There's three things everybody who makes it past eight knows about Eight: don't be keen on the green (cos there's none of it), your only real perspective choices for a career are factory work, factory work or factory work (only don't expect to see any of what you make again). But most of all: Don't talk about things before the Games.

Especially not on Reaping Day.

So it seems like a cruel twist of fate to Hannel that his mother might just be the only person in Eight who's determined to break all of these rules at once. He thinks about it as he trudges home in the mud, the rain too long-fallen to leave any of its smell behind. His back and arms are aching and he wants nothing more to collapse, mud and all, but he can't stop. Needs to get home and make sure the family is in order (or something vaguely resembling it) before the Reaping tomorrow. He feels sick when he thinks about it. Not for himself or his sister (who, thank God, being eight is still under the age limit) but mostly for his mother.

He remembers what she was like last year- in near hysterics, convinced the Capitol would snatch her children away like they'd been doing to so many for the last decade. She'd screamed about it, told them they were bloody thieves and murderers, even go so far to say the Rebels should've won- something most people didn't even dare to think, not if they wanted to keep their tongues in their mouths.

Hannel remembered stuffing a wad of fabric in her mouth, the cheap fabric rough and fraying against his fingers, claiming illness and hysteria; anything to get her out of there. She'd never liked the Games but she'd been getting worse recently, he thought as his brow furrowed in worry. Everybody knew what happened when people started getting too mouthy about the games- a heart attack here, an accident there. And that was if you were lucky. Sometimes people just disappeared from the blue, buttons ripped from a jacket.

She cursed him, cursed the Capitol, cursed the grass-less ground, cursed Eight and God from the forbidden religion and cursed herself and her withered legs. And what difference did it make? This was the way things were. Hannel didn't like it- but so long as it didn't involve him, he could ignore it. He couldn't change it- but he could live alongside it at a push. Even though watching the games was mandatory, when you were watching it all on television it was easy to ignore, to pretend the kids dying were just actors.

It's only make-up, he'd told his terrified sister last year as they watched a thirteen year old boy be impaled by a towering sixteen year old.

Just actors, as two bloodied, beaten and fearful kids hacked each other to pieces with blunt swords. All they'd had in the area that year had been blunted, Hannel remembered with a shiver.

As fabricated as anything we make in Eight, he'd lied to his sister, as a girl was torn to pieces by swollen, hideously modified scorpions that could barely stand under the weight of their augmentations. It took forty-three minutes for her to die. Hannel counted every second on his fathers bronze pocket watch. Tick. Tick. Tick. Went the ebony hand around the cream face. Drip. Drip. Drip. Went the crimson stream that had once been a girl.

Only makeup. Only actors. Not real screams. Not real blood.

Not real death.

And the worst part, Hannel reflected as he turned the corner to their tightly-packed block of flats, was sometimes he actually believed it.