With a loud crash, a bucket turned over. Everyone turned towards the source of noise, cringing.

"Sorry," said Stein, righting the bucket. It was too late, though, and a large puddle of grey was soaking through the paper. Stein stepped aside, not letting the paint reach his shoes. Strata did likewise, ineffectually poking at the paint with her roller. The two were hunched over, as if expecting to be struck.

The guard watched the proceedings without batting an eye. "It's no big deal," she said. "Nobody comes down here, anyway. Just try to soak up as much as possible." Having proclaimed that judgement, she went back to her crossword. "Also, what country has Paris as its capital? Six letters."

Everyone looked at each other. "No idea," Vartha said, shaking his head. Donna had no idea, either.

"France," Theodosius said confidently.

"Thank you, Male Fifteen," said the guard, and pencilled in the answer.

Strata and Stein began to tear off chunks of paper and mop up the spilled paint with them. The paint stuck well to the smooth floors; Donna's cell floor had a few white spots that would probably take paint remover, which they weren't allowed, to get rid of. "Wait, that's Western Europe, right?" Strata asked. "I think I've read about it before. It's total trash."

Theodosius shook his head. "Western Europe was probably the worst-hit place during the Cataclysm," he pointed out. "They struggled to rebuild, and their problems just compounded."

"That's true," Strata conceded as she stepped around the paint, "but it's not a very nice place to live."

"That it isn't." Theodosius crouched down to paint the bottom section of the wall.

"A lake in the southern part of the northern Wilds, four letters," the guard called out. Nobody had an answer to that. "Female Nine, you spent years in the Wilds, how can you not know this?" she asked in an accusing tone.

"I don't know anything about the names of lakes," Donna pointed out.

Katz stood up and stretched her back. "I don't know anything about the Wilds at all," she said as she held the paint roller with her elbows behind her back. "Isn't there some debate over their representation going on right now?"

"That debate has existed since before the First Rebellion," Donna explained, turning away from the wall to face the others. They were less than three metres away from each other, only a small section of the walls and ceiling remaining to be painted. "Communities all over the northern part of the continent did not join Panem officially, but since the maps showed the entire continent as being Panem, there were arguments that this meant that the people of the Wilds should have the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else. The Games, of course, put a stop to any of that." Donna had needed official permission to find out about this. After her promotion to Head Engineer, Snow had permitted her to read a few books from the State Library so that she was aware of the issues she could potentially face as the person overseeing all of on-location construction.

"And now, I'm assuming, the arguments are back," Stein said. He extended the handle of his paint roller and reached up to paint the ceiling. Drops of paint fell onto the paper. "Now that everyone's voice is supposed to be heard, and all."

Donna shrugged. "Most likely. Some of the cities and towns want to join Panem officially, others want to remain how they were, and the nomadic and semi-nomadic groups just want freedom of movement." Theodosius shot her an odd look before resuming his painting. She had just learned that from a clandestine letter and hadn't had the opportunity to share the information yet.

"I wish we got newspapers in here," Li sighed wistfully. "I've heard that in normal prisons, there's even telescreens. Wouldn't it be amazing to find out the news every day?"

The guard looked up from her crossword again. "Who was the mayor of Two during the First Rebellion?"

"Tashen," the four former Peacekeepers and Li said in unison. Li added, "I probably won't forget the name until my dying day."

"Me neither," said Katz. "Did you have to learn that song about loyal troops marching proudly with Tashen under red-black banners?" The others shook their heads, looking confused. "They must have phased it out shortly after I was deployed," the older woman explained. "You were lucky. I can still recite the entire thing in my sleep."

Li looked like he had dodged a bullet. "Did you also have that blue manual you had to learn by heart?" he asked. "Even today, I could probably tell you what was on page twenty-three."

"Something about the structure of a garrison in a sparsely populated area?" Katz said, screwing up her face as she tried to recall.

"I have no idea," said Strata. "I forgot everything the moment after finishing exams."

"Same," said Stein, "except I never knew it at all."

Weiss was scratching her head. "I think that page was specifically about a dense area with a low population, like a small town or the dwellings of workers on a large farm."

"You remember it in that much detail?" Vartha asked incredulously.

"We didn't have much of a choice," Li said. "Plus, that was the only thing we had to actually learn by heart. All of our other manuals, we barely looked at. I don't think anyone ever bothered to even glance at our field manual." That had been the one that permitted Peacekeepers to disobey criminal orders.

Vartha was unconvinced. "Still, how long was that manual?"

