First they try to talk her out of it.
"She's a candidate because she aced all the important tests, but she's not really a contender," Patterson argues, Sloane's file spread out on the table in front of them, pages scattered like they've got the girl's body on the table and are pulling out her guts to examine how she ticks. "She has the physical skills, yes, but her psychological profile doesn't add up. There's a determination there that we're not sure we like."
Lyme knows what he means but pretends she doesn't. "The Centre selects for determination. That's not a reason to keep her out."
He flattens his eyes at her, and he won't go up against a Victor and tell her she's being wilful but he will think it, and let it show on his face. "You know what I mean. This is a girl who's walking in and doesn't actually care about walking out. It's clear in all her interviews. It's clear in the way she ignores the acting classes. She doesn't care about attracting sponsors because that's not why she's here." His jaw goes tight. "I don't care what the other districts say. We don't send kids into these Games to die just because they want to. We're here to make winners, not to pump years of funding and attention into some girl's suicide run."
Sloane's photos lie fanned out in front of Lyme, eyes digging deep into her chest. The girl's smiling in exactly none of them, but she's not crushed, not defeated. She only thinks she is. "I want her," Lyme says again, dogged. "I'll convince her. Nobody's been able to give her a reason but I will."
Patterson sighs like he wants to bury his face in his hands but is too professional to do it. "You're asking us to put a lot on faith."
"That's what you do every year," Lyme points out. "Every year we send kids who are bursting to win, and best-case scenario only one comes back. It doesn't change the odds."
"We aren't playing the numbers game. Odds of winning the lottery barely increase from nothing when you buy a ticket, but you still buy the damn ticket in the first place."
"How do you know she doesn't want to win?" Lyme demands, pounding the table with her fist. "How do you know? Did anyone ask her? She gives the same answers as anyone else. She can parrot as well as the top candidates in acting class, what does it matter if she really believes it? She's got the chops to make it this far and I think she deserves the chance to find a reason to keep going."
Patterson exhales through his nose. "The Games are not an excuse for you to work things out for yourself vicariously. If there's something else going on, you have to tell the Committee. If this is about the incident -"
"It's not a fucking incident," Lyme snarls, and Patterson leans back because he might have made it through to sixteen, seventeen, maybe even eighteen, whatever it takes to be qualified to sit on the selection board, but he didn't walk through that fire and she did. He might have bureaucracy on his side but that won't save him if Lyme snaps and decides to go for his throat. "You call it something like that again and I'll -"
She stops, swallows hard and digs a knuckle between her eyes. "The Village can protect her. We let her go now, he might come looking for her again."
"She's a Senior now, not an eleven-year-old child. She can defend herself."
"It's not about defending herself, it's about knowing -" Lyme cuts herself off again. "It doesn't matter. I think we're selling her short. There's a Victor in there, I can see it. I can convince her."
Patterson's expression returns to neutral. "You're giving yourself a massive handicap right out of the gate. You'll be playing psychological catch-up while the male tribute will be ready and raring to go right from the start. You'll never break even this way."
"Devon and I are two-zero in my favour," Lyme says. "Don't tell me what I can't do. I can make a winner out of her. She just needs someone to tell her there's a reason."
"Winning the Hunger Games is supposed to be the reason. Bringing pride to her district and serving the country is all any tribute is allowed to ask for. Anything else -"
"Anything else is being realistic!" Lyme glares. "Don't give me bullshit. I've been doing this longer than you. When did you start this job? I was killing people when you were still learning how to count. Just because she's not one of the ones who believes the lines we feed them doesn't mean she can't do it."
"I think you're making this personal," Patterson says calmly.
"You're damn right I'm making it personal, but it's my decision to make, and I choose Sloane." Lyme splays her fingers against the topmost photo, the beautiful girl with the hard eyes and mouth that say the Arena doesn't scare her because she's lived through hell and nothing else could ever be worse than this. "If you want to take this to the review board, go ahead, but no one would question if Nero wanted her, so I don't think you want to start this fight."
Patterson looks at her, but Lyme stares him down, and finally he sighs. "I'll give you to the end of the week to decide. You can have the others' files as well just in case.'
Lyme takes them, but she leaves them on her drawer and doesn't even open them.
