Chapter 2: Districts 3, 4, 7, 8

Beetee

He's always thought a little too much, a little too deep. As a boy, Beetee took apart every piece of electronics in the house; his parents used to yell at him until they noticed that when he put them back together they ran faster, smoother, cooler. By the time he was five years old, they were giving him things to fix, to improve. By ten, his father's repair shop was one of the best in the district, and no one knows that most of the enhancements come at the hands of a boy who needs to stand on a box to reach the surface of his workbench.

He loves computers; they don't have any in his home - too expensive, like most of the things that Three manufactures and exports to the Capitol - but he gets to play with them when they get brought into the shop. Beetee loves to take them apart and stare at the workings, at the metal and wire that come together to create machines that can think and draw and calculate.

He likes watches, too. He takes the backs off and stares at them, how the cogs move and the pieces tick, and he pokes at the little spinning bit with his finger and it flutters against his thumbnail like the tiniest of hummingbirds.

People are like clocks and computers, once you know how to look, and Beetee figures it out young. He knows what to say to his parents to make them give him what they want; studies his classmates so he can manipulate them for fun; phrases his answers to the teachers so they pay attention to him in all the right ways and ignore him in others.

He watches the Hunger Games the same as the rest of them, and no one says it, but Beetee knows that this is broken, this is wrong. This doesn't make sense. The cogs are the wrong size, the hand that winds the watch too clumsy; it's a computer running overclocked with mismatched pieces and giant lumps of solder on the motherboard. Sooner or later the whole thing is going to explode in the hands of the people who've built it. He wonders how the Capitol can be so stupid. He wonders how the people in his district don't see it.

Beetee is Reaped for the Games when he's fifteen, but he's not afraid. It's a problem like any other, and Beetee is old enough to understand how things work, the tangled mass of wires that is the Gamemakers, the trainers, the sponsors, the audience. And so he gets his tools, dives in, and arranges the gears to his liking.

He plays smart for the Gamemakers when the other tributes aren't looking; when they are he plays up the eccentricity, spending all his time at the useless stations, camouflage and hammock-making and weaving. By the end of training they all think he's crazy; the Careers slide their gazes right over him as though he doesn't exist, neither marking him as an easy bloodbath kill or as a threat to be taken out. For his private session with the Gamemakers he builds a cage and fills it with a current so strong it sets the dummy inside on fire.

He runs from the Cornucopia once the countdown hits zero, circles back that night when the Pack is out hunting and collects his prize, enough wire and electronics to electrify the entire field by the Cornucopia. Beetee finds the closest camera and smiles.

Beetee finishes his trap on day ten, but he waits. He's good at waiting, at pretending. He builds smaller contraptions to catch food to eat, fashions a makeshift cooking plate so he doesn't have to deal with charred-outside raw-inside meat. One day another tribute stumbles on his hiding place, and Beetee kills him with a taser he made himself. The sponsors send him a rubber mat. Someone in his district must be paying attention.

It's nearly three weeks in when the Gamemakers announce the feast at the Cornucopia, and that morning the sky opens up and pours down with rain. It's a gift to him as sure as the glittering swords the Careers get, and Beetee will not waste his chance. He hides inside the Cornucopia, the rubber mat firmly beneath his feet, and he waits until the last of the tributes appear before he sets off his plan.

The Arena smells like barbecued pork as the hovercraft lands to pick him up.

He'd feel guilt, but guilt is impractical. Guilt would make his hands shake, would waste the food he eats as he vomits it up later, would keep him awake at night because there are screams behind his eyelids. Beetee does not feel guilt. If his hands tremble, if he throws up his meals, if he can't sleep, it must be the physical strain of recovery. Brain chemistry, post-adrenaline letdown, the rigours of starvation, that's all it is. That's all it is.

One year later, Beetee spends every minute he possibly can with his tributes, two bright young children with enough potential to see this through. He might not be a Career, but he knows the system, can teach them how to pull the strings. He plans, he plots, he schemes, and with them creates a perfect plan to get at least one of them through. It can't fail.

