"What is it?" Donna asked.

Theodosius shrugged and put his elbows on the plush toy. "You're right," he said, wiping his face with a sleeve. "It's absurd."

Li looked up from his mandala. "Who's making up for what?" he asked. "Please don't tell me you feel like the Redhill murders are your fault."

"They claimed to have been inspired by the regime we served," Donna pointed out. She wove in an end and moved on to the next antenna. They were made of pipe cleaners she had crocheted over. "Look, there's another one of me running around, spouting the same excuses. How else am I supposed to feel?"

Katz snorted. "Do you know how many people have been attacked to date by thugs claiming they want to keep the Districts in line? I'm not going around feeling guilty for that. I can't be held responsible for the actions of someone who wasn't even born yet when I was locked up."

"Exactly," Grass said, turning to face them. "And what's that about compensation?"

"Nothing," Donna replied, unsure of how to phrase it. She'd need to discuss it further with Dr. Chu. She wove in the last end and stood up to hand the toy to a guard. The older man from Eight looked up from his own crocheting and took it from her.

"Very nice, Female Nine."

"Thank you." He took a clipboard, checked something off, and put the butterfly in a box. "How many more do I have left?"

"Three."

Donna didn't want to go back to making endless sweaters. She handed back the pattern she had been using and took a new one from the binder, one for an impressively-sized spider made out of brightly coloured hexagons. Attaching them together would be an ordeal, but at least the hexagons would be easier than something three-dimensional. She returned her old yarn, picked out the right colours, and returned to her seat on the bench.

"It's like you're contagious," Blatt was saying to Theodosius. "First you're going around acting like you're somehow responsible for everything that ever happened in Panem, now her. What's up with this?"

Settling down, Donna made a magic loop and began the first row. "If everyone had been honest from the get-go, those murders wouldn't have happened."

"That's not the issue here!" Koy called out from the back bench, where the five former industrialists had been deep in discussion about Melton's son's upcoming visit. "You're saying you're responsible for things you knew nothing about!"

Donna turned around to face him. "That's the thing, though, I did know about them. I'm not saying you should feel the same way."

Next to Theodosius, Grass threw her hands in the air. "Even you couldn't have known about every single atrocity that happened."

"I knew of them. I knew they were happening. Is that not enough?" Donna demanded.

Blatt put down her hook and stretched her fingers. "Looks like we've got two professional masterers of the past here with us," she said sardonically.

"What exactly is wrong with what we're saying?" Theodosius asked.

Grass raised her eyebrows. "For starters, why are you claiming to have been responsible for things you hadn't had any control over?"

"But that's the thing!" Donna said, looking straight at her. "It was happening right in front of my eyes. I could have stopped it. I could have refused to have anything to do with it. But I didn't."

"Now that's new," Katz muttered.

"Better late than never," Theodosius shot back.

"Can we please stop discussing this?" Stone begged.

"What should we discuss, then?" Metteren asked in a strained voice.

"Literally anything!"

Metteren scratched his head. "Er, does anyone know how to cure hemorrhoids?"

"First off," Dr. Chu said, "I just want to say that it's a good thing you did, admitting your guilt."

Donna kneaded the ball, hands in her lap. "The others almost convinced me that I shouldn't have," she said humourlessly. "But it's too late to take it back now."

Dr. Chu tapped her pen on her clipboard. "You think you were wrong to say what you said yesterday?"

"No." She rolled the ball on her leg. "Deep down, I wish I could forget about it all, but even deeper down, I know what I did." Dr. Chu nodded and wrote something down, face completely emotionless. "Do you hate me?" she asked.

"What?" The psychologist looked up from her writing. "Of course not."

"But I just said that I bear responsibility for the actions of the government I was involved in." The full weight of Dr. Chu's background crashed down on Donna. "I built the Arenas in which you could have died."

There was no disdain or loathing in Dr. Chu's gaze as she looked at her. "I took this job knowing who my patients would be, and I have never regretted it." She put down her pen and held the clipboard with two hands. "For two decades now I've worked with you and Coll and some of the others, and I would do it all over again. Even if the workload was rather high at the beginning." She smiled slightly.

