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Tango was several hours late for his curfew, but he couldn’t have cared less; while messing around with some unused train tracks he’d found something akin to a rabbit hole, if the rabbit had been the size of a moose.
He snuck in, pulled by curiosity and the cool musty air that contrasted how warm and sticky it was everywhere else.
The dirt hole itself was just that, a dirt hole, and he reached the end of it after walking for less than a couple of minutes. The interesting part was the mechanical hatch he found there, a mix between a manhole cover and a safe like he’d seen on precious cargo containers, plain metal but with a curious symbol painted over it, in the style of district and capitol emblems, a crudely painted snarling pig stared at him.
So of course he started engineering how to get it open, he carried tools with him anywhere he went, a welcome side effect of being a mechanic in training.
He figured his mother had her hands full with his siblings to notice if he were late to get home, so he spent several hours messing with the hatch, trying all he could figure to get it open, and he surely didn’t have any plans of stopping once he’d finally cracked the first of the latches.
What stopped Tango from breaking into what had become to him the most interesting thing in all of District 6 was the rain that started pouring.
He didn’t mind getting muddy, but the dirt hole was quickly becoming too wet to properly work, and also it looked like it could have caved in, so Tango scurried out, getting covered in mud, to add onto the dirt and motor grease that was already all over him.
He promised himself that he’d be back to uncover the mystery, to find out what was down there, if an old war bunker or an entire race of secret pig-men, or a dark maze filled with monsters and treasures.
When he tried to sneak back inside his house, after running as fast as he could under the pouring rain, he was betrayed by his sloshing boots on the floor.
The yell from the other room could only mean trouble.
“Hey! Where do you think you’re going?”
Tango’s mother had been a kind woman once upon a time, when his father was still alive, but after he had passed from sickness when Tango was only eight years old she’d become bitter and angry.
His father was a Victor, so they had lived a good life and when they had to move back to his grandfather's home, his no longer lavish life had changed the kind disposition of his mother.
“I’m sorry, I lost track of time, I didn’t mean to get home so late.”
He knew making excuses was no use, but he still tried.
“I really don’t care, why are you so dirty? Is this the way you honour your father’s legacy? Filth and disobedience?”
She held out her hands, a gesture that might seem tender, but Tango flinched and put out his own, awaiting the punishment he knew was coming.
A few hits on the fingers with a thin wooden rod for every mistake, a classic punishment in the Tek household, so much so that his fingers were already covered in thin scars.
That night Tango went to bed without dinner, aching fingers and wildly running fantasies about what lay beneath the hatch, which he couldn’t wait to discover, all he had to do was to get through the Reaping the following day.