confined to the human mutt wing from then on. I mean, it was his fault for not locking his apartment door, anyway.”

“Do you know the reasons for your other features that are rare in the general population?”

“What, like the baldness? No. Well, the baldness and albinism might have been to make me scarier. Or maybe it was an accident. Weird stuff always happened when a project first started. Not sure about being intersex, though. When I’m dressed, I look pretty normal neck-down. I think Doctor Dacien just wanted to see how much random crap he could shove into one body.”

“When you say ‘doctor’, what do you mean by that? Were they all medical doctors?”

“Dunno. It was just ‘Doctor this’ and ‘Doctor that’. I think Doctor Dacien was a geneticist. I mean, why else would he be creating human mutts?”

“Were you ever scared?”

“Like, ever? Well, I was often scared when I was told to run in an unfamiliar room, because I would often collide with stuff. I broke my nose once. If I ran slowly, the technicians and doctors yelled at me, so I had to be fast. And I was super-scared when I found out about what happens to the special human mutts, but then Doctor Dacien told me I was safe, so I stopped being scared for myself, but there were all those other human mutts and I was scared for them all the time. And when I gave the Deputy Director a heart attack, I was also really scared they’d shoot me or something. By the way, what happened to the Deputy Director?”

“He is in custody awaiting trial.”

“Well, let him sleep with the light turned on, please. And don’t have me testify, because he might have another heart attack. He always threatened to have one when someone told him to visit the human mutt wing. Anyway, the most scared I’ve been was when the Rebellion was coming. All the doctors ran off, and most of the technicians and interns. It was just the few who remained watching over us and stuff. Technician Antus had to deal with the little ones and I barely saw him. The older ones had to help out. I got to watch over Achik, he’s the one over there. He has a name because that’s the point of some experiment someone was doing. Anyway, I watch over Achik because the Rebellion sent in some people, but we’re mostly still just kinda doing the same old thing, going to school and stuff, but all the interns and technicians got arrested and there’s pretty much nobody watching over everyone. Some of the human mutts got adopted, but not the ones with the weird abnormalities. Everyone’s just running around doing whatever. I think I’ll adopt Achik as soon as I move out. Your Honor, where do I go to get a job?”

“The Chair does not deal with such issues, Witness, but I’m sure someone will help you and Achik. I have no more questions.”

“Does the prosecution wish to ask more questions...does the defense wish to ask questions? Thank you, Witness, you are free to go.”

“Okay!”

Someone was poking Irma. It was an MP armed with a truncheon. She got up on hesitant feet and walked where she was led, dazed. The youth’s words were running through her mind. Human mutt. Human mutt. Human mutt... Back in her cell, she lay on the cot, trying to gather her thoughts. But...what? What was there to say to something like this? A child who had spent their entire life in a compound, raised to believe their only purpose in life was to terrify, raised by apathetic researchers and confused interns. This was the end. There was no way any of them were getting alive out of here. She wanted to pace, but couldn’t even sit up.

The door opened, and the psychologist stepped in. Irma motioned him towards the chair, and he sat, clipboard at the ready. “I would like to know your reaction-”

“To that witness?” she said. “No. I can’t do this anymore. It’s too much. They’re killing us.” Dr. Aurelius watched her. “There are no words for this. Did you hear their style of speech? Like any normal teenager in an informal setting, but with a lot of technical vocabulary. They were raised by interns, after all, and never taught how to behave in different settings. Such a little thing to notice, I know, but it’s just - I don’t know, A foolish thing to notice, I understand.”

“No, no,” said Dr. Aurelius. “It jumped out at me, too.”

“It’s just...the poor children.”

“Indeed.”

“I do not understand,” Irma said, wringing her hands. “I just do not understand. Why am I being tried with people like Cotillion? This is- I don’t have the words.” She sagged back. “Please. I need to think about this on my own.”

“I will be back later today,” said Dr. Aurelius, and left. The door slammed shut, leaving Irma alone with her thoughts.

The next day, the torture continued. An entire movie was shown about the IGR, and just when everyone thought they could take no more, an elderly technician testified about an experiment he had been ordered to participate in.

“That was a long time ago,” he said, “but I remember it like yesterday. A room full of children starving to death.” He wiped at his eyes. “They told me they were doing research on how long it took someone to die when given a certain amount of calories. They wanted to know how much they could shrink tesserae by. The children didn’t cry, because they had no energy to cry. They just lay there. I remember their tiny hands. Their fingers felt like twigs when I tried to comfort them.”

Lunch was a dismal affair that day. Coll got into a screaming fight with Dovek. A journalist tried to get too close, and Krechet threw his tea at them. Everyone laughed hysterically. By the time Irma calmed down enough to continue eating, her stomach and cheeks hurt.

Krechet was banned from tea for two weeks, but all of the guards warmed up to him from that moment on and began to offer him tea at every turn. Irma heard a rumour that when one of the researchers found out about the incident, they began to laugh uncontrollably, and couldn’t stop for a solid ten minutes.

“Hey, Slice,” the guard whispered, “could you sign this for me?”

Irma took the brochure from her. It showed the mugshots of the twenty-four defendants, as well as the crimes they were being accused of. Under that was a small blank space that enterprising guards had realized could be used for signatures.

Several of the others had scratched out the charges on which they were being tried, or written pithy one-liners. Irma simply circled the words ‘Count One’, wrote ‘Makes no sense even in theory’, and scrawled her signature. The soldier smiled when Irma gave it back and handed a cup of coffee through the square hole. A complete set of signatures fetched a sizable sum of money on the black market. Equally popular were the cards that had a diagram of the courtroom printed on them, with the defendants and judges labelled.

The guards were a highly unprofessional lot. Irma had heard that Warden Vance was unhappy with how little support he was getting. When he got combat veterans for his unit they tended to go home as soon as possible, and the inexperienced call-ups were incapable of taking anything seriously. They blasted songs in the middle of the night, and while the thought of Lark having to listen to Evening Loudmouth put a smile on Irma’s face, not being able to fall asleep sent her into homicidal fantasies. Only when she had had a meltdown and complained to the warden while crying had the endless singing of Don’t Lock Me Away, Deep in the Heart of Texas, and many other songs both modern and classic finally ceased, if only from twenty onwards.

The chief warden was disliked by the guards because of his tendency to micromanage. They preferred duty in other wings, where he didn’t hover as much. His deputy’s only qualification for the job was that she was female, and thus could be present when the women were being searched. She was nowhere near as demanding, and had amassed her own collection of autographs from every single person held in the jail, from the key criminals to the witnesses whose trials wouldn’t be starting for years, as well as from many of the famous witnesses who weren’t detained.

Vance and Tiller were responsible for the entire prison, and constantly complained about the workload. When given the assignment, three researchers had appeared to give them a memo with extremely cryptic advice before slinking back to the library where they allegedly lived. The wardens had then complained that they were fully aware of the danger of suicide, given how many potential defendants had taken their own lives during the last phase of the fighting, and claimed that they didn’t need advice from some legal historian of all things on how to set up security measures. Irma, however, suspected that she owed the inability to sleep in any way but on her back with face facing the door and hands above the blanket to the memo, as she had never heard of such an absurd arrangement before in her life and neither had anyone else, including Vance and Tiller. Stranger yet had been the demand that air conditioning be fixed as soon as possible.

The researchers had managed to stick their noses into everyone’s business, warning the psychologists about the danger of faked mental illness and telling the Inter-District Committee whom to indict and not indict between frantic calls to Ankara and Buenos Aires to demand documents that nobody had ever heard of and of which no English translations existed. They cryptically referred to various individuals as being “literally Itagaki” and “a slightly less homicidal version of Ohlendorf”, and allegedly had insisted to Paylor that the collapse of the trial would lead to immediate revanchism.

All hopes of the trial falling apart were gone by now, though. The Tribunal kept on going as if the Districts weren’t constantly teetering on the brink of falling out, month by month until the steady drip of atrocities threatened to drive Irma to insanity. It was looking like the trial would take half a year, at least, and several other IDC trials had already begun, to the researchers’ relief. Other countries were sending in humanitarian aid to help with the food shortages, letting the new government continue with the trials unimpeded. Most of the defendants were by now in agreement that something of this sort was necessary in any case, though Irma was sure that she wasn’t the only one hoping for something to split the Districts irreconcilably.

Despite the tensions, an entire industry seemed to be popping up around the trial like mushrooms after a rain. Journalists from all over the world bought souvenirs from guards and tried to sneak inside the prison to get a photo, or even better, an interview. Meersten was overwhelmed with soldiers begging him for funny photos and videos even as he sorted and labelled endless photos for the Evidence Division. Chime, the former archivist in the Presidential Archives, had spent months finding this or that document for the prosecution and defense teams. When the IDC had discovered that she was spending hours peddling Meersten’s photos practically on the steps of the Justice Building to pay her rent, she was immediately billeted in the Witness House, where former Peacekeeper officers stayed in the same room as survivors from Twelve without coming to blows somehow.

