Idiot girl, began the most recent white-enveloped letter. From your condition, I can only guess you attempted to extract information of a classified nature from Head Gamemaker Gallegos.
It was a good guess. This letter, like the first one, had reached me in the hospital, where I was recovering from a particularly brutal visit to Troy Gallegos' mansion. When I'd had the audacity to ask questions about the arena for the 26th Games – of necessity, the questions were concealed beneath insults and implications galore so as not to arouse suspicion – Gallegos had struck me across the mouth with the handle of his whip, splitting my lower lip so deeply that the doctors doubted the resulting scar would be within the Capitol's abilities to remove.
In a way, I was pleased. If I was going to suffer for my cause, I at least wanted to keep the marks that showed what I'd been through. Allison said if I kept up that kind of thinking I might become an honorary Career after all.
I picked up the letter again, scanning for the place where I'd left off. That falls under the category of unnecessary risk-taking. The arena itself will be nothing extraordinary this year. It's the mutts and the tributes you'll need to deal with, and Gallegos will provide no helpful insight on those subjects. Do not provoke him again. Again, I had to fight down my fear that the letters were from Gallegos himself, yet another method of torture. Rationally, I knew psychological manipulation was beyond the Head Gamemaker, but with only two days between me and my last encounter with him, I was still shaken.
I look forward to meeting you, the letter concluded. In the meantime, stay safe.
This was the third time I'd read the message in its entirety, and this time I was nearly positive the writer was one of the victors, one I hadn't met yet. The Games began again in three weeks with a fresh round of Reapings, which meshed with the writer's reference to meeting me.
What victor had the Capitol connections to send me a suit of armor, though? If I hadn't known better, I might've guessed it was Varius. Besides the fact that he already knew me, though, Allison said he and Theta had spent the last week making up after their most recent argument, which meant he probably hadn't left the bedroom long enough to send me a message.
Besides Districts Two and Four, I hadn't met enough of the victors to even hazard a guess at the identity of my mystery correspondent. I was reasonably sure I could rule out District One, and not only because we'd already met, however briefly. Hinge, the morphling addict from Six, was probably out of the question also.
"Don't tell me you're reading that thing again," said a voice from the door, making me jump. I hadn't heard Allison arrive, and while I was now used to her preternatural stealth, I thought she could at least make an effort to be loud when the slightest gesture of startlement on my part made the wounds on my back crack open.
I recoiled from the pain that shot through me, and Allison gave me a pitying look. "Just because Varius wouldn't let them give you any more morphling doesn't mean you have to cry like a baby every time your back twinges a little," she said condescendingly.
I'd have to thank Varius when he and Theta finally surfaced. This was the fifth time I'd had to be hospitalized after spending time with Gallegos, and if I kept getting a morphling drip every time I was here, I'd end up worse than Hinge. Still, that didn't mean I enjoyed the pain, and I said as much to Allison.
She snorted indelicately, settling herself in the chair by my bedside. "You're supposed to accept pain, not enjoy it," she instructed me. From the singsong tone she'd adopted, I guessed she was quoting someone, a teacher, maybe.
"That's what Vega always said," she added, confirming my suspicion. Vega, the now-deceased second victor from District Two, sounded like a delightful woman.
"Speaking of crazy people," I interjected, "Have you spoken to Felix lately? He said he'd give us an update when he thought he knew which of his girls would be going into the arena."
"I talked to him, but he still has no idea," she answered, rolling her eyes. "It's absolutely typical of him. I mean, he's been training both of them for years, so you'd think he'd know who was better. We're just going to have to wait for the tribute trials."
"How does that work, anyway," I asked, only half-wanting to know.
Allison, of course, was eager to discuss the inner workings of the Career selection progress. Her eyes lit up, and she said, "Well, the week before the Reapings, all the eighteens – that's the group of eighteen-year-old tributes, if you couldn't guess – compete to see who gets to volunteer for the Games. They're split into boys and girls, and there's basically a free-for-all. At the end, whoever's conscious is declared winner."
"Is – is that what happened last year?" I wondered aloud.
"Yeah," Allison said, not unkindly. "There really wasn't any doubt Neera would win the female trials, but it's customary to hold them anyway. She didn't kill anyone, though. That sometimes happens, especially if the winner is afraid someone will break the rules and try to volunteer anyway."