She's not surprised when Nero stops by her house that evening. "You want to tell me what you're doing?" he asks, dropping onto her sofa and giving her a hard, level look. "You know better than this."
"Than what? Make an emotional choice?" Lyme doesn't even glance up. She's reading Sloane's file for the hundredth time, unable to tear her gaze away from the information on the incident , as Patterson so helpfully put it. What a nice way to talk about the police report and the hospital stay and the visit from social services that went absolutely fucking nowhere and left her there until she was thirteen and the Centre finally took her away. "I get attached, I know. And then it rips my heart out and Enobaria accuses me of doing it on purpose so I can steal you away for a month while you stop me from getting on a train and burning things down. I know. But I can't stop."
Nero sighs. "I don't want to see you tear yourself up like this on a girl who's probably going to die anyway. Most mentor don't burn out until they're fifty, but you're gunning for a meltdown ten years early. You need to keep some distance."
Lyme grits her teeth. "You do not get to lecture me on choosing tributes for personal reasons."
"No, I don't," Nero agrees, and he reaches over and lets a hand fall on the back of her neck, heavy and comforting, but Lyme doesn't lean into it, not today. "But you've gotta understand -"
"Did you see her file?"
"There was some talk at the last meeting, I heard a couple things -"
"Stepfather," Lyme spits out, and Nero goes dead still. "Yeah. Sound familiar? Only she didn't have a brother to push him down the stairs and snap his neck. She had to live with him for two more years, so don't even start with me. She deserves to fight. She deserves to win. She deserves - everything. Because if we don't choose her, she'll know exactly why we didn't. She'll know we rejected her because of what some shit-fucking asshole did to her when she was too young to stop him."
Nero's fingers are tight on her neck, and Lyme enjoys knowing that she's hurt him. Part of her will always be eighteen, angry and lashing and violent, aching to hurt other people because there's only so much pain to go around, and if she causes it then that's a little less left over to injure her. "And then what? Say you do. Say it works, and she wins, and she comes back here. A girl like that, she does deserve everything, you're damn well right. So is this really what you want to give her? It'll never be over. Every year she'll come back to this. Every year she'll have to look at younger versions of herself and send them off to die. That's what you'll be giving her. Is that what you want?"
Lyme closes her eyes and presses the back of her hand against her eyelids. "Yes," she says. "Because that's what you gave me, and I don't regret a minute of it. I earned this. It's mine. She deserves that chance. She deserves to be more than that girl who had the incident."
It's a shit life, being a mentor, whatever district you're from. Some days when it's bad, when she spends months in the Capitol finagling with sponsors in the off season, when she studies trends and polls and surveys until her eyes bleed, when she pops stimulants and stays awake for eight days straight only for her kid to go down in the mud and blood and dirt anyway, sometimes Lyme wonders if it's worth it. If there's anything that could make up for this. If she wouldn't have been better off if the selection committee had branded her too unstable and passed her off to be a washout trainer or Peacekeeper or doctor instead.
You'll never be anything , sneers a voice in Lyme's head at night sometimes, and she no longer remembers if it's him or her brain's manifestation, but either way it doesn't matter. You'd better listen to me and do as I tell you, because there's nothing out there for mouthy little girls who don't know their place.
But there's a ten-foot wall with barbed wire and armed guards separating her from that voice now, and Lyme became a murderer to get away from it, slaughtered ten kids under nineteen with weapons and traps and even her own bare hands to earn the right to shut it up, and it might not be nice but this is the world they live in. Running away from that reality won't change anything.
The Hunger Games are sick; pitting children against each other is disgusting, and cheering and placing bets and eating popcorn while it's going on is the worst of all. But along with the entertainment and the threats and the ostensible maintenance of public order, the Games give a handful of kids the chance to slay their own demons and come out better, stronger, with a family at their back that will never, ever turn away. If nothing else, there's that.
"She'll kill him if we don't take her," Lyme says, and Nero's hand twitches against her neck. "I'd bet my stipend on it. They taught her to turn her pain into violence. They taught her how to kill. And then they'll let her go and all the counselling in the world won't matter because he'll still be out there. She'll find him, and she'll kill him, because she'll never be able to sleep again if she doesn't. Maybe she'll kill others. And now, because she doesn't have the Centre's protection anymore, when they catch her there won't be any excuses. Maybe in ten years she'll be someone else's red bead."
