Chapter 1: The Reaping: Things fall apart, they fall apart so hard

The flashbulbs are still in his eyes, bright spots dancing in the corner of his vision; his blood sings and his pulse races and Claudius is terrified and eager and a million things altogether and they never told him he'd want to vomit and laugh and run at the same time. It was a fucking great Reaping, as they go; he pulled a twelve-year-old to step in for, which is about the best thing a Career can hope for, that moment of contrast from the tiny, shivering piece of meat dressed in its best clothes, to the tall, beautiful Volunteer who steps in to take its place. The screens always show the parents' faces in split-screen as the Volunteer mounts the stairs, and they look up shiny-eyed with hands clasped in gratitude. This year the mother of the kid Claudius is saving was close enough to the barricade that she actually caught his sleeve and choked out 'thank you'.

Claudius didn't look at her - never look, never acknowledge, it's not the tribute who's the saviour it's the Centre, the District, the Capitol for allowing this to happen, you're just the mouthpiece, the tool, remember that - but he felt her gratitude pressing upon him like the summer sun, warming him straight through to his bones.

He was a little annoyed when next up Nikita got a twelve, too - it cheapens it, takes a little bit of the awe away from his, makes it look staged - but it's bound to happen some year or another, and anyway he forgets as soon as they're up on stage together. Nikita is gorgeous, dripping deadliness and sex appeal, and the beads on her bracelet stand out like gems against her dark wrist, but Claudius can beat her. Not that he's stupid - he knows Nikita is standing next to him thinking the exact same thing, that she's spent the last three days calculating his specific weaknesses, thinking of all the times she's seen him sparring - but he is confident. The bracelet on his wrist has eleven strands, all black, and he has fewer red beads than the others in his year because it took fewer tries for him to convince them he could handle it.

Claudius is one of the only ones his year who made it out of his Field Exam standing. He's never been able to put on the weight like Brutus or Nero but he's fast and strong, like a cobra, and he knows how to twist out from under even the heaviest boys in training. He can do this. He's known since he was seven years old.

You're never ready, no one is, especially not Careers - Careers know more going in than the meat, they have expectations and while with expectation comes readiness there's also dread, curling and waiting in the dark, and if you think you're ready then you're fooling yourself and you need to go back for another test or two - but Claudius thinks he's as close to it as anyone ever could be.

They lead him through into the Justice Building. His bracelet sits on his wrist, heavy and reassuring, reminding him of all the years he's trained for this. Nikita walks close beside him, her movements silent and steady, and the smoky scent of the oil they used to treat her hair sticks in his nose but he ignores it. The Capitol perfumes will be worse, much worse, and Claudius isn't pretty - his face is too sharp, his eyes a bit too hard - and so that means they'll spend more time making him so.

He waits in the small room with the hard bench for the family he has no more connection to and that he doubts will even come, and that's when he sees it. Lyme and some of the other mentors, huddled in a group, passing a piece of paper back and forth between them, and Claudius lets out a sharp breath as the door closes because he knows he was never meant to see that.

He saw fear.

It could be a test, a way to see how easy it is to shake him, but Claudius doesn't think so. He knows what fear looks like because he's seen it, on the people he's killed in training when they realize they're not getting out of this; on himself, in the mirror the morning after they placed the final gold bead in his hand and announced him the Capitol's next and greatest sacrifice. It does takes him a minute to recognize it because he's never seen it on the mentors before, not like this.

Of course, he could be imagining it, and honestly, that's probably it. Claudius isn't so confident as to think he wouldn't get attacked by nerves and start seeing things, though it doesn't say very much about him that it's already starting. Well, never mind. It just means he's gotten over psyching himself out early, and now he can shake himself off and move on.

He needs to push it out of his mind, and Claudius is the top of his class and so he does, lets out several long breaths and imagines the twisting in his gut like a length of snarled yarn that he works out and unkinks between his fingers. Soon the yarn is smooth and his stomach settled, and Claudius doesn't jump when the doorknob turns, only raises an eyebrow.