In spite of everything I knew about the Career districts, especially District Two, that knowledge still had the power to make me shiver. "What about everyone else? You? Varius? Felix? Claudius?"
The look Allison gave me made me feel as if I was being weighed and measured. "I didn't kill anyone. Varius and Felix did. Claudius was before the tribute trial system started. He wasn't even a volunteer, because no one volunteered back then."
I just nodded, not entirely surprised. Besides, I'd already accepted that Varius and Felix – and Allison, for that matter – had killed before, so I tried not to revise my opinion of them when I found out they had more deaths on their hands than I'd originally known.
"Do they have trials in One and Four?" I asked. This was one of the reasons I preferred Allison to Varius: she liked talking, and never got tired of answering my questions.
She shook her head. "Four doesn't even have volunteers, usually," she said. "They're counted as a Career district because their tributes are strong enough that they tend to end up in the pack with ours. "District One has a training center, but it's not as good as ours," she went on, pride apparent in her voice. "Lots of their kids train, but they don't have any sort of system. Anyone can volunteer, it's just a matter of who gets to the stage first."
"They must be very sure they're going to win, to volunteer like that," I said, thinking aloud.
"Of course," Allison replied. "When you spend years of your life training single-mindedly to go into the arena, you don't just think you're going to win, you know it. On the train to the Capitol, both Quintus and Neera were like that." For a moment, she sounded distant and sorrowful, and I wondered whether it was for the boy she'd mentored or the girl who had saved my life.
Or maybe the sadness was for her younger self, I realized, because after a moment's pause, she added, "I wasn't sure at first. Honestly, I was shocked when I won the trials. There was this girl, Helena Petrides, who always beat me when we sparred. Always, except that one day. I still wonder if she lost on purpose."
Allison drew a deep breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she gave me a determined smile and changed the subject.
"Do you think you'll be back on your feet in time for the Reapings?" she asked.
"One way or another, I will be," I said. "Unless they give me back to Gallegos before the Games, but I don't think the president wants me looking less than perfect for the cameras once the media storm starts. Besides, this –" I waved the paper in my hand, "– just told me not to ask Gallegos any more questions about the arena. Whoever's writing to me thinks it's not the playing field we need to watch out for, but the players themselves. Mutts, too."
"Yeah, they outdid themselves with the mutts during your Games," Allison said. "I think it's that geneticist Snow – the old Snow, I mean – hired a few years back. "I didn't envy Neera having to fight that worm monster."
This time, it was my turn to change the subject, because Allison's words had left me with a picture of Neera's determined face in my mind. Three hundred and seventeen days, the voice in my head whispered, repeating the words like a lullaby it was singing to soothe itself. I shut it down firmly, focusing on the present.
"By the way, I think I figured out the letters are coming from one of the other victors," I told Allison. "Can you think of anyone who could pull enough strings in the Capitol to send me armor and have notes delivered anonymously?"
She frowned for a minute, thinking. "Barra and Varius," she said at last. "Jet, from One. Claudius, obviously. It can't be any of them though, mostly because that wouldn't make sense. I don't know any of the outliers well enough to say what their Capitol connections are."
"That's something we need to change, then," I said, shifting with relief into rebellion-planning mode. "During these Games, our secondary goal needs to be making friends with as many other victors as possible. Or allies, if not friends," I amended, correctly interpreting Allison's dubious look.
"You're forgetting that I'm not a mentor this year," she chided. "Oh, I promised you I'd be around, so I will be, but they're not going to let me into the control center with the rest of you. It's against the rules."
"Damn," I said, making her glance at me in mild surprise. I had forgotten. No matter how many times Allison and Varius explained how the mentoring rotation worked in their district, I couldn't quite remember it. I did, however, know that Felix and Claudius were this year's mentors, and Felix and Allison would be mentors the following year.
"Well, maybe that's good," I added finally. "Claudius is one of the early victors, so I'm sure he knows all the others really well. No offense to you, of course."
Allison was already shaking her head. "None taken," she said. "Especially since I'm willing to bet I know the other victors better than Claudius does, because he hardly ever leaves the district anymore. This will be the first time he's mentored since the fourteenth Games."
