Okay now they're REALLY all here


Ashton "Ash" Summers, 15

Every year I was shoved into a crowd of hundreds of children, and that was the only time I felt alone. Society stopped when the Reapings began. We weren't a community anymore, supporting each other and working together to scratch out a life with the crusts and leftovers the Capitol left us. I didn't have a sister or a girlfriend anymore, or any friends. There was only me. I was focused on Bubbles, but she wasn't a person during the Reaping. She was a voice attached to a hand that carried a paper with a name. The whole world was that paper.

I wasn't much of a philosopher. I was fifteen years old. I didn't know anything outside of Three, much less outside of the world. All the same, I was calling on something in my head. I didn't know who it was, or why it made a world like this, but I was praying that this one time, it would do something.

Make it not me, I prayed. Even if it was listening, it might not want to answer such a selfish prayer. Or maybe someone else prayed harder, and what might have been his name was switched to mine. But morals didn't bother me, because morals didn't exist during the Reaping.

The ruler of the world dipped a hand into the bowl and drew out the future. The paper was thin and frail, flapping in the slight breeze. It didn't hide its power. The germ that started a pandemic was even smaller. The future unfolded in front of us and a voice read it out.

"Ashton Summers!"

My first impulse was to find my sister. Until I heard my name, I'd forgotten that the girls had already been picked. It wasn't her, though. She was in the crowd, looking back at me with a tear-stained face. My next thought was for my girlfriend Taylor. She wasn't the girl on the stage, so I swept the crowd as I moved inevitably forward to take my place. She was crying, too. I'd never seen her cry before. Everything in the world could change that fast.

"It will be okay," Lucy said during our ten minutes to say goodbye. My parents were discussing something by the door. They didn't see each other much, which made me and Lucy happy. It also meant we had to live apart, but we made do.

"Three is about due for another winner," I said. I had the same smile I'd had on since I got to the stage. It was my natural expression, and wearing it made it feel like at least one thing was still right about the world.

"You never change," Lucy said. People so often believed the easiest thing. People wanted to think other people were happy. They never asked how it was possible that I was always smiling. Most of the time, I was really happy, but sometimes, it was just an expression. No one had found me out so far, and it seemed likely I would keep that secret until I died.


Sparkil Maclein, 17 (D3F)

It took ages to put her all together. I had to scavenge wires and metal from all over District Three, from melted coins (which wasn't exactly legal but no one cared if it was only the cheapest coins) to gutting my old night light. I had to lay them all together just so like a technological Dr. Frankenstein so everything worked and one tiny glitch didn't make the whole thing catch on fire. Finally, after dozens of false starts, she was ready to display.

"Mom! Dad! I finished her!" I yelled from my basement lair. I heard my parents running down the steps, eager to see the masterpiece I'd been refusing to let them see. I swept out my arms toward my knee-high work table and presented my invention.

"I call her Ada," I said. Ada was a little square robot about the size of a small cat. She had a screen on her face and one bionic arm, just like mine. That was most of the reason I'd grown so attached to her, along with all the hours I spent making her. She was like my baby and my twin all at once.

"What does she do?" Dad asked. I turned her over to show her power bank.

"She runs on normal wireless batteries, so she can go on forever. Mostly she organizes," I said. I opened a compartment and pulled out the handheld computer keyboard I'd wired into her.

"I couldn't get her to transcribe voices, but you can type in messages and she reminds you. Even though she can't understand my voice, she can still talk or read off text," I said. I tapped some letters on the keyboard. Ada, say "hello, Mom and Dad"

"Hello, Mom and Dad," Ada said. It was my voice, since I'd recorded me saying all the letters, plus combination letter sounds and a few basic words. I could keep adding more and she'd get smarter all the way. Mom and Dad laughed, since I'd recorded the words with a goofy Capitol accent. It amused me that Ada would be a very posh robot.

"What does the arm do?" Mom asked.

"It doesn't really do much," I admitted. "It can hold a pencil, but she can't write. Maybe someday." I just really wanted her to have an arm for cosmetic purposes. "She can give me a high five," I added, and I gently high-fived her. I was still wearing the rubber glove on my metal hand. I'd been lazy at first, but I hadn't forgotten ever since I zapped myself trying to wire her facescreen.

"Maybe now you won't forget your homework," Dad said. I stuck my tongue out at him. It was hard to concentrate on silly things like sentence diagrams and geography when I only cared about the science and engineering that might let me do my dream job someday of making Capitol mutts. If the Games were going to go on anyway, they at least should have really cool mutts. My favorite was the phoenix. It was from before I was born, but I could tell even from the footage that it bent light somehow, and that was wicked cool.

"It's pretty impressive, girl," Dad said. He already worked for the Capitol, so hearing him say that was the best thing that could have happened.

"Good enough to work in the Capitol?" I asked.

"You better wait until you're at least old enough to cross the street by yourself," Dad said. But he was just fooling. I was eleven years old. I'd been able to cross the street for three years.