It can't fail. It can't. Not until approximately sixteen seconds into the Games, when the boy from Two kills Jessamine with an axe to her spine - she keeps twitching even after she's gone, electrical impulses in the brain confused by the messages her severed nerves are sending, appropriate somehow for a Three. Not until approximately thirty seconds after that, when the girl from One sends a knife flying after Carmine and skewers him between the eyes.

Beetee has never failed before. He's never found a system he can't work around, odds he can't manipulate in his favour. And yet he does, again and again, year after year and decade after decade.

He learns that failure tastes bitter, like the stimulants he crunched as the timer went off in anticipation of days on end without sleep, like the sour dregs of the coffee he downed that was more grounds than water, like the copper tang of blood. It smells like the burnt-hair aftertaste of an electrical fire. It sounds like the wet, broken scream of a twelve-year-old boy as his throat is crushed enough to kill him, but not quickly. It looks like the dull brown of a burnt-out lightbulb, like wide-open eyes that stare at nothing, like the twist of limbs at unnatural angles. It feels like dry heaving long after the contents of his stomach renewed their acquaintance on the white porcelain tiles of his shower.

The price of genius is arrogance. Beetee has enough genius for five men and arrogance for seven, and a price large enough that it takes twenty-eight years and fifty-six deaths before he finally atones.

Wiress

The thing about machines is that they're simple. It's all just clockwork, electronics, wiring and conduits and tiny pieces that just need someone to fit them together. She's not building a trap, a death machine, not planning to electrocute a bunch of kids, most of whom are only in there with her for the same reason Wiress is, that their names happened to grace the slip of paper that stuck to someone's fingers. It's easier to push the other tributes from her mind completely, and so she does.

She's hungry, exhausted, her nerves run ragged because there's almost nothing to eat and nowhere safe to sleep. Wiress is used to late nights at least; she broke into the laboratory of a different college every night after hours and tinkered with the equipment until it was time for the morning shift, when she slipped out through a window and scurried back to her family's apartment. It's easier to pretend this is just another night in the lab conducting experiments, and so she does.

She rations the energy bars in her pack, a few bites a day, just enough to keep her moving. She designs and builds and they don't stop her, she assumes because she looks mad, because her mentor plays it down - he must, or she'd be getting sponsor gifts for her innovation and she only received one parachute and that held a soldering iron and nothing else - and she immerses herself in the challenge without focusing on the application. It's easier to ignore the intent of what she's building, and so she does.

It works. Wiress turns the whole twisting maze of tunnels into a gigantic conduit for electricity, and she fries the rest of the tributes in a single flash while she hides in an insulated nest that took her three days to build. By the time she puts her plan in action there are only six left, and when it's over there's only one. Quick and efficient, though she has to step over one of them to get to the hovercraft and not even the announcers could call it clean. It's easier to tell herself they would be dead one way or another, and so she does.

She mentors along with Beetee, but there are no more geniuses among the children who go to die. She and her fellow victor were the bright lights in a city of mediocrity; as much as people think, not everyone from their district is a fiend with electricity. Most can tinker, but few have the determination and motivation to make it through. Most don't make it past the bloodbath; many can't even pass their interviews without sobbing. It's easier to think of them as already dead, broken clockwork that will soon get swept up and put away, and so she does.

Years pass, children perish and the Capitol feeds on their blood. It's easier to lose her mind, and so she does.

Annie

It nearly kills her, knowing that Finnick promised to take double the number of clients in the Capitol to keep Annie safe from being a victor-whore, every time he comes back to District 4 with edgy movements and his skin scrubbed clean, every time it takes him a day before he'll crawl back in bed with her and let her hold him. It rips her in two to know he's right to do it, that whatever her strengths Annie could not survive what he goes through night after night, that if she had to do it they would find her in her room with a rope around her neck before the month had passed.