Nero lets out a breath. "Now you're just building sandcastles. You can't choose someone based on hypothetical horror stories you invented."
"No?" Lyme turns to him, and she hated him at first, her mentor, didn't understand why he didn't listen to her when she wanted a female mentor, why he insisted on staying when she screamed at him to leave. If she pulls Sloane out she'll spend the first six months listening to her demand to know why she wasn't allowed to die. "What did you think would happen to me if you didn't choose me?"
Nero closes his eyes. "Now you're not playing fair."
"The world doesn't play fair," Lyme says dully. "I'm just following the rules."
"You really think you can convince her to win?" Nero asks after a long silence. "Don't bullshit me, little girl, I want your honest answer."
Lyme's throat aches, and it takes her three times to swallow. "I do. I wouldn't send her in there just to die."
Except that is what she's doing; gambling that the slim chance of victory against the vast odds of a messy, agonizing death is worth the life Sloane would have as a washout. It's a horrible thing, choosing which kid gets to die, and every year the weight of it only gets heavier. But as one who walked over the broken glass and hot coals to the other side, there's no other way for people like them. If Lyme asked Claudius - Claudius who had an Arena full of twelve-year-olds, who went against the rules and was branded a Two-killer whether he flung the sword through Nikita's stomach or not - he'd say the same.
"I can convince her," Lyme says, balling her hands into fists. "There's more than this. She's just never had a reason to think about it."
"All right," Nero says, and he rubs his thumb along the ridge of muscle in the side of her neck. "Just be careful. She's had a shit go of it, but you're my girl, and of course I'll put you back together but I'd rather not have to."
"Faith is another word for insanity, right?" Lyme says with a short laugh. "We're all deluded every year, just enough to think maybe, maybe. If we didn't we'd never keep the Program going."
"Just enough miracles to keep us going," Nero says, his presence warm and solid beside her, and it still stuns her, sometimes. Her kids are her miracles, sure, but she remembers that Nero's miracle is her and it knocks her breath right out of her chest.
Sloane, if she lives, might never get a miracle of her own, but she could be Lyme's. For a girl who was only ever someone else's burden, someone else's property, maybe that would be enough.
At the end of the week, Lyme drops the forms with Sloane's name and her signature on the selection committee's desk. Patterson holds her gaze for about three seconds before nodding and stamping his approval across the top of the page.
Felix practically shits rainbows after the Reaping, when they all get together in the train car for the first time and it hits him that Devon really is his mentor. It's like Claudius with Lyme all over again, desperation and eagerness and a willingness to please that floats off him like perfume. Sloane stares at him like he's been rolling in the mud and inches away; Lyme has to clamp down on the urge to tell her she's wonderful.
It's going to be a long month.
After a few days of reviewing the pre-Games footage, Lyme has a rock in her stomach and sore cheeks from smiling as she lies her head off to the sponsors. Sloane is - skating. She's doing everything that's asked of her but nothing else, and she's not giving Lyme anything to work with. There's no angle to play for her, no tantalizing backstory; no way in fucking hell is Lyme leveraging anything from her past into her appeal, but there's nothing to compete with Felix and his wide-eyed idealism.
Nothing wows the Capitol more than a trained killer who still acts like a little boy amazed that bubbles shine rainbow in the sun. Sloane and her dark-eyed competence, her grim silence and taciturn demeanour, will fade away like shadows under the force of that boy's smile.
Lyme plays it to the sponsors as a mystery; tells them that Devon's boy is putting everything on his sleeve, that that's fine if they like to know exactly what they're getting, but if they're interested in a little mystique, Sloane is the one to watch. It works well enough with some, but most are skeptical, asking if Lyme can't give them a taste of what they might expect. She's been around long enough, they tell her, to know that no one invests without a reasonable hope of return.
She coaches Sloane every night, tells her what to say to the others, what attitude to take toward the Pack, which station to hit in training, and from what she sees, Sloane plays it perfectly, but her heart's not in it. She's guaranteed to go into the Arena now, and Lyme's worst fears - and the committee's warnings - shine clear through the blank stare on her face when she listens to Lyme's advice, nods, and slips back into her room alone.
She's planning to die, and there's nothing Lyme can do about it.
