District Thirteen

"Citizens Assemble!"

The day began as every day in post-revolutionary District 13 always had done. Silence, an order; and a screech of feedback, fading out across the speakers that drooped from the roofs of every square concrete uniform block in the district. No more hiding underground. There was nowhere to run, no-one to run from.

There was nothing. Nothing they could fear, nothing they could dream of. The world started and ended at the borders, the boundaries of where they lived and what they knew. The sky was a flat grey empty page on which there was no ink to write.

There was no writing anywhere, either. Signposts, advertisements, graffiti, all gone. Words were power; and power was for the few. Nothing could distinguish building from building just as nothing could distinguish between each of the sullen faces that looked out from them.

Just how the authorities liked it. Everybody looked the same after a while; and that made it so much easier. Families like Garcia's were everywhere. Her eyes, from so many different perspectives, scanned the square as people began to file into the open area in front of the District's ancient Justice Building, now home to the authority of 13- the Leader. The people shook their heads like her, breathing through her button nose.

But behind the eyes, the similarities stopped. Thinkers like the Franchez family were banned, their philosophies crushed by the ruling authorities, not caring if they smashed life with it.

All that was left was the Leader.

A round of canned applause buzzed through the speakers, but was not taken up by the crowd. It acted as the signal, the warning, that the Leader was about to come among them.

Nobody could say for sure what the Leader looked like. It was treason to even look him- or her, in the eye. To do so would be disrespectful on the highest level. All eyes turned to the floor, which came several foot closer when the whole group, acting as one, knelt down in the dust before their Leader, the arbiter of their lives who was at the same time a stranger to them.

All they could say for certain about their Leader was that they were a member of the omnipresent Coin family, the dynasty that had had hold of the District for so long they were virtually in the air the citizens breathed. Nobody knew how long the current Leader had even been in power. Obviously, the Coins were mortal and so the Leader had to die at some point, but when they did their deaths weren't even announced, power was simply handed on to the next Leader- whoever they were- and life continued on as if they had always been in power.

There was no resisting them, no opposing their rule anymore. For how could you assassinate someone if you didn't even know what they looked like? When everyone looked almost the same as everyone else? You could spend your life living next to a Coin and never even know. Rebellion was left to rot at the back of people's minds.

And if their secret police came at night, nobody could say where you had gone- or why.

"Let us offer up our tribute to our Leader!" That was the next signal. Faces devoid of emotion, dulled by the routine:

They removed their right hands.

There was a great thud as hundreds of prosthetic limbs were dropped, simultaneously and without ceremony onto the ground. In a great wave of movement, they raised their stumps to salute the Leader, their eyes still fixated on their shoes.

It was a time-honoured tradition, that at the age of eighteen every citizen would cut off their right hand without anaesthetic or similar medical assistance in order to wholly pledge their allegiance. "Let the Leader be your right hand!" The authorities proclaimed passionately. Every citizen must be incomplete, in every sense of the word, without the Leader.

Anyone who refused the act was a traitor, who thought more of their own selfish hearts than the State. It was this new tradition that had forced families like Garcia's out into Panem, like wildfire driving animals out of a forest- or into the gas chambers like sheep blindly led to slaughter. Either way suited the Coins.

It began as every assembly in the square always had. A chant, slow at first but rapidly gaining pace as it was taken up by the increasingly hysterical crowd, driven wild by the frenzied repetition.

"Long live the Leader! Long live the State! Down with Panem! Long live Unity!"

All they could think of was the chant. Traitors were brought forward, their crimes bellowed out but drowned by the sea of noise, before they were thrown to the crowd and snatched up by the hysteria, devoured by the almost ravenous bloodlust. Friends, neighbours, lovers, parents, children- all participated in the dismembering of the accused, all familiarity- and screaming, drowned out still further by the continual chanting.

When the bloodshed was over, the pieces disposed of, they picked up their hands, re-attached them and went about their daily business as if nothing had happened.

Maybe nothing had really happened, to them.