"It's less impressive than you think," Katz explained. "It was something like two hundred pages long, but we spent seven years studying it at the Academy. We were told that if we just studied it enough, we'd always be able to make the right decision, no matter what the situation." Katz' grimace showed what she thought of that reasoning. "Imagine if you had spent seven years in school studying a specific book every day for an hour."

"I think the ideology classes we were forced into were quite similar, don't you agree?" Theodosius asked Vartha.

"We were never forced to memorize books by heart," Vartha pointed out. "What happened if you couldn't keep up?" he asked Stein.

"Nothing." Stein climbed down a step and leaned against the top slightly. "Well, not nothing," he amended. "It wasn't as hard as you think. We'd be assigned a certain chapter for a month, or a few months, and write tests based off that. As the years went on, the questions became harder and harder, and since we'd go over the same chapters over and over, it ended up sticking in your mind without you doing any extra work other than your assigned readings."

Katz cut in. "Remember, the Academy was just like your highschool, but with a few things added and with stranger punishments. The weak students were in one stream, the strong in another. At the end, we had theoretical and practical evaluations that were officially supposed to determine where we would be deployed, but in practice, everyone knew where they were being sent to for months beforehand."

"Stranger punishments?" Li asked, adjusting one of the sheets of paper lying on the floor. "Understatement. I remember once, one of the cadets was caught allowing another one to cheat off her on a biology exam. She was forced to do the high ropes course with him on her back, with no safety gear, even though he was massive and she was borderline failing the strength evals. The instructor said something like 'if you want to carry him through everything, go right ahead.'"

"I heard about that!" Weiss exclaimed. "That at your campus, right? I remember hearing that they both dropped out after doing the ropes course. We younger cadets were all so confused that they gave up after managing it."

"Same here!" Li said. "Like dropping a difficult course after doing well on a midterm," he explained to Donna, Theodosius, and Vartha. Donna wasn't convinced that the analogy applied. When people died because of difficult courses, it was at their own hands.

Katz was shaking her head. "At least there's logic in that one, even though not allowing harnesses was downright sadistic of them."

"Wait, what height was the ropes course?" asked Theodosius.

"At its highest?" Weiss said. "Ten metres. And doing it without a harness was the kind of thing you did to really impress someone you were into." That meant the instructor who had given that order had known that the cadets would likely fall down and die. Given the behaviour of adult Peacekeepers when given unpleasant orders, the odds of teenage future Peacekeepers refusing to do something and thus potentially opening themselves to accusations of cowardice were practically nil.

"As time went on, the instructors became less creative and more sadistic," Katz said sadly. "It used to be that only the most elite Peacekeepers would be hired as instructors after serving their second tour, but as time went on, the best started to request an additional deployment, and only the dregs were left for the Academies and the programs."

Strata raised a sceptical eyebrow. "You're not even fifteen years older than me, how could things have changed that fast?" Katz shrugged. Donna suspected the reason had been something at the Capitol level, but did not say so. The former Peacekeepers resented any mention of politics in conjunction with themselves. Donna mostly respected that, as she also hated it when people tried to explain her actions within a framework of the intrigue in Snow's inner circle, but they tended to go too far sometimes.

"I don't think things changed that much," Li said. "I served with people half my age, and we had some pretty similar stories. You know, forcing hungover cadets to do the worst-smelling chores, sending you to paint rocks if you were lazy, stuff like that." He chuckled slightly, probably remembering a particularly funny event. Stein nodded along, shaking his head in amusement at the same time. It made him look like he was doing neck rotations.

Glancing at the guard, Strata tensed slightly and resumed painting, though nobody else did. "I remember how once, I got caught sleeping with another cadet. For a week, we had to hold our hands everywhere we went. Do you have any idea of how hard it is to fire a gun when you've got your elbow linked with someone else's, and he's also trying to fire?" She rubbed at her face with a free hand as the other military people chuckled.

"I suddenly feel very glad I did not follow my highschool girlfriend into the Peacekeepers," Theodosius joked. Donna turned to him, surprised. He had never told her about that.

"It was different for the Capitolians," Katz explained. "Mostly because it was a very condensed program, so if you had energy at the end of the day to do anything other than pass out, the instructors would have simply felt very bad about themselves and increased the intensity of the program." The three civilians cringed. Even during those worst weeks at university, Donna had always had at least an hour each day to herself, even if it consisted of sitting in the shower and wondering if engineering was really for her, and plus Dem had always been there to cheer her up from second year on.

"I'm feeling even more glad now," Theodosius said. "And I thought university was bad."