She scores a nine in her private session, but that's more because with her abilities she'd have to lie down and take a nap before she got anything less. It burns Lyme up because she knows - she knows - that if Sloane had tried harder, if she'd bothered to do more than showcase her skills in the most perfunctory way, she could've gotten an eleven. Lyme reminds the sponsors that many tributes have won with lower - Devon scored a nine, and here he is sitting across from her, fighting for her tribute to die - and that this is all part of the plan. Sloane is saving the best for last, that's all, not giving anything away too quickly. Some buy it; most of them don't.
The interviews clinch it. Sloane plays them like one of Brutus' boys, laconic and terse, showing everyone that she's not here to win with pretty words but with her fists and whatever weapon she can get her hands on. Except that Brutus' boys always back it up with that blind, fiery patriotism, the ones that makes the audience and the sponsors and the Gamemakers drool because it has the chance of blowing it up in their face; nothing more exciting than watching the ones with the strongest foundation have it crumble to pieces beneath them. Sloane doesn't have that; she's not here for the honour or the glory or the duty, and it shows; she's here for herself, but unlike Claudius, who tore out a piece of his heart and held it out on stage for all of them to see, Sloane doesn't tell them why.
"She could still surprise them," Devon says to Lyme in a low voice, and Lyme shoves her hands in her pockets so she doesn't belt him right across the face and earn an angry phone call from Brutus for smacking his boy. She doesn't need to be patronized by a kid five years her junior just because he won the jackpot. It must show on her face, because Devon winces and doesn't try again.
"Balcony, now," Lyme says to Sloane that night, after she washes off the makeup and warpaint and glitter and tries to retreat into her room. Lyme stands in front of the door, legs shoulder-width apart and arms crossed, and Sloane's eyes flicker - throat, solar plexus, knees - as she considers whether to try to take Lyme down. At least she still has that reflex; that shows there's still a fighter in there, that she's not just going to leap off the platforms tomorrow and be done with it.
Sloane frowns and flexes her fingers, but in the end she's a Career and she nods, heading out to the side door without a word. Lyme takes two seconds to close her eyes and suck in a deep breath, then lets it out and follows her, shutting the door behind her and setting the glass panels to opaque. Devon is not going to spy on her by accident, even if he doesn't have it in him to do it on purpose.
"I know what you're doing," Lyme says. "It stops now."
"Playing the game?" Sloane asks, her tone neutral and never quite sliding into insubordination. She crosses her arms; the beads from her Centre bracelet glitter in the dim lighting, sending flecks of colour flying along the wall.
And this is it. They could do this all night, trade barbs and knives, Lyme doing her best to break down Sloane's defences and the girl building them up just as fast again. Lyme could try to coax her out of her shell with camaraderie and treats and shared confidences like Nero did with her, like she did with Claudius, but no, that's not what this girl needs.
Lyme's tried the whole week to find the right words, but none of them even come close, and she's run out of time to stumble around and fumble in the dark. She may have won her Games on cunning but she cut through enough bodies with brute force, too.
And so, instead of talking, Lyme lunges and gets Sloane by the front of the shirt, hauling her backwards before she has the chance to react and fight back. By the time Sloane stops being startled - she was expecting a lecture, not a physical attack - Lyme drags her over to the edge of the balcony, pushes her over the railing, and holds her dangling in the air, nothing but the strength of Lyme's arms keeping her from plummeting to the ground.
"What the fuck?" Sloane shouts, and she writhes for a second, tries to squirm loose, but Lyme lets her slip a few inches and she freezes, cursing under her breath. "Are you - what the fuck - what are you doing?"
"This is what you want, isn't it?" Lyme asks her, keeping her voice calm, injecting ice into every crack of fear. "This is what you're planning to do tomorrow - or, not tomorrow, but maybe next week, or the week after, right? You're going in there to die. All I'm doing is saving us all a lot of time and bullshit, not to mention sponsor money that I can give to Devon to use on Felix since he's actually here to win."
Sloane's hands clutch Lyme's wrists, gripping tight and panicked, the nails cutting into the skin. Good. "You're fucking crazy!"
"Am I?" Lyme leans forward and Sloane skids down another precious inch and bursts out with another fit of profanity again, this time her voice skittering upward. "Do you know how many times I've done this? I've been mentoring since you were two years old, do you really think I don't know how to recognize a jumper?"