Irma had seen photos of the mini-markets that sprung up anywhere soldiers were stationed, where they could buy anything from a prostitute to hot soup to fake Peacekeeper medals. Far from resisting to the last breath, the people of the Capitol had instead chosen to grovel at the feet of the triumphant Rebels, hoping that it would help them. Given the sort of retribution they had all feared during the beginning of the assault on the Capitol, it had somewhat worked. Anti-government Capitolians of all sorts, from unorganized Rebels to civil servants who had done everything they could to soften cruel decrees, had leapt to greet the invaders as liberators. While many individual interactions between conquerors and conquered had been positive, resulting in a much less harsh general perception of the Capitol, the situation on the ground had not been so rosy.

Soldiers had been under strict orders to not touch civilians, and indeed the few cases of rape and murder had been swiftly and harshly punished, but the destructive energy had simply been funneled into looting everything that wasn’t nailed down and bringing a crowbar for the rest. The courtrooms being used for the several IDC trials in progress were quite possibly the only places in the Capitol that had air conditioning, thanks to the threat from the researchers that pauses in the trial would somehow result in the end of everything.

According to the guards themselves, everything of use had been piled onto trains and hovercraft and taken home, to rebuild. How the Capitol was supposed to rebuild when the very rubble was being shipped to Twelve was not a question they answered. They preferred to swap stories about the most outrageous loot their commanding officers had surprised their families with, from bookcases to bathtubs to entire greenhouses. The ordinary guards had been forced to settle for lightbulbs literally screwed out of stairwell ceilings, non-perishable food, clothes, and electronics. If they were even halfway truthful, then there probably wasn’t a single wristwatch or phone left in the Capitol.

Besides loot, the guards loved to discuss the day’s proceedings, quoting particularly audacious quips by Dovek and Oldsmith over and over. As Irma sat at her table, writing a brief guideline for her co-defendants, she could hear the guards laughing. She had come up with the idea of writing a guide to public speaking after hearing endless complaints about the shouting Peacekeepers. Putting her experience to good use, Irma was now writing down some advice to pass it on to the others, as many of them had never spoken publicly in such high-stakes situations before, and she didn’t want them to make a bad impression.

“Hey, Slice, what are you writing?” a guard asked through the slot.

“Public speaking advice, for the others.”

“The historians will die laughing,” the guard said cryptically. “Hey, can you sign this dollar bill for me?”

Irma complied, receiving a large chocolate bar for her troubles. She put it in her pocket, to share with the others. As the presentation of the evidence dragged on, it was becoming more and more clear that Irma was in a class of her own, and she felt like she had to do something to cheer up the others.

Sitting in the dock was unbearably boring, horror piling on top of horror as documents were read into evidence and witnesses testified until nobody could care anymore. The first time Irma had seen footage of starving children it had been with disbelief, the tenth witness was heard with sadness, and when the hundredth document about starvation in the Districts was read, the defendants listened to it while being more concerned with what would be for dinner. Irma was also keeping track of who made how many quips. So far, Dovek was in the lead by far, Oldsmith right on his heels, and the rest had no chance of catching up. She herself was last, as in everything else they kept track of.

Irma wondered what prosecutor would be going the next day. They had just finished with the systematic abuse of the Victors, and it had been almost embarrassing to see the unfortunates struggle to recall names and dates and pass off outrageous gossip as fact. The defense lawyers, led by Dr. Baer, had made short work of their testimony. It was looking like their cases would be permanently shelved, despite the fact that it had been enough to guarantee death for Kirji, according to all of the journalists. The upcoming day, though, would be less enjoyable for Talvian, Dovek, and, especially, Krechet. Irma was torn between not wanting to know the details of the Death Squad’s operation, and just being glad that she had had nothing to do with any of it.

“Hey, you want to give us a song?” a female voice shouted in the corridor.

“Which one?” a male voice replied.

“The one with the ‘hey-hey’!” a gender-neutral voice shouted back.

“Alright!”

Irma sighed, putting down her pen and rubbing her temples.

”Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, ho!” the man began.

”Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, ho!” the others replied.

Hey, ha-a, ha, ha, hey, hey, ho!

Hey, ha-a, ha, ha, hey, hey, ho!

Hey, hey, ha, ha, hey, hey, hey!

Hey, hey, ha, ha, hey, hey, hey!

Hey, ha-a, ha, ha, hey, hey, ho!

Hey, ha-a, ha, ha, hey, hey, ho!

Irma prepared to hum along to the song.

Hail, hail, we are here

Rowing through the backwaters

Spirited in song are we

Sailing through to victory!

Keep the rhythm, song, and beat

Through the splashing of the oars

Moving hands and moving feet

Yes, we will succeed!

The chorus began anew, all of the guards joining in.

Our boat is sailing fast

Like the river to the sea

Like the trotting of the mare

Galloping to victory!

Lads and lasses in the fields

Beat the drum and sound the horn

Get the people out to see

This, our victory!

“Oh, could you be silent for just an hour?” Lux demanded. “One can’t hear themselves think with this racket!” The former Commander-in-Chief felt personally insulted by the lack of discipline among the forces that had defeated him, and had recently acquired the ability to stand up for himself instead of simply replying ‘yes, sir’ to everything.

Bright didn’t twitch as the prosecutor, an extremely elderly woman from Eight, fired off question after question, but she did look like she wanted to crumple. By now, Irma could tell what her co-defendants were feeling just by looking at them. None of the witnesses Bright had called had helped her much. The Peacekeeper officers had predictably deafened the courtroom with their shouting, annoying everyone and driving Irma to tears. Bright, however, was much quieter, thanks to Irma’s advice.

“What was your reaction to being given the order shown in Document 08-481?” This was what felt like the millionth document with her signature on it. So far, the prosecutor had just asked questions that went nowhere.

“I disapproved,” Bright said in a steely voice. “This was not pacification; it was pouring fuel onto the fire.”

“How did you express your disapproval?” the prosecutor asked. This was a trick, Irma could see it. The instructions had come down from Lux himself, and none of the Peacekeepers dared say a bad word about him. But when was the prosecutor going to spring the trap? Looking around the dock, Irma could see that everyone just wanted this to end.

“How could I have?” Bright answered a question with a question. “It was a direct order.”

“But why did you obey?”

There was a pause. Everyone sat up, digesting the simple question. Lux, who was going to go immediately after her, looked sick as he continued to take notes. Irma fidgeted with the pencil she was holding. Grass pretended to be perusing some documents, but was in reality reading a newspaper.

“I do not understand,” Bright said, sounding confused more than anything else. “All my life, I was raised to believe in duty and loyalty. In such circumstances, the idea of disobedience to direct authority was tantamount to treason.”

“Even if ordered to shoot children?”

“The order was given by superior authority. The question of personal scruples was irrelevant, as we had sworn obedience to the people who had issued those orders.” The answer was given in a rehearsed tone.

The prosecutor held up a small book. “Is there not a paragraph in the Peacekeeper’s handbook that directly says that only lawful orders must be obeyed?”

Bright nodded, suddenly looking much younger than her fifty-four years. “But what is the law?” she asked in a high voice. “When we were instructed, we barely went over that passage.”

The prosecutor didn’t bat an eye. “Is there or is there not such a paragraph?”

“There is.” Bright glanced at the dock, looking for reassurance from Lux.

The cross-examination abruptly shifted to how deserters had been punished under her command. Irma realized that this was an attempt to show that disobedience had been easier and more widespread than Bright was suggesting. Several days later, Bright ended up admitting responsibility for the orders she had signed.

“Yes,” she said, far too loudly, “there is such a thing as taking obedience too far. That is my guilt, that I was not able to tell the two apart. Our loyalty was abused and betrayed. We were taught to become the executioners of our own people. I am ashamed to admit that every single positive quality I ever strove to uphold in myself was twisted into something I can only recoil in horror at.”

As the days passed, Blues and Coll became more and more convinced that they needed to take responsibility, and by the time Blues took the stand, half the world was aware that something interesting would happen. It didn’t happen during the direct examination, though, and as the cross-examination began, Irma started to feel like it had all been a bluff.

“I was not responsible for what went on during the Games, especially the ones that came before my time,” the former Head Engineer insisted.

“And what of the ones that happened during your time?” That was a mistake. Irma had by now picked up a basic maxim - that a lawyer should never ask a question they did not know the answer to. This one was so vague, Blues would be able to say anything. Irma wondered how the lawyer would be able to come back.

