Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Part I - The Lottery

One ❧ Shady Grove

Then Mr. Adams reached into the black box and took out a folded paper. He held it firmly by one corner as he turned and went hastily back to his place in the crowd, where he stood a little apart from his family, not looking down at his hand. – Shirley Jackson

The sun rises on District 12 like a clumsy criminal trying not to get caught. It hides behind the clouds but conceals none of its heat from the low-slung buildings of the Seam. 

Shady Jade isn’t in the meadow, or in the Covey’s crowded house, when the light filters through the eastern edge of the forest. He’s tapping his foot in the alley beside the bakery on the town square. He’s waiting for it to open. 

Reaping Day is always a bit stressful in the Covey house, but this one in particular comes with a grim understanding. The 25th Games. The first Quarter Quell. And the Covey have spent the last 25 years making sure everyone in 12 knows that they’re not District necessarily. They’ve always been outsiders. 

Now that the tributes are getting voted in, Shady Jade and probably the rest of the Covey are sure that one of their two youngest boys, perfectly in the middle of Reaping age, will be dying this year. At least Maude Ivory turned 19 some five years ago, and Elizabeth Ash is only seven this year. 

It comes down to Shady Jade and Donnie Evergreen. The rest of the district won’t send one of their boys with the option of ‘outsiders’ right there. 

If he doesn’t lose this lottery, Shady Jade only has three more drawings to go before he’s in the warren, in the mines. With six other living Covey, all of them more practiced on instruments than him and more capable of keeping a tune, he would be more valuable in the well than performing or teaching merchant kids their scales. 

At least there his sense of rhythm would have a purpose and he’d be able to bring home coins for the family to spend on grain. As it stands, he’s only allowed to bring in the tesserae rations for himself and Clerk Carmine. Even if they all split it anyway.

No one else is recognized by the authorities as family, though all the Covey see it that way and live under the same roof. 

Shady Jade assumed it would also be more of an argument than it had been if he started taking out more slips. This year, it doesn’t matter. Clerk Carmine hadn’t even put up a fight. They all know he’ll go or he won’t. It’s not even chance anymore. Voting makes arguing about tesserae pointless. His uncle didn’t bother this year. And Shady Jade has a sinking feeling in his gut that he’s more disliked than his… cousin of some sort. 

He catches his own grey-green eyes in the reflection of the bakery window.

Caught in the margins between the Clade-Covey look, the merchant one, and the shades of the Seam, Shady Jade is just innocuous enough to fit both everywhere and nowhere in District 12. He figures most people forget him.

Half-deaf and Covey doesn’t give you great options, and he isn’t anyone’s favorite at their now increasingly sparse performances. At least he doesn’t think so. He’s been that way, half deaf, as long as anyone could tell. No misfortune’s come for his life here besides living here at all. Just the same hunger and scraping for pennies the rest of the district has to deal with. So people mostly ignore him. His cousin, though?

 Donnie Evergreen is a favorite of the girls in town, and everyone above twelve gets a vote. Two, actually. One for the boys, one for the girls. 

Shady Jade put his votes in yesterday. He voted himself for male, a lot of the kids of Reaping age voted themselves. 

His small group of friends talked about it after school over a shared and watered down bottle of white liquor two afternoons ago. Jethro was the only one of the group who wouldn’t say he’d vote for himself. Shady Jade had been able to tell Ripper wanted to say she’d vote for him if he didn’t do it for himself, but she hadn’t. 

The girl vote had been tricky. He didn’t want to condemn his friends to death. After all, Lucy Gray still stood a shadow over his family. Even if she’d won, she’d… disappeared? Died? None of the Covey know. And 12 hadn’t had a victor before or since. 

He’d ended up voting on one of the Lipp girls. It wasn’t really out of resentment. Just that he doesn’t know them as well as anyone else in town. They’re so far away, and anyway, when he was a baby one of their family had shamed his mother for having him with a Covey at all. Shady Jade holds grudges, but he holds them quiet. They’re tucked away in the holler and revisited when he’s unsure, like he was for the vote.

A lot of the district hasn’t voted yet; he can see from beside the bakery that people are gathering outside the post office in the square. Shady Jade is glad he got it over with early as the heat of the day starts to set humidity into the shirt he threw on this morning expecting to get back home before the reaping. It’s something that belonged to one of the Covey girls a long time ago, he figures. Just a simple number with square buttons and yellowed fabric.

When the baker finally opens her door to prop it open and let out the steam which smells like some sort of salvation, she only offers Shady Jade a glance. Eminently forgettable, as always. He drinks in the smell of fresh bread for a moment.

The hawthorn taps on his shoes echo in the bakery’s hollow, hard spaces. He’s been wearing tap shoes since he was young. At least he has rhythm, if he doesn’t have tune. 

Shady Jade buys two loaves of white bread; a treat for Reaping Day. It’s not his money. The coins come from performances he and his family have done, but Shady Jade knows as well as anyone that his dances spare them pennies at best. It’s Maude Ivory, Tam Amber, Clerk Carmine, and Donnie Evergreen who make the real money. They all know it. The bread will calm some of his family’s anxieties and be a small comfort to Donnie Evergreen, who’s probably just as nervous as Shady Jade is.

Two boys named for green and overgrown forests; two boys uncertain which of them will be dying next week. It’s the first Quarter Quell. Probably the first of a hundred, if Shady Jade knows anything about the way freedoms can be quelled. And he at least is pretty sure he knows a lot – the Covey have been wing-clipped for years now. At least twenty-five. The Dark Days are becoming a smudge in common memory.

He should talk to Donnie Evergreen today, before they have to dress and present themselves for the slaughter, but instead when he leaves the bakery he finds himself back in the alley. He crouches by the edge of the building, looking out at the line of people outside the post office. Half of them must be writing his name on a line. 

A line that won’t save him. It’ll do everything else. Being mostly forgettable won’t save him either. At least people like Donnie Evergreen. 

It’s already too-hot, and the back of Shady Jade’s mouth is bitter with anxiety. He should move, but he doesn’t. Not until he realizes there’s someone next to him. Bascom Pie isn’t really paying attention to him, he’s looking at the line in front of the post office, too. He’s a year older than Shady Jade, but part of the same group of mostly-seam kids who hang out together. He’s also taller, more charismatic, and sloppier with his movements in a way that’s almost endearing. Shady Jade lets him talk first after examining him.

“What do you want to bet the merchants aren’t voting in any of their own?” Bascom says. Shady Jade only half catches it, but he can guess the bits he doesn’t hear. 

“I think me and Donnie Evergreen are top of the list, don’t worry.” His voice is a mumble. He almost never talks louder than that. 

“I don’t think you should either, with the stuff Donnie Evergreen has been getting into, I bet you’re safe.” 

Shady Jade turns Bascom’s words over and over in his head. Has his ‘cousin’ been doing something he isn’t aware of? He knows that Donnie Evergreen has been hanging out with a Chance girl recently, but that didn’t seem serious. The Covey aren’t really rebels, they’re just not part of the monuments built to the Capitol either. So maybe just the association with a rebel family? But Donnie Evergreen hangs out with girls all over both sides of the lines. Kind of like Shady Jade’s dad in that way.

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” is all he says. 

“Well maybe neither of us should worry. We’re due another victor. I voted Saerrow in for girls, she was so mean at that last Hob party, what about you?”

“Myself for boys, obviously. And Myrabella Lipp for girls. No real reason.”

“Man, you actually voted yourself?”

“You didn’t?”

“Nah. I did one of the Mellark boys.” 

“Huh,” Shady Jade says, voice neutral but he’s thinking about the idea of not having voted himself for death. Kind of seems alluring. Not something he can change now. He figures it’s better to spend the week before he dies not dwelling in haunts of regret. He’s also thinking about how Bascom lied over that liquor, then. 

“You think there’s any chance I have to go in? I hear they’ve built a whole special arena this year.” Bascom examines his fingernails like he’s not nervous, but Shady Jade can see his whole form tense with it. 

“No, I don’t think anyone hates you that much.” 

“We should have all gotten together and figured out who had the best chance to make it out.” 

“Maybe, I guess.” Shady Jade’s muscles are now getting tired of crouching here. His mind is more tired of this conversation than that. He taps his deaf ear, some distant anxiety trying to make sure he still can’t hear anything out of it. When he was a young kid, the quiet was annoying. Now it’s a kind of comfort. A small part of the world, soft, silent, and his. No one else he knows has this particular quiet living like a bird nesting in their ear. 

“It would have made all of this easier.” Bascom’s face is set in something trying to mask a similar kind of anxiety. 

“You’re not gonna go to the Games, Bass.” 

“I’ve been dreaming about it for a week. Isn’t it worse to go when it’s not random?”

Shady Jade is quiet for a long moment. He straightens, standing up to lean his back against the wall and give his knees a break. It’s a chance to subtly move so his good left ear is actually faced toward Bascom. 

“I think it’s maybe better to know you don’t belong somewhere, and be told that outright, than to have to wonder.” 

Bascom seems taken aback by the statement, and looks at Shady Jade with a look that he hates . It’s something between pity, shock, and discomfort. 

“You belong here, you know?” Bascom says. 

“I don’t. None of us do. We’re just stuck here. Better to hunt us to extinction than block the entrances to the tunnels and let us suffocate,” Shady Jade doesn’t realize he’s speaking for all of his kin until the words are out of his mouth. He’s pretty sure they don’t all feel that way. Tam Amber, Donnie Evergreen, and Clerk Carmine are happy to make a quiet life, they’d prefer it. Maude Ivory, she’s just… an unreasonably optimistic person. Barb Azure’s grave would echo with resentment for him even suggesting they should die out. Shady Jade imagines Lucy Gray, under her headstone or wherever she is, would also scream and rage about it, from the stories he’s been told. 

Bascom also doesn’t seem to agree.

“Extinction? You want the Covey to die out all the way? Twelve would be all grey and black without you.” 

“Probably be safer,” Shady Jade mumbles, his eyes affix on a weed growing through the cracks in the pavement next to the bakery. A dandelion, maybe. No flowers, though. He’s never been as good with plants as his kin. 

“I don’t think anyone would be safer just because we were more dismal. Grey isn’t a color that makes people happy.” 

The two boys sit in silence after that, left in the shelter of Shady Jade’s lack of a response. He wonders if shades of green make anyone happy. Because they sure don’t make him feel anything but a deep anxiety in the pit of his stomach right now. 

Eventually, Shady Jade shifts. He holds up the paper sack of bread.

“I need to bring this to my folk, and get ready for the big ol’ day. Good luck, Bascom.”

Bascom looks up from his thoughts like he almost forgot Shady Jade was there. 

“Yeah, you too.” 

“You’re not gonna go to the arena, don’t worry,” Shady Jade says but doesn’t wait for a response. He’s already out of the alley and into the square, gingerly moving past the line of voters. Tap tap tap. Tap shoes amid the whispers each small group is sharing before they even notice him. 

The Covey house leans hard on its foundation. It isn’t exactly well-built or comforting anymore but it’s home, and it has been since Shady Jade can remember. The forest of wildflowers around it forms bowers over rabbit trails. The cat Barb Azure found in the meadow and brought home when he was only a toddler used to make nests in them, til they found him in a ring of bergamot and azalea, dead of some poison the Peacekeepers put out for the wild dogs. He’d died six months after she had. Since those two were some of his first losses, Shady Jade looks at the wildflowers like a graveyard now. He averts his gaze when coming home. 

He still remembers last summer, when despite his discomfort he picked a handful of the flowers, and tied them with one of Maude Ivory’s ribbons. The boys he hung around with had told him a girl wanted to meet him. He’d stood in the square for four hours before he realized either she’d tricked them, or they’d tricked him. He didn’t care much, he’d just been keeping up appearances. But lies always sting, especially from friends. 

He notes the ink staining his fingertips when he puts the bag down on the counter and tries his best to ghost his way up the winding staircase but Elizabeth Ash stops him. She’s four foot nothing and her hair is still in pigtails, but she’s wicked smart already. Before Shady Jade notices, she’s standing on the stair in front of him. Quiet as a mouse when she wants to be and loud as a hurricane when she sings. She’s the essence of the Baird line. 

“Reaping day,” she says with a conviction neither grim nor joyous. She knows she’s just stating fact. Shady Jade looks down at the seven-year-old in a now stained peachy dress that used to belong to one of the other Covey girls. She looks like a sunrise done up in seriousness and linen.

“Reaping day,” he repeats. He’s never sure if it’s time to try to help be a parent to her or if she’s going to try to have a full adult conversation. 

“Do you think it’s gonna be you, or Donnie Evergreen?” 

“Me, probably.” He never lies to her. She’s too smart for that, even at her age. 

“I hope you win, then,” her voice is resolute. She turns on her heel after saying it and goes up the stairs ahead of him, disappearing into the Covey warren somewhere. He can’t even thank her. He knows he won’t win, anyway. And he knows she’s going to the room she and Maude Ivory share to cry about the same conclusion. That there’s nothing he can do now.

Instead of worrying about it, he washes his face and puts on one of Clerk Carmine’s old shirts. It’s the color of wild roses, and ruffled at the collar. Shady Jade doesn’t particularly like it, but it’s decent. For Reaping Day, at least. He’s examining his off-blonde hair and freckles in the cracked mirror when Maude Ivory calls from the first floor. 

“Everyone, time to go, soon as you can, let’s be as pretty as we all know we are!” her voice is musically upbeat but touched by some sadness Shady Jade doesn’t fully understand. He pulls his hair into a loose bun he’s certain one of his kin will nervously make neater on their way or during the ceremonies. 

Just. Three. More. Years. At least, if he can make it through this one.

Chapter Text

Two ❧ Baker’s Dozen, Discontinued

Under a sunken sky, five coal-eyed birds, huddle in the sallow weeds; cackling at me. And it’s times like these I hang my head, and wonder why I never try to fight for myself? What a grim and gloomy scene, just you, the wind, and the dying wheat. Friendless, dreaming. You wonder if you’re incomplete. – The Blasting Company

Shady Jade turned fifteen only a week ago; June 27th. He’s among the shortest boys when he lines up with the others his age, so he gets pushed to the front of his group and against a few fourteen year olds taller than him. He hasn’t inherited his father’s dark hair, nor his stature, nor his appeal with girls. Or boys for that matter. 

This year is different from the last three he’s been in the pen for. There’s always a sense of dread, but today it mixes with the hot humidity and forms its own kind of hell. Thoughts keep slipping from his head as soon as they come, and he wishes he could blame it on white liquor or some other illicit thing. Instead, he just feels like he’s losing his mind, forgetting seconds as they pass.

Whoever gets called, they all know it’s because no one cares about them. Or enough people don’t. 

Drusilla Sickle is an unwelcome sight. She’s in a purple dress, crowned in massive and incongruent spikes around her neck and woven into her blonde wig. Beneath her breasts, there’s something that looks vaguely akin to a pair of scales with the apex of it tangling between the spikes around her neck. It shows off an ever so slightly offset weight to them, so the scale might even be functional. At her belt there’s a long, heavy sword. It looks sharp.

None of the district meets her eye as she introduces herself, her debut, the rising of her star in a world none of them will care or know about beyond this one cruel event. 

In place of the previous years’ bags or boxes, there are two glass bowls in front of her podium. A single slip of paper in each one, even though it feels like everyone in the square is basically six feet underground. Just two kids, just the least favorite of District 12. 

 Shady Jade tries to zone out and not hear who gets called for the girls, but his attention is, as always, inherently drawn to the wrong things. 

“Myrabella Lipp,” Drusilla calls, Capitol accent lilting on the end of her words. Shady Jade winces. He tries not to feel responsible while Myrabella picks her way up to the stage. She has no emotion on her face at all. Or maybe it’s something between determination and acceptance.

Myrabella’s two years older than him, pale, blonde, and tall, dressed in a black dress with green ribbons. Looks like she’s going to a funeral. Shady Jade supposes she is. 

She’s never particularly expressive, and Shady Jade knows her best from lengthy reports in school where he’s an assistant to their language teacher. Her essays are dense and difficult to properly grade, but he’s never actually disliked her that much. She’s just another merchant girl. Apparently the Seam distaste and distance for merchants outweighed any of the grudges amid them.

When Drusilla turns to the other bowl, he’s not so lucky to be given the three-to-one distribution of Seam to merchant. 

“Shady…” Drusilla squints at the paper, confused. “Shady Jade Clade? That can’t be right, this must be a joke, someone–” 

“No, that’s right,” he doesn’t even realize he’s talking until he hears himself. Shady Jade tries not to register how cold he’s gone. He just slides between two of the fourteen year olds and finds his way to the stage. Wood taps on his shoes against hard stone. They keep him together. They keep him whole. Tap tap tap, muffled in one ear.

He leans toward the microphone without thinking, obviously offsetting Drusilla but not all that caring about it. 

“Shady Jade Clade, and that’s Myrabella Lipp over there. We’re…” his voice falters as he thinks of the words, “We’re District 12’s chosen , chosen to be forgotten I guess. Happy Hunger Games, and I hope y’all come to my family’s show after I’m gone. They’ll put on a good one.” 

Everything is quiet for a moment, while he looks at his shoes so he doesn’t have to see Elizabeth Ash’s face in the crowd. Then from the throng, some echo of the past rings out. 

“That’s one of ours, sing for him!” It’s Donnie Evergreen, somewhere between angry and relieved. Shady Jade feels bad for not even finding him in the crowd, but looking up now he can see his kin standing above a few of their taller fifteen year old peers. They’re holding him back from trying to rush the stage. 

Then Maude Ivory starts singing, with her arms wrapped around a tiny and shaking Elizabeth Ash. 

It’s his name song. The one about a girl someone loved. He’s always felt estranged by it. Not only is he not a girl, his hair can’t even decide if it’s brown, and his cheeks never go red. And it’s… just… a disconcerting song, to him. He wishes he had one like any of his kin. Mysterious and pretty. 

“Shady Grove, my little love,” Maude Ivory starts, “Shady Grove, I sing.”  

Then the Peacekeepers are upon her and Shady Jade just wants the entire world to go the same kind of quiet as his deaf ear. Somewhere a Peacekeeper’s rifle goes off, but no blood, at least this time. Probably a recruit trying to head off a riot that wouldn’t have come.

It’s a blur, and he’s shoved to the wood of the stage by another officer behind him. When he looks up and around, Myrabella is just staring into the middle distance like she’s trying to convince herself not to cry. He surveys the crowd. Still no blood. Still no death. Panic, but it feels so far away. Everyone is nearly still. 

His eyes meet Clerk Carmine’s. Unwavering. Both of them only look at each other, not a nod, not a smile, not a well wish somehow presented. Just understanding. In his mind, Shady Jade says goodbye to his family and hopes his scrawling pages of poetry won’t end up on a fire when the dry wood runs low this winter.

He knows his family will survive without him. The warren runs deep, and the rabbits are plentiful this year. Only one of them isn’t old enough to take care of herself and she’s got the rest of them to do it for her. Donnie Evergreen has even started bringing in game meat from beyond the fence the Capitol erected around the district when they were four or five. He figured out how to build himself bows. He’ll probably teach Elizabeth Ash, or at least his own kids when he has them. 

Donnie Evergreen will be safe from the next couple reapings. Shady Jade took everyone’s side when they argued him down from taking tesserae, so he’s probably the safest any of them have been at reaping age. His family will manage without him, Shady Jade at least hopes that to be true. Not like he was doing much for them anyway.

Instead of his death, his mind goes to a list of tasks. Churning butter from their scant cream, milking the goats, gathering wild strawberries, making sure the dying refrigerator is still running and kicking it hard when it’s not, patching their clothes, making sure to map and maintain their few secret trails. Tasks he’ll need to tell Donnie Evergreen to take over, or Clerk Carmine, but he’d prefer not to put more on the plate of any of the older Covey. It makes him calmer just to look at the crowd as things settle, and think of the things that need doing. That will continue to need doing after he’s gone. 

He catches Tam Amber’s face in the crowd, then, and receives a small nod, before he looks down at his shoes again. Scuffed leather. The Capitol probably won’t find him particularly decent or attractive. Shady Jade knows he has no chance at sponsors and less at surviving the next week. 

Somewhere in the crowd, some muffled noise. Shady Jade doesn’t pay attention. It doesn’t matter. Instead, he lets his eyes find a group of three mockingjays huddled on the sweetshop roof. Or… no? Two mockingjays and a woodpecker, a little bigger than them, with a long white beak and a black crest almost like theirs. He wonders, distantly, if they adopted this one. It’s nestled between the two of them, probably freshly fledged. He’s never seen that before.

When the Peacekeeper’s haul him from his spot on stage, he gives no protest. For a moment, he and Myrabella meet each others’ eyes. Blue on green. Then there’s a flash of black, and wildrose, and there’s no more time for connection. It’s onto the train. It’s on to the end of days. 

Drusilla accompanies them, but for the first few hours they’re simply placed in bare and separate rooms. A slim-mattressed bed and a lock that only works on the outside. When night falls, a Peacekeeper comes to retrieve Shady Jade and lead him to a dining car. 

The car is fancier than most anything Shady Jade has seen, but the food is simple. He doesn’t mind because, right now, he’s not sure if his taste buds are even functional through the distance he’s putting between himself and reality. Wild rice and some sort of meat, some sort of fruit. It doesn’t matter. His stomach churns for it though, so he finishes two servings while Myrabella and Drusilla talk, dunking chunks of bread in just for the decadence of it. He wonders what the rest of the Covey are having for dinner, distantly, but can’t bring himself to think about it deeper. It’s all faraway. He’d rather be underground. 

He takes comfort in the muffling his right ear gives him. He takes comfort in the way he can slip from reality while still paying just enough attention. 

Shady Jade goes to bed with no idea of what was said at dinner, what’s to come, or how he feels. He’s made great effort to remove himself from all of it and will continue to do so for the next nine days. 

When he wakes up, the effort finally fails. No matter how hard he pushes the bile down in his throat, he can feel himself trembling. The feelings wash over him, and then come back. Again and again.

He lays on that terrible little mattress and cries until the door slides open and he’s dragged to breakfast. He tries to wipe his eyes clear of tears and sleep, but when he reaches to do it, the Peacekeeper hauling him along threatens to handcuff him. She’s colder than the others he’s dealt with before. 

When he’s dropped into his chair, he’s facing Drusilla. This morning she’s in a bright pink, sheer and feather-cuffed robe over what looks like a one-piece bathing suit. The word marabou comes to mind. She still has a necklace of spikes and her hair is in perfect order despite the obvious attempt at a fashionably unkempt appearance. Her face is remarkably untouched by makeup in comparison to a lot of Capitol styles. 

“Morning,” she chirps and Shady Jade realizes that he’ll never get used to the Capitol’s way of pronouncing every word like it’s a bird trying to escape. Whatever’s in her goblet smells alcoholic, and without thinking, he reaches over to take it out of her hand. She’s so shocked she doesn’t stop him downing the fruit juice and liquor. He doesn’t recognize the fruit, but the liquor tastes basically like white liquor, so he figures they must make it in the Capitol, too. 

“Morning, ma’am,” he says, wishing he could say it with a smile or any charm at all. But he knows what his face looks like, he knows it’s obvious he’s been crying. And there’s no light or color in him today. 

Drusilla is sputtering, trying to formulate a response, and he’s setting her glass down, when another Peacekeeper drops Myrabella into her chair. 

She’s been crying, too. Shady Jade didn’t realize that she could do that. She doesn’t look like she slept at all, and Shady Jade suddenly feels guilty that he could, for some reason. She’s twisting something around in her fingers and with a sinking feeling, Shady Jade remembers that they’re allowed tokens from home if they have them on them during the Reaping now. His pockets are empty. His clothes aren’t decent enough for the Capitol. Maybe they’ll let him keep the ribbon Clerk Carmine tied into his hair while on the way to the square yesterday. When he reaches back to feel for it, he vaguely remembers the image of it loose on the mattress as he was dragged away from it this morning.

Whatever Myrabella is turning over in her hands, Shady Jade can’t make it out, though. Must be pretty small. She’s still trying not to show any emotion on her face but she’s more faraway this morning. Like he imagines he was last night. There’s no confidence in her, just exhaustion and disdain. And fear. When their eyes meet, Shady Jade can tell she’s terrified. 

Even though he’s never held any affection for her, he slides his shoe along the floor with a satisfying sound to press his knee into hers. He’ll be no protection for her in the death trap they’re hurtling toward, but at least he can be some comfort. He has no intentions to kill anyone, especially not someone from home. Maybe she’ll be able to go back.

“So what’s changing this year?” Myrabella doesn’t waste time on a greeting. Drusilla looks delighted anyway, as two teenagers stare her down with the flattest expressions in the world. District 12’s tributes are done this year. Neither of them seem to find this as fun as she does.

“Well! You’ll actually be made pretty, that’s the new president’s first change! No one wants to see you in…” Drusilla pauses to gesture at their crumpled clothes. They both slept in their Reaping Day outfits. “New arena, I’m sure you heard that in the announcement, and for the first time this year your mentors will be victors from the Districts!” 

“Our own districts?” Shady Jade asks, because he knows they’ve only ever had one victor and she’s long gone. He never even got to meet that branch of his family tree, before it was stripped from the trunk. He was born a couple months before she disappeared, and she’d never even known her old flame had knocked up some merchant girl. Not even the one that tried to kill her. 

Shady Jade’s dad was a whole piece of shit, from what he understands, but he doesn’t remember ever meeting him before he died either. So it only haunts him in the small ways the rest of the Covey seem to be reminded of Billy Taupe when Shady Jade brushes his hair out of his face or has some other minor gesture that apparently was written into his genetics.

“Well mostly, yes. But twelve will be seen to by one of District 8’s, they have three and when we did the drawing, we drew all of them! So lucky, that opportunity, for them! Maybe someday they’ll be with the pack,” Drusilla titters while she butters a piece of toast. Neither of the tributes have touched the stacks of fresh bread and jars of jam. Neither moves to. Drusilla pours something out of a flask into her empty glass and then takes up the pitcher of fruit juice from the table to top it off. 

“I don’t think that’s lucky at all,” Myrabella says.

“But it’s such an opportunity! Maybe now we’re doing this the victors won’t have to spend so much time in those awful houses in the districts!” 

Myrabella and Shady Jade share another look. Victor’s Village is new, shiny, with constant electricity and heat. Sometimes, Shady Jade and his friends have snuck into the house at the end of the row that has a loose lock just to warm up when they’ve run out of wood and coal midwinter. The two of them don’t bring up that what Drusilla apparently considers awful is probably the best in all of the districts. Instead they nearly talk over each other to say it’s not an opportunity, but Shady Jade’s the one to get the sentiment out. 

“You mean they have to deal with what you made them do every year now.”

Drusilla is quiet for the rest of breakfast, unsure of what to say. The only detail Shady Jade pays attention to when she excuses herself is her shoes. 

They’re bright red and have three inch heels, with a puff of feathers around the toes. She looks like a fledgling raptor. 

Chapter Text

Three ❧ Waterlilies

He never should have left the shore, Ill Luck Hеnry; hopeless lover; lеts toss him overboard.

The gathering storm is a menacing sight, strike the sails. All hands on deck. Side by side, we stand and fight, to avenge Irina, and Allete. – Emily Axford

Waterlye stands with the other District 4 girls. The edge of the horizon is broken by the shallows, and ringed in a single bit of clear sky underneath grey cotton clouds. It says sailing will be easy, tonight and tomorrow. No storms yet left to fight. Some may come tomorrow evening, but she won’t be here by then.

She’s seventeen, and it was decided by her peers that she’d be going. She’s strong enough, and already second mate on one of the lobster boats. They think she has a chance, but she isn’t so sure. When they talked about their votes at a town hall last week, she’d come out on top for girls but she’d been near-tied with another girl, Schoona, who lives a long way down the shore and is about a year older. 

Waterlye's been a quiet kind of girl for most her life, but she has feelings that could engulf the sea if they tried. She feels like screaming now, but instead she just takes a few steps forward.

When her name is called by the new, fresh-suited man at the center of a town square stage she’s never actually been to, she’s already halfway to the pulpit. She wasn’t listening. But now she does, because hope against hope, he doesn’t get chosen. She knows he’s already been selected, too. But she wants some reveal that everyone was lying. 

“Compass Harvee,” says the man on stage. The man’s hair is hidden under a powdered wig almost as tall as he is and styled into two peaks. Like mountains looking out at the sea, but streaked with nets of golden and jeweled charms. The wig teeters and so does Waterlye’s stomach. 

She tries not to wretch. Keeps her face in order on the stage. Back behind the roped off sections the potential tributes line up in, her mother and father watch without expression. Her younger brother cries, but he knew this was going to happen. Her twin stands amid the other older boys, face turned from her. She can tell he’s holding himself together with rope and chewing gum. If he looks at her, he’ll cry, too.

Compass moves to the stage with a bleak expression. Not enough energy in him after working the shipyards this morning to put up much of a fight. They stand together on the stage, motionless and waiting. Waterlye looks at the shallows of an ocean she’ll probably never see again and thinks about her own little slips of paper. Waterlye Odair. Compass Harvee. It’s what everyone agreed on. She did this, just as much as everyone else did. A self-made doom. 

Compass is even taller than her, and strong. He’s been working the docks for four years, since he was fourteen. He could kill her if he wanted to. Waterlye doesn’t know if he wants to. He seems mostly… shaken by the reality they both knew was coming for them, more than she is. She grieved her own death last night, alone in her bed. Some ugly seasnake had slithered through her dreams after she was done crying. It tangled her in scales and coils, filled her with a poison she’d felt for hours after waking up. Tonight she leaves the rot to rest and goes to bed on a small, slow train.

When she wakes the next morning on the thin mattress, she can feel the absence of the ocean all at once. Like some part of her soul has been robbed. It was the way she knew where west was when she was on land. It was her home. She can’t even sense any of the salt or water now. Just mountains and green. Such a choking color. Her hands turn over on a dull fishhook strung up with twine around her neck. It’s left intentionally dull but the pressure of the point against her finger sharpens Waterlye’s brain.

She thinks, briefly, of trying to hang herself with her sheets. A small spark in her chest of that silly human desire for continued survival quiets the thought. There’s a mirror on the door. She examines herself.

Red hair, and a face almost identical to her brother’s. Severe. She’s never been pretty but at least she doesn’t look weak. She sets her expression, and goes to meet the mentor they supposedly brought from her district this year.

Mags is in her early thirties but she looks a little older, to Waterlye at least. They’ve never met. The three of them, sitting in the dining car for breakfast, are near strangers. Mags doesn’t talk much about the Games themselves. She asks questions about the work both of them have been doing. She shares greenish bread from her pocket that tastes like home. Waterlye appreciates it but she wishes so badly to be back on the shore. Compass just looks sad, while Waterlye tries to embrace the feeling that none of this matters anymore. She’ll win or she won’t. She has to make peace with killing him if she’s forced to. She just hopes her body makes it back complete so it can be wrapped in a net and sunk to the bottom of an ocean that holds her heart. 

That voyage will be easier than this one. 

The train makes her sicker than the first times she stepped foot on deck. It wobbles side to side and the scenery blurs together outside the small window of her room whenever they put her back into it. She hasn’t gotten to change out of her green and yellow reaping day dress and assumes she won’t get to, before they sling her in the arena. They always toss the tributes into it in whatever they came in on the train in. 

When Mags comes in, almost shyly, to her room, she’s a little startled. 

“Your stylist will want some measurements for the last modifications. Is it okay if I touch you?” A little yellow strip of measuring tape shifts between her hands. 

“Oh, sure,” says Waterlye. She pulls the straps of her dress from her shoulders and lets it fall to the floor without really talking. Even if Mags isn’t one of them , they do own every inch of her now. Mags seems a little concerned, but she measures Waterlye’s waist and bust in inches. Her clavicle to her hip. Inching toward whatever fate will come for her, Waterlye lays in her bed afterward without redressing. She hopes the dress wrinkles on the floor. It belonged to her mother, once. When the sea was even just a little less hungry for the shore and their beaches were fifty or so feet out. This whole place is drowning, she thinks.

When she comes to dinner in just her underwear, only the escort guy bats an eye. Compass is drowning his gaze in his stew and probably doesn’t even notice, Mags acts like she’s fully dressed, and Waterlye just… sits. She looks at her stewed prunes and fish with complete non-interest. 

Besides the bread, the last time Waterlye ate was near a full day ago now. Her stomach’s never felt less empty. It just feels like nothing now. She can’t bring herself to work up an appetite, even when a young man in the apparently-popular Capitol Violet brings out apple pie for dessert. She last ate with Alba, with their parents, with Luff, her younger brother. Now she’s pretty sure she’ll never eat with them again. It makes it hard to think about eating at all. 

Food was never plentiful at home, but it was consistent. And it was home. When she came ashore and got to eat with her family, she’d been happy.

Now, she just wonders how Alba is handling all of this. They’ve been a package set for their whole lives, and now he’ll have to figure out how to be alone. Just a singular flag on the line. 

He’s always been softer than her. Or at least less able to sink those feelings of unease into his gut. But they’ve never really been apart. Just two pieces of one whole. 

If she dies, her mother and father will be fine. They have a replacement right there, and Luff will forget her as soon as next summer, when he’s turning twelve, but Alba? She’s not sure he’d be able to handle it. He picks wildflowers from the meadow along the coast, he ties knots into hearts. He chooses, every time, something kinder. 

Waterlye hopes that when she dies it doesn’t break him somehow. 

Compass comes in late that night. Waterlye isn’t sure if he snuck in or was allowed. They sit in quiet for a minute, she tries to pretend the rocking and rumbling of the train is just the sound and feel of the ocean beneath her. It doesn’t work. 

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asks.

“No. You neither?” 

“No.”

“Do you wanna play cards?” 

And they do, for a few rounds, before it’s starkly clear this isn’t just passing time on deck or the shipyard. Neither of them can pretend it’s as light a burden as boredom, what they’re trying to shake off. 

When they finally sleep, they’re leaned against each other and still sitting. Neither of them want to let go of the other’s hand. They’re in this together now, Waterlye supposes. Two shipwrecks. Marooned.

Chapter Text

Four ❧ Refusing To Think About Him

Let me sleep for a thousand years, wipe the memory from my brain, ‘til I can't recall your name. Wake me up when the world is kind, friends are beautiful and true, and there's nobody like you around. – ORION

The train pulls into the station at District 8 with a groan. It’s an old machine, not as fast as the Peacekeeper transports but not so slow as the refurbished cattle cars they used to move tributes last year. Shady Jade still remembers that hot and overcast day, when Trill and Heller had gone. Now that he’s in nearly the same position, he wonders how they felt. 

To him, it’s a bitter sting of loneliness. Reservation. Only the Covey will care when you’re gone, he tells himself. It doesn’t make the fear stop eating at his guts. 

He can only think of days in the meadow, head rested on a lap, little scrap-journal in his hands and nights at the Hob, or the little shack a few blocks down from it the Covey use as a breakroom these days. Days and nights he’ll never get again. He refuses to remember that person’s face, though. That belongs to his subconscious now. Any little kindness, any little affection, any hope that they could keep doing what they had. It won’t serve him now.

 He hasn’t actually tasted food in the day since they left 12, but he’s been better fed than anyone at home. His gut feels heavy and he’s not sure whether that makes him feel safer.

Eight is flat, and plain. It’s a handful of villages spread out on miles and miles of green and brown land, hunching and dissatisfied factories between them like strings of pearls. Everything is mottled brown. Everything is sky and horizon. Shady Jade wonders how anyone lives with any satisfaction here. 

When Woof boards the train, he’s accompanied until the door by two other victors barely older than him, somewhere down the line they’re loading in two tributes from 8 he assumes. Lambs to the slaughter, one girl and one boy. He wishes he had paper and a pen, at least poems calm his nerves.

Woof calms them, at least a little, though. He’s put on the same closed off cars dedicated to District 12, split from his home district. But he’s kind. When he introduces himself he touches his left ear in a familiar way. A mirror of silence holds still between Shady Jade and Woof, two kids with hands to their ears. They don’t speak on it when meeting, but both of them recognize a shared thing before they speak. 

“I'm mentoring you this year,” he says. It’s quiet but clear. 

“Nice to meet you,” says Shady Jade. He extends a tentative hand. Woof doesn’t shake it. 

“You too. I'm supposed to help you win but,” Woof looks between him and Myrabella, “I don’t know. I'll do my best. I think a lot of it is luck and I dunno about your odds. But I'll make sure gifts are sent and the best ones they can be, to the best of my ability.”

He’s stiff. His brown eyes hold Shady Jade’s gaze. It occurs to him that his mentor’s trying not to apologize.

“You didn't vote us in or choose to be here,” says Myrabella. She cuts through whatever guilt was percolating between the two of them. Shady Jade looks down at his shoes. They’re like bells on a cat as much as an instrument, his family don’t like being snuck up on. Now he wonders if the Capitol might provide anything that doesn’t make so much noise for the arena. 

He wants to be silent, now and when he gets put in. Silence is safety. Clerk Carmine told him that, once. It was more about talking too loud or true ‘round the Peacekeepers. But he took it to heart. It’s wormed its way into so many of his poems.

“I didn’t.” Woof suddenly looks a little older, a little stormier. He must be only in his early twenties at most, but right now he looks ancient. Shady Jade suddenly realizes this is the first time he’s ever met a victor in the flesh. 

Victory must be some special kind of torture. He’s not sure he wants to find out what kind in first-person. Especially considering he can’t hide anything from the other Covey, not really. A painful thought, those meadow-memories drag at his subconscious and he shoves it all down. Feels his eyes half-unfocus.

There are ways to kill yourself in the arena, right? At least he wouldn’t have to watch anyone else die. He’s seen enough of that at home. 

One year, he found someone in the woods. Probably died of starving or eating the wrong thing out there. There’s a reason Shady Jade avoids eating berries unless one of his more plantsmart kin have picked them. The person’s skin was stretched so tight and baked into their browned flesh to a point no one could identify them. Maybe some runaway from another district. Maybe just someone dead and hidden long enough to have been presumed missing, or worse. Like Lucy Gray. No one wanted to bury them so they’d ended up in the little Covey graveyard far into the forest. An unmarked grave, no name song to inscribe on a headstone, no color to present for them.

Would it be easier to go like that?

“Well, then, don’t act like you’re condemning us.” Myrabella’s voice draws his eyes from his shoes. He tries to shake off the spiral of thought but it sits in the back of his brain, waiting.

“I’m sorry.” Woof’s voice shakes, and he’s the one averting his gaze now.

“She’s right. We get nothing from blaming you for any of this,” says Shady Jade. Always talking before his brain has caught up with what he’s about to say. Always naturally speaking for a plurality of people who might not agree with him.

“I’m sorry,” Woof repeats, a different tone to it. Shady Jade can tell he’s trying to pull himself together but Woof hates being here. All three of them hate being here. A lot.

“You don’t have to teach us anything, we’re both gonna die by the end of the first day, I don’t think whatever you can say on this train ride is gonna change that.”

When the words are out of his mouth, Myrabella shoots Shady Jade a look that tells him he shouldn’t have said it. But he shrugs at her. A little of that practiced performance-smile touches his lips. Finally. 

“I’m right. You’re tall and strong for 12 but the other districts will squash both of us. Soaking wet I could maybe stand up to a 13 year old girl.”

Myrabella frowns. 

“You never know in the Games,” Woof says, without much conviction.

“I know what they’ve made me watch, I know kids without a skill to their name stand no chance,” Shady Jade’s voice isn’t really all that touched by the smile. They all know it’s fake. Woof struggles for a response, a good rebuke. Myrabella cuts in then.

“We both have skills. You tapdance, must be a fast runner. I’m really good with people. I could make us some allies.”

“Are you? Good with people. Didn’t even realize we agreed to being allies.” 

“You didn’t, but you will now.”

“Guys, we can work with you,” Woof says before Shady Jade can argue with her, “They’re having you do training this year. Just focus on defending yourselves.” 

Shady Jade looks him over. Brown hair, brown eyes, off-grey suit and brown tie. The crease of his brow just betrays more stress, plain and clear. Shady Jade sighs, and lowers his head into one hand. It finds his ear. Tap tap tap, still no sound. Good.

“Just try? Try to stay alive,” Woof continues.

“Okay. Fine.” Shady Jade shifts, the scrape of floor-wood on tapwood echoes through the quiet seconds. “Who else is going? You have to know at least from 8.” 

It’s Woof’s turn to look at his shoes. Worn but fancy, dress shoes. Capitol must not be lying about the money victors get.

“Come on, I can show you the taping of the Reapings if you want.”

Shady Jade really does not want, but he follows Woof anyway, and so does Myrabella. Down the train to another car, the endless rumbling a backdrop to their trio of misery. It’s always just off a consistent rhythm. 

There’s a tiny television set there, a bar off to the side of the room and the rest occupied by a nest of couches. Woof fiddles with the television for a minute or two, and slides something into the slot underneath it. It flickers to life on a surreal look at the stage back in 12.

Shady Jade can pick out his own head, in the middle of the boys’ pen.  The little silver ribbon in his hair bounces every time he turns to look for a friend or part of his family. He notices the way Donnie Evergreen winces when Myrabella is called, like a shot’s already been fired. Did he vote for her too? Or is she one of his girls?  

His eyes stay on his cousin as his own name is called. Surveying himself walking up to the podium seems a daunting task. The wildrose shirt just looks like dried blood. 

Donnie Evergreen, though, he’s furious. Stormcloud in a gold vest, black shirt. Maybe it’s that Myrabella went first, or maybe Shady Jade’s cousin cares about him more than he thought. It’s Covey to get angry when one of their own is harmed, but this is a different loyalty. Bitter, guilty anger. Did he vote for… Did he vote for Shady Jade, too?  

When Woof hears ‘sing for him,’ he fiddles with the television a little more. Skips past the last 30 seconds or so of 12’s recording. 

Eleven’s tributes confuse Shady Jade for a second. Two boys. There’s a boy called for the girls’ Reaping. Or… maybe they just look that way? They’re wearing mens’ work clothes, cleaned and prettied up a little. Yarrow is their name, he tries to pin it in his memory. The boy who’s called next Shady Jade forgets the name of. He shakes his head and tries to pay attention. The two of them look strong and older, Yarrow only an inch or two shorter than the boy. Dark skin and dim regret, both of them. 

Most of the rest of the tributes are similar, around when they get to District 8 Shady Jade starts to worry he might be the youngest in these games, but then tiny, tiny Tineol is called. He can’t be a day over thirteen. Shady Jade swallows hard and tries not to think about what an easy target he’ll make for everyone. About why people would send some child so young into this, willingly. Tineol doesn’t even have the grimness behind his eyes a lot of them do, just… nothingness. He’s trying to escape into his own head, probably. Shady Jade avoids looking at Woof.

Six has two tributes who are either siblings or twins. They look similar, but not near as alike as most twins he’s seen. Both look around his age though, dark haired and skinny, they’d almost fit in in the Seam, if they had greyer eyes and weren’t so pale. They’re named for birds, so Shady Jade can’t help but feel a bit soft to them. Columba and Zenaida. He’ll have to try  to remember which is which. 

When Nine rolls around, they have to shift on the couches to make room for Drusilla’s massive pink ballgown. Still collared in massive, disorganized spikes. She’s brought the sword again today, too. Her wig is some sort of yellow-green which doesn’t particularly flatter her skin tone. She titters through the Reaping of Barley and Fusaria, two skinny kids who look like the wind might blow them away. Fusaria’s crying when she gets up to their stage. 

Shady Jade tries to pay attention, he really does. But all of them just blur into one picture of misery. Twenty four roots to one big, rotten tree. Twenty three of us will be dead by next week, he thinks. With the better fed tributes from 1, 2 and 4 ending out the recording, he doesn’t like his chances. He can’t stop wondering which one will kill him. Over the last of them, Woof’s expression gives Shady Jade the distinct feeling he has a very keen distaste for Drusilla. Shady Jade is prone to agree with that judgement. 

“They do have a lot more going for them than us,” Myrabella says. 

“We don’t know how smart, fast, or actually strong they are.” Woof won’t meet their eyes. He’s not doing a good job being comforting exactly, but his quiet demeanor and seeming sympathy is calming. 

“Are either of us any of those things?” Shady Jade asks. His eyes are set full on Woof now. It doesn’t even take a beat for his mentor to answer.

“She’s smart, you’re fast.”

Myrabella looks, distantly, pleased. Her words do seem to have an effect, when she chooses to use them. It doesn’t seem like she will now, and Drusilla takes the reins of conversation while she leans over the bar for a bottle of bluish liquid. Her bangles clink against the glass.

“Well, for people who are district, at least,” she drips ‘district’ out of green lips like it’s a foul tasting liquid. Shady Jade feels the beginnings of offense well in his gut.

And then the train derails. Shady Jade catches some of Myrabella’s blood in his hands, like that will do anything. 

Chapter Text

Five ❧ Nearly There, and a Thousand Miles Away

Like a leaf, you turn to start again, it was good when you began but better is the end. Like a seed, in a flower bed and then you water it, how better is the end?

I'm still growin' up; doing the best I can. Every day I'm learning to be a better man. –Tophouse

The forest makes bowers out of the canopy. It’s warm, and wet, and just slipping through the loose panel in the fence by the meadow leaves Donnie Evergreen feeling exhausted. It’s been a day and a half. His cousin is as good as dead and the only solace he’s found has been birds and bitter liquor. There’s that Seam girl he’s been seeing, but she probably voted for Shady Jade too, didn’t she? What does that make him to her, someone with no right to her home?

Bow, in the hollow log. It’s mechanical. His fingers move without thinking to string the bow, to retrieve the arrows, to check for damage. At least this, he can do easy. 

 He treks toward the lake, but has no intention of getting all the way there. He hasn’t really slept, since Shady Jade went. Maude Ivory’s been up crying at all hours, and that just sets Elizabeth Ash off, too. When the acrid taste of anxiety begins to touch the back of his mouth, Donnie Evergreen just paces faster. Wastes his energy trying to outwalk his thoughts. 

He starts whistling, and the mockingjays, the last few jabberjays still left here, they all quiet to pick up his melody. It’s too off-kilter for the birds to do much with, but they spread it in the treetops and the noise of them is nice. They refine it ‘til it’s actually something they can harmonize, and he whistles their rendition back. 

Donnie Evergreen has always been more at home in the forest than the Covey house. It’s loud, but all off-pitch. The songbirds out here feel more like family than most of the ones at home. But Shady Jade has been basically his brother, almost a twin despite them looking so different. Though Donnie Evergreen’s actually a week younger, he’s felt protective of his cousin since he was around five. He shot up like a weed, but Shady Jade only put on a few inches over the years. His cousin was all lean muscle and looked younger than fifteen even now, long ashy blonde hair, freckles and crooked front teeth. 