"But why?" So many children hadn't gotten to grow up because of Donna, every single one of them full of potential. She hadn't just ended lives, she had destroyed everything these children could have become.

Dr. Chu shrugged. "I worked at Lodgepole for a while, and that made me realize I could treat everyone professionally."

"Even me?"

"Even you." The confirmation of her own special status as a particularly outstanding criminal hurt. "And, I must admit, there was a good amount of professional curiosity to it, too."

Donna didn't look forward to the academic paper. "I was really sick last night," she said, changing the topic. "It was like a panic attack. I honestly thought I was going to die."

"Could you elaborate on that?" Donna did so, trying to recall emotions dulled by a night's sleep, no matter how poor. "Interesting. Before arriving here, I read a book about someone who, just like you, eventually admitted guilt while in prison. He died the day after doing so."

"Who was he?" She wasn't sure what she thought about someone else having already done what she had. It was annoying enough that the others thought she was imitating Theodosius, even though his oblique denials had never made any sense, unlike hers.

"Mass murderer. Oversaw the deaths of nearly a million people."

"No wonder he couldn't live with it," Donna remarked. A million people. She couldn't imagine it. She herself had overseen the deaths of twenty-three children each year, as well as a few hundred worker fatalities and executions. Added up, that wasn't that much in the grand scheme of things. "But on the other hand, what's the difference? I'm still a mass murderer." The words were surprisingly easy to say.

Dr. Chu wrote something down. "You'd call yourself that?"

"That's what I am, isn't it? It's part of me. I'm an engineer. I'm also a mass murderer. It's just me."

"Interesting."

"I thought it would be harder to say these things," Donna admitted. "I thought I wouldn't be able to say it, but that once I did, I'd feel better. But that's not how it is." She kneaded the ball, watching the seam widen with every squeeze. "The words are just words. You say them. But I always knew deep down what I was. So I just feel even worse now, because I have to actually think about it." Realizing that she wasn't making any sense, Donna tried to rephrase her wording. "I mean, I knew it all along. It's no big deal to say something you knew all along."

Dr. Chu nodded and wrote something down. Donna hoped her words made sense to the psychologist, as they didn't make any to her. "So this admission isn't making you feel any better about yourself?"

Donna wondered if the psychologist had finally cracked. "Of course not. To admit such a thing - that's not going to improve your mood. How am I supposed to explain this to my parents?"

If Dr. Chu thought it was strange that a fifty-eight-year-old worried about parental disapproval, she didn't show it. "When will you tell them?"

"When I get out. We can't talk about this during visits, after all." Alex had visited in late December, and the two had avoided bringing up the Redhill murders. "And in any case, my parents have a truly national-scale catastrophe to worry about," she added sarcastically. "The cat is sick."

"Oh no! Will he get better?"

Donna nodded, feeling like she was going to cry. It was stupid to cry over a cat she had never even met, but she didn't want her parents to be sad, which they would undoubtedly be if Inky died. "In any case, this is completely irrelevant," she said, feeling like a wrung-out washcloth. "Don't we have the past to discuss? For the ten thousandth time?"

"I would like to ask you about-"

"-the forced labourers." Donna sighed, fiddling with the ball. "Whether I knew or didn't know of a specific case of mistreatment is irrelevant. I was the supreme authority on location. I held final responsibility over every decision made. I gave orders without bothering to check how they were being carried out."

Dr. Chu studied her with an inscrutable expression on her face.

"Has anyone found out yet when the trial is going to start?" Li asked for the fifteenth day in a row. This time, Salperin answered affirmatively.

"Next March," he said, standing up and stretching his back.

"It took them less than half a year to prepare our trial!" Oldsmith protested. "What do they need a year and a half for now?"

Vartha had bigger problems to worry about. "Hopefully things will settle down after the first few days," he said. "Last thing I need is for the entire tent city to mob me as soon as I step into the Capitol proper." About five hundred people from Six were still living in the City Circle, most of them gainfully employed in the area by now. While what they were doing was technically illegal, local authorities were willing to hold their noses and not annoy Six further as long as the campers broke no other laws.

"Maybe they'll release you early?" Smith speculated optimistically, not looking up from the sweater she was working on.

"I, for one, am more concerned with the lawyer situation," Grass said.

