Prologue
District Nine
Some time in the early era of the New Republic of Panem
I am living as a free citizen of Panem, which is something I once never thought that I or anyone else from any district in my lifetime would be able to claim. But even now, I lead a life that so often feels lonely, and any true sense of peace still evades me when I remember the very worst of not just living as an oppressed orphan. Or even all I had to do to survive not one but two Hunger Games, but everything that happened in the war to end the Games, to end President Snow's corrupt regime. And realizing that not even President Alma Coin of District Thirteen could be trusted in the end.
One small consolation I suppose is that I think my parents would be proud of what historical changes I've contributed to and accomplished. Right along with my friends, at least half of them are now gone, including my old mentor who once lived just across from me in this former Victor's Village, which at times seems even lonelier than it did in the dark time of the Hunger Games. He was the only man I'm certain I'll ever love as I did.
Are you sure you want to know my story? I suggest you better be. One thing I can promise you is that it's not for the faint of heart. Like the Games, once I've begun, there'll be no turning back. I don't sugarcoat anything.
My home district is a town interspersed with many golden fields where the wheat and other precious grains are grown every year from spring until harvest time. We then have to mill the wheat into the kind of refined or enriched flours that only the citizens of the Capitol and maybe the wealthier districts like One and Two are allowed to use. At least, this is how it was before the longed for Era of Great Freedom began.
I was named Alyssa and I am a Whitestone, the last living Whitestone that I know of. My district and home is Nine, always has been, and I certain always will be. Where else would I go? The Capitol? I would rather be dead than live there, even though Snow, my most dangerous enemy is also gone, and the whole country is now liberated, and President Paylor is a fairer, better leader and human being overall than Snow, driven by the need for power and control, or even Coin, driven by the need for revenge against the Capitol she so despised.
The Hunger Games were one of the biggest problems with this society in Panem, once called North America. There is the Capitol, and there were officially twelve (but actually thirteen) outlying districts.
Apparently the old story goes that the people of the old Panem, not being content nor appreciative enough of what the earlier Capitol gave them, soon rebelled. History would call this period the Dark Days. Everyone turned on one another, and nobody really knew who to trust anymore. The Dark Days seems only a fitting name.
And then came the supposed era of great peace, when the war had ended, the rebellion had been crushed, and the Capitol had been triumphant. A treaty of the treason had been negotiated, and it had been decreed that the rest of Panem, the districts basically, were the ones to be held forever accountable and punished for the rebellion. And to ensure that not only will there never be another rebellion, but that the people will always remember the cost of the last rebellion, they wrote into law the Hunger Games.
The Hunger Games were disgusting, depraved, evil, sick, humiliating, and plenty of other things that are too numerous to mention right now. And by the time I was a teenager it was still ongoing, the one that both changed and ruined my life forever would be the 73rd when I was just seventeen. And the worst part of it all was that we were all forbidden to complain, to protest against it.
See, another twisted part of this cruel punishment is that everyone in all of the districts must celebrate the Hunger Games by law. They must be not only accepting but honored that the Capitol might at any reaping pluck out any of their children to compete in the Hunger Games. In some of the wealthier districts, like One and Two, where there are kids who were trained from an early age in preparation for the Games called Careers, (and they were the tributes who most frequently won the Games) it is easier for many of them to see the Games as they are supposed to.
But I don't come from District One or District Two. District Nine is a far cry from being anything like either, as I've always been taught. Our major industry is of course in all grain, but mainly wheat farming. Needless to say, most of it, and certainly the very best quality of it all goes mainly to the Capitol. While we in District Nine get these dense, often hard to chew, and unpleasent looking brown rolls made from all that we are allowed to use, or if we sign up for tessarae.
But the provision of tessarae is yet another trap, as I've come to see it, especially for dirt-poor, parentless children like me. As if the Capitol is telling us, "The more you sign your name up, the more likely it is that we will eventually have you in that arena. So watch your backs."
I have lived in the community orphan home of District Nine ever since I was four years old up until the day I was reaped for my first Hunger Games at seventeen. I don't know much about who my parents were. Except that I was the only child born to them, that my father was a wheat farmer, like his father and his father before him, and that at least one or two relatives of my mother's, including her older sister, Kayla Morgan had been killed in one of the big Hunger Games, the 50th, which took place some years before I was born.
