Paylor was in her private quarters preparing for bed, her heart heavy. Even now she wasn't convinced she was doing the right thing, though there hadn't been demonstrations against the games as she feared. Maybe she'd feel better about the games after a decent night's sleep, though like so many people her slumber was often interrupted by nightmares. And now she was passing those on to yet another generation.. As she turned towards her bed she let out a small gasp, automatically reaching for a weapon which of course she wasn't carrying.

"What do you want?" Foolish to ask such a question, but it gave her a split second to grab the first thing she could reach from her dresser. Now she was holding a hairbrush defensively in front of her, but already she sensed something was off about this encounter. The intruder was holding up a handwritten sign

Don't be frightened. I won't harm you, I just want you to read my letter. Please.

Paylor was unconvinced, but while the intruder - a woman probably a little older than herself - was holding a sign, she wasn't about to attack her.

"How did you get in here?"

There was a pause. The woman shook her head uncertainly, letting go of the sign with one hand to gesture to her face - no, her mouth. Paylor was confused, but then something clicked.

"You're an Avox?"

The woman nodded.

"Are you alone?"

Another nod.

Paylor couldn't say why, but she believed the woman. Something in her stance, the look in her eyes perhaps? With her back to the dresser, she gestured with the hairbrush.

"You said you've got a letter for me. Put it on the floor in front of me and then step back, please."

The woman hesitated for the barest moment before putting her sign down beside her then tentatively stepping forward and doing as she was told, then backing up and sitting down cross-legged in the corner. Paylor didn't take her eyes off the woman as she picked up the thick sheaf of paper, but when she didn't move, she sat down on the stool by her dresser and began to read.

Dear President Paylor,

Please let me begin by apologising for appearing in your bedroom like this. I pretended to work here and broke in earlier this evening. Nobody helped me, and nobody know I'm here, so if you want to throw me in prison, that's your choice. But I would be very grateful if you can spare the time to read this letter, as it concerns my daughter and our role in your forthcoming games.

Paylor looked up sharply. The woman nodded for her to continue.

I was born in District Seven thirty eight years ago. My life was fairly normal I believe - I had two brothers and a cousin and we all lived with my parents. Of course my parents were lumberjacks; I grew up knowing that would also be my lot in life, and I didn't question it. My oldest brother joined them when he was twelve, working longer hours each year, then my cousin, then my younger brother. I was the youngest and so I was left on my own a lot of the time, preparing meals when I got home from school, longing for the day I would be able to work in the forest myself.

Everything was normal, and it was entirely through my own stupidity that things changed. I was fifteen years old when I started dating a boy - I'm not going to mention his name because I've reconciled my past to where it belongs - and he encouraged me to...no, I promised I would be completely honest. He and his friends stole things, and I followed them blindly. It was fun, and we never took anything important, we told ourselves. A potato here, a bread roll there. Someone's pencil. A handkerchief. It went on for two years. None of us were ever caught and we thought we were invincible.

Until the day I was caught, red-handed I believe the Capitol expression is, with my hand in the cake shop till. I'd asked the woman who worked there for one of the cakes out of the window, reached over the counter and was snatching a handful of credits from the till when a peacekeeper walked in. Completely by accident, but he wasn't about to pretend he was off duty. He grabbed me by the neck and dragged me straight to the justice building. It was there that I discovered we hadn't been so clever after all. The peacekeepers knew there was a gang of thieves working our area of the district, they just hadn't been able to catch us. Now they had me, they expected I would give up the names of my friends but of course I refused. They slapped me, threatened me with violence and worse, and all I said was "You can't make me talk". They threatened me with whipping, and I was terrified, but I insisted "You can't make me talk". They threatened me with hanging, and I told them that if they did that I'd never talk again.

I think that was what gave them the idea. They put out the word that they'd caught me not stealing, but spreading dissent against the Capitol - a treasonous offence. I suppose they figured that if I was so keen on never talking again, they'd make sure that was what happened.