The eyebrow creeps up higher when he sees the woman who gave birth to him, the one who stopped being 'mom' some time around when Claudius was five and that morning bloodied the face of a boy who tried to steal his favourite truck - only about the twentieth such incident and not one of the ones where the other went to the hospital - when he heard her whispering to no-longer-dad that she wanted this thing out of her house, that at least this way someone could get use out of him and she wouldn't have to worry about sleeping with her door locked inside her own house, Jeremy!

Claudius has so many things he could say but he doesn't, because it doesn't matter. None of it does. This woman isn't his family. She may have contributed to his genes, and he can thank her for his too-sharp nose and the cruel twist of his smile, thank her husband for his dark grey eyes, but that's all he's willing to give them. Everything he is, everything, he clawed from nothing himself because the Centre gave him the strength to do it. The Centre is his family, not these strangers.

Certainly not the woman with the red-rimmed eyes and the handkerchief pressed to her face, which doesn't even mesh with his memories. Claudius gives her a long, stony look, which is more consideration than he's owed her, and is more out of his own disbelief than anything else. He knows what he heard. He remembers her fingers digging into his shoulders as she stood with him in the recruitment centre, the sharp hiss of relief when they said they'd take him.

He remembers returning home after the first day at the Centre, only to find that she'd changed the locks.

"Look at you, all grown up," says the stranger, and Claudius keeps his stare cool. He doesn't hate her. He feels nothing. He hasn't seen her since he was seven, when he became the youngest trainee ever to live in the dorms because he'd be going home to the woods or a cave in the mountains if they didn't give him a room. "Do you remember me?"

Claudius says nothing. He thinks of Foster, a bright-eyed, smiling thirteen who didn't make it past his kill test, but who wrapped an arm around Claudius and asked him why a runt like him was in the dorms with the big kids after hours.

"My folks are scared of me," Claudius said, sticking his nose in the air, and Foster laughed and punched him in the arm and said he'd do all right. Foster disappeared the next year but Claudius still cares more about what happened to him after he quit the Program than the family he left behind long before the doors closed at his back.

"Of course you remember me," she says, and her voice goes a little hard. "You're just acting tough, I can see that. Oh, baby, I never thought you'd actually make it this far."

Whatever that's supposed to mean. Claudius rolls his eyes in his head, and he thinks about teenaged arms around his throat and fingers mussing up his hair and sneaking him a knife in training to see if he knew what to do with it.

"I'm proud of you," she says, and that is just rich, isn't it. "Here, I know you're allowed to take a token into the Arena with you, right? So I'd like you to take this."

He's taller than she is now by a good foot and a half, almost, and Claudius allows himself to look down. She's holding a small box in her hand, and Snow only knows what could be in it - a bracelet, a necklace, a pin, a piece of her goddamn placenta, whatever - but he doesn't reach out to take it. She tries to press it into his hand but he leaves his fingers flat and it drops to the ground.

"What's the matter?" she asks, her voice going shrill, and Claudius remembers that, all right. He knows that tone, and somewhere inside him a five-year-old quivers and tries to make himself very, very small in the alcove under the stairs, but that little boy is all grown up now and curls his lip instead.

"I have a token," he says, the first words she's heard him speak since he was seven years old, and Claudius wonders what he sounds like to her. He trained his lisp out himself by getting Daniel, a fourteen, to slap him every time he did it. He holds up his wrist, even though just letting her get this close to the bracelet feels like a defilement of it, and he lets her get a good, long look at it before dropping his arm.

Her mouth thins. "You were always ungrateful," she snaps, and that didn't take long now did it. "Even as a little boy, you never appreciated what I did for you, the sacrifices I made, and now this! You won't even give a mother the satisfaction of saying goodbye to her son."

Claudius thinks, very deliberately, of his first broken bone in training, a spiral fracture after he mouthed off to one of the bigger boys, who held him down with a knee in his back twisted Claudius' arm up between his shoulder blades until the bone gave. He remembers Laverna, his favourite trainer, taking him to Medical and sitting with him on the bench. "You need to cry?" she asked, sympathetic, and even then Claudius knew it was a test.