What infuriates her is that he thinks she doesn't know.

Annie lost her mind when her district partner lost his head, and just like they sewed it back onto his neck for the funeral, she's had the best psychiatrists that money can, but they can't put her back together again and erase the cracks completely. The problem is she's not sure she wants to. No one can change if they don't want to change, they tell her, and for Annie reality is too sharp, too jagged, like running her hand over broken glass and expecting it not to cut. Being declared insane gives her a buffer, like the blanket forts she used to build to protect herself when thunder rolled over the water and whipped the sea into a frenzy. Eventually the doctors shake their heads, and Annie knows just what Finnick does to make sure she gets these sessions - it's Finnick's money, paid for by hands on his chest and lips on his neck and perfume clinging to his skin - so she cuts them off.

The others talk about poor, mad Annie Cresta like she's not in the room, and Annie sits and rocks back and forth and pretends she can't hear them while the anger boils up inside her. She could correct them; she could tell Finnick she knows exactly why he has to visit the Capitol so often, but she doesn't. Anger might be poison, might be draining like starvation and dehydration and exhaustion, but she doesn't care; anger might be the thing she's supposed to let go of, but she can't. She doesn't want to. For better or worse, anger is clear, anger is strong, and it doesn't drag her down or fill her head with wool. Anger is what keeps her sane, for Finnick's sake. For her own.

When Annie is angry, she remembers who she is. Finnick calls them her lucid moments; what he doesn't know is that these are the times she most often wants to throw herself at him and scratch her nails right down his face.

Finnick loves his broken, damaged Annie - he gets to keep his secrets, and every time she smiles he gets to feel like he's doing something good, like he's won a day off from his life sentence of guilt and misery - and so Annie lets him think that's all she is.

It's not forever. One day Finnick will be too old to hold their interest anymore; there will be other victors, younger, prettier, fresher victors, to tempt the Capitol and whet their appetites, and he'll be free. He'll come home to her, no more secrets, no more obligations, and that day Annie will repay them both by slipping off the mask and showing him he helped piece her back together after all. It will hurt, but they can suck the poison from the wound together, and their relationship will be the stronger for it.

It will be years from now - unlikely they'll let him go before he's thirty - but luckily for the both of them, Annie's always been good at treading water.

Finnick

To hear them talk, you'd think Finnick won his Games by smiling at the other tributes until they dropped dead from his charm.

Finnick won his Games with as much stealth and skill as he did violence, but the end the other tributes didn't murder themselves. He drowned them, netted them, speared them, bled them, and when the golden trident floated down on its silver parachute, Finnick had never seen anything so beautiful. Not the brightest sunset over the ocean in District Four, not the flash of scales as a school of fish darted below his boat in the clear blue water, not the stars shimmering bright over the bobbing orange lights of the boats in the harbour. He drove it into the chest of the girl from Two until her sternum snapped and her ribcage sprang open; the blood hit his face in a hot wet spray, and Finnick had never felt so alive.

Games-crazy, they call it. A way for the brain to cope after it crosses that line that no decent human ever should, when said decent human has no choice. Most victors give over to hysterical, screeching laughter by the end, painting their faces with the lifeblood of the teenagers who breathed their last in front of them. It's a way to explain away the lust and drive to take the others down that grips so many, the ones who don't win by chance, by accident, the ones who claw victory from the mangled bodies of the others. A way to humanize the ones who left humanity behind them. An excuse so that the victors don't get rounded up and put down, so their therapists can whisper some comfort, cold though it may be, into their ears as they curl up on their sofas and cry into the cushions.

Most die when they enter the Arena. Finnick died when he left. He died when he traded the golden boy with a grin like a shark and the hands of a butcher for the one with an angel's smile and a lover's fingers. When that boy, who'd speared another boy through the heart and pulled the still-beating organ from his chest, was ordered by the President to kneel in front of a man who couldn't run up a flight of stairs without gasping, to let that man twist fat fingers in his hair and tell him exactly what to do.

