Callista sees her first ghost the fall after the 45th Games.
She had the perfect first tribute, a brilliant boy with a sharp smile and madness behind his eyes. He topped the scores in every category at the Centre except for the psychological evaluation, which only increased his worth as far as Callista was concerned. No one sane could walk into the Arena and come back out unscarred, and better to take a child broken and ready for moulding than to have to unmake and undo first.
Damien had sailed through the interviews, the private session with the Gamemakers. He'd killed three tributes in the first five minutes of the Games, and he dragged the girl from One into his lap and kissed her throat while grinning over her shoulder at her fuming district partner. Callista had more sponsor promises lined up for him than any first-year mentor in a decade; he couldn't lose.
But lose he did, to the giant, scowling boy from Eleven, who slipped into the Career camp after dark and flayed Damien's throat open with his scythe. Shock held Callista senseless, frozen in her seat at the mentor console as alarms flashed across her screen and Damien's vitals leapt off the charts before crashing down to nothing.
All that training, all that preparation, all that perfection, undone in less than a minute while the boy from Eleven slipped away into the trees.
No one wins their first year in the mentor seat, they reassured her. As though Callista is ordinary, as though Damien is nothing but a statistic. As though that brings him back to life.
On ordinary nights Callista likes the sparkles at the corner of her vision, the kind of music that thrums in her bones, smooth dance moves with undulating hips and arms flung lazily overhead, but not that night. That night she needed blood and filth and darkness, and after the hovercraft picked up Damien's body she set out to find it. Callista's mentor tracked her down to a club near the edges of civilization in the Capitol, where drugs are less shiny and more gritty and leave her with a kicked-in skull in the mornings, where pressing up against a stranger in a dark corner is just as likely to end up with hands groping for her pockets as well as her pants.
Hera found her in the club under the pulsating strobe lights, and Callista didn't bother fighting. She'd expected — something, resistance, fury, impatience at being interrupted before she could fight or fuck or both, but the drugs sat heavy and scratchy behind her eyes and a low, hollow pit grew in her stomach and seeing Hera there had almost been a relief. In the end Hera didn't have to say a word, only pulled Callista close against her side and draped her jacket around her shoulders. She wrapped her arms around her Victor and led her out into the street, and once in the car Callista tipped her head sideways into the curve of her mentor's neck and fell into an uneasy sleep to the sensation of fingers combing through her hair.
After that the Village is too quiet, the lot beside Callista's house no longer an open clearing scattered with daisies but an empty graveyard, missing the house that would have, should have been built. Even her own house can't comfort her, not when Callista had stitched a quilt and fixed up her guest bedroom in preparation for her special Victor. The cats stare at her in accusation — she'd promised them a new friend, and what had she brought them, empty promises and lies — and Nero's silent, stifling sympathy follows her whenever she comes within breathing distance.
The Capitol at least has distractions, and so while Hera must be sighing and waiting for Callista to come down on her own, weekend after weekend Callista finds herself on the train, heading for the next party with pretty guests and free-flowing alcohol and pills that dull her thoughts and brighten the senses.
It works, until the night she looks across a crowded ballroom and spies Damien on the arm of a giggling Capitol socialite.
Callista knocks over a server as she all but barrels her way across the room, her usual grace and poise retained even with half a dozen controlled substances in her bloodstream but destroyed by the sight of her tribute, alive and fawning. What happened — how did they do this — had they hurt him, had they brainwashed him, would she have to tear someone's throat out or drop to her knees in gratitude? So many questions and none of them important, if her perfect, wicked boy doesn't recognize her.
The fluff next to him has her claws in his arm, and Callista readies herself to tear off the woman's pretty little face when the boy turns to look at her. It's not Damien, the realization hitting her hard in the breastbone. The eyes are too close together, bright and intelligent but not malicious enough. He's also far too obsequious, standing with his hand on the small of the woman's back, laughing at her silly, inconsequential joke. He's all wrong except he isn't, the face is the same and the bone structure is the same and what is this.
"Oh, look, isn't this fortuitious!" the woman coos. "Do you like him? I had him ordered myself, called in the surgery as soon as the Games started. Yours was just too perfect, you know, and I knew you'd never share him if he made it out. And then he didn't, so it was even more special, don't you think? Oh, you must let me take a picture with you, the two of you together, it's fate!"
Before mentoring Callista had never frozen in her life, always knowing exactly what words to use or what weapon to reach for and where to cut with either, but now she stands stock still with her Victor-face on, the stem of a champagne glass broken in her hand and ready to drive into the jugular only she can't, she can't. Hera's warnings on killing pound in her mind, and so she digs the jagged flute into her thumb and inhales at the sting and the slide of blood down her fingers.
"Stand close now," the woman says, fluttering and floating but a command nonetheless. Callista turns to the boy wearing her tribute's face and for a second his own mask flickers, eyes blank and smile a rictus, and Callista wonders what he looked like before this monster in pink taffeta paid to rearrange his bones. But empathy is a poison and Callista refuses to drink, and so she stands with them and she smiles at the photographer who materializes to take pictures, and she tilts her shoulder just so and thinks of how much money this will make Two when the photos hit the networks.
