"So," Xu asked in a raspy voice, "do you agree with him?"

Donna watched Theodosius' retreating back. "No. I don't see the point of further being no use to anybody. The past is the one thing we have." He and Xu had just gotten into an argument about whether they'd talk to journalists after being released. Donna could understand his belief that they of all people had no right to comment on anything, but she couldn't imagine staying silent.

"The golden middle. Very nice." She reached down and picked up a potato. While she had survived pneumonia last winter - a remarkable achievement, at her age and weight - it hadn't passed with no consequences. Xu was sitting on an upside-down bucket and would need help standing up, as lying down for so long had atrophied her muscles. "I look forward to reading your memoirs."

Theodosius reached the path and began to walk down it, talking to nobody. His strides were quick and powerful. Donna wondered what he was planning to do with the draft he had written years ago, if not publish it. "I don't think you do," she said. Using a spade, she dug into the ground, acutely aware of the fact that this was the penultimate potato harvest. "Do you really want to know about who said what at which party?"

"I'm sure someone will." Xu picked up a potato and tossed it into the air a few times. "Are you going to write about this?" she asked, gesturing with the potato at the yard. The leaves were starting to turn different colours, making the place look rather picturesque.

"I don't know," Donna said, admiring the nearby plum tree. "I want to, but none of the others have as much as breathed a word about the place. Maybe I think I want to do it now, but once I'm out, I'll be trying to forget it ever happened."

Xu nodded, also looking around. The wall and the guard towers spoiled the view slightly, but there was nothing more beautiful than nature. The trees and bushes had no idea they were behind bars, they just grew as well as they did outside them, in the woods where Donna would soon be jogging once again. Or maybe she could go for a hike with Aulus. They would gather mushrooms and berries and edible plants, and then Dem could make some tasty food out of it. "...you listening? Are you alright? Mrs. Blues?"

Donna started and nearly fell over. She reached out to stabilize herself before sitting back on her heels in a squat. "I'm fine, Ms. Xu. Just daydreaming about food."

"That's the last thing I'd be daydreaming about now," Xu said sourly as she tossed two smaller potatoes into a bucket. "Never in all my life did I expect to be growing food with one foot in the grave like some sort of I don't even know what!"

"You don't have to work, you know," Donna reminded the older woman.

"It's this or walk around in circles like Coll over there." Theodosius was indeed speed-walking around the path. "I've got no desire to sit around and read. I can do that in my cell." She looked around. "I don't see any more potatoes within reach." Leaning on her cane, she started to get up. Donna scrambled to her feet as fast as she could and helped Xu up once she got stuck. "Thank you. My legs, they're just not-" Xu sighed, looking embarrassed. She scratched her neck with her free hand. "Could you please move the bucket for me?"

"Of course." Donna grabbed the handle and pulled it out of the ground. "To where?" Xu walked over slightly and pointed down.

"Here."

Donna put down the bucket and pressed it into the ground so it wouldn't topple over. "Here you go." She crouched back down and went through the dirt with her hands, looking for stray potatoes.

"What did you think about that article?" Xu asked as she sat down gingerly.

There were several articles she could have been referring to. A prison in Two had been closed due to a lack of inmates, China had announced that there was no more coal in the entire country, and there had been no documented cases of AIDS transmission outside of some war-torn regions in Western Europe and Central Asia for the past year. "It's not that big of a deal," Donna said, guessing at what Xu would have been interested in. "We figured out how to make steel without it over a hundred years ago. Every stray cat knows we're digging up the last bits of hydrocarbons."

"I think so, too," Xu said, brushing clumps of dirt from her hands. "Look! A mole-cricket!"

Donna almost fell over in her haste to see. "Where?"

"There!"

Donna saw it. An insect so massive, it was hard to believe Cotillion or one of her predecessors had had no hand in its creation. It seemed to radiate pure evil and malice, or maybe Donna was just biased after that potato with a tunnel chewed through it. "I can't believe insects can be this big," she said, watching the abominable creature poke around as if the entire place belonged to it. "Where's the spade?"

"Over there."