Some of the others - outliers mostly, the ones big enough and pretty enough to maintain interest - get called in for Arena games by masochists who want to know the thrill without the mortal danger. No one ever books Finnick for those sorts of evenings. The women run their manicured nails through his copper hair and coo over how soft it is, but they never remember how it looked matted through with dirt and blood and seaweed.

Finnick fulfills their fantasies and steals their secrets with the same hands that wrapped a loop of rope around the One girl's neck and pulled until she stopped fighting. At night he dreams of the Arena, not in fear and terror but in longing, yearning for the last time in his life he had power, the last time he held his life in his own hands, the last time any decision he made was up to him. He wakes with his head aching and his cheeks soaked in frustrated tears because he will never, ever have that kind of agency again, then rolls over and checks his messages for tonight's assignment.

Mags

"You're joking."

The Mayor of District 4 holds the keys to the city, but only one person in this room drove a fishhook up another teenager's nose and into his brain. Only one has dragged a knife across another's throat and felt the flesh give, so like cleaning a fish yet completely not. Only one has since taken eight children under her wing, learned their names, heard their fears, given them weapons, and watched them die.

Mags says nothing. She doesn't have to. The room falls silent, the kind that crawls with discomfort. The Mayor clears his throat and tries again, though he adopts a more respectful tone this time. "I just mean, you honestly want us to turn our children into them? Those monsters?"

She expected this. Districts 1 and 2 have flexed their privilege yet again, and rumour has it they've begun special, secret academies to train children in preparation for the Games. The past three years, each of the tributes from those districts have been volunteers, hale and beautiful, with just a touch too much knowledge of the cameras and how to play the crowd, and one of them has won each time.

Any fisherman in District 4 knows how to read the wind and the waves, to feel the shift in humidity and scent the rain, to sense a storm before the clouds roll in and the sea begins to churn. Mags smells it now in these young, strong tributes with their sharp-toothed smiles, the roar of approval from the crowds at the interviews, the way the mentors from One and Two now have an invisible line in the sand around them. The Games are changing. It's the stillness of the wind before the hurricane, and now it's District 4's chance to board up the windows or stand on the beach and be washed away.

"The Capitol is bored of terrified children who take weeks to finish incompetently slaughtering each other," Mags says, enjoying the way they flinch at her words. So sensitive, these civilians. They don't know the life she's known. They've seen the sacrifices she made to stand here, and yet they speak to her of horrors. "They keep introducing new elements. First it was the sponsors." A way of ensuring that audience favourites had their chance to win, even if the Gamemakers and their scores didn't always agree with popular opinion. "Now it's these children. The ones with the edge."

Eight children, Mags has sent to their deaths, unprepared but for the handful of days with weapons they've never handled, even if she talks to them of poison, of craft and cleverness and stealth, though she tells them to look for tools they're familiar with, harpoons and hooks and serrated daggers like they'd use to scoop the guts from a fish with a flick of the wrist. Eight children, and countless more ahead of her.

"It's early," Mags says when no one speaks. She's nineteen years old but feels ninety. "The system is still in flux. Now is the time to act, before the rules gets set in stone. We're in the position to help our children survive. We don't have the resources for a full-fledged academy with recruitment like in the inner districts -" not officially, of course, but as a mentor Mags sees and hears things to which normal citizens are not privy - "but we could do what we can. We can give all our children the basics in handling things like harpoons and spears. We can make them strong. And for those who wish it, we can offer them more specialized training. It won't guarantee a victory every year, but we can give them hope. We can take away the helplessness."

The Mayor shakes his head. "But at what cost? What would we be moulding them into?"

Mags fixes him with a hard stare, lets him look and search for the Arena behind her eyes. "Are you a father, Mr. Mayor?" she asks him. His gaze skitters away. "I didn't think so. This is the reality of our choice. The children coming of age now have never known anything but the Games; this will be their whole lives, them and every child born hereafter. We can save their souls, or we can save their lives. I move that we ask the parents which they'd rather keep."