"No," he said, blinking fast, but you're allowed to do that. "I need to learn how to break that hold for next time."

"Good," she said, squeezing his good shoulder. "Once you're given the all-clear, find me and I'll teach you."

After the ceremony proclaiming him as Volunteer, Claudius found Laverna in the common room, and while he knew intellectually that she was ten years older now than in his memories, she still looked exactly the same to him. "Thanks," he said. "For the time I broke my arm. For everything." His heart hammered with the incredible stupidity of the statement, she taught over a hundred kids in the seven-to-nine group every year, that's more than a thousand kids between then and now, why would she ever remember -

But then she smiled at him with something else behind her eyes that Claudius couldn't quite figure out, squeezed him on the shoulder just like she did before, and said, "Knew you'd do great things."

He thinks of holding the piece of paper with his name on it and a bunch of official-speak, staring at the signature on the bottom-left corner in the space allotted for mentor: Lyme's name, written in broad, firm strokes. He remembers tracing the swirl of ink with his finger; the warm glow in his chest when he thought of her looking at the list of candidates and choosing him, wanting him, vowing to give up a month of her life for him even if all he does is die, and years afterward if he doesn't. He slept with the paper under his pillow like he was seven years old with his acceptance letter all over again.

Claudius always wanted Lyme. Back when he was ten and they all played the 'which mentor would you want' game, before they all had blood on their hands and the game became too real, no longer about personality matches or who was hottest but actual percentages and scores, Claudius said he would pick Lyme. The others laughed at him, teased him for having mommy issues, but Claudius knocked them down and they never said it again. When he saw her standing there at the selection ceremony he actually forgot how to breathe.

Ungrateful. Yeah, sure, that's what his problem is.

He realizes she's still talking, and Claudius almost laughs now because he honestly doesn't care what she's saying. Not like when he was seven and curled up on the dorm bed made for a thirteen-year-old and pretending he didn't, not like when the other kids his age went home after the little-kid training and Claudius went to watch the older ones spar with weapons and pretended he wasn't at least three feet too small. And he can admit that weakness now because he really, truly doesn't care, not anymore.

"I think your three minutes are up," he says, because through it all Claudius has been counting the seconds in his head. Her nostrils flare, but just then the door opens and Claudius gives her a snake's smile.

After she goes, Claudius waits, but of course there's no one else. He wonders, with the idlest of curiosity, if she was looking to appease her guilty conscience or if she's angling for a spot in the house in the Victor's Village, but those are thoughts for later - or never - and so he pushes them aside.

The box is still on the floor. Claudius considers stepping on it or nudging it under the bench with his foot, but in the end he just leaves it alone. Let the janitors sweep it up and toss it out.

Claudius stands in the Justice Building for over an hour; there is a place for him to sit, but he doesn't want to just in case there are cameras, in case they're watching him, and so he forces himself to stand, hands clasped behind his back, not even giving himself permission to tap his finger against the back of his hand. Normally when he has to wait somewhere Claudius runs through the death list, but as it turns out, doing that when standing in the building where over a hundred kids have stood before him, most of them never coming back again, feels a little like spitting on someone's grave.

Instead he plays with strategy. It all depends on what Lyme and his stylist think, but Claudius knows his appearance does narrow his options a little. He's not a bruiser, so the standard Two smash-and-glare won't really work for him, but he's not young and pretty enough to manage any sort of guile, either. Claudius knows, has always known, that his for-Career-values-of-average looks are his weak point, but that's why he's spent the last few years working out a nasty grin that literally made a man piss himself before Claudius slit his throat.

Nasty won't cut it, though, not to the end; the only real problem with being a Two is that nobody likes the villains, not ultimately; people cheer for them because of the sport, the spectacle, but you have to prove yourself just enough a hero that they can root for you even though you're bigger, stronger, and have every advantage. It means that someone like Claudius has to be careful, because being smaller means he'll have to play it mean, but he needs to find the line.

Luckily it's not his job to figure that out on his own, though of course his mentor will appreciate the initiative as long as he doesn't try to run the show; Claudius lets a flicker of the excitement he's feeling at learning what angle Lyme has planned for him show on his face, just in case she's watching on a screen somewhere.