Moving quicker than she had in years, Donna grabbed the spade and decapitated the insect in one blow. The legs continued to twitch for a while before the systems finally stopped working. "Now if only all of my problems could be dealt with so easily," she muttered, digging the corpse into the ground. The general agreement was that it would scare the others off, but it seemed to have no effect.

"What did you think about that recipe for Bolivian pastries?" Xu asked.

"Looked delicious to me." The scrambled eggs with vegetables had been quite good, as had the canned fish, but they had been unable to compare with the tastes Donna's mind conjured up when seeing a high-quality photo of a large, flaky pastry. "I want pastries now."

Xu nodded, looking around before replying. "My niece sent me a pastry a while back," she said.

"What kind?" Donna asked, interested.

"It was with cottage cheese and jam. Delicious." She smiled.

Donna picked up a potato that turned out to be half-rotten. After contemplating it for a while, she set it aside. The guards could always eat it that day. "What kind of jam?"

"Blackberry."

"My husband made blackberry jam this summer," Donna said. "My youngest said it's amazing. He also took strawberries and blended them with sugar into a jam-like thing."

Xu smirked. "I bet you can't wait to eat it yourself."

"That's not the only thing of my husband I can't wait to eat," Donna joked.

"What else?" she asked, sounding innocently curious.

One disadvantage of talking to Xu was that she did not understand these kinds of jokes at all. "Uh, mushroom soup," she said, not in the mood to explain. "From freshly-picked mushrooms. I'm sure it's amazing."

"Mushrooms are nice," Xu agreed.

Not too far from them, Theodosius had stopped to argue with Netter. "I'll go see what they're doing," Donna told Xu, and walked towards them.

The two men turned out to be arguing about the definition of what it meant to be middle-class. "In terms of hierarchy, though, we were in the middle," Netter insisted, arms propped against his hips. That was not true, as Netter had been born on a small farmhouse with an earthen floor on the very outskirts of the Capitol.

Theodosius ran a hand through his hair. "Middle class is when you need shoes - and go out and buy them."

Netter reared back as if stung. "I had shoes," he insisted.

"That's not what I said. You yourself told me you often had to wear shoes several times too small for you."

"We had a big family." Netter wasn't willing to budge.

"How does that change the fact that in the winter, you needed to wear shoes that were so small, they made your feet hurt?"

Netter shook his head. "You have no right to talk to me about this!"

Not only Donna, but a few of the others too, approached the arguing men, intent on joining in. Stone walked up to them, covered in dirt from head to toe and clutching a squash. "What were you talking about?" he asked.

Theodosius and Netter tried to explain and ended up arguing all over again. This time, though, Netter had had enough. "Whatever," he grumbled. "You're as upper-class as they come, there's no way you can understand." Donna had to admit he wasn't wrong there. Netter marched off angrily, kicking up clods of dirt.

Everyone but Stone beat a retreat, disappointed at not getting to see an argument. "Do you mind if I walk with you?" he asked Theodosius.

"Of course not."

Interested, Donna walked with them. Stone scratched his dirty neck with a dirty fingernail and sighed several times. "Is something wrong?" Theodosius asked.

Stone shook his head. "No. It's just that I've been thinking."

"A dangerous pastime," Donna joked.

"It's just that - it's not fair that we're still here." That wasn't new. "All the real criminals are dead. So why are we still here?" Stone clutched the squash tighter. "But on the other hand, it's not like we're completely blameless. I know I wasn't the worst the regime created. But I'm nothing to be proud of, either."

The path was cool mud under Donna's bare feet, and the pebbles stopped her from slipping. It was so strange, that she was breathing and walking. So many weren't, but she was.

"That's a good way to put it," Theodosius said softly. "There's certainly nothing to be proud of there."

"Hopefully we'll all be released together," Donna said in an encouraging tone. "The majority of people support that initiative." Nobody saw a point to having extremely elderly people be kept in a prison funded by the municipality.

Stone nodded. "Yeah." What the majority thought did not affect the directors, as nobody cared about them enough to decide who to vote for based on that, but the lifers were clutching at any straw they could find.

Donna looked at the potato patch, where Xu appeared to be hopelessly stuck on the bucket. "I'm going to go back now," she said. "You?"