Sloane's eyes are wide and white and panicked in the darkness. "I'm not going to jump!"
"Of course you're not." Lyme narrows her eyes. "You're going to kill as many people as you can first, because you've got a rage inside you that won't go away until you've drowned it in someone else's blood. You'll burn as many effigies of that bastard as you can, whether it's a twelve-year-old with a limp or an eighteen-year-old with arms like a tree trunk. And once you've done that, then all you have to do is not try your absolute best, because there are five other people in there who have trained for years for this, and the only thing you need is to let them want it just a little bit more than you."
Sloane bites off a cry. "Was that in my fucking file?" she demands. "Does everybody know now? Did you tell that to the sponsors?"
"Yes, no, and no," Lyme says. "The mentors know. Nobody else does. And yes, I could have leveraged that to help you, since you gave me nothing else to go on, but I didn't, because you're more than that. Believe me."
"What do you even know about it?" She's half-mad now, nails scrabbling at Lyme's arms and drawing trails of blood, like she's forgotten what will happen if she digs too deep and Lyme lets go. "What makes you think you know anything?"
"I know more than you think."
Sloane stops struggling. "You're bullshitting me."
"Look at me and tell me if I'm bullshitting you." Lyme pulls her up a few inches and stares her straight in the eye. She lets out just a hint of the anger she's carried deep under her skin for years, lets just one drop of the poison in her veins drip down and hiss against the ground. "I don't know what he told you, but I know that not one word of it is true. I know that if he were here I would peel his skin right off his bones and feed it to him until he choked on it. I know that the best revenge you can have on him is to walk out of that Arena and show him that nothing he did to you could keep you down."
"You're acting like I'm trying to kill myself," Sloane says, wild and desperate. "I'm not. I'm going into the Arena like a good little tribute and I'm going to die like a good little tribute, like twenty-three of them do every single year. All I'm doing is being honest about the math instead of taking whatever drugs Felix is on. It'll hurt less for me than for him because at least I'm being real."
"If that's your attitude then I really will just let you drop," Lyme tells her, even as the horror twists in her chest. "You think I'm fucking playing? I didn't pick you to give you the world's most expensive stage to commit suicide. I picked you to win, and that's what you're going to do."
"I'm going to die!"
"With that attitude, yeah, you damn well are!" Lyme actually lets go, lets her drop a whole two feet before catching her by the legs. Her biceps burn but she holds on, and this time Sloane's shriek breaks at the end, her voice catching as she tries to pull back the fear. "But here's the thing, girl, you made it through the Program. How many chances to die was that? How many times did you have a perfectly good place to do it and no one would blame you because there's always one or two every year, but you didn't choose it then. Something inside you is fighting whether you want it to or not. The same thing that's telling you right now that you don't really want to end up a smear on the concrete down there."
"No, because you're a fucking maniac!" Sloane yells at her. "Do people know this? Do they know that you're a mentor and a fucking crazy person? If you're going to drop me then just fucking drop me, don't play with me! This is sick!"
"So tell me," Lyme says, using every ounce of media training over the last three decades to keep her voice casual. "Do you want me to drop you or not?"
"Yes!" Sloane shrieks. "Just fucking do it, I don't care anymore!"
"Fine," Lyme says, and lets her fall.
The scream is horrible. It tears through Lyme's skin and rips off her fingernails, and she takes those few seconds to press her hands over her eyes and suck in huge, gulping breaths because she has to be in control. This is where it matters most.
The panic is gone by the time the forcefield flings Sloane back up into the air, and Lyme reaches out and grabs her, pulls her in and holds her tight against her chest as the girl bawls with terror and relief.
"Remember that feeling," Lyme tells her, and she grips Sloane hard, backs them away from the edge and leans against the wall, takes the girl's hand and presses it against the cool metal, solid and reassuring. "Remember how it felt when you fell and thought that was it. And then you pick up that sword tomorrow and you fight with everything you've got, and when you come back I'll give you a free shot at me in revenge. Okay?"
"You're insane," Sloane gibbers, and she clings to Lyme's shirt and mashes her face into her shoulder and heaves with aborted sobs. "You're fucking - that was - do they teach you that in school? Is there a chapter for terrifying your tributes?"
