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The fake Louella was unnerving, and not just because she had been made up to look like and brainwashed to introduce herself as a dead girl. Haymitch couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but there was definitely something wrong with her beyond the obvious.
He wanted to hate her, this mockery of his poor, dead friend, but his dæmon, Mara, nipped at his ear, brushing his cheek with her feathers.
“It’s not her fault,” she whispered, even though Haymitch knew Mara was even more unnerved by the girl than he was. But she was right, and he found it impossible to hate her as he saw more of the girl’s pitiful state, the result of all the torture the Capitol must have subjected her to.
Now that he thought on it, he figured that it was Lou Lou’s dæmon that was what was creeping him out. A human body could be, and in Lou Lou’s case, almost certainly was modified. They could make a person look like just about anyone with enough surgery. But they couldn’t do surgery on a dæmon to make it look like someone else’s.
But Lou Lou’s dæmon looked exactly like Louella’s, a scrappy little ferret. Had they, in such a short amount of time, managed to find a girl who could both pass for Louella with some surgery and had the same sort of ferret dæmon as her? That seemed unlikely. No two dæmons were exactly alike, anyway; even if they were the same animal, there were differences in coloring or their shape, the same way ordinary animals varied from one another.
Maybe they’d gotten a girl whose dæmon hadn’t settled yet. That was certainly possible; while Louella’s dæmon had already settled, Haymitch’s hadn’t yet at her age. In fact, he’d been something of a late bloomer, with Mara only settling at the end of last year. But was it really possible to force an unsettled dæmon to assume another dæmon’s shape for a long time, perhaps even permanently?
Nobody really understood how dæmon settling worked, after all, though no one really thought much about it, at least not back in Twelve. Your family would celebrate when your dæmon settled, and of course everyone had their own assumptions about what the shape of your dæmon meant about your character, but otherwise, it was what it was, no point dwelling on the phenomenon of dæmons any more than you would about the sun and the moon.
Lenore Dove did, of course, because she took nothing for granted and always had questions of the how and the why for everything in and beyond this world, even if she kept most of them to herself and the few people she could speak freely with. Haymitch was fortunate enough to be one of them. And Lenore Dove had all sorts of questions about dæmons, and dozens of possible answers for each of them, turning around and around in her mind: why people had them to begin with, why they were usually a different sex to their human counterpart, why they could only move so far from them, why they settled in the forms they did, why they settled at all…
Maybe she would know if it was possible for the Capitol to force someone’s dæmon to settle, or appear to settle, in an exact way. She’d find it horrendous, of course. She’d always found settling to be a beautiful thing, uncontrolled and unique to every person. She had such poetic ways to describe it, too.
A dæmon’s true, settled form was, in her words, “a song sang from love that the soul remembers forever”. She hadn’t exactly meant a literal song, but Haymitch supposed there was some truth there, too, because Mara had last changed herself deliberately so that he could sing Lenore Dove her name song for her birthday, and then never changed again. Lenore Dove had been delighted by that, sure as Haymitch was that Mara’s chosen form was proof that the two of them were meant to be. Of course, Clerk Carmine had a much less favorable opinion on the matter, but Haymitch had tried not to think too much about that.
He missed Lenore Dove terribly. But he was glad she wasn’t here, for many reasons, of which this was just the latest.
Lou Lou’s dæmon wasn’t sociable. Mara didn’t want to talk to him to begin with, but Haymitch cajoled her into it. All she’d gotten out of him was “My name is Archibald. This is Louella McCoy, from District Twelve,” with somehow even less inflection than Lou Lou’s own greeting. Wyatt’s dæmon had also tried talking to him, and Wyatt had confirmed that she’d gotten the same response Mara had, and nothing else.
It was another thing they’d gotten wrong. Louella’s dæmon was only “Archibald” on government paperwork. Louella had only ever called him “Archie”, or lately, just “Ar”.
But it wasn’t the name, or the mechanical, programmed words, or even the eerily exact appearance that disturbed Haymitch the most about “Archibald”; it was the way Lou Lou interacted with him, or rather, didn’t interact with him.
A person’s dæmon was their most cherished companion, their very soul. Dæmon and human would disagree at times, but a powerful bond of love always existed between them.
That was the way it was supposed to work, anyway. Haymitch knew it didn’t always. Sometimes, a human and dæmon turned on each other, truly tried to hurt one another. He’d seen it – the evidence of it, mostly; torn fur and feathers, scratches and bites, since people tried to keep that kind of thing to themselves. But on one occasion that was forever seared into his brain, while out delivering the goods for Hattie, Haymitch had actually witnessed a man attacking his own dæmon. The sight had disturbed him so much that Haymitch had immediately run home, heedless of how much of the day’s income he was losing out on, clutching Mara tightly to his chest all the while and her clinging to him just as much. It had been a while before they stopped having nightmares about it.
Lou Lou wasn’t trying to hurt her dæmon. But her absolute indifference was, in some ways, even more disturbing than that man attacking his own dæmon had been. The ferret on her shoulder might as well have been a rock on the ground for all that Lou Lou never so much as acknowledged its presence.
A horrible suspicion settled in his gut, and as much as he didn’t want to think about it, when Wiress brought up the possibility of some sort of transmitter in Lou Lou’s ear, Haymitch knew he had to say something.
“I think the ferret might be listening to us too. I don’t think it’s a dæmon at all; I think it’s some sort of mutt.”