They lead him into the train - the crowd outside gathers close, pressing up against the barriers to wish them goodbye, and Claudius and Nikita wave from the windows with picture-perfect smiles - and once it pulls out into the long stretch of track curving around the mountain, Claudius steps back and sits down. He and Nikita don't talk; the air bristles with competition already, but it's not deadly, not yet. It's too soon to start thinking about that; they have to think of themselves as temporary allies, even if it's both suicidal and forbidden to go all the way to friends. They won't kill each other if they can help it - Twos don't go out of their way to kill other Twos - but that doesn't mean they'll die to avoid it, either.

Then Lyme and Nero walk in, and all bets are off because their faces are pinched and full of dread, all narrowed eyes and clenched teeth. It's grim and the air in the train car feels thick and cold and hot all at once, oppressive and foreboding, and this is not the kind of dramatics that Claudius should be engaging in already.

Still, he's not going to speak without being spoken to, not right off, and so Claudius sits and waits for them to say something. Finally Lyme thins her lips. "They're making a statement this year," she says, and Claudius' stomach plummets. Beside him Nikita twitches, just a brief spasm of her hands against her knees, but it's as good as a full-body flinch for a Two. "Still waiting on official word, but we have the preliminary details."

And that's right, Two mentors get details of all the other tributes before anyone else other than District One - not even Four, the interlopers who manage to scrape by into the Career category because they build them pretty in the swimming districts and get enough food by fishing that they can spare the time to teach them how to use harpoons and spears - and that's bad. Whenever the list of tributes shakes the mentors, that's never a good thing. Claudius tries and fails to remember the last time this happened.

Nero walks by and turns on the television screen, and Claudius sits back to watch. Even if Lyme hadn't warned him, Claudius would know something's up when Nero skips past the commentary and jumps right to the first Reaping itself. The analysis of audience and Gamemaker opinion is just as important, but apparently not this year. The scent of Nikita's hair oil fills his nostrils again, and this time he has to try extra hard to breathe.

They start with District One, as usual, and if Claudius were watching in the Centre with the other trainees he would tune out because the Ones are boring, stuck-up bitches and sons-of-bitches who think they're better just because they call their training centre the Academy instead. He can't afford to do that this time, though, and when the first name gets pulled out of the bowl and the crowds move back, both Claudius and Nikita suck in an audible breath. Neither of their mentors scold them, which means they got it right.

The Volunteers are District One standard stock, beautiful and arrogant and nothing that makes them stand out, but they're not the ones that make Claudius lean forward in his chair. It's the kids they stepped up for: twelve-year-olds, both of them.

"No," Nikita says in a low voice, and Nero doesn't shush her for that, either.

They skip over their own Reaping - another first, as far as Claudius knows - and move right to Three. This time there are no Volunteers, and Claudius watches with a hand squeezing his chest as two twelve-year-olds mount the stage and stare, eyes wide, looking out at nothing because they don't know how to find the cameras or even remember that they're there.

Volunteers in District Four, of course, bronzed and gorgeous, also standing in for twelves. After Four it's nothing but twelves straight down to the thinnest, sickliest pair with the coal-black hair and once-a-year scrubbed skin, all of them blinking and shivering on stage despite the heat. Many of them cry.

"What-" Claudius says aloud, his throat dry, "- the fuck?"

Lyme's eyes are hard and furious, and Claudius knows now that it doesn't matter what angle they play him, he'll be the one who murdered the youngest, most helpless children; regardless of what he does, they will hate him, for being one of the privileged six even more than usual. Child-killer, child-killer, as bad as the ones from the outlying districts who snap and stick their knives into the little ones' eyes, the ones who disappear after their victory because no one in Panem wants to see them. The trainees whisper that they're put down.

Rage spikes in his chest at them for stealing this from him; he trained his whole life, only to be pitted against eighteen snivelling pre-teens just barely eligible. One of them looks like he might be a few weeks away from his thirteenth birthday, but that's it.

