"Thank you," Donna said, taking the tray and putting it on her table. The guard handed over the newspapers next and closed the flap. Since she was already wearing her glasses, Donna read the front page of The Daily Observer and gasped out loud, nearly dropping the papers to the floor.
TWO CHILDREN FOUND DEAD IN FOREST NEAR REDHILL - MURDER-SUICIDE OR THE HUNGER GAMES COME AGAIN?
"What the fuck?" Hope shouted from her cell. It must have taken her some time to put on her glasses.
Donna swallowed her oatmeal in record time and read the article. Shortly afterward, she regretted the decision as she fought an increasing desire to throw up.
Yesterday, a jogger discovered the bodies of two teenagers about eight kilometres north of Redhill, a particularly infamous suburb. The children have been identified as a fifteen-year-old boy and girl, both originally from Six who had moved to the Capitol as children when their guest-worker parents made their move permanent. Their names are not being released to protect the families. One of the children had multiple stab wounds in the abdomen and a slit throat that had been the killing blow, and the other had several smaller wounds on the hands and forearms as well as a left forearm that had been slit elbow to wrist. Both had been beaten before their deaths.
The first teenager had been found in a clearing, and the second had crawled away a small distance before taking her own life. In the clearing, two clear sets of footprints had been found in the muddy ground, with more indistinct fragments, as well as holes from where some sort of stakes had been. The official version so far is that a group of three to eight people had forced the two children to fight, with the survivor killing themselves after they had run off. The stakes most likely formed a sort of barrier or makeshift arena; no signs of them or any sort of rope have been found.
Donna swallowed hysterical laughter and tried to think about it. So this was what this all came to. Twenty years, and children were being forced to murder each other again. Hysteria gave way to indignation as she wondered how this could have been allowed to happen. What was the point of keeping her locked up if someone else would just do the same thing? What was the point of anything? How could the government keep her in prison as it allowed others to repeat her crimes?
The three other newspapers had the same story on their front page, though The World had also included a scathing critique of how the government handled dealing with the past, from Paylor on down. The main story was the same, though the details varied. From the other papers, Donna learned that the two clear footprints belonged to an adult man and either an adult woman or a teenager, that Redhill was overrun with revanchist gangs who did battle with guest-workers and their families in the long-decayed suburbs struggling with poverty, and that the vast majority of teenagers in the country did not know that the Hunger Games had consisted of a randomly chosen boy and girl from each District being forced to kill each other until one remained.
Donna's head spun. How would the Districts react? There were already furious articles in the newspapers, would this result in mass unrests? She sat at her table, head buried in her hands, and tried to make sense of the situation. She really should have seen this coming. Graffiti, shouted insults, physical attacks - it had been building up for so long. The fact that it hadn't had anything to do with her was scant consolation, given the attention this would undoubtedly result in.
Out of the nine women, four were held back to clean the corridor. Donna wasn't one of them. Silently, they stepped into the yard and headed down the path. Donna did her five laps, wishing she could do more but unwilling to risk her knees. She ran down the path, ground slightly soft under her feet, and tried to think about it. A few of the others were talking to each other, while the rest were silent. Donna, too, didn't open her mouth to as much as greet anyone.
Donna looked at the wall surrounding the yard, seeing it in a new light for the first time. Here, she was safe from any attempted revenge, unlike the released ones, who were probably considering hiding under the bed at the moment. The machine guns in the guard towers were trained on the yard, but if they had to, they could be turned one hundred and eighty degrees. Hopefully, by the time she was released, things would calm down somewhat.
As Donna turned a corner, she nearly slipped on a patch of mud. A realization struck her, making her even more unbalanced. The situation would never calm down now. If it did, that meant that Panem wasn't worth living in anymore.
Two children were dead. For the first time, Donna realized why Theodosius had admitted general responsibility. She hadn't been the one to kill these children, she had been locked up since the day of the surrender, but she still felt deeply ashamed, as if she had somehow played a role in the deaths. She had repudiated Snow on the witness stand, she had openly called the Games an atrocity, but before that, she had made them possible, and now others were being inspired by her work.