Blues looked utterly calm. “I wasn’t involved in the planning, only the execution. However, I am still in some way responsible for all of the deaths of the Tributes in the arenas I worked on, the same way that I bear partial responsibility for any crimes that may have been committed by those under my command.”

As the lawyer seized on the ‘partial responsibility’ bit, throwing what looked like kilograms of documents about the mistreatment of forced labourers at the Tribunal, Irma winced and looked down. It was always painful to watch her co-defendants be humiliated. Glancing to the side, she saw that Coll was leaning forward, hands clasped together tightly. He looked resigned.

A few minutes later, it was time for lunch. As always, Irma sat down at the very end. Next to her sat Coll, and Blues sat on his side. “I was very impressed by your performance this morning,” Coll said. “You have inspired me.”

“Thank you, Mr. Coll.” Blues poked at her vegetable stew with a spoon.

“Oh, no, no, call me Theodosius,” Coll replied.

Blues looked up, looking utterly perplexed. “Alright, then. I’m Donna.” She stuck out her hand, and Coll shook it. Irma wondered how long this new friendship would last for. Oldsmith started criticizing Blues for breaking up the united front, and she fired back with vehemence. Irma ate her stew.

Thread turned out to be wilier than Bright. Even when confronted with an entire thirty-minute movie of himself personally hanging and whipping alleged saboteurs, poachers, and Rebels all over Eleven and Twelve, he did not crack, emphasizing the legality of his acts.

“You see,” he said, “if I had let subordinates carry out the sentences, then they’d be the ones here!”

Coll ended up being even more creative, taking partial responsibility for everything the government had done during his time as Minister. Irma wondered why he was so insistent on shoving his neck into the noose.

“How did I do?” Irma asked Dr. Baer the evening after her cross-examination was over.

“You did well.”

Irma tapped her fingers against the table. “They made me out to be Kren’s shadow, or something like that.” No matter how much she had tried, the prosecutor had twisted her words inside and out. She had made her sound like a liar even when she had told the exact truth!

“Nevertheless, you did much, much better than most.” That could be chalked up to the fact that there was simply nothing to throw at Irma.

“What are my chances?” Irma asked directly. She looked her lawyer right between the eyes, heart hammering.

“With the way the trial was conducted? I would put any amount of money on your acquittal.”

Irma found that hard to believe. Even though most of them had had to admit that the trial was scrupulously fair, there was no way that one of the key criminals would be simply let go.

“Hi,” Irma said awkwardly.

“Hi,” Mom, Dad, and Uncle Ant replied in unison. This was only their second visit. During the break for New Year’s not too long ago, they had also visited, together with what had felt like her entire extended family. The guards had been unimpressed with all the children running around (Blues and Coll had eleven children twelve and under put together), and had limited the amount of relatives for the next time. However, they would be able to visit again the next day, and the next, as the judges deliberated.

“How are you?”

Uncle Ant sighed. “We’re fine. How are you?”

“As fine as I could be given the circumstances.”

There was a pause. Uncle Ant chuckled. “We saw you on the television,” Mom said. “They’ll have to acquit you. It would be crazy to do anything else.”

“I know that,” Irma said with a weak smile, running a hand over her hair. “But do they?”

They all laughed at that, but it sounded more like they were crying. “You’re witty all of a sudden,” Dad said. He twirled a braid around his finger as Irma ran a hand over her head.

“That’s nice.”

Next to Irma, Blues was horrifying her parents by telling them that she knew she was going to be executed.

“How else am I supposed to respond to the boredom?” Irma tried to keep the levity going. “By my last count, Dijksterhuis’ name was mispronounced two hundred and thirty-six times, and only two prosecutors were able to consistently say it correctly.” Dijksterhuis leaned over to glare at her before looking back at his teenage son.

Uncle Ant laughed. “When you get back, we’ll never be gloomy again.”

Irma wondered if she ever would. She felt sick at the thought.

For the last time, they took their seats in the dock. The judgement had been read the previous day, and now it was time for the verdicts. Irma sat up slightly, still leaning against the wall, and tried to fidget with her hair, which was too short to fidget with. In her pocket was the breakfast they had been given. Irma wondered what she’d be feeling when she ate it.

The Chair began to read out the verdicts, one person at a time. Guilty, guilty, guilty. Every repetition of the word hit her like a gut punch, making her want to curl up. She knew she was innocent, but the hope was now replaced with the sickening fear that they might not care.

What if they found her guilty? Would they hang her? Irma’s mind refused to consider the possibility, but there was no other possibility. She regretted her old pessimism, wishing that she had at least gotten the illusion of life to cling to for a few months. She wanted to scream at the Chair to just get on with it. One by one, her co-defendants were all found guilty, and then it was her turn. She listened, heart hammering, as the Chair practically repeated the indictment word-for-word, though he did soften up by the end and say that she had been nowhere near as powerful as it could have been expected from a minister’s deputy. He paused, and Irma braced herself, feeling lightheaded.

“Irma Slice, you are found not guilty of the charges brought against you and will be released once the Tribunal adjourns.”

A wave of relief rushed through Irma, followed by the harsh slap of the realization that they wouldn’t just let her go like that. Still, though, not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty. Even they themselves admitted it! She wasn’t guilty! Now, no matter what they did, they’d have no justification in hanging her. Irma realized that she would live.

She took out the wrap from her pocket and ate it. Who knew what they’d do to her later, best to eat while she could. Everyone was staring at her. Slowly, they began to offer handshakes and congratulations. Irma tried to thank them, but found that her heart wasn’t in it. After all, these people would be dead soon.

When they were taken out, Irma was drawn aside and ordered to pack her things. Still wearing her court clothes, Irma did as she was told. When she left her cell holding her box, she was arrested again. This time, she was put in the back of a police car and driven to a station. Her things were confiscated and she was searched, though she did get to keep her nice clothes. Irma sat down on the cot in the small, dingy cell, wondering what now. It was obvious that they were going to charge her all over again, and this time, the charges wouldn’t be so blatantly inapplicable to her.

She spent months in that cell waiting for her trial, but the actual trial took a single day. As Dr. Baer sipped her coffee and Irma tried to twirl her too-short hair, the jury filed into the courtroom, each of them looking more sleep-deprived than the previous.

“Of inciting hatred, guilty. Of hate speech, guilty. Of being an accessory to the implementation of the Hunger Games, guilty.” So they had found her broadcasts to be Games propaganda, then, even though she had never really mentioned them.

“Irma Slice, you are sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment and confiscation of property,” the judge read in a dead voice.

Chapter Text

Nine years. The prosecution had asked for ten. Irma glared at the jury. Who had decided that District people could sit in a jury of her peers, anyway? One of them glared back at her, and Irma dropped her eyes. A guard cuffed her and led her back to her cell. “You will be moved in a few hours,” she said, and left, slamming the door behind her.

Nine years. Almost a decade. Less than half than her luckiest co-defendants, and she would be serving it in the regular prison system, so at least there was that. Irma had no idea how prisons worked, aside from her own experiences and the testimony she had heard during the trial. Would she be kept locked up all day, like in Thirteen? She’d go insane if that happened. What would the food be like? The guards? Would she be allowed to be visited by family?

Her musings were broken off by the door opening. Irma was handcuffed and led to a minivan, where she was shackled to the floor and several other women. Soon, there were six of them, all younger than her, though it was Irma who felt like a fish out of water. They sat on the uncomfortable bench and fidgeted around as the cuffs bit into skin.

“Well,” one of them said, “at least we’re going to prison now.” She looked to be no older than twenty or twenty-two, with pale skin and brown hair.

Irma was taken aback. “What?” she asked. Wasn’t prison supposed to be worse?

“Have you never been to prison before?” the young woman asked sympathetically.

“Well, technically I was, but that’s because Thirteen doesn’t really differentiate between jail and prison,” Irma explained. Were these women common criminals or Games criminals like her?

Another woman, only a little bit older and with darker skin and hair, spoke up. “Well, it’s much nicer in prison, you’ll see. Especially with the reforms now.” The van began to move.

“I can’t wait to get my hair properly done,” said a thirty-something woman with hair like Irma’s, but much longer.

“You can get your hair done in prison?” Irma asked incredulously. “During my trial, they just buzz-cut it every once in a while.”

“How long was your trial?” asked the first woman.

“Well, the one that got me convicted was a day long, but my first one was nine months long, not counting the time I spent behind bars here and in Thirteen,” Irma explained. “Can you really watch television in prison? That’s awesome. When I was in Thirteen, they just kept me in this coffin-sized cell for weeks, twenty-four hours a day.”

The women looked shocked. “Did you steal food?” one of them asked with a distinct Thirteen accent. “I stole food a few times, but they just beat me for a day or so and then assigned me to the worst jobs.”

