Hey there, new (and hopefully old if some of you still have alerts on?) friends! As the summary says, this is the repost of an old story. It switches to the usual first-person present tense after this. I'll put about a billion more disclaimers and content warnings on this later, but for now, all I'll say is please note the rating.

Deyna watched patiently as President Fife picked up the little sphere of metal, tossing and catching it.

"Ahem," Deyna said gently.

Fife jumped at his voice, synthesized by the gas mask strapped over his red hair. "Ah! Oh. Balthazar. Yes, hello," he said coolly.

"That metal, sir."

Fife tossed and caught it again, trying to look suave, but barely managing to keep control of the thing. "What about it?"

"That's plutonium."

"Is it? Interesting, very interesting."

"Plutonium is radioactive, Mr. President. Perhaps you should go get dosed by the medics?"

Fife's lilac eyes widened. "… Is it?" he said again. He put the sphere down gently and scampered from the cell.

Deyna smiled and picked it up. "Who's a good demon core?" he cooed at the metal, which was indeed radioactive, but not of the variety that would do harm through his gloves. "Is it you? Is it you? Coochie coochie coo."

"Mr. Balthazar?"

"Hmmmm?" Deyna said slowly, spinning the plutonium ball on the table.

"I-Is that, er… is that really the demon core, sir?" the technician stammered, peeking through the bars of the cell from the grimy hallway. The man's uncertain voice did not match the gas mask he wore, identical to Deyna's, designed to be as intimidating as possible.

"Oh, yes. I suppose it's not exactly recognizable on sight, is it?" Deyna mused. "Get some masking tape and label it. Maybe it'll give the District Fives a jump."

The techie blinked, nodded, and darted off.

The Head Gamemaker kept spinning the core idly, watching the hallway through the bars. The technician's footsteps faded out in one direction, Fife's in the other. The wrong way, incidentally. Deyna sighed, gave the plutonium a last fond pat, and set off after the President.

"Sir?" he called.

"Yes?" Fife's voice echoed back from around the corner, a bit more high-pitched than before. Deyna smirked. The place already had such atmosphere. It wasn't quite as filthy as he wanted and his favorite tricks weren't installed yet, but this arena had personality. It told a story. He was very excited.

Deyna stepped over a dead body. Real and very fresh, for that extra verisimilitude. "This way, sir."

"Which way?" Fife said dolefully. "You're echoing."

"… I'll just come find you, sir," Deyna said, taking a deep breath to fortify his patience. He adjusted his gas mask and set off down the dark corridor, noting that Fife still wasn't wearing one. Hopefully he wouldn't be held responsible for that. Who could hold him responsible? Not Fife, certainly.

He rounded a corner to find Fife standing in the middle of one of the tiny lead vaults, his lilac suit streaked with black dust. Fife looked up. "There you are."

Deyna nodded. "The exit is back this way, sir."

"Hmm," Fife said. "How close are we to having the arena completed?"

"According to the engineering team… fifty-eight percent," Deyna said, checking his computer. "Most of the infrastructure is done, but there's a lot of wiring and such left. We're right on schedule."

"Cameras?"

"Still working on the mounts and determining the placing for the hidden ones."

Fife nodded. Before Deyna knew what was happening, he was pinned to the wall by his neck, his gas mask torn off.

"M-Mr. President?" he choked out, tugging at Fife's hands instinctively and unsuccessfully.

"All this plutonium, Balthazar. Where'd you get it?"

Deyna gulped. "Er. Well… you know."

"Are you honestly telling me… that you did business with District Thirteen… just to stock your Hunger Games?" Fife snarled in his face.

"Not with the government!" Deyna protested. "A breakaway group."

"You have access to rogue groups in District Thirteen?"

"… Er."

"And you thought I was stupid."

"In my defense, you did do a remarkably convincing impression of it. Sir."

"Works like a charm, doesn't it?" Fife grumbled.

"It does," Deyna said agreeably, well aware that he had been thoroughly outdone. He'd been so convinced Fife was a nonentity that he'd never noticed the man was nearly twice his size.

"So what's your plan?"

Deyna blinked. "Pardon?"

"Communicating with District Thirteen? Hoarding weapons-grade plutonium? I can promise you your life if you tell me everything. No torture. You have my word."

"I… sir, no, it's not like that. Not at all. I promise you, I am not a traitor."

"Why the contact with Thirteen, then?"

Deyna blinked, wondering if he could be misinterpreting the question. "Because I needed the materials, sir. For the Games."

Fife's eyes narrowed. "You've always loved going behind my back, Balthazar."

Deyna shrugged apologetically, coughing a little when doing so made Fife inadvertently tighten his grip. "I thought you were an idiot. It was fun," he said matter-of-factly. "No need for any of that anymore. I mean… think about it, sir. I believe we've established that you tricked me fair and square. But did I ever try to assassinate you or anything like that while I was under the impression that you were a drooling idiot? I did not. Sir."