To her chagrin and relief, the situation only calmed down over the next week in the same way that an erupting volcano calms down somewhat after the first blast of magma. The newspapers were mostly blacked out, a testament to the nation's frenzied attempts to come to terms with the past and make things good again. The police were investigating various revanchist gang members, people from District Six arrived to the Capitol en masse to demand justice and were threatening to live in tents in the City Circle until they got their wish, and Aulus had been prodded into making a speech where he openly condemned her, resulting in a tearful clandestine letter where he promised he hadn't actually meant it. On top of that, Oldsmith had a stroke and had to be transferred to the military hospital.
"I wonder what it's like to have a boring life," Li muttered as he started a new project, a giant mandala that would decorate a room in a Community Home in a few months. His glasses slid down, and he pushed them back up with a fingertip. Li's vision was deteriorating, though not as much as that of Zelenka, who had to settle for simple patterns she could make mostly without looking.
"I don't see how this isn't boring," Katz shot back. "Reading about that situation with the children doesn't exactly liven up my day."
Donna focused on her own project, a palm-sized bumblebee. The administration had recently requested all of them to make fifty stuffed toys each. None of them were sure as to why they suddenly needed one thousand two hundred stuffed toys (even Oldsmith was still crocheting away as part of his rehab), but they were quick to make and fun to look at, so nobody complained. Li, of course, had finished them all in record speed, even making up a few of his own patterns. "It's already livelier than I can stand," she said. "At this point, nothing would shock me."
"I wouldn't go that far," Theodosius said, putting the finishing touches on a doll that looked just like Aslanov, if Aslanov wore civilian clothes. The administration had been originally horrified by his plan to make dolls that looked like all of the Supermaxers, including long-released ones, but they had been mollified by the fact that nobody would be able to notice that the crochet dolls actually had the approximate facial features of convicted mass murderers. They had also been unwilling to resist Theodosius' willingness to go above and beyond the required amount. "What do you think?" he said, holding up the doll.
"I look forward to seeing my own crocheted likeness," Netter said, inspecting the doll closely. "Or rather, I don't."
"Hey!"
"What?" Netter asked apologetically. "The only thing this doll has in common with Aslanov is the colour of everything. Though I don't think his eyes are black." For nearly all of them, the eyes were being represented with black beads. The administration had had to be cajoled into buying blue and green beads so that Theodosius could accurately represent the three of them who didn't have dark eyes.
Theodosius snatched back the doll. "You try crocheting a likeness of a person. Or maybe don't. It might end up a revanchist trophy."
"I'll pass on that generous offer." Netter sighed as he looked at the halfway finished seastar in his lap. "I can't even get the arms of this thing to not stick out upwards."
Donna put one foot on top of her other knee and braced her elbows against it. Using a yarn needle, she sewed on the wings, hoping she was attaching them to the right spot. She hoped the child who would be playing with it days from now would like it. And who knew, maybe the child would be from Six. That would be ironic, though Donna doubted she could make up for the crime committed by her imitators with a plush bumblebee, no matter how cute.
"So," Li said, already on the fourth row, "how do you think things are going in Two?"
"Why should they be going somewhere?" Katz asked. "Unless they kick off another hunt for alleged collaborators." She attached little legs to a spherical cat holding an ice-cream cone, and Donna was struck by the absurdity of the situation. They were discussing the most vicious hate crime since the Rebellion while crocheting toys for children whose parents they had oppressed. Hopefully, the guards wouldn't rush to enlighten the media about it.
"That's exactly what he means," Salperin said. "My lawyer says everyone's going to pieces. It's like a volcano erupted, or something. There's been a wave of arrests of former Peacekeepers. Like that Breakrock trial, but several orders of magnitude more."
"Don't they have better people to be chasing after?" Hope demanded, throwing her hands in the air.
"Apparently not," Li grumbled.
The only bright spot to the situation was that Oldsmith recovered quickly and was soon back with them, bragging about how good the conditions had been in the hospital in a slurred voice - mild hemiplegia was the main serious consequence of his stroke. His monologues were full of phrases such as 'I decided to order pancakes for breakfast' and 'my wife then arrived to visit me in a car she had just bought'.
"That's nonsense," said a guard from Three who had gone to the hospital with Oldsmith to Donna, Theodosius, and Vartha, who were walking around the path together that afternoon. "He was handcuffed to the bed at all times and ate what he was given. And maybe his wife had just bought the car, but it's an ancient wreck, and in any case she wasn't allowed to see him."