Irma shook her head. “No, it’s because I’m the most senior surviving propagandist.”

Everyone stared at her. Probably not Games criminals, then. The woman from Thirteen leaned back slightly, as if trying to get farther away from her. “It’s illegal to be a propagandist?” the pale young woman asked.

“No,” Irma explained, “they found me guilty of carrying out the Hunger Games, even though I just explained what was going on.”

“Huh,” the pale young woman said. “I had a cousin who was a political. He was smart, not like me.”

The ride became bumpier, and Irma grimaced as the cuffs bit deeper into her skin. It was impossible to hold on to the bench, and the only thing stopping her from falling off were the cuffs. She pushed up a cuff, and realized that she was bleeding. One of the women, light-skinned and with narrow eyes, looked down at the floor and sighed loudly. Fortunately, the ride was soon over. The six women were unshackled from the floor and led into a small, grey room, where they were photographed and made to sign a bunch of papers. Irma was pleasantly surprised to discover that they would be strip-searched separately, and not in front of each other. She was even happier when the woman performing the search handed her a small cup of delousing shampoo and told her to shower.

This was already shaping up to be much better than the trial. Irma quickly washed herself with the hot water, which stung her bloody wrists. She was then bandaged and allowed to get dressed in the provided clothes. Underwear, a long-sleeved shirt, thin trousers, and slip-on shoes, all of it light-grey and stamped with ‘Woodheights Corrections Institution’, the name of the prison she was in. It certainly sounded a lot better than ‘Inter-District Supermaximum Security Prison’, where eight of her co-defendants were now residing. The photograph of her on her ID badge, which was clipped to her chest, made her look about fourteen years old.

The six women were handed a stack of spare clothes, a towel, a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and a comb (everyone got one suited for their hair texture; prison was shaping up to be downright chill), as well as a blue armband for some reason. Another prisoner, a woman around Irma’s age, came in to explain the rules. They would all be staying in the minimum security wing, which meant they would be able to work and earn money and also attend classes.

The punishments for various infractions sounded very mild. Before, Irma had heard all sorts of jokes about being beaten in prison, but there was none of that here. Irma decided that she didn’t want to think about the conditions in the Supermax.

There were a variety of jobs they could do. Inside the prison they could clean, work in the cafeteria or the workshops, or teach classes, and outside they could work in reconstruction. Unskilled indoor work paid minimum wage and outdoor - a dollar more, but if you worked as a teacher or in admin that improved your chances at early release much more. They could sign up for classes after two months with no rule-breaking.

Then, the rules were finally explained, though they were mostly common sense. No fighting, no screaming at each other or the guards, no smuggling things in and out, no paying each other to do anything, no skipping work or class, no sex with the guards, no stealing, no drugs, no loud music or television playing, and a whole bunch of other stuff that Irma simply couldn’t keep in her mind. They were helpfully given a large document containing all the rules and regulations. “That armband means you’ve been here for less than two weeks, so that if you go to the wrong place or at the wrong time the guards will be more lenient.”

Irma flipped through the large document, taking it all in. She had been a Literature TA for a semester back in university. Maybe she could teach again here. Before that, though, maybe she could sign up for a reconstruction detail and earn some money. Her parents were pensioners, they’d appreciate it. “You can do pretty much whatever you want with your money.” Four of the other women grinned as they looked at each other, but the one from Thirteen just looked confused. “You can put it in a savings account - they’ll set one up for you - you can send it to family, and, of course, you can buy things at the commissary.” Irma looked at the brief list of things. Things were more expensive than they had been before, but not having to worry about rent or food really freed up her finances.

After the presentation was over, the six women were taken to their new cells with a reminder that their caseworker would meet with them in the next few days. As they walked, Irma stared around herself with awe. After Thirteen and the trial, it was hard to believe that normal prison was so...normal. Irma was pointed to cell MNS019, which already contained a woman about her age. She walked inside, awkwardly waving a greeting. “This cell is massive!” she exclaimed, taking it all in. There were real blankets on the two cots, there were two little cupboards and a stand for the television which was currently playing a rerun of an old show, and the toilet/sink had a curtain. Irma put her things on the free cot and stared around. Maybe prison wouldn’t be so bad after all.

“Hello, new roommate,” the other woman said. “I’m Kia. Where were you before this?” She had light skin and hair only a little bit more curly than Irma’s, but it was trimmed into a neat puff with a small braid at the front preventing it from getting in her face.

“I’m Irma. I’ve been all over. First I was in a basement in the suburbs, then I was in a torture cell in Thirteen, then I was in a Justice Building in the suburbs, then I was in lockup for a brief while, and now I’m here.” Now that she was saying it, it sounded completely crazy, even to her own ears.

Kia blinked. “Are you one of the Games people?” she asked.

“Uh, yes. I’m Irma Slice. You might have seen me on the television.”

“That explains it.” Noticing how Irma was staring at everything she added, “There’ve been reforms since the fighting ended - this place used to be maximum security, actually. Now, we’re paid minimum wage instead of being Chaterhan’s personal property, the guards don’t beat us up every chance they get, we take useful classes instead of having to listen to propaganda while doing work in our cells, and nobody’s dying of TB or typhus. Though if you like the conditions here, you must have been in the pits of hell before.”

Irma shrugged. “In Thirteen, I was kept in a cell so small, I could touch all of the walls simultaneously. The light was impossibly bright. During the trial, I had to sleep with my hands above my blankets even though it was freezing cold because the warden was paranoid about suicide. We were watched every second.”

“Well,” Kia said, “you’re here now. You can turn off the lights whenever you want - I personally like to watch television until twenty or twenty-one, but if you want, I can keep it muted.”

“That’s very nice of you,” Irma said. “Um, I was wondering, what am I supposed to do today?”

“We’re going for dinner soon, and then there will be two hours of rec time if you want. Were you explained how things work here?”

Irma held up the packet of rules and regulations. “Yeah,” she said, “but I bet there’s tons of stuff they didn’t include.”

“You bet,” Kia said with a laugh. “First thing - as soon as you can, buy flip-flops for the shower and conditioner. Where are you planning on working?”

“Outside for now, and then I was thinking about teaching. I was a TA back in university when I was working on my Master’s,” Irma explained.

Kia nodded appreciatively. “A TA? We’ll have to look into having you teach one of the advanced academic classes. Not that many people in here with a Master’s. When are you going to see your caseworker?”

“Soon, whatever that means.”

“Well, just keep in mind that the caseworkers are busy as fuck securing the release of those of us unjustly convicted under Snow. If yours doesn’t fall asleep halfway through the session, consider yourself lucky.”

Irma had never heard about that, though in hindsight, it made sense. Ninety percent of those convicted on some sort of property-damage charges had simply drawn an anti-Games slogan somewhere. “That makes sense. There were so many political prisoners, after all.”

“Not just political,” Kia said. “I was sent here after I killed a man who tried to rape me. Since I was poor and he was rich, here I am, twenty-five years later. I get out in sixteen days.” She sighed, lacing her fingers together.

“Yeah, that’s how it worked back then,” Irma said awkwardly. Connections had been everything under Snow. “So, uh, any more advice?”

“Don’t mess with anyone, but if they mess with you, don’t take any of their shit. Otherwise, they’ll harass you for forever. Most people here are chill, but you never know.” Irma gulped. She had wrestled back in highschool, but that had been more than twenty years ago. “Do you know anything about fighting?”

“Why would people want to fight me?” she asked. “Is it because I was a journalist with the government?”

“Partially,” Kia said. “All of the clear-cut politicals are out of here by now, but there’s plenty of people in here because of the regime”

“Is everyone going to know me?”

“Not on sight, but you were on the television constantly, and it’s probably all over the place that one of the key criminals is here.” Kia sat down on her cot, and Irma did likewise.

“I was found not guilty,” Irma grumbled. “And in any case, they took phrases out of context. I wasn’t some sort of firebrand agitator, burning with hate. That was Lark!” Kia said nothing.

“Um, what do you do here?” she asked, changing the topic.

Kia raised an eyebrow but still answered the question. “I work in the administration, running the classes. I got the afternoon off to help you get settled in. Also, it’s time for dinner.”

As they walked down the corridors, Irma felt more and more nervous. Would someone try to fight her? She tried to assume a self-assured pose, back straight, head up, hands by her sides. In the queue for dinner, a bunch of women waved at Kia. Clearly, she was quite popular here.

“A new roomie just weeks before release?” asked a pale woman in her mid-thirties with braids of the sort Irma had used to wear, though her hair was light-brown.

Kia smiled. “I’ll show her the ropes before peacing out. Irma, this is Katia. Katia, Irma.”