Do you know how they make an Avox, President Paylor? What they do - what they used to do - to prevent us from ever speaking again? No, neither do I. The peacekeepers didn't let me say goodbye to my family - I don't know what story they told, because my mother would have broken the entire justice building down if she'd known I was there - just dragged me onto the train that same night. They put me in a bare truck with no light or heating. When I got to the Capitol I was a sobbing, terrified mess. I'd pissed myself on the train and I stank. I think the Doctor who did it must have taken pity on me, assumed I was even younger than I was, because I remember him saying "sedate this one. No, put her right out" before something was shot into my arm.

I woke up voiceless, nameless and entirely at the mercy of the Capitol. For the first six months I was put to work cleaning toilets at one of the largest banqueting halls in Panem. Can you imagine what one of those places looked like after a Capitol feast, after all the fine gentlemen and ladies had vomited their fill three or four times, President Paylor? I didn't need to imagine it. My tears were silent, but no less real for that. I worked fourteen hours a day, sometimes more if the work wasn't finished. I ate whatever scraps I was allowed. Sometimes they forgot to feed me at all. I had almost no human contact - I forgot what a friendly voice sounded like.

Then I was bought. A man, somewhere in his late thirties, wearing too much makeup and with startling puce eyebrows took me home to be his house slave. You can imagine what that meant, though at first it was even worse, because his wife didn't approve of me at all. He used me in whatever way he felt the need for, and when he was finished, she took her anger and jealousy out on me. He told her not to be upset, because at least she knew where he was now. And yet - and this is a mark of how low I'd sunk - I felt my situation was slightly better, because there were only two toilets to clean here and I was allowed to eat whatever food they left, which was a substantial amount. I began to put on the weight I'd lost during my months at the banqueting hall, and slowly my new life became normal. I lost track of time, counting the years by the televised games. Fifty seventh, fifth eighth, fifty ninth...

My owner was a gamemaker. Not one of those who actually worked on the front line, creating the mutts and forcing the tributes together, but as a designer. He worked on the arenas, so he was away from home for weeks at a time. I actually enjoyed those times, because his wife had got used to me by now; we'd got used to each other. I'd learned to cook her favourite foods, how to do a perfect pedicure, how she liked her hair combed in the mornings. Sometimes she used me physically as well now, and when she asked me if I liked it I remembered to smile and look grateful and then she'd let me sleep on her bedroom floor instead of in the kitchen.

They wanted children, but she wasn't able to conceive. The Capitol doctors said something inside her was missing...I don't know exactly. There's a limit to how much you can learn from listening at keyholes. They decided I would be their surrogate.

I had belonged to them for almost five years when I became pregnant. I was terrified, and it was made worse because I couldn't ask questions about what was happening to me. I can still remember the sickness that got so bad they finally took me to a doctor, which ironically was the best thing that had happened to me. She said she wanted to see her patient alone, and despite their objections she insisted. Then she gave me a pen and paper and asked if I had any questions.

I remember scrawling "Is this normal?"

She gave me a book about pregnancy and told my owners that she would need to see me once a week until their child was born. Joy and devastation in one sentence. I had someone I could communicate with, but I knew it would only last until I gave birth to a child I may never be allowed to see. I looked forward to my weekly appointments even if I knew they meant medical examinations and I was rarely left alone with my doctor for more than a few minutes. Those moments were precious, because it was clear she saw me as a person rather than just someone's commodity. One week I brought her a letter I'd written on scraps of newspaper, asking everything that had occurred to me through the week, from whether the baby should be kicking in the night and keeping me awake to whether it was safe for me to be scrubbing floors.

The next week she gave me a small notepad and a second book. It was called "Beginners' sign language". I tucked them both under my shirt as my eyes filled with tears of gratitude.

In the rare moments when I was alone, I devoured the new book. It described a language developed by deaf people before the Dark Days that allowed them to communicate with each other. There was nobody for me to talk to, but I learned the hand signals anyway. I used them in the mirror, telling myself that everything was going to be alright.

And then, I finally had someone I could talk to. My precious, precious daughter.