"Of course," Vartha said, pulling up his scarf so that it covered his nose. "I should have expected that."
"By the way," the guard said in a more serious tone, "there's news."
Theodosius sighed. "What is it now?"
"A recently released former Peacekeeper just made a public statement about her past actions after being confronted by two survivors from a secret prison she had been a guard in."
"Oh no," Donna said, imagining how the former Peacekeepers would react to that. "What did she say?"
"Said that what she did was wrong and that she bears the guilt for thousands of deaths."
That was unexpected. Donna wondered what had made her say such a thing.
"But she was just a guard!" Vartha said. "There's no way she killed thousands of people."
"You don't have to shoot someone personally to be guilty of their death-" Theodosius began, but Vartha cut him off.
"Spare me," he muttered.
Unimpressed, the guard stalked off to talk to another guard.
Contrary to Donna's expectations, the former Peacekeepers were all content with Cloelia Miner's admission of guilt. She should have seen it coming, though, as one of their favourite refrains was that all the atrocities were the fault of a 'fanatical minority'.
"My psychologist is still going on about it," Li said, adjusting the mandala that draped over his knees and nearly touched the floor. "As if the situations are in any way comparable."
"None of them understand anything," Ledge snapped, spitting out the words. "Like that reporter with my children! Call me a criminal, fine, I'll survive, but why those personal insults?" He had been smuggled an excerpt from an interview with his children. In it, they had described him as a loving father, only to have the reporter tell them that it was wrong to describe one of the key criminals as 'loving'. "Can't they leave my family out of this?" He glared at the hexagon he was working on. "And the audacity of the reporter, to say such a thing! Before, they'd never have dared to."
Once again, time had split into 'before' and 'after', though with the murder as the breaking point. "I liked it more when they were all amnesiac," Grass muttered. "Now, we're never getting released."
Amidst national debates on how history ought to be taught in schools, Six citizens camping out in the City Circle, and an uptick in historical awareness in the general population, the attempted killing of a onetime official from the Ministry of Justice didn't even make headlines, most likely due to the fact that the average person didn't care about someone being stabbed in prison.
That had Grass fuming for a solid month. Her onetime colleague was patched up and given medical parole, as the prison system did not consider an eighty-year-old paraplegic a threat to society, but she still ranted to everyone about the unfairness. Donna was just happy to be in the Supermax, and not a normal prison. At least here there weren't any inmates armed to the teeth and plotting to kill her.
The feeling intensified when six arrests were made. There were six suspects, and they all admitted their participation readily enough, but they defended themselves with excuses that made Donna feel slightly sick.
One of the suspects, eighteen-year-old Sky Garvesson, had merely helped set up for the murder, no more and no less. She had hammered in the stakes, put up the rope, and gone home to study. Unlike her fellow gang members, she was an excellent student who had been planning to attend university the next year. And now, she was claiming that she had been unaware of what would occur within that rope, that she had only gone along with the gang because that was just what one did in that neighbourhood, and that she was apolitical and just wanted to go to university and become a doctor.
Another one, seventeen-year-old Ryan Everro, was immediately labelled a younger version of Holder by the Supermaxers. During his interrogations, he had muttered about thinking it had to be the right thing to do if the older ones had said so and mumbled platitudes about not wanting to be seen as weak. Psychiatrists were shocked that he had never been diagnosed with ASD before, as he was a stereotypical example of a person with that condition.
The two youngest, sixteen-year-old Uta Jackson and William Cutner, seemed to be emblematic of everything wrong with the youth of today. Petty criminals who had dropped out of elementary school and missed work more often than they showed up, they casually used the most horrific slurs during interrogations without understanding what they meant. Cutner had been horrified to learn about what the Hunger Games had really been like.
The ringleaders, Stephanie Tran and Andre Cooper, were both nineteen years old and both willing to push all the blame on the other. They claimed in unison that they hadn't expected it to escalate so far and that they had thought someone else would put a stop to it before it got too out of hand.
"The younger kids, I feel sorry for," Katz said as she wove in a myriad of ends. "But the ringleaders? They remind me of how they all passed the blame around in Lodgepole."
"They're all young kids," Donna reminded her.
"Yes, and one of them's another you," Li said, moving the mandala so that he could continue crocheting.
"What?" Donna asked, confused. "What do you mean?"
