Morning on Reaping Day.
Zachary hears Milah cuss all the time, considering the motivation is often Zachary-based. He's heard her scream too. There's no question that the Games beat her with the nightmare stick harder than most. That's why she's got her night-light package of morphling on standby in the bedside drawer; if he were in any position to judge, he'd have bullied her stubborn ass into rehab years ago, but all he does is shove his own package high in the closet, and somewhere along the line that started feeling like a sad couple of points scored in a sad junkie game. He knows her laughs from dry to acerbic to sweet. The ways she talks to their mentor, or to her family, or to the publicity vultures. He's intimate with the host of her fears. He's only been out a year longer. The point is that, like an older brother, he might have his problems with the goddamn playgirl, but he reckons it's on him anyway to come when she calls him.
And she does it, the morning of Reaping Day. Calls him. Zachary's already pieced his suit together. Started working on hot cereal and cinnamon. He spoons a resilient, snot-looking wad out of it, forehead creasing. What? It's springy between his teeth. What the hell.
The home line starts to ring on the wall, but he's treading over to the sink, wad hanging from his tongue. He drowns it with a gush of tapwater, pinching the thing out of his mouth and rinsing heavily. Rolls it around and spits twice. The taste is coming in belatedly, a sour, infected-tonsil reek, and he gags and he spits again. The thing is pinkish. Grayish. It has to be organic. Holy mother of Snow. How diligently, he's wondering, do they clean out the processing units when they're steel-cutting their oats? And hey, factory foreman of my heart — is there any little, tiny chance that you would have missed the better part of a mouse inside one of your vats?
The aftertaste is far more putrid with the idea. Zachary floods the sink again and rinses, gurgles, spews. The phone rings its way out, but in a second, it's started again. Have your way at it, my man, Zachary thinks, halfway imprinting his idea of the negligent foreman onto the incessant machine. He transfers the fleshy bit with exact delicacy into a paper napkin, and ties it one-handed into a neat burial shroud. Aims, then sinks it in the wastecan. Have your way at it. Zach Still just chowed raw mouse for Reaping breakfast. He will be meeting his newest dead kid today. Just for the appearance of things, he'll be playing grab-purse with sponsors who don't want shit or Shinola to do with him. Coincidentally, he will be setting to the coordination of a multi-district mentor rebellion, with a passel of bona-fide rebels who would have much preferred to be dealing with the old bastard Lorne. He will be taking the next step to enlist a Capitolite who has buried theirself so far underground that Lorne and Pascale combined couldn't dig them up for four decades. So, please! Bring a little more chaos on by, and make his day complete. Why not? If this is a prank call, you are right on your mark today, my good brother. Zachary thinks he would laugh hysterically for at least five minutes before he went into shock, perhaps permanently.
Mr. Still, is your refrigerator running?
The stress he's under. The stress. Has he slept since the weekend? Mind goes light years a minute. Has to. Everything is coming together this year. Because it had to be early.
He could go so keenly for the morphling right now. For clear, rushing sensation to swallow him, muffling his pulse to a cool 30 bpm. To snatch some rest on the train, he could get away with it, probably. But he supposes he'll have to get through the damned ceremonies first.
Phone rings out, then begins again, right on cue. After drying his hands on the inside of his foul baby blue jacket, he picks it off the holder and brings it to his ear.
"Still speaking, Still alive."
Milah. He knows it's Milah before she has to say anything. It's the way the breath torsions out of her nose, like she is strangling in the middle of a Capitol ballroom and can't reveal a word about it.
"Milah." His voice drops to sane registers. "Millsie. Am I hitting your place or are you hitting mine?"
"Lorne." Her breath jutters again, high and caged. Zachary realizes, readily, that this is a new kind of screaming. He knows all her other ones. And this is one, except she is controlling herself enough that it isn't any louder than a prey animal when it tries to chew itself out of a trap. And Milah Ryenhardt is a steely-eyed rebel diehard who hung onto more humanity than anyone would have the nerve to expect out of the second Quell Victor. The point is that a cold, gruesome feeling starts to spill down Zachary's spine when he hears her. It means this is worse than a little more chaos in his cereal bowl.
"Lorne's, okay. He's all — he's up? You talk to him already? Let's hit it."
"There's no use." She stops him with one shoe on, distractedly flattening his dark hair, with the phone nearly a forgotten thing between his shoulder and ear. "You don't need to get out."
"Millsie, I love the radio-drama we've got going here, but I feel like I'm getting mixed signals."
"He's gone. The old man's gone." Milah barks a dry, impatient sob. He can practically see her gritting her teeth and waiting out the current until she can speak again. "He picked up and left us here."
"Then he left last night. We talked to him at six. His lights went out after eleven, but he could've had them on a circuit." Zachary's mouth runs automatically before he catches up to it. Tastes pasty. Full of iron. Although he doesn't remember any blood in the mouse. "What are you saying? What?"
