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Nerissa’s new home doesn’t feel like hers.
It had all felt so formulaic in her head. Just a series of steps to follow, one by one, until she reached the end. Train for the Games. Volunteer. Win. Come back to Four a hero, move into her new house, and dedicate the rest of her life to helping others achieve her same success. But somewhere along the way she’s gotten lost, wandered from the plan, unless maybe the plan wasn’t all that good to begin with.
“I know it feels empty now,” says Kai, her mentor. Together they take in the vast emptiness of her big house. It came fully furnished, courtesy of the Capitol, but it feels empty anyway. “But you’ll get used to it. And now that there’s three of us, Mags and I finally have someone to play pinochle with.”
Nerissa allows herself a small smile. “What do I do now? When do I start helping out at the Academy?”
Kai sits her down on the couch. It’s so plush that she sinks down into the cushions, feeling adrift until she grips the armrest. “No one expects you to start so soon. I didn’t start until well after my Victory Tour. The best thing you can do for these first few weeks is try to rest.”
For the first few days, Nerissa really does try. She lies in her big new bed with the covers pulled up to her chin, eyelids pressed tightly shut. She lounges on the couch and flicks through the channels of Capitol TV. She plays cards with Mags and Kai and doesn’t even say anything when they let her win at pinochle. But there’s something buzzing under her skin, some energy that she just can’t get rid of.
“I don’t understand,” she confesses to Kai, and she hates not understanding things. It’s the middle of the night, or possibly very early morning. Nerissa’s given up on sleeping. Her hands are braced against her countertop, knuckles whitening. She’s still getting used to the feeling of not having a weapon in her hand. “I did everything I was supposed to do. Why do I feel like it’s not right?”
Kai sighs. He’s been a victor for nine years; Nerissa can still remember watching his win on television. “Because it’s not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look,” says Kai, gently leading her over to the kitchen table where they both take a seat. “You’ve spent the last six years training for this one single thing. And now that it’s over, you’re expected to move on and never touch a weapon again? You’re right. It’s not going to feel natural. This isn’t what you trained for.”
“I can’t sleep,” says Nerissa. She fiddles with a lock of her hair. “I thought I’d have nightmares or something, like they warned us about. But I can’t even get to sleep because I feel like I need to be on watch all the time.”
Kai frowns. “It bothers you to not be doing anything?” he guesses.
Wordlessly, she nods.
“I know I made District Four proud,” she says after a minute. “I know I did what was expected of me. I just feel like I haven’t finished.”
“We’ll talk again about mentoring at some point,” he promises. “But I have something that we could try now.”
Nerissa’s so tired that she doesn’t even understand what Kai is thinking until he leads her to the home gym in the basement, standing opposite her on the mat. His hands, clenched in fists, hover expectantly in the air. Her own body is weak from disuse but Nerissa still finds herself sliding into a fighting stance.
“No weapons until you’ve been out longer,” Kai says before they begin. “But you can still hit me.”
Her first few strikes are tentative, and he blocks them easily. Once she warms up, Nerissa finds her footing easily. The familiar movements chase away some of the fatigue clouding her brain. She doesn’t win the fight, not when Kai is more experienced and in better shape. But it’s okay. She’s not sure she wanted to win in the first place.
She collapses onto the mat, sweaty and exhausted.
“How do you feel?” Kai asks.
How does she feel? It’s hard to describe. Energized. More like herself. A little angry. “Better,” she says.
Seven times.
That’s how many times Nerissa mentored before she pulled a victor. That’s how many kids she got to know and then lost. How many sets of parents she had to call, telling them their children gave their lives for Panem. But 38 was, against all odds, District Four’s year. Her year. Most importantly, Dylan’s year.
Ever since she heard the victory trumpets, she’s been running over her first year out in her head. Every trigger she can remember having, every cause of a sleepless night, every word of advice Kai had given her. She thinks she knows what to expect when Dylan comes home.
She doesn’t.
“There you go,” she says soothingly into his ear. “Let it out. It’s okay.”
Dylan’s shoulders heave. He spits bile into the sink. “Sorry.”
“You’re forgiven,” she says immediately. She won’t invalidate his guilt by telling him that he has nothing to be sorry for. They’re victors; if they began to list what they were sorry for, they’d never stop. Dylan hadn’t been a volunteer, and so his victory affects him even more profoundly. He falls asleep fine, but has nightmares almost every night. Unlike Nerissa and Kai, he hadn’t been trained to cover every visible emotion with a blank, impassive stare.
He wipes at his mouth and stares at her with glassy, red-rimmed eyes. “I see why you didn’t think I should ask Selene to move in.”
