Ariadne feels the bed dip under a foreign weight, the moonlight peering softly through the thin curtains.

Johanna knows she is awake. "Ariadne."

She hums contentedly, pulling Johanna down into the bedcovers.

"Come back with me," Ariadne hears her murmur. "To the Village, for tonight. It's so cold in here."

She wants to deny it, but she can already feel Johanna's fingers trailing the gooseflesh on her arm. "Okay."

The Village house is dark, but Johanna manages to wind her way down the corridors and find a light. It's warmer than her own home, bigger as well. Two stories – not just a sleeping loft – with more bedrooms and bathrooms and windows than Ariadne cares to count.

Johanna returns moments later, having illuminated the entire house with the press of a button. As she leads her up the stairs, Ariadne glimpses what she must have found – some sort of touchpad, glowing blue in the hallway – and stares at it in awe.

The staircase isn't like the ladder she climbs to get to her loft. It's bigger, right in the middle of the main room, with real handrails and seemingly floating steps leading to a highly decorated open space. A second living room?

Why?

Then again, the Capitol and its illogical splendor has always confounded her.

Johanna grasps Ariadne's hand in her own and leads her down another hall, this one much more spacious than the last. They pass some sort of black and gold wallpaper, sleek and shining – until she reaches out her hand to touch and realizes it isn't wallpaper at all – instead, real obsidian tile inlaid with gold. On the wall. She recognizes the Seal of Panem - tiny round things pressed into the gold on each stripe – and wonders if they've really put it everywhere. Even at the bottom of the staircase, the Seal was painted into the floor.

She is led into a larger room – the master bedroom, no doubt – and she is shocked at the sheer size. It's as spacious as the living room, a bed meant for a giant, a walk in closet, gold-tiled windows, black velvet curtains, wood floors stained dark, deep violet rugs thicker than her own winter bedsheets. The ceiling is high, and the finishes are encrusted with deep golden curls.

"Was everything like this in the Capitol?" she asks.

"No," Johanna laughs. "This is their cheap shit. After all, who ever expected anyone from Seven to win the Games?"

The bed is soft and welcoming, the sheets some engineered form of silk. She wraps her arms around Johanna's waist, head on her chest. The moon peers out from behind the black curtains.

Johanna wraps an arm around her shoulders. "I have to leave in a few weeks."

"The Tour."

"Yeah. The Tour."

"Do you just…" She looks up at Johanna, turning onto her stomach. "Sort of… wave? Smile? Or do you apologize?"

She shrugs. "I'm not sure. Not like I've done this before."

"What did Blight say?"

"Nothing, besides when it starts." Her hand leaves Ariadne's back to rub her own forehead. "Something's wrong. He's avoiding the subject."

"Hey," she reaches a hand to stroke Johanna's cheek. "Listen. Blight knows what he's doing, okay? He does. If there's something that he's not mentioning, that means it's probably not that important, right? In a few weeks, the whole team and that Capitol woman will be here again. She runs a tight ship. Nothing's happening on that Tour that hasn't already been planned in detail. No surprises. Not for them, not for Blight, not for you. After all, how many years in a row have they done this?"

"Seventy." She is momentarily silent. "Seventy years. Twenty-four tributes. How many…"

"It doesn't matter." Ariadne strokes her face, tipping her chin up to face her. "There's nothing anyone can do. Listen. You're safe now. No more reapings. No more Games. I'll be eighteen before the next one, and I'm only putting my name in once. Your brothers are too young, and now you've got this house and the earnings. They won't need to take tesseraes either. Just once a year, you go out, you say hello, you give our tributes the best damn advice you can, okay? Then you come back. You come back, and you play with your little brothers, and you go felling with your father, and we'll go for walks and smell the pines and have mind-blowing sex. And it'll be alright." She presses her lips to Johanna's forehead. "It will all be alright."

She grasps onto Ariadne's frame, as if a life buoy in a turbulent ocean.


Johanna dreams of the arena.

It is snowing. The pines are thick and dark. She can see her breath in front of her.

"Try rubbing your hands together, to make a fire." She looks to her left to find Blight, seventeen years old, huddled in a mass of jackets and gloves and woolen hats. "Come on, don't stare at me." He gestures at a pile of sticks in front of her. "Do it! I'm freezing! Come on, come on!"

She tries, but when she smacks her hands together, only small sparks fly off, and they are too small to create flame. Instead, they bury themselves into the snow and die.

"I thought you said you were going home." He says angrily. Out of the corner of her eye, she spots Cedan Ashben, face-down in a pile of red snow.

"Well, you're not telling me how to do it!" She retorts. Her lips feel numb. "You're not telling me anything!"

"You should know! I thought you said you'd done this seventy times!"

"I don't know how to do this! What do you think I am, the girl on fire?"

"You could be. But you won alone."

"What does that mean?"

"You saved yourself. And that's what you'll be doing, for the rest of your life."

She reaches out and shoves him into the snow. "I'm saving your goddamn life right now, Blight!"

When he cobbles back to his feet, it is Asher staring back at her. He is fifteen years old. "Jo." He speaks slowly. "Welcome back."

An arrow buries itself in his chest, and he falls to the ground with a thud, muffled by the snow. She rushes to him, remove the arrow from his heart, but all she finds in the wound are rose thorns, too many to count.

She turns on her heels, digging into the snow, and searches for the culprit. She searches until she can no longer feel her legs. She never finds him.

She feels Blight's hand on her shoulder once more. "I'm sorry."