Everyone else looked at him in surprise. Which, now that Haymitch had said it out loud, he felt a little ridiculous. What he’d said was crazy; the difference between a dæmon and an animal, even a mutt, was deeply and instinctively recognizable. The same way Haymitch had known immediately that the spider crawling on Beetee’s arm was the man’s dæmon and not some unwanted visitor, there should’ve been no possible way to confuse a mutt for a dæmon or vice versa. The thought that the Capitol could create a mutt that fooled people into thinking it was a dæmon, however imperfectly, was absurd. And viscerally, existentially horrifying, which made Haymitch think it was probably the truth as much as he fervently wished otherwise.
The others seemed to agree with him, as despite the insanity of his statement, Wiress looked thoughtful, and several dæmons grew agitated, whispering in their counterparts’ ears.
It was Maysilee who asked the obvious question.
“Where’s her dæmon, then?”
A question that no one would ever have to ask about Maysilee – she had one of the largest dæmons Haymitch had ever seen in person; some tough-looking creature that no one recognized, looking like he was suited to much colder climates than District Twelve, which probably should have been a sign to him earlier that there was a lot more to Maysilee than just a stuck-up, spoiled mean girl.
And it was also a question to which Haymitch didn’t really want to think about the answer.
Hiding under her clothes, he wanted to say, must be something small, forced to stay hidden by the people who tortured her.
But Lou Lou would have to be seen by Louella’s prep team eventually, dressed up for the interviews, and later, for the arena. And then the secret would be out, if she’d kept her real dæmon up her sleeve.
No, Haymitch didn’t think her dæmon was hiding under her clothes.
A thick dread settled over the group in the long stretch of silence, and Mags had gone pale.
“Severed,” she mouthed more than said, barely a whisper of the word Haymitch didn’t dare to speak.
There were cruelties that the Capitol put proudly on display, and there were cruelties that they wanted everyone to pretend not to know about. That was something that Haymitch had been getting intimately familiar with over the past few days. It was all well and good for them to show off as they shuffled off a bunch of kids for their murder pageant every year, and twice as many for the Quarter Quell, but they’d lie through their teeth and their camera lenses just to hide that they’d shot a kid dead and grabbed another one out of the crowd. Even though it didn’t really make a difference; shot down with a gun, name pulled out of a bowl, singled out in a crowd for getting in the way…it was all the same death sentence regardless, and no one could do anything about it anyway.
But the Capitol wanted to uphold an image, so they all had to learn which punishments were public and which were supposed to be private. Watch all those kids die in the Hunger Games, but pretend these replacements for the kids that died before they even got there were here all along. Know that they’ll cut off your tongue if you misbehave, but don’t ever acknowledge that they might go as far as to cut off your dæmon instead. That was something to keep to the shadows, the unvoiced fears in the back of your mind.
But now they had voiced it, or at least Haymitch had implied it and Mags had sort of whispered it, and no one in the room could pretend they hadn’t heard it.
Wyatt’s dæmon gave a soft cry of terror and buried her face into his neck, little rat paws tucked into herself. Maysilee’s beast of a dæmon trembled, and the room seemed to shake with him, and the rest of them weren’t much better off. Mara’s talons dug into Haymitch’s shoulder, but no one said anything more. What else was there to say? There was no greater horror, no greater mutilation than a severed dæmon. The stolen tongues and voices of the Avoxes were dreadful, but their loss was only physical, their minds intact. And even a hijacking victim was still a whole person, albeit a brainwashed and damaged one, but their Lou Lou was only half of herself, and spending her final days of life in inconceivable loneliness, never to see her dæmon again.
What could they do but spend those days looking after this half-girl as best as they could? They couldn’t replace the loss of a dæmon; their own dæmons could not touch her. But human hands could, and though that couldn’t even come close to make up for her lack, it was better than nothing.
So they cared for her, the three of them along with Mags and Wiress, giving Lou Lou comfort and friendship in her (and for the tributes, their) final days.
When the time for the interviews came, Haymitch was distracted from his own concerns when Lou Lou became a bit more animated.
“Mine,” she said, and accepted their would-be stylist’s snake around her shoulders with something approaching eagerness.
“Do you think she had a snake for a dæmon?” Mara asked quietly. She adjusted her balance as Haymitch shrugged, lifting her with the motion. It could be, Lou Lou certainly responded to that big snake more than anything else, aside from the District 11 bread, maybe. But maybe it was just something, anything that felt closer to a dæmon to her than that horrible empty mutt she’d been saddled with. They really had no way of knowing, did they? Not any more than they could know Lou Lou’s real name, or her dæmon’s name.
He wished he could ask. But asking would just get the poor girl tortured with loud noises in her ear, and there were too many people here, anyway.
But watching Lou Lou clutch onto that snake the way she did, Haymitch hoped she found some comfort and familiarity from it, even if that was terribly sad in its own way, a pale substitute for what had forever been stolen from her.
.
.
Haymitch’s suspicions about the ferret were proven horribly right, as he furiously ripped the pump from the girl’s chest and gave her the mercy the Gamemakers tried to deny her.
The cannon fired, but instead of fading into rapidly dissolving wisps like the real Louella’s dæmon had, Haymitch and Mara saw as the ferret simply slipped away into the constructed garden around them, solid as ever.
Just one more mutt in Snow’s perfect Quarter Quell.