I loved her from the first moment I saw her, me exhausted and she covered in blood. My owners didn't want to dirty themselves so I was allowed to be the first to hold her. They didn't know about babies either so I was allowed to feed her, change her, care for her. In every way that mattered, she was mine. Oh, they could take her away from me at any time, I knew that without anyone needing to say anything, but in those early months all I knew was bliss. Bliss, and exhaustion! But it soon became clear that things weren't perfect. My daughter - I doubt I could have pronounced that name they gave her even when I had a tongue - had a problem with her heart. For the first time I was grateful to be in the Capitol where money could fix anything. But then other problems started to show. She didn't crawl until she was a year old, and didn't start to speak until long after she was expected to. She was almost always happy, but she was still so small, and my owner's wife had no interest in what she considered a less than perfect child. He adored her though, and wouldn't hear of casting us - her - out.

I called her Aspen, after the shivering sound of my favourite trees because it was an easy movement to mimic. I taught her how to sign even before she learned to talk. Eventually another medical specialist explained that my daughter's condition was one that had rarely been seen since before the Dark Days. It's name had been lost, but she had a difference in something called a chromosome. I didn't understand. I wrote a letter to my doctor, who tried to explain. She said every person is made up of billions of tiny things called cells, and my daughter had a tiny difference in each of her cells that added up to the physical differences we could see. Do you understand, President Paylor? Does that tiny little difference matter to you?

It didn't matter to me. She was a bit more fragile, and a bit slower to learn, but she loved everyone in her tiny world. She was almost always smiling, and she was my best friend.

Aspen's father's wife left just before her eighth birthday. She'd found a lover and left, and we became something like a family. Hardly anyone knew about Aspen, because he didn't want her judged for being different, so we used to creep outside at night so she could play on the swings and roundabouts that the ordinary Capitol children used by day. She learned to tell time by the moon rather than a clock, and she looked forward to the night because it meant she could go outside and play. We exhausted the possibilities of the small book I had been given and began inventing signs of our own to describe words, people and situations. I taught Aspen to read and write, though our studies were limited to what we could find within the house. She learned how to do makeup and style hair, but I couldn't teach her my own district's history beyond my own descriptions of the trees, the crisp, clean air and the feeling of waking up in the morning knowing you had nothing to think about that day except swinging an axe and bringing down your quota of trees.

When the uprising began, nothing changed at first. Her father came home and said we weren't to go outside anymore, not even at night, and we would stay safe indoors until the peacekeepers got everything back to normal. Even after we'd eaten all the food in the flat he still said we weren't to go out, but...I disobeyed. What was he going to to do me? Especially after he was called back to work, on such top secret business he couldn't even tell me, his voiceless slave, what he was working on. Besides, I'd been going out at night for years; I knew where to go to keep safe, and I brought back what food I could. Bread and anchovies, that was all we had for nine days. When I had to go out again he grabbed me by the shoulders and told me which streets to avoid. There was panic in his eyes and he wouldn't let me go until I nodded and swore on Aspen's life that I wouldn't go anywhere near them.

He still wouldn't tell me why, and then a few days later, he never came home.

I don't want to know what happened to him, though I imagine I don't need to be told. I just hope it was quick. Aspen asked where he was, why he wasn't coming back, and I said he'd had to go away. What would you have said, President Paylor? How would you tell your child that her father wasn't coming home?

But we survived. When the peace finally came we were assigned a new apartment, smaller but with a garden where we were allowed to go any time of the day or night, not just when there was nowhere else around. I found cleaning work at a shop near our apartment - work I was actually paid for, for the first time in my life - and Aspen was able to go to school. I thought we were going to have a normal life. I was saving up to take her back to District Seven.

But today, her name was chosen and now my daughter has to take part in your games. I should be angry, but I've lived long enough to know nothing good lasts forever. But this is the reason for my letter. I've just got one request for you. I know it's unusual, but these are unusual times. As far as everyone knows, I'm just another freed Avox, trying to make my way in the world. Please let me go and work in the tribute centre so I can watch over my daughter for as long as possible.

Thank you for your time.

Elowen Ambrose

A/N Wow, so I finally got up the courage to post another chapter! The title is obviously a nod to "The Handmaid's Tale" which gave me the idea for Elowen the Avox being a surrogate. I tried something a bit different with the format here because I wanted her to tell her story and I needed her to make the request of Paylor. I hope it feels fairly realistic!

Anyway, I've actually got the entire story drafted, so hopefully I'm going to manage to update a bit more often from now on!