"It depends," Li said, sitting down on the top of the ladder. "I know people who washed out from the Academy had a much lower suicide rate than people who dropped or failed out of college in the Capitol. No idea what that could be attributed to, though. Interestingly enough, the rates were even lower for those washed out of the Games Academy." Every year in Two, a hundred boys and a hundred girls of twelve years of age had been selected after the preliminary evaluations at the Peacekeeper Academies to train for the Hunger Games, and they would be slowly weeded out until one from each gender remained.

"You know the ironic thing?" Katz asked. "More people voluntarily quit the Games Academy than the Peacekeeper one. As soon as that year's 'harvest' turned eighteen, more than half of them would suddenly discover an intense desire to serve Panem in a different way."

"Why?" Donna asked. As far as she had seen, the Tributes from Two, as well as One and Four, had all been brainwashed to the point where they were willing to consider killing other children with their bare hands as their duty. At the trial, mention had been made of the younger trainees' frequent reluctance, but the impression she had gotten was quite different. She said that much to Katz, picking her words carefully to not offend her.

"Not quite," Li said, shaking his head. He looked solemn, almost sorrowful. "Almost nobody wanted to actually go to the Games. No matter how much the boys and girls were kept apart in the Games Academy, everyone still knew everyone, and the thought of you or one of them was horrific, and in any case, anyone with a brain could calculate the odds of survival. Only a tiny handful were willing to go all the way. Stonesmith once told me she made it all the way to eighteen, but the final kill test was too much for her. She couldn't kill a twelve-year-old child, even a convicted saboteur." Donna struggled to imagine a twelve-year-old committing sabotage. She had thought during the trial that now she knew all the atrocities of the Games regime, but she still learned increasingly horrible things every day. "Of course, she didn't say that, that would have gotten her dishonourably discharged. Instead, she said something about preferring a lifetime of service to a week of sacrifice. Ironic, isn't it?" Li asked, wiping at his face. "Stonesmith, refusing to kill a child? But she was just a child herself, then."

"We all were," Katz said, staring off into space. "I knew a few people who used the same phrasing to transfer to our Academy. It was the one thing the Capitol didn't kick up a fuss over. They wanted only the most ruthless and one hundred percent dedicated. If someone wasn't willing to give up their life right now this instant, don't force them." Her voice took on a caustic tone. "Would have ruined their Games, wouldn't it have? If a tribute from Two was anything but death on two legs. Everyone knew that entire spiel about the most honourable sacrifice was total bullshit. It was the entire District performing a sacrifice, taking an eighteen-year-old brainwashed killer and sending them in in place of a twelve-year-old to kill other twelve-year-olds. But hey, at least lower-class children in Two could take out as many tesserae as they wanted without worrying about the Reapings!" Katz was practically shouting by now, and the guard, who had walked halfway across the corridor to better hear the conversation, was staring at her open-mouthed.

"Female Seven?" the guard from Eleven asked softly. Katz turned around, taking off her cap and snapping to attention. "At ease." Katz adopted a slightly more relaxed stance. "I lost a friend of mine in the Seventieth Games. The boy from Two killed her. I don't blame him, though, or your District, not anymore. The decision was the best one you could have made under the circumstances, and I am only angry at the country's leaders of those years that my District wasn't allowed to make a similar one." Katz looked like she didn't know how to react. Donna hoped that the reference to the country's leaders wasn't supposed to be an insult to her.

It was always difficult when the former Peacekeepers talked about the Games. All of them except Best had been raised in Two (though a few suspected they had been kidnapped from outer District Community Homes at very young ages) and thus had a District opinion on the Games, which made Donna feel very uncomfortable about her role in them. She had never directly influenced the Games in any way, shape, or form, but she had still worked to make them a reality. Did Katz and the rest of them hate her for that? The idea of anyone holding a secret grudge in the Supermax's tiny collective seemed absurd, but then again, the others were being friendly with Li, as if they did not talk about him in withering terms on the rare occasions when he was definitely out of earshot.

A silence ensued, and everyone turned back to their painting. Donna collapsed the paint roller handle and crouched down to paint the very bottom of the wall as Theodosius braced his knees against the top of the ladder, both hands holding the roller. Strata tore off a piece of paper to wipe off her shoe, but when the guard's attention was focused wholly on her crossword, she put it in her pocket. Was it for writing or for another of the former Peacekeepers? One way or another, Donna would probably find out at some point. She turned back to the wall, shifting over half a step and extending the paint roller handle.

The two groups finished painting at the exact same time, which made sense given how much they had tried to work at the same rate for that last metre. The stripe of old paint in the middle shrank steadily until it was narrow enough to be painted with one sweep. Vartha swept his roller up and down the wall, making the entire thing a uniform grey.

"We're done," he said.

"So are we," said Katz from the other side. The eight turned towards the guard, waiting for her to tell them what to do next.

