Disclaimer: The Hunger Games is not mine.
In District 13 with its recycled air and the fundamental inability of its people to stay away from each other, an airborne virus spread like wildfire. This was bad enough when it was something annoying but simple like a head cold. When the virus in question was more virulent and serious, the consequences were dire. They noticed when the coughing and congestion started to spread (as all such things were tracked and monitored), but they did not realize the severity of what they were dealing with until the coughing was followed by fevers and the fevers by system failures and deaths. They attempted containment as best they could, but the damage already inflicted was devastating. People were not intended to live completely without sunlight, and the lack left them particularly vulnerable to an entire subset of diseases and conditions. The epidemic which they were currently riding out proved to be one of them.
That's when the suggestions started. They had to be very careful of their dealings with the outside. They existed in an impasse. Any shift on either side could end that impasse, and District 13 had no illusions about their fate were that shift not to occur in their favor. There had always been those within the upper levels of the District hierarchy that held that they were only biding their time until their District could afford to make a move. With the disarray of the current situation and the absence of certain authority holding persons who would normally have offered them opposition, they saw a chance and decided to take it.
It seemed a perfect position for them to be in as they made the final call. They could not afford for information on their weakened state to get out unless, of course, the other side was facing a similarly weakening crisis of its own. The common consensus had always been that the structure and terrain involved made a frontal assault an impossibility. An attack that they would carry into their borders on their own was another matter entirely. No one would be able to track anything back to District 13. They were, after all, isolated. There would be no reason to suspect their involvement.
They would not achieve anything decimating. They had studied the projections and knew that without the restraints of enclosed spaces and lowered immune systems (not to mention the higher quality medical care) there would not be as high of an infection rate or a fatality rate among the infected. Still, it was a chance to do something. They might even get lucky. How many of the people in their precious, protected city would ignore the fact that they were sick in order to indulge in their cherished Hunger Games parties and events?
They did not spend much time pondering District 12. It was just a step in the process - a vector to move their virus from point A to point B. Losses happened. Everyone in the Districts of Panem should know that already. They were not trying to cause widespread harm in Twelve to hurt the people there. They just needed enough saturation to ensure that the virus made its way onto that train. Nature would take over from there. They had estimates, of course, but most of them did not worry over those. They were focused on their goal. The projections would not have done them much good even if they had paid attention. Projections can only be as good as the quality and quantity of information going into them. They had figured on open space and not thought about the realities of workers in the mines. They had reconfigured for immune systems uncompromised by living under the ground and not adjusted for ones compromised by malnutrition. In short, they had done a shoddy job because they really did not care to know.
It wasn't the first time that District 12 had been used as a means to an end.
Ari's mother had been less than pleased when Maysilee had trudged into the apothecary's shop and plopped a sick child on the bench next to the door. She may have known her remedies and been the obvious person for Maysilee to ask, but she was a strict adherent to the belief that the sick should be kept home. There was much muttering about "traipsing about without a lick of sense" and "as if the rest of the world wants a share of what you have" whenever someone obviously ill darkened her doorstep instead of sending a relation to pick up what was needed or ask someone from the shop to stop by and make a recommendation. Maysilee had tried to explain her reasoning, but she had been met with even more muttering about incomprehensible teenage girls picking up strange children.
"Like as not you'll end up with Peacekeepers breathing down all our necks for making off with someone's child," she had been saying as she crushed up something and mixed it into a glass of water.
Maysilee had given up on trying to explain by that point. Ari's mother never listened well when she did not want to hear what was being said. She could put up with all the grumbling as long as she got what she had come for in the first place.
"All over you," the woman stated with a shake of her head as she watched the child muffle another fit of coughing in Maysilee's shirt. "You'll be down with it next, and I'll thank you to stay away from Ari until you're well over it," she admonished. "Get him to drink this," she ordered, "and then get to the Justice Building without any detours. You go straight home from there and clean up, do you hear me?"
"Yes, ma'am," she recited dutifully as she tried to figure out how to arrange the little one on her lap to make the drinking process work. Ari's mother chuckled at her clumsy attempts before turning to head back behind the counter.
"Don't spill that on my floor," she commanded. "And you remember our terms."
"I won't forget," Maysilee promised thinking about the best way to explain to her parents that she had bartered an assortment of candy for Ari's next birthday in exchange for medicine for a child she didn't know. It wasn't so much that she thought that she would be in trouble as that there didn't seem to be a way to explain without the story sounding bad. Her parents would tell her that she had overreacted - holding to the point that the woman still chuckling at her attempts at coaxing the reluctant toddler into taking sips did. No one would abandon a child in Twelve. There simply wasn't any way to not be found out.
The Peacekeepers had scoffed and told her much the same thing when she had finally arrived after an excruciating forty minutes of pleading and cajoling and being splattered with spit while no less than three persons prolonged their transactions in the apothecary shop in order to stare at her. Then, there was a particularly rude boy from the Seam that she knew enough of to avoid at school who had decided that he had nothing better to do than block her path and make crude, insulting statements about where she might have gotten herself a baby. She didn't feel even remotely badly when a particularly violent round of coughing ended with the atrocious boy getting a face full of snot.
Later, she would regret thinking that he deserved it.