"He's 'done as much as he knew he could do.' He 'trusted we'd take it the rest of the way.' That's his note. Just because he doesn't have anyone but us — he's finally safe to make a run for Thirteen, but your parents, my whole family, and Lupin, and he doesn't give a — even if we can't manage to cover for this, it never mattered to him. He knows we still have to go through. He stuck the target on us. Because everything rides on this year. Except him. He couldn't hold on for the kickoff of his own fucking revolution."
Zachary is blank. One of his feet is cold on the linoleum, and the tip of his nose is freezing, even though the forecasts promised it'd be a near-scorcher to ring in the Reapings by noon. "What did you do with the note?" he asks, because nothing else is solid enough for him to understand.
Milah laughs, and then bursts into tears. Real gushing, relieving tears. The speaker of the phone shudders in Zachary's ear. "I ate it. Asshole. I didn't know what else to do."
"Good on ya, keed," he says, the mechanisms of his brain just beginning to grind again. They're letting off smoke, but they're moving. Sure. Not as fast as the old man must've packed out of the mansion and all the way to the train station out of their lives, but they're moving. He is grateful that he held off on the morphling. "It's not just going to be him, is it? Probably set it up years ago. I want to bet it'll be a few of the old guard."
"Then one of them'll be Pascale. She always wanted to go hands-off when the year came. 'I'm a strategist, not a grunt with a shock baton.'"
"Decrepit bitch," Zachary says comfortably. His pulse is dipping back to something like survivable levels. "If we catch up to her, she's getting a good taste of my shock baton."
"Dentures in or out?" Milah snorts. The sound of cloth roughly mopping up phlegm rustles through the receiver. Zachary pretends not to notice anything until she gets back on. "So...short-term plans. Short-term. Today. How do we handle this today?"
He's started drifting, though only for a moment. What if this had been a wrong number? What if Lorne was still in the mansion, ready to see off his Victors for the beginning of the end, like they'd planned together for ten years? What if he'd had the stones to put himself even close to the position where the kids were putting themselves? For Snow's sake, Easton Watts is all of nineteen, and the little nerd is as radicalized as his Grandmumma Pascale. And he'd bet ten k on the low end that Grandmumma is on the fritz too, leaving the nerd in the hot seat. What if it had only been a prank call in the end?
Is your refrigerator running? You'd better catch it, Mr. Still!
Lowers his head. Shivers.
"How do we handle this?" Milah is saying. "How do we even pretend to have missed Lorne out the gate? We're always with him. If we don't convince them of that, there's every chance they go straight for our families."
Zachary cocks an ear. The seniors haven't stirred yet, but with dawn crawling through the shades, the farming instincts will kick in for them soon. As if they haven't spent the last decade enjoying pre-processed foods and a house with over two rooms. And, hell, all they have to put up with is a media-hogging murderer son with a million useless magic tricks and a box full of very special non-prescribed sleep medicine.
"Millsie, baby," he says slowly, tapping the mouthpiece against his cheek. "How's your thoughts on taking a glorious dive off the wagon this morning?"
Their escort, Xavius, has to hold Milah up with his whole arm around her waist, which leaves her bitter breath intercepting his face and her cold, clammy cheek bouncing off his shoulder when he moves. She would feel so bad for him, except everything feels so lusciously good right now. She is smiling like a moron into the closest camera. Laughter bubbling, for no reason. Holy...crow. The children look terrified of Zachary and her.
She gives the boy a thumbs up. You go, Heath-eighteen-years-old. You go and gettem, tiger.
The mayor trips over the word 'sacrifice' in his closing speech. She snorts, then giggles. It seems to set Zachary off on the other side. A wheezing intake of breath, and a yawn. The comedowns from this will be so bad. So bad. They're pros at morphling, to say the least. They could write the books on it. To be convincing, like they were out of it, the no, Mr. Peacekeeper, I didn't even think about Lorne until after we left the stage, and what do you mean he's not home kind of out of it, they shot up enough to probably kill a litter of small animals each.
Essentially, it couldn't just be the Capitolites that believed it. Zachary and Milah would nearly have to believe it themselves.
She is willing to believe anything right now, swimming through the not-quite-scorcher of a gorgeous Nine sky. She can remember the matters of extreme Panem-shaking importance through a filter, like a frosted glass panel, but they feel too abstract to worry about from here. Lorne left them. He disappeared when he was supposed to be there for them. And that's true, and she can say it if they question her. She doesn't know where he is. Also true. Could've been held up in some podunk district station hours ago. Dragged to the Capitol. Ripped into tiny pieces by sniffer mutts. If that is the case, she and Zachary will be finding out faster than they can sober up.