"I want to walk for a little while longer," Theodosius replied.

It was odd that he was willing to ignore his precious potatoes like that, but maybe he just couldn't stand them anymore. "Alright." Donna made her way back to where Xu was indeed trying and failing to stand up.

"You're just in time!" she said cheerily. "I just finished with this bit." Donna helped her up, feeling very glad that her parents had Octavius to help them out. "Did you talk about anything interesting?"

"No." Donna moved the bucket and watched Xu sit down gingerly. While she could get out of bed with no issue, the bucket was simply too low and there was nothing to hold on to. "We should get a taller bucket for you."

"There are no taller buckets." Xu used a spade to dig up a potato plant and managed to tear out the entire thing. "Guards spent half an hour looking for one." She removed the potatoes from the thin roots and tossed them into a bucket, one by one. "What do you think about the news about AIDS?"

Donna had read up on it, but she was far from an expert. "With how long the incubation period is, there's no way it'll ever be eradicated. Unless people stop fighting each other, it'll be impossible to supply every HIV-positive person with medication."

"I just think it's crazy that so many countries managed to work together."

"It was in the interest of everyone, so why not?" Donna used a shovel to dig up the plant and crouched down to pick up the potatoes.

"Still, though. I can't imagine it."

"You don't need to imagine it. It's all in the papers." The bucket was completely full. Donna got up and went to empty it into the wheelbarrow.

For lunch, they had potatoes and vegetables. Donna poked hers with the spoon, trying to determine if they were blander than before. The last check-up had revealed that her blood pressure was pre-hypertensive, and Tia had told her that the salt in her diet would be cut to the minimum, even though it had already been quite low.

It was ridiculously unfair that her blood pressure could be going up even though she ate well, exercised, and was at a healthy weight. No matter how often Donna told herself it was normal to have a chronic condition at her age, and that her blood pressure was brought to normal thanks to the medication she took in any case, it still stung. She felt like her body was falling to pieces around her as she struggled to keep it together.

The potatoes were definitely blander than before. Bread was made with salt, and since she ate bread at least twice a day, she got her sodium from it. Donna ate another spoonful of vegetables, feeling them stick in her throat. In a year and a half, she'd be eating Dem's cooking every day. In her imagination, even thawed frozen vegetables tasted better when he prepared them.

Donna tried to do the mental math. It was the twenty-eighth of September. One more year - three hundred and sixty-five days. October, November, December, January - she added up the months one by one. Four hundred and eighty-eight days until January twenty-eight, which meant four hundred and ninety-one days until February first, when she would be released the minute the day began. Donna realized with a start that the five hundred-day barrier had been broken. Theodosius hadn't told her about that.

The food was cooling rapidly. Donna ate faster, trying to not think about the days. Sometimes they felt like they were flying by, and sometimes it seemed like the day would never come.

Four hundred and ninety-one. Not even a year and a half. In forty-one days, only four hundred and fifty would be left. Another milestone. As she got closer to the end, the milestones appeared in quick succession, one after the other. Fifty days after that would be four hundred, and after that would be three hundred and sixty-five.

Donna scraped the tray clean and tried to force herself to think about something else. The only thing that she could think of was the potatoes, and that made her think about how this was the penultimate potato harvest, making her think about how many days she had left all over again.

With a sigh, Donna rested her chin in her hand and chewed the bread half-heartedly. It was a tiny crescent-shaped dark loaf cut in two and smeared with a graphene-thin layer of peanut butter to make a sandwich. Her teeth didn't like how dense the bread was, but at least it tasted good. Donna wondered how much sodium it contained. Tia had told her that most people needed very little sodium, but an excess didn't hurt them. Donna, however, was at risk for developing hypertension, which meant that she needed to consume enough salt to keep her cells functioning and not a milligram more.

She'd need to get a book about high blood pressure. A few of the others were like walking encyclopedias themselves, but a reliable source was always better than what Zelenka and Katz had allegedly read in a book once five years ago. Katz had recommended her something along the lines of Healthy Living For Those Who Are Over 60, but Donna didn't need to be reminded that a sedentary lifestyle was dangerous.

