Work Text:
In Four, the stories are about deities— women who lure explorers to collapse into seafoam, helpless to resist the allure. In Three, they're about outlaws— men in suits, and later boys in hoodies, who built miniature empires and found a way to live outside the layer of the city they were forced in.
In the deserts of Two, they're about migrants.
Lyme starts at the Center when she's eleven, the tallest girl by far. Her parents drive for hours in scorching sun and an old ATV, and drop her off at the meeting for out-of-county kids. The teacher tells her that she is like those immigrants, that she has made a journey to give her family a better life.
The next day, she goes to her intro meeting with the other girls her age. She's told that they had checkpoint signs in the desert warning the migrants, correctly, that they would likely die of heat and thirst if they continued. But there was a button they could press on the sign, and police would come.
If they pressed the button, they would be detained and ashamed but alive.
If they continued, they would either die or reach the promised land.
"Does anyone want to press the button?"
No one raises their hand.
"Good. You have a much better chance than any of them ever did."
It's been a year since Beetee started to learn that it's impossible to outrun the Gold Coast, that he will always be defined by his family's wealth. And it will be thirty years before Finnick learns that sirens are a lie men tell themselves to justify the unspeakable, that he is the one without a choice.
When Lyme wakes in the middle of the night with half a scream still lodged in her throat, her mentor tells her something that should have been obvious— that even after the migrants crossed the border, they were still second-class citizens, marked for life— she feels lied to for the first time.
When she becomes Head Trainer, the first thing she does is abolish that narrative.
She's tired of stories.