Valeria, head of the placement division of District Two's Peacekeeping forces, narrows her eyes. "Say that again?"
Darius is eighteen years old. He joined the Career Program at seven and stayed to sixteen, where he made the transfer to the Peacekeeping Academy. He graduated third in his class. "I want District Twelve."
"Is this some kind of joke?" Her voice cuts at him like a feint with a knife, searching for openings. "You have seven job offers here in Two. You could end up as the bodyguard for the District Mayor if you keep up working."
Darius holds himself proud and straight. "I want District Twelve," he says again, not flinching.
"Nobody wants District Twelve."
They could do this all day, moving step over step in an intricate dance, crossing swords again and again. Darius cuts through the ritual, a hidden knife at a hand-to-hand brawl. "I went there for my practicum, I know what I'm doing."
Valeria looks over the paperwork on her desk, flipping through the pages and tapping her fingers against the paper. "So what's this about, then? You want to go for the white liquor and the cheap whores?" she says. Darius isn't the only one with a hidden weapon in this fight. "You can get those here for much less trouble, and you wouldn't have to live out in the sticks."
"It's not that." Darius winces. "Nobody cares about Twelve."
Valeria raises an eyebrow. "And this is a surprise? Why should we? It's a backwoods district where people walk over corpses to get to their little black market. The only reason we're there at all is to keep them from drinking themselves to death. There's a reason we don't send anyone useful to Twelve; it's a waste of their talents. If I sent you to Twelve I'd be fired."
Darius shakes his head. He saw Twelve during his practicum; not just walked through it, but saw it. He saw the hollow cheeks and empty eyes; saw the girls skitter away from him when he passed, seventeen and copper-haired and handsome, saw them the next day when they gathered in front of his house, lips bitten red and cheeks pinched until they glowed. The jealous, furious looks the people from the Seam shot at the merchants for their privilege, a privilege that barely meets the poverty line in most areas of Two.
"Twelve needs help," Darius says, giving up on finesse.
Valeria stops. "Say that again?"
"They need help," Darius says. "I want to help them."
Once he held a baby for a young girl with skinny knees and a dress too small for her while she slipped into a store; stood there for an hour before the shopkeeper poked his head out and hollered that she'd long run out the back door. Darius carried the baby - tiny and big-eyed and silent - to the group home, handed it over to the world-weary woman in charge. He looked down into the face of a little girl with a handprint on her cheek, bright and stark because it didn't matter who saw, no one would care.
"And how would you do that?" Valeria asks.
"They just need hope," Darius says. He should have come up with something better, written a speech, maybe, but it's too late now. "They need - compassion. Understanding. Something. A little bit of District Twelve pride, that's all. Something to get them out of bed in the morning."
Twelve, as the stories go, is a district where babies are born in silence because they're born knowing there's no point in crying. They die the same, silent and alone and forgotten until the stench gets bad enough to warn the neighbours.
"Nobody cares there," Darius says. The Peacekeepers trade for poached game; they take home the girls so starved it's impossible to tell whether they're legal or not because none of them have any curves. "They just need someone to care."
"I see," Valeria says, and she goes still. If this were a fight, Darius would be watching her back hand, looking for the moment she draws a hidden dagger. "Maybe Twelve is the best place for you after all."
It takes weeks of deliberating, but finally they approve the placement. Darius' father refuses to see him to the train, and stares at the wall in stony silence when Darius promises to write. His mother cries. His little brother hangs on his arm. "Bring me back a bear!" Croyden says, swinging from his elbow. "I heard they have bears out there!" Darius laughs and ruffles his hair.
Darius spends the train ride with a dossier of registered citizens, matching their names and faces in his head. He's always been good at memorizing, and by the time the train arrives the next day, he's got the Reaping-age children down. He'll learn the rest as he needs to.
The air in District Twelve is heavy and sweltering; the people barely glance at him as he passes. Even the cicadas in the trees buzz in a desultory fashion.
A dark-haired girl in a man's leather jacket and handmade boots brushes past him. Darius takes a moment to run through his mnemonics - he'd drawn a tree by her picture, a pine tree, an evergreen, aha! - and touches his fingers to his forehead in salute. "Good morning, Miss Everdeen," he says. She stops in her tracks, stares at him, then scurries off in the opposite direction. When she turns back to glance at him, Darius smiles at her.
Dust and drifting coal already mar his pristine white uniform, but he doesn't bother to brush it off. A merchant child with her blonde hair in pigtails runs after a ball that rolls into the road; Darius picks it up and hands it to her.
A little compassion goes a long way, Darius tells himself. That's all the district needs.