So that part of the plan is covered, kind of. Except it leaves them swaying in cold sweats on stage, giggling at the impassive crowd of their district, and at the children — the terrified, helpless children. That makes Milah feel kind of horrible. The high has to take its time on that part. It warms her shoulders and back, strokes her untidy auburn hair, rocks her like a cradle of the perfect silken bathwater. The high is one of her most consistent companions: an ever-lingering loose-limbed animal at her side, on her nightstand. It grows and it purrs with hunger, and all it needs is for her to take the needle or the pill again, to invite it into her blood. To feed it. It's easy as long as it never goes hungry too long.
She hasn't let that happen in a while. The shape it takes when it grows is dark and vile, and it scratches on the inside of her skin. The high lives with Zachary too, although she doesn't think it's as persuasive for him. He always had more of a control complex.
Under the clouded sun, her head dips, and the stage swirls with ribbons beneath her. Ribbons! What will they think of next? Her fingers make soft grabbing motions at them. A little drop of saliva descends from her parted lips and lands below, what must be thirty feet away, because it's tiny down there. So tiny.
Zachary's girl, Marla-fourteen-years-old, is trying not to cry. Heath is shuffling his feet, red-faced, looking in any direction other than Milah.
Yeah, you and me both, kid.
By the time they make it to the train (are forcefully guided by Xavius, really), Zachary is humming some song, one of those old nursery tunes, maddeningly familiar. Something about a mouse? His hands swirl around like tick-tocks. He swipes a tissue out of an ornate paper box. "I could pull ten of these out of your pocket, Xav. It's an old trick. Learned it from a book."
"I'd rather you didn't," Xavius says, steering both shaky-legged mentors toward the couch like kittens. He brings each of them water, and plants himself on the ottoman in front to watch them drink it. Milah thinks this is a bit much until she has a coughing fit around her tongue and has to be slammed on the back.
"What would we do without you, Xavius?" she says hoarsely, kneading his hand.
He extracts it with high grace for a man of his size. He doesn't look pissed at them. Just disappointed. It's worse. He's really not bad for an outer-district escort. Most of them are worse cutthroats than you'd find on a stock-trading floor. "Fall prone on the Reaping stage and knock Nine's odds to the bottom rung more expeditiously, I suppose. I'd lined up a night on the cocktail circuit for you. By the way the chatter's flowing in those circles, I'll be ripping that one out of the book. Maybe a round in one of the harder partying hotspots, though Snow knows they don't turn up much coin."
"I'm sorry." She presses her cottony eyeballs down with her palms. The water's left her lips and tongue feeling even drier, which completely isn't fair.
"Could you crack the screen on?" Zachary says, both hands nested in his hair. "Feel like I want to scope out the Reapings. Get a sense of where we're sitting."
And spot out whichever mentors are playing hooky. Milah feels her mind sharpen minutely. The purpose of the plan this year is unpleasant to think about, and it takes effort for the high to let it puncture her protective barricade. But it has to come through. "A few minutes before they send our kids in won't hurt."
"Not quite yet, Miss Ryenhardt." I'm a Mrs., she thinks, off-balance, but then remembers: Lupin. Ah. Not everything holds together. Xavius bustles over to the kitchen area. The sounds and heavy scents of coffee brewing float back to her. Zachary seems to have reverted to an energy-saving mode, or simply passed out, his olive throat craned back across the couch. "You will be sobering as best you can, and when the children are brought in, you will do your utmost to conduct yourself rationally and helpfully. The first day is a critical period in establishing the mentor-tribute bond. When the connection is one of distrust, polling indicates a plummet in survival standards."
"We didn't just do this for kicks," she says, angry red sparks weakly fizzling on the insides of her eyelids. Her throat is parched. "We're junkies. 'S how it goes. There's thousands of people on the cocktail circuit who're the same thing. Just different poisons."
"It doesn't change the fact that you are ravingly high."
"And you're manic-obsessive, except tomorrow morning, I'll be sober," she cracks. The red sparks detonate like pop rocks under her skin. She scrubs at her arms, trying to flush the itching out. Mumbles a curse. The cool sweat settled on her chest and forehead is starting to feel sub-zero in this air conditioning.
"Usually Lorne seems to be able to buckle you two down." Xavius brings her an enameled mug of black coffee that punctures the crust in her sinuses pretty handily. "I have to assume that his absence today was a mystery to you."
"Oh, don't get me started." Milah kisses his smooth cheek, eyes watering over the first hit of boiling caffeine. "I hate the old man sometimes. It's not that he even likes us, either. He sees us as- as jigsaw pieces in the whole picture of Panem that he thinks he has to solve."
"I wouldn't have the slightest idea of what that's like," he says gravely, making subtle fluttering motions with his fingertips from on high. A fall of Snow.
"Xav, you can't say that. That's practically sedition." Milah snickers, risking another sip on her burned tongue. She knocks on Zachary's shoulder. Best if he manages to chug something down before the kids finish their goodbyes. "Jackass, wake up. We've got a schedule to get on."
Yeah. Don't they just.
I am alive (theoretically speaking) and writing, in genuine fact. Please stay tuned. I love you and hope you are safe.