That was news to me. It also put a kink in my plans, because I sincerely doubted Claudius, winner of the third annual Hunger Games, would take kindly to a seventeen-year-old telling him he had to make nice with people he'd been avoiding for years. With difficulty, I refrained from cursing again. Twice in one day would probably make Allison die of shock.
"Felix knows everyone, though," she was saying, undistracted by my own mental detour. "He doesn't like everyone, but he knows them. And I think he's more willing to help you then he's letting on. Mentoring bores him. For all his paranoia, I sometimes think he'd like to be back in the arena. He gets off on danger."
As deeply disturbing as that was, it was also nice to know I'd have a partner in crime, so to speak. "Where'd he get that knife?" I asked, remembering the way Felix had greeted me back in Two.
"Which one?" Allison asked, rolling her eyes. "Most of the victors have at least one illegal weapon. Um, except you, I mean," she added uncomfortably. "Anyway," she continued. "Felix has quite the collection of knives. I think he probably paid an outrageous amount for them on the black market, and I know he's had to bribe Peacekeepers out of reporting him a few times."
Thinking back to what I remembered of Felix's Games, the knife thing didn't surprise me much. Knives had been his weapons of choice, and he'd wielded them with a murderous precision I wasn't sure Neera could've matched.
His arena had been one I now recognized as "standard," a desert-like scrubland with few rocks and fewer trees; in short, almost nowhere to hide. That was one of the years the Gamemakers had tampered with the natural cycle of day and night to devastating effect. The bloodbath that year took place in late afternoon, and when the sun went down at the end of the day, it didn't rise again for the duration of the Games. The Capitol must've installed special cameras in the arena, though, because the footage was a clear and horrific as usual.
As far as I'd seen, Felix's victory had had three components: luck, generous sponsors and superhuman perseverance. In the initial battle at the Cornucopia, he'd picked up a pack with a pair of night-vision goggles, which the Career pack had used to hunt less fortunate tributes as they stumbled around in the dark. Then, when the Career alliance had dissolved, Felix's sponsors had sent him stimulant capsules that allowed him to go without sleep for days on end.
He'd kept going long after the caffeine, or adrenaline, or whatever it was, had worn off, though. In that arena, falling asleep meant death, because there was no cover and no designated nighttime, which was something even the Careers usually acknowledged as time to sleep rather than hunt. Once it had gotten down to the final four, all Felix's opponents had also acquired glasses that let them see in the dark, so only the fact that he was constantly moving kept him alive.
In the end, it had come down to him and the boy from Seven. Even stumbling over his own feet and trembling with fatigue, Felix's aim was flawless, and he'd finished his opponent with a throwing knife between the eyes.
That – the nature of his arena – was why I'd been so amazed to find he preferred to live in total darkness. It made a bit more sense now that Allison told me he missed the Games. He's like Neera, I thought. He was in his element during the Games, but that very fact doomed him when it came to life as the Capitol's toy.
I picked up the angel necklace from my bathroom counter – I'd taken to leaving it in District Three when I was summoned to the Capitol for Gallegos's amusement just in case it didn't make it back to the hospital with me one of these times – and fastened it around my neck. I'd come home unaccompanied, for once, because the Reapings were in less than a week and Varius and Allison's new status as would-be rebels couldn't stand up to a lifetime of pro-Games conditioning.
Still, the apartment seemed oddly empty without them, so when a chime signaled that someone downstairs wanted to come up, I walked a little faster than usual to answer the call. The voice on the other end of the line was unfamiliar, though, and it turned out to be only a Capitol messenger with yet another white envelope for me.
I turned it over in my hands, not minding when the sharp corners dug into the flesh of my palm. Finally, I shook myself out of my daze and ripped it open, fastening my eyes hungrily on the letter inside.
Congratulations on your continued survival, it said, skipping over the salutation altogether. I would wish you luck with your district's impending Reaping, but that might, perhaps, be the wrong sentiment, in light of your grander scheme. I propose a deal between us. If you follow through with your plan and produce a victor for District Twelve, I will ensure that the Head Gamemaker discontinues your sessions together. Do we have an agreement?