It’s a tenuous attempt at a joke. Nerissa doesn’t want to let the pride show on her face and make him feel even more uncomfortable, but he is making progress. Even when his nightmares still send him vomiting in the sink. “That’s not the only reason I didn’t want my teenage victor living full time with his girlfriend,” she says, which gets a small laugh out of him. She brushes his sweaty hair from his forehead. “Besides, you’ll get there.”
Dylan slinks to the floor like a puppet with his strings cut. Nerissa joins him, leaning against the kitchen cabinets. “I don’t think I will.”
“You’re right about one thing,” Nerissa says. “The life you had before won’t be coming back. That’s a loss you’re allowed to grieve. But the same can be said of anyone, not just victors. Selene, too. We all go through things in our lives that change who we are.”
Dylan sighs. “I just don’t think I’m ever going to feel normal again.”
“You will,” she responds. “It’ll just be a new normal.”
“I think you missed your calling as a head doctor,” he mutters. Another joke! This time, Nerissa doesn’t bother to hide her smile.
“No, I think I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”
Dylan makes slow, steady progress. He’s exceptionally strong, even if he can’t always see it. He thinks that because he was reaped and because he cries often, he’s somehow less of a victor. Nerissa lets him entertain the thought because repressing it would do no good, but she disproves it every time. And when he wakes up in the middle of the night, frozen in fear of the arena, she reminds him that he’s done his part and he’ll never have to do it again.
That’s the promise of the Games, isn’t it? She won’t dwell on how someone as kind as Dylan made it into the arena, much less made it out. The important thing is that he’s here now, and so is she, and she’ll do everything she can to help him.
When Kai tells Nerissa she should go out more, she knows something’s wrong.
Kai all but stopped involving himself in the Games once Nerissa started mentoring. He helps out at the Academy every now and again, but she always got the feeling that ten years had taken enough of a toll on his psyche and he was ready to retire. He still leaves his house, but not often, so to hear such a statement from him is jarring.
Still, she can’t deny that she’s been caught up in her work. Being a mentor is a year-round job, and it’s even more intensive now that she has Dylan, though she wouldn’t trade him for anything. It’s sometime in the summer of 39, right after the Games, that she watches the live music in the Town Square. It’s sometime around that night when she meets Shale.
She’s not looking for anything romantic, not at first. Nerissa is far too busy with work and with Dylan. Besides, dating a civilian complicates things further, so the only real alternative is to not date at all.
They bump into each other, literally. “Sorry,” says Shale, his bright blue eyes appraising her. “You alright?”
“Fine,” says Nerissa, pushing her hair out of her eyes. There’s something different about the way he looks at her. “It’s crowded. Not your fault.”
He shrugs. “No, it was definitely a little bit my fault. I wasn’t watching where I was going.”
“You should probably work on that.”
It comes out sharper than she’d intended, but he laughs anyway. “Want to get out of here? Somewhere a little less crowded?”
Nerissa doesn’t know what possesses her to say yes, but she does. They walk to the beach, chatting quietly about something dumb like the weather. By the time they sit down by the shore, Nerissa’s more relaxed than she’s been in years.
“You ever jump off that cliff there?” asks Shale.
Nerissa follows his gaze. “Hasn’t everyone?”
“Not me,” he confesses. At her surprised look, he says, “I know. I was always too scared.” He’s endearing when he says it, but not embarrassed.
“Afraid of heights?” she guesses.
“No,” he replies. “Afraid of falling, I guess. Or landing wrong. Breaking all my bones.”
Nerissa squints. Even in the dark, the rocky cliffside is recognizable. Every senior at the Academy takes turns jumping off it after their final examinations are done. They say the person who can make the smallest splash will become the volunteer, but that hadn’t been true in her case. “That fall wouldn’t break all your bones.”
Shale shrugs. “Funny, that’s what my friends kept telling me. I wasn’t going to risk it, though.”
Nerissa nods. “Probably for the best. Jumping into any body of water when you don’t know what’s underneath can get really dangerous. That’s why I always tell my tributes not to do it. Just because something looks safe doesn’t mean it is.”
The mention of the Games dampens the atmosphere, which she honestly should have seen coming. Nerissa is so involved in the Games that she forgets that most civilians prefer not to think about it. But they’ve become so normal to her.
She almost expects Shale to get up and walk away, or ambush her with questions if he did decide to stay. He does neither. “Makes sense,” he says, and that’s that.
That night is the first of many meetings, which later become dates, and even later become everyday occurrences. Shale doesn’t shy away from her place in the Games or her responsibility to District Four, but he doesn’t expect anything from her either. He’s there for her when she comes home from the 40th having lost for the first time since Dylan won.
