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In the mines, Jessup had seen men driven mad by the dark and the dust and the gas, trembling like they had no say in it, trembling like his hands are now, tangled in Lucy Gray’s skirt in the tunnels of the arena. He tries not to think about that.
Instead, he remembers the canaries they took underground with them. Back home. Those sharp, warm sherberts, hangovers from an earlier age, swinging in their cages. After a string of gas explosions, the miners had complained to the overman, who had complained to the Mayor, who had promised doubtfully to relay their concerns to the Capitol. What came back was a truckload of whistles.
“Canaries,” the Mayor announced, frowning at the piece of paper in his hand. “Particularly sensitive to toxic gases. Take them into the mines. And when they stop singing, run.”
Jessup loved the birds instantly because of their voices and the fact that wildlife was so hard to come by in Twelve. His neighbour had a dog, a world-weary thing that made lame passes at his ankle, and of course, there were those morbid birds around the hanging tree, but nothing like the canaries. He had hated seeing them trapped in their cages. Worse were the tiny bodies, cradled in the hands of a miner who had escaped an explosion and was too panicked to understand, or else discovered the day after a gas scare, once the tunnel had been cleared, lying abandoned on the floors of their cages.
When Lucy Gray, a sort of canary herself, sang through that first night in the zoo, he listened until she stopped. Run, he thought. Except there was no way out.
It was Leah, his older sister, who had caught him stealing. Poor luck she finished at the washhouse the same time he had left the mines, and after Jessup glanced at his pocket once too often, she dug in her heel and ordered him to open his hand.
“I can’t,” Jessup whispered.
“Why’s that?” Jessup glanced over his shoulder.
“I got a bird.”
Pa’s shift didn’t end until the evening. Jessup begged Leah to forget what she had seen. He’s embarrassed now at the memory, but at the time he was only young, so he promised her everything boys think older sisters care about: he would mend the curtains, he would sweep the floors for a year, and he would give her his entire button collection. All Leah said was, “We weren’t raised to take.” But she emptied her jewellery box from Ma and lined it with a towel, instructing Jessup to lower the canary inside. She wedged the lid open with the towel’s edge, a crack just enough for a beak to poke in and out, almost making her smile. Jessup never took his eye off the box, terrified the lid would slip shut.
Pa sat at the kitchen table, the box in front of him. Behind him at the sink, Leah pulled a towel through her hands.
“Your canary is sleeping,” Pa said, “so we’ll talk soft.” He hadn’t had the chance to wash; his face was covered in soot and shining with sweat, but Jessup was relieved to see his eyes, which were brown, kept their kindness still.
“I’m sorry, Pa. I couldn’t watch them lined up to die and not do something. At the end of my shift, I figured – well, I guessed they wouldn’t miss one.”
Pa considered this. “What you did was noble-minded. You’re growing gentle and that’s good.” He shook his head. “But acts aren’t simple. Because you saved that bird, another man won’t know when to get out. It might mean death, an empty seat at the table. Mouths unfed. I don’t say this to upset you,” he held Jessup’s gaze, noticing his chin tremble, “just to learn you.”
“It ain’t fair,” Jessup whispered.
Pa smiled, but his eyes deepened, the way they did when he mentioned Ma or the war or he and Leah counted out their month’s wages at the table. He extended a finger towards the box and the bird’s beak met it, suddenly, in a quick nip. Pa sighed a laugh through his nose. “No. No, it ain’t.”
Nonetheless, Pa let the canary stay so long as Leah agreed. He returned the evening of that year’s reaping with a birdcage he claimed an old mining buddy was scrapping, though even Jessup was old enough to know he’d been to the Hob. Leah fixed it up. All three of them – Pa, brother, and sister – admired the elegant white bars meeting in a rounded top like that of a beautiful egg. The canary chirped, flitting between the perch and the stale crumbs Jessup sprinkled on the floor.
Although he cleaned the cage every morning, the canary died before the year was out, choked by the coal dust and grime of the Seam, the same that had choked his Ma. “No place for women or birds,” his Pa said, removing his hat as Leah covered the small grave by the border of the woods with dirt and the last glint of gold Jessup would ever see disappeared beneath.
The night before the reaping – his last, he realises – Leah knelt beside his cot bed, her face damp. He’d grown some, so he reached out and tucked a finger under her chin, winking.
“I hate it,” she said.
“Me too.” He risked a smile. “You’re safe now.”
