Chapter 24: Autus Router

Fender's POV

The recess bell is still ringing shrilly when my friends and I burst out onto the cobblestoned play-yard in front of the District school. I make sure to put on my cloth mask – everyone's required to wear them here in Six, as the smog from the factories and also the illegal meth labs in the tenement slums can get really bad. All around me, kids are gathering in groups of twos and threes and fours, some of them playing marbles and jacks, others picking up spare sticks and playing Careers and Tributes. As many as possible try to have their fun away from the late-summer heat, specifically in the shadow of the trio of statues that loom over the play-yard.

In the shadow of one of these, I meet up with Aaron Train, my best friend. He likes to go by Train, his last name, as it makes him feel closer to his great-uncle. Apparently, this great-uncle got all the way to the Top Two in the Hunger Games – had the Victors' Crown practically in his hands – only to get cheated by some mental defective out of Ten. My buddy told me once which Games it was, but I can't remember. The…. 5th, maybe?

Sitting in the shade of one large, marble statue, Train pulls out a deck of cards from his pack and begins to deal them. I don't move to pick up a hand, though – these cards aren't meant for playing.

Victor Trading cards are every Panem kid's hot commodity. We can buy them, sell them, collect them, bet on them for keeps. But mostly, we trade for them. That's the whole point, right? I pull out my own precious deck – a collection that isn't nearly as impressive as Train's. Shuffling through them, I pause on one. Rifle through a few more just to be sure.

"You want a Poseidon Waverunner? I just realized I have two of him, actually."

Train glances up, eyes gleaming. "Would I?! I'll trade you for a Cecelia."

My eyes go huge as I think of the drop-dead gorgeous girl from District 8. "You seriously have the girl who won this past summer? You're joshing me!"

Train's eyes gleam. "I wish I was. I have three of her – hocked one of them from Raven Kia's locker."

I practically lunge for him. "Lemme see it!"

Train teases me by holding one card out of reach. "All right. For the Poseidon Waverunner? Haven't collected him yet."

"It's a Snowdamn deal!" The cards change hands. Train watches me excitedly as I drink in the lovely Cecelia's face. "How did you even get one of these, much less three? These have to be brand-new!"

"Oh, they are!" Train chuckles. "I was first in line when the dime store opened last Monday. I had it on special information from Mr. Lipwack, the owner, that the new cards would be in." His orbs gleam. "If you look closely, you can see down her shirt to her flowers!"

"Nah!" I breathe in awe.

"Check out her tank top – you can see the outline of her tits!"

In an instant, my hand is down my pants, and I'm jacking off to the totally, smoking-hot Victor.

"All right, all right, Romeo, enough!" Train laughs, and he pulls out another one of his cards and flashes it at me. Instantly, I stop fondling myself and scuttle my new card of Cecelia away for later. Only one thing could keep me from looking at a Victor's titties, and that is the card Train now holds in his hands.

There are brand-new cards, of course. And then there are rare cards.

"Which would you rather have? A Beetee Latier… or this?"

"Fucking tucking Jesus!" I reach out a trembling hand for the card, and am amazed when Train trusts me enough to pass it over. I can't even fathom the coin or even the number of hits this card could bring down in the black market and the drug dens. "Where did you get this?!"

"Can't tell – it's a secret," Train winks.

Any Victor card trader worth his morphling knows that certain trading cards are rarer than others. The brand-new ones, like Cecelia, are precious for a time, but then might decrease in value as the summers pass. But there are the select few whose value stand the test of time. A card of a Quell Victor, like Haymitch Abernathy – those are the rarest. A Victor card of a winner from the single digit Games are pretty hard to come by too. I have a Vulcan Bronzedrop in my deck; not even Train knows that. It's the pride of my collection, despite how I know my best friend would laugh at me for thinking so.

But just as owning cards of the Quell Victors – only two so far – would be like owning the Holy Grail, owning the card of a Victor whose year bookended a Quell… well, that is just as rare. This is evidenced by how the card I now hold in my hands is still in pristine condition. None of the corners have a crease or a rip anywhere. I cradle it in my palms, afraid if I touch it wrong, it will disintegrate into dust.