Donnie Evergreen wears enough age for the both of them. At fifteen, he looks near eighteen. His stubble’s already coming in evenly, the leather hand-me-down jacket from some Peacekeeper’s donation at a Hob performance is starting to get too tight on his shoulders. He and Tam Amber are the tallest Covey. He resembles his father, just with lighter, olive skin, and straighter hair. Grey eyes to his father’s dark brown.

“Donnie, you’re a fine young man,” he starts to sing without really thinking about it when the mockingjays finally give up on his halfhearted whistling, “You’re hoping to take the hand of some sweet thing who understands what this world’s about.” 

His name song’s always been a comfort, but he can’t even get to ‘I bet she’ll come around’ before his voice falters. It’s been a hard couple of days. Whatever’s in his heart, it isn’t music right now. Mostly, just grief for a family member. Grief for that merchant girl he doomed to die. 

He doesn’t want to be home when the mandatory broadcast of the arena starts sometime in the next few days. He’s been stretching the privilege of his family’s unstable freedom in 12, of not worrying about going to the mines, or school much either. Doesn’t intend to stop ‘til the Games are over with. The forest is a friend that keeps the secret when he cries. It feels so pathetic. He’s not even the one going to his death. 

His brother, his cousin, whatever, the blood tie doesn’t matter… His kin is gone. 

When the crying stops, he finds himself gripping the string of his bow with both hands, curled up against a hawthorn. The warbler in the branches above him drowns out the mockingjays further away. When the grief ebbs, anger comes in. It fills him and burns him to his foundations. 

His brother isn’t just gone , he’s stolen . Donnie Evergreen isn’t sure if he’s more angry at the district or the Capitol. He balls his fists and slams them into the tree. Again and again, ‘til they’re bleeding and he has to stop because the sound of wood being knocked on just reminds him of Shady Jade. 

He resigns himself to not hunting today and unstrings his bow in frustration, when a thought comes to him. 

Oh no.

The Covey have never much cared who or how their people love so long as they’re not breaking hearts. So of course he knows about Shady Jade’s boy back in the Seam. How did he not think of him til now? 

Donnie Evergreen hasn’t ever been much a fan of Rye Chance. Rye spends most of his time intoxicated, and most of his mine earnings on feeding one habit or another. He’s bad news, and started hanging out with Shady Jade when Rye was fifteen and Shady Jade was twelve . Now that Donnie Evergreen’s fifteen, he couldn’t imagine picking up some hapless twelve year old. 

But at least Rye makes his cousin happy. And with the way Donnie Evergreen has seen them cling to each other on trips they take on Sundays sometimes all the way to the lake with the whole household and their loved ones, he figures Rye is probably in shambles right now. 

Since the anger’s passing made him an empty shell, it’s with a numb dedication that Donnie Evergreen picks his way back through the forest. Exhaustion and responsibility in equal measure. He stops at the strawberry bushes. Used to be Shady Jade’s job to check these, but now it doesn’t much matter. Maybe Rye’d like some.

Mechanical replacement of bow, and arrows beside it. Mechanical checking of the sky for any clouds, it’s past noon now. Hot, tiring walk back to the fence. Hot, tiring walk through the winding streets of the Seam. His bag hangs heavier than it should on his back, and he knocks on the Chance door with no real expectation of a response. Rye’s mom is probably in the mines, so should Rye, and his brothers should be in school. Technically, so should Donnie Evergreen. But there’s the sound of shuffling in the house, and then wrestling with the door.

It takes a second to get the old, warped thing to open, and then he’s met by the oldest Chance boy. Maybe a few inches shorter than him, dark hair and dark eyes. Those eyes almost mirror the purpley-brown tint his skin has cast under them. Rye hasn’t slept either, looks like. He’s still in the now-crumpled clothes he wore to the Reaping. And his cheeks are subtly blotchy. Been crying, too, Donnie Evergreen figures. Wonders if his own face looks like that.

“I brought some strawberries,” he says. His hand falls to his bag. He listens to the quiet of the midday Seam. It never feels itself when most people are out.

“Oh…” Rye looks him over. Donnie Evergreen is sure he isn’t looking any better than Rye is.

“You and Shady Jade, what was that?” 

Rye meets his gaze like both of them are in the arena themselves. A junco cries above them, and Donnie Evergreen can imagine its tiny black eyes trained on them from some rooftop. It’s a nest-defense call. Rye’s body roils with something between anger and fear, but he doesn’t answer. So Donnie Evergreen presses on. 

“I mean, I can assume. You spend just about every minute you can with each other. You don’t needa tell me. I really don’t care. Won’t tell anyone or anythin’. Just figured you’d like some happy in your head after… after they took ‘im.” 

A thread snaps in Rye. His shoulders slump. He’s still got soot on his face, even though Donnie Evergreen guesses he hasn’t been back to the mines since the day before Reaping. Sometimes the overseers will turn a blind eye right after. Especially if they know you were family or friend to the tributes. 

“Thanks,” he mumbles.

“I’m serious. Won’t tell anyone, if you need to talk. Too many of your family’ve gone up a rope before. Don’t want you doin’ it to yourself, okay?” 

They stand in silence until it becomes uncomfortable. It probably wasn’t something that should have been said aloud, but they’ve both known too many people to die after someone they love gets taken. Then Donnie Evergreen hands him a couple handfuls of strawberries to be set on the table beside the Chance household’s squeaky door. 

They don’t say goodbye, but Rye gives him a look full of gratitude, and Donnie Evergreen makes a silent promise to bring the Chances his next rabbit. 

He takes his time going home, and when he gets to the Coveys’ house, he lays out amid the wildflowers for a long, long time. His brain won’t stop working over all his worries, but he still feels mostly numb. It’s the weirdest feeling. 

“Take the weight off of your legs,” he sings to himself, quiet enough anyone in the house can’t hear, disjointed and a bit off rhythm, just an attempt at bringing any color back into his chest, “You’ll come to no harm, no cause for alarm, come little–”

And then his vision is blocked by a tired, concerned Elizabeth Ash. 

He just shakes his head at her. 

“You’re singing, want me to join in?” 

“No.”

“Okay.” So she sits, careful of a bit of brushflower between them. She looks at the sky. “No rain today.”

“Nah, probably not.” 

“I should water the flowers then. Been a minute.” 

“If you want to. I can get it after I sit here a bit.” Flat on his back, he watches the fluffy clouds creep above the uneven roof of the house. Too nice a sky for a day so hot, too nice a sky for a day like this. She hums to herself, and he fiddles with grasses and stems with one hand, the other slides over his eyes, until he’s ready to drag himself from the earth. 

They make dinner in a kind of silence almost unknown to that house. It usually brims with music or chatter, spilling over the rafters and out the windows. It’s going to be a lot quieter here from now on, he has a feeling. Two of their own. Fifteen years. Their colors even nearly rhyme, Gray and Jade. And them going, it’s all the Capitols fault. 

When the pot of stew boils, he can finally feel the anger coming back with it. Roiling in him. It bubbles in the back of his throat as he eats. The colors are all dull now, none of them in the Reaping Day attire they also use for performances. Clerk Carmine went down to the Hob to cancel one they’d scheduled for the end of the week. Everyone understood. It’d be quiet ‘til the robbers gave back their shady grove, and if they didn’t it’d probably be quiet a bit longer still.

After choking down their roots and wild turkey, Donnie Evergreen and Elizabeth Ash water the flowers with an old milking bucket that’s pretty leaky now. This time they sing back and forth to each other. Old Covey songs Maude Ivory taught both of them. She’s the repertoire of songs now. They have a few written down, thanks to Shady Jade, but no one remembers the tune like she does. She was too young to have Elizabeth Ash. And Elizabeth Ash is too young to be dealing with any of this. 

He tries to imagine what this would feel like to him when he was seven. Losing one of theirs. He’d at least been a bit older when Barb Azure went. Some fever, they told him, but it didn’t seem like any he’d seen. Elizabeth Ash doesn’t show her worry much though, she’s resolute in her convictions. She thinks the world is good and she’ll try her best to force it to be that way. Today her hair is up, tangled with wild roses. She’s falling apart at least a little less than the rest of them. Some small comfort. 

They stay up most of the night together, after the rest of the family’s gone to bed, though, and he can see the barely concealed understanding of true dread setting into her face. 

The television set in the corner is on. They can’t turn it off while the Hunger Games footage is running. Reruns of old games and this year’s Reaping play on loop for late-night viewers. They haunt him through a hazy semi-consciousness that falls on him. Maude Ivory’s sobs from somewhere upstairs sing him into it.

When the sun rises to reports on the television that his cousin may be dead but they’re not sure, Donnie Evergreen decides he hates the color orange.

Chapter Text

Six ❧ Winter Roses in July

Time has not been kind; we lost thousands of boys, I lost two of my own, north and south combined in an orgy of violence like none we have known. Such a war was fought brothers fought against brothers on my command but was it for naught, when the slaves are all free in a more perfect land? – Molly Lewis

When Shady Jade wakes, it’s to a room more devoid of color than any he’s ever seen. His wrists are shackled to the metal railing on his bed. Everything is white, too bright to see much of anything at all. When he raises his head, memory becomes a fractured concept very, very faraway. 

Myrabella’s body, in pieces in his hands. Drusilla screaming, her bottle shattered against a wall. His head spins.

Everything he can see is white. Even the rose on the lapel of the man sitting in the chair a few feet from his bed. But his tie is dark red.

“You seem to have missed a meeting,” says the man. With a rueful grin. His lips are too-tight. 

“Sorry, busy gettin’ in a trainwreck, sir,” Shady Jade tries to match the energy in his voice. Tries to take some power in the situation. Own it, the Covey’d say. He can’t move, though. Can’t own anything now. And while his brain slowly comes into a semi-focus, he recognizes the blonde man. Must be in his early thirties. 

Coriolanus Snow has only been president for a couple years now, but he’s made sure his face is plastered almost everywhere since he was… ‘elected’. More accurately, since his only opponent died  of some foodborne illness. Mysterious, that. 

“At least you’re more punctual than your district partner.” 

Shady Jade looks away. The room is windowless. So bright. In the spots behind his eyelids when he tries to block it all out, the image of two lifeless blue eyes on a face half-severed from its torso swims into his vision instead. He slams his eyes open and stares into the white until the image overlays the far wall of the room. Shaking his head doesn’t rid him of it. 

His hand jabs into his good ear. Muffling the sound of the beeping, something attached to his arm. He can’t hear when Snow speaks anymore so he just keeps staring at an awful memory. One fragment of time. It seems like they sit there like that forever, Snow speaking and Shady Jade unable to make out any of it. It must only be a minute at most, though. 

An Avox comes in to set platters of tea, small rolls, and cakes on a small table off to a side of his bed, closer to the president than him. The Capitol took more than her tongue. Looks like they took near her entire bottom jaw. Or maybe that was some accident, in whatever district she’s from. It makes Shady Jade shudder. He looks at the wall and does his best to roll his sleeves, the same red he wore on Reaping Day still, up past his elbows so he only has to see them in the edge of his vision.

Snow eats, and drinks his tea. At no point does he blink. He’s not talking now, just examining Shady Jade with a distant recognition and a curiosity only thinly masked behind etiquette. Shady Jade slowly lowers his hand from his ear. 

“What is it?”

“You're Covey,” it’s half a question, half statement, “and your other ear doesn’t work, does it? How does that serve you in their little shows?”

“I dance.” 

“So do most of you. All swishy bright colors.”

“Was planning on going to the mines when I was old enough, sir.”

“Ah. A spare little bird. I assume you can’t sing.”

“Can, sure. Not the best at it.”

“What were their names… all your little ballad colors? Who’s still alive out there?”

“How do you know the Covey, Mr. Snow?” Shady Jade watches a stiffness go through the president. Not regret really, some albatross to carry.

“Mm. Answer my question. I'll consider answering yours.”

“Tam Amber, Maude Ivory, Clerk Carmine. Then Donnie Evergreen and Elizabeth Ash. There’s one other we’re pretty sure. Whoever they are, they’re not named like us.” 

Snow examines his empty teacup, considering something. It’s a long few seconds before he speaks. The room smells, faintly, like sweetened blood. And roses. Roses will be the death of Shady Jade, won’t they? Wildrose shirt, rose in the lapel of a president who has some barely masked disdain for him, the scent of roses in this hospital room. He just hopes they won’t come for his family, too. 

“I mentored your victor, when I was in school. So nice to hear that Tam and Clerk and Maude are still alive.” When Snow says ‘nice’ it doesn’t sound like the word he wants to use. There’s hatred riddled through the heartwood of his sentence.

Shady Jade sits in the uncomfortable silence and glares at bleached sheets. The Covey don’t even have any pictures of Lucy Gray. The Capitol took her from them. And Snow has the gall to sound pained, worried when he talks about her? It’s stomach-churning. The tunnels underneath and between the sheets look like some sort of salvation.

“Yeah, well,” he reaches for some biting retort but he can’t find one. His voice hangs in the air. 

Grey-green on icy blue, their gazes both hold. The pain in Snow’s eyes drains, replaced by amusement. Shady Jade looks away again. 

“I’m going to give you a lesson and a favor, little dove.” The words sound like venom, too-sweet. When Shady Jade doesn’t respond, Snow gestures to the door of the room. He beckons in another Avox. This one is cold, tall. At least her jaw is in place. 

On the silver platter she carries, there’s a tiny mechanical device, and a thin needle. When it slides into his arm, Shady Jade finds his head spinning worse than on any of the liquor or drugs he’s ever experienced. He nearly crashes into blackness, then is brought back by a pressure in his bad ear. By her hand holding his head still. 

The pain sends him over the edge and an artificial night comes down hard over his vision. He manages to hear one last thing from President Snow, it doesn’t make much sense but it feels… like a threat.

“Remember, the rest of your life might not be over until the mockingjay sings, but I doubt you’re much of a mockingjay. Our show has more staying power than some little spot of color.”

Then it’s a spinning, dreamless void.

It feels like a few seconds but when he wakes, the stiffness in his joints tell him it’s been hours. He’s untethered now, and groggy, but he tries to stand. 

When the Peacekeepers stationed at his door shove him back toward the mattress, Shady Jade doesn’t fight it, but he can't sleep. He just stares into the now-slightly-dimmer white void of a room around him. President Snow is long gone. Probably meeting with other tributes, Shady Jade thinks that if his innocuous performance was enough to spur a visit from their kind and benevolent leader, or whatever he’s supposed to be called, then everyone else is getting one too. Or maybe he just visited Shady Jade because he’s Covey. A fragmented piece of his past. He doesn’t worry about it much because the thing in his ear is a seed of panic.

For the first time in his entire life, he can hear himself shift on the sheets in his bad ear. He can hear every heartbeat against his pillow. And behind it, there's static. An untuned radio. Probably hooked up to some Capitol transmission. He feels the gooseflesh rise on his arms.

Without the cuffs, he can now reach up to touch his ear. Sticky dribble at the lobe, but when he taps on it, he can’t help but stifle a shriek. It feels so foreign to hear rather than feel the rhythm on that side. Silence is safety.

Tap, tap, tap . Too loud. No good. He tries to focus on the memory of voices that he’s loved. He shoves one far, far to the back of his mind, and leaves the rest on repeat. Songs and memories and home. Dread settles into his stomach. It’s hollow, and cold, and he wishes desperately for a pen or a bit of burnt wood, a scrap of paper or a journal made from old shop ledgers gifted by merchants. Just had to write the other way from the words already there and it’d be mostly legible. 

He forces himself not to think of days in the meadow with his journal. Instead, times leaned against Clerk Carmine while reading poems to him and Donnie Evergreen complaining from across the room that they weren’t the right beat to put to tune. The dread explodes in the mineshaft of his gut.

He’s never going to see his family again.

Shady Jade sits there dizzy, half propped up just to prove he can move his own limbs still. How does someone mourn themself , he wonders, but doesn’t think of an answer. He’s less scared than sad right now. Eventually the sadness and fear fall away and there’s just exhaustion, distant anxiety, and the white room.

At some point he drifts into a hazy unconsciousness again. Another needle in his arm. This time it’s the first Avox he saw, so he goes down into that blackness with an image of horror against his eyelids.

He wakes up handcuffed, but not to the bed. Just his wrists, connected together. He’s seen that, sometimes, when someone working in the mines misbehaves. They’ll be cuffed and led in to work, or if it’s bad enough, to that old warped tree. Will they execute him? Get it over with? Any number of excuses could be made. Covey, outsiders. Somehow caused the trainwreck. Just a district animal. 

They drag him to some van. It’s all harsh hands and force even though Shady Jade doesn’t care to fight them. This is the second time Shady Jade’s ever been in a car. The last time, it was some school trip to the overground mine facilities. He’s not sure if it’s that the Games are looming on his horizons, or that the trainwreck did something to his brain, but it feels so much more terrifying now. He’s just waiting for another crash. 

It doesn’t come. The van stops in front of a building bigger than any Shady Jade’s ever seen in person before, all marble and brightly colored windows. He tries to read the banner above the big double doors, but his vision is blurry and he’s still dizzy. He slowly comes to the conclusion he must have hit his head pretty hard on the train. The only thing bleeding at all is his ear, at least. 

His shoes are too loud on the floor to him when he’s led into the large, hardwood space. His taps echo against the massive walls, and mostly empty room, trying more to be a melody than rhythm. Shady Jade wishes he had enough mobility to push his fingers into his ears. The Peacekeeper with a hand on his back guides him to a simple little chair. There’s another, just two or three feet away.

He sits there in the cuffs while other tributes are shuffled in. A twitch in his eye makes the room spin even heavier, everything out of focus. He can hear every movement too clearly. The tall redhead girl from 4 gives him two seconds more of a glance than she gives to the rest of them. He’s not sure why but he thinks there’s some kind of distaste or confusion in her expression. 

Shady Jade slumps in his chair. Looks at his shoes. Still the same shirt in the periphery of his vision. Not usually bothered by his own smell, he’s starting to wish he had some lavender or something else to cover it all up. Or a bath. What a kindness a bath would be. He hasn’t even been allowed to wash his hands of Myrabella’s blood, or the dribble from his ear. It’s all stiff and sticky now, pulling on his skin. Underneath the blood, ink still stains his hands.

Two blue eyes. One neck half open. 

He’s not surprised when she doesn’t show up to whatever meeting this is they’re here for. He knew the second her blood was spilling off his hands that she was gone. No chances to be punctual anymore. He’s trying not to think about it.

Shady Jade also tries not to see tiny Tineol a few chairs to his right, or the skinny District 6 girl picking at her nails in the row in front of him. The boy from 7 is looking at him with curious eyes and an expression of recognition. Or maybe it’s distaste? Sympathy? Even here it seems like he’s half-outsider. Always getting incomprehensible looks. 

It’s easier if he doesn’t see their faces. One of them’s going to kill him, but twenty-two of the twenty-three left have to die anyway. It’ll be a mercy if he goes early.

Vaguely, Shady Jade resolves that this will be the way of humanity now. Killing children. The districts will forever be just tunnels leading to the Capitol. Twenty three every year. Near two thousand and a half by the hundredth Games. Over a thousand by only twenty-five years from now. How many have died? He does the math. Twenty-three times twenty-four. 552. Then one for Myrabella, and one for Lucy Gray. 554. 

In his gut, Shady Jade doesn’t think his long-lost cousin is still alive out in the woods. Everything anyone’s told him about her suggests she was too bright a spirit to stay quiet or lonely. Too strong a song in her throat to ever be silenced. Something clicks as the lyrics of some old song even Maude Ivory nearly ever sings wash his brain. Lucy Gray wrote it, in that glimpse of time between the Games and her… disappearing. 

This world, it's cruel, with troubles aplenty, you asked for a reason, I've got three and twenty; for why I trust you.

You're as pure as the driven snow.

Ah. Probably more than her mentor. Did she… write that for him? Why would anyone write anything for that sickly milk-colored man? Especially after he put her in the Games. It doesn’t make sense. 

The insides of his cheeks pour nauseous saliva, and he swallows hard. Far wall. Grey and bland, just cast in marble on the outside; it’s made of cinderblocks. He starts to count the blocks while breathing slow, in and out. Tap tap tap , his shoes echo on the floor no matter how much he tries to stop moving. 

Once all the tributes have taken their seats in the two orderly rows, unfamiliar Capitol folk start to wander in. They’re almost all done up in extravagant outfits. Fur and feathers, bright candy colors. So instead, Shady Jade counts them as they enter. Twelve in all. They start with the girls of each district, but since the chair beside Shady Jade is empty, the man he assumes is assigned to 12 just comes to sit across from him instead.

There’s a live, blue-green lizard pinned into his hair and a large yellow snake around his throat. He’s in a shiny cyan shirt tucked into pants that squeak like plastic but shimmer like shined leather, held up with a crocodile skin belt. The man has a faraway kind of intoxicated smile that Shady Jade’s seen on… no , he shuts that thought down immediately. Feeling far too tired to do it, Shady Jade takes the conversation first. Own it, the Covey always told him. 

“Hello, my name is Shady Jade. Pleasure to meet you.” The words feel foreign in his ears. He’s mimicking the Capitol accent a little, and losing a bit of home while he does. 

“Mine’s Magno,” the man across from him says, “Stift. I’m your… stylist this year?” 

“That nearly implies there will be a next year, sir.”

“Of the Games? Sure. For you, probably not. I’m just hoping not to get stuck with coal miners as my only inspiration for the next however long until I retire.”

“Well not all of 12 are–”  

“Whatever, we’ll pretty you up.” Magno leans in to examine Shady Jade closely. His eyes feel like the flicking snake tongue at his jaw. Cold and displeased. “Or we’ll try, I guess.” 

Shady Jade looks at his shoes. Owning it didn’t work. Whoever Magno is, he’s Capitol through and through. Mean and thinking of himself higher than everyone around. He doesn’t know why he speaks again. 

“Why are you being like this? Why are all of you like this?”

Magno doesn’t seem particularly taken aback, just mildly annoyed. 

“Like… what?” 

“You’re all cruel. All of you. I haven’t met anyone Capitol who isn’t like that.” 

At this, Magno does seem a little offended. 

“Cruel? To district dogs? You’re lucky that I’m going to help you out, kid. None of us want to look at you when you look like,” he pauses to gesture to just… all of Shady Jade, “that.”

Shady Jade is quiet. Magno wants to move things forward, talk to him about what he should look like for the presentation this evening but Shady Jade pretends he can’t hear him. He deliberately shuts his mouth and keeps his focus on making sure it stays shut. Silence is safety. 

When he loses the battle with impulsive speech, it’s in the middle of one of Magno’s sentences about making sure his whatever or other is kept straight during the show. 

“I’ve performed before. I know how to make myself look as nice as I can and keep it that way. Can I have new shoes?” 

“Well, you’ll get new everything.”

Shady Jade grimaces. There’s some irony to that statement. Most coffins do come with at least the prettiest clothes they can scrounge up, don’t they?

Chapter Text

Seven ❧ Deep in the Meadow, the Rabbits are Screaming in Harmony

A little ink between my shoulder and my jaw. Pour out a drink and sip it through a plastic straw, sink all my teeth into a million-dollar mold, and have my name spelled out in gold. Or could I stand to maybe show a little skin? Tear all my clothes and patch 'em up with safety pins? Nobody warned me we'd get sick of centerfolds. I'm getting bored or getting old, so I don't feed you my heart well enough, but I don't need any part of your love. 

Go tell someone what you wish I would've done; make me bleed if you need to confirm that it's something I can do. – Raynes

The little walled off part of the warren in his mind collapses between being dressed in new clothes, new shoes and when they pull him into a stable. Shady Jade tries to focus on the horses, the too-short dark grey coveralls. The bright red helmet. The cuffs on his wrists again. Anything besides the sound of other tributes being loaded into chariots. 

His brain keeps coming tumbling back to the other face he’s been trying to forget. It hurts his heart with every beat. 

Rye probably won’t miss him. The Covey talk a lot of love. Making sure to trust and be sure of that trust, because nearly no one actually cares for them all that much in 12. They’re canaries in a cage. The mines will most likely see the end of them soon. It’s made it hard to fall in love. But sometimes Shady Jade trusts Rye, at least most of the time, really. He tries so hard to make this the some-of-the-time when he doesn’t. It hurts to imagine Rye actually loves him as much as Shady Jade thinks he does.

He tells himself not to wallow in it and it doesn’t work. He’s loaded into his chariot. His cuffs are linked to a bar at the front and the grey horses, young and half-wild, shift nervously in front of the chariot. Being the only tribute chariot with just one in the cart puts him in the center of it. He tells his knees not to bend. He tells himself not to bow to the Capitol. But he can’t help it, he’s crouching with his hands still linked to the bar above his head when the horses start their procession. 

Lazy days in the meadow, a border of low-hanging trees and budding flowers fill his mind, while tears fill his eyes. He’s been crying too much lately. He can’t bring himself to stand and meet the crowd his chariot is whirring by. The horses are near upon 11’s in front of him, but they slow before they collide with the next chariot. Tap their hooves nervously, too loud. His shoes swim in his vision, but they feel all wrong. Some Capitol approximation of miners’ work boots. Too new. Too polished. He pushes his head into the rail and begs his brain to stop fixating on someone he’ll never see again.

He hears, too clear, someone in the crowd ask where the tributes from 12 are, and manages to stand on shaky legs. He isn’t sure what his face looks like right now. Just stares into a swimming crowd of candy-colored people. He mumbles to himself, the lyrics of some old song, not one of the Covey’s but one they’d found when entombed in District 12. A cloak of leaves, a moonbeam ray. Forget your woes, and let–

Then something’s thrown into his chariot and he has to duck to avoid it. Shady Jade’s pretty sure that it was actually meant for 11 until he sees the bit of charcoal bump against his feet. Not true coal, but… a small bit of home, he supposes. His eyes search the crowd for who threw it, but his head swims and all of their overlapping calls out to the chariots tangle into a mess like fescue in the woods. The other chariots are rained on similarly, but most of them are tossed flowers or food. He closes his eyes and lets a small laugh burble up through him. Insult or gift, he might be able to snatch it up with a toe or once they unshackle him. Then all he needs is some scrap of paper. It’s a small comfort, however it was meant. He doesn’t get anything else, or if anyone tries to throw anything else to him, they’re too drunk to aim it properly into his chariot. 

When the horses halt, he tentatively squints just enough to see a tall building, covered in the scaffolding of construction. It’s halfway between being some sort of multi-family tower of twelve floors and a mansion, by the looks of it. On the lowest balcony, which juts out above the square, President Snow stands in an all white suit. Thoughts of coal and home evaporate as fear sets its teeth into him again. Fear is always hungry.

He wills himself not to, but Shady Jade bows his head, lets his eyes close. It probably looks like deference, or too weak. As much as he searches his gut for any shame about it, it’s gone. Just play the game, he tells himself, there are worse ones to play. He thinks back to that half-rotten, half-mummified corpse, to the starved figures of Seam kids, to the bodies he’s seen hauled from homes because their lungs were too heavy with soot to keep breathing anymore. There are worse games, at least I’ll probably die quick.

When he does glance up, Snow is smiling down at him. The president’s toothy sneer and slit eyes look like the threat some snakes make when they’re coiled back to strike. At least he doesn’t need to speak now. From what Drusilla said to him, he won’t need to really talk until assessment by the gamemakers, most of them former mentors, or until the interview he’s scheduled for about four days from now. His death is being painfully extended. Snow doesn’t speak either, or blink, he just waves to the cameras and gestures to the tributes beneath him.

The District 7 tributes look angry, but everyone else looks scared or like they’re full of some form of guilt or dread. Or just numb. Shady Jade’s eyes catch that District 7 boy’s eyes again. His gaze is imploring and he gestures with his chin toward Snow with intensity in his eyes. District 12’s is the closest chariot to the president now. Years of practicing dance make it easy to flip the chunk of charcoal up to his hand. But his aim’s not any good, and his hands are still shackled like the rest of the tributes’, so Shady Jade knows he’s gonna miss the President. 

The burnt wood does connect, albeit with Snow’s pant leg. It leaves a small black mark there. Snow’s smile immediately melts into displeasure but he seems mostly to be watching the massive screen of the broadcast erected in the roundabout in front of what Shady Jade assumes is his house. He straightens his jacket a bit and pulls a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe at the soot mark.

“We need to start delaying the broadcast,” Snow mutters, and Shady Jade is just close enough to hear it with his artificially extended hearing. He looks back at the District 7 boy with the hint of a smile and is met with a subtle thumbs up. 

The boy’s pretty handsome. Muscular even if obviously underfed, tall. His eyes are bluish hazel. He and his district partner are done up in brown pants suits with skirts over the pants and they're crowned in what look like real laurels. They'll be a big hit with the Capitol citizens who pay enough attention to this new presentation type to decide to sponsor anyone, probably. 

Shady Jade rededicates himself to killing no one in these Games. If his heart flutters a little for that act of approval, it'll shatter if he ever hurts the doves from 6 or that little boy from 8. He's more sensitive than he would like to be, honestly. If I kill anyone, he thinks, I won't be able to live with myself for the hours or days I've got left. 

“Hey, asshole!” It’s the boy from 7, shouting back at Snow, too loud. “What are you gonna do about it?”

The girl next to hazel-eyes puts a hand on his shoulder, shaking her head. Shady Jade can't read her expression from here and looks to Snow instead. The president looks amused as he bends down and lifts a rifle that was hidden behind his podium and points it at District 7’s chariot. The muzzle flicks between 7 and Shady Jade for too long before Snow lowers it and laughs. He raises a dismissive hand, waves the chariots back to the stables. He says something but Shady Jade can’t hear it this time.

When Shady Jade is brought for the first time to the tribute apartments after being removed from the chariot and finally uncuffed, he waves Woof off at the door with a similar gesture to Snow’s. Shady Jade's brain is so wired to mimicry he's becoming one of them, and it disgusts him. 

They had let him bathe, finally, before the parade. When he settles down to sit on the marginally softer bed in his room to look betweens his hand and the window, he still finds traces of ink in his fingerprints. Maybe charcoal. It makes him ache for home. And sheets made of paper instead of fabric. When he settles into bed, he doesn’t even bother taking off his boots. Faces and voices flash through his head. The boy from 7. Rye. Donnie Evergreen, Elizabeth Ash. The rest of the Covey. Friends from school. It becomes a twisted bower above his head and Shady Jade forces his brain into a twisting tunnel in an attempt to escape all of it. He spins and spins and spins. His pulse against the pillow keeps him awake.

When Shady Jade finally, finally starts to drift off, his ear buzzes with life. 

“What a show, circus bird. I hope you can give us an even better one in the Games.” President Snow’s voice is crackly and distant, but still feels like an affront to a previously quiet ear. “I think you might look quite nice dead. You do look just as pretty as the rest when you're actually seen to. I'll be sure your flock sees your face one last time.” 

The crackling ends, and Shady Jade can tell there’s no chance for a retort. Instead he shuffles groggily into the fear that will keep him up until sunrise comes again. 

A single pearl earring drops into his mind as the light against his closed eyelids burns a little dot into them. Spilled from Myrabella’s hand or pocket just like the blood fell away from her. It must have been her token, now forgotten in wreckage on the side of tracks to the Capitol. Shady Jade faintly realizes his ribbon is gone now, too. No scrap of home left to comfort him, the bed on the other side of his room is empty and quiet.

It’s twenty-two tree roots now.  Twenty-one between him and home, which he wouldn't dare to cut from the tree. Even if that tree is the Capitol’s spiffy new arena. All those other winding paths might lead back to their homes, too.

Woof comes to collect him, when Shady Jade is finally beginning to doze and the sun has passed his window.  They don't talk much at breakfast, but Woof bumps his shoulder like Donnie Evergreen used to. Myrabella’s… gone. And Drusilla seems not to have risen yet to come meet them, Magno doesn't seem necessary for the training which is supposed to begin today.  So Woof and Shady Jade are just two trees alone in what should be a forest. For both of their sakes, Shady Jade hopes the forest fire is quick and mostly painless. When he finally joins Woof’s stop and start speech, he realizes how much thinner the air is here. How hard his lungs struggle for oxygen with each breath. Even the hottest and most humid days in 12 are different from this. 

Woof starts talking strategy, and Shady Jade tries to pay attention but his thoughts keep coming back to that Peacekeeper from that awful night two or three years ago. He’s had blood wash over his hands twice now, when someone was dying. Could he do it again? No. Probably not. He’s not even sure he could call himself the same name if he fell that far.

“So you don’t go to the place they’re putting the weapons this y– are you listening?” Woof says. He’s not even angry, concern storms over his brown eyes. 

“I didn’t sleep, sorry,” Shady Jade mumbles. It’s still too loud in his own ears. “The thing they put in my ear, they can talk through it, I guess.” 

“The thing they…?” Woof stands and moves around the table where his plate is cleared but Shady Jade’s is still untouched, full of a bed of wrinkle-leafed plants, plump red berries, and groosling. He pulls the hair that Shady Jade hasn’t tended to this morning away from his right ear, and tries to hide a grimace. Woof doesn’t seem to know what to say so instead he just sits on the floor by Shady Jade’s chair and shakes his head before it falls to his hands.

Kinda feels like the way Donnie Evergreen tries to just… be there, when he’s not sure what words might work to make someone feel better but he knows something’s deeply wrong. Familiar and fractured all at once. For some reason, Shady Jade finds himself putting his hand on Woof’s shoulder and keeping it there until Drusilla bursts in, demanding their presence at ‘the training center’. 

Really, it’s just the shell of the old arena he kept seeing on TV until a couple years ago when they started walling off large plots of wilderness. It’s cut down in size with massive barricades to block off the tunnels from tempting any escape and lined with tables along one half of the awkward circle they create. The other half is some sort of weapons training area, long stretches of space set out for practicing long and short range weapons.

No handcuffs today, but each of the tributes get a Peacekeeper as a shadow. Always a few feet behind them, rifle ready. Twenty-two other pairs of one white clad terror and one nervous kid slowly start to cross to the tables manned by people in Gamemaker uniform. A few go to the weapons range; both from 1 and 11, the girl from 4, and the one from 7. The rest eye the weapons with nervousness.

Most of them are still in the clothing they wore to the parade, but Drusilla had told Shady Jade to change back into the now-torn Reaping Day shirt he brought with promise that the miner’s outfit would be coming back to him for interviews, and he’d get another new outfit to go to his death in. The tap shoes he had to slide back into as he returned the boots are too loud to him and make him feel exposed when everyone else moves quieter. 

He crosses to the spindly table covered in bushels of plants just because it seems more familiar than anything else and means he doesn’t have to watch his most likely killers throw knives and tridents into targets.

“Some of these are poisonous,” the tired-eyed woman behind the table says, “So don’t touch without me telling you which.” Shady Jade doesn’t respond, just surveys the piles of stems and leaves, berries and fruits, on the table. 

“Nightlock,” he finally says, pointing to one sprig of berries he thinks he recognizes.

There’s a pressure on his shoulder from an unexpected hand. Suddenly dark hair comes into his vision, full of wilting laurel leaves. The boy from 7 again. Is he following Shady Jade around? Or have the times they’ve had some sort of interaction just been a bunch of coincidences? Same place same time, deliberate targeting, or curiosity? Shady Jade’s not sure. 

“Nah, those ones are the edible ones. Nightlock’s a mimic. See, you can tell by the tops. Nightlock has more of a hard connection to its stem so it always goes brittle at the top when they’re picked and they have thicker stems than this. These just whither a bit,” says hazel-eyes. 

The woman behind the table looks impressed. Her pale eyebrows raise and she leans over to look at the berries with them. 

“Always better to be safe than sorry, though,” she says, eyes now straight on Shady Jade. He feels his cheeks go a little hot in shame and thanks whatever part of his genetics mostly mask when he blushes. 

“All the fruit here’s edible actually.” The boy from 7’s voice is deep. He must be no more than a year or two older than Shady Jade but he has a foot of height on him and looks a lot stronger. He’s examining the table, but his fingers keep finding the needles on a branch of some type of fir tree. They smooth over the branch like a bird preening feathers. Probably soothing. Shady Jade stops looking at that spot on the table. 

“Not that one, I don’t think,” he says, pointing at a goose-egg-sized, white fruit with the remnants of its flower still forming a red crown around it. 

“You’d think so but that’s just ringfruit!” The other boy picks it up, and the woman behind the table doesn’t stop him. He brushes the flower remnants from the fruit and reveals a perfect black circle through the white on the fruit. Then he bites into it like one of the apples out of the trees just beyond the fence. It sounds like the texture is nearly the same. Hazel-eyes winks at Shady Jade and talks with his mouth full. “They’re not that great but they’re real nutritious, is what I was taught.” 

“Right again,” the woman cuts in, “but please don’t eat my examples.” Shady Jade’s eyes fall again to the table, trying to find anything he might actually be right about. 

“Katniss, also edible,” he says as he picks up the half-bloomed and under ripe plant, root and stem. When he glances back up, hazel-eyes is grinning at him. He has a nicer smile than Shady Jade’s ever seen in his own mirror. Shady Jade looks at his shoes and tells himself not to tap his toes while his cheeks go hotter. He tries not to think about Rye, or home, or anything but a small moment of enjoying someone else’s smile. 

They end up going through nearly all the plants on the table over the next hour. Besides the katniss and a few neither of them can puzzle out without help, hazel-eyes seems to have a handle on everything presented. He either came over because the green felt familiar, or he did it because Shady Jade really had caught his attention, because there’s almost nothing for him to learn and almost everything for him to teach.

When they walk away together, breaking off to head for the table at the very end of the arc that has water glasses lined up on it, hazel-eyes keeps talking to him. 

“What’s your name, by the way? The Reapings were so hard to remember and we only watched the recording twice.” 

“Shady Jade.” Shoes, tap tap tap , blur in his vision. “You?”

“Spyle.”

They spend most of the rest of training for the next three days leaned against a barricade between the plant table and the one that has a bunch of different pigments and dyes spread out on it. Shady Jade’s not sure what that one’s actually supposed to be for but he manages to beg a pot of ash-ink, a thin pine twig, and a bit of paper between both booths so he spends a lot of time leaned over the floor with his makeshift quill. 

He writes for the first time since before his birthday. Spyle’s always reading over his shoulder or interrupting him to distract them both from the horror they’re hurtling toward with quips and questions and rambling conversation. It’s not as annoying as it should be. Once or twice, Spyle even convinces Shady Jade to sing or dance a little. 

It all comes crashing down when Spyle asks the question he’s obviously been wanting to the entire time. 

“So you came to the stylist thing covered in blood. What happened to your district partner, did you kill her?”

Shady Jade can’t explain what happened without crying and just stands up to go try to shoot any of the bows even though he knows his aim is a lost cause. Spyle tries to call after him, and Shady Jade ignores it. 

Chapter Text

Eight ❧ The Water by the Pines

When I was in high school, I read the Odyssey, and the Iliad, and Aneid, lots of Greek and Roman tales. I thought they were laughable, the people not the poems. What kind of person sees a freaky wooden horse and doesn’t bail? But I am older now and so much more mature. And since I finished college, I’ve had time for self reflection. I’d like to apologize to all the Trojans I insulted. I should have realized the horse was just a misdirection. Snakes! I forgot about snakes! I forgot that the guy who tried to stab the horse, pretty soon after got brutally killed by snakes! – Marijke Perry

President Snow is a white shadow in the small room Waterlye’s been dragged to. The way he doesn’t blink at all perplexes her. The way he sits perfectly, one ankle crossed over the other knee to rest crossed hands on top infuriates her. He’s the picture of a term she’s long deemed distasteful, ‘Polite Society.’

She watches his eyes. Cold grey-blue of a stormy ocean on the pale blue of ice on a lake. They don’t falter, so she doesn’t either.

“Hello, Miss Odair,” he says. He sits in a chair across a table from her, his black suit is in perfect order and the wings of his shirt, the rose in his lapel, flash white against it. “This year I’m making it a habit of speaking to our tributes before the Games. It is a special one, after all.” 

Waterlye tries to make herself presentable. She’s still in the dress from Reaping Day, and smoothes it against her legs. The pleats are wrinkled, the fabric becoming dingy after days of use, but Waterlye holds her head high and looks the president straight in the eyes. What she wears doesn’t matter, she learned a long time ago, it’s how she wears it.

“You know you’re meeting with people you’re sending to their deaths right? You’re a murderer. You kill kids .”

“Oh little fish, like I haven’t heard that before? We do this because of what you all did to us. The districts killed my mother, you know.” 

“And the Capitol will probably kill mine,” Waterlye’s voice doesn’t waver but it isn’t angry either. It’s between matter-of-fact and cold. 

“There’s no guarantee of that if you behave.” President Snow smiles. What a thinly veiled threat , she thinks. She’s seen sea snakes better at pretending they’re not venomous. 

“And what does behaving look like to you?”

“Play your role, be pretty. Perform. Own whatever you might think the audience might like.”

“I wasn’t planning on doing anything other than playing your game.”

“Your district partner disagrees with that plan, it seems. A lot of you this year seem a little…” Snow searches for a word. He still hasn’t blinked once. Waterlye dedicates to keeping her eyes fixed firmly on his to see if he ever does. “A little upset about your positions.”

“Well, it feels a lot worse when it’s not random, I imagine,” she says. 

“I imagine so as well.” Snow folds his hands in his lap. Lily-white, devoid of real emotion.

“What did Compass say to you?” 

“Oh, he didn’t. He spat on the floor and refused to say anything. At least you’re more cooperative.”

“His family’s from here, you know? The Capitol.” It’s true, the Harvees are well known in 4 for having come from here. People have different opinions about that, depending on how much the Capitol has hurt them.

“I know. They were disgraced just after the rebellion. We exiled them to the sea. I suppose they’re happy about it. Or well liked, in the districts.”

“They’re not, but he’s a good guy,” Waterlye believes it only once she says it but she says it with conviction. She’s never really known the Harvees, but when Compass fell asleep with her on the train he seemed soft and kind. His sleeping expression was a lot like Alba’s. No worry line in his brow, just a sleeping kid. Compass looked strong enough, but she’d known that was mostly just the muscle put on by strain of shipyard work. He mostly just looked too-young to be eighteen, and scared of the world. When she’d watched him smile, their hands no longer tangled, she hadn’t been able to stop herself from brushing his hair behind his ear and kissing his forehead before she stood. 

“Well, good people aren’t typically anti-nationalists.” 

“President Snow, I think we’ll have to disagree on that one.” 

His eyes narrow. But they still don’t blink. Waterlye starts counting like row-beats in the back of her head, how many seconds it’ll be ‘til he does. Snow tries to straighten himself up, look more intimidating, but she has half a dozen inches on him and doesn’t flinch. It seems to make him just as displeased as her words.

“You’d best watch your mouth in the Capitol, girl. It isn’t polite to challenge someone in their home.”

“And what will you do, kill me?” Waterlye asks, laughing. It’s a bitter chuckle. She knows he could, if he wanted to, and that he’d rather put on a show of her death than kill her here.

“Oh my dear, you forget about your family tree.” 

Waterlye stops laughing. Her face is mirrored in her mind, her twin and her combined. The rest of her family might be alright if they lose her. But Alba or Luff? She’s not sure they could weather that storm. The president smiles and she sets her face into cold neutrality.

“You’re going to kill them anyway,” she says, “one way or another.”

“I suppose you could believe that lie, if it makes you feel any better.” 

They don’t speak much more before Snow leaves. When he does, he hasn’t blinked once. Too many seconds to keep count of. Waterlye feels acrid distaste on her tongue and smooths her skirt again as she stands. Before the Peacekeeper can grab her, she walks out of the room ahead of him. She refuses to be touched by their kind right now. 

She tries to hold her cold grace all the way through the chariot parade, but when the single scrawny kid from twelve hits the president with a chunk of coal, she can’t help but smile. Just a little. There’s a little spark of fire in that boy and while she’s all water, she might like to see Snow burn one day. Or melt.

While she looks over the other tributes, halted for a moment in the space before the president’s mansion, she starts to come to terms with how many of them she might have to kill. There’s a girl in the District 8 chariot taller than her short companion, pale, looking like she might be a problem. The tall blonde boy from 1, Hyacinth, she distantly remembers, looks a threat. Compass beside her could kill her easy, but Waterlye is decently sure he won’t want to. She’ll let someone else have him. 

There are too many to properly think about them. To keep it all in her brain at once. The Reaping recordings are already fading from her mind like seafoam at low tide. It will be easier after the first fighting is done, when the scoreboard finally lights up. Or will there be a scoreboard this year? What will they do with this new, actually custom built arena?

It doesn’t matter, they’re whisked away from the mansion then, and she goes to bed after ridding herself of the uncomfortable, sparse net of turquoise beads her stylist called a “dress” as though it could even be called clothes. The only thing on her mind when she eventually crashes headlong into a deep ocean of sleep is that she hopes the Capitol found her body nice enough to garner her some sponsors.

She’s disappointed to find herself expected to wear the same thing to the training center. It’s not that she’s particularly shy about how much skin it shows, it’s that it isn’t easy to move in at all . Between throwing spears and tridents that she pretends she knows how to use better than she does, Waterlye tries to decide what her plan is. Mags hasn’t been very helpful. She won’t talk about her own victory and Waterlye can’t remember if they ever aired it. 

The easiest to take out will be the twelve year old from 8… Linelol? Tineol , she thinks. Both from District 3 won’t be hard either, the boy looks around Waterlye’s age but he’s skinny and if the thick glasses mean anything then he’ll be easy to incapacitate. The girl has wide eyes, pacing between booths like some fearful energy drives her and an unbidden energy feeds it. She’s small, one of the youngest. Seems like most districts sent older kids this year. 

Then there’s the kid from 12, he looks… thirteen maybe? Close to the age of the girl from 3. And by the end of day one he hasn’t even bothered doing more than looking at that useless table draped in plants and baskets of fruit. He’s just sitting by the barricade with the boy from 7.  That one might be more dangerous, he’s strong and probably knows how to use an axe.

That first day, Waterlye hits the target with every throw. She’s been spearfishing most of her life, most of 4’s ships have at least one trident on board to feed the crew while they’re out. They’re more austere than the fancy, decorated ones the training center has stocked, but the weight is close enough, and Waterlye finds herself pretty decent with a spear as well. 

It does make her a little nervous, the thought of driving one through a person. When she hits the center of the target three times in a row, she sets down her spear and crosses to pick up a hatchet before someone catches her eye. 

