Chapter Text
Most districts hold the reaping in a single town square. The children line up in order, youngest at the front, eldest at the back. Girls to the left, boys to the right.
Not in District Five.
In District Five, the girls stand in the southern square (the nicer one, really, lined with the upper-class merchant shops that display clothes, and shoes, and pastries in the windows). The boys attend the northern square, flanked by the Peacekeepers compound on one side, and the warehouses on the other. Families, if they have both a boy and a girl in the reaping, have to choose which child to go support.
It has been this way for a very long time. There are the rumours of course, that the old folk can remember a time, back in the very early Hunger Games, where the children fit into a single square. But the why depends on who you talk too. Some say that there were less children after the dark days, and that the district has prospered since. Others say that the north square used to be larger, until they build the second, larger Peacekeeper’s compound.
For a district whose main export is power, there seems to be very little of it for the people.
But today, there is only a single square in use. They use the northern square, of course, where the presence of the Capitol’s power can be seen clearly, with the flags of Panem hung on the sides of the compound, and no worn fabric bunting strung from store to store in a paltry attempt to liven the place.
The square is filled with a mixture of girls and boys, all those above the age of 14 crammed in to watch the spectacle. Parents, and other district dwellers spill into the side streets for the compulsory watching. The younger children are in the southern square, able to watch on a screen, clutching at each other’s hands in the knowledge that they are safe this year.
For this is no ordinary reaping.
No.
This is a Quarter Quell.
And for these Games, the tributes are to be selected from the victors.
District Five is not an abundantly successful district in the games, but we hold our own. It’s not unusual for at least one of the tributes to make it to the final ten, and six of the houses in the Victor’s Village are occupied.
The word is that the poorer districts, who rarely produce winners, must select their tributes through a reaping of the 18 to 25 year-olds. It’s clever, and it’s cruel. Selecting the tributes from the pool of victors (and where they aren’t available, the young adults), it is obvious that the Capitol want this to be their most vicious — sorry, entertaining — Games yet. But it also sends a message to those who thought they were safe, that they had escaped the Games, that there is never truly any escape. Not through age, nor through victory.
The Capitol always wins.
The six victors of District Five, once so revered, and adored by the Capitol, are marched onto the reaping platform by an escort of Peacekeepers, to remind the world that whatever the Capitol giveth, the Capitol can taketh.
It’s a one in four chance.
And the odds never have been in my favour.
After the reaping, there are no goodbyes. No final words with our families. Instead, the Peacekeepers flanking the stage move the second the cameras stop rolling, two per tribute and escort us straight to the train with a firm grip on our arms. When they try the same with our handler from the capitol, she snaps at the Peacekeepers to remember just who she is, and marches forward in her ridiculous red heels.
It’s a sullen, and silent, train journey to the Capitol. The monotony interrupted only by a private breakdown while sitting on the toilet, and later the clinking of cutlery, and stilted requests to pass the salt during the midday meal. Arriving in the Capitol does little to improve our moods, and neither I nor my fellow tribute can muster a pleasant expression for the cameras, although our handler’s disposition suddenly turns sunny and charming.
This year is something of a promotion for the district escorts. Instead of inviting — or rather, requiring — former victors to return to the Capitol to act as either ambassadors or mentors for their district’s tributes, this year, they have been forced to remain back in the districts. Instead, the handler’s will be doing all the schmoozing of sponsors and deciding when to send their tributes gifts in the arena.
It is not until the parade that evening that we get to see our fellow tributes, and even then, they keep us apart until our chariots are drawn out in front of the crowds. In an interesting turn of events, another sign that the Games will be very different this year, we each get our own chariot, drawn by a single horse, physically dividing us from our fellow district tribute. The large screens show televised close ups of our faces as we draw into our places in front of the presidential balcony and get to see our competition for the first time.
It’s only the career districts of interest anyway since they have so many victors to chose from. The outlying districts have only one, maybe two living victors at best.
But it is certainly gratifying to see the tributes take a second glance when they realise that I’m stood in a chariot that flashes and crackles with the electricity that climbs around it. My suit is made from a black rubber (which is ugly but practical, so I don’t get shocked by a stray branch of what is essentially lightning flying around me), but I can see from the screen that nobody is going to notice that. Not when the special panels built up the sleeves of my arms attract the lightning to jump through the air in a dazzling display of blue-white light.
Much better than my tribute parade, where my fellow tribute and I were dressed as a pair of wind turbines.
The week in the training center is fraught with tension. The male tribute from District One, a hulking fellow whose own Games were nearly twenty years ago, and is best known for killing a tribute with a single punch to the head, sticks to himself and a punch bag. His fellow tribute, Cha-cha, on the other hand, moves from combat station to weapons station, making sure that everyone sees her prowess with whatever weapon is in her hand, and the eager look in her eyes.
Apparently, she had volunteered again for the Quarter Quell, the only tribute to do so.
Most of the districts have at least one tribute to worry about, a previous victor who knows what it takes to survive a Games. But it is District Two that has me the most concerned.
Their male tribute was last year’s victor, and he certainly proved he knew his way around the weapons that their district produces for the Capitol’s Peacekeepers. He had scored a ten in training for his Games, and once he got a hold of a knife in the arena, he never missed.