Theodosius turned to look at her. "You didn't notice the parallel?" Donna shook her head. "That Garvesson - she's acting just like you did."
Donna thought about it and came away even more confused. "But how? I was never ideological." The more she thought, the angrier she became. "Are you really comparing me to a gang member?"
Oldsmith chuckled. "You? Not ideological? You did an excellent job of pretending, then."
Something inside Donna snapped. "Fine," she admitted. "Have it your way. I was the most ideological engineer in all of Panem. But how can you compare me to a gang member who orchestrated a murder?"
"Isn't that how you view the rest of us?" Grass asked pointedly.
"No!" Why were they all ganging up on her? Even Theodosius was looking on silently. "And why do you care? I don't see you calling the old regime a criminal gang."
Katz sat up straighter. "We were no criminals. But we were led by criminals. And it's a little bit hypocritical how you condemn someone who did the same thing as you."
"How did she do the same thing as me?" Donna demanded, throwing her hands in the air. The motion knocked the metre-long butterfly she had been putting together onto the floor. She bent down to pick up the pieces, fuming. "We have nothing in common." She tried to think of a comeback, but there were no hard-hitting comparisons she could draw.
That night, Donna lay on her cot, wrapped up in her blankets and trying to think. Garvesson was being put on trial for the kidnapping, assault and battery, and murder of people she had never even laid her eyes on. All she had done was put up a few stakes and a rope, but she was being tried for everything the gang had done. For conspiracy.
Just like Donna.
Donna turned over to her other side, trying to fall asleep. The parallel had jumped out at everyone, but to her, it was obviously different. Garvesson had joined a gang. She had known they were plotting to kidnap and murder two children. She had made it all possible.
But if Garvesson had made the murder possible, that meant that Donna had made all of the atrocities possible, no matter that she had been acquitted of conspiracy. If Garvesson was guilty of the brutal beatings the children had been subjected to during their kidnapping, then Donna was guilty of everything that had occurred during the construction - and after.
There was no getting around it. Donna sat up, feeling as if she was being choked. Either both of them were guilty, or both of them were innocent, and it seemed absurd to acquit a member of a murderous gang just because she had not been there during the murder itself.
That meant that she was guilty. There was no getting around it. She was guilty of the murders.
Donna leapt out of bed, wanting to tell someone. Hiding was pointless. Hiding was what had led to the situation in the first place. She felt the cold floor with her socked feet as she paced around, wishing she could tell someone about it. Donna grabbed a blanket from the cot and wrapped herself with it, continuing to pace around. "It's on me," she whispered. She sat back down, trying to hide from the cold. "It's all on me."
On a piece of toilet paper, she jotted down her thoughts, words undoubtedly illegible as she wrote almost blindly. The two things weren't distinct, they were the same. All of it, the beatings, the executions, the conditions, they had been part of her job. Nothing could have happened without approval from Snow, and she had been the only one in the Arena construction industry with access to him.
Feeling empty, Donna lay down on the cot, pulling the blankets tighter around herself. She'd need to tell Dr. Chu. The night dragged on, and still she lay awake, until she woke up and realized it was morning. Donna pressed the button and, when the guard showed up, asked to see the psychologist.
Dr. Chu arrived immediately after everyone had left for work. "What is it?" she asked calmly as she took out her things.
"I've been thinking," Donna began as she kneaded the ball. "About the arrests. And what one of them said."
"Garvesson, I presume." Donna nodded, and she jotted something down.
"Yeah," Donna said, drawing in a shuddering breath. She suddenly felt anxious, heart beating fast, icy tendrils in her chest. Her feet tingled like they wanted to run away, and her throat felt like it was being constricted. "What she said - it sounds like what I said. What I say."
The psychologist said nothing. Donna focused on the ball, squeezing it, poking it, turning it into a cube with her fingers.
"It made me think. Everyone thinks that the person who put together the place of killing is just as guilty. Which means that the workers' deaths are on me." She looked at the floor. "I never hurt anyone personally," she added, as if that would somehow make up for it.
"You only ever talked about the Tributes before," Dr. Chu said encouragingly. "What is so different now?"
Donna remembered the workers. They had laid down railroad tracks, dug tunnels and pits. The memories were faded, but they were there. She had failed to forget them, no matter how hard she had tried. "I didn't want to hurt anyone," she begged the psychologist, wishing that she could somehow take the memories away. "But I worked on the Games. How could I have ignored that?"