It was rather unfair, I thought, to end an anonymous letter with a question. I had no way of replying short of chasing the messenger and his Avox attendant across my district, assuming they hadn't already left. That aside, there were few things I wanted more than for Gallegos to leave me alone, even if that meant I'd be sent to other rich and important Capitolians in his place. Try as I might, I found no reason to refuse the offer – at worst, I would end up back where I was, with no victor and lots of torture.
And the letter confused me in another way, seeming to contradict my theory that the writer was one of my fellow victors. A victor might have the power to send me notes and even armor, but I doubted many people in the Capitol had the ability to call Gallegos off like a dog. There was no way a victor could do so.
Who, then? The Head Gamemaker's obsession with me had been crippling in more ways than one, because it had given me no chance to meet any of the other higher-ups in the Capitol. All of a sudden, I felt my aloneness keenly, realizing how much I'd come to rely on my allies for information.
I turned and went into the bedroom, glad I'd gotten home in time to sleep in my own district for a change. The fact that I couldn't make a plan for when the Games started was messing with my head, my nightmares getting stranger and more intense as the days went by, and I was tired of waking half the building with my screams. At least here, I had the place to myself.
As I'd expected, I dreamed.
The dream was different, though, one I'd never had. It featured neither Neera nor Glint. Instead, I found myself back in the desert, this time accompanied by Claudius, age fifteen. Having never met the Claudius from my time, it wasn't unusual that I was imagining him as he'd been in the recording I'd watched of his Games.
His hair was black, and not cropped short the way the other male Careers wore it. He wasn't actually a Career, though, as numerous people had pointed out. He was handsome enough, in that dark-with-light-eyes way, but he already looked like more than a boy. There was something hard and razor-edged in his eyes, something that spoke of killing and a willingness to kill again.
"Are you ready?" he asked, looking at me sideways. He wasn't much taller than me, but he moved like every part of his body was a weapon, and I flinched under his gaze.
In the dream, I nodded dazedly. Claudius picked me up like Neera had done on the first day of our Games, cradling me in his arms. And like Neera, he ran, long, easy strides that sent us speeding over the sand. After some indeterminate time, he stopped and set me down.
"He'll be here soon," Claudius said, standing over me so his shadow fell on my face. "Are you afraid?"
In the real arena, I had never been afraid at the right times. I'd been numb at the Cornucopia and afraid of Neera, which I now knew was idiotic. In the dream, I shook my head. "I'm not afraid."
Then Head Gamemaker Troy Gallegos crested the dune to out right, and I screamed, scrabbling backwards to get away from him. Above me, Claudius frowned down at me placidly. "You said you weren't afraid, Memorie," he scolded. I tried to answer, but I was frozen by fear.
Claudius loped forward, a spear appearing in his hand. Gallegos, surprised, tried to turn away, but the spear took him through the heart. Claudius spun back to me, smiling widely. "See," he said, breathing a bit hard. "Nothing to be afraid of."
"Thank you," I said. "Why are you protecting me?" I recalled asking Neera the same thing.
He smiled again, helping me to my feet. He ran a hand through my hair and the fresh blood left streaks. "What else would I be doing? I was born for this. We all were."
"I don't understand," I said. "You won your Games. You – you're forty years old! Why are you in my arena?"
He sighed deeply and leaned down to kiss me. In my deep, all-consuming shock, I was too paralyzed to respond, which he took as acceptance. And I kissed him back, feeling as if we'd been doing this for years.
Without warning, my mouth filled with liquid. I shoved Claudius away, gagging. Blood was pouring from his mouth, trickling down his chin and onto his chest. When I put my hand to my own face, it came away red.
I jerked myself awake, sitting up so quickly the weeks-old injuries on my back twinged painfully. In spite of myself, I clapped a hand to my mouth, nearly gasping in relief when it came away dry. As my heartbeat slowed, I managed to gain some emotional distance from the nightmare. Claudius – young Claudius, because I'd never met modern Claudius and had no idea what he looked like – had kissed me, and I'd kissed him back. And then he had died, spewing his heart's blood into my mouth.
No doubt it was some kind of metaphor for my alliance with the Careers, I thought, flopping back down in a way that made my back hurt again. I didn't care, though. It was bad enough when I had straightforward nightmares about the arena. If I was going to have complicated symbolic ones on a nightly basis, I'd start contemplating alcoholism. Too bad Flux wasn't around to give me any pointers.