The Council sits in silence until Muriel sits up straight, and everyone leans back to let her speak. She's an Elder, one of the few who escaped the mass executions following the Dark Days because she hid her involvement too well. Mags' heart flutters in her chest. "My granddaughter," she says slowly. "If she were chosen, I would want her to have the best chance I could give her, for her to know I had done everything in my power to help her. I would want her to be more than chum in the water." She turns to Mags, her watery gaze pinning her to her seat as surely as any harpoon. "I would want her to be unafraid."

The vote falls 21-14 in favour of instituting a volunteer training program. It's Mags' job, when she's next in the Capitol, to sell it, to promise a better showing - handsomer, deadlier tributes, a more exciting game - in exchange for the necessary funding and elision of the government's gaze on this particular area. She delivers her proposal the next week and receives the go-ahead. Preparations begin the following month.

In eight years' time, Mags stands upon the stage with Calypso, tanned and beautiful and proud, dressed in a gown of seafoam and wearing a crown made of gold and forged in blood. Elder Muriel walks up the stairs and places a wreath of pearls and sea glass in her granddaughter's hands. Calypso's eyes glitter in the sun. "I dedicate this win to my family and my district," she says in a clear, ringing voice, and those gathered burst into thunderous applause.

For what shall it profit a man, asked one of the old books, destroyed in the Rebirth (as the Capitol calls it - the Purge, say those who have the courage, or perhaps madness, to do so) and forbidden, but Mags was there and she remembers, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Mags looks at the girl who traded dolls for daggers, gauzy ribbons for garrottes, who stands tall and proud and alive; at the audience who weeps for her; at the children who do not fear because of her. She thinks of holding Calypso through her nightmares, that first morning when she tried to drive a knife into Mags' eye when her mentor awoke her for breakfast. She thinks of innocence lost, and another sixty years gained.

Everything, Mags thinks, sure as a fishhook in her skin. Let the others keep their principles. She would rather keep her children.

Blight

Blight was an accident; his name, deliberate.

He learns to fight because he has to, because it's jeers and well-aimed kicks at school, snarls and bottles at his head at home. He learns that knowing how to take a punch is just as important as throwing one back. He learns you never tuck your thumb inside your fist unless you want it broken. He learns that crying is the worst kind of suicide.

He hurls axes into trees because the trees don't scream, because he can do it again and again and again and picture a face on the trunk long after an actual body would be nothing but pulp and his ass hauled away by Peacekeepers to be executed or sent to the graphite mines or whatever they'd do with underage murderers.

Except there is a place for someone with a lot of rage and frustration and desperation and humiliation, isn't there. A way for someone like him to dig out every last dark, ugly secret inside him and fling it out for everyone to see without a single consequence, other than the one that takes them all in the end anyway.

If Blight stays, one day he'll save up enough money to get away, maybe find himself a tiny shack somewhere and make a living cutting down trees even though they've industrialized in most of the district to keep up with their quotas. If he's lucky one day he'll stop feeling helpless and impotent and afraid.

If he goes, maybe he can scratch the itch that's built up inside him since he got his first split lip at the age of three; since he was seven and decided to stay out late after school doing absolutely nothing because every other day his old man always smacked him around and said he 'knew what Blight did' just to cover his bases, so it may as well be for something.

If he goes, it will all be over, and at least he'll get a few good hits in before the end. That's more than he can say for here.

Every year he prays that his name will come up in the Reaping, but it never does. Then Blight is eighteen years old and it's his last chance and the name they call is one he's never heard before, and before he knows it, District 7 has its first volunteer in all of Panem's history. Three weeks after he takes the stage, Blight gives his district another first.