"You were far from the only one to consider District people subhuman."
Donna didn't want to be like the others. "But I saw them all the time!" she said. They had been so pathetically grateful when she had given them extra food. By the time their terms had been up, they had looked sickly and sunken-cheeked. "How could I have ignored that they were suffering?"
Shifting in the chair, Dr. Chu looked at her curiously and adjusted her bright-pink kerchief. "You thought as a specialist and not as a human being."
Hearing her own words parroted back at her stung. "That's nonsense!" Donna exclaimed, crushing the ball with her hands. "So what that I was a specialist? They were my workers, my responsibility!"
The psychologist didn't even blink at the admission. "You told me before you bear responsibility for the deaths in the Hunger Games," she said in a probing way.
"Yes," Donna agreed, feeling exhausted. "The children are dead. But I'm still alive. That is my guilt."
"That you're alive? Are you saying you should have died?" Her voice was as calm as ever.
Donna shook her head. "I guess I deserved that," she admitted. "When you add it up - nine years of Hunger Games, plus all of the workers, how can someone want to live on after that?" Children just like her own, and she had built the slaughterhouse in which they would be killed.
"Are you saying you want to die?"
Oddly enough, Donna did not, even as the thought of the hundreds of children dead in her Arenas and the workers coughing in the tunnels destroyed her mind. "No. I guess I'm not a good enough person for that." She kneaded the ball, suddenly overcome with a feeling of pity for it. The poor ball had probably been hurt when she had crushed it. Gently, she patted it and set it aside, fighting back tears. "It's crazy, right? How can I admit to that and want to go on living? But I want to."
"You want to go on living?"
"Yes. But it would have been the right thing to do, to hang me." She drew her knees to her chest, unable to meet the psychologist's eyes.
Dr. Chu nodded. "What brought this on? Why now?"
"I thought you'd be happy," Donna said, confused. "For months, you interrogate me about the Redhill murders, and now you're asking me why?" She sat up straighter, hands braced against her cot. "Of course it's now! Look at the way the country went to shit because nobody faced up to what they did! How can I-" she choked up and fell silent. Clearing her throat, she continued. "How can I evade my guilt and set the scene for the return of everything I claimed to scorn?" The realization hit her, and Donna felt her face and ears burn with shame. "I sat there in the dock and twisted and turned, and all of the professionals thought they were in the clear. But they weren't."
That was also her guilt. She had given them an alibi. She had let them spread it until every stray cat in the Capitol could point to her as an example of someone apolitical who hadn't really been that guilty. Theodosius was right. As high officials, they bore responsibility for what their government did. If she had disapproved, she should have quit. But she hadn't. And that tied her to everything. All the murders, all the tortures, the starvation, the suffering. It was all her fault. And there was nothing she could do to make it better. All she could do was die, and let her victims be in peace.
"Please leave," she said. Dr. Chu began to protest, but she cut her off. "For today, at least." She nodded at the papers lying on her table. "I need to think some more. Tell the guards I'm not going to work today. I just can't."
The psychologist nodded, though Donna could see the reluctance in her face. Once she was gone, Donna climbed into bed, unable to think further. The flap opened, and one of the unfriendly guards spoke up. "You're not allowed to lie in bed without permission. Get up."
"I can't," Donna muttered.
"If you're too depressed to get out of bed, you need help. Should I call back the psychologist?"
Donna groaned through gritted teeth, wishing the guard would let her be. "If I still can't get up tomorrow, call in thirteen psychologists if you want! Just let me be for one single day!"
Dr. Chu must have explained the situation to her, for the guard unexpectedly closed the flap and walked away.
For the entire day, Donna lay in bed, only getting up to eat and use the toilet and steadily feeling worse and worse. By the time evening hit, she wasn't sure if she was having an anxiety attack or a heart attack. She was soaked with sweat, shivering with cold even though she was wrapped up in blankets, and her chest hurt. Feeling light-headed and dizzy, she tried to sit up, gasping for air. It felt like a noose was constricting her, and Donna remembered telling Dr. Chu that she should have died. She laughed bitterly, and then had to scramble out of bed to throw up. Her stomach felt like it was being torn at from the inside.
