I'm so clever I wrote this two days ago so I could publish today even though I just woke up at 1:30pm after having gotten back from work at 5:00 am and will go back to work in two and a half hours.

Walcott Patel- District Three female (16)

There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in philosophy. Three is all about science but there are things science hasn't explained. Spring-heeled Jack, for one. Some guy came out of nowhere and multiple people saw him jumping over buildings in reports spanning across a nation and over forty years. Some people chalk it up to mass hysteria or attention-seekers. But is it really that much harder to believe than a duck-billed platypus? If a mammal can lay eggs, look like a beaver and a duck hastily spliced together, and have poison sacs hidden behind its flippers, things like vampires sound a lot more believable.

It wouldn't be the first time a humanoid species was discovered after years of skepticism. Scientists snottily looked down on natives telling tales of orange monkey-men who lived in the jungle. "Primitive superstitions", they said, patting themselves on the back about how much smarter they were than the silly natives. Then the first colonizer saw an orangutan for himself and suddenly it wasn't superstitious at all. Orangutans weren't even trying to hide. How much easier would it be for an entity that looked just like a human and was intelligent enough to know to conceal itself?

But they weren't always hidden. My father saw a vampire's marks for himself. Everyone in Three knows about Shinju Matsushita- no one more than the families she left grieving. Natalie Huawei was killed by a vampire and it was my father, her boyfriend, who found the body. What do you do when your entire reality is shattered and rewritten in front of you? It isn't something you can come back from to see that the supernatural isn't separated from you by bounds of fiction and nonfiction. My father was never the same. After years of living isolated from a humanity he could no longer hope to communicate with he found the only person who could: Alexa Kim, a woman raised in the same orphanage as the monster. My mother.

No one in my family had encountered a vampire since then, but we were ready. We were always ready. Every night we trained to recognize the enemy and react if they recognized us. It was a delicate line between being prepared and tipping them off that we knew they existed. And there was so little to go on. Everything in the books and movies was just hearsay. Every incarnation followed different rules and had a different description. The only things we knew for sure were from Shinju. She was how we knew vampires did have reflections, could walk in the sunlight, and were mortal. More mortal than anyone knew, in fact. A stake for sure did the job but it seemed like crushing the throat was just as deadly. Assuming all vampires were the same, which we also didn't know. Better to err on the side of the majority.

A lot of people think they're quirky for liking true crime. Everyone likes true crime. People think it's unique to have a morbid streak but all humans are fascinated by death. It's the last mystery and the greatest adventure and all that. It's the only thing we can't know and humans love knowing things. But when I bent over the articles and accounts strewn on my desks I wasn't just indulging my macabre side. I was looking for leads- looking for murders or assaults that could have been our enemy. There was so much precedent. Two hundred years ago a woman was cut in half and found with not a single drop of blood in her body. At that point denying it doesn't make you a "skeptic". It makes you willfully blind. So many cases of bodies found and never even identified, murders with no leads and not a single suspect, people who had angered no one and whose murders left only confusion and unanswered questions. Some of them were just the displaced, the forgotten, or the adrift. Some of them ran afoul of a drug deal or a serial killer who saw an opportunity and took it. And some of them weren't victims but prey.

Ezra Aaryn- District Three male (17)

There weren't many pretty things in the Districts. The outlying Districts like Nine to Twelve had prettier countryside but the people there couldn't enjoy it because they were always working and always near starvation. The inner Districts were a little richer but everything here was covered in smog and the depressing grunge of a sprawling city. Capitol tourists came to see our neon lights and our technology expos but if they stayed too long the veneer wore off and they saw the city for the soulless place it was. But I guess Capitolites are soulless too, since they're the ones that made the Games.

Anyway, it was sad and exciting all at once that the Reaping was the prettiest time of the year. Capitolites poured in to gawk and experience it up close. It was always an experience to see their colorful clothes and hear their funny accents that made them all sound like wind-up china dolls. And our new escort, Aoelde Bangle, was lovely too. It was like seeing a strange and wonderful creature from another world. She had one blue eye and one pink eye and favored mosaic dresses made with stained glass fabric that caught the light and bent it in rainbows. And she had ivory-ashy skin almost like most people in Three, which made her very popular with us. It was like any one of us could be a Capitolite.

There were so many people in Three that the chances of getting Reaped were statistically significant. It was also frowned upon to show extreme emotion, so most of our Reapings were quieter and more subdued than the other Districts. The boys around me and I just watched silently, our faces tight and blank, as Aoede picked a name.

Her emerald green lips, blown up on the big screen behind her so I could see every movement, formed around the words. "Ezra Aaryn!"

One.

Two.

Three.

I did it without even thinking. Back when I was just a little kid my parents used to tell me to think before I acted. They always said I had to count to three before I got mad or yelled or anything. A lot of the time just thinking about the numbers was enough to put things back into perspective. But not this time. Getting Reaped took a lot more than a count to three.

I didn't look scared when I was walking to the stage. I saw myself walking on that big screen and stumbled a little when seeing myself moving messed up the rhythm of my steps. I smiled at the crowd like it didn't mean anything and some of the people in the crowd smiled back like they believed me.

We're supposed to be all about thinking in Three. I wouldn't call what I was doing on the stage really thinking. It was fleeting impressions and images more than composed thoughts. I kept seeing my sisters' faces and acknowledging the void in my head where there should have been some idea of what they would do without me. The past few moments bounced around in my head, trying to be thought about but finding I didn't have the capacity to do so. I heard the applause after Aoede renounced me and Walcott. Standing on the stage I could hear the loudspeakers behind me, the air blasting my back and the stage vibrating under me with its force. I hadn't known that most of the applause was artificial. It made sense, though. All of the Capitol was artificial. The only thing real about any of this was the death of Districters.

Walcott: half Korean, a quarter Mexican and a quarter Indian. She has pale brown skin, dark brown eyes and wavy, black hair. She has dark circles under her eyes from anaemia. She likes to keep her hair tied back because it's more practical. She's petite but athletic, a lot like a gymnast.

Ezra: dark short hair that was always seems to be messy. Big amber eyes that have a sort of curiosity about them and dark skin. He has freckles. He's pretty tall (6'3") and has blocky shoulders. He's pretty naturaly muscular