"Shut that down," Lyme says, and Claudius doesn't realize she's speaking to him until she punctuates it with a "Hey!" and he sees his nails digging crescents into his palm. He straightens his expression back to normal, and the fact that he can feel the effort it takes to smooth out his jaw and forehead tells him that his face must have been doing something special. He doesn't apologize, just forces himself back to neutral and sits up, getting his tongue between his teeth so he can't clench his jaw so tightly.

"What are they doing?" Nikita asks, but Nero shakes his head.

"Not our job to ask what they're doing or why," he says, but Claudius knows. They all do. The price of produce, bread, beef - everything that comes from Districts Nine through Eleven - has skyrocketed in the last few months, the result of stalling tactics by the districts that they claim are all the result of weather, or disease, or otherwise bad luck and not outright treason. The Capitol is pushing back, and the loyal Careers are the ones to deliver the message.

This year the Careers won't be playing to please the district audience. Sponsor gifts will be slim because they'll all be sickened - the betting will be all off, no point in laying odds when three-quarters of the tributes would statistically be dead in the first five minutes in a regular game - and the Gamemakers will be extra hard on those of them who survive the first hour because they'll have to make it interesting if they don't want it to end in a matter of days.

If Claudius wants to win this, if he wants to get anywhere at all, he'll have to stop looking for a balance between monster and anti-hero and start being the Capitol's executioner. It no longer matters that he stepped in for one of the district's youngest and most helpless, that the boy's mother offered him her thanks with tears in her eyes, because he'll be turning around and spilling the blood of at least four times as many as he saved. He risks a glance at Nikita, sees the veins standing out in her arms as she closes a hand over her bracelet, and he knows she sees it, too.

And the mentors didn't know. The Capitol pulled this stunt and the mentors didn't know, not even the Twos, and that's not how it's done and not how it should ever be done. Claudius wracks his brain until, in a flash, he realizes that this is their warning. It's their reminder that the Careers don't get to run the show, that privilege does not equal a right and it can all disappear in a heartbeat. That Twos can't always get away with killing the little ones fast and quick and only if they must, leaving them to the Ones who play the crazy better or the outliers who are so desperate they'll do anything; that they can't always be the honourable warriors. That the Capitol isn't the villain; they are, and it's time to remind everyone just who they should be focusing their hatred towards.

And these are not thoughts that a tribute should be having before the train even pulls in to the station in the Capitol - these aren't thoughts a tribute should be having at all - and Claudius closes his eyes and wrenches his mind to more acceptable lines of thinking.

"Tell us what to do," he says, and his voice keens up at the end, just slightly, and he winces inwardly and gives himself a good mental kick.

Lyme doesn't comment on his slip-up, though, and this is wrong, wrong, wrong, all of it wrong. "You focus on what's in front of you right now," she says. "That's the Remaking. Do what you're told and we'll have a meeting before the parade."

Claudius thinks of his nightmare-face and the way he has to hold himself with three times as much confidence and brashness as someone twice his size, the way he's been trained to make himself look bigger, wickeder, deadlier than he is, and how that will look when he slices the first sobbing twelve-year-old across the belly. He's not sure he can retrain himself in time. He's not even sure if he should.

His prep team is disappointed with him. They twitter around him, complaining about his face, poking at his nose and wondering if they can't fix it in time - they decide they can't send him to the parade with a bandage covering his face, and Claudius rolls his eyes inwardly even as he stands there stone-faced - and one of them even says he can't possibly be a Volunteer because they're always so pretty. Claudius says nothing because that's what they trained him to do, and when they finish erasing the last of his training scars they sigh and decide that's the best they can do.

"It's too bad," one of them says in a stage whisper as Claudius sits and waits for his stylist. "Do you remember the boy from last year? He was beautiful. It's such a shame."

Yeah, well, being beautiful didn't help Pavel, now did it, because Johanna Mason gutted him in his sleep. But that's not an appropriate thought to have, either, and Claudius shoves it back.