It’s the girl from 11, watching her while perched on one of the tables. Something about her eyes is colder than the waves in January, but she looks… she? It’s actually hard to tell. They look… almost friendly. Curious? Yarrow, is the name that comes to mind.

Waterlye goes back to trying to perfect her aim with weapons she doesn’t know so well for the rest of the day. She and Compass are accompanied back to their quarters by Peacekeepers to find Mags sitting at the table in the common room of the apartment. At the center of the table, there’s a plate heavy with slices of roast sculpin, grain, and cattail shoots. There’s even a healthy helping of nasturtium sprigs at the side of it. For the first time in days, Waterlye’s stomach wakes and she sits down without words to help herself to some. Mags pushes the plate across the table so it’s closer to them as Compass sits down, too. 

“What are your plans, in the arena?” Mags asks. 

So she’s finally decided to be helpful, Waterlye thinks before she speaks. “Fight. Win.”

“Fighting isn’t always the best way to win,” Compass says between mouthfuls. Both of them examine him with different shades of incredulity. 

“What do you mean?” Waterlye meets his gaze and finds only tired resolve.

“In the 19th, the victor just stayed hidden, waited everyone else out. I think he only killed one person.”

Mags nods slowly. “No, you’re right. I think the victor before me only killed one as well. She just had to wait for sickness to kill the rest, or each other. She stayed hidden too.”

“I don’t want to hide,” says Waterlye, she looks down at the plate of food and picks up a cattail shoot, putting it in her mouth. She swallows before she continues, “I don’t want to let them make me look like a coward. If I have to die, I want to die pretty. They have to show the deaths, and I don’t want my family to remember me as a mess or something. But I want the Capitol to see what they’re doing to me. I want them to feel bad about it.”

The room is quiet. Mags seems to be mulling something over and Compass examines his hands, suddenly no longer reaching for the food. 

“What?”

“I… don’t know how to assure you that can happen,” Mags says.

“That’s fine.” 

“Hiding may be the safest option.”

“I don’t care.” Waterlye shoves her chair back and takes herself to her room. Her sheets are soft on her skin. Sleep is a familiar tide.

The rest of training is largely uneventful. Waterlye ignores all of the tables except the shelter-making one while making rounds of the weapons. She finds she’s best with the trident but not half-bad at spear or hatchet throwing, and she can use all of them okay at shorter range too. 

On the third and last day, Waterlye hears the boy from 12’s shoes clacking hard across the floor and then he’s standing next to her, picking up a bow and shooting at the target without paying much attention to the Peacekeeper collecting their spent projectiles. He misses every time. Both Peacekeeper and target.

She raises her eyebrows at him. He hasn’t touched the weapons at all during training. Some people seem more affected by the stress of all of it than Waterlye does. When she turns on her heel, he doesn’t even glance in her direction.

 The boy from 7 is still sitting against the barricade where they’ve been camped out most of training, looking through a mess of scraps of paper left on the floor. When he finds whichever one he was looking for, he folds it and puts it in his pocket, then stacks the rest neatly in their spot. He promptly goes to find his district partner at another table further down the row after that and doesn’t look back.

She’s not sure why, but Waterlye glances at the both of them to check they’re not looking and crosses the old arena to pick up the first face-down leaf on the pile. 

A poem. Small handwriting but bold and neat.

I was still just trying to get settled

in a world with borders made by your bombs

when you decided I was better for a tomb,

like I was some replacement for the alms

you owe us.

That old and creeping ivy moves its fingers up your stairways,

civilization melts amid its grip.

While the hungry beg for bread,

you just fill your coffers

and beg circuses of old. 

I hope one day 

you’re all choked in gold.

I want to kiss the coolness of the forest, 

flirt with darkness, 

Build civilizations out of ashes

but my vine is cut. 

Where there is smoke may you find fire,

a smolder to a spark. 

I may be one cold ember,

but you and your sins can never be apart. 

So kill twenty-three more roots,

the heartwood to your tree.

By the grace of glen and wood, 

your threats mean nothing more to me. 

I've seen your sap before,

sweet and seeping from the bark. 

Black stains in your rivers,

black marks on your hearts. 

So sing for the gem when I am gone,

that lovely Panem prize,

but hide never from that choking ivy vine.

For now it might be smoke,

but one day it will ignite.

Waterlye just stares at the page for a moment. Huh. Rebel boy, she supposes? She lets the scrap fall to the floor. She hasn’t known many rebels. The few she knows mostly hang around the very edges of her town in 4. Alba sometimes visits one of the girls from that crowd, but Waterlye always tells him not to. She doesn’t see much point to the small but extant rebel movement; the first rebellion brought them the Games, after all.

At the end of that day, they’re all brought in for separate assessments by the two dozen or so Gamemakers who were once mentors themselves. She wonders distantly if it’s better to be from the districts or the Capitol, as a mentor, or better to have one or the other as yours. She isn’t really sure what skill to perform, so when she’s brought into the small side room off their quarters, she stands tall and still for a long few seconds and eyes down the Gamemakers before she surveys her options. 

Nonsense from the other tables, some shelter supplies, and then a rack of twenty or so weapons. Two flour sack dummies at the far end of the room. Waterlye selects the trident from the rack and hurls it directly into one dummy’s head. Sawdust spills onto the floor.

She turns back to the Gamemakers, wordless, but when one of them raises her eyebrow, Waterlye breaks the silence.

“That’s what I can do.” 

She doesn’t wait to be dismissed before she goes, and her Peacekeeper escort follows her without a word. There is no further sound from the Gamemakers behind them.

The next day, the tributes are shuffled into the now-standard interviews, still in their chariot outfits. They’re put in a small room, with a screen on the wall that has a view of the stage. The new announcer for this year, Caesar Flickerman, is some relative of the previous 14 years’ announcer, Lucky. He sits clothed in a suit like the night sky. Deep blue, it flickers with pinpricks of light, near mesmerizing. His hair is bleak white, and so are his lips. Some new and bright star. 

Next to him there’s an older woman, more reserved but with an unpredictable riptide current underneath. She speaks into the microphone between them before he has a chance to lean in. 

“Welcome to the first Quarter Quell, Panem. Tonight you’ll get your first preview of the tributes sent as retribution from the districts for their wounds to the Capitol in the Dark Days. Today we remember our fallen.”

“Quite right, Doctor Gaul!” Caesar chirps, too eager. He shows his teeth with his smile. “Remind the audience for us, what changes are in store for our 25th Games?”

Waterlye scowls at the screen. She’s getting really tired of the overly chipper attitude this whole presentation has.

“Well, for starters, we’ve built a brand new arena. It will be a fantastic sight to see, and all of you will get to visit once we’ve cleaned up after the Games. We’ll also be selling…” Waterlye stops paying attention until Caesar finally comes to the results of their assessments. Dr. Gaul seems just as inpatient with the man as she does, but she’s quiet while he speaks. 

“Oh! And our previous mentors have given scores to our tributes based on private sessions this year! Let’s get to that. It will make the betting after tonight's interviews so much easier!”

The screen cuts into shots of them clipped from the Reaping or training. Waterlye pays attention to each score as it comes up, oddly boys first, unalike to most other Games proceeding. 7, 9, 8, 8, 3, 5, an 8 for Compass, then it’s her. She gets another 7, and feels a little disappointed but makes sure not to show it to the other tributes as she ticks down their faces with their scores.  4 and 5, 5 and 5, 9 and 6, 2 and 6, 3 and 4, 7 and 6, 8 and 6, and finally just… an 8 for the boy and a dash, where the female tribute name’s should go from 12. 

 How the fuck did that rebel kid get a higher score than her? And what kind of name is Shady Jade? She remembers, now, the spiked woman calling him at the Reaping and seemingly having the same thought. Waterlye balls her fist into her netting, beads pressing white spots into her palms. None of this is fair.

Slowly Peacekeepers and a flock of Avoxes usher the kids from one, two, and three on stage in turn. Girls first this time. Before she knows it, she’s being whisked onstage, too.

Once she’s closer to Caesar she can see how odd his white eyelashes look against his skin. Waterlye arranges herself into the chair with a carefulness only those doomed to death might have. 

“Please welcome Miss Waterlye Odair,” he says to the cameras and audience, then turns to her, “So, Miss Waterlye, give us an idea of who you are. You’ve been pretty quiet from what everyone’s seen.”

“I’m going to win.” Her eyes are cold when she looks at him. This is probably her best role to play. “And I’m pretty enough to get some gifts.”

She watches Flickerman’s gaze skate down her body, mostly exposed by the net. She watches his eyebrow raise. She knows she’s right. Satisfied smile and a shift to cross her legs.

“And how do you intend to win?” Flickerman says with a smirk, pulling his attention from her back to the cameras.

“By any means necessary.”

“What, may I ask, may those means be?”

“Well, I’m not sure yet, Mister Flickerman.” She puts on a fake smile. “We don’t get to know what the arena might be like, do we?”

When he laughs it’s almost genuine. They both kind of know this dance, but they’re young albatrosses learning to navigate the seawind through the rest of the interview. It’s banter back and forth, a little awkward, but both of them are almost perfectly put-together. She’s ushered back to the waiting room with just enough time to see that the District 5 tributes don’t fair so well. They fumble enough to notice, and both of them seem much more nervous. She holds her head high knowing she did well. 

None of the interviews are of much note, besides both District 7 tributes refusing to speak for their whole allotted time, and then 12. There’s only Shady Jade to interview and Waterlye leans in with a distant curiosity to watch his. He’s odd, even for the outer districts. He doesn’t look quite like anyone she’s seen from 12 before, some mix of freckles and the middling olive tone a lot of them seem to have, the long near-blonde hair brushed back over his shoulders.

 “And lastly, welcome to the stage Mister Shady Clade.”

“Shady Jade Clade,” the boy says, looking at his toes.

“My apologies! So, Shady, what do you have to tell us about the question everyone’s asking tonight?”

“What would that be, sir?” 

“Well, you’re the only one with a district partner here, can you tell us about the trainwreck we’ve all heard so much about? I heard it was a rebel attack.” Ah, so he didn’t kill her sometime on the train to get an upper hand. Waterlye’s almost disappointed.

An expression like confusion flashes over the boy’s face, and then is immediately replaced by pain or sadness.

“Myrabella?” 

“Yes, Myrabella. Your district partner. Did you know her?” Caesar’s tone switches from boisterous to an almost-concerned crooning.

“Not well, but she was from home,” Shady Jade’s voice is barely audible over the microphone, “I don’t think it was an attack or something. That train was just old and rickety.”

Somewhere behind Waterlye the girl from 9 mutters something that sounds like agreement.

“That must be hard! Well what do you have to say to her family back home?” Back to boisterous now, Caesar straightens his tie.

Shady Jade looks up from his shoes and searches for a moment, then his greenish grey eyes find the camera and Waterlye feels like she’s staring him down as the filming crew closes in on him. She can tell he’s trying not to cry as some kind of distant look goes over his face.

“I’m sorry she died, but I’m glad she won’t have to go into this. This is all..” The cameras have to quickly readjust as he stands up. “This is all nonsense!” It probably doesn’t ring with as much authority as he meant it to. Sounds like a kid protesting bedtime in tears.

Then he throws his chair, hard, into the crowd, and before the Peacekeepers can grab him, he’s already walking off the stage with his head down again. What a weird fuckin’ kid .

Gaul and Caesar come back for the outro of the program. The only thing Waterlye catches is how uncanny Gaul’s horrifyingly delighted laugh is as they break the likelihood of each tribute winning so betters might have an idea which horse they should put their money on. Then,

“And with that, join us tomorrow for our first Quarter Quell,” says Gaul, “And may the odds be ever in your favor.”

Chapter Text

Part II - The Bird’s Nest

Nine ❧ A Big, Big, Big Day

Her thoughts were a flock of birds, scattered and fluttering without direction. Fragments of sanity slipped through her fingers like sand, leaving nothing but emptiness in their wake – Shirley Jackson

Shady Jade wakes on the morning of the games with a pit in his stomach, cold and hungry for a hearth or warmed loaf. To be cold in the middle of July seems downright contradictory, but whatever air system their quarters have keeps the room chilled and even if he weren’t a bit cold, he’d be shaking. He still doesn’t know what will happen when he gets in there. That’s probably the point, isn’t it?

Magno Stift arrives early, Drusilla on his heels cooing at a snake ringed around her wrist. A noose or a bracelet, he can’t tell how the thing is tied, but it writhes in pain. They coax him into shedding his clothes, like he doesn’t know already that this will be the last time he wears anything from home. He searches his pockets for some crumb of 12 and finds them bare, cleared after the trainwreck probably.

Well they’ve taken him from home, might as well take his history too. A thought swims to mind. He doesn’t need a history to burn something down. All he needs is to be a warm ember. Even if he’s nothing, he can maybe make others remember they have all-fire in them, too. It’s been too long since there’s been a real rebel response to the Games. 

Days with Rye, the meadow spinning down for the year and only autumn blossoms out then, Shady Jade remembers fantasizing with him about a day there might be no next Reaping. Rye’s a Chance with a softer fire than most of his family, but he’d been learning to stoke those flames more and more before Shady Jade ended up here. 

But what could Shady Jade even do ? He’s small and all he has is a rhythm, an okay handle on knives, and words. Poets don’t make good revolutionaries, from anything he’s been taught. 

The tittering pair of Capitol escort-and-stylist dress him in underwear that covers about as much of his skin as the clothing they give him to put on. It’s one piece, not quite overalls. Like a shirt and skirt sewn together, shorts under the skirt. All of it is a deep, bluish green. Then a clunky brown belt with wide rings of metal in it. They attach a hood with little snaps at the back of his collar and he pulls it up as soon as they’re done. He doesn’t like his hair on the back of his neck much, but without anything to tie it up he doesn’t care. At least he can hide his face. Woof joins the trio when they get to the common room of the apartment.

Shady Jade doesn’t understand why they take the stairs to the roof, but when they get there about half the tributes are already milling around as well. He catches Spyle’s gaze from across the group circling around a massive concrete disk, and he’s surprised to find no hostility in it. The other boy nods, then turns back to conversation with the girl from his district. Woof puts a hand on Shady Jade’s shoulder and opens his mouth like he’s about to say something but then the Covey boy understands why they’re on the roof. The hovercraft appearing above them looks like the ugliest bird he’s ever seen.

They’re whisked inside without so much as a goodbye to their escorts, mentors, stylists. The Peacekeepers cuff them into their seats. Sitting there, nausea finally rises in Shady Jade’s stomach, though he isn’t sure if it’s the hovercraft or the impending doom bringing it on. He wishes he’d been given time for some kind of breakfast. Bile and hollowness run through him. He looks at his shoes. Chunky boots with heavy but soft soles.

At least they’re quieter than his taps but Shady Jade even misses those now. He forces his thoughts away from what else he misses and tries to think about what he’s going to do. If he’ll try to survive. 

It takes the full journey for him to stop the vultures of his thoughts from spiralling around the carcass of his life. By then, he has no answer. The only thought that keeps repeating is the first time he snared a rabbit with his cousin. They’d heard the screech clear across the woods. An awkward, badly tied snare. A prolonged death. Grey fur under his fingers when he broke the thing’s neck because Donnie Evergreen had frozen. Shady Jade couldn’t stand to watch the bunny suffer. She was a pretty thing. He didn’t eat that night.

She should have tried to run, he thinks, it would have made death quicker.

The hovercraft stops with a jolt, though it doesn’t seem to lower much, and the Peacekeepers emerge from their room off to one side of whatever converted cargo structure this is. A massive hatch at the back of the room drops downward and reveals a 100-foot drop to a wide… prairie? It looks like fescue and fire. A meadow speckled with long red and orange flowers, trees dotted with fruit ring the horizon.

Shady Jade’s stomach drops like the door, and his shoes give him no respite for the panic in his chest so he squeezes his eyes shut and begs his stomach not to turn. He only opens them when a Peacekeeper comes and unlocks his cuffs. Her brown eyes are unreadable pools and her face is set.

Two paths diverge ahead of him in his mind. Shady Jade could kill the Peacekeeper. Her neck is inches from his mouth, and his hands are free now. He’d be dead seconds after her, with the flock of them around, but it would make a point. Or he could play their game. He forces himself to take a seat and hand of cards instead of closing his teeth and hands around her throat.

He’s the last of the tributes to be lead to the edge of the precipice hanging over that prairie. There’s a gold gleam at the center, but Shady Jade doesn’t want to look down at that drop. When the Peacekeeper guides him to the ladder, she gives him one command: ‘ only eight rungs down, no further ’. He lowers himself to the dangling bit of metal, slams his eyes shut again as he climbs down, and finds out why only that many rungs when his foot automatically reaches for the next one down after eight. His foot finds air and he nearly lets go of the steel, the shock of horror running through him. 

Do not vomit, he commands himself in his head. Then the ladder starts moving downward, sliding at first and then dropping. All of the fears solidify into a white void in his head and his body goes icy, his gut is suddenly the last thing on his mind. The ladder jolts when it completes its quick descent, and with a trembling leg Shady Jade reaches out a toe tip to search for ground. He isn’t sure he’s ever been so relieved when he finds it.

Slowly, he opens his eyes to find a Peacekeeper in most of his vision with a curved basket made of gleaming metal behind him. Wide open meadow surrounds them both, a flat disk buried in tangled waist-high grass and tall clusters of blooms. Now that Shady Jade’s closer he can identify apple trees crouched at the very edge of his vision. 

He used to pick those in the forest, with Donnie Evergreen, Rye, and whichever one of Donnie Evergreen’s brood of girls or boys was brave enough to come. He wasn’t much good at picking them, but he’d hold the basket and set his shoe against a tree while Donnie Evergreen sang and their companions sang along or laughed. 

Home had been good company. He tries not to think about it while the Peacekeeper leads him to a metal plate set into the grass and points for him to stand on it. Instead, he looks up and around and stuffs memories into the tunnels of his mind. As the Peacekeepers move away from all the tributes, lights start blinking just around Shady Jade’s feet. Instinct keeps him still. 

The thing in front of him… cornucopia? He distantly thinks. It has a scattering of parcels wrapped with twine-tied paper at its mouth, and more between it and him. His attention jumps from package to package, trying to determine which might contain something useful. When that doesn’t serve him, he looks up.

There are twenty-four circles of gleaming silver around the golden horn at the center of them, though there’s conspicuously two empty. The other twenty-two tributes have been shuffled around, no district partners next to each other. The space between each is six feet or so. To his right, Tineol trembles, wide eyes set on the taller boy from 11 on the kid’s other side. On Shady Jade’s left, Spyle stands rooted to the spot. He’s motionless looking down at his disk and the attempts at breathing deep barely conceal short and sharp breaths that hitch his chest. All anger has drained from those hazel eyes. Now it’s just fear. 

“It’s okay, ju–” Shady Jade starts to say to him, when Dr. Gaul’s voice crackles over some massive, unseen speaker symptom. He has to stop himself from raising his hands to his ears.

“Welcome, tributes, to our first Quarter Quell and greatest Games yet! This year, you will see in front of you, we’ve given you a gift for your participation. First come, first served. Please do not step off of the circles you have been placed on until you hear–”

And then the girl from 9, on the other side of Spyle from Shady Jade, explodes. She didn’t even move. The sound of it rings across the arena. There is silence, and the distant song of a chickadee. Shady Jade just stares at where she’d just been standing. He suddenly feels a million miles away. There’s blood, bits of her, strewn across and around her plate. Not as much as Myrabella had left. No face to look into one last time.

There’s no grief in him and it almost makes him disgusted between the clouds obscuring most of his thoughts. Some small anger, some small fear, mostly a vast and empty fall. He doesn’t dare move a muscle.

Gaul clears her throat into whatever microphone she has, probably in some safe office back in the city or something. Shady Jade’s hatred goes from seed to burning ember, coal, then oil sitting in his lungs. It becomes the only clear thing in his mind. He tries to ignore Spyle gasping and retching to his side.

“Well, excuse that interruption,” Gaul says, “But a lovely demonstration of what those plates can do until they’re disabled. And all your odds have just gone up! Wait for the gong, and then enjoy your show, Quarter Quell tributes.”

The static cuts off and a weird, massive screen slides up on the horizon. It’s followed by eleven more. The scoreboard he recognizes from the previous games passes over it for a second before it’s replaced by the Capitol seal. Then a countdown and a torturously loud percussion that matches it. 

Sixty… Fifty-nine… Fifty-eight…

The Game’s claws are slowly closing in. Shady Jade asks himself if he wants to make peace with death or meet it with his own talons. The scales are rusty, he can’t tell which is weighted better in his favor. As always, his body reacts without him telling it to. 

  One.

The gong rings.

He didn’t know Myrabella was right. He hasn’t run much. But Shady Jade is fast, the first tribute to the pile of the packages at the mouth of the Cornucopia. In the split seconds he’s weighing them to take the heavier of the big parcels he grabs in each hand, two things happen.

First, he hears Spyle yelling his name from behind him. And second he feels a hard punch connecting with his jaw. The clouds swirl like a tornado.

Heavier package on the right. His worse hand. Whatever . He drops the one from his left and turns to face the attacker, that redhead from 4. He ducks her next punch and his kick to her groin isn’t as effective as he’d like but it gives him a second or two to dart. Back the direction he came. He’s not really thinking consciously right now. The only thought in his brain is Out, out, out. Out. I want out.  

Well that makes the choice then , he guesses.

When his eyes focus on the few disks he can see, Shady Jade almost falters in his dash. He’s surprised to find Spyle with his hand tangled in Tineol’s shirt collar, hauling him away from the Cornucopia. Tineol is clutching a parcel, hugged against his chest. When Spyle’s hazel eyes meet greyish green ones, he shouts to Shady Jade and waves to him with his free hand.

“Get out of there, you’re coming with me too!”

Shady Jade doesn’t question the directive as the sounds of combat rise behind him. The scream of someone being hurt, badly, is too loud in his right ear. He moves fast, and for some incomprehensible reason puts another hand on Tineol’s collar. Between them they drag that tiny form into the grass. The kid is crying and looks just as faraway as Shady Jade feels. 

They don’t speak as they weave through the meadow and flowers. It’s just the sounds of breathing until the three of them all fall down a ten foot hole. 

There’s little light down here, but winking green spots every five feet at the top of the cavern tells Shady Jade there are still cameras on them. They all check themselves for injuries, and though Tineol is still speechless, crying, he seems alright.

It’s Shady Jade who breaks the silence, peering out into the cavern. A dozen tunnels leading off into the murky black.

“Looks like we’re in the warren, then,” he mumbles, “guess at least we’re together?” 

“Guess at least we’re together,” Spyle echoes. His voice isn’t so sure. 

The small, perfect circle of light from the hole they fell down dims. A distant click.

Suddenly, it’s perfect blackness. Thoughts of coal mine collapses whistle through his head like wind. The cannons beginning, somewhere above them, sound like bombs. 

“Guys?” Tineol finally pipes up, his voice is shaky, “There’s something else in here.”

They all turn to look, but they can’t see it, they can only hear it. Heavy steps and growls echo in the tunnels. 

Chapter Text

Ten ❧ Caustic Reactions

But I did nothing wrong, it was siren song. I just went along with the waves, no use of pulling away and you were lying too. What was I to do? The water’s so tempting, felt closer to empty. There’s plenty of reasons to choose not to stay. My compass has always been pointed the wrong way. – Lillian VanDaam

The kid who fell off the ladder in Waterlye’s hovercraft died on impact and waiting until the timer starts, she almost envies him. Waterlye’s pulse only slightly quickens when the girl from 9’s body disintegrates upon the ground. This world feels hostile and near hopeless. Of course the timer would start with three empty starting markers. Waterlye’s eyes are on her competition and the Cornucopia. It’s like Gaul says, that’s one more down she doesn’t have to deal with. Twenty more to go between her and home.

The first scuffle at the mouth of the horn is a sharp cry to bring her back to reality. Specifically in her most sensitive bits. Everyone’s in the same weird skort rompers and hers protects absolutely nothing from Shady Grove’s harsh strike. She grabs for him when he flees but she’s too far away and that big guy from 11 is already hurtling toward her.

Before he can make the unarmed strike, a spear still partially wrapped in paper and twine comes flying toward them and lodges in his gut. He looks almost surprised as he falls. 

Nineteen to go.

Her eyes catch Hyacinth’s, the boy from 1. She gives him a curt nod, after all 1 and 4 have been making thin alliances for at least fourteen years now. Cooperation between the two of them is almost expected.

He returns the nod before he bends to pick up another long and slender package. Waterlye swiftly takes the spear from the dying boy’s back. She thinks his name might have been Cadence, but what does it matter? 

The Gamemakers only implemented cannons as a method of signalling deaths a couple years ago, so when one goes off, before the boy’s even done breathing, she jumps just a little. Shaking it off, she hears pounding footsteps, and turns to find the girl from 3 tearing open a package containing a backpack ten feet or so away. The frail thing is frantically looking around, but mostly keeps her eyes on the parcel. The backpack spills, full of… gumdrops? And not much else, looks like.  She must be no older than thirteen, and she speaks while Waterlye readies the spear. 

“I could help you out a lot, you know, I’m smarter than most people usually in the pack,” the girl says. Their eyes finally meet, strong and without diversion. Waterlye tries to remember her name. 

“That’s nice,” Waterlye responds. Then the spear is in the girl’s throat. Harley , she thinks. And suddenly she remembers Compass. Another cannon. 

Spinning on her heel, Waterlye grabs three middling to large packages and pulls the spear from the girl’s throat. Enjoy your energy running out , she thinks while Harley’s eyes flicker open and shut. Her gasping is a backdrop while Waterlye surveys her surroundings. 

Compass isn't in sight. Hyacinth has a sword in the belly of the boy from 6. Cannon shot, seconds after he dies. They haven't gotten any good at timing those; especially during the first fray. Information runs over Waterlye’s mind. Columba, score of five in training. Seventeen left. Eighteen if she includes herself but she intends to go back home. To Alba and to Luff. To her coastline. 

Already she feels her muscles straining under the weight of the packages, she didn’t eat this morning and she’s hungry after that hard spear thrust, after working it out of two other kids, and that run. With no one else in close proximity, she backs swiftly toward Hyacinth. She keeps glancing behind her to make sure he doesn’t have a weapon trained on her this time. Her paper-wrapped loot drops into the grass beneath them and disturbs the pollen of a crushed flower. 

They both automatically look for more allies or foes. Across the Cornucopia’s mouth from them, the girl from 2, Heylen maybe, is locked in a wrestling match with the boy from 10. He’s taller, but she’s better fed. Still, when he hits her over the head with the wrapped bundle he’s carrying she falls quick. His heel into her head is probably what sets the cannon off. 

Waterlye’s eyes flick up to the screens almost automatically. Checking the scoreboard like she always did back home when they were made to watch the Games on flickering screens. 17 to 7. Just 16 more to go.

Some tiny part of her shakes, deep in her chest. That’s a lot to go, actually. And worse, she’s starting to realize she’s scared, scared to die so far from her ocean or her sky, scared to die at all, scared of herself. She tries to rid the worry from her bones. The quicker this is, the better. 

Then two boys, from 10 and 5 are both nearly at the arena’s center, the 10 girl further back but approaching. Waterlye’s brain immediately shuts down to essentials. Fight, kill, survive. While Hyacinth opens his parcel, she rushes for the bigger boy, the one from 10. 

She doesn’t have a good handle on the spear, and he catches her by the throat before she can jam it into his. Lights burst behind her eyes but the tip of her spear finds his diaphragm and sinks deep. His blood is a warm spray against her hands. Snapling. Seven in training.

She still feels like the ocean in midwinter, like when it brings in sheets of ice from far away; roiling and lined with frost.

Two cannons. Fourteen left now . 

Once she’s wrestled the spear from Snapling’s body, she turns to find the retreating forms of the girl from 10 with Hyacinth in pursuit. The rest of the usual pack allies are nowhere to be seen. When the girl outruns Hyacinth through tall and tangled grass, he returns to Waterlye and squares his back to hers. Another cannon, not the girl from 5, somewhere else someone must have died. Thirteen. Ten dead and fourteen still alive.

Almost half gone, minutes into the first day. Things aren’t looking terrible for Waterlye. They wait for more attackers but none come. Everyone else seems to have disappeared into the field of wildflowers and prairie grass.

“You going to kill me if I put down the sword?” Hyacinth asks, his voice is level and devoid of accusation.

“No, you’re too useful right now.”

“Okay.” And so he does, set it down in the grass, then he begins ripping at the packaging at their feet. She crouches to start deftly untying the twine knots. 

They have three backpacks, the spear, and Hyacinth’s sword. One pack is full to the brim with rocks of various colors, and they both decide that one’s not worth it. The second is half full of bread and bottles of water with all of it piled on top of a tarp and a small packet of something they don’t recognize. There’s rope tied to the side. The last is probably the best, water, candy, a small knife, and a book of matches. 

Waterlye immediately removes the matches to stow in her pocket, ripping the book in half and handing one side to Hyacinth. They rearrange the supplies into two packs without speaking much, and eat a bit of bread each before they have to compress it into the bags with their other supplies. Just in case they need to move. Slinging the two packs against their backs, they stand awkwardly.

“Should we go after them?” Hyacinth’s voice is surprisingly reedy. 

Waterlye sits down with her back against one wall of the mouth of the Cornucopia. 

“Probably better to stay with all this.” She gestures to the packages still strewn around them. “More food and water in some of them probably, and weapons we can better use. We can defend it okay til the rest of the pack joins up if they do.”

Then a flock of hovercraft, smaller than the transport ones but larger than delivery drones appears in the bright, bruised purple sky. They make Waterlye nervous, so she watches them intently, as rickety claws descend to collect the bodies of the dead around them. Hyacinth joins her on the ground. They don’t look at each other.

“Then we’ll hang out here, see if anyone else–” he’s cut off by another cannon. Twelve, now. 

Somewhere else there are tributes fighting. Each other, the arena, muttations, whatever. As long as she stays alive, Waterlye doesn’t care. 

The day goes by making their stomachs feel like they’ve eaten enough with bread and water. They don’t bother to open other parcels yet. Just sit back to back, hands on their weapons, eyes on the horizons and the grass. Without thinking, Waterlye begins to braid and knot a few pieces of it at her feet. A bird calls from the trees, far away.

“Which of us will win, you think?” Hyacinth asks. She doesn’t hesitate to answer. 

“Me. You’re softer, you’ll let me kill you.”

“Yeah, probably.” His voice is sad. “Who do you have back home?”

“Two brothers.”

“I’ve got a younger sister,” he says. His blonde hair falls over his face in one seamless cascade. 

“I’m sorry.” Waterlye isn’t sure if she means it. Hyacinth seems to work it over in his head.

“Can I try to sleep? I've been skipping half the meals back at the apartments.”

“Sure. Get some rest. I'll wake you up if anything’s happening or I get tired.”

As he settles against her shoulder, Waterlye notices the camera at the very top of the entrance of the Cornucopia. She pulls the top of the romper down a little as though she’s just adjusting herself, then winks at it. Hyacinth falls asleep almost immediately. 

It’s hours of stillness, of boredom, of her watching the sun set on a purple sky that slowly goes black. The stars are all wrong. The same constellations she’s navigated by since childhood are flattened and distorted, jumbled above her. Waterlye just keeps a tight hold on her spear. A blanket of nothing spreads out before her as night crashes over the arena.

She doesn’t even think of waking Hyacinth, sleeping in fits of trembles beside her with his head on his pack, until the morning light crosses over the arena. Lilac sky and… something moving against flickering clouds. Something long, and massive. An obscured and monstrous thing, when she looks to either side she realizes it rings the trees at the horizon. She almost reaches for Hyacinth’s shoulder.

Then fire erupts like a waterspout fifty yards from them, just past the starting plates and originating from a depression in the grass. It and the smoke it brings spiral into the fractured, uncanny sky. Waterlye doesn’t need to wake Hyacinth. 

They’re both immediately on their feet as the prairie goes up in flame. 

Chapter Text

Eleven ❧ Smoke and Sparrows

If memory is smoke, I am a bonfire doused an hour ago. If purpose is an engine, turn my birthright into coal. 

My temper borne of winter, I know hibernation well and the longer I must wait for justice, I grow ever hungry in the cold. Grasping at the little I control, I fight the devil with a devil, making deals, it hardly matters; when you’re gambling with worthless things like souls and other horrors.

Turn my terror into terror, take from them just what they took from me. It’s hard to shoot a pistol when you’re looking through a mask, it’s hard to see a future when your purpose is your past. If ragе and engineering built my legacy of fire I must sit upon my sеcret.

Name each bullet, shoot to kill and live to last,

Grasping at the little I control, I fight my shadow with an army. Not the kind that wields my horrors, no, the kind that fights with laughter and the sunlight of forgiveness; looks through darkness and decorum, sees a man, not a monstrosity.

If loneliness is prison, every touch is liberation. Love will outshine any antidote where hatred is a poison and I know good deeds don’t guarantee a path to some salvation, but what if rage and engineering turn destruction to creation?

Holding tight to what I can control, I fight my terror with a family; making deals, the checks and balances, they help me build a birthright borne of blood and death and winter. Peace hard won and better justice. — Lilli Furfaro

Shady Jade’s eyes are beginning to adjust to the dark when the thing closes in. Blood staining his shoes is becoming one of the worst recurrences he’s ever experienced. He can tell Tineol’s gone when the wound around the claws in the boy’s chest stops gushing in clear tempo. The cannon shot above ground somewhere is just insult to injury. The claws are badger-like, long and blunt, but they pushed through the tiny body like they’re made of steel. The beast looms behind that slight and stilling form. Some grotesque mutt, created by Capitol scientists who probably took glee in how it might kill.

Its face is striped like a badger’s too, but the colors are all wrong, dark and pale green. The snarling maw of it closing down on Tineol’s corpse’s shoulder is lined with long greying teeth. And it sounds nothing like the single badger Shady Jade’s ever seen, stumbling upon the rare thing in the woods. It screams like a human. He’s reminded distantly of those catamount wails from the hills.

Shady Jade can only think to fumble for the package at his feet, hands finding twine, before he shouts to Spyle.

“Come on, back this way.” 

Spyle seems too shaken to move.

Shady Jade decides to treat the thing like a wild dog in the forest, even though it’s easily twice his size or more. Hard to tell in the dark. He’s unsure what exactly he’s shouting or if it’s even words, but he’s loud, and raises the pack above his head. For a moment, it seems to work.

And then Spyle starts toward it, beginning to try to wrestle Tineol’s body from its claws and teeth. His arms strain against the hold its mouth has on the corpse. Dread sinks in Shady Jade’s stomach. Idiot, he thinks, with more affection than there should be. 

“Stay away from the mouth, dumbass,” he’s saying while he moves toward the fray against every instinct or conscious thought, “and duck!” 

At least that seems to reach Spyle’s brain. When his arms reach up with the package and slam it into the badger mutt’s eyes above Spyle’s head, Shady Jade has to force himself not to think. The bundle comes down repeatedly, and though his muscles have hardened a little in the intervening year or two since he last did this to something or someone, the parcel is softer than his washboard had been.

The package makes contact with its right eye and the badger screams that awful sound as it releases Tineol’s body. Spyle is quick to grab and drag the corpse, but Shady Jade doesn’t stop smashing at the thing until his ally’s safely away and the beast is beginning to back up. 

“Now run!” he commands, taking backward steps too, increasing the distance between him and the monster. Almost in unison, they turn to flee into one of the tunnels. While Spyle’s slow in comparison to Shady Jade, especially dragging Tineol, at least the lumbering mutt is a little slower and they had a five foot head start.

“Here,” Spyle says, breathless, just behind Shady Jade. He stops to look. There’s a crevice in the wall he hadn’t noticed, and he shoves Spyle and his corpse prize into it as the mutt starts closing in on them. Its claws just miss Shady Jade as he pushes himself into the crevice to find a small cavern. 

There’s a hole above them, a perfect circle about five feet across at the center of the croft. It must be similar to the one they fell through, but it’s closer to the cave floor here. Shady Jade vaguely thinks of escaping up through it, but his attention is drawn back to the crevice as the badger scrapes away at stone and soil trying to get to them. Some part of the structure of that opening goes thin with an awful crack and then collapses. 

That… kind of solves one problem, even if he can still hear scraping on the other side. The adrenaline spike comes crashing down and Shady Jade collapses to his knees, eyes fixed on the light above him so he doesn’t have to look at his companions. 

“That was stupid of you,” he says, and then he starts crying. It’s a cold, still and angry cry. The scratching continues in the minute or two of silence between them. 

“Sorry. I didn’t think,” says Spyle. His voice is wavering.

“Obviously.”

“Thanks for getting us out.”

Shady Jade looks up at him now, the anger starting to dissolve into grief. For all three of them. For his family probably already grieving back home. For the kids who came before them and who will come after.  The tears fall harder. Spyle is crouched on the floor beside the body. Shady Jade lets himself fall to the floor, and the sobs wrack his chest. 

“Thank you, too,” he tries to gasp out but it can’t be very intelligible. Spyle crosses to him. The hand that meets Shady Jade’s cheek is sticky with blood, and it just makes him cry harder. 

“You don’t have anything to thank me for. It’s okay,” Spyle says. He’s shaking, though, fingertips trembling as they try to find a path through Shady Jade’s loose hair and get caught in his hood instead. “I’m sorry.”

Shady Jade doesn’t respond. He makes himself into a ball on the cold soil on the cave floor, and lets it all run through him. 

“Do you want to go through whatever we managed to keep?”

Shady Jade glances at the bloodied package at his feet. Must have dropped it. Silence. That Peacekeeper’s face and Tineol’s swim in his mind, almost merging into one. 

“We killed him,” his voice doesn’t even sound like his own, so cold for being spoken between his waning sobs and gasps.

“No, they did.” 

“What’s the difference?”

“None of us keep them imprisoned in the districts, starve them out, make them out to be animals.”

“I am an animal.” His tears are slowing now, trying to swallow an old, familiar, icy self-hatred. Spyle’s sympathetic look, fear still written into it, just makes it sharper. 

“Why?”

“I killed a Peacekeeper once,” Shady Jade tries not to let his voice falter, “I’m supposed to be in a Game like this. I’m no better than the–”

“Are you sure you should be saying that?” Spyle looks up at the blinking light on the wall. 

“What does it matter,” Shady Jade mutters. He turns to face away from Spyle, but Spyle moves closer, sitting in the dirt with his back to Shady Jade’s shoulder. There’s another long stretch of silence punctuated only by Shady Jade’s slowing harsh breaths.

“You’re still better than them.” It’s not an argument, just a fact.

“How do you know?”

“You feel bad about it.” 

Shady Jade stares at the far wall. Does he? He supposes he does. It’s just… he’s been so numb since then he can’t tell for sure what he feels about any of it. When the quiet spreads out like a blanket, too wide and too long to be broken with ease, Spyle speaks again after rummaging in his pocket. 

“This is really pretty, you know?”

Shady Jade turns to look over his shoulder, expecting Spyle to be showing him his token from 7, or some other silly sentimental thing. But he’s holding an unfolded scrap of paper and Shady Jade recognizes his own handwriting on it. 

“You… took that?”

“Yeah. This one was my favorite from training. I asked if I could replace my token with it.”

“Huh.” His heart flutters, but he turns away from Spyle again. What’s the real use in feeling anything for someone he’ll know for a day or two, who comes from all the way across the country, who he’ll never see again, who he might have to kill?

This might be the last person who ever loves you, his subconscious pulls the answer to his question to the surface and the tears start to fall again, slower this time. He refuses to let his breathing change.

Eventually, he can hear Spyle’s breath slowly coming down from panic to determination, folding the paper again and then starting to open the package. Shady Jade pushes himself up and turns back around while wiping his eyes clear of crying. They sit cross-legged on the floor, neither looking at Tineol, while they go through the backpack inside of the parcel.

A long cylinder he recognizes as a davy lamp, two cans of oil, a bread knife he slides into a ring on his belt, six small water bottles, a tiny flint striker with no flint in sight, and two long tubes of some sort of medicine. Shady Jade can’t make out the words on them in the half-light. 

“No food,” Spyle says, while Shady Jade roots around in the few stones at the edge of the cavern. 

“We’ll also probably have to get aboveground to get sponsor gifts, if either of us get any,” he mumbles, finding a grey flake of chert amid the piles. At least, he’s pretty sure it’s chert. Usually Tam Amber starts the fires, Shady Jade just tends them. He slips it into his pocket along with two other semi-promising stones.

The scraping of the mutt continues, and both boys are still, looking up at the hole above them. Spyle finally stands, and reaches up for it, fumbling to try to get a grip but it’s inches out from his fingers. The shadow of Tantalus, or Icarus maybe, hangs over the tableau he paints; dripped in golden light and reaching toward a sunbeam. He’s the kind of pretty you need to see in the sun to see it just right, but when Shady Jade sees it his heart tumbles.

“I could boost you up,” Spyle says. Shady Jade looks at his bloodstained shoes. 

“I don’t think I’d be able to help you out from up there,” he admits, “and we don’t know if that one will close, too, once someone’s through it.”

In the moments between them both turning to look around the hole and anywhere in the cavern but where Tineol’s body is resting, someone else falls down it and the whole space goes dark again. Well, that answers that concern. The person shuffles, confused in the blackness and by the startled noises Spyle and Shady Jade make simultaneously.

“Who is that?” Shady Jade asks. 

“Uh. Sorry,” the girl says, and Spyle gives a delighted yelp, falling to the floor to help the girl up clumsily in the dark.

“Elma!”

“Spyle?” 

“Yes!”

There’s the rustling of paper as the two of them stand, while Shady Jade takes a step back. Spyle’s district partner, probably. He suddenly feels very, very remote.

“Elma, over there is Shady Jade, he’s from 12. Shady Jade, this is Elma! She’s from the same group home in 7!”

“Hi, I guess,” she says. She sounds tired, maybe a little wounded. Out of breath from running from something up above them. Shady Jade doesn’t respond, instead he goes to search out the pack in the dark. When his hands find it, he realizes they’re shaking on the zipper. He forces them still and pulls the lamp from it anyway.

Today has not been a good day, but tomorrow might be better, it’s something he’s been telling himself since he stopped playing the washboard at all. It rings hollow like his stomach now. Tomorrow will probably be even worse if I make it that far.

He removes the lamp base, fills it, and goes for the flint striker. When it meets the chert, the cavern fills with flame. Flame erupts up and out of the hole, blowing the sliding mechanism that shut the trapdoor off entirely. For a small second, he can see the frightened faces of the two tributes from 7, frightened more than he’s ever seen anyone really.

Ah. Right, firedamp. That’s why they’d have a lamp like this. Pretty ironic to forget that, is the last thought Shady Jade has before the panic completely whites out his mind and automatic movement sets in. His vision swirls, and everything is too-loud in his right ear, but terror makes him steadier somehow. 

Flame licks at the ceiling, the mutt now quiet at the collapsed crevice. Shady Jade starts tearing at the stones there after he slings the pack over one shoulder. He can feel the heat on the back of his neck and then a hand. It pulls at the collar hard enough to unrest the hood from its attachments, and to catch a little in his hair but he’s not sure if he can even feel pain right now. His hands are bleeding from pulling at the rock and his skin is so hot but none of it even feels real. 

A small gift his distractible mind gives him is one gleaming memory. Sitting in the meadow with his cousin strumming an old guitar at his back. The memory of frosted trees and early winter, crunch of cold grass under his toes, all swim through his head. For a moment, he can almost convince himself he’s chilly. That’s when the heat really sets in and his ears stop ringing. 

“We need to go,” says Spyle in his ear. Shady Jade struggles from his grasp and is starting to explain the logistics of climbing out of a hole with a flame erupting out of it when he catches it. Salvation on the other side of the cave, previously too dark to see but easy to see when it’s awash in firelight. A low opening, they’ll have to belly crawl and hope but it might be better on the other side of that cavern wall than being in a room on fire. The two of them both drag Elma from her huddled position at the edge of the croft, pushing her through the space first, then Spyle takes Shady Jade’s backpack and shoves him forward. 

The crawl is dark, awkward, and damp, sliding along under a shelf of rock that feels a million miles long. It must only be maybe fifteen feet, though, and when Shady Jade feels the wind he instinctively grabs Elma’s belt.

“Check for a drop before you keep going.”

“Oh, uh, thanks,” Elma says. Her voice is still unsteady. He can just make out her reaching a hand out beyond their movement, and he’s glad he told her to, because there’s a sharp right-angle turn in the cavern just ahead, and once they’ve turned, bright light. The expansion of his pupils hurts Shady Jade’s eyes. Fresh air and sunlight stream out in front of them.

He barely manages to catch Elma again as she tumbles out of the cave opening. Thankfully the drop is only a few feet, and as he shoots forward he can just manage to lower her down without her hitting her head. He’s only half as lucky, but he’s used to tumbling down unseen small drops in the forest. Tuck and roll, he’s back on his feet in a few seconds to receive the pack dropped down to him and then help Spyle down. 

They all look around, adjusting to the bright light of near-sunset compared to the dark of the cave. Elma is the least hurt, but she looks somewhere between angry and terrified. Spyle’s legs are wreathed in the red marks of fresh burns. Shady Jade almost sighs until he turns to look behind them. The pillar of flame is something he’s seen in nightmares before. A true minefire, the kind where dozens don’t come home that night. 

I did that , he thinks, distantly. And then he sees the fire in the fescue racing toward them. 

“Run!” he’s louder than he’s ever heard himself, and his lumber district companions don’t hesitate. The pack hits his back hard with every pace, but he breaks for the trees, still off in the distance and they both follow him. Shady Jade suddenly starts to think any three of might have a chance at winning, glancing behind him and recognizing the one big advantage they might have. None of them trip in the grass, used to working with the overgrown patches between trees most likely.

Three trees, from opposite coasts, pull up their roots and flee to try to rejoin the forest. A grasshopper sparrow sings like hope from in front of them. Shady Jade swears to himself he’ll kill it if they make it to the forest. He can’t afford hope if he wants either of his companions to get out of this alive. 

Chapter Text

Twelve ❧  Luring Birds with Forget-me-nots and Candy

Your life is not a testimony shared upon a stage. Your story isn't paperback with pictures on each page, you are far more complex than beginning, middle, end. Before the plot is over a new one will begin.

Your life is no commodity; it can't be bought or sold, and everything will still be changing even when you're old. 