“I used to have braids like that,” Irma told Katia. She touched her messy short hair self-consciously. “If you want, you can sign up to have your hair done. We’ve got professionals here. Something about teaching people useful skills.” Irma remembered the woman in the van who was planning to have her hair done here. The idea of a hair salon in a prison still seemed strange, but Irma wasn’t complaining. “The wait list is two weeks long, though.”

“That sounds nice.” Before, Irma had pulled strings to let her family skip queues and wait lists. Two weeks had been several times shorter than anything they had had to deal with.

The queue slowly crept forward. Eventually, Irma was given a portion of vegetable stew (with sauce!!!), a wedge of loaf bread, a handful of canned fruit, and a cup of water. The stew turned out to taste infinitely better than during the trial, though the portion was still quite small, due to rationing. Irma sat at a long table with Kia, Katia, and a few others. Everyone knew who she was, and demanded stories.

“What were the guards like?”

“Not professional,” Irma said as she ate the stew. “They were all very young and swapped chocolate for autographs. Also, they blasted Don’t Lock Me Away at insane hours of the night, chatted with us constantly, and only stopped messing around when the warden was there.”

“We followed the trial on the television,” Katia said. “You deserved to be found not guilty. Why were you even there in the first place?”

“Because everyone more higher-ranking than me offed themselves, and Lark could only represent Lark, because he was Lark.”

Everyone laughed at that. Prison was shaping up to be easier than highschool.

The next day, Kia went to work and walked Irma to the meeting with the caseworker at the same time. The caseworker turned out to be an exhausted middle-aged pale man blankly staring at a computer screen. When he noticed her, though, it was as if someone flipped a switch. “Good morning!” he said enthusiastically. “Come on in and sit down!” Irma sat. “Now, you’re Irma Slice?” Irma nodded. “I’m Charlie, your caseworker. Are you aware of the opportunities you have here?”

“Yeah,” Irma said. “I can work and stuff. It’s honestly kind of awesome.”

Charlie looked at her strangely. “I forgot,” he said, shaking his head slightly, and the expression disappeared from his face. “Yes, you can work. Where would you like to work?”

“I was thinking outside, and then teach. My roommate says I’m qualified to teach anything academic. I guess I’d also want to take some, uh, non-academic classes.”

“Sounds good to me,” Charlie said, typing something in on his laptop. “I’ll get you signed up for reconstruction detail. Keep in mind that you need to stay out of trouble for two months before you can teach or take classes.”

“I never had any disciplinary problems or anything since middle school. I think I can stay out of trouble.”

“Since middle school?” Charlie asked, frowning. “There’s no record of you ever being suspended or expelled.”

“When I was little, I used to steal things all the time, and sometimes I got caught,” Irma explained. “It ended when I got caught going through a teacher’s purse in grade eight. I was in state school at the time, my parents had gone into huge debt to pay for it, so admin told me I’d be expelled if anything else happened. That scared me into following the rules.”

“You were incredibly lucky they didn’t expel you then and there,” Charlie said, shaking his head. “I’ve heard of kids getting sent to closed institutions for less.”

“It was state school, not public school. They wanted that final tuition check any way they could.”

“That makes sense, I suppose.” Charlie took a sip of his hot water. “Now, I know it’s been a long time since then, but I’m still going to warn you. This place can bring out the worst in anyone.”

“I’ve never had a slip-up since I was thirteen,” Irma said with a sigh. Why had she even brought up middle school? That had been decades ago. “I’m sure I can keep it up.”

“Excellent! Now, who do you want on your list of visitors? Three names for now. Same goes for phone calls.” One half-hour phone call a week was free, more cost fifty cents per minute, unless there was documentation proving that it was an emergency, and Irma didn’t even want to think about how much of a hassle it would be to get that documentation.

Three names? “Well, I guess my parents and uncle.” Irma gave their names. She had last seen them a few days before being acquitted at the trial of the key criminals. It must have been so hard for them, to be given hope and then have it be snatched away.

After the meeting was over, Irma was directed to the library, which was apparently also a new addition, and took out a few books before going back to her cell. For the rest of the day, she read and watched the television. She’d need to ask Kia about where she could work out in here.

Irma woke up at her usual time, which was convenient, as it was also the wake-up time for the reconstruction detail. She quickly brushed her teeth with her toothbrush and Kia’s toothpaste, pulled on the warm sweater, and stepped out into the corridor. The women were fitted with tracking anklets and led to buses. They weren’t shackled, but a guard pulled aside several women including Irma and warned them of the consequences of trying to run away. Irma gulped, and nodded.

The bus was quite large, with moderately comfortable seats and papered-over windows. Irma found herself sitting next to another inmate with the blue armband, a young woman with dark skin and long straight hair. “I know you,” the young woman said.

“I know,” Irma replied with a smile. “During the trial I faded into the background, but now, I’m a celebrity all of a sudden.”

It turned out that the young woman’s name was Alyssa, she had just turned nineteen, and she had sold drugs with her boyfriend. Under Snow she would have been in prison for life, but now, she was only looking at five years. “I can’t believe we’ll be earning actual minimum wage,” Irma said. “When I was in highschool I worked in retail, and we earned three dollars an hour.”

“You worked in retail?” Alyssa asked. “I’ve actually never worked before,” she added with a strange inflection in her voice.

Irma had no idea how to react. “Well, you’ll be making good money,” she said.

“That’s the hope.” Alyssa glanced at her. “Do you know why they’re called Inter-District Military Tribunals when there are barely any military people on them?”

“Sorry, no.” Only the judge from Thirteen had been in uniform.

“What was it like?”

“What was what like?”

“The trial. I saw bits and pieces on the television. It looked very different from a normal political trial.”

Irma wasn’t sure how to summarize the past year and a half. “It’s a long story,” she said, running a hand over her hair.

“We’ve got plenty of time,” Alyssa replied in an upbeat voice. Irma nodded, and began to talk.

“It was an entirely different world,” Irma said with a sigh. “It wasn’t even a political trial in the strict sense of the word, because it was far too fair for that. Sometimes I felt like I was in a particularly absurd tragicomedy.”

“Why?”

Alyssa’s curiosity made her smile. “Have you ever heard of political trials with defendants of such a calibre that ended in an acquittal?”

“Well, no..” Alyssa fidgeted with her armband. “What was it like to sit next to all those people?”

“It seemed normal at the time.” Irma thought back to the trial, which was already feeling like an eternity ago. “Sometimes, though, I realized just how out of place I was, and then it felt downright surreal.”

The bus reached its destination with only a brief pause as someone needed to go to the bathroom. Even in this, prison was way better than the trial. There, the guards had all acted like the defendants were trying to mess with them on purpose, but here, the driver stopped and a guard stood up from her place without a word of complaint. When they arrived, they were counted, checked against a list, and only then led out into a scene of devastation. Irma had seen similar scenery from the windows, but actually standing in the Capitol’s most destroyed neighbourhood was an entirely different thing.

Even now, years after the fighting, a few of the neighbourhoods were completely unlivable, and little effort was being put into fixing them. Irma saw buildings missing an entire wall, craters in the ground, and piles of rubble that still concealed bodies. She could smell the sharp stench of disinfectant. The overpowering odour made her want to cry.

All around milled civilian workers. Whenever their gazes fell on one of the women, they immediately looked away. Irma’s face felt hot, and she looked at the ground. Trying to distract herself, she followed the lead of everyone else and began to sort through piles of brick looking for ones that could still be used. Others sat on the ground and cleaned cement off them. Irma approached a man who was stacking clean bricks onto a pallet, but he took one glance at her and fled. Was it because he had recognized her or because of the uniform? Feeling very awkward, Irma took over his job and continued stacking bricks.

It was monotonous but at least she was outside, and the lunch they got was a much bigger portion than yesterday. It still didn’t look like enough to regain the weight she had lost since her initial arrest, but at least it was something.

“You shouldn’t eat so fast,” one of the women told her. “The slower you eat, the less time you have to spend working.”

Irma shrugged. “I’ve always eaten like this.” She had no idea what had made her eat like her food would soon be taken away.

“Slow down. You have half an hour of break, use it.”

“Uh, alright.” Irma tried to eat her potatoes, beans, and microscopic bits of chicken more slowly.

The next week, Irma got paid. Seven hundred and twenty-eight dollars, a huge sum for someone who didn’t need to pay rent. Irma bought herself flip-flops for the shower, which varied from spotless to atrocious depending on the time of day, as well as hair products and snacks. Due to rationing there wasn’t much besides very old canned goods and snack cakes and the prices were exorbitant (thirty dollars for a stale piece of chocolate the size of her pinky?!?), but even though Irma sent half her money to her parents and put a quarter into her savings account, she still ended up with extra. She left it on her day-to-day account, so she could buy a television once Kia was released. Maybe she could even buy a nice television.