He tells the people who had the cheek to pop out a kid and name him after a disease to go fuck themselves when they show up at his shiny new mansion, and for a few weeks Blight sleeps well. But then he heads outside for a walk one day and passes a tour group from home, come to gawk at his house in the empty Village and say they knew him when he was a wee thing. They like to do that, tell the part where they always knew he was a strong boy, a fighter, and not talk about the part where they saw him wearing long sleeves in the middle of August and flinching when anyone touched his shoulder, saw and never did a damned thing.

He hears one of them whisper that it looks like he really is Burt's boy after all, and everything crashes down like a giant oak felled by a hundred tiny hatchets.

From that day on he's never alone when he sleeps. The faces haunt his dreams, hiss in his ear and ask him if it's worth it, ask him how it feels to be his daddy's son. He looks in the mirror and sees his old man's eyes, his square jaw and crooked nose, sees his anger tightening the corners of his mouth. Finally Blight can't take it anymore, and he takes a train all the way across the district to find the liquor shack near where he grew up, walks in at three in the morning and greets the man behind the counter.

"How's it goin' Hank," Blight says, easy as you please, like he didn't walk out on his hometown and everyone in it the day he stepped onto that stage and never looked back. "Gimme a case of the old man's favourite."

He takes the first train back, cracks open a bottle and stares at it for a good hour as the sun creeps through the trees and throws jagged pine shadows on the floor. At last he shrugs, places the glass against his teeth and drains it in one go. You know what they say. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Blight killed five kids, but he never spawns a single one to suffer under the kind of father he fears he's programmed to be. By his math, that puts him square.

Johanna

Some nights Johanna buries a hatchet in the President's chest. Simple, elegant in a brutish sort of way. He collapses to his knees, eyes wide with shock, and blood bubbles out of his mouth. He scrabbles at the handle but can't pull it out. Johanna strides forward, pushes him over with a foot against his shoulder so he lands on his back. She takes bets with herself whether the wound will kill him before he chokes on his own blood.

Other nights she hangs him by his feet and slits his throat, lets him bleed out like they do the chickens in the outer districts because it makes them taste better. He tries to hold the gaping cut shut but it hangs open like a second smile, curved and wicked, and the blood trickles up his chin and face and soaks his white hair.

Others she pins him down with a spike in each hand and foot, slices him open from pelvis to jawbone, peels back the skin and saws through the bones. She pulls him apart the way he pulled her life apart and flings the pieces as far as she can throw them.

Still other nights she drives a knife into the softest parts of his body. "That's for my mother," she says, thrusting the dagger into his eye as it squelches like a peeled grape. She does it again with the other - "That's for my father." She punctures his bowels and the insides spill out, the foul stench thick in the air like the time Dad took her hunting and she messed up while field dressing the deer. "That's for my brother." Then one last strike down through his groin as he screams and writhes and sobs for mercy. "That's for my little sister, you son of a bitch!"

Every night her family runs to her. Johanna takes them in her arms, pets her sister's hair, chucks her brother under the chin, squeezes her parents close and breathes in Dad's aftershave, Mom's perfume. "It's okay," she tells them. "It's okay. He's dead. I saved you."

Every morning she wakes alone, and the only blood beneath her fingernails is her own. Johanna treats the scratches on her arms, her throat, her cheeks, ignoring the sting of iodine as it seeps into the shallow cuts. She stares at the girl in the mirror and makes her the same promise she makes every morning: one day she'll do it in the daytime. One day she'll do it with her eyes open. One day she'll make him pay for real, and when she closes her eyes and opens them his blood will still be on the floor.

One day. One day.

Cecelia

The rural districts have different ideas about life after death - all of them forbidden, of course, but some things are harder to control than lives and laws and money. In Seven, people believe that if you plant a tree over a person's grave, their spirit is reborn in the seedling and they live forever in the branches, in the wind in the leaves. Soul trees are marked with red ribbon around the trunk so that even in the harshest winter they will never be used as timber. In Ten it's the opposite; bodies should be burned, for if they're buried the worms crawl into the body and take pieces of the soul with them, and the dead are forever fractured, always seeking the way back together. It's the reason why worms gather where there's dead, seeking out their soul-shards in the bodies of their brethren.