"Of course you are," Oldsmith said in a voice that was still unclear, even after months of therapy. His cane lay on the floor behind his feet. "Your lawyer's defending the star defendant. I suppose we should be grateful they didn't snap up all of them."

The other side of the benches then launched into a discussion on which lawyer had defended whom at Lodgepole. While Donna had more cause for concern than most of them - Dr. Fisher would be defending Everro, who was rumoured to be mentally incapable of standing trial - the others weren't very happy, either. Tran was going to be defended by Jamieson, Grass' onetime lawyer. Cooper had ended up with two lawyers from Two who had defended several of the former Peacekeepers. Hryb's lawyer would be defending Garvesson. Jackson and Cutner were both now in the care of, of all possible people, Low, who had switched from the star defendant to the least-significant ones.

"I'm impressed they didn't drag in Wreath," Katz said quietly. "Wasn't he one of the most successful of your bunch?"

"I doubt he'd want to get involved with this sort of stuff," Theodosius explained. "Isn't he in Two right now, still defending former Peacekeepers?"

"I think so," Salperin said.

Katz nodded. "Makes sense, then. I don't blame him for preferring to defend soldiers instead of thugs."

Most people deemed the two to be one and the same when it came to Wreath's clients. "Or maybe he doesn't want to deal with high-publicity trials anymore," Donna suggested. She switched colours and pinched the place of joining together with two fingers as she made the first few stitches. "I don't even want to know what my lawyer is going through."

Of course, she knew that very well. Dr. Fisher had written her a clandestine letter in which he had complained about being swamped with hate mail and death threats. Oddly enough, nobody had thought to threaten him for defending her, but a mentally disabled teenager who had been present at a murder was a step too far, in their opinion. On top of that, the workload meant he couldn't pay as much attention to her case, but it was obvious to Donna that he could spend the next five years in Thirteen campaigning, and the governor would still tell the director to refuse to release her and Theodosius.

"I'm glad mine's not having to deal with this," Theodosius said, bending down until his face almost touched his knees in order to do a particularly finicky section.

Li snorted. "Yours is long-retired."

"Exactly."

Li crocheted with an astonishing rapidity as he worked on the last row of his mandala. It had a radius of a metre and a half, and each row was a different intricate stitch or pattern. The bright colours faded into each other, creating a spectrum that went from red to green to blue and back, over and over. "How done are you?" Donna asked, eager to see the entire thing.

Smiling slightly, Li adjusted the mass so that he could reach the section he was working on. "I am so done with all of this," he joked, using slang he had gotten from the guards. "Like, one hundred percent done."

"Sorry, Mr. Li, but you're too old to sound like a teenager struggling to finish their homework," Theodosius said. Everyone chuckled at that.

Li turned out to be more done than Donna had realized. She had only completed a few more rows when Li exhaled with relief, put down his hook, and cut the yarn. He tied it off and wove in the end. Donna envied him his willingness to weave in ends as he went instead of dealing with all of them at the end.

"Are you done?" one of the guards asked. Li nodded, smiling happily. "Let's see!"

The mandala was duly spread out on the floor and they all crowded around to see. It was more like a carpet than anything else, a giant multicoloured circle that seemed too beautiful to have been made with human hands. Donna wished she could be so good at crocheting.

"It's amazing," the other guard said. "But how are we going to transport it?"

"You could fold it in half and have an entire family sit under it and watch television," Xu said, scratching her head. "Or you could just drape it over a couch."

Koy shook his head. "This thing has a diameter of three meters. Not all couches are that big."

"The yarn is quite thick," Li said. "I was thinking it could be a carpet."

The other guard, an older woman from Eleven, nodded. "We could try rolling it up like a carpet."

The suggestion was taken up, and the guards rolled up the mandala into a tube. "Now what?" the man from One asked. "It's not going to fit into the boxes."

"We'll wrap it in packing paper later," the guard from Eleven said confidently. "It'll look like a carpet is being delivered. You all - back to work!"

They went back to their benches, some quickly, some slowly. "You know what I just don't understand?" Li said quietly as he stretched and relaxed his hands before starting a new project. "None of them wanted to kill those kids."

