The smoothness of the train is enough to put anyone to sleep – it sails along the track like the smoothest ship on the calmest water. I've been dozing thru every train stop in 4 and jerked myself awake as we reached district 11. Most people generally leave the train at this station, and then there's only me and two other people in the car. The map in front of me shows a few more stations in 11 – it's the largest district in Panem, and has half a dozen stations on this track alone – and then it goes on to my final destination.
District 12.
It's been ten years since the revolution. The War. The Battle of the Mockingjay, the Battle at the Capital, the Massacre. I was only a child then, only nine years old, but I remember everything.
I remember how Peacekeepers tried to poison our waters, so that everything we caught would turn our insides into poison and we'd die in agony. The rebels managed to stop them, but some of the poison did leak – it took years for people to determine that the catch was safe again. I remember the smell of rotting fish, and shells cracked open to reveal black insides. We still had to bring in everything suspected of the rot (because that's what it did, it rotted your insides until you died) and left it to bleach in the sun. The smell was atrocious, and the added vomit in the beginning of the sea culling still haunts me at night. I remember how my mother worried that the stench carried hints of poison, and she would check our eyes every morning and every night. Blindness was the first sign that you had the rot.
I remember going to bed hungry every night, and how sometimes the only thing we had to eat was dried seaweed. I don't think I'll ever get the salt out from my teeth – we used to compete to see how green our teeth would be at the end of the week. I remember my baby sister crying for water after chewing on the salty greens; she hated the saltiness. I remember her in her little casket, no longer crying for water. She had snuck out and nibbled on a fish that had washed ashore, not knowing that it had the rot until she woke up and couldn't see our faces. I don't like to think of how she died. My mother died not long after we sent my sister out to sea in her little casket. There was no earth left to bury either of them.
I remember my older sister and how she would hide under jetsam and overturned fishing boats, waiting for Peacekeepers; she was always so good at hiding. No one ever found her – until they did, and they shot in her in the town square with a handful of other rebels. They had set traps in the sand, covered with barbs and poison jabs, and Peacekeepers would fall in and be covered in sand, suffocating and poisoned – like the citizens of Panem. She looked at me and smiled before the bullet blew her head apart. That was the day my father stopped speaking.
The war destroyed my family. No, that's not entirely true. The Capital destroyed my family. The Peacekeepers – what an ironic name – tried to destroy my village, my district. And yet we survived. We are fewer, so much fewer than before the revolution, but half the village survived. Everyone has lost someone – a child, a parent, a friend – but we survived.
In the ten years since, we have come so far; change has been welcome and successful. People have flocked to district 4; some only visit briefly, but some have stayed and become permanent. They brought knowledge with them from their districts, and soon we began to try new farming techniques, design new electronic devices, and create stronger medicines. The medicines is what helped change our whole district.
Our town leader got together with three other leaders, and built the largest hospital in district 4 between them. It primarily offers support and care for the war veterans – people who suffered much worse than I have, and yet still survive. I volunteered for a short while, but I couldn't look at them with indifference. I couldn't not take their stories home with me. I began to write them down, and then record them on a small recorder. I always asked if it was okay first, and many gave their consent – some seemed eager for someone to write down their account of the war. I went on every floor, visited every room, spoke with every patient who could. Some used their hands to sign their stories, like an Avox – their voices destroyed in various horrific reasons. Some would write them down and give them to me – they didn't want to voice what they saw in their districts. I even found a survivor from the Capital; apparently he had had his fingernails painted in solid gold and never found a way to get the metal off until rebels pried them from his fingertips. He wept and showed me his hands, how the nails never grew back.
Everyone suffered. There was no one that the war left untouched.
I published the stories in book I called "The War Districts: Volume 1". I didn't really expect anything to happen from it, but the book sold well in every district and got rave reviews in the Capital, of all places. Letters came from all corners of Panem, asking for me to interview them or simply sending their stories. Everyone had a story to tell – some so horrendous that I couldn't get thru them in one sitting, some with hope and acts of courage and valor and love. A few even made me laugh, which brought a smile to my father's face. He signs that I smile so rarely.
The second volume did better than the first, and a few individuals offered ridiculous amounts of money for me to write about things they found to be important. I turned them all down. I didn't want to write about things I found trivial. I wanted to write as a historian of the war; I wanted to get my stories and my facts as straight from the source as possible. History deserved as much. Civilization, and the survivors, and the future generations deserved as much as well.
So I quietly made arrangements to rent a small room in district 12, packed a suitcase, kissed my father, and boarded a train. District 12 is still tiny – there are only two stations in the whole district still. They seem to have had the harder time of getting back on their feet than the other districts, but I'm determined to see for myself. Furthermore, I'm determined to see them for myself.
Katniss Everdeen. Peeta Mellark.
I'm not leaving until I see them.