What you're doing now you'll live again in fifty years. – Emily Anne/Emhahee

Donnie Evergreen has both elbows on the counter of the candy shop and his chin in his palms. He’s only half listening to one of his favorite girls’ ramble about the new Peacekeeper base, mostly trying not to hear the screens from the square just behind him. They’re required to watch the Games now, but being in the town square counts enough that both of them aren’t paying much attention. Most families assign someone to take notes for the questionnaire these days, especially for miners who still have to work. These days the Covey take shifts on it. The old television sets installed a few years ago deep down in the mines barely get enough signal to show the miners the Games half the time anyway, so the Peacekeepers look the other way.

Artemisia “Artie” Stout is a year younger than him, and her family have been Merchant since the Dark Days, but she’s one of the few people he likes this much on the nicer side of town. Besides her, it’s just his girl from the flower shop and one of the Peacekeepers. She’s pretty, but in a way that says she’s between awkward adolescent and fiery-tempered adult. Blonde hair that falls just beneath her chin in ripples of curls, grey eyes which hint at some ancestor of hers being Seam. She’s usually wearing a smile that says there’s more fire in her than most Merchant folk, and her being at the Hob every time she can kind of proves it. 

Her slipping him a few dollars and a kiss on the cheek between his sets after she’s been out to the back alley with some other boy just punctuates that. She’s capital T trouble, and Donnie Evergreen really likes that about her. He doesn’t get protective over what he’d like to think of as his brood, the girls and boys he has around town. They know he isn’t settling down just yet, and he doesn’t mind if they aren’t either.

Someday there might come a time he’s gotta, he’s been thinking about leaving the Covey house for a long time, and Shady Jade being taken just kind of tied that little idea off in a twine bow. Most people in 12 can only get a house assigned if they get married, and he’d like to really try to be a person that he’s not when he has to do that. He knows Artemisia isn’t going to ever settle down herself, but he enjoys her company and she’s incredibly charitable in a way not many people he knows are. She’d make a good rebel if she isn’t one already.

Artie’s mad about the Peacekeeper base, how close it is to town now, how big and imposing it is. The old one is apparently going to house some experiments for a few years and then be torn down. She doesn’t even stay quiet about it while other customers come in, move around Donnie Evergreen at the counter, and purchase a small bag of hard candy or gumdrops. She’s braver than he is, or more careless.

When she’s done with her ramble, he glances around before leaning over the counter to kiss her. She doesn’t protest, and she leans in but she doesn’t close her eyes, they’re fixed on the screen out the front window. Suddenly she pushes him away and points. Donnie Evergreen does not want to turn around, but he does. 

There’s fire running down the tall grass that makes up most of the arena and there’s a camera zoomed in on his brother and two other kids. Donnie Evergreen’s heart seizes. He’s never seen him this scared. Even after the fall before last, when Shady Jade had come back to their little shack shaking like a leaf with blood all over his hands, his clothes, his washboard, his shoes. Donnie Evergreen would give anything to reach through that screen and pull his brother out.

Despite the sudden quiet in the shop, he can hear the fire in his imagination. It roars through underbrush with a hunger he knows well. 

“He’ll outrun it,” Artie says.

“Not if he’s waiting on those two.”

“It’s not moving that fast, they could all get out.”

Donnie Evergreen pulls his attention from the screen to her instead. The intense look in his eyes says all it needs to. When he kisses her again, it’s not so sweet. They’re both distracting themselves and they only stop when someone walks past the windows sending shadows across them. 

“I should go say hey to Holly,” he says when he pulls away. No flicker of emotion beyond the previous concern crosses her face.

“Okay, I’ll see you Sunday. If not sooner.”

“Yeah.” He squeezes her hand on the counter before he goes, but doesn’t say more. He’s only in so much of a talking mood. He does whistle a little as he steps out the door though. Trying to cling to some of that comfort. He catches the flickering image of his brother splashing into a stream and hauling the girl he’s with after him in the periphery of his vision. The relief doesn’t feel so comforting when Donnie Evergreen knows there’s more in store.

A mockingjay takes up his shaky melody, somewhere above the square. When he looks up, he finds a pair of them sitting on the candy shop roof, though only one is singing. The other grooms a white-billed woodpecker, a kind he’s never seen before. Immature, it nestles down into a ball of feathers and colors. 

“Huh,” he mumbles to himself. He heaves a sigh as he leans on the florist shop’s rusty door. It’s one of the less maintained buildings in the square, with ivy pulling at its old bricks and snaking up the side facing the alley almost to the roof. Still prettier than anything in the Seam, but the Monroes don’t make a lot of money here. 

Most of the district can’t afford flowers for weddings or funerals, or they pick them from the meadow. It’s not a particularly lucrative business except around this time of year when the Peacekeepers buy big bouquets for celebrating Reaping Day, or when someone’s feeling particularly sentimental, most of the Merchants get them for New Years. Usually, Donnie Evergreen brings a handful of wild irises or aster when he visits so they don’t have to ship as many in, but he hasn’t been past the fence today. 

There’s a gentle chime of small bells attached to the inner door handle as Donnie Evergreen wrestles the swollen wood open. His nose fills with the scent of marigold and forget-me-not, rose and lavender. Behind the counter is an older and pale Merchant woman, her gray hair tied back in a tight bun as she leans over the counter watching the screen out of the window. Holly’s grandmother, Nacea, who usually isn’t here because she mostly works with the mayor. She has a severe distaste for Donnie Evergreen hanging out with her granddaughter. 

It’d be worse if she knew he thinks Holly’s his best chance at loving just one person if he has to. Settling down with her would mean taking her back to the Seam. You can’t really marry up in 12, only down. Too early to think about that, anyway. He’d want them both past Reaping age before getting married. She’ll turn fifteen in a few months, so it’d be four years. One more drawing for her than he has, and she’s one of the few Merchants to take out tesserae.

“Is Holly upstairs?” Donnie Evergreen asks, when Nacea only glances at him and goes back to watching the torture of children with a near-bored expression. 

“Mm. I think she went out for bread. Better not go padding after her like a dog, now, Covey boy.” 

“Yes ma’am,” he says, even though he has no intention of following the directive. As he leaves he makes sure to shoot her a tiny rude gesture. She doesn’t seem to notice. 

His shoes clacking on the stone of the street makes him miss Shady Jade more and he tries to pull himself together. Imagines his ribcage like the eyelets on a boot, stringing a lace through them and tightening. 

Donnie Evergreen makes sure to put on a cheerier expression as he approaches the bakery. Their door is propped open, and the smell out of it makes his mouth water but he knows he’ll likely find Holly bantering in the alley beside it with a friend. And he does; she’s sharing a roll with Jethro Callow, who’s Seam, but Holly makes friends across the thin borders between the populations of 12. Callow’s a little younger than either of them, but eager and good with numbers, so sometimes he does the Monroes’ books as a favor to a friend. Donnie Evergreen likes him. He slides in beside Holly, takes the small bit of bread he’s offered and just looks at her for a second.

She, now, she’s beautiful. When she smiles at him while handing him the bread, he feels hungry for more than that and his guts are a little aflutter. He’d call her hair black, but when it catches the light it’s the warm brown of healthy tree bark. She leans back, making a quip at Callow’s expense that Donnie Evergreen isn’t listening to, and when she laughs it’s like soft rain on the roof of home. He’d go padding after her every day of the week if she’d let him. She finishes her bit of friendly verbal jabbing and turns to Donnie Evergreen. He winks.

“Oh don’t put on that face,” she says instead of greeting him, even though she winks right back, “I know you’re sooo ready to have fun and be happy today. Considering all that.”

They both turn to glance, just momentarily at the screen. For a second they both somber up a little.

“We’re actually supposed to be watching that y’know,” she says, but sarcasm drips from her tone. Donnie Evergreen can see Callow’s attention’s caught on it though. That boy has always been a little too comfortable with the Games for his taste.

“Oh I know, you know I love to watch kids beat each other to death and the Capitol titter away about it on big screens every day.” Holly examines her nails. Clean, kept short except for on her thumbs. She sometimes uses those to clip leaves from flowers when her parents drag her attention from a sketchbook to help out at the shop. She probably doesn’t know Donnie Evergreen’s ever noticed it.

Callow opens his mouth to speak. Donnie Evergreen cuts him off.

“Gentle on her Callow,” he says, voice careful and soft since the younger boy can have a temper, “She can see the screens from her window when she’s trying to sleep. At least we can cover our televisions.” Holly shoots him a half-disguised grateful look. 

“My family never does,” Callow says. Holly’s retort is quick. 

“Well maybe if your family had someone in the games you would. Myrabella was one of my further cousins, you know? And Donnie Evergreen’s got a cousin in there, too.” She’s less jovial now with their friend. Donnie Evergreen leans over to kiss her cheek but her hand catches her shoulder, with a quick glance to the few folk milling around in the square. He relents and leans back against the wall while Callow’s brows knit.

“Don’t test it,” Donnie Evergreen says, and that just stokes the fire in the boy. He has the sense to think before he speaks, though.

“Fine,” is all he says, before he stalks off into the smattering of onlookers to the Games. Alone at last, Donnie Evergreen smiles at Holly and she returns the genuine smile she saves mostly for him. 

“Hey, pretty flower,” he says.

“Hello, mister pinetree.” She barely gets it out before he’s sweeping her into his arms, but she doesn’t let it stop her thought even though he tickles her nose with his a little while she does. “I’ve missed you, it’s been ages .”

“It’s been like two days.” He can’t stop the laugh before it leaves his throat. 

“Yeah, two days too long!”

They’re both laughing as he sets her down, and her pretty black shoes hit the ground with a little tap that makes him feel at home. He can smell the sprigs of chamomile in her hair. For one gorgeous second, Donnie Evergreen forgets about the screens, forgets about the Capitol, and just feels like he’s laying in a bed of blooms. Their laughter slowly ebbs, though, and the moment flickers like sunset, slowly closing in.

“So what brings you by the bakery?” she asks.

“I was looking for you.”

“Me? Really?” The overdramatic hand on her chest tells him she’s joking again. She knew. She’s sharp, understands things a lot of other folk don’t almost before he’s saying it. 

“You, really. I thought my little flower deserved a hello before I need to get the chores done. You’re my last stop on the way home, needed some happy in my head,” he says it more seriously than she did, but he’s still smiling. Holly chuckles a little, still like soft raindrops. 

“I miss you every day I don’t see you, you know.”

“You too. Like the meadow misses flowers in the winter.”

“But if you’ve got things to do, I don’t want your family mad at you. You should get going.” Her voice is a little sad at the prospect and Donnie Evergreen leans against the wall again. 

“I’ve been thinking about changing my name, you know.” 

“Why?” Holly turns to face him. 

“I think the Covey… I think we’re a family tree burnin’ at the roots. It might be safer for the future. If I can ever have kids after what’s happenin’ to Shady Jade, for them not to be so much like us might be good. Duller colors fit in better here, with all the…” he gestures around them. Even in the town square, coal dust is already settling again after the surface cleaning the Peacekeepers do for Reaping Day.

“I don’t know about that,” is all Holly says. The stormclouds above them skate across the steely sky. Everything looks grey. Like he always does before he leaves her, Donnie Evergreen leans into Holly’s ear, and just above a whisper, sings her a stanza of an old Covey song. 

Are you, are you, coming to the tree?

Where they strung up a man, they say who murdered three

Strange things did happen here, no stranger would it be

if we met at midnight in the hanging tree. 

He likes singing better than saying goodbye. She smiles a sad, knowing smile, and this time doesn’t resist when he goes in to kiss her cheek. 

“You take care of yourself, now, Donnie Evergreen.”

“You, too, Holly.” 

He fails at avoiding catching her dark green eyes as he turns around. The saddest and deepest summer color he’s ever seen. 

The walk home’s oppressive, humid heat even on an overcast day gives no comfort. He considers visiting the boy he has down at the other end of the Seam from the Covey house, but it’s hot and his heart is a little too heavy right now. Donnie Evergreen hates making his loved ones sad, and he’s become extraordinarily good at it lately. 

“Nothing you can take from me,” he tries to start, but his voice is too faltering, his throat too dry. He’s been out all day, arranging music lessons for the mayor’s kids, making social calls, and his stomach rumbles even though hunger nearly disgusts him. His brother might be out there, ‘bout to die from starving. 

When he passes the meadow, he thinks about that loose fence panel. He thinks about running away, disappearing into the green forever. Donnie Evergreen knows he could never really be alone, but it’s tempting to think of leaving all of this behind. To not have to stand in the pen next year thinking of Shady Jade. 

The wildflowers beckon when he gets home, but Donnie Evergreen forces himself to go inside. For shade, and because, since the Reaping, Rye has been practically living with them. Sleeping in Shady Jade’s empty bed in the room Donnie Evergreen and his brother used to share, and crying most nights. Rye’s been a ghost in their halls, but none of them have the heart to tell him to leave. Even if they share a distaste for him and the influences he had on Shady Jade.

They’re all in this together, right? 

Still, Donnie Evergreen isn’t thrilled to find Rye in his near-permanent position looking like a fragile finch perched on the arm of the couch with his eyes glued to the television. Smoke curls around his fingers from some leaf wrapped in paper. His face is still tear-streaked but he’s not crying right now, just watching with faraway worry. Without a word, Donnie Evergreen settles on the couch next to him. Rye’s elbow bumps his shoulder, and stays pressed there. They’re both shaking just a little.

Together, they watch the next horrors unfold.

Chapter Text

Thirteen ❧  Tipping Scales

I'm staring out the window at where the ocean meets the sky, just wondering if I can change the world one word at a time. I'm lost in every raindrop dripping down the glass, leaving trails behind, an outline of the past. If I knew how the world would end, would I tell someone, or just pretend? If Atlas fell and I could fly, would I help him hold up the sky? – Pey

Day two of the Games only really begins once the remaining thirteen tributes are fleeing the slow-moving grassfire. 

Waterlye’s seen wildfires a few times, and they send all the furry things skittering from the forest to the large posts marking the edge of where they’re allowed to go in her part of 4. She feels like one of those animals. When they get to the large, arcing creek, Waterlye splashes into it only to be startled by a sudden drop in the riverbed a foot or two out. She instinctively starts treading water. 

Looking behind her, Hyacinth is a few paces back, some ten feet in front of the fire and she can make out other shapes making it to the river, vaguely wondering why she hasn’t heard any cannons. 

“Watch ou–” she gets out before Hyacinth splashes past the dropoff and immediately goes under. He’s… clearly never swum before. Waterlye gives herself the time to sigh and roll her eyes before she dives for him. He’s a good bit heavier than her, but she’s had to pull drunk men out of choppier waters than this since she was twelve. Her hand finds his shirt, then his arm, and she starts to hoist him up, one hand on the shelf of the dropoff. 

That hand is all that keeps her up when his flailing gives Hyacinth purchase on her shoulder and he tries to push her down in a desperate attempt to get to the surface. If she could, she’d slap him right now. Instead she grits her teeth while hauling him onto the shelf of shallower water then lets go. Quick backstroke and a kick to his side to get him to let go, and then her head’s above water. 

She’s at least a little relieved to see him realize he’s in shallower water and get his head up too, but he’s clearly still disoriented. Waterlye hauls herself up a few feet away. Adrenaline was coursing through her but it’s dying out, and she can’t stop herself from gasping in air. She sits on the shelf before the dropoff and watches the fire creep closer to her back and the fruit trees on the other side of the river.

Her muscles sting. Anger wells in her, she should have let him drown. It would honestly make winning easier at this point. Her pack is soaking wet and heavy now, it seems like Hyacinth lost his in his desperation. Once he’s able to push himself up, he looks at her with real gratitude, and the anger flickers out. 

One of her earliest memories is having to be dragged out of the ocean by her father. Coughing out salt in streams down her chin. Waterlye remembers how scared she’d been, how angry her father had been. He’d hit her and Alba when she cried after they got home. Her for wandering off, and for crying, and Alba for not watching her closer even though they both must have been no older than five and it was silly to expect him to just because he was the boy. The memory of it is enough to give her the sympathy to slide along the shelf toward him and awkwardly pat his head. 

“You can’t swim,” she says. 

“Lucky I’m with you then.”

They both look up at the grass, flames licking the bank only a few feet away now. 

“Lucky for you. Come on, time to get to the other side. One arm over my shoulder, and then kick with your back feet. Just keep your head above water.”

He sits up but she can tell he’s too weak to give her much help with this. Another heavy sigh, and she jams her shoulder into his armpit. At least she won’t be working against much of a current here. The creek is relatively still. Hyacinth’s hand clutches at her shoulder. It’s exhausting work, but when Waterlye gets them to the other side she’s disappointed not to find a matching shelf there, or even much of a shallows at all, but dragging them both along it with her free hand she finds somewhere where both of them can at least stand. They get their elbows up on the bank. 

They’re both breathing hard and unsteady as they pull themselves out of the water and Waterlye just collapses on the grass. Hearing Hyacinth do the same, she squeezes her eyes shut and puts a hand up to pinch the bridge of her nose. She holds her tongue and sits up. Then it hits her, not only is Hyacinth’s pack missing, so are both of their weapons. 

Great . Even if I can find them… can I handle another dive? Maybe with a little rest…

Instead of addressing it just yet, she surveys her surroundings. Still half-dark, she can only just make out silhouettes fleeing into the trees. It seems like no one’s interested in more fighting. Her eyes find the thing, closer now, curled around the entire horizon above the trees. It’s a massive greenish black snake, or something like it, biting at its own tail and missing every time. At least it seems preoccupied for now, so she looks away from it.

Hyacinth next to her is still panting. For such a strong guy, he sure hasn’t been a ton of help yet. 

She reaches into her pack. The knife is still secure in an interior pocket. By some miracle, the matches tucked inside the tarp are only damp. The bread is turning to mush, though, and she pulls it out. 

“Eat it fast.” Her voice is colder than she intended. “It’s not going to be good in half an hour.” 

Neither of them speak for a few minutes while they eat. She almost resents that he seems as exhausted as she is, considering how much sleep he’s gotten. It must not have been good sleep, she guesses. 

It’s funny how much eating accidentally soaked bread feels like home. Less salt in this, though, and it’s nearly pure white. They both jump a little when something falls at Waterlye’s side. The drones have been getting better since Waterlye can remember, and they’ve started dropping sponsor gifts in little baskets with a parachute attached. 

“That’s probably for you,” Hyacinth says, “someone liked something you just did.”

“Probably, I just saved your life,” Waterlye bites back. 

“Yeah, thanks.” His voice is genuine again and it makes her resolve quiver, she’s just tired and frustrated, she shouldn’t give him reasons to hate her this early on. Still, he squares his shoulders and starts to mask that soft expression again. He’s in this to win, too, she knows. She kind of wonders what his play is. 

Reaching for the basket she finds two delightful surprises inside; a long coil of rope, and atop it two green loaves. Bread from home. She can’t help but break the strong shell she tries to keep around herself, she mouths up toward the trees, where she knows there will be cameras. ‘Thank you, Mags.’

“Well, we have dry bread again now. Should leave it in the basket until my pack dries out,” she says, but she ties the rope up in its loop, then through the strap of her pack. 

“Oh, sweet! You know, we never had this much to eat back home.”

“Really? I thought 1 was better fed than all of us.”

“I think most of us are. My family are painters, though. Not really a lot of money in the Capitol for portraits right after the war so we fell out of favor pretty quick.”

“Hm.” Waterlye searches for something polite to say. “Do you paint, too?”

“Yeah. How’s the food in 4?”

“Soggy, usually. Sometimes we get a windfall but there’s usually not much of it.” Waterlye thinks of the times whales have beached themselves, still living, and half the district ran to grab a trident or spear to help kill it, or knives to help butcher it. Whales are rare out at sea nowadays, but they beach themselves every few years.

“They don’t let you eat what you fish?”

“Do they let you keep your paintings?”

Hyacinth shakes his head, something sad shadowing his face for a second.

 They finish their soaked bread in mostly quiet. They don’t have much to talk about, really. But they do decide to sit with her facing the water and Hyacinth facing the forest, so that they’re not taken by surprise. Sated for now, Waterlye feels the exhaustion pulling at her eyelids and shakes her head to clear it.

One last thing to do before I ask if I can rest, she thinks. She looks up to the opposite bank of the river, the flame dying now as the sun rises above the trees. 

She’s been diving for shellfish and lobster before. Back home, Alba works most of his time on a pearl farm just off shore. Mostly, they get sent off to jewelers from the Capitol or District 1. The farm puts rounded scraps of gravel or coal into oysters and line them up in long, stiff baskets underneath the waves for a year or two. Then, good divers are sent down to collect the baskets, hoping for pearls. She helps him when she’s off her lobster boat shifts. He nearly never gets breaks, since the farms are so close to shore that he can go home every night. 

This dive won’t be anything compared to that. Breathing deep, she readies herself. 

“I'm going to try to go get our weapons.” Waterlye digs into her now-drying bag and hands him the knife. She doesn’t wait for his response. If she waits any longer, she’ll talk herself out of it. 

Once she’s in the cold, clear water, it’s easier than Waterlye expected to get her muscles out of their fatigue. The water is deeper than she really expected it to be, twelve or fifteen feet. In the struggle to get Hyacinth ashore, the weapons must have been moved by the slow current and their splashing, so she has to surface twice between dives but she recovers the spear and sword. She drags herself onto the bank by Hyacinth and forces her breathing to stay deep and even. 

“Here.” She drops the sword in his lap and looks at the morning glow taking over the trees. “We should find a good place to set up, then I need to sleep.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course.” His voice is mostly breathless. Waterlye can see the way his muscles strain as he gets up. He’s tired, too. But it’s her turn and pragmatism hasn’t killed her yet. 

They pick their way into the forest some five feet before they spot movement another ten feet ahead. The girl from 8 is picking herself up from the ground, rubbing her head and looking further into the trees. But when the girl’s hand reaches out toward them and flattens, Waterlye suddenly realizes it’s a wall. Fifty feet or so high, smooth and so realistically painted with more forest that she could swear she sees shadows move in the pigment. 

“Kill her or let her go?” Hyacinth asks while they both watch the brown-haired girl pick her way along the wall like she’s trying to puzzle something out about it beyond Waterlye’s comprehension. 

“Let her go,” Waterlye says. If the girl’s got any weapons on her, she might wound them more than they can take right now. They need rest and maybe to find another member of the typically allied districts with more supplies before they hunt again. The girl hasn’t noticed them, and they let it stay that way as she continues her way along the wall out of sight. 

Finding a place that feels safe to sleep is… hard, knowing there are only fifteen feet or so of forest and they both want to feel a little sheltered. When they approach the wall, Waterlye gingerly touches it, but nothing seems out of place to her. What was that girl trying to figure out? It’s just a wall , she thinks.

There’s still long grass here, though not as long as what was on the prairie. Sitting down against the wall, with her hand in it, Waterlye realizes that the flowers here have a different give to them from real ones and looks down. They’re paper. Every little flame-colored dot amid the trees is paper. She can see where their boots tore through some of them on their way here. What an oddly off putting thing.

Hyacinth sits down next to her and Waterlye sets her still-damp bag in the sun, the basket on the other side of her. Day two is shaping up to be… something alright. It doesn’t matter. They’ll get through after some rest.

“Wake me in a few hours,” she mutters, letting her head fall back into the wall. 

“Can do. Thanks again,” he says. 

She wakes in the early evening to a cannon, and to Hyacinth asleep beside her. Eleven left. She barely feels like she slept, and obviously her companion needed it too. She bitterly wishes he’d stayed awake on watch, but their supplies are undisturbed. Frustrated, she almost kicks him awake as she stands, but Waterlye decides she’s feeling nice since he nearly drowned today. 

She combs hands through her hair and looks out across what she can see of the arena between the trees. The scoreboard informs her that’s been the only cannon today. Then her eyes fall on the blackened circle of what used to be grass at the center of the arena still somehow dotted with green and the gleaming horn in its middle. Her stomach sinks as she finds a pattern. 

It’s the years when the members of the pack are scattered, or their supplies destroyed, when other districts win. Both of their worst scenarios are happening. 

She might actually be doomed. She looks down at Hyacinth still sleeping fitfully and weighs her options. Better off alone? Maybe, at this point. That would mean killing him. 

Waterlye finally asks herself the question she’s been avoiding:

Am I still scared of killing someone I care even a little about at this point?

She thinks of Alba and Luff. She couldn’t kill them, but… she gives herself the answer with surprising speed. 

No. Not anymore.

Chapter Text

Fourteen ❧  Aim True

I want a week spent in silence, so the next time we speak, others will be ready to hear what we have to say. And the following day will be comprised, not so much of moments of silence, but 24 hours of noise.

Noise for the toys that we as children never wanted to let go. Because we live in a world that told us to grow up, so we grew, growing up to know we knew;

noise is not enough because our fathers are dying.

We were left trying to make sense out of a world that doesn't, because everything that was supposed to be wasn't. Because what wasn't never was what we wished for.

We grew up waging war against birthday candles.  –Shane Koyczan

Shady Jade always moves in a double-step when in the wilderness, reaching out with a toe to check the ground in front of him before continuing. He feels the dropoff in the stream before he sees the darker water beyond where they first splashed in and drags Elma to a stop, hand on her belt. He flings his arm out to the other side to stop Spyle. 

He looks at the river, the two tributes from 7 look at the flame behind them with a knowing terror. 

“It might jump.” Spyle’s voice is shaky, watching sparks fly from the grass feet from them and then turning his gaze to the grass and trees on the other side of the water. 

“Can either of you swim?” Shady Jade asks. He knows how, decently well. There’s a little concrete house, or what used to be one, by the lake that the younger Covey visit often enough. Clerk Carmine taught Shady Jade when he was little. 

“No,” Elma says, her eyes still on the blazing prairie. It only occurs to Shady Jade now that wildfire must be just as scary to them as mine fires are to him. She looks stricken by the kind of fear someone’s known well before, and when he glances up to Spyle, so does he. 

“Okay. We’ll stay here until we know it won’t spread to the other side. Then I’ll help us cross. There’s at least food and more cover there.” Shady Jade takes his backpack off and surveys the opposite shore. He doesn’t particularly want it getting wet, so he tosses it onto the opposite bank, just clearing the seven or eight foot wide waterway. His boots are already soaked so he just takes them off and nestles them under one arm as he sits down on the shelf. Nervously, the others follow his lead, though they keep their boots on and their legs as far from the edge as they can, cross-legged in the stream’s current. 

They all watch the fire. It licks at itself and smokes on the damp grass but marches on. That’s when Shady Jade notices the sky. What he’d assumed was west is almost certainly not. Because it’s not evening. It’s morning. This isn’t sunset, it’s sunrise.

“How long was I crying?”

“What?” Spyle seems momentarily distracted by the question. “I think you were in and out for a couple hours. Not sleeping just kind of… out of it, I think. I don’t know, sorry.” 

“And you didn’t try to get us to move along?” 

“I mean, the cave seemed pretty safe, and we’re all really stressed out.” 

“We’re in the Games, of course we’re stressed out! That’s not an excuse to risk yourself to let me have a breakdown.” Shady Jade throws his hands up in the air. Spyle seems about to respond when Elma breaks in.

“Hey, what’s that? Do we know what that is?” She’s pointing to a black shape in the water fifty or so feet away. It moves like a fish but the ripples in the water around its tall fin make it look more like some kind of lizard. Whatever it is, all of them stiffen and stand. Shady Jade looks between the fire and the thing in the water. 

“No clue,” he murmurs, “Do we–”

“Get Elma across,” Spyle says. It’s wavering but resolute. Shady Jade takes only a moment to look questioningly at him before he nods and grabs Elma’s arm. 

“Hold on tight,” he says to her. She wraps an arm around his waist. Taller than him but slim-built and cooperative, it’s only a little unnerving to get her to the other side. She pulls herself up next to his toppled backpack with ease, eyes on the fin in the water.

Shady Jade does fast calculations driven by a crisis-calm he’s learned well. Spyle on the other side of the water is too far to reach before that thing bears down on them. Shady Jade pulls himself out of the creek and searches his belt. He’s relieved to find his knife still in one of the metal rings. He pulls it free and gives it a tiny toss and catch to check its weight before he tosses it to splash at Spyle’s feet. It’s hard to hear what Spyle says over the pounding in his ears, but he does scoop it up and ready himself. 

Its reptilian maw pokes up through the surface and makes a sound like grinding metal. Spyle brings the serrated knife down into one slit eye and it lets out a higher pitched echo of that sound. Spyle doesn’t stop until the knife is at its hilt and the tip is pushing at the skin of the thing’s lower jaw from inside. By the time he’s pulled the knife from its eye, it’s turned to start making a wobbly retreat. It streams blood into the water behind it, stops moving a few dozen feet away. The current takes it away down the curve of the river. 

All three of them are wide-eyed, breathing heavy. Shady Jade knows they have to keep moving though. 

Getting Spyle across the river is more a clumsy swimming lesson than assistance. Shady Jade doesn’t think himself capable of actually dragging someone Spyle’s size through a current, he’s used to swimming in calmer waters with less riding on his shoulders. But they manage. 

“I’m getting really tired of mutts already.” Spyle takes his boots off on the shore after handing the knife back. He starts shaking them and wringing his socks out.

“Yeah, me too,” says Shady Jade. Elma keeps an eye on the flames. 

“You guys should dry your clothes out as much as you can, last thing any of us want is rashes or something.” Spyle starts pulling his shirt-skirt-short thing off. Shady Jade sighs and nods. Probably smarter even if he feels too exposed. Blinking green lights in the trees, in the tall grass down the line of the shore. He didn’t notice how burnt-through the shoulder of his outfit is until he’s laid it out on the grass next to the other two. 

Checking over his and Spyle’s burns, Shady Jade finds them painful but not severe. His hair is singed, and his arms red, but they’ll survive. Hopefully no blisters. He’s seen and lived through worse. 

Furthermore, he’s delighted to see that when he reaches into the backpack for three water bottles, the now-legible label on one of the tubes of medicine is ‘burn cream’ in big block letters. Pulling all four items out, Shady Jade waves the cream at his District 7 companions. 

“Hey! Look!” 

They take a moment to process but Spyle grins. They all down half a bottle of water and help each other apply the salve. It soothes the burning and at least sharpens them back to tasks at hand. After taking a moment to regroup and let their clothes dry, they take better stock of their surroundings. 

If Shady Jade is guessing, the circle of the river follows the arena the whole way around, but the forest seems to be a less precise circle in places, thicker and thinner in different spots. Where they’re sitting, it’s thin, and nearly reaches the banks of the creek. No one else is in sight at the moment and he feels relatively safe with his companions. He knows it’s tenuous; if it comes down to just the three of them, then it’ll be hard, but he’s starting to… trust Spyle. That realization sits with distaste in his mouth. And if Spyle trusts Elma, he’ll try to as well. 

He catches her brown eyes, avoiding looking at her district companion. She looks like she’s trying to figure something out, brows furrowed. She doesn’t seem unfriendly, mostly just a quiet girl who shouldn’t be here. 

“You’re both from the same home, then?” he asks as he stands, brushing off his damp undergarments and picking grass from his legs. He’s surprised that Elma’s the one to answer him. 

“They sure call it that.” There’s almost a flash of anger in her face. She stares at the ground before she stands and helps Spyle up. 

“The group home in 12 is pretty small.”

“We have at least two,” Spyle says. 

“Lots of accidents?” 

“Enough that we need two.” Elma pauses while stepping back into her clothing.

“We have a lot of mine fires.” 

“None of us enjoyed that, then.” Spyle nods toward the dying embers across the river from them. Then he pauses, and looks closer. “Hey Elma, check that out.” 

She looks and her head immediately tilts to one side, so Shady Jade looks too. As they watch, amid the dying fire there are shoots of green pushing up through the ash. These aren’t grass though. 

“Saplings,” Elma says. 

“Fire germinated?” Spyle sounds confused. Shady Jade masks his own confusion by squeezing the last moisture from his socks.

“Must be… but I’ve never seen them grow like this.” Elma bites her lip, worrying at it with her front teeth. “I… has the Capitol ever made plant mutts before?”

None of them can remember if they have. 

“Do you think they’re safe?” Shady Jade asks.

“I think we’d better stay on this side of the river until we absolutely don’t have to. I mean… apples. No water monsters yet. No mysterious plants.” Elma looks up to the shiny apples in the trees above them.

Too shiny. 

“Can either of you climb?”

Elma and Spyle look at each other and only Elma can cover the shared laugh with her hand. She’s so slim, he wonders how Spyle’s managed to get as strong as he looks without much food, if they’re fed similarly. 

“Of course we can, we don’t just chop down trees, you know,” Elma says. Maybe she’s less quiet than Shady Jade thought. She turns to Spyle. “Let’s see what we can do.”

Back home, Donnie Evergreen climbs trees like nothing else, but the District 7 tributes would put him to shame. They’re lightning fast and seem to barely need a foothold to get up the relatively short trunks. Even hanging just five feet above him, Shady Jade tries not to imagine what their vision looks like. Vertigo makes his stomach churn just at the thought. 

He forces grey-green eyes to stay on them as they near-simultaneously reach for an apple. They realize the thing Shady Jade was pretty sure he knew before they even began their ascent.

He’s seen decorative fruit once or twice. The mayor’s house has a dusty bowl of it in the entry hall, some taunting reminder that they can always afford food. When Spyle’s face falls and his fingers find the apple, he looks confused. 

“It’s fake, right?” Shady Jade calls up to him. In response, Spyle pulls the apple from the branch and drops it to him with a grim expression. When it hits his hand, it’s featherlight and sounds like a hollow wooden ball. Scratching his nail at it just confirms that this thing isn’t fruit. A flake of red paint falls to his palm.  The others drop in near-unison to the ground like cats, or squirrels. The three of them look at the round ball in Shady Jade’s hand as he shakes it and finds it disappointingly hollow-sounding. Empty. 

“Okay, so no food,” Spyle says, he’s forcing some optimism into his tone, “Maybe we’ve gotten enough attention to get sponsors!”

Shady Jade makes his expression neutral. He doesn’t think his stunts have done particularly well with the Capitol audience and the 7 pair haven’t exactly been showstoppers from what he can tell, either. 

“Let’s try to explore a bit. When it starts getting dark, I’ll take first watch. You both need sleep.” 

They both seem about to argue, but Shady Jade tosses his pack over his shoulder and starts walking. Left along the river, maybe six or seven feet from the bank with a hand on his knife, just in case. Footsteps behind him say they’re following. Numbness and the need to continue drives him forward. The sun on his bare shoulder makes the treated burn itch.

The forest is unchanging, though they find other fruit trees spattered amid the apples, they’re all fake as well. In their exploration, they try to delve deeper into it and they find a wall with taller elms and birches along it. Behind him, the District 7 tributes talk quietly between them about the trees and how devoid of animals it seems this place is. They sit down and rest in the shade of one of the trees to take a break from walking just past afternoon. 

“We’ll need to find food,” Spyle says while Shady Jade passes their water bottles back out. Shady Jade’s eyes are on the paper flowers speckling the grass. What isn’t fake here? 

“It must have all been back at the Cornucopia.” Elma accepts her water with relish. Her thin wrists are trembling a little. 

“Well, then, it’s gone now, probably.” Spyle’s mouth twists downward. They all look back toward the center of the arena for the first time in an hour or two. The saplings must have grown at least a few inches. They sway in the breeze. 

“So should we go back or keep walking?” Shady Jade asks. His voice is finally starting to lose the authority of calm. He’s been forcing himself just to do, not think but he’s losing the resolution. Spyle shoots him a concerned look.

“Do we think there’s anything but mutts in here?” Elma finishes her bottle of water and goes to kneel by the stream to rinse it out but not yet filling it.

“I’ve heard birds, but haven’t seen any. The grass… seems real. Everything else is paper, metal, or wood, I think,” Shady Jade mumbles. His shoes are still damp, but when his eyes fall to them at least they don’t find much more than specks of Tineol’s blood. It’s mostly been washed away by the water. Elma’s voice takes up the pressure of being the steady one. Maybe not so quiet after all, he thinks.

“Okay, then going back is probably our best bet. There might be something we can salvage there. We’ll need your help across again, though.”

“I've got a better idea,” Spyle says, eyes flicking between the river and the trees above them. Shady Jade connects the dots and puts a protective hand over his knife. No use dulling it for felling trees when that’s a fruitless endeavor anyway. But Spyle doesn’t ask for it; instead he scurries up the trunk nearest the one they’re leaned against and starts snapping off thinner branches and dropping them at its base. After repeating the process on several nearby trees he takes a few trips to come back and set the bundles at Elma’s feet. 

“Tree bridge?” she asks. 

“Yep, if it works in the air it should get us over a little gap like that.”

Shady Jade watches them sit and begin to weave branches tightly together until they have a slim, seven foot long mat of wood.  They hum to each other, but don’t talk now. He wonders what music there is in District 7, even if the time for pondering things like that is long gone.

Because he’s not occupied with his allies’ construction project, he’s the first one to notice the girl beginning to sneak up on their group. She’s crouched, moving through the grass and sparse underbrush between the trees. Golden-blonde hair and muscular. Something metal glints in her hand. An axe, held near the blade. Shady Jade stays quiet, pretending he hasn’t noticed her and slowly slides the knife from his belt. He takes his time standing as though he’s going to lean back into the tree. One last glance at her.

Aim. 

It’s not as easy to throw as his juggling knives, or the ones the Hob boys play knife games with, but he knows its weight and he’s made due before. 

It sticks in her temple with a sickening noise and Shady Jade can’t help but put a hand up to each ear for half a second. She falls. Spyle looks up from their near-finished bridge with wide eyes, and then toward the leafy bushes where Shady Jade’s knife and the girl disappeared. With grimness, the Covey boy listens for a cannon which doesn’t come. 

“Wh–” Spyle is starting to ask, but Shady Jade raises his hand and starts a slow creep toward the greenery. He tries to emulate the way he’s seen Donnie Evergreen move, and his silent step gives him a little bit of advantage it turns out he doesn’t need. The girl is splayed on the forest floor, golden halo of hair around her head staining more and more red. Her eyes flick back and forth but her limbs are motionless. Her moving lips bring no sound. He cautiously reaches down, brushes a strand of hair from where it’s stuck in her mouth, and when she doesn’t move he wrests his knife from her head. With it, comes a splash of red and grey. Something goes out of her eyes, but it takes another thirty seconds for the cannon to sound. The world shrinks in like it did on that night with the Peacekeeper. 

A tangled warren, a million paths diverge in his head. And he’s chosen one without thinking yet again. 

But they can’t tell you how to walk it , he tells himself. It’s faltering, but he puts his fingers into the dirt and blood. Grey-green eyes search for a blinking light in the trees and he selects a birch as close as possible to the one acting as nest for the camera. It’s not good work, but it’s words, for her. For them. Just three lines, it’s all he can reasonably get out of the mud her blood is making in the loam. He scrawls it with his fingers, wide strokes and large letters. He wants them all to see. 

I never knew your name

but I know I heard your voice. 

I'm sorry that you didn’t get the choice to use it.

Poets don’t make good revolutionaries, Clerk Carmine once told him, like the older Covey was afraid of something. Silence is safe. 

Looking at the tree, at the whole blanket of his past, at the girl at his feet, Shady Jade isn’t so sure he agrees. He wonders if all that the Covey taught him was to keep him in the nest a little longer, for fear he might break his wings on the long way down or for losing one of their own again. 

“You’re crying.” Spyle’s voice is the kind of careful someone is around a precious, fragile heirloom. His eyes are fixed on the girl still on the ground. Shady Jade hadn’t even noticed him coming up, or that he’d sunken with his back against the tree. He touches his face and is almost startled to find it wet with tears. 

“I just don’t want you guys dying.” His voice sounds like he’s listening to it through a thin wall. He brings his knees up to his chest and buries his face in them. Spyle’s hand is firm on his shoulder.

“There’s a hovercraft waiting to pick her up, we should go.” 

“She had a pack and axe,” Elma says, behind Spyle’s shoulder and out of Shady Jade’s vision. Spyle helps him up, and Shady Jade catches her avoiding eye contact with the body and with him while she slings the bloodied pack over her shoulder. Spyle picks up the axe. As a group, they shakily turn and start back toward the river and the district partners’ bridge. Shady Jade wipes his tears and gives into the fog becoming increasingly common in his brain.

“Good enough?” he asks, gesturing to the bridge. Spyle has Elma hold it, presses on it a few times, then shrugs. 

“Hopefully. Let’s give it a go.” 

The bridge only reaches the shallow shelf on the interior side of the ring-river. It still holds their weight as they cross one at a time, though. Light enough on their feet, the trio pick their way through the unnaturally growing field of evergreens and cottonwood. It’s movement with ease of motion and unease of thought. They have to step around now-obvious pits that probably lead back down into the tunnels. When they reach the burnt ashes surrounding the plates, they sit down and look at the burnt parcels around them. The sky is darkening overhead now, strange configurations of stars faintly visible against a beginning sunset at the top of the bowl of violet and orange.

“Is that a snake?” Spyle asks, covering his eyes and pointing out. Shady Jade’s eyes flick to the ground first, then follow his finger to the horizon just above the screens and trees that make up the edge of the arena. Sure enough, a dark shape moves serpentine across the horizon.

“Must be a projection or something,” Elma says. 

Shady Jade kicks the burnt remnants of a package at his feet, sending up a puff of ash. 

“I don’t think we’ll find much while it’s dark. You two should rest.” 

They decide the safest place is inside the metal horn, it’s still warm from the sun and fire of the day, and the two District 7 tributes can tuck into the far back of it while Shady Jade sits at the mouth. The pair settle down and he cleans his knife, trying not to think of the girl. She was from 1, maybe. It’s all blurring together. He doesn’t want to feel the regret pulling at his stomach. It won’t do him any good right now. It won’t do his companions any good.

Elma is a soft snorer, and she sleeps quickly. It’s another few minutes that Shady Jade listens to Spyle shifting before there’s silence behind him. Then he watches the sky and the strange stars in it shift. There is no moon here, just an unnatural light from the sky that makes him think there should be one. He tries to be like the stars back home. To never collect dust, or lose any of their shine.

The meteor shower must start at somewhere near midnight. Streaks of white light, sending distorted ripples across whatever simulated sky the Capitol has constructed here. Shady Jade’s seen a stray shooting star or two, but never hundreds. If it weren’t fake, he’d almost think it were some sort of sign. A fate written in the stars. He knows it’s not. The Capitol is just putting on a show. 

He makes a wish anyway. A couple dozen, really. 

Chapter Text

Fifteen ❧  Smothering the Spark

This war’s a big one, the best one you’ve had. You’ve never wanted something so bad. Like that set of toy soldiers you begged for from dad. He liked guns, he considered it, figured you’d get rid of it one day. You got lucky when you were like five. 

In your head your little soldiers did fight for their lives. How you’d rip off their arms and you’d set them alight. In your head, they were in on it, little fucking idiots. Your little gladiators. You little Caesar. 

Your men wouldn’t stop fighting so you didn’t either. Now this war’s a small one, you wail as a preacher to a vacuum of innocents. Sucking on your brilliance. Your little toy soldiers got big, you got old. Like little toy soldiers they did as they were told. With some fictional foreign invasion they took to your hold and before you’d considered ‘em, they were already killing them.

Sensationalize ‘em. Embrace the mind of a child and that’ll break ‘em, get ‘em excited. As a kid it cost maybe a fiver to make you a tyrant. Well now it costs a little bit… 200,000 civilians. — Seb Lowe

Deer run through Donnie Evergreen’s dreams, a whole herd of them. They send swirls through the foggy hope that last night gave him; his brother defending himself, a meteor shower somehow seen through that plum sky the Capitol has curtained the arena with but also here, at home in 12. The stags have antlers drenched in silverbell flowers and the does sparkle in the dappled sun. They’re chased, though, by wild dogs colored like guilt and fear. The television being on always gives him nightmares even if he can’t see its glow behind his eyelids.

Donnie Evergreen wakes in early enough morning for the only light to be the faintest hint of gold beneath the horizon out his window. Rye is curled in Shady Jade’s bed, his arms wrapped around the patched remnants of a blanket stitched together so many years ago no one can remember where it came from. There’s a siren blaring in the distance. It’s the mine siren, shoddy and only upkept half the time.

The only people who should be at the mine this early are Peacekeeper guards, though. Donnie Evergreen lets his sheets fall to the floor and moves to the window. Through dusted glass he cranes his neck to get an angle toward the mine. There’s smoke on the periphery of his vision but no fire yet. He nudges Rye awake. Finding bleary eyes and an eminently irritable expression, Donnie Evergreen cuts him off before he can cuss the Covey boy out. 

“Mine’s on fire. Come on, we should check on your family.” 

Rye’s eyes shoot open. He’s suddenly serious.

“I can’t, shit, I'm on the firebreak team.”

Donnie Evergreen doesn’t bother to ask how Rye of all people ended up with that responsibility but instead offers him a hand and pulls him out of his cousin’s bed. 

“Then you need to go , bud. I’ll check on them. Get dressed and go.”

They both dress with matched urgency. There isn’t much care to what they put on. Coal-seam fires don’t extinguish themselves. They run hot and deep, and need immediate attention. In minutes Donnie Evergreen is ushering Rye out the door and waking the rest of the Covey. 

While they’re not Seam necessarily, nearly all the people they know are. So like a flock of birds scattering, the Covey split off to flit amid houses. Rousing companions, checking no one was on an odd early shift, and assuring the fire hasn’t spread far yet . 

It’s an hour or two before Donnie Evergreen makes it back to the house, and the sun is rising properly, cresting the trees and drawing out any coolness from the air. He's the first one back and considers waiting for his family to return. Considers visiting his Merchant girls or trying to check up on the Peacekeeper boy he sees sometimes, but instead when he leaves, he makes for the meadow. His feet move without much reason. Just an average Saturday , Donnie Evergreen tells himself.

He slips through the fence and pauses only to retrieve his bow. Then he doesn't stop until near noon when he reaches the lake. He sits in the shade of an old oak and watches the slight breeze send ripples over the water. He can almost pretend things are alright out here. Shady Jade should be with him, though. He rarely makes these treks alone.

When did life go this wrong? Was it fourteen years ago when his mother brought him to the Covey, a decade ago when he had to watch her wither way from afar never having remembered her touch? Was it three years ago, when he started giving his heart away to anyone who'd take it? Maybe two years ago, when Shady Jade had broken? When the Capitol had taken him? Or was it twenty-eight years ago, when the first bombs dropped became a seed for all of this? Twenty-five, when the war ended?

He doesn’t know.