As Donna thought, she ate the apple. It wasn't very tasty, so she left a large core uneaten and went to wash her hands. Did apples contain sodium? Probably. It seemed like everything contained sodium to a greater or lesser degree.

"I've got news," Salperin said quietly to Donna and Xu, who were back to harvesting the potatoes. Theodosius was still walking around.

"What are they?" Xu asked, livening up slightly.

Salperin looked around for something to sit on and found nothing. Donna was also standing, and Xu was sitting on the only empty bucket around. "Guard told me just now. It was just revealed that, a while back, a group of people tried to kidnap someone practically in broad daylight."

"Who was it?" Donna asked, hoping this wouldn't result in more angry Districts.

Xu shook her head from side to side. "This wouldn't have happened under Snow."

Donna doubted that, but her desire to know more overpowered her desire to argue with Xu. "No, really, what happened there?"

"Group of young people in a park chatted up a young woman and ended up inviting her to a party. In the car, though, they said they were going to kill her."

"Where were they from?" Xu asked, her preferred answer obvious.

Salperin shifted from foot to foot. "There were five young people, all but one from the Capitol." Xu's face visibly fell. "The last was from Nine, the same place as the would-be victim. She tried to appeal to him based on that, but he brushed her off and said she was lying."

"Why did they pick her?" Donna asked, thinking of Joel.

"They spent weeks trying to pick up someone from the Districts, but they were careful to not push too hard, which meant that everyone kept brushing them off or offering to get to a certain address on their own. Eventually, I guess someone fell for it." He shrugged. "I don't know how they picked their targets. I assume one of them would approach people at random in a District-heavy neighbourhood."

"But why?" Xu asked.

"There's more of the story left." Salperin crossed his arms. "After being threatened, she obviously started pleading for her life. They offered her her life if she had sex with them. At that moment, she realized that that had been the plan all along. She agreed, and suspecting something was wrong, asked when they'd let her go. They laughed in her face."

"That's messed up," Donna said angrily. If Joel ever moved to the Capitol, would he also be at risk from roving gangs looking for the most isolated and vulnerable to prey on? "How did she get away?"

Salperin snorted. "The kidnappers were a very incompetent bunch. They took her to another park so that they could spend some time together, so that if anyone snapped a photo of them, it would appear that she had gone willingly. But the fact that it was crowded there meant that they couldn't restrain her without drawing suspicion. She simply ran away and there wasn't anything they could do."

"She got lucky there," Xu said. "And lucky that they didn't threaten her family."

"She was picked at random, there was no way she'd believe such a threat," Donna pointed out.

"That's what I thought, too," Salperin said. "Had I been in charge of the operation, it would have gone off without a hitch."

And if Li had been in charge of it, the poor woman's ashes would have been scattered within the hour, but Donna did not put it so crudely. "I defer to the experts," she said, careful to put a slight sting in her tone.

"How am I the expert on this?"

"You just said you'd have successfully carried out the kidnapping," Donna reminded him.

Salperin looked awkward. "I meant theoretically. I'm not an expert at this." He laughed nervously. "That's Li. I've got to tell him about this, I'm sure he'll find it interesting." He marched off in the direction of Li, who was gathering walnuts.

"I don't see why he's so cagey about it when we all know the truth," Donna said, crouching down and picking up a potato.

"Maybe because he knows that the likes of you will start blaming him for things that were never proven in court?" Xu raised her eyebrows and tossed a potato into a bucket.

Donna sighed. "He just said he knows how to carry out a kidnapping."

"He meant theoretically. Plenty of true-crime readers also know how to do it."

That was a valid point, but Salperin hadn't been given a life sentence for carrying out executions. "So all the witnesses were lying, then?"

"Not lying, mistaken. They had been talking about events from as much as forty years ago."

"And the documents?"

Xu deflated. There was nothing any of them could have done against documents that had tied them, black ink on white paper, to various crimes. "Li never killed anyone," she pointed out.

"Define 'killing'," Donna shot back. "He was involved with the planning. He sent in detailed notes about their daily routine. He set the ground for it. I'd say that's conspiracy to commit murder."