That was a rather odd thing for Li to say. "You never wanted to kill anyone, either," Donna said.

"But I never killed anyone!" he hissed.

"That's a bad analogy," Salperin said. "There's a difference between obeying orders and willfully doing whatever you want. Those kids are just murderers." He emphasized his words by jabbing his hook at Donna. "No matter what they say."

Opinions were split on that count. Some thought they had all been eager to kill, and others thought that none of them had truly wanted to kill those children and had only gone along because of peer pressure. The lines were drawn rather predictably - the former Peacekeepers rejected anything that likened them to the youths, while the civilians had more sympathy for individuals who seemed to be living proof of the fact that it was one's circumstances that determined their actions.

Donna perused a lengthy article about the tent camp, studying the photographs carefully. Livia had complained in a letter about the trash ruining the City Circle, but these people didn't look like trash. There was no garbage on the ground, the tents were orderly, and the people wore clean clothing and had combed hair.

Now that the weather was warming up, more people were pouring into the encampment. Most were from Six, but there were some from all over Panem, including the Capitol. As Donna studied the photos, she hoped she wouldn't see familiar faces. Her parents had gone down there a few times, and had she been told to guess where Aulus was, she'd have picked that place. Fortunately, she recognized nobody in the photos. The people holding up signs or sweeping the street or cooking were all strangers. Most were young, but there was also a sizable amount of pensioners, and even a few families. The kids went to the nearby schools, but Donna doubted a tent city was conducive to doing homework.

Having determined that Livia was simply being her stubborn revanchist self, Donna read the article. The first interview immediately got her attention. The subject was a sixty-year-old who had lived his entire life in the Capitol.

I've been here since day one. The moment I read on the Web that this was going to happen, I marched down to the train station to greet the first bunch from Six. What else was I supposed to do? Nobody seemed to care. They were trying to brush it away, like they did everything else. But thanks to these people, it's become impossible to ignore, and the country is finally facing up to its past.

When asked about life in the tent city, he was cheerfully optimistic.

It certainly wasn't any fun in the winter, I'll give you that. I bought myself a proper sleeping bag, but then I didn't want to leave it in the morning! There were days when the kids would go to school and the adults - to work, and there would be maybe ten or twelve people remaining, max. Hopefully we'll have more people by next winter! [laughs] We've come too far to just up and leave now. Though, something's telling me some of them have become a bit more attached to the Capitol than they expected!

Another person, a nineteen-year-old woman from Six, was asked what she thought of the defendants.

Look, I won't lie to you, it's definitely weird. Like, they're my age. And some are just kids. But we're not here demanding a tough sentence for a bunch of stupid kids, no matter how messed up their crime. We're here to demand the government confront the past, and we're succeeding. People are becoming more aware of their history. The Games regime is being included on the school curriculum, and war crimes trials are well-attended.

That was the first time Donna had read of an educational reform, but she should have expected it. She wondered what Sooyen would think of it, although with how interested in the past she already was, she'd probably be able to teach the teacher a thing or two.

The idea of being discussed in history class seemed absurd to her. Donna didn't feel old enough to be history. But then again, twenty years of her imprisonment had already passed. She could picture Snow as clearly as if he was standing in front of her, but there were grown adults out there who had no memories of the Games. To this young woman, the regime wasn't memory, it was history.

The shouting of a guard brought Donna out of her reverie. Time to go outside. After some contemplation, she decided to not take the newspapers with her, though she did take her glasses. She pulled on her shoes, fastened the velcro, and grabbed her light jacket before pushing the door open and stepping into the corridor.

Outside, it was unpleasantly chilly, but by no means cold. Donna carefully put her jacket on the ground and set off. She wished she could jog for more than five laps, but there was a limit to what her knees could take. The orderly frequently reminded her of that.

Donna passed Zelenka and Fourrer, who were arguing about what the weather had been like in some year before Donna had even been born as they jogged slowly, and was passed by Li, who looked happy about something. The next time Li lapped her, he didn't look happy anymore. Donna wondered what that had been about.

After she finished jogging, Donna drank some cold water from the tap before putting on her jacket and joining Theodosius, who was walking with Vartha. "Good morning," she said. "Any plans?"