"Carry everything to the second floor," the guard said, "and report to your gym."

Donna volunteered to do the washing as usual, as dealing with the paper would have been too frustrating. The guard would be watching, making it impossible to sneak some. She gathered the rollers, taking off the painting surface and cringing at the feel of cold paint under her fingers. They went into a bucket she picked up with one hand, and half of the handles went under one arm. Theodosius took the other half, as well as a can of paint. The other cans and buckets were spread out evenly, Li looking almost disappointed at the two measly cans he was carrying.

On the second floor, Donna dumped the rollers into the sink and turned on the water, which was, of course, freezing at the beginning and slowly turned to scalding hot. She and Theodosius squeezed the rollers, watching diluted paint pour out from between their fingers for the last time.

"Satisfying, isn't it?" she asked.

In response, Theodosius held a roller under the steaming water, one end awkwardly clutched in his hand and one - under the stream, watching the water go from dark grey to light grey to transparent.

Donna picked up a bar of soap and rubbed it on a roller, feeling the soft material become slippery. It remained slightly tinged with grey, though, no matter how hard she tried. She rinsed the roller and placed it on a shelf beside her, and picked up another one, which had been partially cleaned by the water in the sink already.

Carefully adjusting the tap, Theodosius managed to make the water downright cool. "Nice job," Donna said, shoving her hands under the stream. "Much easier this way."

The buckets were much easier to clean. They simply poured out the unused paint, peeled off the bit at the top that had dried, and easily washed off the rest with a hose. As they struggled to adjust the water pressure, Kremser came in, followed shortly afterward by Verdant.

"You're done, too?" the former Gamemaker assistant asked, dumping another bucketful of paint rollers into the sink. Her hands were almost completely grey, and paint had also stained the sides of her cap and face, temporarily adding some colour back to her snow-white hair.

Donna laid out the rollers in an orderly row in the sink. "We're just finishing up the washing," she said. "You can have the sink, we're cleaning the buckets now." Verdant decided not to try to cram himself into the tiny closet, preferring instead to hover outside. He was leaning just the slightest bit on the paint roller handles in his left hand.

"We're done with that, then," he said. "It's back to the blankets, now." He sounded disappointed.

"And the sweaters," Donna said as she rinsed off her hands.

Theodosius noticed the way Verdant was standing. "Is your leg alright?" he asked.

"Perfectly fine," Verdant replied icily, blue eyes flashing. The other three eyed him sceptically. "Same as always," he amended after a moment's pause. "Too much standing, probably."

Kremser looked around the closet. "You could sit down on a bucket, maybe?" she said as she pointed to an upside-down bucket. Verdant continued to look icily at her. Donna was fairly sure that if he tried to sit on that upside-down bucket, he'd need help to get back up, paint roller handles or no roller handles.

"No thank you, Mrs. Kremser," he said. "I'll just go back down." He handed the paint roller handles to her and limped down the corridor towards the two guards standing at the locked cell block gate. The administration had given up very quickly on giving them an impossibly short amount of time in which to go from floor to floor, instead posting guards at each stairway landing.

Not bothering to look for a cloth, Donna dried her hands on her shirt. "Will you be alright cleaning the rest of this on your own?" she asked.

"Of course," Kremser said. "You go ahead." Donna and Theodosius nodded to her in farewell and stepped into the corridor, where eight inmates were still painting. They only had less than a metre's width of wall left, so it was looking like they, too, would be finished today.

At the gate, one of the guards unlocked it for them. They went down the stairs, passing two more guards who started and took earbuds out of their ears. As Donna walked past them, she could hear very faint music.

"Wouldn't it be nice to hear music again?" she asked Theodosius wistfully. "As long as it wasn't blasted at six in the morning." Every so often, the most experienced guards must have felt nostalgic for their days guarding in jail, as they would turn on extremely strange music at odd hours.

"You forgot Smith's singing," Theodosius pointed out.

"No, I blocked it out from memory," Donna answered in a deadpan voice.

Carefully sticking the yarn needle in, Donna wove in the ends of her sweater. She tried to use the small length of yarn to cover up the small but noticeable gaps at the places where the sleeves were sewn on, to no avail. It just made the gaps bigger. Donna snipped off a section of the yarn with a pair of extremely dull scissors and laid out the shoulder of the sweater in her hand.

Not too bad. Definitely her best attempt so far. Donna stood up and approached the warden, who was crocheting a flower out of yarn thinner than Donna had thought possible. The man from Eight didn't notice her, so she had to stand there for a while, cap in one hand and crochet things in another, until another guard pointed her out to him.