They paint his face with smears of smoky grey across his cheekbones and dress him in armour that makes Claudius look like a statue of an ancient warrior hewn from rock. Claudius doesn't waste much time looking around at the other tributes at the Parade - usually it's time to psych them out by glaring or smirking at them, but Lyme tells him not to, not this year - but what he does see is a bunch of crying children in ridiculous, overblown costumes. He wonders what the commentators are going to say, how they're possibly going to spin this into anything but a giant execution.

Oh, look at the two from Ten in their little white outfits! Claudius imagines Caesar Flickerman saying, mugging for the camera. What adorable little lambs for the slaughter.

The actual parade is the first time that the Games feels the way it should, the way Claudius imagined it. The crowds roar; his own image glares down at him from the animated banners, fierce and proud, and when a bouquet of flowers makes it all the way down from the bleachers, Claudius catches it and brandishes it above his head like a sword. He and Nikita stand apart, tall and strong and separate, united against the others but not together, and the blood rushes in his ears and yes, this is what he trained for.

After the parade, Claudius expects the four of them to sit together and watch it, go over the other costumes and try to pick out strategy, but instead Lyme shakes her head. She takes him by the arm and leads him into his room; startled, Claudius follows her, watching as Nero does the same with Nikita. A chill spreads its way through Claudius like spiders made of ice running through his veins.

Lyme shuts the door behind her and waves a hand for Claudius to sit down. He's still wearing the jumpsuit he had on under his armour, and while he wiped some of the makeup off onto his sleeve, he hasn't had time to clean himself up properly. Lyme doesn't seem to care, and as Claudius sits on the edge of the bed, he realizes she's angry. No, not angry, furious; her jaw is set at a sharper angle than Claudius has ever seen, and every line of her body is hard and taut.

"First off, Nero can't know any of this, do you understand me?" Lyme says, and Claudius only just stops his eyes from widening. He thought the Twos usually worked together, at least at first. This year just keeps getting worse and worse. "I've come up with a plan, and if you decide to go with it, it starts tomorrow as soon as you leave this room and get in front of the Gamemakers."

Claudius sucks in a breath. "Why wouldn't I go with your plan?" he asks, because it doesn't sound like this is a rhetorical thing, like Lyme is pretending he has a choice to be nice. It actually sounds like he could say no.

Lyme's mouth tightens. "Because there's a really good chance that if you follow it, you'll end up dead."

Claudius sits a little heavier, allowing himself to drop fully onto the bed instead of holding himself forward. "What?"

"Yeah." Lyme runs a hand through her cropped hair. "I'm not going to lie to you, Claudius. You do this, it's a big risk, and chances are you'll get a boulder dropped on you. But on the other hand, you play the straight-up child killer and you'll definitely get the boulder dropped on you, so it's up to you."

"I'm dead anyway," Claudius says, and Lyme gives him a sharp look. "I mean it. The odds were never in my favour - what, 20% at the outside, adjusting for the usual spread? - but this year, forget it. Anything you tell me to do that will help, I'll do it."

"I need you to understand," Lyme says, but she's nodding, so at least it looks like she believes he's serious. "If this doesn't work, you'll be dead faster than any Career should ever be, and if it does, you'll be a pariah with the powers that be. The people might accept you, but there's a very good chance that Snow won't."

Claudius meets her eyes and tries to put as much surety as he can into his voice, even though his palms feel slick with sweat. "But the safe bet - if I play it like a normal year - means I'm definitely dead."

Lyme hesitates, just for a second, but then she says, "Yes."

Claudius nods. "Then let's do it. What's the worst thing they can do, kill me twice?" Lyme frowns, and Claudius adds, "No, I know, they'll find someone close to me, but." He spreads his hands. "What have I got? If he wants to track down my parents and kill them, I'll kiss his fucking boots."

"Don't say that out loud," Lyme warns him, and she's serious. "Let them think they have a way to get to you; it's better that way. If they know it won't work, they'll just find something else." But this is all skirting dangerously close to treason - even Claudius, whose own loyalty goes to Two above all else, up to and including Snow and the Capitol, knows this isn't safe.

"Okay," he says. "Tell me the plan."