Hair more-or-less properly washed (she couldn’t wait to get it properly done), Irma sat down on her cot and leaned back against her moderately soft pillow to watch the news with Kia.

“Hello, class!” Irma said. Fifteen women stared back at her. One was cuffed to the desk and the floor. “I’ll be taking over from Lina. Could you please introduce yourselves? I don’t know all of you.“ She would never remember any of them, of course, but it was the sort of thing instructors were supposed to do.

After that was finished, Irma asked, “What exactly were you on?”

“Chapter five,” someone called out. “We literally just finished discussing chapter four yesterday.”

Irma would have preferred tutoring university students, as that was what she was actually qualified to do, but one exam and two training sessions later, she was assigned to teach highschool Lit. Irma herself had never read that specific book before, as it had been banned, but she had read it and the other two books they’d cover later during the past week and passed the exam with flying colours. The idea of leading discussions felt strange, as discussion had not been allowed when she had been in highschool, or for that matter university, but hopefully she’d do alright. “Alright,” she said. “Can I have a volunteer to read?” she asked, finding the right page in her copy of The Grapes of Wrath, which was held together with tape. The prison library, one of the reforms, was made up of donations.

Nobody raised a hand. “Uh, don’t you want participation marks?”

Everyone raised their hand. “Alright, how about we all go around the room.” The first woman began to read, and then the next. As soon as they reached a place Irma had highlighted, she paused them and asked the question. They were the best class she had ever seen, all willing and eager to participate, to the point where half the class was just them talking and sharing. One of them, wrists cuffed to the desk in such a way that turning a page or holding a pencil was hard, had to gesture with her head instead of raising her head. A few days ago, she had punched another inmate who had allegedly stolen her conditioner.

When the clock signalled the end of class, Irma called a halt and wrote two questions on the board. “Alright, for homework, read the rest of the chapter and answer these questions.” The guard unlocked the shackled woman from the desk and led her off. The others also filed out. Irma sagged against the board. How could talking about a book be so exhausting?

Irma noticed the words splashed across the cover of the magazine, and immediately went to snatch it up. She sat down on the overstuffed couch, desperate to know anything about her former co-defendants. Life in the Supermax! the cover proclaimed. Irma flipped to the right page. Noticing her intensity, a few of her friends drifted away from their table tennis game (playing without a net and with broken paddles was hard, but doable) and sat down next to her, reading over her shoulder.

Key criminals reap what they had sown! went the byline. “Wow,” Katia said. “You sure got lucky they didn’t try to send you there. That’s almost as bad as what we had before.”

The good people of Panem can rest easy knowing that the key criminals and other malefactors of the old regime are being subjected to the strictest letter of the law. According to several guards and wardens, the conditions the currently forty-two inmates live in are nothing less than harsh. They live in solitary confinement, with lights that never go off, not even at night. They do not have as much as a television to provide them with entertainment, though they are allowed to get a few books from a very limited selection. Their days are spent performing heavy labour in the yard, and they aren’t allowed to speak to each other at all. The slightest infraction can be punished with up to a month of total solitary, a punishment so cruel it has been banned in the ordinary prison system.

Each prisoner is referred to by only their number, which is painted on their back and knees. Using names is strictly forbidden, even in intra-prison communications. Prisoners must ask permission before speaking to a warden (they may not talk to anyone else), and they must take off their caps whenever a warden or guard approaches. They are allowed to write one short letter weekly, and it is very heavily censored to prevent any secret communications. No phone calls are allowed, though they are allowed one half-hour visit from one person every two months, which is strictly monitored to prevent prisoners from talking about the recent past or prison conditions. Prisoners are always separated from their visitor by a pane of bulletproof glass. Parcels are likewise banned, and their food intake is very limited. For as long as they perform the hard manual work required of them, the women eat 1800 and the men - 2200 calories a day, but the amount will shrink by 400 for those incapable of doing so.

All of the staff who interact with the prisoners have been carefully trained to prevent them from feeling any possible sympathy. Four orderlies monitor the prisoners’ health and watch out for dangerous levels of weight loss, and a staff of doctors is always on standby. None of the Supermaxers will be able to take the easy way out. They will remain in their tiny cells until they reach the end of their natural lifespan or their sentence is up.

“The article uses loaded words,” Irma said. “It’s not as bad as it appears.”

“Really?” Katia asked. “They’re not allowed to talk to each other, it says so right there.”

“And total solitary?” Emmy added. She was a short woman in her fifties who never spoke about the past. “I had to go through that a few times. I don’t know how I survived.” Total solitary meant never being allowed out of your cell and not being allowed to read books or watch television.

“It’s bad,” Irma admitted, “but not as bad as it appears. ‘Up to’ a month of solitary confinement, and if the guards are anything like at my trial, they’re not going to actually enforce the rules. Remember, these aren’t professionals. Ours were also drilled about how to treat the so-called ‘key criminals’, and they were swapping autographs for candy the next day.” She looked at the illustration, a pencil sketch of a woman whose back was turned. The back of her shirt showed a prominent ‘9’, her practically shaven head was bowed, and she was holding her cap under one arm. “I mean, if max is twenty-three hours in your cell, then this doesn’t really sound like supermax.”

Emmy leaned back against the couch. “I bet it’s because of the heavy labour,” she said. “If they don’t work, then they stay in their cell twenty-four hours a day. Without a television, without even being able to shout at each other through the grille.”

“Well, they are the key criminals,” Gretel said. She was the woman from Thirteen Irma had been brought here with. “And Peacekeepers, and Gamemakers. If you ask me, the whole pack of them can rot.” She looked back at the newspaper she was reading. “They should consider themselves lucky they weren’t strung up from the nearest lamppost.”

“Still,” Emmy said, “this is way out there. But I guess they should be grateful they aren’t being beaten.” While the ordinary Capitolians didn’t exactly care about the former elites, given the stark inequality that had reigned supreme under Snow, the former Rebels were much more vehement. Irma considered herself lucky that Gretel was willing to be friends with her, but then again, she had been found not guilty at the trial. Most of the other Games criminals tended to shun her, as if afraid her status as an indicted key criminal would rub off on them somehow. They had all been tried directly by the Depuration courts. While those found guilty at an Inter-District Committee trial went into the regular system if their sentences were less than five years long, they were for some reason gathered at a different prison, maybe in an attempt to keep them all in one place. They were also joined by the majority of those in Irma’s situation. “Hey, Irma, what are you thinking about?”

Irma snapped out of her thoughts. “Oh, just wondering why I’m here and not at Townhome.”

“Because the bureaucracy is too dumb to tell you were tried by an IDC trial at one point,” Kia explained.

“Well, probably.” The trial had never had any issues with paperwork, but then again, maybe they had spent so much effort on it, they didn’t have any energy remaining for anything else.

Irma had literally just turned on her television when the door opened, and a woman wearing a blue armband shuffled in. “Good morning,” Irma said, but the woman flopped onto her cot without answering. “Um, what’s wrong?”

“Wrong meds again,” the woman grunted. She was very pale, with limp brown hair gathered into a shoulder-length ponytail. “I’m Cyn, by the way.”

“That’s terrible,” Irma said. “Should I mute the television so you can sleep? I have to go to work soon, anyway. Oh, and I’m Irma.”

“Nah,” said Cyn, turning over. “I’m not really tired, I just feel like I’m gonna puke.” She sat up against the wall. “Last month, though, that was when I just slept all day. Ended up sleeping through my hearing.”

“That’s terrible,” Irma said again.

“Yeah, yeah. I’ve been here before, spare me the lecture. I like your braids.”

Irma twirled a braid around her finger. “Thanks. I got my hair done yesterday.”

Cyn said nothing after that, blankly watching the morning news. “There’s gotta be something more interesting than this,” she grunted after the morning trial coverage began.

“You got a favourite channel?” Irma asked, reluctantly getting up and walking to the television. She wanted to know what was going on at the Ministers’ Trial, but she also wanted to do something nice for Cyn.

“Echo-Net.”

“Alright,” Irma said, adjusting the dial to the Echo Network, which played reruns of old series and nothing else. Right now, it was playing a soap opera that had been dated when Irma had been young. “If you want, I’ve got some snacks here. Crackers and stuff.” She also had a pack of dried noodles, which has cost her a mind-boggling seventy dollars instead of the one (maybe three or four, but that was the high-end stuff) that it should have, but she was saving that for her birthday next month.

“Nah,” Cyn said, and fell silent.

The television began to show a concert. Irma hummed along to the song until she realized what the lyrics were.

