Katniss Everdeen's courage failed her at the Reaping of the 74th Hunger Games, and she watched in horror as little Primrose Everdeen fell in the arena – a victim of circumstance, youth, and all-consuming destiny. But smarts beat strength in that forested arena, as an unheralded tribute from District 5, Finch – a girl with a face like a fox and hair as red as fire – emerged victorious. But a twist of fate alters every strand of the future, and with no spark of rebellion, unrest churned across Panem for years beneath a shadow of oppression.

Yet even the iron fist of a tyrant can be shattered.

Now, with the 96th Hunger Games looming on the horizon, the slip of a finger alters the fate of Panem forever. For young Terra Pike of District 5, the shockwaves won't be felt immediately. As shadows cross Terra's path, however, she'll be thrust into a dark new order of the Capitol and the Hunger Games – and the menacing storm raging beneath Panem's veil.

/ / / / /

Snow fell, and three ropes jerked.

The winter air bellowed with the cheers of a thousand applauding onlookers. Encircled by the mob, three bodies suspended by their necks shook from head to toe, wracked with spasms of death. Their eyes glazed over with oblivion and their mouths frothed as if collecting the flurries fluttering down from the overcast night sky. Neon red and green lights lit up the bodies as onlookers laughed and pointed. These men had been dreamers once, but every action carried a consequence. Theirs had cost them their lives and rendered them as nothing more than an amusement for a Capitol audience eager for entertainment.

A hanging well done.

A tall man with the first hints of a receding silvery hairline watched from a secluded balcony. He folded his arms and pulled his crimson cloak tighter across his narrow shoulders to ward out the night's cold.

"Let them have a few hours of fun," he said. "Then cut the bodies down and get rid of them."

"And your father's body?" a stout man to his left said. "He's been lying in state for two days, Creon. Give them more time to mourn."

Creon Snow's jaw tightened. "Enough grieving. Find a place in the crypt for a body and get on with it."

The other man frowned. Cyrus Locke had served Coriolanus Snow for more than a decade and earned the trust of the legendary president of Panem. He'd watched Snow's Hunger Games, seen him put down riots in District 8 and 11, and expanded the iron reach of the Capitol to every overlooked corner of the country. Snow's thanks for fifty years of hard work? Nothing more than a brief speech from his son before his body, its neck still bearing the needle wound of an assassin's venom-tipped dart, would be buried and forgotten in a concrete-lined vault.

So ended an era in Panem. A giant retired, brought down by a trio of ragged philistines. What replaced him? A son, a man? Cyrus had earned Creon Snow's trust, but he didn't know how well he understood the new ruler of millions.

"Those people out there loved your father," Cyrus protested as Creon watched his glowing city. "Loved. Let them mourn. He deserves a little respect."

Creon turned and pushed open a glass door behind the two men. Inside had once housed the former President Snow's greatest escape, a greenhouse home to all species of Coriolanus's treasured roses, brought in from the Capitol to the districts to the tropical southern frontier of the nation. Now the shelves were bare, and hundreds of wilting flowers piled up in a pyre in the center of the room.

"Respect?" Creon said, turning on his companion. "Two days of shutting down this city isn't enough respect?"

"He gave a half-century to this city. He was a visionary, an icon. Build a monument, declare a holiday, put on a special Hunger Games for the year, something. He earned that much."

Cyrus had never seen Creon smile. The man's stony face, gray eyes, and wispy hair made him look like a statue of ice in the chilly greenhouse. He picked up a thick wooden rod, with black tar coating a wound-up rag at one end. The new president pulled out a metal lighter from his robe and glanced at the pile of dying roses.

"He wouldn't hear your respect," said Creon. "All dead men are blind and deaf."

The man clicked his lighter on. A tiny droplet of flame sprung from the tip, and when Creon pressed it to the tarry rag, fire leapt up in great bouts.

Shadows writhed upon his stony face. "I don't have any doubts about your loyalty, Cyrus. This country, though, the people here and in the districts…they need a leader. They need guidance, and they need it now. You think a memory or a monument is enough for that?"

"No."

Creon tossed his torch onto the pile of roses. Flame blossomed above the fertile earth of dead things. Wisps of inky smoke slithered through holes in the greenhouse ceiling.

