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This is a story told in One sometimes, in those small secluded places, where security cameras can’t reach and spies don’t think to look, by those who know to tell it, to those they trust to listen.
After the war, the Capitol was very displeased with One. They killed all the most prominent members of the rebellion in One and had their leader and his wife beheaded on live television. Then they made avoxes of the man’s parents and his children and what siblings he had that had not already been killed. But afterwards, the conditions in the mines and the factories were improved, and we were paid more for our work, and encouraged to buy and keep some of it for ourselves, to see ourselves as belonging more with the Capitol than the other districts, and we thought we were forgiven.
Remember this: the Capitol never forgives.
They claim that the selection of tributes is random, but we in One have always known better, or at least we used to.
That first reaping, the boy and the girl from One were both twelve years old (the tributes from Two were eighteen, and unusually tall and strong). The girl was the daughter of the leader’s sister, the boy the son of his right hand woman. The boy’s fifteen-year-old neighbor volunteered in his place. The girl went to war. Neither of the children from One returned (neither did the tributes from Two. It was instead a girl from District Four that won the first Hunger Games. The Capitol could not control everything.).
The girl had an eleven-year-old sister. She watched her sister be torn limb from limb in the games, saw how the Capitol delighted in the carnage, treated her death as entertainment. She well remembered the war, however desperately her parents tried to shield her from it (unlike the games, her parents gone, and television screens confronting her at every turn, displaying every gory detail to fill her nightmares) she remembered the war, and she saw that it was not over. She swore that no twelve-year-old girls would be sent to fight in it again, not if she could help it.
There was little she could do at first, only a child as she was, and the Capitol was thorough in its purge of the inner circles of the rebellion, leaving behind few adults she knew and could trust. Still, she spoke in whispers to her most trusted friends and she planned and she trained.
And then, on the reaping of the eighth hunger games, she volunteered, and she won.
After her victory she came home and spoke loudly and publicly of the glamour of victory. She always smiled in the spotlight and spoke of what an honor it was to be a tribute, spoke of the pride in volunteering, of offering oneself freely in tribute to the mighty capitol, of the glory that such a person would gain, lauded for eternity, even, perhaps especially, if they lost their life.
And more quietly, and in private, she spoke of a war unended. She spoke of defeat but not concession, of a fighting spirit that could not be spent. She spoke of injustice and tyranny and she spoke of choice. Because the Capitol, in its hubris, had given them choice, with the assumption they would not, as a whole choose bravely. She dared them to to prove them wrong. Eighteen was still too young, no age is old enough to walk willfully into death, but what eighteen-year-old of One would stand by while children were sent to slaughter? What eighteen-year-old of One would go unprepared into battle?
But publicly she spoke only of honor and glory, and she stroked the egos of the Capitol until they purred beneath her hand.
Those next few years, those who volunteered were mostly her close friends, children of rebels with fighting spirits. But soon, when she felt the Capitol had enough trust in her loyalty to get away with it, she established the school.
The school was an only thinly veiled training program for tributes, and it quickly filled with students, both those dazzled by the opulent facade of a victor's life and the promise of renown, and those who wished to fight and die for the sake of One and its children. In either case she trained and tested them and every year two tributes were sent to the Capitol to fight, and every year these two were the strongest and best One had to offer, and never under the age of eighteen.
Now, few in One remember the war or our place in it. And of those who do know, fewer still resolve to care. We are content in the opulence of our times, and forget the injustice we live under. We see ourselves as belonging more with the Capitol than our fellow districts, and to most of us the Games have become merely an exciting piece of entertainment, in which there is no chance that our children will be taken from us by force. We have bought in to the glamour and the fame and the Capitol’s particular brand of sacrificial patriotism, and so we send our children to be trained and given up to the Capitol anyway.
But ever since the eighth Hunger Games, not once have we of One sent a child, unwilling and untrained, to war, and for that, at least, we can be proud.