Chapter 2

The train to the Capitol

I wake with a bad headache and an empty stomach. My bones are unhappy with their current position, so I move. I regret it.

There is a knock on my door. For a blissful moment I think it's my mother, come to tell me that I need to get up, go to school. But Theta Ivory walks in, and I can hear the gentle rhythm of the train as it thunders along the tracks. I want to be back in District one. In fact, I want to be anywhere than here. My mother once said that I will never make my life in District one. All women in District one work for the capitol people: they make their jewellery, act in plays for their entertainment, model the latest fashions for them to see...a women's life is nothing in District one.

If I can't even find something I'm good at when I'm at home, how will I survive this? I've immediately banished all hopes of ever seeing my family again. I know that when I leave the Capitol, it will be in one of the badly-made, Capitol-issue coffins that they put dead tributes in to send back to their districts.

I haul myself painfully and stiffly out of the bed and look around the room that will be my home until I get to the Capitol. Rich furnishings, with lavish decor. The bed has a silk coverlet, with a pattern that must have taken a poor, undeserving district worker weeks to sew.

I peruse the beautiful dresses with both desire and loathing. Desire, because they were the most beautiful dresses I had ever seen, loathing because they would soon become my shroud. I put on a pretty red one that had white flowers around the hem, and walked out.

The train was as lavish as my room. My tired vision couldn't take it all in!