"Why are we even arguing about this?" Xu asked. "What's done is done. It doesn't matter what any of us did, because the only thing anyone will care about is what they claimed we did."

Donna looked around for something else to talk about. In the distance, several of the others, and even a few guards, were gathering around Li. "I think Li's going to explain how to kidnap people properly," she said, pointing at him. "Let's go?" Xu nodded, so Donna helped her to her feet and they set off. Xu walked slowly, leaning on her cane, but there was no rush.

Li was standing in front of a bench and dissecting the failed kidnapping. "If they wanted to go to a public place," he said, "they shouldn't have let her out of the car. In any case, I don't see why it was necessary at all. She was seen leaving with them of their own volition already, they could have simply taken her to their place." He scratched the back of his neck. "Though I'm not sure why they were trying to kidnap a stranger in the first place. Usually, victims of trafficking either already were prostitutes who were taken advantage of by a pimp, or were sold out by significant others or family members."

"Is that what you'd have done?" one of the guards asked seriously. "Just grab a prostitute?"

"Not quite." Li rocked back and forth on his heels, looking at the audience gathered before him. All of the inmates were there, and five guards. "I'd have used a Web dating platform under a fake name and photo. While chatting, I'd carefully ask about their living situation. If they live alone and seldom contact anyone, I'd suggest they come over to my place."

"How do you know that stuff?" Ledge asked, incredulous.

Li shrugged. "It's mostly common sense. For most people, the most dangerous person is the date they met over the Web."

"What would you do next?" another guard asked. Donna began to suspect that this would be leaked to the media and presented in the most unflattering way possible.

"It might take a few attempts to get someone willing to come over to my place like that. Once they arrive, I drug their food, and mission accomplished." He smiled.

"You're scaring me, Mr. Li," Melton said softly. "You talk as if it's a funny joke."

"Not my fault I was plucked out of the Academy and taught to do this kind of stuff," Li replied with a shrug. "And this is not supposed to be funny. If you want a funny story, I can tell you one about how Krechet needed to play violin in the street in order to observe a local homeless person, ended up in a duet with another musician, an accordionist, and completely lost track of time. He ended up late to a party where he was supposed to accompany Stonesmith, funnily enough."

While that was indeed funny, there was nothing humorous about the fact that even the street musicians could have been spying on her back then.

"Why were Krechet and Stonesmith performing at parties?" Xu asked.

"Didn't I tell you? Talvian dragged us around like dogs on a leash. If she was at a party, then at least one of us would be in the crowd."

Donna would need to tell Sooyen about it. Her granddaughter was fascinated with the past and sent in lengthy clandestine letters about something or other she had read about the Districts back then, but she did not understand the subtle horrors of the Capitol nearly as well. While they had not been nearly as apocalyptic as mass shootings just outside one's village, they had still been horrific in their own way.

The guards looked horrified and intrigued, and Donna felt a sudden surge of irritation at Theodosius as she realized that his planned silence would mean that this would be the only information anyone got about them.

As the crowd broke up, she caught up to Theodosius, intent on confronting him. "I wonder what the tabloid readers will think of this," she mused.

"I can imagine the headlines," he replied with an edge to his voice. "'Death Squad Member Slams Would-Be Kidnappers For Incompetence'. It would be at just the right level of absurdity to fit with everything else."

"This is why we need to speak out once we get out," Donna said, putting her hands in her pockets. "Nobody else is saying anything, so this is the impression the world gets of us. They have no idea Li is a harmless old man who once crocheted a metre-long plush whale."

Theodosius chuckled. "It was at least a metre and a half." He sighed, turning serious. "I can't," he said, running a hand through his hair. "If you want, publish those notes of yours, and I'll go on record as being confident in their veracity. But I don't want to go out there and tell people what to think."

"This is the one field where we have every right to say what's what!" Donna insisted.

"And you do so, if you want. But I want to stay silent."

There was no arguing with him. True to his word, he remained silent for the next while as they walked around the path at a high speed, as if Theodosius had somewhere he needed to go.

A/N: In case you're wondering - the reason why blood pressure goes up with age is that the blood vessels become less elastic. While you can't do anything about that, you can eat well and stay active to minimize the health risks.