Theodosius shook his head. "I think I'll just walk in the morning. We'll see about the afternoon. Maybe start planting."

"Sounds good to me."

"Did you read that article in The Capitol Daily about the tent city?" Vartha asked. He wasn't wearing a jacket at all, but instead had on two sweaters.

"Of course."

Vartha shook his head, clearly disapproving of something. "I can't believe they're still there. I hoped winter would scare them off, but now that it's April, that means they're going to stay."

"I wouldn't want to be the kids," Theodosius said. "To them, it must seem like hundreds of people are cheering for their deaths."

Donna nodded. "Weren't there protests the evening after our sentencing? They even had to re-arrest Slice right in the jail, because they were worried someone could attack her if she stepped outside." She remembered the guards telling them about the fevered speculation on who would and would not hang. "Can't say I blame them, though." She still didn't understand how Tran and Cooper could have thought it was a good idea. According to the article, many people also did not understand how the others had gone along with it, but that much, Donna understood very well.

"It's rank hypocrisy on their part," Vartha complained. "Did you read the bit where the person calls for a restoration of the death penalty just for them?"

Theodosius unzipped his jacket and shoved his hands in his pockets. "Can't expect people to be rational when someone got brutally murdered like that."

"You three discussing the article about the tent city?" Best asked from a nearby bench. He and Verdant were reading from the same book.

Donna nodded. "We were. What are you reading?" She suspected it was either something about submarine tactics or the memoirs of a war orphan.

"The memoir of a nineteenth-century general," Best said. "William Sherman. Fought for the United States of America to put down that rebellion of theirs. Have you heard of him?"

Donna knew about the US Civil War, but the names of generals were beyond her knowledge. "No, but it sounds interesting."

"Indeed." Best draped an arm over the back of the bench. "Are any of you reading anything interesting right now?"

Donna doubted he was interested in engineering journals. She shook her head. So did Theodosius, who had requested several books in Spanish at random and had ended up stuck with five romance novels featuring relationships between women, hardly something he could relate to. "I'm reading a collection of modern poetry," Vartha said.

"What country?" Verdant asked, interested.

"It's local."

Verdant nodded appreciatively. "And they didn't reject it?"

Vartha shook his head. "There's nothing forbidden in there. It's all about the rural landscape and love and whatnot."

"Rural landscape?" Verdant asked, sitting up slightly, one arm propped against the bench to take the pressure off his bad leg. "What's the title?" In a quieter voice, he added, "Is there anything about Two?"

"It's called Rural Voices, Panem Dreams. And there's an entire section about Two."

Verdant leaned back against the bench. "I'll have to give it a read," he said. "With the political climate being the way it is, it's looking increasingly unlikely that I'll ever see the rural landscape I grew up in." He linked his hands behind his back. "Though I don't envy you, Mr. Vartha. You'll be getting out just as things start to escalate all over again."

Vartha scuffed at the ground with his foot. "I just want to be left alone. Maybe if I lock myself in my room, the journalists will get bored and move away."

"They won't," Theodosius said. "They're journalists. My son once went undercover and spent half a year just hanging around a certain bar to be able to score an interview with someone." He ran a hand through his hair. "I hope he won't try to interview you," he said jokingly.

"Given his political affiliations-"

"What does that have to do with anything?" Donna asked, rehashing the same debate for the thousandth time.

A/N: Dr. Fisher's new client is inspired by the trial of Jürgen Bartsch, a German serial killer. One of his lawyers, Heinz Möller, defended a group of genocidaires at the same time as Bartsch. There's an excellent article about the popular response to the Bartsch trial ('Fantasies of Violence' by Kerstin Brückweh), give it a read if you can get access to it.

In case there are any Torontonians reading this (though I'm sure the Toronto van attack is quite well-known all over the country), Dr. Fisher is not going to try to use Everro's ASD for a not criminally responsible plea. I wrote this chapter months before the trial of Alek Minassian and Everro is not supposed to be based on him in any way. His motivations are completely different and his ASD made the situation worse in a different way, not to mention that Dr. Fisher can argue, for example, that Everro was only an accessory to murder.

For the crocheters reading this - Li has adapted a Mandala Madness to make it even more impressive.