It’s not easy. It’s not uncomplicated. But Shale makes Nerissa feel like a person first and a victor second, and she’ll hold onto that feeling for as long as it lasts.
“She’s so small,” whispers Calder, reverent.
Nerissa laughs. Her newborn daughter Cordelia beams up at her. Having a baby is very similar to having a fresh victor, and in 46, Victor’s Village had been given both.
Shale took their four-year-old son Murphy to the beach for the day, so Nerissa invited Calder over to meet the baby. There’s something healing about new life, something that fresh victors often forget when they’ve seen so much blood. “Do you want to hold her?”
Calder shifts on his feet. “Can I?”
“Sure,” she says, picking up Cordelia, careful to support her head. “Come on, let’s sit on the couch.”
She shows Calder how to hold the baby, describing her hand placements as she does. They both look at her at the same time, and their identical hopeful expressions nearly knock the air from her lungs. They’re both so impossibly young, and in different ways. Nobody would dare to say that Calder is naive, not after what he’s been through, but being a fresh victor is like starting over from scratch and building a life from the bottom up.
“Kai said that he mentored you, too,” Calder says after a few minutes of comfortable silence.
“He did,” she confirms. “You’ll probably be his last. I usually do it, but I had Cordelia so close to Games season that it just wouldn’t have been possible. Kai took over for me in 42 when I had my son, Murphy.”
Calder looks like he wants to say something, decides against it, then reconsiders. “You’re not worried? That something will happen to them?”
Nerissa pauses. She and Shale had talked this over before they ever decided to start trying for kids. There’s always the possibility that their name is drawn in the reaping, no matter how slim. And being the children of a public figure opens them up to a level of scrutiny that most children don’t have. But Nerissa is exceedingly private about her personal life while she’s in the Capitol. It’s thanks to her impressive mentoring record that sponsors and Games fans alike aren’t interested in what she does outside of work.
Besides, it’s rare for victors to have children, and rarer still for those children to go into the arena themselves. To Nerissa’s knowledge, such a thing has only happened once, and the child had been a volunteer looking to follow in his mother’s footsteps.
“Every parent worries about their children,” she says eventually. “We knew it was a risk, but it was one we were willing to take. Besides, that’s why we have volunteers, as I’m sure you know.”
Calder smiles. “Yeah.”
“How have you been feeling about it all?”
Cordelia gurgles in his arms, which makes him laugh a little. “I don’t know. I’m still getting used to it, I guess. Kai keeps telling me it’s normal to feel like I don’t belong here, but that doesn’t make it true.”
Nerissa nods. “Yeah, I think that’s a phase every new victor goes through.”
“What’s it like?” he asks. “Being a mentor.”
“It feels a bit like going into the arena again,” she confesses. She’s never said that aloud before. “Because you’re so invested in your kid’s success that you’ve put a piece of yourself into them. No matter if they win or lose. But it’s also a great feeling when they do win, and you get to help them come back from it.”
“I want to mentor someday,” he says. “I want to bring home a victor.”
He hands Cordelia back. Nerissa holds her close and tries not to think of the arena. “Just keep working at it, and one day you will.”
When Calder leaves, she puts Cordelia down for a nap and then just watches her sleep. She can’t keep her mind from spiraling out towards the future. Change always prompts these thoughts in her, and today she’s too tired to fight them. She wonders what Cordelia will grow up to be, what she will do, who she will love.
And Nerissa wonders, not for the first time, whether her daughter will live long enough to grow up at all.
Nerissa wipes at her eyes. They’re starting to burn because she’s been staring at the sponsorship records for so long, so she blinks rapidly and tries to refocus. “Here,” she tells Mags, who is sitting next to her attentively. “Why did the Prices not donate as much this year?”
Mags took the paper from Nerissa’s hands. “Tight year, maybe.”
Nerissa shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so…”
“Nerissa,” says Mags, gently placing a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to do this.”
Her heart clenches. Ever since Shale died last year, she’s been trying to keep busy. It hasn’t been very hard because her kids are growing up and District Four won the 53rd. Coral had been her tribute and was now her victor, and Nerissa is grateful that she survived because it gives her somewhere to put her energy. Except today she left Coral alone in the house, and she gave Calder instructions to stop by. Dylan is busy with his wife Selene and their five-year-old son Leander, giving Nerissa nothing to do but think.
“You don’t think we should find out what caused them to donate less?”
Mags gives her a knowing look. She has the rare ability to look through any facade and see what’s underneath. “Let’s take a walk.”
Her eyes could use the break, so Nerissa lets Mags lead her to the shoreline, where they watch the waves crash against the sand.