What he does know is hunting. His family and many of their loved ones will be exhausted today, game will be a kind surprise. Pulling himself to his feet, he picks his way through summer clover to the door of the old house by the lake. The door is loose now and its hinges groan. Inside is cool and dark. Donnie Evergreen pries up a floorboard to pull out a book that he slips in his pocket and a few pieces of dried, smoked fish from a leather sack in the corner of the secret space. He puts the knife resting there firmly in his belt before leaving. He refuses to think of Shady Jade tossing it and catching it point down in an apple. The trick that always made Elizabeth Ash giggle.

He chews on the fish and a few foraged mint leaves while he makes his way through the forest. Setting his steps slow, and keeping himself quiet has been a hard art to perfect for him, but Donnie Evergreen is getting good at it now. In his meandering path, he takes down two turkeys and a rabbit. He shoots and misses at a high-flying heron and wastes half an hour scrounging in the brush for his arrow.

When Donnie Evergreen finds himself at the Covey graveyard he’s half-surprised. He knew he’d been heading vaguely in this direction but his muscles’ memory of this place must have outpaced his intention to hunt. It’s a small stretch of flowering grasses, a handful of their dead marked in stone marbled with the colors of their name and engraved with their songs. 

He sits beside Barb Azure’s. It’s grey-brown stone with veins of dark and muted sky blue running through it horizontally. Dusty storm clouds breaking up a bright day. He realizes he only barely remembers her. Wonders how long it will take him to forget Shady Jade’s face, his voice. Or his own voice. 

How’s he going to keep singing if the other half of his entire life up until now doesn’t come home? Shady Jade came home clinging to Clerk Carmine around the same time Donnie Evergreen’s mother was wasting away. Shady Jade’s had just died herself, feeble attempts from her body to birth the child from her new husband. Astray together, they made their own map of their home and family tree. Learned how to be Covey, and how to be their fathers’ children while still walking among 12. But they’d always been together doing it.

Donnie Evergreen pushes himself up to stand against the headstone. Looks down at her inscription, and sings soft to himself while he forces his feet back toward home. He blinks back the moisture in his eyes. No time for crying. There’s only dwindling smoke in the direction of town, at least.

“All in the merry month of May, when green leaves, they was springing, this young man on his death-bed lay, for the love of Barbara Allen.”

He catches two squirrels on the way home before hiding his bow. Making his way back through the Seam, he doesn’t conceal his catch. Seems silly to, when the streets are so empty. His first stop is the Chances, and he resolves to offer them the first pick of his game. Mrs. Chance, the only one home now that half the Seam is seeing to the fire, selects the rabbit. She sends him on her way after squeezing an arm around his shoulder and thanking him profusely. 

The Hob is mostly quiet, but he can rely on Barb Azure’s old flame to be there. When he sidles up with a squirrel in hand to her booth, strewn in tools and knicknacks, she smiles at him in a misty far-off way. Her long, wavy hair shields most of her face but he knows she’s always sad to see the Covey these days. 

“For you,” he says, holding the squirrel out to her.

“Thank you, you know you don’t have to give me things for free, right?” She tries to brush the curtain of brunette strands from her face, but they just fall back into place. Still, she takes the small, limp form from him.

“We take care of our own,” he says, and when she’s silently searching for further words, “I have to get the rest of this out. I hope business isn’t too bad today.”

She smiles in thanks, and stows the squirrel in the bag beside the old barrel she’s sitting on. 

“Tell your family I say hello.” 

“I will.” He won’t. 

In the Hob, he trades one of the turkeys in exchange for some metal meant for Tam Amber and sweets meant for Maude Ivory and Elizabeth Ash. Then he checks around for his favorite Peacekeeper, but coming up empty, Donnie Evergreen makes for the town square. It’s quiet like Saturday usually is, but the air still smells of too much coal smoke. The sun beats down on the back of his neck. Fire’s been nothing but trouble lately. 

When he gets to the square, he leaves Holly’s grandmother the other squirrel and is disappointed to learn she’s visiting a friend. Turning on his heel to check in on Artie, he’s met by the stern faces of a pair of Peacekeepers. He vaguely recognizes them but they’re not Hob regulars he doesn’t think.

“Afternoon,” he says. He tries to sidestep them and one grabs his arm. 

“We’ve been looking for you,” the Peacekeeper says. Donnie Evergreen raises his eyebrows. That’s actually a surprise. He wasn’t aware that he’d done anything particularly wrong.

“And… why’s that?” 

“The mine fire. Commander thinks it’s rebels. You’re to come in for questioning.” 

He feels himself turned around but his brain is reeling. Donnie Evergreen hasn’t ever been particularly vocal about any distaste for the Capitol. Is this about him leaving the fence line? Hunting? That’s never been a problem before. He tries to ask but before he knows it, he’s being cuffed and led toward the shiny new Peacekeeper base on the other side of town.

It’s a long, hot, and humiliating walk through the square and past Victors Village. As uncomfortable as it is, at least they do him the favor of confiscating the other turkey and they don’t have to walk him the handful of miles to the old base. It’s the first time he’s seen it, but the new one crouches like a massive coiled creature on newly flattened ground. A squared spiral of austere buildings and covered walkways with a huge watchtower at their center.  The double doors they lead Donnie Evergreen in through open onto whitewashed halls that wander like a maze through the structures. Even the Peacekeepers seem to get turned around once, but they escort him to a thick metal door. 

They push him through and he hears a lock scraping behind him. The overhead light is dim, but he recognizes, with a sinking heart, the other Covey in the same small room. All of them look at him with shades of surprise on their faces.

“Donnie Evergreen!” Maude Ivory yelps. She’s clearly been crying, but he watches at least some of the worry disappear from her face as she jumps up to hug him. The rest of them are sitting against the walls of the windowless room. Concrete floor, four walls, overhead light. Nothing more. A holding cell, most likely. But Peacekeepers can hold someone as long as they’d like. Dread settles in his chest.

“Hi, Maude Ivory.” He tries to sound happy, but it’s a hollow, emotionless voice which bounces off the walls. She hugs him anyway, and he hugs her back. Tight.

“Why are we here?” he asks her.

“Because they think bombs set off the fire. Because they think we had something to do with it. Because they don’t like us.” Clerk Carmine is the one to answer. He’s been quiet, and uncharacteristically angry since Shady Jade’s Reaping, now he speaks with conviction. 

“Yeah, they’d rather we just fade out, I think,” Donnie Evergreen says. He releases Maude Ivory after giving her a half-turn twirl and takes her previous seat between Elizabeth Ash and Clerk Carmine. He puts an arm around both of them. On Elizabeth Ash’s other side, Tam Amber stops staring at the wall to move and lets Maude Ivory sit between them. 

“We won’t let them make us.” Maude Ivory’s voice is certain, stubborn.

“I don’t know if we can stop them,” says Tam Amber. For a long moment they look into the gloomy space and all probably wonder if it’s the end of the song now. Then Elizabeth Ash starts crying, and four pairs of hands immediately jump to soothe her; smoothing her hair and holding her tight. It must take half an hour to get her breathing and sobbing to slow.

They sing soft songs to each other but mostly to her, keeping track of time by what could be any Sunday Hob show setlist. Then a second, most of a third. When they finally hear voices outside the door, Donnie Evergreen estimates they’re well into the evening now. It sounds like an argument.

He breaks from a newer song, one he pulled from a rearranged poem of his cousin’s, to look up as the door scrapes open. The harsh brightness from the hall hurts his eyes. There’s a young woman standing there, beams of light streaming in behind her while she debates with the Peacekeeper guard. Her hair is the color of pink clover flowers, and the puff of her shiny green sleeves is distinctly Capitol. Donnie Evergreen tries to hear what they’re saying over his family’s suddenly concerned breathing.

“Ma’am, we have good reason to believe they’re rebel sympathizers. We can’t just release them.” 

“Well, we’re in the last third of the Games now and their… cousin? Is in the final eight. I need to have them for the cameras, the Capitol wants them interviewed.”

She turns to the Covey. 

“Feel camera ready? Because it’s time to go.”

Chapter Text

Sixteen ❧  Shady Grove (Reprise)

A kiss from pretty little Shady Grove is sweet as brandy wine, and there ain't no girl in this whole world that's prettier than mine.

Shady Grove, my little love, Shady Grove, I say, Shady Grove, my little love;

I'm bound to go away. – Appalachian Folksong (adapted by Doc Watson)

The trees keep growing, reaching dark fingers out for the streaks of light above them. Distracted by the flow of stars over the blanket of purple sky, Shady Grove doesn’t notice when Spyle stirs and comes to join him at the mouth of the Cornucopia. He jumps when the other boy speaks to his right and instinctively puts a hand to his ear. 

“I don’t think I've ever seen stars fall like that.”

“They’re meteors, but they can’t be real.” Shady Jade relaxes a little. “Another trick by the Gamemakers, like all the mutts and the trees. They’re putting on a show.”

Spyle stills beside him before leaning a shoulder slowly into Shady Jade’s. 

“Pretty way to remember the world, I guess.” 

“You think we’ll have any memory after we’re gone?” Shady Jade lowers his hand from the ear. It’s quiet for now, and Spyle’s voice is soft and low.

“As long as someone remembers us, and as long as the plants we’re buried under keep growing.”

“Is that a 7 thing or a you thing?”

Spyle thinks about it for a second. 

“Little bit of both.”

“There used to be this belief, way before the war even, that if you were good or kind or pure or something, you'd just move between different worlds when you died.” Shady Jade draws his stare from the reflection of shooting stars in Spyle’s eyes. He kicks a bit of ash and soot up with his boot before looking up again.

“Only if you’re good?”

“I think that’s the gist of it. Lots of poems and songs talk about it like that.”

“What if you're forced to do bad things?”

“I don’t know,” Shady Jade must say it with a hint at his fear and sadness on the subject because Spyle wraps an arm around his shoulders. His fingertips are calloused and cool where they fall into the burned-away hole in the shoulder of his shirt.

“I hope you get a new world, then, Shady Jade.”

For what must be an hour, they sit and watch paths of light cut short by the sky, the border of the arena, and fate. At some point, Shady Jade tucks his head into Spyle’s chest and just breathes. For a moment, his muscles relax.

“You should get some sleep before the sun comes up,” Spyle finally says. Shady Jade pulls away with reluctance and picks himself up quietly. 

He still doesn’t want to admit he enjoys Spyle’s company. It’s one part the way the Peacekeepers treat people like him back home, one part not feeling like he’s a good enough person for anyone to love, and one part not wanting to get attached. What does hiding his attractions do for him now? He’ll be dead in a few days, forgotten in a few years. If Spyle wants to care about him, who’s he to deny what might be a dying wish? But what if Spyle wins? Shady Jade’s leaving behind people who will be hurt enough by losing him. 

Attachment. The aversion to it is selfish. It’s sculpted by years of going to a friend for help, or Rye, or anyone except his close-knit nest of songbirds and finding no reprieve. Would it be just as selfish to form the attachment, though? 

He looks up at the swathe of deep violet above them and wonders if it’s the last color he’ll ever see. The pines reach like the outline of teeth closing on his wishes.

“Yeah, goodnight, Spyle.” He tries to sound light.

Shady Jade doesn’t think he’ll be able to sleep, but settling down beside Elma, he feels strangely at home. Darkness comes quick to his consciousness.

Spyle wakes them both in the early morning. Light streams through the mouth of the Cornucopia and the rosy clouds floating over the arena are tinged dove grey. Shady Jade sits up bleary but forces himself to focus when the now ever-present dread of context sets into his bones. 

“Safe or not safe?” he asks. 

“Safe for now,” Spyle returns while Elma rubs her eyes. She reaches her arms out and Spyle hugs her. Shady Jade relaxes a little. In the distance, he hears an unfamiliar bird. It’s so odd, he hasn’t seen any birds here but they’re constantly singing. Then his ear crackles to life. The static voice makes him bend over his knees and try to calm his stomach.

“Be careful,” this time the voice is Dr. Gaul’s, not President Snow’s, “I don’t want an uncouth performance in my Games, you know.” 

“What does that mean?” he mumbles, and his companions turn to look at him. Shady Jade tries to ignore them.

“It means that coarse behavior may very well ruin your chances at going home, young man.”

“Coarse? Like killing people?” his voice rises without meaning to and the bewilderment on his allies’ faces sends a pang of guilt through him. He holds a finger up, shaking his head.

“The better you behave, the more likely you are to be shown on screen. The more shown you are, the more likely you are to be liked. The more liked you are, your chances of survival go up exponentially. So behave. You should kill that boy, or at least stop getting close to him.”

“Oh, are the kids from districts that don’t make killing a career not allowed to have friends ?!” 

Gaul’s cackle is haunting, it reverberates through his ear and his skull while the kids from District 7 look on with wide, confused eyes. Shady Jade squeezes his eyes shut. 

“Oh, Mr. Clade, is that what you’re doing? Don’t ruin my Games for me.”

 He slams the side of his fist into the interior wall of the Cornucopia without thinking while her cruel laughter fades back to static. Shaking, he buries his head in his knees. 

“What… was that?” Spyle asks, leaning over him in a way that makes Shady Jade flinch. 

“They put something in my ear. Used to not be able to hear in it, now I hear everything.” Shady Jade realizes his accent is slipping. He usually tries to mimic the voices of the people around him, and learned a lot of how he speaks from one of his early Merchant-class teachers, but he falls back to the Covey lilt when he forgets not to keep up the mimicry. He’s not a mockingjay, not even a songbird. He’s just been pretending to be one so long that it comes natural. 

When Spyle leans down to look at his ear, Shady Jade moves away instinctually. 

“Sorry,” Spyle says, and at the same time Elma speaks, her gaze fixed out of the mouth of the Cornucopia. 

“Look,” is all she says. They both do. 

Six grey birds are plodding through the near full-grown forest, the height of cranes but nearly naked beyond sparse feathers on their heads and shrunken wings. They make the keening noise of waterbird fledgelings begging for food from unresponsive parents as they call back and forth to each other while the flock wanders through the ash. Their beaks are hooked downward, almost as sharp as the massive claws on their feet. 

“Great,” Spyle says softly, creeping forward so he can stand beside Elma and picking up the axe on his way, “more mutts.” 

“I’ve got it.” Shady Jade is quiet, slowly moving to his feet and slipping his backpack off his shoulders. Knife out of his belt, he moves in a near-silent crouch past his allies. He shakes his head at Spyle’s questioning look, then slips out of the mouth of the Cornucopia. Crisis-calm takes over. They’re trapped in the center of the arena if these things attack since his companions can’t swim. 

If these react like wild animals, he may be able to scare them away. He remembers scaring flocks of turkeys toward Donnie Evergreen. A controlled movement. A burst of sound. That’s all it takes.

Shady Jade circles far around the birds. For lack of his tap shoes, he begins rapping the flat of his knife against the trees when he’s snuck his way off to the right of the flock. He doesn’t want them running straight for the Cornucopia and District 7 tributes. 

But instead of startling, half a dozen heads turn toward him on thin necks, bobbing up and down. Their eyes are black all the way through. Chill runs through his veins, then the flame of adrenaline when the first one takes a step forward. 

It’s lucky he’s fast and used to dodging trees. They’re clumsy things, but he knows he can’t outrun them long. When one catches his burnt shoulder with that sharp beak, he bites back a yelp and turns his knife on it. The bird’s horrid keening continues as it collapses and Shady Jade looks up to find only three more. The other half of the flock must have split off. 

Hopefully not toward Spyle and Elma, he thinks. 

Then Shady Jade goes for the birds before they can close in. Their heads and necks seem the most vulnerable, but they’re still strong. He’s out of breath from dodging claws and beaks by the time they lay dead in the ash on the forest floor. He forces energy to his limbs, two days without food now rearing a cold and shaking feeling in his muscles, and takes off back toward the Cornucopia.

Everything is still there, too still. Spyle is sitting on the ground, two cleanly beheaded birds on the ground block Shady Jade’s vision of his next nightmare. As he approaches them, he hears Spyle before he sees it.

Spyle is singing too soft to hear the words of. Elma’s head is in his lap. The gash spilling half her insides out says it’s too late to do anything but the steady rhythm of her blood flowing out of it says her heart still wants to try. Shady Jade approaches quietly. Spyle brushes hair out of Elma’s eyes as they go glassy. 

Shady Jade sits against a tree some ten yards from them and lets his ally do whatever needs doing to mourn his loss. His eyes dart around the forest for the last bird but it seems long gone now. He slides his knife back into his belt. Once Spyle has gone silent, his hands clutched around one of Elma’s now limp ones, Shady Jade stands and breaks a stick from the tree, then moves five yards closer where the trees are thinner. As the cannon goes off, he checks for a camera, and angles his writing for it to be seen. This one he writes large, scratches it deep into the ashes. As the adrenaline is draining, bitterness is replacing it. 

Your story has seeds in the binding. 

One day they will sprout,

become a tree or a flower. 

You will be brilliant again, 

and when wildfire catches you, 

you’ll burn brighter than anything we’ve ever known.

He looks straight at the camera and searches for words. Searches for something profound to say beyond the poem. Instead he just screams. It sounds like a foreign wild beast in his mouth. He watches the camera stop blinking. The scream strangles in his throat and he almost starts laughing.

Ha. Cute. Don’t want to show what they do to people.  

With little ceremony, a basket floats down to land with a small thump next to his boot. Its silver parachute tangles in the handle as Shady Jade grimly bends to pick it up. Well, someone thinks he’s worth backing, at least.

He takes his time walking back to Spyle. When he gets there, he puts a hand on his shoulder and points to the sky. Spyle’s tear-streaked face turns upward to find the waiting hovercraft and the broken faraway look is one Shady Jade’s seen in the mirror. He kneels beside them, and gently reaches out to touch Elma’s face, then close her eyes.

Wordlessly, he offers Spyle a hand up and leads him back to the edge of the forest. He’s careful to go the opposite way from where the birds came from and where he scrawled his words. That might just add insult to injury. In the shade of a gently swaying pine, he has to pull Spyle down but he gets his arms around the other boy’s neck and hugs as tight as he can. Spyle’s breathes as though he’s crying but has no more tears to give. 

Once the hovercraft has collected Elma’s body, Shady Jade goes back to get his backpack, Spyle’s axe, and the basket. Before tucking into whatever sponsor gift he’s gotten, he hands Spyle a bottle of water. 

“You need to stay hydrated.”

“What do I even do now?” Spyle asks, but he does take the water. 

“You start by thinking you could win this thing.” Shady Jade’s eyes find one of the screens at the edge of the arena. “You're already halfway through.”

“What about Elma? What about you? We don’t know how many are alive from the stronger districts, probably all of them.”

Shady Jade puts a hand on Spyle’s shoulder before he can get too wrapped up in it. 

“Right now, just drink that water, and let’s see what Woof sent us.” His voice is less sure than he’d like, he’s trying to mimic that tone that Donnie Evergreen uses when he’s about to panic. It’s so rarely the other way around, he knows he’s bad at this. But Spyle nods and Shady Jade watches as he counts breaths down on his fingertips and knuckle joints with his thumb. Four in, hold at the palm, then four back out, once for each finger. It’s a rhythm that’s oddly calming to Shady Jade to watch. Sixteen beats, each broken into four sets of four. He stops himself from blurting out that he could practically dance to it. For once, his verbal filter does its job. 

Instead, he stays quiet and investigates his basket. It’s heavy with a jar of some kind of soup which was probably warm the half hour ago it was sent and two small loaves of dark bread. Atop all of it, there’s a long, blue-green ribbon. Shady Jade’s heart jumps more at the reminder of comfort and home than the promise of food and his hands immediately tangle in it. He pulls his singed hair back and for once feels like he’s doing something normal while he wraps it around the bunch he makes and then winds the ribbon through his hair to tie it in a neat bow at the bottom. Then he lifts the basket. 

“Hungry?”

Spyle looks over at him from his counting and his expression lightens a bit.

“I’m starving. They don’t call it the Hunger Games for nothing.”

“Well I’ve found us breakfast, looks like.”

Spyle wipes blood onto his skirt and accepts the half-loaf of bread offered to him. Shady Jade unscrews the lid of the jar and holds it out for Spyle so he can dip a chunk into the stew. When Spyle puts it in his mouth, his eyes go wide, then glassy, and tears start to well then roll down his face again.

“What? Is something wrong with it?” Shady Jade puts the bread to his nose and it smells familiar and a little odd. But not bad . Spyle vigorously shakes his head and then takes another bite of the bread without the soup. Cautiously, Shady Jade rips a tiny mouthful from his piece and puts it on his tongue. 

It tastes… faintly of pine flour. The stuff the Covey make from grinding up that soft inner layer of pine bark when the grain and performances and Donnie Evergreen’s game aren’t enough to get them all fed.

“It’s bread from 7.” Spyle wipes his tears with the back of his arm and stifles a smile, like he’s guilty for smiling at all right now, but he takes another bite before continuing. “It tastes like home, I don’t know what the soup is, though.”

Shady Jade dips his bread into the now-tepid liquid and finds himself fighting back tears when it hits his tongue, too. 

“Bean and ham hock,” he murmurs between bites. “That’s ours.”

“You’ve got a good mentor.”

“Yeah. I really, really do.” Shady Jade’s fingers find the comforting slip of satin in his hair. 

When they’re finished eating, both of them sit back against a tree, almost uncomfortably full after not eating in days. They only manage to down half the jar of soup and one of the small loaves.

“So are you serious, you really want to try to win this thing?” Spyle asks. 

“I want you to try to win.” 

“Why not you, though?”

“I don’t have a chance against the bigger tributes. I barely had a chance against some birds. You do. And if you go back, you won’t have to go back to the community home.” Shady Jade looks at his hands. He should make the walk to the river to clean them soon. Blood and ash have collected between the creases of his palms now. Spyle is quiet, so Shady Jade changes the topic. “Do you want to go back and look through the burnt packages, or do you just want to keep moving?”

“I don’t know. You seem better at this than me.”

Shady Jade laughs. 

“What? You do.” 

“I don’t know about that. Can you get us some eyes on what the arena looks like now?” he nods toward a closeby evergreen, one of the tallest in this young forest.

“That, I can do.” The wink Spyle shoots him almost doesn’t seem like it’s trying to mask the stress and grief this morning has already brought him.

Spyle climbs like a squirrel, quick and nimble up the pine bark, moving branch to branch and making his way so high that the tree sways with his weight like it doesn’t cause him an ounce of anxiety. Shady Jade can’t imagine what it must feel like to be more than a foot or two off the ground and not terrified.

“See anything up there?”

“Well, there’s the huge flickery snake we’ve been ignoring,” Spyle calls back down, eyes scanning the rest of the forest and further, “At least one person has a camp out in the apple trees. And we’re not alone in the middle. One tribute at… four o’clock and one at about ten.” He points out toward each he sees. 

“Anyone heading this way?”

“Doesn’t look like it.” 

Shady Jade looks up at the sky as Spyle drops down next to him. He looks up to the sky. No later than noon, at least by the arena’s standard. 

“Then let’s see if there’s anything left in the packages.”

It takes them an hour of searching to come up with nothing but the metal blades and tangs of weapons, melted plastic, and the ashes of what used to be food. Neither of them look at the place where the two fallen birds still lay, their bodies a nest for where Elma had died. 

“What do they expect us to eat? The mutts?” Spyle says, frustrated, as they sit down by the Cornucopia and pass a water bottle back and forth. They only have one more after this, so they’ll have to make a trip to the river soon.

“Sponsor gifts, probably.” Shady Jade takes a swig and hands the bottle back. Clouds are starting to form under the violet sky, and their shadows are appreciated, but they don’t move like normal clouds. Instead they circle the arena again and again like caged animals.

 “I don’t know if my mentor is even with it enough to send me anything.”

“Well, let’s hope,” Shady Jade says as he stands and slings his bag over his shoulder. The can of soup sits just as heavy on his back as the water had when they’d had all of it. “Let’s go, we can’t be the only people about to–” 

They both jump back as a knife clatters off of the metal horn behind them. Neither had seen the boy from 2, tall and angular creeping through the treeline. Spyle freezes for a moment longer than Shady Jade does, but they close in on each other, shoulder to shoulder and backs against the horn. Before the boy can reach them, Shady Jade’s picked up the fallen knife and weighed it in his hand. It finds his target’s eye with precision learned from tricks like throwing a knife through a tiny noose toward a small bottle. The sound and proceeding thump are sickening, but the nausea is becoming second nature to Shady Jade now. The cannon confirms his aim. 

When he moves toward the fallen tribute, and Spyle doesn’t follow, he looks back to see him looking distant again and trembling a little. A pang of guilt goes through Shady Jade. 

“Sorry,” he mumbles.

“No… it’s okay. You’re just scary good at that.” Spyle’s voice is a little ragged.

“I won’t hurt you, you're going to win.” Gaul’s words run through his head, so he adds, “Because you're my friend. And friends protect each other.” 

It’s loaded emphasis, and even Shady Jade isn’t entirely sure what he’s trying to underline. Spyle just nods, so Shady Jade paces over to the boy and rummages through his bag. Two more knives. Four thin strips of dried meat. He stows it all in his own pack and almost turns to walk away. Something stops him in his tracks. Instead, he grabs a stick to begin scratching in the dirt and ash again. 

We all walk the cliff notes between cliffs and corpses. 

I hope you flew for a second before you fell.  

He doesn’t know if that one is for him or for the boy. But he writes it all the same. They all deserve an obituary, and no one else will write it for them.

Spyle seems too shell-shocked to move when Shady Jade gets back, so he passes half an hour writing more poems in the dirt. Wherever he can guess someone died. 

After circling the Cornucopia four or five times, he sits beside Spyle who’s just staring at the forest. 

“Ready?” 

Spyle looks at him as if he only just noticed his presence. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

They head back toward the makeshift bridge, and Spyle offers Shady Jade a hand across the gap onto it. 

They spend most of the afternoon avoiding sounds they hear among the false apple trees. The ground has somehow gotten spongier on this ring of the arena, and the swirl of clouds above them is amassing.

The girl from 10 sneaks up on them. Neither of the boys hear her until she steps on a twig only paces behind them and they both spin to look at her. She’s pretty, but her short brown hair is a mess, tangled with vegetation, and she carries her left arm like it might be broken. In her right hand is a loosely held pitchfork. Spyle is opening his mouth to speak when she rushes forward. Shady Jade doesn’t hesitate to grab a tine of the pitchfork and shove it away from both of them, sending the girl stumbling off to the side and giving him time to retrieve his knife. Spyle’s already readied his axe, though.

As her shoulder hits a tree beside her, the girl looks at them both with something between hatred and terror.

“We don’t have to hurt you,” Spyle says. His voice is oddly steady, like the faraway voice Shady Jade recognizes sometimes in his own throat. But his hands are trembling a little on the axe.

Then she rushes for them again, and at the same time two weapons find her slim form. An axe to the chest, a knife to the forehead. The pitchfork falls to the ground before she does, soft thumps in the thick grass. Cannon.

Spyle and Shady Jade take a minute to breathe, to let the surprise and anxiety ebb, before they check if she had anything in her pockets. She seems to have nothing but her weapon, so they back off after retrieving their own. He has to pull grass away from the ground to write her words. 

 You spun silver like the backs of summer leaves, 

clinging to these moments because it was your last chance. 

They made sure you never had a chance.  

The hovercraft collects the girl, and the sun starts to creep toward the snake on the horizon, before Spyle takes the lead this time. He pushes himself up from where they’d been sitting, sharing one of the strips of dried meat, and brushes himself off. 

“Let’s find a nice tree, I think I saw some saplings up ahead,” he says.

Shady Jade looks up at him. Spyle’s hazel eyes are decisive, reflecting the purple and orange in the dimming day. Shady Jade hopes he might be deciding he has a chance. He follows his ally without question as they make their way toward the wall, and further along the river. They reach a stand of young aspen dotted amid the apple trees at the very edge of the arena. 

Spyle begins bending and weaving their branches and tops together to form a bower against the wall, and Shady Jade breaks apart the other loaf of bread. He rolls Gaul’s words over in his head, trying to decide if he cares. There’s surely a spin they could put on it for Spyle if Spyle does win. Should he deny himself another thing because they told him to? What harm could they do to his family if he misbehaves? 

Gaul only threatened him, after all. And Shady Jade’s making peace with not going home. Somewhere along the winding path from the training center to the center of the arena he started to really believe Spyle has a chance at winning. And he seems like a good person, a really good person, the type who could do something with his victory earnings. It only clarifies now to Shady Jade that he probably hasn’t felt as bad about these deaths because he was killing to protect someone else, not himself. He makes himself a formal, mental dedication to continue until he can’t. To help Spyle win.

Spyle comes to join him when the bower is done. They settle down cross-legged in the tall grass and eat half of what’s left of the bread. 

“Do you think the Capitol will ever stop doing these?” Spyle asks, eyes on the slowly darkening sky. 

Before Shady Jade can answer there’s a near impossibly loud blare of music surrounding them. The Capitol anthem echoes around the arena. Then Gaul’s voice comes over hidden speakers that must be set into the walls and trees.  

“Congratulations to our final eight tributes. For the first time this year, we will give you, the lucky last third, an opportunity to strategize by seeing your fallen dead. Say goodnight to the third day of the Hunger Games. And may the odds be ever in your favor.”

The recording cuts out to her laughter, and then the screens ringing the arena flash before going dark. In silence, a photo taken during the interviews materializes on them. Spyle and Shady Jade look at each other. Though they both seem uneasy with it, they move to get a better view of one of the screens.

The photo of the boy from 1 stays on screen for five or ten seconds. His name, Hyacinth, is inscribed below along with his district. His district partner and both from 2 are gone, as well. So most of the trained tributes are dead. Both from 3. 

The rolling photos skip 4 so they must both be still alive. Then the boy from 5, the one from 6, and then… 

There’s Elma. Without thinking, Shady Jade’s hand finds Spyle’s. He squeezes tight. Spyle looks away but Shady Jade keeps his eyes on the screen. Right after her, Tineol. 

Both from District 9, and 10. Then just the taller boy from 11. And they punctuate the broadcast with Myrabella. As though she was even given the chance to fight. Shady Jade’s free hand clenches in the grass while the screens go from dark to scoreboard once again. Eight of them left alive. Another sixteen dead for the Capitol’s appeasement.

Instead of trying to give his shaking companion comfort, which Shady Jade knows he should do, he just stares at the sky as a few stars begin to fall again in the growing gloom. 

“I’ll take the first watch again,” he says. Spyle looks like he’s going to argue and Shady Jade shakes his head, pointing at the shelter. “Go rest. If you’re going to win, you’re going to need it.”

“What if I want you to win?” 

The question comes as almost a surprise. 

“Then you’ll be sorely disappointed. Go sleep, Spyle.” 

The night is quiet aside from the rustling of trees and paper flowers. Day four is nearly as quiet. Shady Jade and Spyle spend it circumnavigating half of the outer ring of the arena and without seeing another human being the whole day. Every time they pass one of the yawning mouths to the tunnels, they can hear the grumbling or growling of mutts, so they give them a wide berth. 

There’s one cannon shot in the midafternoon. The boys finish nearly all of their food and water, leaving one strip of meat. As darkness creeps up around the endlessly twisting sky serpent, the clouds finally reach bursting. They settle under a tree while the rain starts. It’s cold and smells of ozone even though the sky here must not be real. 

“What’s the weather like in 12?” Spyle asks, eyes on the cottony grey storm moving in circles over the arena. Shady Jade looks up from setting their emptied water bottles out to collect the rain. It’s a surprisingly light question. 

“Hot in the summer, cold in the winter. Always humid.”

“Not too different, then. Though I think it's chillier in 7.”

An uncanny calm falls over them. The rain falls only intermittently through the wide branches of the tree, and the forest around them is still. A few bolts of lightning arc across the low clouds, and the moment is almost comfortable. 

“Is me falling in love with you what you want or is this something else?” Always speaking before he thinks. Shady Jade feels the cold stab of regret immediately. Spyle looks at him, cheeks suddenly reddening.

“Is that what you think?” 

“I don’t know. Why else would I be asking?”

Spyle stammers for a second, fluttering between some sort of nervous giddiness and grim.

“I mean, I. I wish…” his voice is less stable than it’s been all day, “We met different?”

“That’s not an answer.”

Spyle gives a nervous laugh at that. Shady Jade shakes his head and looks away.

“Don’t worry about it. It wouldn’t matter much anyway. Sorry to ask.”

“Yeah…” Regret fills every space in the sound Spyle makes, a muffled sigh with a hint of whine to it. 

“Sorry.”

“Me, too.”

They take up the same shifts as the last two nights, Shady Jade stays up until the moonlight tells him they’re about half through the night, and then wakes Spyle. The ground feels even softer than yesterday, and the morning light with Spyle looking in at him from the entrance to tonight’s bower makes Shady Jade want to turn over. Go back to sleep knowing he’s there, believing that the morning sun will be eternal. 

Instead, he drags himself up and slides his pack on. Day five. 

“Safe or not safe?” he asks, rubbing sleep from his eyes as he pushes out of their shelter to stand beside Spyle. He doesn’t need to ask why Spyle responds with;

“Uh, not entirely sure.”

All around them, marble blocks have pushed themselves through the loamy soil and up past the top of the grass. Ivory laced with robin’s egg blue and sage green dots every visible bit of the forest around them. 

“Huh.” 

“Yeah.”

Shady Jade reaches out with a boot and nudges one. Nothing happens, so he leans down to examine it. Closer to its base it narrows with decorative flares into a cylinder. Just… a piece of architecture. His stomach growls, and Spyle lights up. 

“I got a gift this morning! I was waiting for you to eat! Then those started coming up.” The genuine excitement in Spyle’s voice is almost startling, but Shady Jade can’t help the small smile that touches his face. 

“What’d you get?” 

“Bread, it’s just regular Capitol bread, though. And some more beef strips.”

They sit down to eat on the new marble blocks, their legs tickled by long grass and paper flowers. Spyle packs what they don’t eat of the dozen rolls and half dozen strips of dried meat into Shady Jade’s backpack. At least his stupid question from last night hasn’t cracked their trust, Shady Jade figures. Then it occurs to him something feels off. His eyes dart to the sky.

The snake thing… was moving clockwise, endlessly striking at its own tail until sunset last night at least. Now it’s still. Its head has stopped to face the two of them, just above the screens crowning the wall they’ve sheltered by. Massive and flickering glassy eyes. Dread seeps into Shady Jade like cold in the winter when the fire’s gone out. 

“We should get away from the wall, I think,” he says to Spyle, who takes a moment to follow his pointed finger to the sky. When Spyle sees it, Shady Jade watches him force the tremble of panic from his fingers.

“Yep, let’s get out of here,” he says, then under his breath, “What the fuck even is that?”

“Don’t know, never seen a mutt that big. It might be a projection but let’s not take any chances.” 

Spyle nods vigorously and leads them toward their woven bridge. It takes nearly an hour to get back to it, even with all their backtracking yesterday. It feels like distance has been stretching and contracting in this round pen. Both of them keep their eyes alternately on the forest around them and on the snake. Its head follows them all the way around the arc of the wood as they wade through grass and step from pillar to pillar. By the time they’ve reached the bridge, each slab of marble sits a few inches above the top of the grass. Like the forest in the center of the arena, it’s as though they’re growing . 

There’s no birdsong from those unseen birds this morning. The last vestiges of the night’s storm are blowing themselves out like spring breezes speckled with tiny intermittent raindrops. It’s too still. Shady Jade keeps watch while Spyle crosses his bridge, then follows after him. Water bottles clink in his backpack. There’s a hint of fear in his eyes as Spyle gives him a hand up from the shallow side of the bridge, but he doesn’t expect what Spyle does next. Spyle pulls Shady Jade up from the bridge and tilts his head up. He kisses him so quick that Shady Jade is left wondering if it really happened. Shady Jade’s brain reels, his heart thumping in his chest and his eyes darting around to make sure he wasn’t distracted enough to miss something.

“Safe or not safe?” Spyle asks. Shady Jade isn’t sure whether he’s asking about what he just did or if he’s asking about their surroundings.

“Safe, I think.” His voice is shakier than anticipated.

“Okay. What… do we do now?” 

“I… guess we look for people to kill?” Shady Jade is surprised to find himself saying it. That’s usually something the trained tributes do. But there are seven of them left alive now. Only two are trained, and both he and his ally are armed and fed for now. This might be the best chance. Still, the owl-wide eyes Spyle looks at him with makes him feel guilty for letting his mouth run again. 

“Are you sure that’s the best call?”

“No, but at least we might get you out of here.”

“I don’t… really want to kill anyone else. I don’t like doing this, Shady Jade.” The softness in his voice makes Shady Jade’s heart tremble and he has to force back tears, looking skyward. 

“I know, me neither.” He looks down at his shoes and tries to still the quiver in his voice. “But I want you to get out alive if we can make it happen.”

“Why not you?” Spyle’s boot shuffles closer to his, bumping their toes together.

“Because you’re a better p–” Shady Jade starts to say, but through the forest he sees movement and immediately halts his voice in his throat. He raises a hand and they both still, looking in the direction it came from. 

The two tributes are maybe sixty yards away, probably fresh from hauling themselves from the river. It takes Shady Jade a moment to place them, but the trident in the girl’s hand is a good clue. Both of them are from District 4, he’s pretty sure. Spyle’s hand on his backpack drags him into the underbrush. They crouch to watch the pair pick their way through the ash, now mostly a black and grey paste mixed with rainwater on the forest floor. All four tributes startle a bit at the distant cannon shot. 

“I think this might be it,” Spyle murmurs. 

“They usually try to draw it out a little longer,” breathes Shady Jade. They watch as the pair of tributes in the trees collect themselves and continue moving toward the center of the arena.

“Day five. Five goes into twenty-five five times. Might be symbolic.” 

Shady Jade isn’t so sure, but taking a glance behind them, the snake’s dark eyes are still firmly fixed upon their location, and it makes him uneasy enough to act anyway.

“Well, guess we don’t have to look for someone.”

“They’re trained for this , Shady Jade,” Spyle hisses as Shady Jade stands. He feels cold determination, and the clouds of his brain’s intentionally lost thoughts. Not much else. 

“It’s this, both of us dying, or however many more days of not knowing what will happen to us.”

Spyle is silent, working it over with his tongue pressed to the inside of his cheek, but he finally nods. They set off slowly in the direction the District 4 pair went, axe and knife in hand. Shady Jade pauses only for a second to slip his two spare knives into the other rings on his belt. 

In these final moments of quiet, the birds remain absent. The forest is still. Every time Shady Jade glances back toward that coiled snake on the horizon, it seems closer. They stay hidden in the brush when they reach the Cornucopia. The girl from 4 is rooting around in the ash, while the boy keeps idle watch. His hand moves against the metal. Tap, tap, tap.

When Shady Jade moves to break away from Spyle, to come at them from two different angles, Spyle stops him with a hand on his wrist and a shake of his head. ‘Together,’ he mouths. Shady Jade shifts between feet, unsure, but nods. The girl’s trident is a few yards from her, and the boy’s spear is at rest. The trained tributes haven’t noticed them yet. 

“Now’s as good as ever,” Shady Jade mumbles. He pulls Spyle up and sends his bread knife clattering into the Cornucopia inches past the boy from 4’s head. The second catches him in the throat before he has a chance to fully turn around. Cannon shot, too loud. The next moments are a blur of quicktime and slow motion. Everything distorts. 

The girl goes for her trident, Spyle steps in front of Shady Jade with his axe poised to throw, but her trident finds the tree beside them first and then she’s scrambling for her fallen companion’s spear. She closes in on them before either of the boys can throw their weapon, and then the sky fills with a burst of light. Three heads instinctually turn to the snake on the horizon. It’s the only thing visible, and it closes in. 

When it strikes, there’s a sound like a mine explosion that runs through the whole arena and even though it seems to connect with nothing, a section of the ground ten feet away from them explodes into sod and tree roots. The pine on top of it tumbles toward them and all three of them break into an immediate sprint to get away from it. The smell of dynamite, ripped pine bark, and blood are all Shady Jade can focus on while his ears ring and he runs. Dizziness makes him stumble more than he should.

He’s still the first to stumble into the tunnel. This one’s mouth is sloped and the ground is loose enough soil that they slide into the bottom of it in a heap. The one grace they’re given is that this one doesn’t close, so as the three of them right themselves, eyes still fixed on each other, they can all three of them tell who’s who.

The girl slashes out with the spear as they stand but Spyle manages to catch the tip with his axe and knock it away. He goes in for a swing and catches her off-hand. It’s a deep wound and blood starts seeping down her spear when she takes it two-handed again. Shady Jade throws his knife but the spinning world rewards him with a far miss. 

Then there’s the feeling of metal in him. It’s somewhere above his heart or lungs, but the gush of blood is too hot, too fast. He feels it spilling down his shirt when she pulls the spear tip free. His vision blurs. There’s a surprising lack of pain, like its space is entirely occupied by fear. Distantly, he realizes he’s sinking to his knees, and that there’s more sound of scuffle, eventually of silence. He finds himself laying on the ground, then, listening to the sound of wind echoing through the mouths of the warren. The sound of retreating steps echoing in the tunnels. A shuffling at his side.

 “Shady Jade?” Spyle’s voice is soft. He’s masking fear, trying to sound soft and gentle. 

“Spyle,” Shady Jade chokes out. He can feel blood or bile welling in his throat.

“You’re…”

Shady Jade just shakes his head. The pain is starting to come in now, like a storm, with the alternating lightning and thunder of heat and cold. Each pulse of his heart makes him cold like winter and between them he feels like he’s on fire. He lifts a shaky hand and points to his throat. More shuffling beside him, and what might be Spyle’s knee against his shoulder. 

“Okay.” Spyle’s obviously trying not to cry.

His singing voice isn’t what Shady Jade is used to, but it’s soft and warm. One of the last things that he hears is a nice one. One of the last three gifts he’ll get.

“ Way out on the field there’s an old pine tree

We planted it when we were young and free

It stands sentinel while you sleep

It’s reminder where we used to be

Let not the fire touch it,

Lay your head upon my lap

And underneath it we will sit

Teach me the what the sky says, love

Make me think you have the map

And tell me of every passing dove

Before we take that summer nap

Let not the axe touch it

It’s what we’ve left of home now

It’s where the blood and lovers sit

The one thing we’re allowed

Overplanted oldgrowth,

Hearts and hope both stowed

That old pine is where we rest

So darling, make me one oath

In the ashes of our history

Make yourself a bird’s nest

Because I’m lost without that pine

But here we know

Which way that treeline grows

So rest your heart on mine

Keep sweet this melody

And sleep beneath our old tree.”

Spyle leans down to kiss his forehead, and Shady Jade can only make out his blurry silhouette against the perfect circle of lavender amid the black above him. The second to last gift is the static in his ear cutting out, returning him to the silence he’s always known on that side. The third is the axe.

The last thing he hears is less a gift, and more a period at the end of a poem which didn’t need it. His cannon fires a second before everything goes dark.

Chapter Text

Part III - The Story We Used To Tell

Seventeen ❧ Ash, Quicklime, and Seawater

They guessed Vi had met her doom. I couldn’t take that, it didn’t make sense. Vi and I dreamed in the future tense. I crawled into her bed, beneath a fat lopsided moon. The picture hung above me and that’s when I could hear it; her tune. She sang the story we used to tell, so enraptured she’d been captured by the picture’s spell. Vi trapped inside by a witch’s craft. And through the frame came a draft.

I struck the glass, but it pulled me in. – Shirley Jackson, adapted to lyrics by Ryan Scott Oliver

Waterlye moves away from Hyacinth’s body after his cannon goes off, sliding his sword into her belt and giving the hovercraft enough space to retrieve him. For the first time there’s a pang of regret but she’s a little disgusted to find that it’s not really with herself so much as that she may have just made a strategic mistake. No use thinking about it now though. 

She spends the next hour or so tying herself a net of woven grass framed by her length of rope and seeing what she can catch in the river. All she manages to haul up are some ugly, unfamiliar looking fish with long bodies and red sails across their backs. Skeptically, she scoops them up and dispatches them with Hyacinth’s sword. Gutting them reveals a mess of odd organs she’s never seen in a fish before, so she takes care not to puncture them. She strings them through the gills and ties them to her pack. She finds their mouths full of barbed, razor-sharp teeth. Those can be a last resort food. She knows as well as anyone in 4 that unfamiliar fish may be poisonous. But their flesh looks… normal enough.

Waterlye pulls her net up when it begins to be too dark to see the water well, and moves a bit down the outer ring of the arena. She’s heard no movement from other tributes since she woke, but as she’s distracted from searching in the gloom for any sign of them by a sudden streak of light across the sky, there’s splashing off to her right. Spinning and readying her spear, she only lowers it halfway when she catches sight of Compass pulling himself from the river after tossing his trident ashore. He sits on the shore ten or so feet from her with a grey backpack and the glimmering trident slung across his lap, breathing and pushing hair back from his face. 

“Compass,” Waterlye hisses just loud enough for him to hear. He turns to look at her and his face goes from surprise to masked relief. She crosses to sit beside him. 

“Hey, I was starting to think we were all dead,” he says. Another streak across the sky draws her gaze and he follows it. 

“You and me are still out here at least,” she says. He nods. 

“You had anything to eat?” Waterlye gestures to her pack and he nods but they pool supplies anyway, eating some bread before she lets Compass get some rest. Apparently he hasn’t slept since yesterday morning really. She sits beside him and watches the stars falling from the sky. They make it seem like the whole world is spinning in her vision.

The morning of day three, they start their hunt. Better sooner rather than later, they both agree. They exchange weapons; he’s better with a spear than she is. 

In the pale light growing at the edges of the arena, it takes Waterlye an hour or so’s walk along the river to realize there are new trees sprouting in the center ring. Her eyes fixed on them, Compass has to grab her arm to prevent her falling into a pit she was about to step into. 

It must be at least five or six feet deep and is half obscured by the long grass they’ve been pushing through the entire morning. Both of them peer down into its dark mouth. Wind and water echo through it, and there’s something shifting down there, too big to be human. Both of them keep their distance.

They’re more careful as they continue on. Somewhere closer to the center of the arena, there’s another cannon blast. Waterlye holds back the tiniest of smiles. 

“Getting closer to winning now,” she says as she and Compass settle down to eat a small lunch and debate trying to cook the strange fish. He’s for it and she’s still cautious. They’ll go bad much longer in the sun, though, so he wins out, and they light a small fire on the bank of the river. Its thin white plume of smoke rises until it seems to pool some sixty or seventy feet above them, hitting some invisible barrier and falling lazily back toward the earth as it disperses. They cook her catch on sticks sharpened with the sword and tented over the coals.