It's sweet, in a quaint sort of way, but District Eight has no such customs, it being a sprawl of ramshackle slum-dwellings and ugly factories that spew out industrial fumes. No greenery here, no nature to touch the minds and inspire the people to weave tales about their dead. The only thing they weave is cloth, and they cremate their dead because there's no room for anything else.

Cecelia heard the stories the same as any other child in Eight, told in whispers while the machinery thrummed to cover their chatter, in disbelieving giggles. What funny things other people believe. People in Eight are realistic and have no need for children's stories in order to make themselves feel better about everyday facts of life.

She understands the appeal a little better now. Cecelia poisoned three people to earn the right to come back to her district; she can't eat now without testing all her food, and most of her victor stipend goes not toward beautiful clothes or furnishings but for portable tox kits so she never has to fear. She marries a man who loves to cook because she can't anymore, can't even sift flour without imagining the ratio of poison to make it a lethal dose, and barely trusts herself to heat up leftovers.

Cecelia and David have three children. When their first is born and Cecelia tells him the name she chose, he looks at her with wide eyes. "Cici no," he says, and he touches her cheek. "You don't have to do this."

"Yes, I do." Cecelia looks down at the tiny, wrinkly, red-faced infant in her arms, wailing and furious and so, so alive, and she strokes one finger down the side of his face and whispers the name of the first boy who choked on cyanide.

No one ever remembers the ones who died. People ask Cecelia why she chose to have children, but never where their names come from, never why three and only three. They joke about the interruption it must have on her getting any rest, and only David knows that she doesn't once sleep through the night until her third is born, safe and healthy and squalling. "Not this time," she says to them as they sleep, stroking her hand over their soft curls. "Never again."

Reincarnation isn't real, Cecilia is a murderer, and she can't guarantee any of the promises she whispers to her children in the dark, but that's the thing about surviving the Games. For the first time she realizes that an ugly truth isn't always superior to a beautiful lie.

Woof

He was a weaver. As a child he used to sit with Mama, a tangle of thread and yarn in his lap, and wind the strands together on a loom made out of scraps of wood she'd gathered from back alleys and nailed together herself. He wove blankets and tapestries in bright colours, working with cloth his neighbours brought home from the factories; the smallest kids worked to clear out the machines, crawling in behind the large cogs and pistons to pull out the strings that got tangled around the inner workings. They would stuff the pieces in their dresses and bring them home to him.

Their apartment was small, and dingy, but had the prettiest furnishings in the whole tenement. Mama used to tell him he had a talent. And then came the Reaping, and none of that mattered anymore.

He won his Games by weaving nets, by wrapping ropes around the throats of sleeping tributes and pulling until their breath stopped, and when he ran out of rope he used his hands. Woof crawls out of the Arena with his guts trying to tumble out of his stomach, and even after they put it back and sew him up and proclaim him fixed, his hands won't stop shaking. His mother gives him a handful of yarn to keep him busy, and where his fingers used to dance the strands free of knots, now it all ends in a snarl worse than before.

He tries to weave, but his hands always tremble. He can't thread the loom, and the shuttle slips out of his hands and clatters to the floor instead of flying across the strings. He begs his hands to listen but they won't, not anymore.

One night, his mother wakes him from a nightmare - he's trapped in a half-finished tapestry, the strands curling around him like spiderwebs, and every one is a bright, bright horrible red that stains him with leftover dye - and when he comes to himself he has her on the floor, his fingers around her throat. Those same fingers that shiver and shake and cramp when he tries to work the threads are strong and firm now as they crush the air from her windpipe. He can't unlock them. He can't make them stop. After she stops moving and kicking and coughing and twitching it still takes him over an hour to wrench his fingers open. He tries to lift her but his hands are useless again and she drops to the ground.

Later he cries, rocks himself in the corner. It's days before he can call anyone to get her.