“She’s strong, your Coral,” says Mags conversationally.
“She’s had to be,” Nerissa agrees.
Mags nods. Then, quieter, “It shouldn’t have happened.”
Those are dangerous words. “I know,” Nerissa says. Her gaze is fixed at the horizon. “It’s not fair that nobody stepped up when her name was called.”
“It’s not fair that we ask our children to step up in the first place,” Mags says, and her words are swallowed by the sea. “And yet we have to do it.”
Everything seems to go still. “What do you mean?”
“What if there was a world without the Games?” Mags asks.
Nerissa’s heart skips a beat. Her mind is flooded with images of her children, and Dylan’s son, and her victors. “Are you involved in something?”
She listens as Mags explains the resistance that has been forming. Ending the Games is an ambitious goal, one that can’t be completed alone. “I won’t be around forever, and I don’t know how long this will take,” says Mags. “I’ll need someone else, and I know you’ve been thinking about it.”
“I haven’t been thinking about it,” Nerissa lies instinctually.
“You hide it well,” Mags allows. “But you’ve been a victor for more than twenty years. You’ve seen the toll it takes, whether we win or lose. And you have victors and children of your own, so you have something to fight for.”
“And you think this will work?” Nerissa asks.
Mags looks over at her and shrugs. “I can’t be sure of anything.”
Nerissa nods. That’s enough for her. “What do you need me to do?”
“Keep doing what you’re doing. Train our kids. Bring home as many victors as you can.”
“So we look compliant?” she asks.
Mags nods. “We can’t win a game we refuse to play. And when the time comes, we’ll need as many fighters as we can get.”
“I’ll think about it,” she says. “I have the kids to think about.”
When they head back inside, the sea washes away their footprints and any echoes of their conversation.
“I’m coming with you.”
Dylan meets her at the train station on the morning of the 62nd reaping. He hasn’t come to the Capitol since his own Victory Tour, but Nerissa can hardly refuse him now. Not when his own son, Leander, was just reaped.
“Of course,” she says, even though it wasn’t part of the original plan and they haven’t cleared it with the Capitol. “We’re going to do everything we can for him.”
The luxury of the train is lost on Dylan as he says, “Leander’s fourteen. No fourteen-year-old has ever won the Games.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” Nerissa says. It will only be a few minutes before the tributes arrive, and they will both need to present an image of strength. She puts her hands on Dylan’s shoulders. “I know this hurts. And you have every right to feel that. But our work starts right now. We need to show Leander that we believe in him. He’s smart, he’s funny, he has a chance.”
Dylan’s eyes water but he nods bravely.
The next week is a whirlwind of sponsor meetings and press conferences and strategy discussions. They garner as much support for Leander and Dylan as they can. The audiences love a throwback, even for a victor like Dylan who faded into obscurity in their eyes. They leverage the power of Leander being a legacy tribute. He gives a solid interview, gets a decent training score. He’s a fast runner and makes it through the Cornucopia bloodbath in one piece.
It’s not enough.
Leander dies on the fifth day to a pack of bloodthirsty mutts. Nerissa stays with Dylan until Four is out and they’re cleared to go home. She doesn’t leave his side until they both return home to Victor’s Village and Dylan and Selene embrace, and even then she says, “I’ll be back in a few hours.”
Mags seems to anticipate her visit because she’s waiting on her porch before Nerissa can even knock on the door. “Walk?” Mags asks, and Nerissa nods.
The sound of the ocean covers up anything they say, so Nerissa asks, “Why did that happen?”
Mags sighs. “I can’t say for sure. All I know is that there’s been some unrest in some other districts. Eleven and Eight.”
“What does that have to do with Dylan?” she bites out. “He never even goes to the Capitol, he’s done nothing wrong.”
“It’s got nothing to do with Dylan,” Mags answers honestly. “What happened to Leander was an example, nothing more. Why do you think that girl from Two won this year? He’s sending a message to the other districts that no one is safe, even if you try to stay out of things. Only absolute loyalty to the Capitol will be rewarded.”
Nerissa wipes her eyes. “Dylan thinks it’s his fault.”
“It’s not,” says Mags. “We both know whose fault it is.”
She nods. There’s an image that she can’t get out of her head. Dylan’s face as he watched Leander run from the mutts; it was just a flicker of hope, the kind of hope that no parent can truly let go of. Then complete, utter despair. Isn’t that what the Games do to people? Failure is so much more devastating when you believe, even for a second, that you might succeed.
“This can’t continue,” Nerissa says. “Dylan can’t take any more. None of us can.”
Mags glances over at her, a silent question in her eyes.
“I’m ready,” says Nerissa.