Flashbulbs flicker in the corner of her vision, purple blobs that hover even when she blinks, and soon Callista bids the woman and her pet goodbye. Her breath roars in her ears and for an agonizing moment she misses the blazing heat of the Arena and the freedom to murder anything that moves with an ache so fierce it catches in her chest. Her eyes burn and Damien lies in a field of flowers and that horrible woman is fucking an imperfect copy and this isn't why she trained. This isn't why her parents gave her to the Centre, this isn't why she learned to flay the skin off a person's body and flick her wrist so the blood scattered just so.
"Callista," says a voice at her side. She catches herself before she jumps and whirls — cameras, always cameras, don't break don't scowl don't give them anything that isn't perfect — and gives the man beside her a hard-edged smile instead. "I'm from Victor Affairs," he tells her. "I'm here to take you home."
Victor Affairs has not followed Callista around since she was fresh out and in danger of sticking her knives into a rude party guest, but apparently losing her boy has put her back on the watchlist. Callista should be angry or indignant offended or a dozen things at the step backward in her personal liberty, but much like Hera and the nightclub, any attempt to dredge up emotion comes up with nothing. "All right," Callista says, and lets him lead her to the car.
They drive in silence, heading for the central train station, and Callista doesn't try to argue against the babysitting. Finally, as the road curves toward the terminal, Callista asks, "Is it common? Stealing dead tributes' faces and putting them on their fucktoys."
The man is too good at his job to glance at her in the rearview mirror. "Common enough," he says.
Perhaps District 2 even receives a cut of the proceeds if the model is one of theirs, not that anyone would be sordid enough to discuss such a thing in public. Callista imagines Ronan being called in to consult on that meeting, pictures him trying to weigh which is more important, his soul and integrity or ensuring that they can at least profit somewhat from this tasteless enterprise, and she manages a dry laugh.
She turns on the smiles for the cameras at the station, the blinding flashes and microphones shoved in her face, but ignores the shouted questions, the cacophony as they all fall over themselves for a moment of her attention. Normally Callista revels in it but tonight it's dry and pointless, and she can't trust herself not to snarl or claw one of them across the face. Luckily aloofness is part of her persona and so she sweeps past them with little more than a flicked glance, knowing they'll only beg for her all the more later.
Hera meets her at the station in Two, and Callista grits her teeth but climbs into the car. The train ride has thawed some of the dreaded apathy, and the first stirrings of anger are kindling in her chest but for now she's too tired to do anything about it. The rage will come later, and then Callista will reach for her knives and skirt the very edges of her promise to Hera not to kill anyone but for now she needs her home.
"It will happen again," Hera warns her. She sounds tired, her voice not gravel-exhausted like the long nights in the mentor seat but dull, sapped of spirit and life and personality. "It's too profitable an enterprise to forbid. We pretend we don't notice, and it's not good form to flaunt it at us. She'll be told not to bring him to a party you're attending in the future, or any future Victors. It's all we can do."
Callista says nothing until the gates of the Village close behind her, shutting out the world and its madness and its suffocating inferiority. She inhales deep, scenting the pines and the apple blossoms, and reminds herself that she is home, and one day that horrible woman will die from a botched plastic surgery operation or a drug overdose after a small, insignificant life of parties and unfulfilling sex while Callista continues to live and wring every last drop of matter out of life.
"If I see him again," Callista says, tilting her head back to stare up at the moon, "I am ending his career. See how much she enjoys her pet when he has no tongue or functioning hamstrings."
Hera says nothing, but she hands Callista a pair of knives before bringing her to the backyard. Their fight is long and messy and Callista screams until half the Village must hear her but no one so much as peers out their windows. Eventually Callista tires, and she takes herself to bed with a bottle of wine and a roll of bandages and calls the cats up onto the bed with her as she patches herself up.
Next time, Callista promises herself. Next time her tribute will win, and none of this will matter. The others can make inferior copies all they like, Callista will have her Victor and she will protect him and anyone who even looks at him sideways will have their eyes torn out through their skulls.
Next time, next time, next time.
The next time Callista's tribute loses again, and she looks for him in the Capitol for weeks, expecting to catch a glimpse at the corner of her eye, before she remembers. That night she comes as close to breaking her no-killing promise as she ever gets, and she stares as the blood as it leaks out onto the concrete, dials up the local emergency number and walks away.
It is not the end of the ghosts, and as much as Callista wants to slit their throats and dump their corpses in the alleyway she can't. Instead she stalks them and ruins their nights, slashing tires or slipping emetics and impotence drugs into the wine, sneaking into the kitchens to poison the food so both end up expelling from every orifice. Eventually, without a single official word, the idea spreads that it is a bad idea to take one of Callista's tributes as inspiration for a plaything.
One day, Callista reminds herself as she dumps her ruined, blood-soaked shoes in the dumpster and makes the trek back to her apartment barefoot. One day she will pull a Victor and all of this will be worth it.