They’re both suspicious of the unfamiliar fish, probably a mutt she now figures, watching its flesh bubble with dark, purplish juices as it cooks. They both take small bites at first and set their portions off to the side to wait for strange breathing or stomach cramps to set in. In their absence, the two of them eat, smother their fire, and pack away what’s left over. 

“I think we’ve got a shot at this. Bet no one else has figured out how to fish.”

“We should be careful fishing, those things seem safe but I keep seeing other weird stuff in the water,” Waterlye warns, “who knows if any of it’s edible.” 

“Yeah, guess you’re right. Let’s hope the catching’s good. Do we wanna find somewhere to net?” Compass frowns, but nods, gathering up his spear as he stands. He stretches his arms out above his head. Waterlye reaffirms that she’d prefer him as an ally rather than adversary.

“Let’s look for both. Good spot to fish and maybe anyone else, too.” I doubt there are many alliances happening between anyone else. I know the boy from 1 and girl from 2 are gone. So there are only the four of us at the most left from the usual alliance and we’re pretty scattered. Better to go it just the two of us right now.” 

So they pick their way along the river for another hour or two. They pause when a cannon at the center of the arena draws their attention. The now half-grown forest, pine and cottonwood, obscures any sight of what’s happening there.

“It’s just getting easier and easier on us,” Waterlye says under her breath. It’s only after she says it that she glances at Compass and sees the displeasure in his expression. Of course. He’s gotta be having a pretty hard time with all of this. She pats his arm.

“One of us is going home, don’t worry.” 

Another cannon a bit after they’ve set their net and settled close by just underlines her point. The ground seems to become softer as they sit and wait for their net to snare something, like it’s taking on water. It makes Waterlye just a little uneasy. 

They end up without any catch to show for the night, but eat the rest of the fish they cooked earlier as well as their bread. As Waterlye’s settling down to sleep against her pack while Compass keeps watch, the Capitol anthem and ensuing broadcast jars her out of her dozing. She sits up next to Compass to watch. He’s flipping a single, water-warped playing card over and over the fingers of one hand. 

As it finishes, she gets her count straight again; eight left. Seven between her and home.

She falls asleep more hopeful than she has since Reaping Day. When Compass wakes her, it’s still dark, but Waterlye takes up watch and lets him sleep long past the sun brightening the edges of the sky. As it becomes lighter, she re-strings their net, and manages to catch another of the long, ugly fish before something tears through the grass center of her net entirely, leaving all of her braided work in tatters. She tries not to be frustrated as she settles to cook the fish and shakes Compass awake when it’s near-done. 

“Breakfast,” she mutters. She feels more irritable than she’d like today and makes sure to drink extra water as they eat. She can’t let the arena get to her. 

They decide to pack up for now and try to find any of the six tributes besides them, so they work their way back the way they came in case they were followed at all. It isn’t until they find and dispatch the girl from 5 that there’s the first and only cannon of day four. 

When the storm above them breaks and the rain starts pouring down, Compass and Waterlye retreat to the shelter of a thick stand of apple trees to re-weave the net in silence. Until Compass breaks the quiet. 

“Not much of a talker, are you?” 

“I suppose not,” she says, deftly stripping and then weaving a stalk into her braidwork. 

“You know, at school no one could make sense of you. It’s like you’re good at almost everything except people.” 

“I wasn’t under the impression I had any reputation.” 

Compass laughs a little.

“You do. Why else would we all have agreed to vote for you when you put yourself up for it?”

“What about you?” Waterlye changes the topic. “Why’d you put yourself in?”

“Deal with a friend of mine. I didn’t want him putting his in so I told him I’d do it too if he did. He called my bluff.”

“Well,” Waterlye says with a shrug, “here you are now. Final seven. Just six left to go.”

“Five besides us.”

Waterlye lets that hang in the air. They’re both imagining what would happen if it came down to the two of them. Who’s quicker on the draw, who’s stronger? Waterlye doesn’t like how matched their odds seem. 

“Take first watch?” she asks, finally, and he nods, looking out at the dimming water skipping light over its tiny ripples. 

She sleeps with her hand clutched around the trident. Day four ends on a somber, sour kind of note. 

Compass touches her shoulder to wake her and she pulls herself up to take the second shift, finding a particularly soft part of the ground to settle on.

Cross-legged, she absentmindedly braids grasses and forces herself to stay alert. It happens so slowly that Waterlye doesn’t realize she’s sitting atop a pillar rising from the ground until one of her feet slips and finds itself in the grass instead of on the ground. Startled, she stands and steps off of it, turning to examine the odd thing.

Nothing here makes sense. It’s like the way logic drifts just before she falls into a sleep full of incongruous dream, thoughts bumping and melting into one another. This arena is unpredictable and confusing. Circling the pillar and leaning to press on it finds it bare. Just a disembodied part of some Capitol building. Waterlye shrugs.

She begins stringing the repaired net for an attempt at morning fishing before she nudges Compass awake. They take turns tending the net and scanning the forest around them until she notices it. The snake’s stopped moving on the horizon. Instead, it curls, head facing them down, fangs bared. 

“Compass, collect the net. They’re driving us into the middle, I think.” She doesn’t look at him while she speaks, but hears him quickly reeling it in and bunching it together. He ties the end to her pack when he joins her to look up at the serpent. Waterlye takes a few steps toward the river before handing her pack and trident to Compass. Wriggling out of her outer clothing, socks, and boots, she tosses all but the boots carelessly inside and ties the boots by the laces opposite from the net. She reattaches her belt around her waist though, and makes sure the sword is secured in it. Compass follows suit, sans sword. Then she dives in. Reaching the other side, she calls back. 

“Alright, toss it all over!” She catches both of their packs before they hit the ashy muck on the ground but sets them down anyway to give Compass a hand up. At a quick scan of the new forest, they’re alone. Waterlye rings her hair out and takes up her backpack and trident. 

“Do you think it’s worth seeing if anything’s left at the Cornucopia?” Compass asks. Waterlye looks in what she’s pretty sure is that direction. 

“It’s been three days since the fire, but maybe,” she answers, “I mean, we might be able to find some wire for fishhooks. It’s worth looking.”

Both of their stomachs are growling, she can hear it. They make their way to the golden horn, Compass in the lead guiding them around the yawning black pits scattered amid the trees and Waterlye close behind with her eyes on the woods around them. Once, she swears she could hear movement, but she can’t catch sight of anything and tells herself it’s just the forest. 

They reach the Cornucopia, redressing now that their skin is mostly dry, and Waterlye delegates Compass as the watchman while she circles the now-sodden and burnt packages, rummaging through for anything that might be of use. She does find a short length of wire which she slides into her pack. But more odd, she finds the remnants of barely-legible words scrawled into the dirt, painted across the outside of the cornucopia and on disintegrating package paper with ash and blood. Someone must really be going crazy in here, she assumes. 

Then there’s a loud clang . Her head shoots up just in time to see the second knife catch Compass’ throat. A single thread of shock runs through her body before she snaps it and fumbles for her trident. It lands in the tree beside the boy from 12 and the one from 7, but she manages to grab Compass’ spear a few feet away and is almost on the two of them when the sky lights up blinding white. 

When the snake strikes, fighting is forgotten and they all flee directly away from it. 

Once they’re in the tunnels, Waterlye is pretty sure she’s never felt the type of pain that bursts over her when the boy from 7’s axe buries in her left hand. Still, spearing his companion is enough to give her time to flee down a tunnel entrance she can barely see at the far end of the cavern they’ve slipped into.

The cannon firing behind her brings no real comfort as she cradles the hand spilling blood onto the floor against her chest, trying to keep pressure on it. Trying to keep her thumb and the rest of her fingers from trying to separate from one another. Her breath comes too-quick, and she’s paying no attention. Somewhere behind her she dropped the spear in favor of holding her hand steady, but she can’t bring herself to care.

The tunnels echo with water, wind, and a distant melodic voice. This arena is the worst she’s ever seen. Not saying much. They didn’t scout this one, the Gamemakers built it for this horror and it shows.

Eventually, her shaking legs give out in another tunnel that opens into fresh air and a single window of daylight above. She tucks herself against the wall and wills unconsciousness not to take her. Waterlye barely manages to rip the skirt from the one-piece arena uniform and tie it around her left hand as tightly as she can with her teeth and right before it does.

When she wakes, the disk of daylight has faded to deep amethyst and her vision is blurry. It takes her a long, groggy moment to remember why she’s in so much pain, and longer to realize that she isn’t alone. The girl from 8 looks down at Waterlye imploringly. 

“Morning,” she says. Her voice is tired, but not unfriendly. Even if she wanted to, Waterlye doesn’t think she could go for the sword she still feels in her belt. 

“Good morning?”

“Your hand’s pretty bad, I couldn’t fix it or anything, but I got the bleeding to stop mostly.” 

“Thanks…” Waterlye squeezes her eyes shut. Her head is pounding. “I should get back above ground, these caves are so confusing.”

“I think that’s kind of the point of this whole ar–” the girl cuts herself off like she realizes she’s about to ramble more than she should, “Uh. But no, you probably shouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“It is… not looking good up there at all.”

Chapter Text

Eighteen ❧ A Bruised Crown

I think he was like me in a lot of ways. When something big and scary charges straight at you, you do not face it down; you sidestep it, like a matador. Let it tumble hoof over horns into the deep maze-like vault that extends like tendrils of anthills for hundreds of miles beneath the surface. You trap the monsters behind that thick iron door, and you slam it closed.

That's how I am. That's who I am, by default I learned it from him, I suppose.  – The Narcissist Cookbook

Donnie Evergreen’s eyes follow dust motes as they fall to the couch. Despite disuse, it’s fancier than anything most of the district owns. The Justice Building has always been more imposing of unease than justice. Angels stare down at him from the molding while he waits for Clerk Carmine to finish his interview. Beside him, perched on seats and arms of the velvet couches and chairs of the sitting room, the Covey only whisper to one another. About the goats, the meadow, things they’re allowed to know. Donnie Evergreen understands relatively quickly and keeps his mouth shut until Elizabeth Ash tugs on his sleeve.

“How much longer until they let us go?”

“I don’t know, meadowlark,” he mumbles back to her. He reaches up to her spot on the arm of the couch and strokes her hair. She smoothes her skirt. She’s losing her composure a little, Donnie Evergreen is surprised she kept it this long. 

The door to the office the Capitol crew has been filming them in opens with a pull of air. Like it’s being sucked from the sitting room and their lungs. Clerk Carmine stands rigid in the doorway, straightening his shirt. Flanking him, a Peacekeeper and one of the Capitol crew look through their paperwork. 

“That’s all of them. Is he close with anyone else?” says the man with violet hair and inset lines of just barely visible glowing notches in his cheeks. He directs the question at Tam Amber, but Clerk Carmine answers with a firm finality.

“No.”

Donnie Evergreen’s hand falls to Elizabeth Ash’s and squeezes but he keeps his eyes on the Peacekeeper. They’ve always made him nervous, most of them, anyway, but he knows the Covey’s favor among the Peacekeepers has been very quickly waning over the past few years.

There’s more shuffling of papers, and then Clerk Carmine’s escorts convene to discuss in the office for a few seconds before the Capitol man pops his head back out with a shooing gesture.

“You're done for the night, go home, we’ll send Peacekeepers if you need further interview or interrogation.”

Always the sing-songy voices. Donnie Evergreen grits his teeth while Tam Amber ushers all of them out of the Justice Building. It’s just before dawn, the birds will start singing any minute now. The air is already warming, but there’s some comfort that the smoke in the distance is only a thin smudge now.

They’d re-shot Donnie Evergreen’s interview what felt like a hundred times, and Clerk Carmine seemed to take even longer, so it must have been hours just between the two of them. The Covey walk home quietly, watching the sun rise out beyond the woods and intermittently holding hands. 

Donnie Evergreen pushes the door open and pointedly throws a blanket over the television set. Once they’ve all shuffled in, none of them seem sure what to do. Sighing, Donnie Evergreen leans against the refrigerator.

“What day is it?”

“Saturday, I think,” Maude Ivory says. “Mine fire on Friday.”

“Okay. What does everyone need to do to keep us on our feet? I need to hunt. You,” he gestures to Maude Ivory.

“Milk the goats, check the cheese and the garden, go into town for some supplies.”

“Okay. Tam Amber?”

Tam Amber looks at him with an unreadable expression for a moment before answering. 

“I need to work on some jewelry and small parts.”

“And CC?” Donnie Evergreen looks at Clerk Carmine but suddenly, everyone’s gaze is drawn down to the little whimper. Elizabeth Ash is holding back tears, lip trembling. 

“Are we really pretending this isn’t happening?”

Donnie Evergreen wants to comfort her but he can’t find the energy. He just shakes his head and turns on his heel. The door closes a little too hard behind him.

He makes his way into the meadow with his eyes on the grass rather than the fence. Donnie Evergreen’s walked this path a thousand times. So when he glimpses an out of place color at the edge of his vision, he dives behind a boulder. Peacekeeper uniform. He leans around the rock, crouched low in the grass. As the Peacekeeper approaches doing a patrol of the fence, Donnie Evergreen feels a split of feelings. Relief– he recognizes Vireo, and this is one of the few on the base he likes. And confusion– this fence is never patrolled. Vireo’s eyes catch Donnie Evergreen’s and he waves, then crosses to join him at the boulder. 

“Glad I caught you,” Vireo says. He adjusts Capitol-issued glasses with one hand and leans on the rock with the other. 

“What’s going on?” Donnie Evergreen levers himself up to sit on the boulder. 

“The mine fires, the commander figures the Covey might have had something to do with it. They’re really sure you’re involved in rebel sympathizing now that you’ve had that Chance boy over so much.”

Donnie Evergreen finds his mouth curling downward. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. As far back as he can remember, the Covey have been telling him to keep quiet. Keep his nose out of anything even slightly rebellious. What else could they do when one of their own so conspicuously disappeared and suddenly all Peacekeeper eyes were on them? They’d barely managed to negotiate continuing performances at the Hob, and just as often as not these days, they were told to clear off anyway. They’ve practically been model citizens if one can ignore their disregard for the fence.

“We didn’t have anythin’ to do with th–”

“I know,” Vireo cuts him off, eyes flicking to the treeline. “But they’re going to start patrolling the meadow for a little while. So you need to be careful if you’re planning on going outside, Donnie Evergreen.”

The Covey boy glowers out over the grass and fence. Summer flowers sway in a breeze that brings no relief from the heat. 

“I need to hunt.”

“I know. Just be careful. I don’t think this will be a long-term change. They’re DNA testing the bombs now.”

“There were bombs?”

“I guess so, but you didn’t hear it from me.”

Donnie Evergreen smirks, forcing the usual casualness back down on his face. “Hear what?”

Vireo’s smile is genuine and he nods toward the loose fence panel. 

“Go ahead while I still have plausible deniability. Be safe coming back. If I were you, I might go down by the Hob and try to climb the fence instead. Friendlier Peacekeepers might not be on shift when you get back.” 

Donnie Evergreen leans in to whisper a thanks into his ear before he’s off. Today’s hunt isn’t good. It’s too hot by mid-morning for most animals to want to be out, and even checking his snares he finds only one rabbit. Eventually he manages a single, young goose and resolves to simply gather some plants and mushrooms instead. By the time he’s filled a bundle of berries and fungi, he finds a decent stand of black walnuts and spends thirty minutes collecting as many as he can. 

Returning, he skirts the fence toward the Hob instead of the Meadow, keeping his eyes peeled for Peacekeepers as he goes. He crests the fence at the edge of a back alley and lands on the packed dirt, sending coal dust into the air around his boots. No Peacekeepers seem to be hanging around the old warehouse, so Donnie Evergreen sells his rabbit with relative ease. He intends to stop by the Covey house only to drop off the goose before going into town to trade some of the herbs he’d gathered to the Marches, but his plans are rarely drawn out perfectly.

When Donnie Evergreen steps in the door, the air is already crackling with tension and it’s only seconds later that Clerk Carmine is grabbing Rye’s wrist, preventing the boy from throwing a cup at the television set.

“Woah woah woah,” Donnie Evergreen interjects into their incomprehensible arguing. His uncle and Rye both turn to look at him. “What’s going on here?”

Rye stammers, an angry kind of stammering, before gesturing carelessly at the television set. Donnie Evergreen’s eyes follow his hand, though he really doesn’t want to see what he assumes will be his cousin in some dire position. Instead, what he finds is the image of Shady Jade leaned back against a tree, seemingly as comfortable as one might be able to be in the arena. The boy from 7 is leaned against the same tree, and they’re talking, sharing food. 

“They’re… having lunch?”

“Get him out,” Clerk Carmine grumbles, eyes meeting Donnie Evergreen’s, “He’s getting violently jealous and I don’t know what he’s on.”

“I don’t need to leave!” Rye protests. Donnie Evergreen looks between the two of them and sighs. 

“Come on, Rye. I’m sure your ma’s worried about you.” He puts a hand on Rye’s shoulder, and then has to tighten it to steer him toward the door. Rye puts up only a little protest as Donnie Evergreen drops this morning’s spoils on the table and then pushes the other boy out the door and down the street.

“He’s flirting with him!” Rye breaks the silence a few houses down, throwing his hands in the air. 

“It doesn’t matter, Rye, if he survives then the boy from 7 won’t. Otherwise let him enjoy his last few days.” Donnie Evergreen is becoming increasingly tired of having to be the steady hand in this chaos, but snapping now won’t do anything to help either of them. 

“It does matter! This is the last I’ll get to remember him if he doesn’t.”

“Well I figure he’s returning the favor, then,” Donnie Evergreen says before he can stop himself. Rye stops dead in his tracks and glowers at him, then turns on his heel and marches off toward his house. Donnie Evergreen considers following him but shakes his head. Not today. 

He’s standing at the crossroad of the lane leading into town and the one that winds back toward the meadow and the Covey house. Everything in him wants to walk to town, wrap his arms around one of his girls and take one full, real, deep breath for the first time in days. Instead, he turns to walk back home. He feels like a fish on a line, slowly being reeled in against the pressure of watery air around him. 

Clerk Carmine is busying himself with the goose when Donnie Evergreen opens the door. He looks a little calmer without Rye in the house, but his brows are still knit together. 

“Hey CC.”

“Donnie Evergreen.”

“How are you holding up?” Donnie Evergreen sits at the table and begins sorting his plants. He sets aside a few mushrooms and herbs to trade to the Marches, a newer Merchant family who have a tiny shop next to the Monroes’. Some blackberries for Artie’s aunt. Most of the rest will go into their own cupboards. It’s already harder to feed them all without Shady Jade helping with snares and gathering. 

“I don’t like doing this again,” Clerk Carmine says, setting aside some cleaner flight feathers. Donnie Evergreen stares down at the blackberry he’s rolling over in his fingers. 

“I’m sorry.”

“I wonder if in fifty years any of us will even be left.”

“I hope so,” Donnie Evergreen says, and he means it, “Maybe we won’t use our names, maybe we won’t sing. But our blood will be here. They won’t leech that from the trees.” 

Clerk Carmine looks up at the window with a long-off look. He doesn’t seem so certain. 

“If we don’t sing or keep our songs alive in who we are, how are we still Covey?” 

“Because we are. It’s in our history. We wouldn’t bruise if our veins knew how to forget.” 

“You’re starting to sound like him.”

“Sorry.” Donnie Evergreen frowns. Clerk Carmine laughs a sad and hollow kind of laugh. 

“I just hope he comes back.”

“Me, too, CC.” 

Donnie Evergreen leaves for the town square not long after. His first stop is a large house neighboring the Mayor’s, where he sells his blackberries. He peeks in at the sweet shop but seeing no sign of Artie, he moves on to stop by the Marches’ little closet of an apothecary. They always give him good prices on his gathered herbs, and he needs the extra cash right now, but he spends nearly thirty minutes haggling with the eldest of the March boys before they agree on a deal. With a lighter bag, Donnie Evergreen peers into the florist’s window as he leaves. He can’t help but smile seeing Holly leaned over a book of blank paper splayed on the sales counter. Her pencil is scratching away and she hasn’t turned on any interior lights despite the now-looming dark and the shop’s east-facing windows. Only when he pushes his way into the gloomy storefront does Holly look up and brush a curtain of dark hair behind her ear. 

For half a moment, they just smile at one another.

“Hello,” he says in sing-song and Holly’s already dropping her pencil to the counter to let him sweep her up in a hug in the middle of the shop. 

“Ah! I’m glad to see you, I heard the Peacekeepers are giving your folks trouble,” she says between giggles and him kissing her cheek. 

“Can’t let that stop us living our lives, right?” 

“Just watch out for yourself, alright?” Holly gives him a playfully admonishing look.

“I will. Look, I don’t have long, I have to check up on how things are at home. But I’m thinking of trying to get us out to the lake tomorrow. Distract us all a bit. Wanna come?” 

Holly lights up a little. He knows she enjoys their long treks to the lake, usually with her sketchbook tucked into a bag and her hair tied up off her neck. She always looks lovely against the green. Then Donnie Evergreen watches her expression darken.

“Don’t you want to be here… you know… if he?” She gestures halfheartedly toward the screens in the square and Donnie Evergreen can’t help but frown. 

“I don’t know.” He leans back against the counter and smells a bundle of lilies tied there. “Is it better to know when it happens or to not see it at all?”

Holly doesn’t have a good answer, they watch the girl from 4 stumble through the tall grass on the screen in silence for a few minutes.

“I’ll come.”

“Okay. Sunrise, tomorrow. Meet me at the Covey house, but we’ll probably do some walking. The Peacekeepers have been patrolling the meadow fence.” 

She looks concerned but he just shakes his head and leans in to brush hair back from her face and kiss her forehead. 

“I’ll see you then,” she mumbles, but when she picks her pencil up again he can see the tremor in her hand. 

The Covey convene for dinner in growing darkness. The flickering television set gives most of the light to the main room of the house. Tam Amber sits at the open back door, twisting wire between his fingers and staring out at the white form of a Peacekeeper making their way along the fence. Clerk Carmine and Elizabeth Ash sit on the couch beside one another, her dozing against his shoulder. Maude Ivory is at the counter, already serving up goose stew in a mismatched set of bowls. She smiles at Donnie Evergreen when he comes in, but no one greets him, so he goes to sit beside Tam Amber. 

“They’re going to be patrolling for a while, Vireol said they think we’re the best suspects for the mine fires.” Donnie Evergreen watches something flicker in Tam Amber’s eyes, some kind of annoyance or bitterness, but it’s gone quick as a stone skipped across calm water. He takes longer to choose his words. 

“You shouldn’t see him anymore.”

“I know,” Donnie Evergreen says. He looks up to the ribbons of pink along the clouds above them. He turns over his shoulder to call back inside. “Need any help, Maude Ivory?”

The only Covey who goes to bed that night is Maude Ivory. The rest of them settle on or around the couch. Elizabeth Ash stretches out on the floor leaned against Tam Amber while he continues working on little metal pieces’ intricacies late into the night, and Clerk Carmine falls asleep beside Donnie Evergreen on the couch, both of their eyes fixed on the now mostly-dark arena. Eventually, Donnie Evergreen drifts off, too.

He’s woken sometime before sunrise by the sound of a solemn, solo fiddle. Sliding out from under where Elizabeth Ash wormed her way up beside him on the couch, he steps as quietly as he can and heads for the back door. The sound leads him into the meadow, though not far. Clerk Carmine is playing soft, and has taken a seat in the grass that mostly blocks the view of him from the fence. Donnie Evergreen considers going to sit with him, but when the lanternlight from a neighbor’s back porch catches the tracks of tears on his uncle’s face, he decides this may best be a private moment. He returns home and begins breakfast. 

He’d told the other Covey of his plans to go to the lake over dinner, though only Tam Amber and Elizabeth Ash had given him a solid affirmation of their intention to join him. Still, best to ready themselves as best as possible anyway. While cooking some scavenged duck eggs, Donnie Evergreen fills a basket with a water bottle and some gathered vegetables and dense tessera grain bread. When he puts the whole thing back into the refrigerator, he tries not to notice how empty their food stores are. He’s plating eggs and some leftover stew by the time any of the other Covey stir. Donnie Evergreen hadn’t noticed Clerk Carmine sneaking back in, but when he looks up from the plates their eyes meet and they exchange a silent nod. 

The five of them eat with their eyes on the screen. It’s almost like they’re eating breakfast with their wayward fledgeling, and his new friend, whenever the camera cuts back to Shady Jade and the boy from 7 eating their own breakfast. Donnie Evergreen feels a pang of loneliness, of loss and regret, ring through him, and he finishes only half of his breakfast. Elizabeth Ash polishes his plate off, and he’s beginning to stand to put the dishes in the sink when he watches his cousin go stiff on screen. 

He sets the plate on the table with a clatter and sits back down. Suddenly all of their eyes are trained on the screen, they can’t see whatever Shady Jade can see, but the two tributes previously relaxed now move with urgency back toward the river. Then the camera cuts to the snake, iridescent and massive, curled around the horizon and coiled with its head pointing at the center of the arena. 

They barely breathe for the next hour and a half. All five of them sit motionless in front of the scattered dirty dishes. They’re frozen in anticipation, anxiety, and then horror.

When the spear moves through his brother, Donnie Evergreen could swear he feels the pain just under his own clavicle. He can’t help but think of a rabbit caught in a badly-tied snare, slowly choking on its own blood. The lapin screech of inevitability drawn out too-long. His stomach turns, and the world just after it. He doesn’t realize he’s on the floor until he’s retching. Tam Amber’s warm hand on his back doesn’t help, but his stomach refuses to let anything come up. It’s like he’s hearing it from six feet underwater, but somewhere Maude Ivory gasps and whimpers. Something crashes into the wall and breaks. 

Donnie Evergreen breaks with it. Finds himself stumbling for the door. He trips over his feet in the meadow, or over the grass. When he falls to his hands and knees, he doesn’t get up. He collapses to one side and looks up at the sun creeping over the morning sky. His chest is an empty stretch of withering things, rustled by intermittent and sharp gusts of grief. The grey clouds above him go gold around their borders and he turns over so he can’t see them anymore. What right do things have to be beautiful now?

Beyond the fence, a woodpecker keeps time as a duet of mockingjays trade songs. Instead of music, Donnie Evergreen offers only sobs. Who even is he without his brother? The future has always been the two of them. His horizon has always been imprinted with two silhouettes, not one. The only time he’ll ever get to see Shady Jade again is when his body’s sent home on the train. Simple wooden box. An impersonal ‘gift’. 

“Donnie Evergreen?” Holly’s voice startles him. She’s calling out from the edge of the meadow, and he forces himself to sit up. He can feel the mess his hair is, the sticky streaks of tears down his face, but today he can’t bother making himself look any nicer.

“Over here,” he calls back, and he’s not sure he’s ever heard his voice so unsteady. 

She makes her way through the grass and settles beside him. Her hands worry at her skirt and the azaleas tucked behind her ear have come uncharacteristically loose. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. He shakes his head. 

“He was really special.”

“I know.” 

“I don’t think we should go to the lake today,” she says, reaching out to gently rub at his arm. It would usually feel nice but something between his nerves and brain just isn’t connecting. It feels like pressure, nothing more and nothing less.

“Yeah,” he mumbles, then smiles a bitter smile at the ground, “I think I was right. Would have been better to not have seen it at all.” 

Holly’s eyes are soft, her touch softer as she lays a hand on her shoulder. 

“Why don’t we get you home?”

He lets her lead him back to the leaning house at the edge of the meadow. Donnie Evergreen feels like each creak of the wood in the wind echoes through him. His hand is too-tight in Holly’s, but she just gives him gentle squeezes back every few moments. The main room is quiet now. Tam Amber and Clerk Carmine sit together at the back door, heads leaned together. Elizabeth Ash is curled into a tiny ball on Maude Ivory’s lap where she sits against the arm of the couch. The television set is covered in a blanket once more. Holly says soft hellos, but leads Donnie Evergreen past all of them and up toward the room he used to share with Shady Jade.

She tries to settle him in his own bed, but Donnie Evergreen slips her grasp and goes to lay on what had been Shady Jade’s. He silently curses Rye for eliminating almost any smell of his cousin with the scent of smoked herbs and white liquor. Still, he’s exhausted and burrows underneath Shady Jade’s old quilt, a rainbow of faded colors. 

Holly sits beside him, a gentle hand stroking his hair and he begins to drift off before he notices something in the pillow underneath his head. He reaches up to break apart the clump of feathers before he stops still. A perfect circle, a spiralling pattern. An old story floats to mind. Covey? Seam? He can’t remember.

“What’s wrong?” Holly asks as Donnie Evergreen fumbles in the drawer between the beds. His fingers find one of the little throwing knives Shady Jade always kept there. He strips the case off of the pillow like skinning a rabbit, and finds the clump again. The incision he makes in the pillow is only long enough to remove the clump of goose down. 

A pristine spiral of white feathers sits in his palm. All barbs face inward, all feathers layered in on one point. As though intentionally crafted, though it couldn’t have been.

“It’s a feather crown,” he says, with a small smile. “He’s going somewhere nice.”

Holly looks confused but Donnie Evergreen just sits on the bed with his back against the wall, cradling the symbol to his chest.

Chapter Text

Nineteen ❧ Built in a Day

The bones are melting, the skeleton is ash, the clavicle detaches and falls with a deafening crash.

And I'm not your protagonist; I'm not even my own. I don't know anything, I don't even know what I don't know.

And if you look outside you'll see disintegrating trees; the artificial way the sunlight bounces off the waxy leaves. My heart catches on every thorn.

You're already halfway out the door and I've never looked so old, and I have never been so cold and it is 85 degrees.  – Penelope Scott

Neither Waterlye nor the girl from 8 are big talkers, but the girl shows Waterlye the way up to a shallow tunnel entrance where she doesn’t need a second hand to climb up and see out to the rest of the arena. When she pokes her head out, Waterlye can barely see past the strange and shifting architecture which has toppled many of the trees of the new pine forest. Bombed out marble walls scrape against one another as though they’re dancing a sick waltz. 

Beyond the replica of demolished Capitol walls curling around the center of the arena, the outer ring has become a mess of columns and stands as though emulating an ancient amphitheatre. The brunette head popping up beside her nearly startles Waterlye. She does her best not to show it. She checks the dark horizon for the snake but can’t see anything moving across the treetops now.

“So I think I figured it out.” The girl points up toward the sky where the stars move like they’re rocking in the waves. “The point of this whole arena. It’s disorientation. Not knowing how or where to run I think. They keep resetting and skipping around with the sky, there’s no real pattern to it. And they’re not letting us have the same environment for more than a day or so.”

Waterlye turns it over in her head. It is pretty dizzying to try to watch any of the arena right now. 

“Distance has been weird, too,” she mumbles. 

“Yep. I don’t know how they’re doing that. The wall can move, though, so maybe that’s it.”

Before Waterlye can speak again, a howling wind picks up, pulling itself in spirals from the outer edges of the arena to the center. Before their eyes, a heavy storm sets in and a deluge begins. The girl from 8 drags Waterlye back into the tunnels. 

“Come with me, the tunnels have been the least changing so far but they flood a little when it gets wet up there, let’s find a cavern with a slope.”

Waterlye hesitates only for a moment before following her down deeper into the burrows. If this girl wanted to kill her, she’s had ample opportunity. But Waterlye still follows with a cautious eye on the girl’s hands. She appears unarmed but one can never be too cautious. Their footsteps echo in the dark, but something else’s do too, beyond the wall to their right. The girl Waterlye is following veers to the left like she’s been walking these tunnels for days. Maybe she has. 

“What’s down here with us?” Waterlye hisses under her breath. 

“Mutts, there are burrowing things and big insects mostly.” 

Waterlye shudders. She’s been on more than one ship with bugs scraping away at the wood beside her ear. Her eyes fall to her bandaged hand. It aches constantly and stings whenever she subconsciously goes to move any of the muscles there. Worse, she can feel the ache coming up further now, circling that wrist. The fear of it sets between her bones like salt driven between cracks in a hull.

They make their way up a shallow slope and into a cavern wider than any Waterlye’s seen so far. It slants down where it meets the tunnels, and up toward a cresting hill at the center of the enclosed space. There’s a sliver of dim light from the dark arena outside just over the summit of the hill. Off to one side of the cave and mostly hidden by a large boulder, there’s an alcove which has clearly recently been used, judging by the scuffs on the floor and arrangement of rocks and grasses into a sort of nest. The girl leads Waterlye over to it and they both settle, sitting there, while the girl digs a few parcels of fabric from deeper in the alcove. She offers Waterlye half a white roll and though it feels like sand in her mouth, Waterlye eats quickly. 

“Do you need to sleep? I can keep watch.” Waterlye stares out toward the cave mouth, more visible now. Rain is still coming down hard. In the halflight, the girl is examining her when Waterlye looks back. The girl’s expression is deeply analytical, though she hides it quickly when Waterlye meets her gaze in the half-light. 

“That would be nice,” says the girl, her voice reserved. Waterlye settles just at the edge of the alcove while the girl curls up inside of it, hand on the sword in her belt. She feels shaky, but she’s not sure which part is how hopeless this last push feels, which part is pain and exhaustion, and which part is hunger. 

The girl had been right, the sky outside the cavern twists with color in nonsensical patterns of light and dark. Waterlye isn’t sure if it’s been minutes or hours when her companion wakes up, but it’s around the same time Waterlye receives another basket, floating down at the entrance to the cavern. The two of them examine its contents together and stow the two pieces of bread with the rest in the alcove, then share the warm broth and small disk of cheese, and set the empty water bottle at the entrance to the cave to catch the still-flowing rain. 

“Any cannons?” the girl asks while they eat.

“No. Still four of us.” Rivulets are running down the cave floor now, though their nook is raised up just enough they’re staying dry despite the rising humidity in the tunnels. 

“How much longer do you think we have to go?”

“Another day or two, probably. The boy from 7 lost his advantage with the topside looking like that, but so did I. Do we know who the fourth is? Can’t be one of the mining districts I don’t think.”

“Yarrow from 11,” the girl answers, pulling her boot away from a tiny rising trickle of water at one side of the alcove. “He’s stayed hidden the whole time. I ran into him a couple times, we’ve both spent most of the game down here.”

Something about the stillness itches at Waterlye and irritates her restlessness, her anxiety. 

“We should hunt them down,” Waterlye says without thinking. The girl from 8 looks at her mildly bewildered. 

“I'm just going to wait it out,” she says it with a finality that suggests arguing with her is useless. Waterlye lets her head fall against the stone at her back. 

“Then it might be a while, if we're all getting sponsors.”

“Depends on where we are in the tunnels. The drones have trouble finding you if you're too deep.”

“Still.”

“I mean, the gifts must be really expensive this far in. It can't be much longer before someone gets too thirsty.”

Waterlye lifts her eyebrows at the girl, then nods toward the deluge still making them raise their voices to be heard above its splashing echoes. The girl grimaces. 

“The rain has to stop sometime. And there's no food down here except mutts and gifts.”

Waterlye hums a noncommittal little hum, not sure if she agrees. Her worries about going stir crazy just watching the rain and waiting are quickly alleviated by heavier worries, though. 

The splashing from the tunnel they entered the cavern through are distinctly coherent, a large and awkward creature that seems to half flap, half drag itself through the seven or eight foot tall mouth of the tunnel. The entrance seems too small for it. As a sliver of light touches it, Waterlye can make out its form. Twisted, near-humanoid but with arms lengthened and bent unnaturally, strung with the skin and sinew of bat wings. Its tiny, entirely missable eyes are set in a shag of patchy brown fur above what could be a beak as easily as the pinsirs of an ugly beetle. Waterlye shoves her mouth close to her companion’s ear.

“What kind of mutt is that? ”

The girl just shakes her head in cluelessness, shoving herself further back into the alcove and out of the creature’s sight. Waterlye looks between her and the bat creature. 

Its arms, or wings, it's clumsy wading through waist high water doesn't tell her much about how it uses them, are long enough to reach the back of the alcove with moderate ease. Hiding here won't do them good for long if its hearing or smell is any better than its eyesight. Even then, it's lucky the mutt hasn’t spotted them. With one clumsy hand, she arranges her hood around her red hair. Then it drops to her sword. She forces herself to breathe as evenly and quietly as possible while she watches the thing splash out of the water and drag itself up the incline toward the surface. And toward them.

On dry land it drops to its knuckles, its stretched, webbed fingers contorted to the sky and folding flaps of skin up against its ribs. Waterlye shudders and locks her feet in place. Back home, she did this sometimes on a pitching boat. Finding a center of gravity and trying to stay still until restless waves would inevitably drag her into their balancing act between peril and play. This time, the ocean is not what makes her stomach pitch and roll; it’s the mutt locking its eyes on her. 

She doesn't think, she just moves. Climbing uphill is immediately off the quick decisions table so instead she holds tight to her sword as she hits the downslope running. Waterlye expects the slide of mud and gravel under her boots and ducks under the muttation lunging up the hill toward the alcove. Only half a thought crosses her mind to look back before she dives into the freezing and choppy water now mostly concealing the lower tunnels, instead she takes a deep breath and plunges in.

Waterlye tries to reverse the directions back the way they came, but being underwater, in the dark, with the unpredictable current, she might as well be sailing with no idea which way the sky is. There is only darkness and fumbling on slick stone, the rush of icy water and the sound of it muffled by itself all around her. If this is how humans are born, Waterlye has never been so sure in her conviction that she never should have been. It must be only seconds but bright spots flicker to life, then glow and dance until they flash in the darkness of her vision. Bubbles that feel like they take little bits of her consciousness with them when they pop. Her lungs spasm for oxygen, gripped by waves of ache and stinging and Waterlye’s fingers fumble desperately for what she thinks might be up. It would be ridiculous, mad, to die like this. 

Only years of becoming used to the subtle buoyancy of her body saves her. Something slippery curls around her ankle while her fingers catch on a notched stone. She's either stronger or more full of adrenaline than whatever has a hold of her, though, and kicking, Waterlye drags herself up to a ledge just above the waterline. There's enough space to sit, but she's too close to the tunnel’s roof to stand even if she could. Her muscles cramp with two parts ebbing fear, and one part exertion.  Everything is pitch dark. Proprioception and sound are Waterlye’s only methods of orientation, and the endless rush of water makes it hard to focus on either. She feels her hands shaking against one another when she crosses them on her knees. The cold water numbs some of the injured one’s pain, at least. 

It makes no difference if she closes her eyes or not, but she squeezes them tightly shut and lets the sound of water enclose her and the darkness both. It’s a remarkably similar sound to the one she remembers from childhood, when she held an empty conch to her ear and closed her eyes. She tries to imagine Alba beside her now, braiding together kelp strands to wear around their shoulders like capes. Waterlye wonders if she’ll ever smell low tide again. Surrounding her is only the smell of ancient water and cut stone.

There’s no real way to tell time in the dark and no real rhythm to the rushing waves lapping hungry at the walls of the cavern. Time must pass, though– things change. At first the water rises to a cold film of foam and ripples over her overhang. Then the water recedes painfully slowly. She taps her fingers against its surface whenever she can’t handle the impatience and it sinks by half inches, slow. Waterlye’s unmoored thoughts drift between deep and shallow memory. A gob of something clammy and sticky falls on her left elbow and she brushes it away, tracking what must be mud across her arm. It takes her a few moments for the right worry to send a jolt to her brain in connection with that. Even though she can’t see anything, she looks up. Yawning darkness presses back on her irises. Her gut twists when a pebble hits her shoulder, and she begins to hear a new, different splashing amid the roar of water against the cavernous walls.

The feeling of being trapped snaps its jaws shut around Waterlye’s ribcage but she wills her breath to stay steady. Panic is only more likely to get her killed. Instead she tucks herself as close to the ceiling as she can without straining her muscles. She has no idea what else to do, no idea how much soil is on top of her or how much might come down. 

And then all of it comes down. In chunks at first, then all at once. The first chunk splashes into the center of the tunnel and lets in a stream of lavender morning light so bright it makes Waterlye’s pupils feel strangled and wrung out. The following chunks sound like the biggest parts of a shipwreck falling to the waves. Soil and stone pummel Waterlye’s shoulders, head, legs. The water rises, and when the section of ceiling above her collapses, it drags her with it into the icy waters. Wriggling like a fish, breath knocked clear out of her, she narrowly avoids it pinning her to what used to be the tunnel floor. Something snapped on the way down and every stroke toward the surface sends sharp pain through her chest.

Waterlye thanks the watery violet light guiding her back to the surface, but spends the next several minutes treading water and dodging the ceiling. By the time the sky is on a half-shell of what used to be one of the tunnels, the one Waterlye was unlucky enough to find herself in, the water has risen near to the same height as the now-boggy soil at the center of the arena. She pulls herself, gasping from the water and feels her head spin with relief and breathlessness in equal measure. Her flesh feels as though it’s echoing off of her bones and the dizziness threatens to take her for a few long, spinning moments. It takes her a few more to stand up and take stock of her surroundings, doubling over in pain at her first and second attempts only makes her more determined on the third.

Around her, the dance of old architecture continues its scraping choreography. It feels like early afternoon, but there’s no sun in the sky. Instead, looking up is like looking into a nacreous shell, shifting whenever she turns her head. Each marble pillar looks like an old and broken bone against a worn and forgotten bed of mother of pearl.

That's when Waterlye notices the tallest pillars of them all. Twenty-five of them, spaced near where the ring of the river must be. The shift of a wall with broken candy-colored glass reveals the base of the closest one standing beside the overflowing stream. It’s hung in sea-green rusted chains and something paces along the base, silently howling to the sky with a horrifyingly human face full of anguish. Around the chains and stretched limbs, there are twenty-three wreaths of seaside wildflowers. One hangs heavy, shaped like a seabird, around the thing’s neck where the creature tears at it as though it burns.

It looks almost like the bat mutt, but it paces on all fours and its face is too familiar. The mandible-beak is understated, and now in the light it’s clear the eyes are only undersized for a face so stretched and distorted. There’s no fur or feather, either, just grotesquely taut human skin. 

When the mutt’s sad, kind eyes meet hers, Waterlye suddenly understands why its pillar is engraved with a massive “XI” . Those eyes are identical to Mags’. The eleventh victor. Made a monster dressed in garlands of triumph. Waterlye begins to shake.

She backs away so quickly she nearly puts herself in reach of the next closest pillar’s beast. Near identical but smaller, this one seems almost rabid as it paces under the numeral for ten, with scraps of rainbow fabric tied tight into its flesh. All twenty-three of its garlands are made of white roses. 

Skirting the edge of its reach, Waterlye keeps her eyes on that one. Beyond the rose-covered mutt, there’s a stretch of ten pillars still strung with chains, but empty of beasts. She walks along them, counting back from ten until she reaches one final empty pillar. Near its top, it’s etched deep with “XXV.”

That one must be for us, then, Waterlye thinks as she trudges toward it. Settling at its base, she feels exhaustion settle with her. The sound of wind whistling through the mutts’ tortured lungs, the water on the shore, and the rustling of their victory laurels become a numb, fuzzy hum in the back of Waterlye’s brain. 

Her stomach growls. Hungry and tired, she sits beneath what she hopes will be her placard, she knows that otherwise it will be her headstone. Her hand aches and stings nearly up to her shoulder now. The smear of mud across her arm is gritty, blood-red clay.

The distant sound of a cannon shot distracts her, even if momentarily. Three left, two to go now.

Disorientation, huh? Well if these skies don’t have the stars she’s used to navigating by, at least it’s simple enough to follow the two points of light she has left leading her out of this train tunnel. She can orient herself in conviction. She always has, after all. Conviction for family, for home. It’s gotten her this far, and there are much worse convictions to chase.

Chapter Text

Twenty ❧ The Phoenix or the Egg

See, my birds of a kind, they more and more are looking like centurions than any little messiah. As I prune my feathers like leaves from a vine, I find that we have fewer and fewer in kind. But my palms and fingers still reek of gasoline from throwing fuel to the fire of that Greco-Roman dream. Purifying the holy rock to melt the gilded seams, it don't bring me relief, no, it don't bring me nothing that…

You were the song that I'd always sing; you were the light that the fire would bring. But I can't shake this feeling that I was only pushing the spear into your side again and again and again.  – The Oh Hellos

Donnie Evergreen has never much been one for white liquor. A swig at the Hob or with friends every now and again had been his old norm, but since Reaping Day, he’s been leaning on libation more and more.  Previous lines in the sand  don’t stop him when he finds himself awake with a bottle of it Rye’d clearly secreted away between the sheets of Shady Jade’s bed against his cheek. The liquor haze brings with it an odd sort of clarity. 

There’s a kind of comfort to reaching rock bottom, knowing that there are worse things that could happen but that all of them are faraway. In this state, there’s no further down his emotions and expectations of himself can go. In the space between sleep and waking, he watches the stars out of the window Holly only left half covered when she left for home, and he listens. The Covey house has its own rhythm, deep in its bones. The aching of wood harmonizes with the way the drafts pull the front door against the frame and then whistle through the kitchen near-silently. There’s the quiet sound of crying, and shuffling, and the breeze outside. He still cradles the spiral of feathers to his collarbone. Donnie Evergreen remembers this type of silence in the house only once before. 

That’d been a bad night. He’d gotten in with the wrong crowd, a precocious young teenager with plenty to prove. Donnie Evergreen tries to choose his company more carefully these days, but back then he was out near every night with spraypaint, wire cutters, and half a dozen other rebellious or brave kids. The fence had never known so many wounds and for nearly a year there had been a weak spot every few yards surrounding the whole district. No one could keep them penned. 

It was the eve of the Reaping two years ago when the Peacekeepers caught a handful of the gaggle of troublemakers Donnie Evergreen had fallen in with. He and the other Seam kids who hadn’t been with them thought they’d been lucky, but the ones who got caught’d sung like canaries in a clear mine. The next six months were spent dodging Peacekeepers and pretending to be entirely on the straight and narrow. Donnie Evergreen had figured that would be enough; they didn’t have any real proof after all. 

He can’t remember if it was a Sunday at the Hob or if it was one of those late autumn days when a number of Seam parents pooled together as much money as they could spare to put on one of the collective seasonal birthday celebrations 12 often did to make sure kids could at least see a bit of happy for getting through another year. What he remembers, clear like looking through the ripples of a clean spring, is Elizabeth Ash popping into his vision while he was laughing with a friend from school between songs. Her face, fittingly ashen, was imploring and wide-eyed. She’d beckoned him down to whisper in his ear. 

“Shady Jade just killed a Peacekeeper,” she had said, in the matter of fact way only a five year old could. Her dress had been azure blue, hemmed in white lace like an early evening summer sky speckled with clouds. Donnie Evergreen had felt the air and ground torn away from him in one moment. Since then, he’s been falling from nothing into nothing. Guilt, fear, responsibility, have become his fence, and despite his body leaving 12’s borders, his mind never does these days. 