"Enough looking back," Creon said. He turned his back on the fire and staring out at the winking white lights of the Capitol's towers. "The people can have the fun and games my father loved so much. We have to watch over this country now, Cyrus. We've got work to do."

/ / / / /

I had to hurry.

A mile-high giant lumbered towards me from the horizon. The sandstorm had welled up in just minutes off the distance, and in no time the towering tan cloud of dust had closed in on the desert flats. Dark Hell, I was stupid. I hadn't been paying attention at all to the wind as I'd hooked up electrical cables to row after row of solar panels. Now I was going to pay for it if I couldn't rush out of here. Already, strong gusts whipped between the fields of glistening silver panels arranged all around me in perfectly geometric arrays. Dust clumped up in mounds next to the thick black cables I'd been hauling about just a few minutes before. The sun still beat down without mercy on the baked land and on my sweat-beaded forehead, but the storm would begin to blot out the daylight in moments.

Forget walking. I broke out into a run.

My brown hair billowed around me as I sprinted towards a wooden scaffolding a quarter-mile away. The rough desert heat made my legs feel like jelly, and I only half-watched where I placed my feet as I ran. Before I knew it, my foot tripped against a black computer monitoring cube, sending me sprawling. "Damn!"

I rubbed sand from my bright blue eyes and glanced over my shoulder. The cloud laughed at my efforts to get away. In a mere minute, it had swelled up from a looming giant into an onrushing freight train of sand and swirling grit. I had two minutes - at best - to get to the lift before it'd overtake me.

No time to sit here and nurse my aching knee. I jumped to my feet and took off running again. Off to my left, a furious dust devil whipped across the ground. Gusts battered my white shirt with a coat of khaki dust, and the yellow scarf tied around my neck yanked like a wind sock. The air coagulated with dust as the sandstorm rolled in. Already I couldn't see the most distant solar panels I'd just been working on. The haze was from more than just the storm: The heat had set off a hammer pounding inside of my head, and my parched tongue felt covered in scales.

I made a mental note to keep myself better hydrated and gritted my teeth. As the first blast of the storm sandblasted the back of my neck, I dashed up to the scaffolding and banging open the elevator's rusty metal doors.

"No, no, no!" I cried as I banged on the black buttons to take me down from the canyon ridge. Bad luck - of course. On the back wall of the elevator, someone had hung a wooden "closed - maintenance" sign that spun around on a loop of frayed yarn. Thanks for telling me, guys.

I cursed and tied my scarf around my nose and mouth, shielding my eyes with one hand and bracing against the wind with my other arm. The air was a monster now, one giant, coalescing beast of sandpaper that stormed all around me. I strained my eyes to catch a glimpse of the wooden fence that ran fifteen yards to the left, the only thing between me and a drop of hundreds of feet down the rocky canyon.

Gah, I should've gotten down below a half-hour ago. This is your fault, idiot girl, I thought.

"Terra!"

I stopped. There was someone else in the storm - someone calling my name. I'd heard something, something more than the feeling that I would have to wait this storm out alone and curled up in a ball in the broken elevator.

"Terra!"

A shadow materialized in the storm. I shook my head and looked down as a piece of rock lodged in my eye. When I glanced back up, the shadow jogged forward and grabbed my shoulder.

"-hell are you doing?"

I could barely hear the shadow's words, but I knew my rescuer's thin build, rugged brown jacket, and fine brown hair that looked so much like my own - a copy, even.

"Flint!" I cried, waving my hand in the air to steady myself in the wind.

My twin brother pulled my face into his jacket. "Come on," said Flint.

I coughed and grabbed his waist he pushed ahead into the storm, the lapel of his jacket blocking out the worst of the dust. I was thankful that he'd come for me. I knew the path back to the stairwell that led down the canyon walls to home and hearth - really, I did - but the storm's arrival had thrown off any semblance of direction. There was nothing now but me, Flint, and the rushing wind. Nature had draped a sepia veil over the red desert and blue afternoon skies.

Flint pulled me towards a wooden railing and tightened his grip on my hand. Corrugated steel railings materialized through the dust, and I reached out to grab the rough metal. Finally! I nearly jumped down to the first rickety step in excitement, eager to head down the zig-zagging descent to the canyon floor below. The metal groaned under my feet.

Creak, creak, creak.