Oh, give me land, lots of land, and the starry skies above

Don't fence me in

Let me ride through the wide open country that I love

Don't fence me in

Let me be by myself in the evening breeze

And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees

Send me off forever but I ask you please

Don't fence me in

“Ouch,” Irma said as the song continued. “That’s as bad as Don’t Lock Me Away.” Cyn said nothing, continuing to stare at the screen blankly.

Cyn didn’t get up when it was time for breakfast, but Irma hadn’t expected her to. Fortunately, the television in the cafeteria was playing the news. Apparently, someone at an IDC trial had punched the person sitting next to them, but she didn’t catch any more details than that, unfortunately.

If someone had punched Lark, or at least Dovek, that would have made everyone’s year, or maybe even life. Irma giggled silently at the mental image of Chaterhan, the prim and proper industrialist, snapping and decking the loathsome propagandist Lark, and dug into her macaroni and cheese, which was very skimpy on the cheese, and indeed on the macaroni as well. There seemed to be no end to rationing, despite huge shipments of humanitarian aid from abroad.

After breakfast, Irma went to her carpentry class. She would have preferred to teach Lit full-time instead, but even a single class left her utterly drained (and in any case nobody would ever let her teach after she left here), so carpentry, cooking, and law it was. She also had to take a special class once a week. Since she had been convicted of hate speech and incitement, Irma had to sit with a bunch of women, who were mostly very minor Games criminals, and discuss the importance of inclusion, equity, and social justice. She felt completely out of place there, and the inmate who led it was either delusional or thought too highly of humanity. Carpentry, or even cooking, was much easier.

Irma hoped to become an actual carpenter. According to Charlie, nobody would prohibit her from that, and a carpenter made way more money than a coffee shop cashier or something, even if it would take her a year of perfect behaviour until she could join a work release program as an apprentice and actually start earning money, and four more years of apprenticeship after that.

As she sat in the classroom and breezed through the assigned calculations, she wondered what her parents would think of that. They had been so proud when she had gotten into state school and then into university. They had bragged for years about their successful journalist daughter. Would they be disappointed that she was working with her hands now, just like Mom had? Irma wondered how to present that to them.

At the end of the day, her resume would either end up saying ‘Nine years as a food court worker at a government institution’ or ‘Journeyperson carpenter, four years’ experience with a government institution.’ Nothing else really struck her as something she wanted to do. Cooking was just a useful skill, especially since she wouldn’t be allowed into a position of responsibility outside (ironically, the politicals were once again worse off than the criminals, who were only barred from certain types of work and often temporarily), and everyone took some sort of law class here. At least she didn’t have to take classes on financial literacy and how to find a job, as she already knew all that stuff. Not that such phrasing would make her parents happy, of course.

After the class, she had to go to the cafeteria and prepare lunch. Irma dutifully wrote down that there were a few specks of black mold on the wall by an oven. The administration, being complaint- and inmate death-fearing, had declared a holy war on the nuisance, but it was a pain to get rid of. The ventilation needed replacing, but there was only space in the budget for it the following year, so disinfectant it was.

Irma chopped sad-looking vegetables and tossed them into large pots. At least there was the opportunity to sneak food here, though some of the guards didn’t look the other way and tended to write up the women who tried. Since the one supervising her right now was chill, Irma snuck a piece of bread, which had come from the freezer and tasted like cardboard.

Once lunch was over, Irma had to clean up. The hot water was terrible for her skin, but that was what hand cream was for. She rubbed it into her hands as she walked back to her cell to pick up her things for the Lit class, remembering how once, she had applied cream to her aching hands after a long session of rock climbing. The calluses forming on her hands now were in different places than before, though. How could her own hands feel strange to her?

When she got to the classroom, one of her students wasn’t there. Irma suspected Velia was not sick but was suffering from the effects of tainted drugs. Suspicious sickness aside, the lesson went well, though Irma had to sit down for a few minutes and let her students discuss among themselves. Leading a discussion was utterly exhausting. Fortunately, the class soon ended, and after more math (she had never realized how much math was involved in carpentry) and dinner, Irma queued at the commissary with the twenty-one dollars she had left over from that week, after sending a chunk to her parents and depositing another into her savings account.

It sucked to have so little money, especially after how much she had earned during the first two months, but in a few years, she would be earning fifteen dollars an hour, and working outside the prison to boot. Irma bought a large bottle of her favourite conditioner for twenty dollars. When she got her braids re-done, they never had the conditioner she preferred, so bringing her own was easier. A dollar extra was left in her day-to-day account. All in all, not too bad.

Irma dropped off the conditioner in her cell next to Cyn’s (good thing they had such different hair; someone was always getting punched over accusations of stealing beauty products), carefully laying out all her hair things. It was nice to have properly done hair again, even if her braids were still quite short. As she walked to the gym, Irma fidgeted with her braids. Her old habit was back with a vengeance.

At the gym, several extremely buff shirtless women nodded to Irma as she went through her stretches and dumbbell exercises. One spotted her when she moved on to the bench press, lifting the bar Irma had failed to bench even once with seemingly no effort. Irma ran through her routine, moving on to bodyweight exercises and wrestling moves. She wished she could join one of the martial arts classes, but you needed two years without being written up for fighting even once to get into that, for obvious reasons.

She then jogged around the yard, putting the shoes her parents had sent her to good use. The ones the prison had issued her would have been terrible for that. It was nice and cool outside, and Irma savoured the breeze as she ran. She wished she could do the exercises that didn’t need equipment outside, but mats weren’t allowed, and Irma didn’t fancy falling onto the closely cut grass. There was a pull-up bar, though, and whenever she passed by it, she did as many pullups as she could. After a year of being too depressed to do as much as a pushup in her cell she could barely do a single one, but it was still progress. She also did finger hangs, missing the finger boards at the gym.

As she passed by one of the basketball games, Irma waved at Katia and Arina, a short woman about her age with tan skin, narrow eyes, and cornrows. She played basketball with her friends on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays she did her routine - today was Sunday - and on Mondays she spent her time in the rec room playing board games and losing endless imaginary money at cards (she wasn’t quite willing to actually gamble, as Emmy’s skills were terrifying), only doing her stretching routine in the morning and evening. While this wouldn’t help her regain her climbing skills, hopefully she’d be able to relearn that quickly thanks to being in good shape. Exercise also gave her goals to set and meet, and kept her mind off things, if only for a little while. And Irma had to admit that she liked the idea of actually looking good again.

Before even taking a seat at the table in the visitors’ hall, Mom reached out and hugged her. Irma had always hated hugs, but tolerated it this time to make Mom feel better. “Hi,” Irma said. “It’s nice to see you again.” Mom reached up to touch Irma’s braids. She forced herself not to flinch back at the touch. “I get them done here,” she said.

“So you told me,” Mom said, sounding like she was struggling not to cry. Her hair was as curly as Irma’s, and was cut into a neat puff. Before, she had dyed it, but now it was snow-white. “You look very nice.”

“Thanks. I’ve been working out. How’s everyone?”

“We’re well.” Mom wiped at her eyes. Irma felt her face heat up at watching her mother suffer. “You don’t have to send us the money, you know.”

“There’s a limit to how many packs of noodles I can buy, even if they’re seventy dollars a pop,” Irma said with a weak smile. “I might as well help you out.”

Mom shook her head, reaching out to pat her on the arm. This time, Irma couldn’t take it and withdrew it, crossing her arms on the table. The silence stretched, and Irma felt very uncomfortable. How often must her parents have feared during her childhood that she would end up right there? Irma had gifted them twenty years of pride in their only child before snatching it away when she should have been entering the best years of her career.

For the first time, Irma regretted what she had done. After all, she had known full well what she was supporting in her broadcasts. Couldn’t she have done something else, or at least been less ambitious? Anything to make is so Mom didn’t have to look at her like that. Irma sighed. She was forty-five years old, and still the thing she feared most was disappointing her parents. “No, really, it’s fine,” she insisted. “And once I start my carpentry apprenticeship, I’ll be earning good money soon enough.”

“A skilled worker?” Mom said sadly. “Well, that’s still more than I ever achieved.”

“It’s not that bad,” Irma said, trying to hide her desperation. “I never liked being a media personality, anyway,” she added, trying for a joke.

Mom sighed. “I always knew you weren’t cut out for such a public job. You always found it hard to deal with people. To tell you the truth, I don’t know how you coped.”

Irma didn’t want to explain and sound like she tended to dissociate, even though that was the best way to describe it. “It was like riding a bicycle with no tires, only rims,” she said, using an analogy Charlie had told her. “It’s doable, and it will get you places, but it’s insanely difficult and uncomfortable.”

“You told me you’re also a teacher.”

“Only one class. It’s hard. I don’t know how I managed to do it in university.”