"Don't say you understand." She pushes him away, trying in vain to stand on icy legs. "You don't understand. You won, too. You had her, but she left you."

He sits beside her, and begins to saw off his hair.


She finds herself on the train again. Cornelia Lolita has placed a schedule in front of her, but she is unable to decipher the words.

"Twelve o'clock, we go to Twelve."

"I heard it burned down." Johanna protests.

"No, no. Not yet, anyway." Cornelia turns the page to reveal a map. She points with an orange fingernail to District Four. "And here's Finnick."

"What does he have to do with anything?"

"He's a fisherman. With a trident."

Johanna blinks. "Are you high?"

Blight enters through the north doors, wine in hand. Lucius follows, looking pleased with himself. "Don't worry, my dear, no one keeps dogs as pets anymore. Oh, look at this." He strides over to the map, pointing to the Capitol. "Here's where Snow lives. He holds his party at the end of the Tour right here, every year." Lucius leans down to her ear and covers his mouth as if to tell her a secret, and whispers, "He's from the Capitol."

"Don't tell her something you haven't told me!" Blight protests.

"Well, who else is going to tell her? You never tell her anything." Cornelia quips.

Blight sighs. "It wasn't the right time."


Johanna returns to her sleeping car. In the middle of her bed, Ariadne waits, naked and shining. They've made up her face with a multitude of blacks and greys and golds.

"What if my mother sees us?" Johanna asks.

"She'll know, either way. I thought you said she never ignores anything anymore."

Johanna shrugs. "You want me to ignore everything."

Ariadne raises her arms over her head and smiles. "But don't I make it easy?"

Johanna lays beside her and stares up at the black ceiling.

"Why is your brother called John?" Ariadne muses.

"Because my father's name is John."

"What if your father's name was Johanna?"

She laughs. "My father's name isn't Johanna."

"But say it were. And say your brother were called Johanna. And then, they would call you something different. Maybe they'd call you Ariadne. And then, I would be Ariadne too. Maybe we never would have kissed. Maybe it would have been too weird, having the same name and everything. And we would have never fallen in love." She sighs. "It's the little things that change destinies."


A bit later, she says, "I keep thinking about Blight's games."

"Go watch them." Ariadne says.

"I've already seen them."

"Well, they've got his Tour on tape, if that's what you're wondering."

"Where?"

"In your house, hidden in the cabinet. They've got all sorts of shit hidden all over your house, if you would care to look instead of babysitting Asher and fucking me all the time."

"Where's the train headed right now?"

Ariadne frowns. "District Twelve. Can't you smell the flames?"


Johanna is awake. Her hands are clammy.

She gently frees herself from Ariadne's embrace and makes her way out of the room and down the stairs. Under the holoprojector, in a large cabinet, she finds them: Games One through Seventy, from the Reapings to the Tour. Below them are other films – Capitol-made flicks about hopeless love and parties, historical documentaries depicting the honorable Capitol soldiers fighting to preserve Panem during the Dark Days, tearing through hordes of thieving, murderous rebels. They've left her an entire collection. There's even a documentary on Snow. She's heard of this one; it was required viewing at school when her father was a boy. Allegedly, half of the movie depicts a handsome Snow rooting out corruption and kissing babies and personally thanking citizens. Her father told her that almost all of the instructors were purposely putting the volume too low to hear. Eventually, it was mandated that a Peacekeeper was to sit in on every classroom and enforce the screening.

She finds Blight's tape, a thin little disc in a box decorated with his face. Seventeen-year-old Blight once again stares back at her, holding a knife in one hand and a crown in the other, the Seal glistening in the background. His head is shaven.

She skips the Games, though she does watch the Reaping. As the Victor, they show his reaping first – and then it skips to One and plays the rest in descending order. The girl is reaped first. She's somehow even shorter than Asher, a tiny frame with wispy brown hair that's so thin it's almost colorless. She's pale, blotchy in some areas, and when the camera pushes in on her face, you can see the blue of her eyes. That isn't common, not in Seven. Capitol blood, her mother used to say. Maybe the grandfather, great-grandfather. During the Dark Days, local girls used to surrender themselves to Capitol soldiers in exchange for food. That was one of the first things they did, to cut off grain supply coming out from Eleven so the rebels might starve before they could fight. Sometimes, the girl would turn up pregnant. Not often. But sometimes. It happened everywhere during the war, but of course at the time, Seven was so homogenous that you would know what happened when you saw those eyes. You wouldn't have to guess.

Johanna watches the girl's ashen face and wonders if a Capitol cousin of hers was glad when she died.

Blight takes the stage moments later. He looks like a giant standing next to her. He is solemn.

When the tape finally arrives at the Tour, she watches intently. Blight's escort, a slight man with silver lips, rushes him out onto the stage. It becomes readily apparent that they are in Twelve. The pictures of the tributes glow on the projection behind him. The anthem plays out, and he waits until it is finished to speak.

I am sorry for your loss. His face is blank. I respect your sacrifice for the well-being of Panem. Both Hallifree Cartwright and Niels Donner fought very bravely and embodied the strength of your District. I am humbled to have faced such honorable and courageous tributes.

This is repeated throughout every District. Only the names change, though the speech – and monotone – remain the same. His tour is bland. His face is emotionless, even when he is brought to the Districts of the tributes he personally killed. The Tour is boring. After the party, it appears they want nothing more than to leave him alone. She knows this was not an accident.

What a pair, they are. Behold, the Victors of District Seven, Masters of Being Conveniently Ignored.