Craggy rock walls on all sides towered higher and higher as I hurried down the stairs. The lower I went, the more the dust storm dissipated, weakening from a gale into a dusty, dry breeze despite the loud howling up above. As the air cleared, District 5 opened up around me.

A giant limestone dam loomed up behind Flint and I, its placid white face resilient against the storm, its brute strength holding back the majestic crystal lake behind it. Thousands of gallons of water rushed out from holes on either side of the canyon, generating electricity for the Capitol and refreshing the powerful river below. That dam was our bread and butter here in District 5, the biggest part of everything that we were. Wind turbines scattered around the surface and built into the canyon walls twisted in the wind, and solar farms and other power sources added to the electricity that we worked so hard to produce - but the dam was an ever-present reminder of exactly why the Capitol and the Peacekeepers were lenient here.

Houses jutted out from the rock on either side of the river below. Some were no more than bungalows, tiny mouse holes cut into the ancient rock, while others, two stories high and built of mud brick and imported white wood clustered about markets and watering holes, interspersed with hardy desert scrub and the occasional brown-tipped palm frond. Even with dust from above lingering in the air, I could just see the towering green algae farms popping up over the canyon walls further down the river. The desert was dry, but life still thrived here.

I had to give her home this much credit: District 5 offered a striking view.

"Terra," Flint said, grabbing my shoulder and stopping me before I could trot down the rest of the staircase. "What'd you do, fall asleep up there? You can't see a damn storm coming?"

I pulled my scarf away from my face and looked off into the distance. "I just got carried away. Sorry."

"You got carried away connecting solar panels?"

I clutched my arms to my side and stepped away. I hated it whenever Flint sounded like this, as if he'd already made up his mind about things before I had a chance to defend myself. Why'd he have to be so critical whenever I slipped up? He wasn't our father.

Heck, I even came out first...

"Why'd you come up?" I asked, trying to steer clear of another drawn-out, patronizing argument.

"Don't change the subject."

"Look, some of the panels were glitchy. They wanted me to look at 'em. Can you just leave it?"

"Who's they? That Peacekeeper supervisor guy?"

"Yes. Orson."

Flint paused and looked towards the buildings below. I followed his gaze. Down near the canyon bend, Peacekeepers had set up tall scaffolds draped in scarlet sheets. The gold of Panem's eagle seal glistened through the haze.

Reaping tomorrow.

My gut churned, and I knew why. It was the new president's first Reaping. There was a new Snow leading the country, six months on the job since he old president's death, but would the Hunger Games change as well? The annual festival of blood had been a staple in Panem for nearly ninety-six years; I'd never known life without it every summer. Then again, Coriolanus Snow had been a constant as well. Now he was nothing but dust, no firmer than the sand swirling about above the canyon.

Flint frowned. "Dad wanted me to bring you home before tomorrow. I didn't see you come down with the other guys."

I held back a feeling of resentment in my heart, tempering my urge to ask why he didn't work along the solar arrays like I did after school. I already knew the answer: Our father and mother needed a hand to help in our family's cantina, and they kept Flint around for that. I know what they thought of me. I was extra income, a benefit, a perk. After all, our father had wanted a son...and as he'd said, I was too quiet and "too prone to staring" for working in the cantina, anyway. I guess that made me "weird."

"You know," Flint added when I sighed. "Just want to look like everyone else. Families all get together the evening before the Reaping and all."

And the sun forbid we didn't keep up with the other merchant families. "Great. Let's just go."

I shrugged and looked across the canyon. A freight elevator sat motionless at the bottom of a lift that stretched from the canyon floor to the top of the desert. The train station was up there, just a pile of sandstone and mud bricks lost in the dust storm today. Tomorrow it'd take two kids away from here – forever, if our district's recent track record in the Games continued.

Reaping tomorrow.

/ / / / /

~ Thanks for reading! This is a take on an alternate history when Katniss can't summon up the courage to volunteer for Prim. Predictably, Prim…never made it out of the arena. Foxface won the 74th Games, and without a symbol to rally around, the rebellion never came together. It's technically a story that I half-finished two years ago under a different account name, but new and improved!

Any questions, comments, criticisms, etc. are always welcome! Many of your favorite characters will show up eventually, but a great deal won't show up until later on in the plot as things develop. A few other minor plot points have been adjusted for creative content. Rated T for violence, horror, and occasional mature language. Suzanne Collins owns all original property of The Hunger Games. Enjoy!