As the rosy bloom of sunrise touches the edges of the window, Donnie Evergreen is dragged from a half-dream of a mutilated pair of fawns by a familiar sound. The fiddle notes are further away, CC must be at the far edge of the meadow now. He thinks of staying in bed, and turns over to commit to it, but his muscles move without much of his own input to stand only a few seconds later. He plods quiet through the Covey house, and picks his way through the meadow barefoot to where Clerk Carmine leans against an old oak with his fiddle. A patch of stunted burdock where his foot is stationed sways with each movement of his bow. 

He doesn’t acknowledge Donnie Evergreen sitting down, or minutes later when he begins to quietly sing along. The safe songs, name songs of the living and the calming or celebratory melodies of 12 slowly melt into the forbidden ones. Name songs of the departed, and the songs the Peacekeepers always keep an ear out for when the band performs. Donnie Evergreen’s memory of their lyrics is poked through with a million pinholes, the memory of their tunes a little dusty with disuse. He wonders what singing felt like before the fence went up, before the Covey caravan came to its final stop. When the sky and the birdsong travelled with them, but the scenery didn’t. It must have been a different kind of freedom, he supposes.

As he sings, he finds himself longing for a sunrise years ago. Before he or Shady Jade were old enough to worry about or understand the Reaping or the Capitol, or what their kith and kin had lost. For a time when Clerk Carmine had chided him for not finishing his breakfast and he hadn’t been taught not to ask why he was being told off. When Maude Ivory had had to explain to him how scant food might be sometimes, and how faraway any help was for them. When he was still clueless enough to look for clues. This morning he looks for none. He ties together no loose strands. He simply is, with melody vibrating in his chest. He simply sits beside his kin. They try to mourn, in their own way, but when the fiddle stops and they forge a path through the fescue back to the house, no wounds have been tended to. Despite their songs, only silence has finished its breakfast.  The mockingjays don’t join the chorus this morning.

“Tam Amber! You can’t expect us to do that,” Maude Ivory is exclaiming from in front of the stove as they return to the Covey house. 

“We need to eat, Maude Ivory,” Tam Amber says. His voice is level and his expression masked, but Donnie Evergreen can see the tightness at the corner of his father’s lip. No one expects him to, but Donnie Evergreen knows it’s his job to fix this before the argument upsets Elizabeth Ash. She’s watching from the overhang of the loft, owl-wide eyes and blanched cheeks. The weight of responsibility feels choking.

“I’ll take Elizabeth Ash out to hunt and forage after school today,” he says, settling lightly on the edge of one of their mismatched kitchen chairs. He can feel the eyes of the other Covey on him, but he focuses on the woodgrain of the old kitchen table.

“We can’t stop performing forever. This wedding will feed us through ‘til autumn if we stretch things right.” Clerk Carmine crosses his arms, like he and Tam Amber have already discussed this and knew the argument was coming. 

“Right after? This soon?” Maude Ivory’s voice jumps half an octave and Donnie Evergreen watches the older Covey soften to her. She’d been their Elizabeth Ash, once, he reminds himself. As much as she seems an adult to him, she’s still younger than Tam Amber and Clerk Carmine by a solid margin. The tremble of her lip only punctuates the thought, and Donnie Evergreen laces his fingers on the tabletop. 

“These aren’t our people,” Tam Amber starts. 

“They don’t work on our schedule. They don’t care about the Covey. They only liked Shady Jade for his looks and his dancing, they didn’t know him,” Clerk Carmine finishes for him. Donnie Evergreen grimaces. He knows they’re right, but he can also see out of the corner of his eye how close Maude Ivory is to crying.

“We can feed ourselves without it. I’ll take out tesserae starting next month. Two won’t get us far, but that’s all Shady Jade had and we made the thin months work,” he says. All three older Covey look at him with consternation. 

“Absolutely not,” Maude Ivory is the first and last to speak on it, “Two is more than enough for us to lose. We have three more years to worry about you, and then seven to worry about Elizabeth Ash for after that. We’re not sending another of our own to the Capitol.” 

 Another. Two. Talking about Lucy Gray is rare in this household. His eyes flick to the blanket-covered television set in the corner. The border of the quilt thrown haphazardly over the staticky box is trimmed in intermittent lace from one of Lucy Gray’s old performance dresses. Her songs play on their lips most performing nights. She still haunts this house and his elder kin like she lived here yesterday, but Donnie Evergreen never met her. She’s the ghost they set a place for at the table, but who he’s never broken bread with. 

He wonders, with a pang, if Shady Jade will even be allowed his apparition, or if his memory will fade like the memory of an unfenced District 12. Like the traces of freedom from before the Dark Days. Donnie Evergreen shakes the thought. If no one else will, he will remember his brother, he’ll name his firstborn after Shady Jade’s favorite spiky little flowers, he’ll write poetry, he’ll do whatever he needs to do. He will build himself to be a haunted house meant as home for exactly one ghost if that’s what it takes for someone to remember his cousin. And remembering means moving forward. Carrying those impermanent moments as far toward the future as his mortal body will allow. 

“Then they’re right,” he says, levelling his gaze on Maude Ivory, “we need to keep singing for our supper.” 

For the first time, the three elder Covey look at Donnie Evergreen the way he’s been trying to get them to look at him for years. Like he’s an adult. Like he knows what’s going on. Like he understands that there is darkness and the only way to fight it is to hold a little of it in your mouth. 

“Fine, but no happy songs, I couldn’t bear to sing any right now,” Maude Ivory says after a long moment of quiet.

“It’s a wedding!” Elizabeth Ash cuts in before any of the others have a chance, “There need to be happy songs!” Maude Ivory’s expression softens just a little at her daughter, and she goes to perch on the ladder to the loft, squeezing Elizabeth Ash’s hand. 

“Okay, maybe a few happy songs, then, meadowlark,” she says. 

The tension mostly dissolves, but Donnie Evergreen can feel the thread of it through the room, taut, as Clerk Carmine finishes breakfast. As Donnie Evergreen herds Elizabeth Ash off to get ready and then out of the house for the walk to school, he’s certain another argument will break out once the door closes behind them. 

He sees Elizabeth Ash to her classes with the younger kids, and then finds a group of boys lingering around the back entrance to the old, low-slung school building. One of the Mellark boys is tossing a stone idly between his palms, beside him Bascom Pie is crouched down to try to rub some of the coal dust out of the creases in his boots. Cham, the butcher’s son, is speaking animatedly until Donnie Evergreen stops near them to say good morning. The Mellark boy and Cham both eye him with an indiscernible expression he suspects might be mistrust, but Bascom chirps his usual hello in return. Donnie Evergreen gives a small wave and slips past them, not even trying to hide the confusion on his face. 

He pays more attention in school than usual. Most days, he messes with friends at the back of class or stares idly out the window. By the time they break for lunch, Donnie Evergreen has more or less puzzled out that he’s not as uninterested in the mechanisms of the mines as he thought. Or maybe it’s just a welcome distraction. He’s also figured out the suspicion; perhaps only one part suspicion, really, the other an uncertainty of how to treat him. Uncertainty over his seeming lack of grieving. There’s pain in Donnie Evergreen’s chest, but now that he’s out and following a normal schedule, it’s almost upsettingly easy to ignore. Still, the looks from his classmates mean he avoids socializing over the bit of bread and hard boiled goose eggs he brought to eat between classes. Instead he sits out on the small field beside the schoolhouse, in the shade of an old sycamore. His boots blend in with the earliest dropped fruits, brown hulls on the ground and brown cracked leather. 

Soon, there will come a cooler cast to the air, but there are a few weeks yet of sweltering heat left. That, mixed with a churning discomfort in his stomach, means he barely touches his food. Instead he leans his head back against the bark of the tree and breathes. In and out, trying to time his heartbeat to the rustling of the leaves in the warm breeze. He finds one small moment of peace before he pushes himself up to get back to learning about blasting caps. Even with a newfound interest, or at least engagement with keeping his mind on the here and now, the rest of the school day drags on like the last swallows in a warming glass of water.

Elizabeth Ash and Donnie Evergreen walk back to the Seam with a few other kids who live on the same side of the meadow as the Coveys. She jokes with the youngest girl of one of the families Donnie Evergreen doesn’t know well, and her laugh makes the walk a little lighter. When he finds himself thinking that he’ll miss her when he leaves, he nearly stops in his tracks. It hadn’t ever occurred to him that he’s decided to. But stumbling to keep up with the little pack of kids, eyes on his boots the way Shady Jade always used to take this walk, he realizes that it was decided the second it hit him how much the Covey have erased Lucy Gray. 

If silence is safety in the Covey house, then he’ll need to find his own home, hopefully somewhere on the edge of the district where he can scream into the forest. Where the last of the dying breed of jabberjays might pick up Shady Jade’s name and carry it into the hollers. He refuses to be the last one to ever say it.

When the Covey kids reach their crooked house, Donnie Evergreen almost forgets to drop his schoolbag before he’s out the door again. On the way to the fence by way of a detour at the Hob, he’s so distracted by thoughts of what he needs to do before dark that he nearly runs straight into Artie. She was looking down at something in her hands, which she shoves deftly into the pockets of her skirt. Her expression softens a little, but her expression doesn't have the same quality of pity a lot of their classmates had given him all day. Without thinking, he hugs her and buries his face in her shoulder. 

The fabric of her dress, merchant quality, is soft and smells of licorice or something like it. Her hand on his back nearly cracks his shell but he only trembles a little. No tears fall. Donnie Evergreen just clings to her for a few seconds before he lets go. 

“Hey,” she says, in a refreshingly normal tone.

“Hey.”

“Sorry to have not been able to make it this weekend, but I heard that the Covey didn't play.”

“Yeah. Shady Jade…” His voice dies in his throat and she shakes her head. Her hand finds his and squeezes softly. 

They walk together to the Hob, where he leaves Artie at the wide doorway and breaks off toward the fence. He has to wait twenty or thirty minutes for a group of Peacekeepers to quit milling about, but Donnie Evergreen slips into the cool of the forest with a few hours left until it gets dark. In the dappled sunlight and solitude, his body falls into habit; eyes out for movement or the telltale marks of certain plants, hands always lightly gripping his bow by string and grip. Meanwhile, his mind spirals. Memory and detail come in bright, clear chunks just like the light through the woods’ canopy. 

Slowly, the scabs come away and he begins to remember his brother’s staticky, rattling last breaths, too clear and then cutting away a bit. Like there was a microphone right against his jaw that switched off and the sound had to be picked up by one just a bit further away. Donnie Evergreen shudders at the amount he’s been forced to learn about the way they’re always listening. Without thinking, his eyes jump to the trees, seeking out any unusual thing there that might indicate the surveillance has extended beyond the fence. They once found a camera not too far from the meadow-side fence, but that’d been years ago. Still, there are times that even out here, he feels watched. 

Instead of a camera, Donnie Evergreen’s eyes settle on a pair of round greenish yellow ones. They’re attached to a bundle of brown and black mottled fur, one of the stray cats that aren’t common but aren’t exactly rare these days, relatively close to the fence where they can slip through and steal scraps no district citizen would usually dare to and be gone by morning. The ratty thing is crouched on a low branch, the fur between its ears sticking up at an odd angle. It looks skinny and adolescent, with only half a tail. 

“Hello,” Donnie Evergreen says, expecting it to startle and disappear into the brush, but it doesn’t. Its eyes stay firmly fixed on him. He shrugs, looking around. He hadn’t thought he’d gotten particularly close to the fence, but he realizes with a mixture of relief and hindsight-panic that he must have skirted along one of the dropoffs into the valley and come back around to almost the other side of the district while he followed a flock of turkeys. Through the trees, he can just make out the roof tiles of one of the Victor’s Village houses. 

“Well thanks for making me pay attention,” he mutters to the cat. He wanted to sound annoyed, but there’s some real warmth in his tone for a companion out here who’s just as much a mess as he is.  The cat continues to stare at him. 

“What?” he asks. Its half tail twitches and it lays its head down on one paw.  “Okay then, nutball.” Donnie Evergreen readjusts his bag and the turkey hanging from it on his shoulder and tries to decide if he should go back along the valley edge or continue his clockwise trek around the district. He hasn’t circumnavigated the fence in a couple years, and the dropoffs make him nervous when he’s this in his head, so he turns to continue his course. 

The ground is marshier than he remembers, close to the fence separating him and Victor’s Village. The twelve mansions sit quiet even if they’ve been seen to. Every year before Reaping Day, the Capitol sends a crew of Avoxes, Peacekeepers, and overseers, to undo the previous year’s disrepair and accumulation of black dust. The lawns never stay tended to, at least not for long. Not like anyone ever expects 12 to get another victory. Losing Lucy Gray? The Covey figure that was just as much a way to send a message as a period on the end of a very, very short story. Where there is smoke, there will not be fire, at least Donnie Evergreen doesn’t think so. Still. If things were just a little different, his cousin might have one day lived there. How weird it’d be to have to walk all the way from the Seam to see him, but how much better than never seeing him again.

He turns his eyes away from the houses’ too-wide lane and toward the stretch of wood and grass between him and the road out of town. Then his gaze settles on another thing he’d let somehow slip his mind; the roof of the new Peacekeeper base directly in the path he’d been intending to take back toward the Seam. He groans, and looks back to Victor’s Village, and the sky. Definitely too late to skirt the base as wide as he’d prefer, and nearly too late to turn around and get home before dinner, especially if he’d like to stop by the Hob. He doesn’t want to walk through the town square with turkeys hanging from his belt, especially with the Games still drawing meager crowds and plentiful Peacekeeper eyes.

Donnie Evergreen tests the fence around Victor’s Village anyway, as he makes his way back toward the valley. He startles a cottontail that had been about to bed down some fifteen yards away when he kicks the chain link in frustration with the patch job done after his early-teenage antics. His fingers tangle in the fence as he stares the mansions down with a smoldering hatred. Their gardens were replanted in late June. In the closest one, a small group of orange lilies have sprung up among the roses and hydrangeas. Trudging anticlockwise around the fence, he tries to remember where he last saw those lilies. The insides of the orange petals speckled red, always in soft ground that smells of moss and marsh. He knows he’s seen them before. 

One last glance back and he can see the cat disappearing into the grass, the young rabbit dangling from its mouth. It doesn’t afford him any acknowledgement, but he still silently congratulates it on its kill. He then turns, trips and lands painfully on his wrists as his foot sinks into a boggy hole. Swearing and muddy, he pulls himself to standing.

Once he’s back to the Seam nearly an hour later, Donnie Evergreen’s frustration has hardened to coal in his chest and he stalks toward the Covey house in a decidedly bad mood. He ignores the Hob entirely today, not even sparing it a glance. He barely notices the Peacekeepers standing on the last street before the Meadow before he barrels straight between them. Still, when he stops short their hands grip his arms and his collar hard. 

“We need some samples from you, boy.” Donnie Evergreen looks up at one of the few people he knows who’s significantly taller than him. The current Head Peacekeeper, reinstated after some sort of drama on the base early this year; Picus. His face is creased, with skin so pale it’s nearly transparent. Capitol born and bred. He won’t even meet Donnie Evergreen’s eyes. About to launch into an explanation, he’s cut off by Picus’ nervous companion and decides it’s much safer to keep his mouth firmly shut.

“We should probably have him charged for poaching, as well,” she says, nodding her head toward the mud-spattered turkey now strung to Donnie Evergreen’s belt.

“Hm.” Picus eyes him up and down. “We’ll decide back at the base.” The Head Peacekeeper’s one of his best customers for wild turkey. At least there’s the small comfort that Picus is only as likely to have him hanged as to confiscate the turkeys and pretend he saw nothing. Donnie Evergreen only half resists their dragging him back out of the Seam, letting his mind drift. 

Suddenly he remembers the flower. The last he saw it, Tam Amber had been transplanting the small bunch that had grown outside the Covey house in Donnie Evergreen’s earliest memories to sit right at the entrance to the Covey graveyard. It’d only survived that summer, but apparently the older Covey had to skip or dance around it whenever they went to visit the most recent graves there. 

Gray’s Lily. Rare, a gem of just these mountains. A ghost in the hills and one of his earliest plant identifications. Donnie Evergreen has never understood why it’s called that, when it’s so brightly colored. He’s never seen them growing in town before. He’ll have a long time to wonder about the peculiar bloom tonight, though. The Peacekeeper jail has a way of dragging clarity out of the mind kicking and screaming.

Chapter Text

Twenty-One ❧ Diluvian Games and Drowned Laurels

It doesn't get much darker than this; riding the train through the abyss. Left all the good ones behind, not because I wanted to, but because it was time. I've come a long way. Now let's just lie here, tell me how it's like fog out at sea. But you can't get to the point, so I doubt that I can give you all of me.

But we let ships collide, but we let ships collide. I jump into the waters. Every time I do, it's not even cold.  – Squalloscope

It may be hours, or half a day, but eventually Waterlye has to get up and search for food. She considers killing one of the bat creatures, but prefers her chances at the stream. She’s abandoned her squelching boots and socks, and the torn romper uniform. The air and ground are cool, spattered with occasional mistings of raindrops. Each gust and step up onto a shifting marble block is crisp. She reminds herself to focus on that clarity. 

She moves carefully around the sliding marble, through doorways and gaps in the whirling facades. Waterlye holds her bad hand to her chest and tries not to think of the unnatural split in it, the pain spiralling up her arm. When she gets to the riverbank, she can’t help but be a bit frustrated they took the dulled fishhook she’d tried to bring into the arena as a token. She paces the water’s edge with growing bitterness in the back of her throat from both the lack of food and the displeasure. Splashing into the flooded shallows where the river broke its initial containment, she keeps her eyes trained downward for movement. 

Unlike in true streams, young fish don’t dart from the drowned grasses. It makes sense, she supposes. The mutts only need to live a week, maybe two. What purpose would populating a full ecosystem of them do? As long as it looks close enough, it’s not like most viewers will know to search for those details, if they even know what a stream is supposed to look like. Past where the shore used to be and the dropoff, the current is heavier with the extra rainfall. Further out, the wall expands and contracts beyond the mostly-toppled fruit trees and pillars like folded paper being swiftly manipulated. A bird is calling somewhere, but it sounds like a siren. Repeating on and on with the same tone. It almost sounds like a child calling out for his mother.

Cannon fire brings Waterlye’s line on her mind tight and she reels it in fast. A hovercraft appears noiselessly above the orchards. Her attention is suddenly focused, eyes on her immediate surroundings and flicking toward the flashes she can see of the arena’s center. Relief and numb determination flood her every muscle in equal measure. Her stomach and hand become the last things on her mind as every bit of her hones in on finding the very last barrier between Waterlye and living for another ten, twenty, fifty years. Two pinpricks of clarity collapse into a singular north star. Her heart takes off in a burst of speed, matching time with a sudden wind howling around the arena. 

I will go home, she tells herself. It becomes a chant in the back of her brain. Her good hand falls to her one chance left. That sword which still hasn’t left her side. That old roman candle, the last of the bunch. 

It’s hard to pin down movement amid the waltz of walls, and she has to travel by their choreography, so she weighs her options. No matter who’s left, she has a good chance against them now. Either the last… day? However long it’s been. Either that’s killed the other two, or her last opponent has. Either way, they’ll be exhausted. 

Either way, all roads lead to that old central hub. The Capitol does love its cliches, and the cameras have all the best angles at the Cornucopia. There’s no use in letting them chase her there, she may as well make it look good. Favor from the viewers has gotten last tributes out of tougher situations than this in later dire moments. Even if sponsorships get awful expensive this late in the Games. 

Waterlye moves like a minnow through swaying reeds, half-turns and sidesteps putting her just out of reach of spinning walls. She dodges rusted and bent rebar, planks of wood peppered with nails, and sharp fragments of marble. The Gamemakers were kind enough to offer some improvised weaponry for what everyone knows will be the finale to this year’s show. The first Quarter Quell winner! She can almost taste it. Maybe for once she’ll get to keep a pearl or two legally . They have a way of reflecting everything around them in the most entrancing way. She’s always wished she could be like that, make the world into a delicately iridescent bubble. Exquisite and tough.

She’s shaking her head free of the overeager thoughts as she first catches sight of it. Not the Cornucopia, or movement. The sky is rippling. A calm tidepool broken by a bubble, but in reverse. The circles collapse in on themselves at the center, vague and indistinct warping of the mulberry sky. Every second and a half or so, another comes, and the brightness of the sky dims just quick enough to be mistaken for a blink. She’s surprised she even noticed it. Waterlye frowns at it as a faint, mechanical whining starts behind her and to the left. She’s just lifted her cold blue gaze to the river when she hears the crack of electricity and the sky goes fully dark.

She hits the ground like the boom is swinging wide in a jibe and a crew member didn’t hold their line. Flat in the grass, she rolls out of the way of a curved wall which is inching along the ground significantly slower than moments ago. It speeds up as the sky flickers on and off a few times as though it’s a television with bad reception, and then finally holds a quivering, seasick shade of violet. Clouds jump in and out of view with each little flash of the sky, accompanied by impotent spritzes of fog that dissipate long before they fall. 

Waterlye forces the confusion back down into her stomach and turns her attention back to the ground. This isn’t over yet. It won’t be until she hears that last cannon.

If the cannons are even working, kinda seems like this shouldn’t be happening, she thinks. It doesn’t matter. If she’s the last one standing they’ll still have to call the Games for this year somehow. Cautiously, she stands and moves gingerly through the groaning architecture. The inner ring of the arena seems eerie, now, less frantic. Like a salvage ship in the yards with a few instruments still working, a radio chirping every now and then as being on the fritz slowly winds its battery down. The tilt-a-whirl of ruins has done its job as much as she’d hate to admit it, though, and Waterlye finds herself facing the tail of the Cornucopia instead of its mouth. 

She doesn’t like how much of her eyesight is blocked now, and how easy it would be to hide from her here. Still, she skirts the horn and searches for any sign of life. When she’s mostly satisfied that she’s alone, she leans casually against the Cornucopia and waits. Around her, the arena continues what she can only imagine is its death throes. She’s no expert from 3 or anything, but Waterlye’s certain this thing must be taking a massive amount of power to run and it seems like that’s finally testing its limits now. It’s almost amusing, but she doesn’t have time to spare for a snort right now. Standing around is starting to drive her wild and it’s only been moments. Her muscles are elastic stretched and waiting to snap to action so she forces some looseness into them, shifting on her feat between loam, marble, metal. 

Avoiding the gaping holes still echoing with the sounds of rushing water in the tunnels, she begins a spiral out from the Cornucopia. The hunt will begin and end today. She’s spent enough time playing games. 

It’s frustrating, slow work, to sort through the whining and wheeling columns without getting turned around. Waterlye keeps track of progress by noting slivers of shattered windows in neat technicolor arrays. Ivory here, daffodil there. Then a metallic flash between toppled trees and tilting walls. Blue-green fabric and blood-speckled coppery skin. A flash of sage green at the wrist indicates a scrap of fabric tied there; he must be a hand down too. His axe is clutched in the other and his belt is heavy with two knives.

The boy from 7 hasn’t spotted her yet. Waterlye drops to a crouch. She perches on the base block of one of the columns, so it moves with her tucked against it and keeps her mostly hidden from view. It almost feels like riding waves. This hunt will be easy; every bit of her feels natural here. She’s only a handful of yards away when her attention is dragged from her catch, though. 

If every noise Waterlye has ever heard could be condensed into a moment, that’s the sound that rings through the arena. The cacophony is too complete to differentiate any single tone or give her any idea of where it comes from. It envelopes her entirely. Falling to the ground is involuntary, she doesn’t register raising her hands to her ears until she feels the sticky, congealed blood on her cheek. Fire rings through her ears, and colors pop and then float in her vision. It lasts only fractions of seconds, but it leaves her stumbling as she tries to come back up to her knees. The whining from the walls is gone, replaced by a distantly keening silence and the roaring of her own pulse. 

As soon as she’s shakily up to her feet, she scans her surroundings. The whirling and blinking clouds in the sky have started flashing with pink lightning. A tree not too far from her melts like butter on a hot day, leaving papery mush behind on the ground and an ugly metal skeleton where it once stood, crowned by a blinking green lens. Every image is accompanied by echoes of itself when she turns her head, but she finds the boy from 7 still shakily finding his own feet. He’s still wearing his boots, torn and sodden though they are.  Focusing on their singular point, Waterlye breathes. He still hasn’t noticed her, and moves with less urgency, just a grim determination. She’ll outrun him in the soft grass if she needs to, as long as she keeps her eyes on the marble. She tucks herself behind the pillar again.

You have the upper hand, she tells herself, you will win this.

And then the clouds break. The image of them against the watery purple light above is almost unchanged, still jumping in and out of sight, flashing and distorting, angry then gone then quiet and then angry again. But the puffs of mist suddenly stop, and the Gamemakers’ sky suddenly appears to be falling.

It isn’t rain. It’s sheets of water, hard, fast, from too far up. When one catches Waterlye’s shoulder she feels her joint pop and a new point of pain bursts on her left side. Her gaze finds the boy from 7. He’s bewildered, and behind it, defeated. The first sheet to hit him catches his outstretched arm and he drops his axe, pulling the now unnaturally bent limb to his chest with an unconcealed gasp. Whether on a whim or because of some deepseated indignation, she makes the stupidest decision she’s made since she voted herself into this sodden arena. 

You will win , she tells herself, but not like this. Not like fucking this. This isn’t fair to him. This isn’t fair to his family. Waiting it out would be the coward’s way. Right?

She snatches a crumbled piece of marble the size of her palm and hurls it at the pillar closest to him, gesturing wildly before she turns on her heel and darts back the way she came. 

The previously dancing walls are collapsing, some to dust or sinking into the soil, others under their own weight just topple forward and rest in the grass which seems not to be faring much better. The arena is deeply diseased. Waterlye can’t hear it but she imagines the audio must be incredibly unpleasant for viewership right now, which is, at least, some small satisfaction. Her eyes focus on dodging malfunctioning machinery buried just under the surface of the grass. Spouts of sparks and smoke obscure her vision and cloud her lungs, but the shattered glass guides her back. Daffodil. Ivory. Silver. Emerald green. As her hearing slowly dissolves into muffled ringing layered over the off-key chorus of disrepair around her, she can briefly make out the sound of wet boots slapping marble behind her. Good.

She wants one fight that’s fair. One fight where she looks good before she wins. One last image for the Gamemakers, her flag hoisted higher than the Capitol’s for once. A sailor made victor, a district girl winning or dying with dignity. It would mean something for District 4, more than the informal alliance between them and the regular victors. It would mean sitting at the table. So Waterlye’s casting her net, and she intends to bring in her catch today.

Her foot finds ground colder and damper than it should be on the next step. The one after that, she can just make out the familiar sound of a splash as her legs are misted with cold water. In front of her, what had been the ring river has burst its banks and is swelling toward her with a hunger only rising tides know. Waterlye staggers backward and only barely dodges the stumbling boy from District 7.  She notices now that the hand she’d assumed was bad is just tied with a ribbon. While the other, the one hit full force by the water, now does hang limply at his side and he seems clumsier with the ribboned wrist, it’s clearly not injured. He’s, for all intents and purposes, also trapped. Backing away from the rising river, pressing close to the overhang of a crumbling wall. He looks pathetic, a cornered and injured seal. Without thinking, her hand knots in his collar and she drags him away from the river, darting between architecture and the few still-standing pines. She manages just barely not to stumble. He manages just barely not to struggle. She still isn’t sure why she’s doing this beyond appearances. 

Whatever, there will be time to wonder about all of that after she kills him. Fair and square. On her terms. The clearing at the center of the arena opens in front of her. The ground, marred with rubble and the infrastructure of the Games, is still intermittently streaked in wet black soot. One last dash and she’s at the horn, just barely clear of another curtain of water closing on her play. She practically throws the boy from 7 into the Cornucopia as she dives in after him.

“Why–?” he’s starting to ask but her knife is at his throat and instinctively the confusion and shock seems to harden in him. He mutters something she can’t catch between the fading ringing in her ears and the slamming deluge on the metal above their heads. He takes half a step to the left while he places a clumsy, ribboned hand on one of the knives in his belt. She mirrors him. In the dim lavender light, they circle each other. Two hands on a clock counting down til one muscle twitches just a little too fast. The slow waltz of time mimics the slow march into disrepair the arena still dutifully performs outside.

It’s his resolve that snaps first. He snatches for the knife and she lunges. He catches her half by surprise when he blocks her sword with his already injured arm. The bone crunches under the blade, and metal lodges in flesh. In the split seconds it takes her to wrench her weapon free, Waterlye feels the cold and foreign force of his knife burying in her chest. When she kicks him away with the knife still in his hand, she feels heat coarse down her abdomen, her stomach suddenly slick. She ignores red in her periphery and the way her breath comes short now, the feeling of bubbling against her lung. She wrangles dizziness like she has a swordfish on the line. It pulls her forward, but she pulls right back. 

She moves around the other tribute, water moving around stone, blood moving around bone. His knife catches her cheek despite her feint to the side, but her sword catches the dip between his ribs, and she has no intention of waiting to see who bleeds out first. Before she wrests the blade from his chest, she twists. Once it’s free, she watches him stagger and the cloth over his heart darken. She slashes for his throat.

He falls.

There is no cannon shot. There’s no fanfare. There is the grinding and wailing of an arena on its deathbed, and the warmth of her blood dripping down her skin. There is a crash, as all of the water comes down finally. All at once. The Cornucopia floods to her knees. The boy’s body floats on a red cloud. Spyle, she thinks his name might have been.

Wading from the horn, the entire arena is drowned. The flickering sky reflects from a million fractured ripples, a few feet of water across every inch of the battlefield. 

Waterlye thinks vaguely of the old Games, or what the people back in 4 call the old Games at least. So long ago no one’s sure how many years anymore. When the seeds of the forefather thoughts of Panem were planted in arenas called Coliseums. They’d flood them, sometimes. Send out great naval fleets upon the water to reenact battles. How she’d thought of glory when her father told her those old stories. 

How glory looks so full of the grime of a flood when you can see it up close. Floods aren’t pretty things. They rip up what’s better left underground, lift family secrets from crawl spaces, and sweep the dead and decaying along with them. Displacement is the weapon of floods, just as much if not more so than disorientation. Displacement and transparency brought through murk. Waterlye has never felt quite so displaced.

The water splashes merrily away as she makes her way back toward the pedestal where she’d first been waiting to start the hunt. It doesn’t care about the trail of diluted crimson she leaves in her wake. If she cared more, she’d be worried about the mutts in the water smelling it. But it’s over now. Right? She won?

Just one left. Her. 

They have to name a victor, even if the arena is breaking down. Right? She won?

When she reaches the tall pillars, half have fallen. But the one marked with the numerals for twenty-five still stands. The mutt at the twenty-fourth has been mercifully dispatched by its own fallen pillar. For reasons unknown to her, Waterlye pauses for a moment to pat its unmoving head on her way to sit beside the twenty-fifth. The water flows over her legs and she stretches them out toward the Cornucopia. Leaning her head back, she watches. There is no hovercraft. But there is a slow deterioration beginning at the horizon. All at once, then, the lilac gives way to bright, clear blue. The handful of trees and grass still left around her attempt to disassemble themselves into an approximation of confetti paper, though only a few spouts of them make it into the air.

Finally, she can’t help it. She laughs. 

They fully broke it, didn’t they? The Gamemakers absolutely botched their own plans. They spun the wheel too hard and snapped it clean off the rudder. The confusion train has run out of coal. All that’s left is blue, blue sky, paper, and sparkling city walls disintegrating in front of everyone in the entire nation’s eyes. 

They can’t even control their gameboard, but the Capitol still manages to keep their thumb on an entire country. It’s ironic. It’s hilarious. What a fragile line her captors walk. Waterlye laughs until darkness closes over her. 

The next indeterminate moments slip in and out, a haze of white and black, the orange of too-bright lights in Waterlye’s eyes and the blue circles behind her eyelids when they disappear. Pain becomes her north star, her ever-constant. She hitches her dinghy to it and lets the waves do as they will. It’s not like her body has strength in it for anything else. She blinks and it’s light. She blinks and it’s dark. The flock of shadowed Capitol doctors around her shift in height and the features that swim through shallow vision. Her consciousness is tidal and collects in pools at the edges of the room. Her good wrist is bound in rigid metal. They’ve cut her clothes free of her. There’s a war-torn border of stitches below the right side of her collarbone. 

And there’s no telling how long it’s been until finally the ocean comes in with a roar. Waterlye’s unsure how many times she drifted in and out, but when she comes back to her body she does it fully and with a distinctly terrifying realization. The first question on her mind is not if she’s alright, where she is, how long it’s been. She doesn’t even ask herself if the Games are over because her subconscious has already answered that question.

What Waterlye asks herself is who she needs to kill next to get out.  

It shakes her. She quiets the thought and raises her hands to her face only to be gripped by another, entirely separate terror. She swears… she can still feel the agony of her left hand. The echoes of infection up her arm. But when she lifts it… it’s. Just. Not. There. 

The shriek startles her, beginning as a bubble in her throat and then exploding out of her to be silenced just as quickly. A pack of white coats and unfamiliar faces slam through the door of her tiny white room. The doctors descend on her and this time, she doesn’t drift into darkness. She goes down with her teeth sunk into starched linen and skin.

I will go home, she tells herself as a needle slides into her arm. It’s a promise, but it’s full of the venom of a threat.

Chapter Text

Twenty-Two ❧ Ovivory

I hate my mind and how it never seems to foster any peace. And how when I get sad, I sit there and just sight-read Für Elise. And every time that I get up, I get up just to fall and sometimes I wonder why I bother getting up at all. And I think I'm running out of time to save the world before it kills me.

Life is a long and uphill climb and I throw myself off cliffs just 'cause it thrills me. I think I'm running out of time to save the world before it kills me.

Life is a long and uphill climb, and I throw myself off cliffs just 'cause it thrills me  – Tobi LaCroix

Donnie Evergreen is patently sick of jail cells and he’s only seen them a handful of times in his life. When the Peacekeepers slam the door shut behind him, he sinks to the floor and groans, resolving to never ever let even the slightest hint of his appearance slip again. He’ll set his nose to whatever grindstone the stupid whiteclad soldiers want him to if it lets him remember his cousin and he doesn’t have to see the inside of a plain block of concrete even one more time. At least this time the other Covey aren’t with him. 

The other Covey. The thought echoes through him. When Donnie Evergreen shifts his boot on the bleached floor, the sound echoes with his turning brain. There’s little to think about in four grey walls broken only by a few inches of barred window on the far wall, a difference from the last time he was here. As much as he wishes to think of family, of the house he should feel less misgivings about regarding as a home, he cannot. His thoughts are tangled green spaces with drawn borders between edible and ornamental. Flavor, poison, and nutrition. Every stem splays against the walls. Every leaf imprints its veins into the concrete of Donnie Evergreen’s closing eyelids. Lilies and pine trees. Hawthorn and holly. Katniss and burdock. The birds that scatter their seeds have feathers in their wings with barbs just like the veins of leaves, shafts just like the stems. 

A mockingjay breaks the pre-dawn silence with a familiar and melancholy tune. As he listens closer, Donnie Evergreen can hear the faint chorus of its kin and the drilling of a woodpecker. Best as any of them try, none can properly replicate the exact sound of a mourning fiddle player playing to the mourning doves or the snake rattle slipped inside the bout of his instrument. He wants to, but he does not hum along to the refrain of ‘The Goose and the Common.’

So much for silence, huh, CC? thinks Donnie Evergreen, to conceal as best he can from himself that he’s hiding in silence now. He turns into the corner and finds himself tapping the toe of his shoe against the cement wall. A little set of three. Just like Shady Jade does. Used to do, he has to remind himself and somehow, that hurts more than the looks at school or wandering numb and alone outside the fence. He digs his palms into his eyes and curls his knees into his chest. 

Minutes pass, and in a room with no feedback beyond the slowly lightening sliver of window above him, Donnie Evergreen’s body slowly rids itself of the poison of memory. His gaze drifts between the raised textures of different hands applying cement to this cell. No matter how uniform the Capitol tries to make its infrastructure, hands will always be needed to apply the cement and final touches. Humanity seeps through the cracks. Just like the Covey do.

The other Covey, the thought comes floating back, and with it dread comes to nest in his stomach. Maude Ivory might be worried sick, up all night. CC’s already taken things hard enough with Shady Jade. Elizabeth Ash was already barely keeping it together on her way to school yesterday, no matter how nice she played it all off. She’s good at hiding her pain. Tam Amber’s the only one who’s got a chance at keeping them together.

He’s never been particularly close to his father. Most Seam kids would call theirs “Pa” but that seems almost too personal. He’s not even sure what Tam Amber’s favorite color is. Donnie Evergreen gets the impression his father’s never come close to having a favorite person, he’s just good at trying people out before they realize there aren’t more words to be found at Tam Amber’s core. Donnie Evergreen’s father is a deep void, something from a bygone time. An outsider among outsiders. 

Donnie Evergreen’s fist connects with the cement before he can stop it. He doesn’t want to be an outsider anymore. Born Seam, always Seam. After all, wasn’t walking that tightrope line between the margins of the districts what put Shady Jade in that arena? When the thoughts of his cousin come, they don’t stop springing up. They’re like chives or mint, waging war on the wildflowers around the Covey house. Something to be garnered and some beauty to be lost. Donnie Evergreen buries his face in his knees and smells iron as his knuckles brush his cheek. No matter how much he begs them to, no tears come. Parts of him want to tear this room apart, to tear himself apart and pound on the walls until he’s bloody and exhausted. But most of him is something worse. 

Just numb. Just still. The sun rises against the slim window and crawls out of sight. A tray of less-than-tessera-grain-quality bread and unidentifiable gravy slides under his door sometime close to noon, followed by an unpeeled, boiled egg. The egg rolls loose on the concrete. Donnie Evergreen’s hope rolls with it, teetering on every divot in the floor. He wonders how long he’ll sit here, what they’ve found about him besides the poaching. He never even considered being at the mines the day of the fire. He’s barely even seen the shafts. They’re deep and twisting and have haunted him in intermittent nightmares since the first class field trip down there.

He really can’t think of anyone who’d start a mine fire right now honestly. Even the Chances usually quiet down just a little until after the Games are over. And the fires do happen at random sometimes. But something feels off. Explosives, Donnie Evergreen vaguely remembers being mentioned. He nudges the egg with his toe. It rolls some more. Who would plant explosives now? It just doesn’t track.

The sun continues its arduous path, the light in his cell reddens and dims. Another tray, another egg. Donnie Evergreen resigns himself to spending the night here as he absentmindedly clacks the two eggs together. The percussion is bittersweet. He finds himself repeatedly coming back to the little three-beat-and-rest that Shady Jade always seemed to fall back to when his thoughts were elsewhere. Tap, tap, tap. Pause. Tap, tap, tap. Pause. Tap, tap, crack.

He sighs and squints at the egg in the dim light. He couldn’t be less hungry, but it’s too ingrained to avoid wasting food for him to put the little thing back down. He puts his back to a wall while he peels it. His hands are shaking a little, so it’s probably a decent idea to eat but when he lifts a scrap of white to his lips, he can’t help but gag a bit. It’s a strangely familiar kind of bitter.

When Donnie Evergreen puts together why it’s familiar he stops fighting his stomach’s churning at the taste. He doubles over, wretching. Only bile comes up alongside the tiny white mass, but he forces up as much as he can as immediate anxiety grips his chest. The trembling turns to spasms as the pain sets in. It’s like fire that sparks from his throat to the tip of every nerve, and it comes in waves. He balls himself as tightly as he can on the floor, suddenly shivering hard and feeling a chill deeper than bone tear straight through him after every wave. His mind reaches out in a thousand directions, to regrets, fears, family. He knows there’s nothing he can do, though. There’s no one else to fill the table with meat. He can’t make people not miss him if he goes and it’s not like saying goodbye to himself would do anyone any favors. The last desperate grab in his blurring thoughts is at least some small comfort. The memory of a melody none of them remember the words to. Hummed late at night when the Covey kids are young or sick. He can only remember the tune in times like these. 

Donnie Evergreen welcomes the warmth of darkness slipping over his consciousness with eagerness that would surprise him if he had the capacity to be taken aback right now.

That capacity returns in full force when he finds his eyes opening again. The cell is bright with morning light, the dandelion yellow caste of a day already shaping up to be insufferably warm spins with his vision. Donnie Evergreen blinks, then resigns to closing his eyes altogether when he finds it helps the splitting pain in his head. Every muscle feels sore and overworked. He flexes each one slowly, reassuring himself his body is still whole, responsive, real, and alive. He’s still cold, still shaking. But he’s definitely alive unless the after looks like a Peacekeeper jail cell. 

Slowly, his brain starts to rid itself of fog. He opens his eyes cautiously and finds the pain not gone but more manageable to ignore. Donnie Evergreen throws a reproachful look at the trays and eggs still on the floor before he arranges himself in the corner to wait. Poison, he concludes, but why?

Executions in 12 are public affairs. The Capitol makes an example wherever they can. If they can make something a spectacle, they will. That’s one of the infallible truths of life in Panem, everyone knows it. He’d expected he’d be going up the rope this morning, honestly. Thievery is punishable by death, and poaching wildlife that technically belongs to the Capitol? That’s even worse. Donnie Evergreen’s brain spins like a pinwheel. Why poison him? No one would see. No one would…

The Covey might figure it out. If they didn’t know, they’d suspect. They’d be furious. It might be enough to incite a response, at least enough of one to excuse a summary extermination. The Peacekeepers have been getting orders from higher up to put more pressure on the Covey to assimilate or act out enough to punish for years now. One excuse would be all the Capitol would need. Color doesn’t look good for them, not in the middle of the Seam. It reminds everyone that being born in the districts doesn’t make anyone less human. 

Donnie Evergreen spits on the floor and winces at the taste on his tongue. He’s getting unbearably thirsty but  he knows asking for water when he hears footsteps outside of his cell every few hours would be a fool’s errand. And anyway, he’s smarter than to trust anything he’s given here now. Fear and anger are beginning to loop back around into a kind of melancholy boredom by the second or third time he hears those steps. The fourth brings only a distant numbness. He’s begun finding shapes on the walls and making himself wait to swallow.

No food comes at noon today. A terrible thought comes to Donnie Evergreen; they probably think the eggs killed him. There’s no telling how long it’ll be before the Peacekeepers come in to collect his corpse. Maybe long enough he’ll go the way of the kids he’s seen shrivel away on the television when the Capitol’d scouted arenas in District 10 or the high deserts tucked away in corners of 2 and the Games had gone on long enough that dehydration became an issue. The thirst gnaws at his gut and he tries not to worry about it. It will happen or it won’t. There’s nothing he can do. 

Donnie Evergreen is giving into the boredom-driven thought of just trying to sleep the time away when there’s a change to the sound of the patrol outside. Two sets of shoes this time. One’s the slapping artificial rubber of Peacekeeper boots, but the other sounds almost routine. Wood and leather. The mixed material makes him think merchant, and the voice he can just make out through the thick door confirms it. His heart soars. Even though his muscles ache and protest, he shuffles to sit closer to the door.

“Thanks bunches, I won’t be more’n a minute!” Artie’s voice is chipper but he can hear some strain in it. She’s worried, really worried. When Vireo responds, his own voice cautious and wavering, Donnie Evergreen understands why. 

“Okay… just… be quick. You’re really not supposed to be in here. The Commander said anyone who’s not an officer needs to stay away from his cell until tomorrow and… you know.”

“He wouldn’t kill Donnie Evergreen, he likes turkey too much.” 

The silence hangs outside the door for a long moment. Donnie Evergreen can practically see the uncomfortable way Vireo shifts on his feet before giving a nervous smile and moving away from the cell. 

“I’ll keep an eye out for you, Artie, but I can’t promise anything.”

“I know. Thanks, sweetheart.” Outside, there’s a clanking, and the distant sound of a different door opening and closing. Artie waits a few seconds before he watches his door shift a bit and hears her speak, a little closer now. 

“Donnie Evergreen?”

“Don’t wear it out,” he tries to answer her in his usual casual tone but it comes out as a croak, voice rusty from thirst and disuse. He clears his throat but it still feels as though it’s sticking to itself. She doesn’t laugh like she normally would, but he can hear relief in the sharp exhale of a breath she’d been holding. 

“You’re alright,” she says, and her voice is hoarse now too. 

“Oh, sweetling, don’t cry, I’m fine. Just thirsty.” While he speaks, he relaxes into the familiarity of focusing on someone else’s problems instead of his own. 

“I’ll ask Vireo to bring you some water,” she says. Her voice is cautious, testing the waters on a cold lake. He imagines the nervous twist of her hand just under her chin, nails searching for some purchase of uneven skin. He wishes he could hug her, or tell her things will be alright without feeling like he’s lying. 

“I wouldn’t drink it, if it came from them,” he returns. He tries to keep his tone light, breezy. 

“Even Vireo?”

“Even Vireo,” he says, more resolute than he feels. There’s quiet and a shuffling outside the door. In his imagination, Donnie Evergreen watches her shift in her shined brown shoes. 

“I’m going to get you out. I know you didn’t do anything.”

It’s his turn to pause while he tries not to snort. 

“Artie, if my number’s up, it’s up. Even something sweet as you can’t change what they want.” The echo of the truth of it in his gut makes him feel hollow.

“Money talks louder than sugar,” she says without even waiting a beat for him to finish speaking. “We’ve been in talks to sell the shop off for a couple months. The deal went through. Ma wants me to sign on to the Peacekeepers but you know me.” He can practically hear her mischievous smirk. It almost distracts him from what she’s saying. “I like my coins with some in the pocket and some for friends.”

“Artie,” he starts but she hushes him with an urgency that stops the words in his throat. Peacekeeper boots slap across concrete and there’s a hushed exchange that Donnie Evergreen can’t make out outside his cell. He can tell they’re about to make her leave. Despite the wretched feeling of his throat, he hums as he hears her shoes retreating and her voice raising in argument. He can’t sing her out today, but it’s still better than saying goodbye. 

The afternoon dissolves slowly into evening. His thoughts continue spiralling, but hearing one of his girls’ voices was a satisfying enough breath of fresh air that most of them spiral around her, and then the rest of the people he knows. The Stouts have been struggling with keeping the sweets shop afloat for a year or so now. Old Ellabeth Stout spends too much on wagers and white liquor these days, though he’d never say that out loud. Selling the shop comes as no surprise, but Artie, always precious with her coins, suggesting she might spend them on bribes for him comes as a mild one. He knows he can’t convince Artie to do or not do anything, though. 