Donna took deep breaths, resting her head against the cold wall. She reached over and grabbed her blankets from the cot, sitting down on one and wrapping herself as much as she could. Shivering madly, she threw up again, this time bringing up nothing but bile. She tried to stand up to get some water, and nearly fell over from the light-headedness. It was like being drunk, but a thousand times worse.
The cold water made her shiver more. Sweat chilled on her exposed face, and the rest of her felt unpleasantly sticky. Donna curled up on the floor in paroxysms of terror, feeling like she was going to die at any moment. She wasn't sure why she was so afraid, but she felt fear like she had never felt before. Her breath came in desperate gasps, and she couldn't get enough air. She was choking.
"Help me," she wheezed, but she was too quiet for anyone but the lightbulb to hear.
Come on. Breathing exercises. Control your breath. Focus on something.
She wanted to press the button to call for help, but she couldn't stand up from the floor. She took out a hand to scratch her neck, but it was so cold, exposing as much as a fingertip was painful. Donna touched her face with her palm and realized she was burning up. Maybe she was dying. That thought sent a stab of panic through her. She didn't want to die.
The night was dark outside, floodlights illuminating her cell. Donna looked around it, feeling acutely just how much of a waste her life had been. There was nothing she could do to make up for it. Ever. They were dead, and she was alive. Donna reached under her undershirt to touch her heart, which was hammering away madly, as if trying to run out of beats and stop bothering with the pretense as soon as possible.
Donna took a deep breath, feeling the air whistle slightly. She held it, and let it out. Over and over. Eventually, she fell asleep and woke up on the floor, feeling physically fine but completely drained, as well as stiff and sore from sleeping on the floor. Lethargically, she went about her morning routine. She stretched. Tidied up. Did her exercises. Washed. Thanked Tia and put on her glasses. Ate breakfast. Read the newspapers. Cleaned. Got dressed. Jogged. Went back in. Put on her indoor clothes. Went to the gym. Sat down. Attached antennae to the giant crochet butterfly.
"What is it?" Theodosius asked for the seventh time already. He was attaching a leg to a bumblebee big enough for a toddler to sit on top of.
Entranced, Donna stared at the bumblebee. "How can you admit so much and go on living?" she asked. "Thousands upon thousands of dead. You can't make up for that with a plush bumblebee, even such a cute one."
Unexpectedly, Theodosius burst into tears.
A/N: This is probably the one time that someone making a tragedy all about themselves (note the lack of discussion of the victims) is actually a good thing. Congrats to Dr. Chu on yet another professional achievement!
The Redhill murders are not inspired by anything. There have been no shortage of horrific hate-motivated murders in history, but the specific nature of this one is tied to the setting. The way society responds to it as a final straw of sorts does have its parallels, but everyone will connect it to events from their own country, so I won't claim it's based on one specific thing.
Donna's admission of guilt is partially inspired by that of Franz Stangl. In-universe, Dr. Chu has read 'Into That Darkness' at least ten times and hoped for a similar result (though without the death - yes, dying of remorse is apparently a thing).
Oldsmith making up nonsense about his hospital stay was also inspired by a real-life incident (when Baldur von Schirach was hospitalized for eye surgery). There, the punchline is a guard telling Albert Speer that 'the car was a Fiat Topolino', but I couldn't figure out a way to detach it from the brand name.
'Making good again' and 'coming to terms with/mastering the past' ('Wiedergutmachung' [technically means 'reparations' or 'compensation'] and 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung') were terms coined in the Germanies in the 50s and 60s. 'Wiedergutmachung' referred to the reparations paid to countries like Israel and Poland, as well as individual survivors of German atrocities. 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung' is the process of understanding and coping with an unsavoury past.
The title of the chapter (Apotheosis) means deification, but also the culmination/peak of something. So we have the culmination of all of Donna's back-and-forth handwringing as well as Dr. Chu ascending to become some sort of goddess of psychology.
Crochet bumblebee pattern here, apologies for FFN eating the link: hookedbyrobin .(c) (om) (slash) blog (slash) 2019 (slash) 03 (slash) amigurumi-bumblebee-free-crochet.(ht) (ml) Isn't it adorable? I need ten of these. And a scaled-up version a metre long would be even better. By the way, Katz was indeed crocheting a plush Pusheen.
The next chapter will pick up immediately after where this one left off.