Mom smiled softly. “You were always so ambitious. I worried for a while you’d break under the weight of your own expectations.”

“Well, that clearly wasn’t the problem here,” Irma snarked.

“I can’t believe they scapegoated you like that!” Mom said indignantly. “Dr. Baer told me she’s working on getting you released early.”

Irma was fully aware of that, but she didn’t let herself hope.

Irma was about to head out the door when Cyn turned over abruptly. “Happy birthday,” she whispered.

“Thank you,” Irma said, feeling unexpectedly touched.

The librarian proffered a small book at Irma. “I think you’ll like this,” the stocky woman said.

Irma read the title. The Sword in the Scales. She had never seen it before. The author’s name told her nothing either, and the cover was blank fabric. “What’s it about?”

“You.”

“Wait, what?” Irma asked. “It’s about the trial?” She had read the book by Aurelius and Mallow, and hadn’t liked it much. It had barely even mentioned her and made too much of Blues’ and Coll’s responsibility nonsense.

The librarian grinned. “No, it’s about a different trial, and a different person. Check out the introduction.”

Irma flipped through it. This was a pre-Cataclysm book! The author had apparently had a job similar to hers in a regime even worse than Snow’s. Like her, he had been a third-rate propagandist who had surrendered to the enemy, been tortured, and then tried as a key criminal instead of the actual responsible person, who had killed himself. Found not guilty, he was then retried, just like her, sentenced to nine years, just like her, and released early, hopefully just like her too but Irma wasn’t holding her breath. Irma wondered why the historians hadn’t told her about this.

After the introduction, there was a photo of him sitting in his cell. He looked like Coll, though with less curly hair. Irma wondered for a while what her former co-defendant was doing before beginning to read the book. She was a little bit confused by some of the references he made, but understood enough to tell that this Hans Fritzsche would have understood her perfectly.

“I’m taking this out,” she said.

The librarian took out the card from the back and filled in Irma’s name. Irma was fairly sure that nowhere else in Panem did they still use those cards. A little receipt with the due date printed on it was handed to her, and Irma went off to read. Back in her cell, she asked Cyn to turn down the volume on the television a little bit and submerged herself in this strange world. Everything must have been different back then. It took her half the chapter to realize that there were practically no women in the book. What was going on there? Had women not done things back then? She decided to ask someone who knew their pre-Cataclysm history.

“What’s that book about?” Cyn asked quietly. Now that she was finally on meds that worked, she was quite friendly, though shy.

“It’s about a man who was just like me, but hundreds of years ago,” Irma explained, trying to make sense of what had been the background of his trial. She vaguely remembered it being referenced at her own trial, and a few of the historians’ references were starting to make more sense. A few details about his life in jail were also eerily reminiscent of the regime she had endured. Irma wondered if Vance and Tiller had studied the book to get ideas.

“Like you how?”

“He had the same job and went through the same stuff after the regime he served was destroyed.”

“That’s cool.”

“Listen to this. ‘At first I could not recognize a single one of the weirdly-clad men who strolled around in groups always keeping a little distance from the wall. They seemed to have dressed themselves in strangely assorted selections from the uniforms of every army under the sun.’” Irma remembered that day when she had seen her co-defendants for the first time. “Even in the little things, I suppose the prosecution was right. There was nothing unique about us or the crimes. It’s just the details that were sometimes different.”

“Interesting.” Cyn nibbled on a chip.

“Though I still do not understand how the Games happened.” Logically, Irma knew that in the decades before the Dark Days, dangerous sports such as rock-climbing without a harness or fighting with sharp bladed weapons had been popular. As the country slipped further and further into dictatorship, people who fell afoul of the regime were sometimes pressured into participating in them, ostensibly as a way to regain honour.

Chief of these proto-Games had been fights that could theoretically end with death, and sometimes minors had been forced to participate, with more and more outrages happening every year. In such a context, the Hunger Games made sense as a brutal punishment for real and imagined crimes, but it still boggled Irma’s mind sometimes that it had gone on for so long.

“You told me you had good news?” Dad asked, fidgeting with his braids.

The previous day, Irma had called her parents and told them that, providing no details. “Yes,” she said, struggling to hold back a smile. “I’m going to start working outside next month.”

“That’s nice,” Dad said, smiling. “Will you continue teaching?”

Irma shook her head. “I’ll finish out this term, and then I’ll quit.” The more time passed, the more difficult teaching became for some reason. Even her students could tell that she was struggling.

Dad nodded. “It’s not for you. I always knew that. You’re not like me, you can’t work with people.” He clasped his hands together.

Irma suppressed her desire to be contrary and simply nodded.

As Irma sat in the back of the pickup and ate her sandwich, she noticed a familiar word on the cover of one of the magazines in the nearby kiosk. Without thinking, she swallowed the last bits and leapt for the magazine.

“Hands off!” the cashier snapped. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

This happened far too often for Irma’s liking. “I’m on lunch break,” she explained, “and I have money.” She was allowed to take small sums of cash with her outside as a reward for not breaking any rules, though she did have to return all of the unspent money to her account and present a receipt for anything bought, as well as the thing that had been bought. She unbuttoned her shirt pocket and took out the ten-dollar bill, holding it out to the cashier. “Could I please have that magazine?” she asked, pointing to it.

The cashier took the bill from her with two fingers and handed her the magazine, as well as her change. Irma asked for the receipt, and the cashier complied with an audible sigh. Not wanting to bring down more insults on her head, Irma hastily beat a retreat to the pickup. The others were all sitting in a circle a small distance away. She got along with them individually, but as a group, they were simply too much.

In any case, this magazine promised exclusive photos from inside the Supermax, which was more important. She had read rumours before (ranging from the merely inane to the completely insane) and seen the occasional blurry photo taken by sentries, but this was unprecedented. Irma eagerly flipped to the right page, and was immediately hit by a wave of memories as she recognized her co-defendants. Were that seriously Blues and Coll, kneeling in the grass under a tree and offering apples to guards? At the trial, they had definitely seemed to be the boot-licking type, but this went beyond boot-licking.

Irma realized that they both had strands of grey in their hair, and their sun-darkened faces were more lined than before. Well, her own hair wasn’t exactly black anymore. They were all growing older. Irma saw a photo of Best, and winced. He looked like a little old gentleman out for a stroll, though the number ‘16’ painted on his knees slightly ruined the impression.

She studied all the photos carefully before reading the text, and only got partway through the article before her break was over. Irma wished she could continue reading, but she didn’t want to appear to be shirking. She had spent years on her best behaviour to get this chance, and she didn’t want to waste it. Reluctantly, Irma folded up the magazine, tossed it inside the car through the open window, and walked towards the house.

There was nothing for Irma to pack. The clothes she was wearing did not belong to her, and she didn’t want to deal with all of her hair products, giving them instead to one of her friends. The television was garbage in any case, the snacks had all been eaten, and the stationary she was leaving for Cyn. Irma approached the exit wearing donated clothing and clutching her copy of The Sword in the Scales and a manila folder with family photos, official documents, and a credit and debit card.

Irma paused by the door, feeling unsure.

“What are you waiting for?” a guard asked with a smile. “Get out!”

Irma pushed open the door, heart hammering away. She stepped into a parking lot, but before she could take more than a few steps, her parents embraced her in a crushing hug that she tolerated for their sakes. “Please stop choking me,” she said, laughter bubbling up inside of her. She was free!

Mom and Dad took a step back. They had tears in their eyes, and Irma looked down, not willing to see the expressions with which they were looking at her. “I’m going to need to get an actual ID,” she said, feeling anxiety bubble up inside her. How was she supposed to deal with all the stuff she had to deal with? “The one they gave me expires in a month. And I need new clothes. And I’m going to have to get in touch with my firm to say that I’m out now so they can rehire me. And-”

“We will get you whatever you need.” Dad took the envelope from her, as if it was a heavy load she couldn’t carry. As they walked towards the car Irma had gifted them more than ten years ago, Mom and Dad stayed on her sides, half-hugging her. “What’s this book about?” Dad asked, looking at the cover. “He certainly looks happy, not like the other guy.” On the dust jacket was a photo of Fritzsche after his acquittal, where he was grinning from ear to ear. It must have been painful to be arrested all over again after that.

“It’s the book I told you about a while back,” Irma explained. “It’s about the man who would have understood me perfectly.”

“It’s nice you have something like that,” Mom said. “Did you know that someone is writing a book about your trial? They called me and asked for an interview.”

Irma didn’t want to think about her trial. She looked at the sky instead. The clouds were the same as any other time she had seen them. Were her surviving co-defendants also looking at them right now as they worked the ground of their prison yard? “Well,” she said, “tell them that I’m now available for an interview, too.”