Not once.
He had caught the audience’s interest from the moment his name was pulled from the reaping bowl. It wasn’t only the Capitol, and not just because he’d fought successfully to first blood against the first volunteer in order to keep his place as tribute, but because he only had a first name. Diego. Orphans are not uncommon in the districts, but when they have no family at all, they rarely make it either to or through the reaping ages by themselves.
Diego taught the districts that it was different in the more favoured districts. Or at least in the district known for breeding Peacekeepers (sometimes, when on night shifts high in the air fixing the electrical cables, we would joke darkly that the Peacekeepers weren’t really flesh and bone, but were instead assembled in factories of District Two). His interviews had revealed he was something they called a foundling — an abandoned baby or toddler that nobody would claim. In most districts, this is a death sentence. Even in District Five, where most of the population is two days rather than two minutes from starvation as they are in Twelve, such a child would be dead within days. Nobody can afford to take in an extra mouth to feed, and if the abandoning family were caught, they would be whipped by the Peacekeepers.
In District Two however, it is seen as an opportunity. Foundlings are taken into an orphanage home and cared for, and in return for their upbringing, they must provide at least five years of service as a Peacekeeper upon their majority.
Diego had turned 18 in the arena. His sponsors had sent him a small piece of cake.
Apparently, a year living the softer life of a victor hasn’t dulled his aim. He tails Cha-cha round the weapons stations, and be it bullet or blade, he hits the bullseye every time.
Through the week I ignore the female tribute from District Eight and slip away every time she tries to approach me. It was the same at the last Games, but that was much more difficult to avoid, when the victors were expected to mingle and be friendly outside of their mentoring duties.
Now, we are enemies. Competitors. It is expected.
My training days mostly consist of moving from survival station to survival station. It matters little, as everybody already knows my strengths. How I won my own Games. The stations might teach me something about how the arena will look. What sort of resources might be available, and how to get them. My companion, more often than not, is the male tribute from District Twelve. A slender man, with greased hair and an anxious manner.
He is not a victor.
His name is Elliott, he blurts, as we practice making a water purifier. He’s 22, his Dad died last year, his mother when he was a child, and he’d thought he was safe. He had been thinking of proposing to his childhood sweetheart, as soon as he could scrape together enough money to get his mother’s ring altered to fit her. Later, when the televised scores are shown, it is no great surprise to see a 3 next to his name.
The competition is particularly fierce this year, after all.
Interviews are terrible things.
Horace Herb, the host and face of the Games, is a small man. But the people of the Capitol seem to like his enthusiastic manner, and how he always seems overly starstruck by the event. He does his best to crack a few jokes for me, after we have shaken hands and taken our seats, and I paste on my very best smile and try to be charming.
I may be seething, and bitter, and I may be angry enough that all I can do is picture myself wringing the necks of every Games official in sight. But I am not stupid, and that attitude is not going to win me any sponsors. There is no Allison here this year, to smooth things over and act as my mentor outside the arena. Stuck back in District Five, she can’t ply every inch of her considerable charm to persuading rich Capitol citizens to part with their riches, in order to feed and water the District Five tribute.
But when he asks questions about my family, about my brothers… How Klaus cried when my name was pulled from the reaping bowl… I snap. “I didn’t even get to say goodbye!” I pause, and take a deep breath trying to rein myself back in. Showing defiance of the Capitol won’t help me, and it will only endanger them.
If this week has taught me anything, it is that the favour of the Capitol is even cheaper than we had thought.
When Herb mentions Ben, I shut down completely. He seems to realise his mistake, but through the distant roaring in my ears, I hear the buzzer signalling that my interview is over, and I leave quickly, refusing his parting handshake, and ignoring the routine wish that the odds be ever in my favour.
The odds are so rarely in my favour.
It has been three years since I won my Games, yet I still have nightmares about it, and I do again that night, in the precious little sleep I manage to catch. The next day, when my stylist, Dot, wishes me luck on the platform that will raise me up into the arena, it is all I can do not to vomit down the front of my warm jacket. It is all sturdy clothing, with tough trousers and stout boots. When I pat at the bulge in the coat pocket, I find the Gamemakers have even been generous enough to stuff fingerless gloves in there.
Whatever the Quarter Quell holds for me, it looks like the fire-starting lessons are going to be useful.
And then I am rising. There is bile in my throat and my knees try to knock together, but I hold myself upright through sheer force of will. I cannot look weak. At 16 I am the youngest tribute in the Games, and the smallest. District Twelve might be the poorest, but this year their tributes are in better shape than usual, being old enough to have left school and started work in the mines. It puts muscle on their frames that the children usually lack, and the wage puts a little more food in their bellies. Elliott seemed soft, appeared weak, but that could all be strategy. His fellow tribute, Sissy, was hard as nails when she went toe to toe with Cha-Cha on the firing range, and had held her own with a shotgun.
The light is blinding as my platform rises into the arena, and I shelter my eyes against what I think is sun, and then I realise is flame. Coughing into my sleeve, and peering through the drifting smoke, I realise with horror what they have done.
For the Quarter Quell, they have set the world on fire.