"You'll share every bit of information you have about Thirteen, and you'll explain why you didn't do so before." It was a statement, not a question.

"Of course, sir. I can do the latter right now. I didn't tell you because I thought you'd mess it up, and it would be better to save the information to share with the next President."

Fife considered that. "Understandable. You'll also consent to observation, physical and technological."

"Of course, sir. I don't mind at all. Always happy to show my work, mm-hmm," Deyna gritted out, standing on tiptoe to keep his windpipe working. "Certainly."

"You're either being totally genuine or plotting my murder."

Both, as it happened. Deyna was quite serious about having no political aspirations; his concerns began and ended with the Games. But it also happened that he preferred not to be choked, and both his trachea and his ego were already bruised.

He looked away. "I just want to do my job, sir."

"And I'm sure you'll do it brilliantly."

Deyna risked a toothy smile. "Oh, me too, sir."

xxx

Cleo's cackle rang out across the Gamemakers' office. "Get a load of this motherfucker."

Tibbi leaned over her shoulder to read the kid's profile. "Why, what's…? Oh my gracious to Betsy, what a bastard."

"But then there's her," Cleo said gleefully. "Oh, man. These two, man. We gotta make 'em fight."

Tibbi's face lit up. "Did you see the girl I found before, too? Maybe the two of them will ally, and, and… ooh, you just know the Careers will try and track him down once they figure out what's going on, and… This is gonna be awesome."

"Ahem."

They turned to find Deyna behind them, looking grumpier than usual and rubbing his neck.

"Good morning," Tibbi chirped.

"No," he grumbled. "Are you done with the roster yet?"

"Er," Cleo said.

"What's the holdup?"

"Scouting teams, sir. Bit of a mess, but it should all be under control soon."

"Soon," Deyna repeated doubtfully, throwing a glance at the tall man behind him.

"Who is that, by the way, sir?" Cleo asked, staring at the man unabashedly. The man's glasses were too dark to tell whether he was staring back.

Deyna swept past her. "A friend," he said airily.

"That's funny, because he sure looks like one of the President's personal thugs."

"I have friends in high places," Deyna sniffed. "I am in high places."

"You sure you're not just high?"

He considered it. "No. Just get me that damn roster, would you?"

"Doing our best, sir."

"Somehow that doesn't fill me with confidence."

Cleo made a face at his back.

xxx

Hundreds of miles away, an Avox woman died. She was the ninth that day.

An engineer in a gas mask turned up the portable fluorescent floodlight by the door. The stark glare splashed across fiberglass body bags piled on the concrete floor, the first few lined up neatly, later ones haphazardly slung down when it became apparent that the death rate would be immense. A Geiger counter clicked gently in the corner, the reading slightly higher since the dying woman had been brought in.

He punched a needle into the woman's arm, drew blood into a tiny vial, and plugged the vial into a device on his belt. "Damn," he said.

"How much?"

"Twelve grays."

The second man whistled, his mask rendering the sound as a soft shriek. "Where was she?"

"Let me check." The first engineer scanned the tracker in the woman's arm, pulling up her assignment history. "Looks like the workshop room, mostly. Yeah, we'll have to bring that down; anyone who spends a lot of time in there will be someone the Gamemakers want to stay alive for a while. What's in there?"

"Some cesium-137, I think. Might've been polonium, too. All in capsules, though; shouldn't be more than a millisievert an hour. Just to give 'em a jump if they get a counter working."

"Some of the capsules must be leaking." The engineer glanced around the the room, a vault they'd been forced to set aside for Avox corpses. "Hey, Avox, c'mere."

A teenage girl with a torn paper surgical mask tensed in the corner, crouching over the body of an older boy.

"Yes, you. Leave him alone a minute; I promise he won't run off on you."

The girl stood up and crept over warily. Her eyes were bloodshot, her hair limp and full of gray dust. Her posture conveyed the exhaustion of someone who'd been so scared for so long that she'd lost the ability to do anything but what she was told.

"Pick up a Geiger counter and go to the workshop. That's section 3A, second level. There are cabinets in the back of the room with little gray balls loose in them, like marbles. Hold them up to the counter. If the light turns red, bring the ball to Contamination."

The girl's eyes went dead.

"Quickly, please," the engineer reprimanded.

She tilted her head, giving him a questioning look.

"What?"

She drew her finger across her throat and gave him the look again.

"Will it kill you, you mean?"

She nodded.

He considered it. "I doubt it. Hold it far away from your body and walk fast. Can't hurt to use tongs if you can find them. Don't eat it and don't skip any mammograms for the rest of your life, sweetie."

She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then swallowed hard, nodded, and trudged off, staring at the ground.

The engineer heaved an impatient sigh. "I wish they wouldn't look at me like that."

"Makes you feel like a monster," his colleague agreed.