What do the Covey think has happened to him, he wonders? Are Clerk Carmine and Maude Ivory searching the woods? Has Tam Amber had some somber conversation with a Peacekeeper, never betraying that he might be worried? Elizabeth Ash… oh, Elizabeth Ash. Donnie Evergreen doesn’t want to think about what losing her two cousins would to do the poor girl. So he doesn’t. He rests his chin on his knees and stares at the congealed gravy on the trays in front of him. He slides in and out of consciousness the way one only can when given nothing to focus on, and no clue of what comes next. Waiting and not knowing become the beast. Sleep would be a reward his brain refuses to offer, but wakefulness requires input. Maybe this really is the after, he muses as the sunbeams march in a thin line further and further across the room. 

It’s dark, when the door finally scrapes open. The air of the hallway is cooler, fresher. The Peacekeeper in the door is backlit.

“Donnie Evergreen? Come with me,” says the Peacekeeper. He can’t place her voice, and barely recognizes his own when he responds. 

“Just Donnie.” The words don’t feel as foreign in his mouth as he expected. It’s odd how easy it is to cut a limb from a family tree. Maybe the connection had been waiting to be broken, slowly rotting at the heartwood and making the branch sag with every freeze and thaw. He thinks of the cuttings of willows which can grow their own roots from just a twig, and of the way the Peacekeepers felled acres of forest for the new base without thought or effort. Perhaps diversifying the portfolio of foliage in this forest is the only way to make sure there’s still green for summer, orange for autumn, the cold black bark that makes midwinter tea, or the soft white flowers downy serviceberry puts out in the spring. It’s… surprisingly easy, to think of hiding his color to protect it. Leaving home to protect at least one sapling from the Capitol. Just Donnie. He’ll find himself a surname later.

If he can escape the hanging tree, at least. The outlook isn’t good, as he’s led down the hall. The Peacekeeper’s face is set in a cold forward stare and she won’t look at him. Either she knows him despite him not recognizing her and feels distaste at what she’s doing, or she’s new and there’s no bank of memories of Sundays at the Hob to ingratiate him to her. He counts her footsteps and keeps his head down. Donnie’s got a feeling if he gets out of this one, he’ll be keeping his head down a lot more in general from here on out. He’d rather not be caught up in an extermination.

The new base is a maze of hallways, connected unlike the not-so-temporary temporary structures that the old one had. The Peacekeeper leads Donnie down winding halls that feel like they sink further and further into the soil before they climb a steep staircase back to ground level. There’s a siren somewhere deeper in the ground, wailing out, and birds, probably jabber jays, cry out in harmony with it. Coming up to light again is a welcome reprieve. They pass a door propped open just enough to let breeze in and despite the futility of hope, he can’t help but look at it.

It’s a cruel irony that out beyond it he can see that curving path toward the tree. Are you, are you, coming to the tree… The refrain becomes a contagious plague passing between his thoughts. His brain never allows it to go beyond a few lines, the same as when he practices a string of chords and can’t get the last few right. Over and over again the words tumble in his brain. A cold fear finally finds the will to crystalize in his chest. Donnie might be walking to his death. He’s almost relieved when he’s shackled to a table in another small concrete room and the Peacekeeper takes a seat across from him. 

The questioning is long, harsh. Donnie would call it unfair if fair had a meaning anymore to him. But it doesn’t end with his head in a loop, so it goes about as well as he could hope. Dawn is brimming on the edge of the district’s distant mountains when he’s lead toward the town square. His escort, some ten Peacekeepers and a stray kitten which has half of them enthralled, mill about while Donnie stands and waits for further direction. All he knows is his punishment is lashing, and that he will not die today. At least if he behaves. He can nearly feel the weight of the bags under his eyes, but he stands straight and tall as the merchants slowly begin to go about their days and take notice of the group assembled in the square. 

No order for assembly needs to go out. District 12 knows its place, and its routine, now. Once the Marches catch sight of the Peacekeepers and Donnie standing there in chains, the word gets out quickly. It’s when the Seam folk not needed in the mines begin to trickle out toward the center of town that he knows the show’s supposed to start soon. He tries to prepare his brain for the physical pain he knows is soon to come but isn’t exactly sure how to brace for a strike he’s never felt before. He avoids the eyes of kids he knows from school, still blinking sleep out of their eyes as they finish fastening their buttons or tying their shoes. 

His eyes follow lines of coal dust into the square, and land on Holly Monroe. She stands beside one of the March kids, who’s fidgeting nervously with his cuff. There’s concealed distaste in her eyes. It’s not for him, Donnie knows. It’s for the process. It almost makes him smile.

But then there’s the tug, the shove, the reading of his sentence, and sound of the whip. There’s the tearing of fabric and the blinding of pain. It’s all he can do to keep standing against the crude sawhorse they’ve drug out for this purpose. His vision becomes a kaleidoscope. After the first dozen lashes, the pain just becomes a haze. More and more are layered on top. He can feel the blood begin to trickle down his ribcage. His vision coyly dips in and out of focus. Donnie’s not even really aware of when each new sting is ignited in his back after a certain point, and he certainly doesn’t register when the lashes stop coming. 

Familiar and unfamiliar voices mix around him but his eyes won’t focus. When hands release and try to lift him, he tries to struggle free. Fabric and sun burn against each mark on his shoulders. He simply doesn’t have the strength. Donnie gives in while he’s pulled up to half-standing, half-stumbling. He fights to stay standing, to keep his clumsy feet moving. The trek back to the Seam must take an hour or two but time stretches and bunches around him. He can’t keep track of his vision, who’s guiding him and propping him up as they fumble back toward the Covey house. Time is even further away.

When they get home, he won’t cross the threshold. He’s not sure why, but his body simply won’t let him take another step past the first stair up to the door. So his envoy lay Donnie in the grass. Splayed on his stomach, pressed to the soil, he tries to find a center and slowly begins to differentiate voices. Maude Ivory. Rye. Bascom. Holly. Half the March family. Something soothing is spread against his skin but it’s too hot and the pain makes his vision blink out again. 

“The Games are over.” The sound of Clerk Carmine’s voice is what rouses Donnie from the unconsciousness. CC’s hand is tight around his shoulder, keeping him from rolling onto his back. There’s a fiddle abandoned in the wilting summer grass between them. 

“For good?” his voice falters with false hope.

“For this year.” Clerk Carmine rummages beside him and offers Donnie a metal cup. Without thinking, he half empties it. The water is warm from sitting in the summer night but it’s possibly the best drink Donnie’s ever had. He slowly sits up with a groan and feels the dizziness of pain and bodily exhaustion try to take him back down to the ground. 

Above the two Covey, a blanket of stars sit still. They haven’t changed, really, since Shady Jade died. Since Donnie was a kid. Since before the Covey settled here. He almost wishes they wouldn’t watch and wait without interfering. If stars have the privilege of watching humanity’s games, and falling over them in silly showers of misplaced wishes, shouldn’t they at least help?  

“I’m alive,” Donnie says, as though it means something.

“Yeah.” Relief touches the edges of Clerk Carmine’s voice, but the silence between them is pregnant and they let it sit long enough it’s bursting at the seams, ready to deliver. CC does the midwifery. 

“I’m sorry,” the elder Covey begins. Donnie doesn’t let him finish the thought.

“Why? For what?”

“I didn’t take care of Shady Jade like I should have. I was a bad… parent.”

Donnie pauses for a moment. It’s a confusing line of thought. He’s watched Clerk Carmine grieve his cousin, raise his cousin, do his best for being only a dozen years older or so. 

“You weren’t even his dad. Your brother fucked up.” Donnie groans as he shifts to sit cross-legged on the grass. He looks up to the sky so he doesn’t have to look at his uncle. 

“Well I promise I’ll do better with you.”

“What? Being a parent? I’m not yours either.”

“I want to try, Donnie Evergreen,” Clerk Carmine says. Donnie can hear him tilting his head up to look at the stars, too. His full Covey name suddenly sounds strange to hear in someone else’s voice. Donnie stows that feeling deep in his stomach. It would only upset CC to know he’s decided to leave.

“I’m okay.”

“I don’t think any of us are okay.”

They sit and watch the stars. Donnie finishes the cup of water.

“We need to keep making music, we need to make ourselves part of this place but our own part,” Clerk Carmine finally says.

“Silence is safety,” is all Donnie can think to respond with. 

Chapter Text

Twenty-Three ❧ Keelhauled

I want to help you (on sea), I want to help you unsee. I want to help but if I help you, I can't help me. And if I go unhelped, what help can I be? But what if everything is okay? What if everything is easy for once? Maybe everything can be easy for once. Maybе everything can just… be okay. 

Yay.

Maybе that isn't a psychopomp, maybe that's our lifer Hoopoe, maybe that little Grim Reaper will grow up to be a lighthouse keeper. Hope. I hit the deck, a cannonball from a diving board on the crow's nest. Best leave the stunts to the unprofessionals. – Stephan Nance

Waterlye watches the shadows spin in her glass of posca, the reflection of the ceiling fan turns a still red lake into a wine-purple sea. It’s cool, inside the president’s penthouse. Especially chilled to a perfect temperature. She’s never seen anyone sweat here. 

She sits beside the window and tries to focus on anything but the point of her body that every ounce of her brain wants to lean toward. Missing a hand is not an experience she ever thought she’d have. Not an expected expense for living. Her arm just ends now, somewhere like two inches south of her elbow, and it constantly aches. The kind of pain you can’t get away from. Even sleep is no relief. The sensation tries to convince her, in some cruel twist, that she still even has the thing.

She empties her glass and her eyes settle on the president’s. Blue on blue. Northern ocean and Appalachian iced over lake. The lake is unblinking, the ocean’s tide betrays a storm.

“You and me,” she says before he has a chance to start the conversation, he’s the first person she’s talked to since the hospital and the past few days have been hell, wandering his rose garden and avoiding his cousin, “we’re in this together. Me and you. I understand, don’t worry.”

Coriolanus Snow looks at Waterlye with half-masked confusion which quickly dissolves to amusement. 

“Is that so?”

Waterlye is silent as an avox refills her glass. She empties it. The avox fills it once more. One sip this time. 

“I thought that’s what I was here to prove,” she says and gestures to the grandeur around her. Snow just laughs.

That night, there’s a banquet in the palatial penthouse. Scaffolding stripes the window, and pinstripe is “in” this season, it seems. As much as it feels a jail, Waterlye slides into entertainment with ease. Putting herself forward as a cut on the butcher’s counter feels second nature at this point. She dissolves into the glitter of the party and kisses politicians’ babies on the cheeks. The annoying Heavensbee woman follows her from room to room with an anklebiter on her hip and insists Waterlye lavish the toddler in affection at every opportunity. The flashbulb of cameras burns itself into her eyelids. Her sea-green dress is too-tight and it’s like struggling against the entire ocean whenever she moves.

Waterlye smiles the fakest smile she’s ever smiled. Exhaustion is banished to the corners of her mind as she reaches a conclusion she’d been trying not to reach in the arena.

The Games don’t end when you win them. So she plays. She tells herself cumulative victories will make her life or death worth something. 

When she’s given a hand of cards after dinner, she politely takes them and tries to throw a flirtatious quip at the dealer. Her voice wavers when she thinks of Compass and Snow meets her eyes from across the room. She buttons the performance up immediately. The message is clear; he only has so much patience and she may well wear it out if she doesn’t do her best.

Snow personally sees Waterlye to the train station with an escort of half a dozen Peacekeepers. Before she steps onto her car, now unshackled, he presses an envelope into her hands. His expression could almost fool her to believe it’s genuine warmth or charity. 

“Your first month of the victory stipend,” he says. His voice and posture tell her she’s supposed to feel deeply indebted for the thick paper. Instead she feels an absence as she slips it into the too-small pocket of her dress’ skirt. She uses only one hand this time to drag herself into the train car. 

He. Never. Blinks. She wishes he would. 

On the way to the Capitol, she’d thought the voyage home would be easier now she had no imminent death in sight. Now she feels shipwrecked. Marooned like a poem by Leigh Stein. Photographs of other people’s children burn themselves into her mind. She can’t sleep so she stares at the ceiling and tries not to scream. Until the nightmares drift through her half-consciousness, she succeeds.  She makes up rules to card games after that, shuffling the deck she stole from the party. It’s hard, one-handed. Waterlye tries not to think of Compass’ family, what their faces will look like when she returns. 

She’s lucky; the usual parade of sea-weary sailors and workmen are replaced this year, upon her return, by a shiny Peacekeeper escort. Her family are those escorted, she’s unlucky to find. Alba is sobbing either in relief or realization of part of her being missing; something neither of them would disagree means part of him is missing too. Either way, it makes for good television. She waves, though the makeup from the party has run and smeared she makes sure to try to perform her best camera-ready expressions. Her brothers weep. Her parents are cold and still like they always are, oceans against the shores of their children. Waterlye wishes they’d smile at her, as she’s led down the steps from the stage by one hand. Alba and Luff do. They hug her, and her brother holds her head to his shoulder.

For the first time since the Games, Waterlye feels those two halves of the shell that make her up shucked. They fall away from each other, indecision between a hard exterior and a cold inward one, with a pearl at the center. One half is what the Capitol created, two parts desperation and one part hatred. The other is formed of seastacks and old saltworn forests. The pearl is made of some misguided hope and shimmering nacre. 

Alba holds her, and she shakes but doesn’t allow herself to cry until they’re home and back, sequestered in the room they used to share. After she’s let the sobs wrack her and his rope-savvy fingers find the strings of nerves at the end of where her hand used to be, he asks the question that reminds her this isn’t even home anymore.

“Do… you want us to move to the Village with you? It’s so far from the farms…”

Waterlye had never considered coming home and not living with her family. She’d never considered the concept of leaving home and not ever coming back. But that’s what the Games do, right?

For the next six months, she passes in and out of a doorway that never has anyone behind it waiting for it. It stands too far from the shore to see her coastlines, up in the hills of inland 4. She forgets who she is outside of interviews with Capitol newscasts, pacing the promenade outside the Village, and the visits from Mags that she never invites. 

Mags becomes a near-constant, in those months as the storms roll in over the ocean. The big and hungry ones that always eat away at the shores during the colder months. Mags’ sisters, and the girl she’s seeing on the down-low from near the shoreline visit. So do Mags’ parents. There are too many long evenings of Waterlye pretending she likes them, because while there’s now a void of family in her life, Mags and company try to fill it. 

She sees Alba once a month, a previous half of her life now split away from her because of his increasing hours at the pearl farm and their father’s failing health. She awards him most of her victory winnings anyway, Mags feeds her most of the time and at least it means Luff eats better. Waterlye barely eats at all. It’s strange, the way survival has become so secondary. With the tour of districts Victors are taken on looming on the winter horizon, she’s not even sure she wants it anymore. She fought so hard to live, she’d really thought that being alive would be different.

In the time between visiting with her former mentor, Waterlye slowly closes that old oyster shell again. Hope isn’t worth keeping open to the world. Her heart hurts, her head hurts. Her now ghostling hand hurts. In the first few months, she sings or hums herself old sailing songs when she stares out the window at the hills. She’s quiet, though, by the third or fourth. Opulence surrounds her and she refuses to let it inside. Instead her days become strings of false pearls, scattered on the ground and leading, stubbornly, into the future. If she could stop time, she would. 

The Victory Tour kicks off with surprisingly little fanfare. She was less popular after the Games than she anticipated, and has only entertained a small handful of vacationing Capitolites. Her picture has not been up on many Capitol posters. Waterlye, Victor of the 25th Hunger Games would nearly be forgettable if she didn’t make sure she showed even more skin than her stylists intended for any photo opportunity and have an increasingly publicised brother. 

Alba is whipped in dockyards the day before she leaves. He’s been buying guns with his farm-pay. She had thought she’d been paying attention to him. She thought she’d been keeping track. She doesn’t even realize the day she leaves is Sunday, though. Between the Capitol and 4, something must have slipped in her brain. 

She and Mags both board the train destined for District 12 for the kickoff of her tour, and Waterlye forgets how to breathe once she’s in her room. The Peacekeepers allow her more freedom now; a fresher train and never cuffs. Not that she couldn’t slip out of at least a leftside one now. She doesn’t see anyone else familiar; her stylist has been replaced, the escort for 4 didn’t bother taking time out of his winter vacation. The pretty Avox girl who attends her is fine company, though. Waterlye watches Panem fall away and tumble over itself out the window and the girl sits and hums in a small chair in the corner. 

When District 12 materializes in front of her, she recognizes epitaphs on the Justice Building before anything else. They’re worn and shadowed with soot, or coal dust she supposes. It looks a thousand years old, and the words all give grace to a country which only decided its fate twenty-five years ago. 

She isn’t sure how to commune with the dead. In 4, they tie the bodies of the deceased in nets and send them out to sea. Like marriage and birth, all roads lead back to the ocean and the way they’ve fed themselves for as long as anyone can remember. It’s always seafoam rearing its head in the back of her mouth. When Compass’ body had come  home, they put it in an old shipping box from 4. She’d not been able to attend. There weren't any other engagements. But the faces of the dockworkers always hold a strange sympathy and reverence she resents now. 

The Capitol needed to make her bleed, she justifies to herself. She needed to do this to help her district. She needed to kill the old her so that the country could see some unity. She is loyal even if hurt in her mind.

It almost comes as a surprise when the Peacekeepers come. They pull her from the train before she can even get properly dressed, so as they drag her through the town square of 12 toward the Justice Building, her hair sticks up in odd red structures. Crumpled dress gifted by a Capitol citizen who passed through the Village to bother Mags, she looks a mess and isn’t sure why they won’t let her fix any of it. But then it does come as a surprise when they take her not to a stage, but to the Peacekeeper base. 

The base is outside of the fence that 12 has ringing its one little town. It’s odd to Waterlye, a single town and a whole actual fence. In 4 they only have posts for most of the way around the district to mark where they’re not supposed to go. It’s not like they couldn’t leave by sea anyway, why would the Capitol bother? Few of them even want to escape, it’s only people like her brother who are insane enough to try to leave.

But the walls of this place, even outside the fence, don’t give any hope or promise of escape. When they put her in a cell she finally understands what’s happening. Thrown to the ground, she feels the skin of her palm burst on her good hand. Her neck feels a little wrong but manageable. 

Suddenly, she’s right back in the arena. She’s watching kids write poems before they go to her death. She’s in a chariot. That sharp steel of knowing the fear of death slams down between her and the mainsail she’s been trying to climb in her mind for the past five years. She feels a smile pulling at her lip. She wasn’t made to do this. She made herself for it, years of shipwork, and training for it. This is the only thing she knows now. Someone just needed to give her permission to die or kill again. And right here, here it is. 

They keep her in the cell for two days. And then they walk her to the tree. She holds her head high but her hair is still a mess, her dress dirty. She is alone. It is colder than she's ever experienced before. The mountains watch her, sentinels draped in pine and bare branches. She's never going home.

Waterlye realizes the sentence was drawn at least metaphorically more than six months ago now, with that edge of steel against her throat mirrored in rope.

Chapter Text

Twenty-Four ❧ All-Fire

With a couple years' work their project was complete, they all backed away as they watched it lean and it fell down the hill, crashed into the sea. All those birds cheered "Goodbye, ye old evergreen tree!"

That woodpecker soon realized one small thing, asked around, "Oh, have ye seen my family?"

All the birds questioned what this poor fellow could mean, said 

"You mean the ones that lived in the evergreen tree?"

Let this be a lesson to all of ye; don't waste all your precious time worrying.

About things that are small in the big grand scheme. Let 'em be unlike the bird and the evergreen tree.  – Halfy & Winks

The sun rises on 12 with an icy acceptance, a criminal off to its cell. Donnie has spent six months slowly unraveling his life. He tried, and he tried hard to keep playing with the Covey. He picked up the old washboard none of them had touched since Shady Jade had hit a Peacekeeper with it. He sang like a mockingjay, over and over and over again. He retuned his guitar over and over and over again. He killed his old self, best as he could, over and ov…

When he found that odd white-beaked woodpecker dying in the front garden of the Covey house, and thought of killing it, he couldn't do it. It had pecked and pecked at the ground where it lay, but he just couldn’t snap its neck when he went to do it. A windowstrike or a stray bullet, he didn’t know, but its expiration was drawn out. More than it should have been. 

He stopped talking for a week. He’d been thinking of that bird like his brother, but also himself. It was why he tried percussion. It was a worry and a burden and a comfort and a haven. A reminder someone would care about even the odd birds.

So he puts his head down; he looks at his shoes and feels horrible echoes in every tap, tap, tap. He avoids everyone except for Artie and Holly. He visits town-proper less and less. It feels like there’s blood spilled across the square now and the rift between Merchant and Seam is widening into a chasm after his last lashing. There have been three. He doesn’t even really know what they accuse him of these days.

He goes to the forest less, though he still goes. They need to eat, after all. The summer had melted itself into the scenery, though. And he hated when orange took the deciduous leaves of trees scattered around 12. Orange is definitely his least favorite color now. Winter frosting them over, killing them, taking them away, it feels almost cathartic. Settling puffed and quiet in the rime is much more comfortable than nesting in spring or singing in the summer.

A hanging isn’t a holiday, but it’s mandatory like the Reapings. They’re not expected to dress for it but Donnie does. A shirt in some shade of wilted rose, and that old vest. Gold upon petals. He woke this morning with what isn’t fire but certainly smolders on the old flowers between his ribs.

Where there’s a will there’s a way; this will be his impetus. This will be the thing that forges him. Just like those tokens his father makes that merchant girls love. Donnie isn’t sure anymore if he wants multiple merchant girls to love him like they loved his cousin’s father. He just wants to be safe. He wants to quiet the woodpecker drill of percussion, just without the woodpecker having to die. He… wants the Games, the beatings, the lashings, the hangings, to be over.

And with the Victory Tour of that girl from the ocean, they should almost be, right? It’s the ribbon on the present that Shady Jade’s death presented to him, it could be untied. 

It’s the rising tide, a livable and laughable ability to ignore what’s beneath. Waves and mazes. Donnie wonders what the ocean looks like, vaguely, while he ties a ribbon from Maude Ivory around his neck. The Covey used to know, but now that memory is only enshrined in rhyming poetry and lyrics.

I was a child, and she was a child, in that kingdom by the sea. And all that.

His first stop for the hanging isn’t the Hanging Tree, the forest, or the meadow. It’s actually the post office. The Peacekeepers who staff it don’t have to attend the hangings, and earlier in the morning apparently one of the Chance kids came around to tell the older Covey that there’s something for him there. Maude Ivory had said it with worry so that strings Donnie tighter than the idea of watching a girl hang. He’s seen that enough times. 

He winds his little circumbendibus path through 12, and taps his boots against the doorframe to rid them of dust. Tap tap tap, and there’s that mistrust. Of the world and himself. He and the Peacekeeper staffing the counter this morning don’t interact very much, and Donnie doesn’t really know his name. So he says his hellos, goodbyes, and goes to read the envelope sent to him behind the bakery instead. 

It’s… odd. Donnie doesn’t often get letters, and this one is all the way from District 7, for some reason. It must have cost half a fortune to send. Maybe a family’s whole paycheck, maybe a friend’s. It’s a month’s stipend of postage to send even a sheet of paper like this, at least in 12.

When he opens it, two small slips of paper fall from it. One of them is pristine, fresh-pressed pine and white. The other is half-soaked in very old blood. Months at least. One falls from the torn packet before the other. It’s the bloody one. 

Donnie reads that one first. He finds words, hauntingly familiar. Certainly his brother’s. The writing is tiny, shakier than Donnie’s used to. But even through the stains, it’s legible. 

How do you define a sunrise,

when it feels like a sunset?

The sunrise in my eyes make me think of you,

but I'm not dead here watching from my grave.

I don't know if you'll miss me when I'm gone.

This game I'm playing,

it's got no real winning.

And every time I try to think of how

I might win it,

I'm pretending I might come home to you.

There's a green on the east horizon

it sings and sings,

maybe like it misses me,

but I can't decide if I'll really try to come back.

There are meadows in my mind,

flowers and the spiderwebs of lightning

make such a fine bower.

What a place to rest my head.

There's a pine tree just out the window,

trying to break in.

I'm waiting for my breathing to finally begin.

There's a wild rose in my hands,

all it would take is just to crush it.

But I've lost these bets before.

Lost down in the holler, never thought I'd wear this collar of rope

or give my heart to you.

I thought I could deny myself the hope

of never touching blood.

It wasn't til you found me in that alley I felt guilty.

It wasn't til you kissed me that I cried.

We together are a sum total

of our shared and foreign histories,

and I miss you.

When I say things like maybe now,

your name is always the next word on my lips.

I miss your fingertips

running streams through my hair.

I miss our little share of the world

stealing kisses

stealing time.

Still there is blood beneath these flowers,

and there was always strain upon the hours.

I miss tall grasses

and trapping rabbits.

Woodpeckers tapping,

you laughing.

And my cracking open

just for you.

Even though I tried

to never let you in.

It was your wits,

what kept me from the odds.

It was mine,

what kept me from your heart.

Probably my worst mistake,

even redder than that night.

Still, I suppose there is a way to make this some new sunrise.

There are worse games to start,

I could probably make dying some kind of art.

At least, the rise and set might be kept apart. 

Donnie stares at the words realizing that he has a different way of seeing than six months ago. Maybe then, he’d have tried to make this a song. He almost thinks it fits exactly into the type of poem Shady Jade used to write to give to him for that. Now there’s no melody or harmony in Donnie’s head. There’s wind. There’s the distant sound of a discordant mockingjay. Donnie puts the paper in his pocket and walks to the Hanging Tree. He doesn’t want to think about it anymore. He just wants to let go.

Funny, it’s Rye who finds him at the corner exiting the town square toward the fence. Donnie doesn’t even acknowledge the liquor he’s offered, though. The bottle has this awful shiny sheen. Probably bought off a Peacekeeper, from a Capitol shipment instead of the usual white liquor from home. 

“Hey,” Donnie mumbles.

“Hi,” Rye says. They slowly make their way, with a growing crowd of other citizens, to the patch of beaten ground not far from the fenceline. They stand in silence for a long time as others filter in, right at the back of the field.

“So, what was that, with Shady Jade?” Donnie finally asks.

“I think I loved him.” Rye doesn’t look at Donnie. Donnie wants to punch him. Instead he looks forward and takes a deep breath.

“Did you, really? That’s why you messed his brain up all the damn time? Slept with half the boys in the Seam?”

“I don’t know, man.”

“He could have had a better life without you. You know how much he cried to me the night you first…” Donnie cuts himself off and presses fingers into his temples. They’re still smudged with the soot that Elizabeth Ash was using to color tools last night. He doesn’t care if it gets on his face right now. Another deep breath. A counted breath. Four/four time. 

“Yeah, shut up. They’re starting.” Rye says it like Donnie was going to keep talking. He might’ve. But Rye’s right. The Peacekeepers are marching up to the little platform. Over the stage and under the tree. Through the throng. Over and under like the rabbit he used to imagine as a way to tie his shoes. Donnie’s mouth goes dry. The girl, Donnie knows her name but refuses to think it, goes up with them. 

She killed his brother. Now they'll kill her.

It goes around, around and under. Bunny ear knots, they all tie and burrow any kid from the districts into. His ribbon feels too-tight across his throat.

The girl tries to smooth her wild red hair, but the chain holding her arms to her waist allows little movement. The Peacekeepers didn't cuff her, and he can see why as she tries to lift a hand that's absent from her body. Instead they just wrapped her up in chains to lead her to the tree. Like a box, like a piece of equipment. She moves mechanically, not naturally; exactly what they made her.

She doesn’t speak as they take her to the rope, she just looks at the Peacekeepers with betrayal in her eyes and something in her muscles that wants her to remain prim and proper. She’s a spayed dog for them, Donnie knows that much. No wild left in her even if they tried to bring it out in that place. At least his brother went down with some heartwood still in his veins.

The girl just goes down quick. 

Swallowed by the hungry rope, the floor beneath her falls. Her body moves limply into the hole her feet created in the rotting boards of the hanging stage. Only halfway. Incomplete. The mockingjays don’t even carry the little whimper she’d let out as she fell. 

A few hands go up in the crowd, solace for someone else’s lost child, but Donnie remains still. 

The walk back to town is grey, gloomy, and slippery with frost. There are pictures of kids hung up around the Peacekeeper base as he passes it. He lowers his gaze before he can catch any grey-green eyes staring down at him from posters hung by them.

Donnie goes home. Donnie goes to the forest. Donnie hunts. It is habit. It is him. Or it becomes him. Becoming of him? Who knows. He doesn’t care. District 12 is cold. The Hob is quiet when he returns.

Donnie is surprised by his girl. He tries to keep the rhythm. His words don’t rhyme. Finally, though, his brain breaks from the monotony, the necessity.

Holly Monroe stands in front of him. A shining gem amid cold stalks of wilted and dead wildflowers, when he returns to the Covey house. 

She’s wearing new, pretty black shoes and in a fresh dress. She almost looks Capitol, dark hair, and brilliant green eyes. A willow against the snow. Summer in a bottle. He doesn’t know why, but when he sees her, that’s when the tears finally come. 

They collapse in the frost together, stroking one another’s hair and the tears fall and then freeze. But Holly is warm, and the wildflowers hold them. It’s a comfortable bed. Their own miniature bower. Not the meadow, not home, but a place just for them. And it’s a long time before they get up again. When they do, the sun is setting on 12.

“Can I stay over tonight? Things are kinda… weird at home after, you know,” Holly asks. Her shoes tap on the Covey porch. Donnie knows she’s asking not for herself, but for him.

“Course,” he says. He sings her into the house, though he sings soft. The kind of singing that feels comfortable only for her. Anything but that old song about the tree, he sings it to her. 

He empties his pockets onto the small dresser he and Shady Jade used to share as a sort of night table when they get in, and there’s the letter. It falls on a book he doesn’t remember putting there, stacked right above Shady Jade’s old one that Donnie took from the house by the lake this summer. 

The Covey don’t keep many books, this one looks out of place. The cover is new, clean. Not like the scrap journals Donnie’s cousin put together, not like anything that Holly draws in. When the letter falls on it, there’s no puff of coaldust so it must be new. Donnie looks at it a little too long and she notices. Of course she notices, that’s how she always is, never missing a detail in the drawing. She crosses the room, all swishes and with sweetlily behind her ear. 

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know. Wanna open it?” He asks because he doesn’t want to. If Clerk Carmine or Tam Amber, any of the Covey, left him some bit of his brother, he’d rather not know. He’s had enough of that today.

“You seem scared of it.” Her eyes follow his as his hands fall on the book.

“I know, sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. We can look together.”

It’s silly, to be scared of it, because when they do look, the book is blank. Like an invitation to write something into those white sheets. It feels… disconcerting.

Instead of looking at it, he decides to look at Holly with her hand on the blank book beside his. She smells of lavender and longing, and a way out of his own life. He kisses his girl, and drags her to bed, trying not to laugh at it all. Or cry. Trying to do anything but think about the past. But he does sleep, with her in his arms, dreaming of deer and rabbits, and history. 

When he wakes up, he tries to leave it all in bed beside Holly. She has a hand tucked to her face. He’d rather the sheets take away all his memory than ever have anything but this again.

After all, the future’s on its way. Better make sure to put out breakfast.

Chapter Text

Twenty-Five ❧ Epilogue (The Ballad of Donnie Gene, reprise)

Don, you've got yourself a wife, you only had to ask her twice. But rest assured, she's on your side until you breathe your last. Together you will build a home

a legacy stronger than stone.

You'll work them fingers to the bone but she will hold you fast. Donnie, don't give up on her. She won't give up on you. She's the kind of woman that only speaks the truth. She'll give you blue eyed babies and raise 'em real good, too. Donnie, don't give up on her;

She won't give up on you.  – The Arcadian Wild

Donnie Everdeen puts in his name change form on the fifteenth of July, two years after Shady Jade died. He usually goes by Don now, but it’s on paper as Donnie still. He’s stopped hanging around with anyone except Holly Monroe. He played spotty shows during those two years, but since the victor’s hanging, he hasn’t played much at all. Vireo and Artie, the other kids he fooled around with, they’re becoming hazy names in the back of his mind. 

It was a year before he read the letter that came with the last poem that he got to see in his cousin’s handwriting. The letter isn’t Shady Jade’s. It’s a group letter from a community home in District 7. It just explains that family might like it more than they do. That they’re sorry for the loss. It all drips of empathy but it’s masking that they need to do their own forgetting, too. He loves, he loses, he forgets. The Covey house feels odd, the crooked way it leans used to be normal. It used to feel safe. Now it feels like an impending collapse of architecture. 

Donnie marks the ongoing march of the years not in months but in hangings and wastings away. In lashings, and whispers, and new restrictions. Banned songs, raids, and burning photographs scrawled with poems on their backs. All of it sprawls across his memory. He tries not to speak to the other Covey much, but he picks burdock flowers every spring and puts them on the kitchen table. They sit there, usually, until Clerk Carmine removes them, realizing that his brother’s boy’s favorite flower can only bring any of them pain. It sticks in the back of the mind and in his throat. 

And as Donnie grows quieter, the pine of his name forgotten, so does his district. It might’ve been easier to make Avoxes of them all, since 12 goes down fighting, but they do hush up. The shows at the Hob almost stop altogether, and Donnie really tries to not feel a little relief about it, but it’s hard. Anyway, taking their tongues wouldn’t have sent the same, lasting message; Quiet is good.

In the heartbreak, he has one solace. The years march forward, and Holly always marches to his door. She’s usually got a sketchbook in hand, but after a few years, they start filling that one under the poem on Donnie’s desk, too. She draws the flowers and he writes about them. It’s simple. When the book is about a quarter full, though, they stop. Not because it’s time to but because someone else needs it.

The March matriarch's first birth is tough. For six months, about five years after Shady Jade’s death, Donnie brings her chamomile and mint and whatever she needs while she lies in bed, and then she wastes away too.

There are too many deaths. They pile up like snow against the window in December or silt on the lakebed. Heroes’ Day is celebrated, then Artemesia goes up the same tree that girl from 4 did, then New Years, and Rye is strung just the same. There is no one safe from the tree. Donnie replaces Lucy Gray as the ghost among the Covey. He wanders the halls but looks at Maude Ivory with shallow, empty eyes. It’s intentional. He shut the front door to the house after the first lashing years ago, and shut the part of him that thought he was coming home with it. None of them sing his brother's name song in the next half decade. 

It takes Donnie four years to ask Holly to marry him. He's nineteen when he does and they've both made it out of the Reaping pool. He finally fully lets her in. His pulse still flickers like coalfire when he sees her. Everyone else is grey. It takes asking her three times to agree; summer, then autumn, then winter of that year. 

He thought going to the mines would keep him out of the disgraceful watch of Peacekeepers but every accident is another reason to drag him in for questioning. Holly begs him to stay out of the forest sometimes. Don goes anyway. At least he doesn’t think they can see him there.

It’s a long time before either of them considers kids. Kids means Reapings again, and it’s already bad enough to watch Elizabeth Ash in the pen every year until eleven years after Shady Jade dies.

But then there’s his little baby boy. There’s his sunlight. The only thing that makes an orange glow appealing is the look of his kid, backlit by the wood stove that sits in his and Holly’s assigned house. It’s almost eleven years out, and Don still feels… odd. Out of place. A bobber without a pole, an arrow lost in bushes. 

But when he sees his baby smile, he can’t help but think of his brother. He can’t help but feel like something’s been returned to him. He can’t help but name Burdock for his brother’s favorite flower. He’ll never let go of the memory, but now, he stays silent about it. His son will never know about that Covey uncle. His son will never know a sunrise, a sunset, as anything but beautiful. At least that’s what Donnie hopes.

Goodbye, is what he thinks, when Burdock is born. He never got one. 

“Hello,” is what he says, though, “Hi, little guy.”

And then he kisses his wife and holds his son. Like Icarus he will always adore the bright spot in the universe his son creates. He grows up too-slow and too-fast at the same time. And this dandelion-gold moment isn’t really meant to last. Donnie’s always known that.

“Silence is safety,” he tells his kid. Just like his uncle told him. Just like the Capitol would prefer he’d repeat. 

And Burdock sings anyway. 

The little songs that Donnie forgets he’s singing when he does work around the house. The songs of weddings and funerals, some Covey and some not. Don almost wishes he wouldn’t, but it’s home. And home is only quiet when there’s been a disaster. They play in the meadow. They’re, for once, what Donnie feels like is a family. He watches the Covey house from afar when they go, not sure how to interpret the poetry of its shutters, its little garden. 

And then they return home, to a small place with less character but more hope. It’s just another low-slung, leaning building of the Seam. But every day, the sun rises on it. Every day, Don gets to hear Burdock laugh. He really would do anything for that kid or Holly.

When Burdock comes home from school one day, late July, the summer of his first year of submitting his name to the Reaping and being spared, he finds a rose bud on the porch. Probably shed from one of the wildrose bushes, he says when he shows it to his father. 

But Donnie knows better and returns to the woods to burn it in the Covey graveyard. Right next to the new stone, at the very edge of the woods. The smoke climbs it like the ivy already starting to creep over its face, grey and green together. Shady Jade’s grave isn’t as pretty as the others, but it has a snippet of his name ballad, and Don makes sure to leave a scrap of paper full of words or a few wildflowers there whenever he makes it out this way. This is the only time he sings that song. It’s quiet, and to himself. He always taps his boot against the stone, just the toe, gentle; a tiny tap tap tap echoing around the wood.

But the mockingjays take the melody. So does the last jabberjay. They’ve been disappearing from the woods now. The very last song he’ll ever hear from those Capitol creations is his brother’s name song.

Over and over and over again, they are in this together. Even if he’s gone.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

❧ End

Thank you so much for reading Rabbit. I have never felt so much satisfaction finishing a project this long before and I’ve written a number of original fiction pieces even longer than this! So it means a lot to have anyone see it through this long.

Please stick around for Rose to Shine if you want to, it’s a prequel in the same universe as this one featuring the 19th Games and will likely be at least a little longer (I’m estimating around 80k words but I mean y’all saw me say 50k for this fic right at the beginning so I may be wrong.) plus is my actual first SYOT! It will be… what I think is called a Partial? Because I will also be doing 3 main POVs for that but I’ll also feature everyone at least once. I’m very excited for it. 

The first chapter of Rose should be written in the next week or two (I might take a couple-day break to read others’ stuff & rest!) and I also have a lot of content about tributes in these games but I need to do some heavy editing if I decide to post it so that will take me a while. 

Again, thank you so much  for joining me for this story. 

And an optional treat! For your perusing, enjoy every Shady Jade poem that I wrote for this fic (a bunch never showed up in the fic!)

Ivysmoke (Training Center poem, found by Waterlye)

I was still just trying to get settled

in a world with borders made by your bombs

when you decided I was better for a tomb,

like I was some replacement for the alms

you owe us.

That old and creeping ivy moves its fingers up your stairways,

civilization melts amid its grip.

While the hungry beg for bread,

you just fill your coffers

and beg circuses of old. 

I hope one day you’re all choked in gold.

I want to kiss the coolness of the forest, 

flirt with darkness, 

Build civilizations out of ashes

but my vine is cut. 

Where there is smoke may you find fire,

a smolder to a spark. 

I may be one cold ember,

but you and your sins can never be apart. 

So kill twenty-three more roots,

the heartwood to your tree.

By the grace of glen and wood, 

your threats mean nothing more to me. 

I've seen your sap before,

sweet and seeping from the bark. 

Black stains in your rivers,

black marks on your hearts. 

So sing for the gem when I am gone,

that lovely Panem prize,

but hide never from that choking ivy vine.

For now it might be smoke,

but one day it will ignite.

Forgotten Words (Training Center poem)

We are the line between morpheme and morphling,

I think,

stealing sips from your drink. 

Twilight sits between my clavicle and jaw, 

blood wants to well up from my palms.

If killing means surviving,

I'm trying to argue to myself 

I shouldn’t be a shrike.

For there are rabbits in these tunnels,

and caves where I've never been before swim inside my brain,

and who would I be to upset the warren,

if I’d be so ashamed?

I'm a wrecking bell, 

not rolling or swinging,

just ringing.

Endless echo 

a death knell

for the people we have been before

We chose this, you and I

underneath some twilight sky.

I don’t know if I trust

that you had the heart to string this bow. 

To fire the arrow, 

right into my throat. 

But we’re somewhere near the end now,

so I guess I’ll never know.

Wheatgrass (Training Center poem; replaced Spyle’s token & taken into the arena)

How do you define a sunrise,

when it feels like a sunset?

The sunrise in my eyes make me think of you,

but I'm not dead here watching from my grave.

I don't know if you'll miss me when I'm gone.

This game I'm playing,

it's got no real winning.

And every time I try to think of how

I might win it,

I'm pretending I might come home to you.

There's a green on the east horizon

it sings and sings,

maybe like it misses me,

but I can't decide if I'll really try to come back.

There are meadows in my mind,

flowers and the spiderwebs of lightning

make such a fine bower.

What a place to rest my head.

There's a pine tree just out the window,

trying to break in.

I'm waiting for my breathing to finally begin.

There's a wild rose in my hands,

all it would take is just to crush it.

But I've lost these bets before.

Lost down in the holler, never thought I'd wear this collar of rope

or give my heart to you.

I thought I could deny myself the hope

of never touching blood.

It wasn't til you found me in that alley I felt guilty.

It wasn't til you kissed me that I cried.

We together are a sum total

of our shared and foreign histories,

and I miss you.

When I say things like maybe now,

your name is always the next word on my lips.

I miss your fingertips

running streams through my hair.

I miss our little share of the world

stealing kisses

stealing time.

Still there is blood beneath these flowers,

and there was always strain upon the hours.

I miss tall grasses

and trapping rabbits.

Woodpeckers tapping,

you laughing.

And my cracking open

just for you.

Even though I tried

to never let you in.

It was your wits,

what kept me from the odds.

It was mine,

what kept me from your heart.

Probably my worst mistake,

even redder than that night.

Still, I suppose there is a way to make this some new sunrise.

There are worse games to start,

I could probably make dying some kind of art.

At least, the rise and set might be kept apart. 

Coliseum (Training Center poem)

He’s a growing seed, 

hurtling toward ancient 

just waiting to be that way.

He wants to be in ruins and

will pass the crying and scrying

of archeology to you. 

If you cut him down,

then Rome will never fall.

What a beautiful idea, to you,

that you may be everlasting.

What a horror to the Romans.

Next June (Training Center poem)

There might still be days
full of the spinning of the seasons.
There may still be trees
left to plant.  

In every glimmer I see
the hope of glistening water,
free and wild.

You may be lost, child,
but one day may we all be found.

Children Hold Hands (Training Center poem)

Did you know

Zhan’s couplers require no human hands
to make a connection?

It’s a train car’s way of protecting its own self 

And it doesn’t need human hands to do it.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever prove it.

Did you know that

falling to failure is inevitable?

That one day this thing they call entropy will tear us apart?

Leaving us endlessly empty and miserable?

This world’s got no heart,

but it sure wants to pretend sometimes. 

So do I. 

Sometimes I think I was built

or grown to spoil on the vine.

When the theme of the party’s the industrial age

why wouldn’t you show up dressed

like a trainwreck? 

Bakery (Written before the 25th Games)

The grain liquor is my goldmine

Like heartbreak is still in kind.

That was then, this is now, 

I don’t know if it was now then, too. 

I know there’s something in the water 

and something in my shoes.

We look for each other, yeast to sugar

Veins to the rocks; 

Seams between our sunrises. 

The sunlight costs the same as the luxury

of clarity now. 

Grieving is a form of thievery

like air from baking bread

like food from mouths. 

Old and molded memories,

dusted nerves left bare.

This house is alive.

Tiny things live inside of it. 

Hope.

Safety.

Little yellow flowers. 

In heartache, the lopsided thrives. 

It’s a draft through the bones,

reminding us there’s still a tide

somewhere out beyond where any of our eyes

have ever seen.

Almost makes you believe in that daft thought;

“there is enough” when there is not.

That something might begin,

when it’s just ended. 

So the procession waits 

We bait our breath
Mousetraps and death rasps
We live inside the borders of epitaphs
But the obituaries remain unwritten.

Baird/Bird/Bard/Borrowed (Written before the 25th Games)

You don’t even know

which family tree you fell from.

Is it all falling? Is it flying?

You don’t know that either. 

From grace, from power, from lips

maybe it’s all falling. 

Like summer to autumn, like winter to spring. 

You didn’t even get your roots in, did you?

When they pulled you up?

There’s no such thing as all-fire.
I don’t think there’s retribution

immortality

or fame. 

But there is flint and stones

your bones can grow a garden

your fats could light a match.

There’s the chance that one day

this disease is more than catching.

There’s no such thing as fate

but there are snares for rabbits,

There are arrows, there are knives,

and all these things remind us, there is

cinnamon and gray. 

Poems in the Dirt & in the Blood (Written during the 25th Hunger Games)

1. We all walk the cliff notes between cliffs and corpses.
   I hope you flew for a second before you fell.
   (For Odyssey, D2 Boy, 17)
2. Your story has seeds in the binding.
   One day they will sprout,
   become a tree or a flower.
   You will be brilliant again,
   and when wildfire catches you,
   you’ll burn brighter than anything we’ve ever known.
   (For Elma, D7 Girl, 16)
3.  You spun silver like the backs of summer leaves,
   clinging to these moments because it was your last chance.
   They made sure you never had a chance.
   (For Doe, D10 Girl, 14)
4. There are places where the world shatters
   there are still stars for us to wish on
   if they can’t promise you that,
   then I will give you what I can;
   We are alone in this.
   But someone will remember us.
   If nothing else than
   because of what they did to us.
   There will be stars in our eyes.
   (For Euler, D3 Boy, 14)
5. I never knew your name
   but I know I heard your voice.
   I'm sorry that you didn’t get the choice to use it.
   (For Barley, D9 Boy, 16)
6. A red breasted dove
   dovetailed from flight and fell from the sky today.
   I know who forgot to catch it,
   and refused to put it back together when it broke.
   (For Zenaida, D6 Girl, 15)
7. They’re making us go extinct like it’s going out of style.
   We don’t fall like we used to.
   (For Heylen, D2 Girl, 18)
8. They take us from our meanings
   This is why we kill and bleed and find
   The seeming inconsistencies of us.
   I’m sorry.
   (For Diamond, D1 Girl, 17)