"I prefer to improvise," Lyme tells her, and it's so good to hear the snark, even laced with delirium, that she has to swallow a delighted laugh. "Now are we good?"
"Yes," Sloane says, and she pushes away and rubs her hands over her face and buries her fingers in her hair. "Yes, you fucking maniac, okay, you win. Fuck me!"
She gets Sloane calmed down with a mug of hot chocolate dosed with sleeping pills, and she sends the girl to bed and collapses on the sofa, holding a cushion over her face.
"Do I want to know?" Devon asks as he comes out of Felix's room and pads across the floor to stand next to the couch.
"Friendly chat," Lyme tells him, stifling another hysterical bubble of laughter.
"Okay," Devon says dubiously, but he heads into his room and leaves her alone.
Lyme lies there for a while longer, the pillow firmly pressed to her face. "Up to you now, baby girl," she says into the fabric, then sits up, wipes her face, and heads to bed.
Sloane stands in a crouch on her platform, eyes narrowed as her gaze sweeps the field in front of her. A few quick glances to mark her fellow Careers, another for the meat, and she's back to the Cornucopia and the pile of weapons. There's a shiny sword in the middle of it with the perfect reach just for her.
The countdown clock hits zero and Sloane springs off her platform, faster than the others, and she's at the Cornucopia with the weapon in her hand, swinging round and doubling back, before the others have even reached the mediocre supplies in the outer rings. She swings the sword (the boy from Seven goes down in a spray of blood) and before she turns and cuts down the girl from Nine, Sloane pauses - just for a second - to shoot the nearest camera a sharp, wicked smile.
"Where the hell did that come from?" Johanna demands, throwing down her headset. "So much for that."
Lyme ignores her, hands tight on her console, as she offers up a silent prayer.
Six months later the winter wind whips past the windows, rattling the panes as hail strikes the glass. Lyme stands next to Devon, her back stick-straight and expression picture-perfect politeness as she shakes the hand of Claribel of District One, Victor of the 73rd Hunger Games.
"I thought you should know," Claribel says, pressing Lyme's hand, and this isn't scripted but it doesn't matter because the cameras stopped at the door. "She - your girl - she almost had me there, at the end. I could see how much she wanted it."
The blade finds its mark regardless of intention, and Lyme swallows bile. "Thank you," Lyme says mechanically, and the girl flinches just a little around the eyes and fuck, no, it's not this child's fault. She played the game the same as Sloane, it's not fair to blame her. "Still, congratulations. You obviously wanted it more."
The girl's eyes are shadowed, and whenever someone passes too close - especially a man - her shoulders tense like she wants to cringe but knows she'll get in trouble. "I did," Claribel says, the words edged with desperation. "I really did. But -" she stops, pinching her lips together. "I did," she says again, more firmly. "I do. I'm glad I won. For the opportunity."
Lyme smiles (and smiles, and smiles) until the train pulls away, and that night she puts a hole in her wall and stares at it, fingers bleeding onto the floor tiles, until Nero appears out of nowhere with a bandage and a glass of whiskey.
Lyme's learned her lesson when selection for the 74th rolls around. No more girls, no more emotions, no more making it personal. Pick the one most likely to win, the one with the greatest sponsor appeal and highest scores and all of that, and be done with it. This year it's not even a choice; Cato stands out above the rest of the boys in his class like the sun on an exposed block of marble in the middle of a pile of gravel. Cato with his rages and his attitude problem and his attachment issues and pathological need for attention and codependent friendship with the girl who's frontrunner for the year after him.
It's Brutus opposite this year with the girl (Gisele, probably, she's top of her class and quarry-proud and gorgeous) but in a way, that's better. Brutus chooses his tributes on skills, not feelings, and that will help Lyme remember where she is, how she needs to be.
The official deadline is a while yet, and Lyme looks at Cato's file just long enough to reassure herself that yes, she can fix this one, before putting it aside.
Lyme heaves herself to her feet and opens the window, letting in the sharp spring breeze. The wind blows the curtains and brings in a breath of fresh mountain air. It jingles the wind chime, handmade and forever unfinished, fashioned from cords of tattered black leather and chipped glass beads, scrubbed clean of blood to show the original colours: orange, red, silver and gold. Lyme stares at the newest strands for a long time, then shakes her head and pulls the curtains shut.