"Oh, sorry, Female Nine," he said, putting down his project. "Are you done?" Donna nodded. "Hand it over." Donna gave him the scissors, which went into a case, the yarn trimmings, which went into a large paper bag, and the sweater, which he studied intensely.

"Better. Make your next one in the same size." With that, he put the sweater on the bench next to him and went back to his flower. His hook looked impossibly tiny in his large hands. How did he even see where the stitches were? The thread was so fine, it was almost invisible from Donna's vantage point. He looked up again, confused to see her still there. "Are you looking at my flower?" he asked, holding it up. It was almost impossibly delicate, with multicoloured petals whose colours looked like they had been painted on.

"It's beautiful," Donna sighed, studying the tiny crochet piece. So small, and yet so detailed. "Are you making jewelry?" she asked.

The warden shrugged. "I just wanted to make something beautiful," he said, staring at the flower. Donna nodded and hurried back to her bench.

"What was that?" Theodosius asked. "He was holding something up."

"He's making a really tiny flower," she explained. "The hook looks more like a needle than an actual hook, and the yarn looks more like sewing thread."

"Embroidery floss," Li corrected her. "He's probably using embroidery floss." He sighed wistfully, looking at the warden. "You can make the tiniest things out of it, it's very fun. Challenging, of course, but very, very rewarding."

"That sounds difficult," Stein said.

Li launched into a monologue about micro-crochet as Donna started to make the starting chain for her next sweater. She counted out loud in a whisper, not letting herself focus on the words being said around her. Losing track and needing to re-count was terrible. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two...forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty. That was the first panel started. Donna chained one and made the turning stitch. Now, the actual crocheting could begin. She tuned back into the conversation around her.

"So do you think the verdicts will be harsh or not?" Katz asked. How had they managed to go from crochet to the District Affairs trial in this short span of time? "You haven't even said what you think."

"I don't know," Theodosius said, sounding exhausted. "Look, I know some of these people. I worked with them. I don't want to think about them possibly being executed next week, and I don't want to get my hopes up, either." The verdicts were being read at that moment, and the sentences would be passed the next day. Donna wondered if any of them would get any sleep that night.

"You should have said so earlier," Katz said. "Now I feel bad for pressuring you. I don't know how I managed to forget you were one of them. You too," she said, noticing Donna was looking up at her. "At least we'll find out if anyone's being acquitted today."

"I doubt that," Donna said. "I think they'll just dump it all on us tomorrow evening."

Stein disagreed. "I'm sure someone will tell us something."

Donna, unfortunately, ended up being right. It was evening the very next day, in the dinner queue, when the inmates were able to finally find out anything. One of the guards read the sentences from her communicuff as the thirty-one women crowded around, anxious to hear the results even if they had never heard any of the names before the trial had begun.

Four were acquitted, twelve - given prison terms from one and a half to twenty years, seven - life imprisonment, and two - death by the rope. Donna had never worked with either of the ones now slated to die, but it still felt strange. In a week or so, they would stop breathing. For some reason, Donna felt as if she had dodged a bullet. The guard added that one of the prison terms was rumoured to be caused by some sort of mitigating circumstances and that the now-convict's continued existence was controversial.

Back in her cell, Donna ate her oatmeal with canned fruits and drank her tepid tea as she tried to work out what she was feeling. She struggled to focus on her reading that evening, but forced herself to keep it up, reluctant to draw any kind of attention by changing her routine. As soon as she could, she went for her book of number puzzles and took out one of the pieces of paper. It was stained with paint, but now that it was dry, it could be written on.

Dr. Chu was certainly going to ask about this next session, so Donna tried to come up with the answers now. Was she envious of the acquitted? Absolutely. Anxious because the capital punishment announced reminded her of expecting to receive the same? That much was also obvious. Anxious because of the mention of mitigating circumstances? Probably. Dr. Fischer had told her to deny all accusations and emphasize that she had always sought to treat the workers under her command well, and Donna had followed that instruction partially.

But why was she anxious, then? Then and now, the court had taken into consideration mitigating circumstances. Nothing strange or unpredictable about that, though back then, she had still expected death. Maybe that was it, then. Maybe it also brought her back to those days when she had resigned herself to the end.

Realizing that didn't make the anxiety go away, but that was what the extra-difficult sudokus were for. Donna hid her diary entry, already looking forward to Dr. Chu's visit. Hopefully the psychologist would be happy to not have to explain everything. As Donna penned in tiny numbers in the corners, she continued to contemplate the topic. A shame none of them would be joining her in the Supermax. Some new faces among the inmates would be nice. Being deprived of even that was probably the thing that worried Donna the most about the dissolution of the IDC.