Leah was looking younger and younger those days, nothing near nineteen. In her nightgown with her hair loose, Jessup could picture her as a little girl.
“You’re not,” she frowned.
“Almost.”
“Your last year.”
He sat up, pressing his hands over hers, alarmed to feel them shake. “After tomorrow, you’re stuck with me forever.”
She didn’t laugh. “What Pa taught us is good,” she said, “but doing good ain’t always right.” She was staring into him with an intensity he didn’t recognise. The little girl was gone. “If you’re reaped, you have to win. I’m saying it because I think you can. You’re strong, Jessup.”
For all she called him strong, her grip fixed him like iron.
“Promise me you’ll try. Promise.”
So he did. The Mayor yanked his name out of the bowl so carelessly that he sent a dozen slips fluttering to the ground like gassed canaries. Jessup clenched his jaw, imagining for a moment those different futures, another name so easily called. An inch to the left and his life altered. And another ruined. No, he couldn’t think that way. What would Pa do? Head pounding, Jessup moved stiffly towards the stage. The thought struck him, absurd, that he should have scrubbed his face better for the cameras. The girl tribute – she had been singing, he recognised her from her performances at the Hob; he had forgotten where he was – held out her hand to shake, the bruise on her cheek hardening. How did she get it? Jessup hesitated, almost toppling as she looped around him and tugged them both into a deep bow. Her hand was tiny and hot in his, like holding a canary, and he knew then that he would break his promise.
Despite rumours of raising the employment age, the youngest children in the mines worked as trappers, operating the tunnel doors so fresh air could flow. They endured twelve-hour shifts without lamps or canaries. While the job had bored and scared Jessup as a child, Pa and Pa’s friends had looked out for him. The coal face was another breed of terror. As a hewer, he was responsible for loosening the coal from the bed. He had known men and women buried if a hewer cut too deep too fast. Last winter, testing a new seam, an apprentice had struck water. Although Jessup volunteered to join the recovery team, the floodwater had glutted them up to their waists and they were forced to retreat, scrambling over the uneven rock. Forty-eight bodies were still entombed underground.
One trapper haunted him as the peacekeepers wrenched open the train doors and the stink hit them. He stepped towards the canary – Lucy Gray, she called herself – before a peacekeeper could and lifted her into the carriage. The trapper had been the youngest he’d met, no more than ten, her thin hair sticking to her forehead despite the cold. Her hands were too old, wrinkled with black dust. The glow of Jessup’s lamp had revealed her slumped by a tunnel door, curled into herself.
“Hey,” he had urged, nudging her gently with the toe of his boot. If a trapper fell asleep, it was a death sentence for the hewers relying on their air.
“I’m awake!” A pair of dark eyes surfaced above her crossed arms. Seeing Jessup, they widened. “I’m sorry. Please don’t hurt me.”
Jessup set his lamp on the ground between them, lowering his voice as Leah had when he was feverish and had needed a wet rag changed on the hour. “Why would I do that?” He removed his jacket and held it out. “Here. I’m about to sweat it off anyway.”
He could tell she was weighing him up. The cold won out and she took the jacket. It broke Jessup’s heart to see it swallow her. “Thank you,” she murmured.
“You just keep opening and closing those doors for me, alright?”
She nodded. Then, like a pickaxe falling: “I don’t want to die.”
While the train to the Capitol rumbled on, he found the trapper’s eyes in the twelve-year-old girl from District 8, clinging to the boy beside her. Everybody had somebody to protect, someone to get home to. Leaving the trapper to the darkness had been one of the hardest moments of Jessup’s life. He got the sense he was going to have a few more.
A squeak. A scamper of fur. Bitten.
He shielded Lysistrata during the arena tour because that’s what miners do, or at least what Pa’s son and Leah’s brother was raised to. You watch for each other. When you’re at the bottom, you give a hand up. Each Reaping Day, Pa says that if the Capitol wants to learn about human nature, they ought to spend a day in the mines.
Back in the tunnel, in the present, Jessup mumbles as much to the canary as they lie down for the night. She shushes him, smoothing a hand over his hair. An image of a woman, older and bigger than Leah, doing the same when he was very small tugs at him. It takes too much effort to place her so he quits trying, but he chases the soft fabric of her skirt, the start of a lullaby, the warmth spilling out from her touch, to the edge of sleep.
Jessup thinks he hears a canary whistle. He hopes it never stops.