I was too young to clearly remember it all for myself from the day it happened, (though in time I learned many things) but my father, along with many discontented others, including several old friends who were also consequently punished, had been very outspoken against the evils of the Capitol. I remembered less about him than I did about my mother.
My mother was as good to me as she could afford to be, and beautiful, and kind, but she always seemed sad. But at least I once had a family to call my own. My father was Gordon Whitestone, and my mother's name was Teresa Morgan, until the day she was married to my father. That is, I had a family until the day when they were both cruelly taken from me.
They came one day to our house without any given warning, these men clad from head to foot in the protective white armour of the Peacekeepers. They took my father away first, and then my mother, and just before they came for her, she told me not to cry, and to not be afraid, that I am a Whitestone and that means something, but I didn't really understand it back then.
But I hoped that someday soon I would. So much time has passed since then, so many things have happened, terrible things I can never change, and good things, in the moments that count for much more than the bad.
Today is the first day that I am being interviewed about every major event that occured in my life. About my Hunger Games, both of them, and about what happened during the war, so that other people can understand better. So that history will remember that I was the Freedom Fighter. That I had a significant part in changing Panem forever, I suppose.
I very nearly refused to do this. I really didn't want to relive that world with some complete stranger from up in the Capitol, when I still had those memories that at times couldn't give me any peace. But Plutarch Heavensbee knows this journalist-of course he does-and it was Plutarch, and the rest of Panem, that insisted I do this, just this once. So what else could I do but say yes.
I watched from the sitting room window of my mansion in the Victor's Village as the man himself came up the front walkway to ring the doorbell which one of my household staff went to answer, but I said to her, "It's all right Hanna, It's for me anyway." And I open the door to him. "Good afternoon Miss Whitestone, Jem Tasselgrove." He shakes my hand and says to me, "Once again, I thank you for allowing me to come down on such short notice, and my condolences for your loss. Noah Linwood should have had a longer life than he did."
Mr. Tasselgrove is dressed quite professionally enough, and although not quite as gaudy as some colours still known to come from the Capitol, his obviously dyed in hair colour certainly said it all as far as his place of origin was concerned. So I say to him, "Well, let's not waste any more time, come in, and we can get this first session over with." I say to Mr. Tasselgrove, resigned to it, and wondering why I had agreed to doing this. The truth was that it was actually not only Plutarch from way up in the Capitol, but my therapist, Dr. Hart and even my friends Cassandra and Mace had been in agreement that it was what was best.
"Alyssa, it's been three weeks since the war ended, and you know, they wouldn't want you to shut yourself out from the world, not Nathan, Prim, Finnick, or Noah, or your parents, I'm certain. Not any of them, if you won't move through all this for yourself, then at least move through it for them." Cassandra had told me admonishingly just the other day when I had gotten the phone call.
When I found out that not only would Mr. Tasselgrove be coming to interview me, Alyssa Whitestone, the girl who was once known to the world as Alyssa of Nine and the Freedom Fighter, but that I would have to relive every moment from my childhood and horrors of the Games to the tragedies of the war, I knew it would not be an easy task. Not when I wanted more than anything to forget, even knowing that I never could. Not now.
Panem is really all there is left of this world, now, for us to inhabit. Even though the Hunger Games are now effectively outlawed, everyone still watches me, and Cassandra was right, the people of Panem still needed their history.
As if having some inkling of every thought running through my head, Mr. Tasselgrove says, sitting in the chair across from me at the coffee table, "Miss Whitestone, I...understand how difficult all this must be for you, now. Emotions are still running very high in Panem, especially in the Capitol. And from what I gather, with your Games, all your personal losses, well, if you need to, just take your time-"
"Do you want to hear about my story or not, Mr. Tasselgrove?" I ask him sternly, which shuts up all his unbearable prattling about how he understands what I've lived through, my reality. It's still separate from his own reality as night and day, and so much uglier, tainted from the crimes and cruelties of the Capitol in the Panem I knew before the war changed it all. "Of course, Miss Whitestone. That's why we're both here, after all."
And so, my story begins, with the spring that I was seventeen, the year when one of my worst living fears and haunting nightmares first became an irreversible part of my history...