Autus Router – Victor of the 24th Hunger Games, and District 6's first Victor ever – stares back up at me with a broad grin.

My parents weren't even alive when Autus won, thirty-some years ago, and they had me and my sister young. But my Grandpappy and Nannie used to tell us about what it was like, in the years before the First Quarter Quell. They said that District 6 was cursed in those days. By the time of the Twenty-Fourth, they were the only district in Panem not to have a Victor. And after coming so close several times: a handful of Final Eights. A pair of Top Threes occurring in the 'Teens. And, of course, everyone knows the story of Train's great-uncle – I know folks who still get teary over his loss in a heartbreaker, and shake their fists while cursing Guernsey Hyde's name. Still, the fact remained: until Autus, twenty-three Games had come and gone and all forty-six tributes from District 6 came back dead.

My grandparents and their peers had all thought the Twenty-Fourth would go much the same way when Autus – the largest eighteen-year-old to be conscripted into the arena since Train's great-uncle – was called at the Reaping. Some were hopeful, due to his size and his health (Autus was one of the few teenagers in that time who wasn't addicted to morphling), but many shook their heads. There was no point in hoping. They had gotten their hopes up with their boy in the 5th and look what happened. The cynicism only grew when an emaciated twelve-year-old girl hopped up on dope was selected as Autus's district partner.

For districts who still didn't have a Victor – that would have been us, and also technically District 12 (they still at least had a damn name to read at the Reaping, though their one case apparently up and vanished right after she won) – districts who had more than one champion loaned one of theirs out to help. For years, Districts 5 and 7 had taken turns on the job. The kids in Upper School who take Hunger Games History class say that when Autus comes in to guest lecture, he tells of how Eddison Watts mentored him his year; Acacia Ivy from District 7 coached Bonnet, the girl.

When Autus and Bonnet were launched into the arena, the tributes were astonished by what they found: for the first time in history, the Games were not held in a setting that could be called outdoors.

The arena that year was set in a hollowed-out brick tenement building. Ladders and scaffolding beams lay about. There were holes in the floor. Every single window was blown out.

Beginning at the Bloodbath, District 6 tried to ignore the exciting itch that something felt different about this year. For the first time in…. forever, it seemed, a Cornucopia Bloodbath came and went with neither of our tributes meeting their end. We mostly had Autus to thank for that – he managed to gain a backpack after fighting and killing the girl from 12. Then, he ran, rescuing Bonnet in the process. Autus has said later that the Careers had tried to court him into their crowd due to his size, but he wanted no part of it. Nine tributes would ultimately perish in the opening hour.

The Careers hadn't waited long to go a-hunting. The next morning, they chased the girl from 10 up to the roof of the building and teased her by driving her up to the edge. When they finally did push her off however, the 10 girl yanked the boy from 2 close and held him fast in an embrace, dragging him over the side with her so that both fell to their deaths.

The boy from 2 had been Pack Leader that year, and though the boy from 1 quickly assumed command, the three remaining Careers were sufficiently spooked. They decided to pursue the large boys from 7 and 9, who had formed an alliance. It was common for the Sevens and Nines to team up back then, because apparently two of their Victors were married to each other.

Unfortunately, the 7-9 alliance had found our pair first.

Autus showed no fear as he tussled with them, the large knife he had found in the Cornucopia clutched in his hands. He managed to skewer the boy from 7 and injure the boy from 9 by slicing a hefty gash into his arm, driving him off, but not before Bonnet was callously killed by the alliance for getting in the way. Autus held the little preteen as she died, and a couple hours after she expired, another cannon sounded. When the faces appeared on the walls of the tenement building that night, District 9 was among the fallen. The Careers had found him and finished him off, leaving ten left.

Ten became eight several days later when another alliance, this time the kids from 5 and the girl from 11, brazenly attacked the trio of Careers. The girl from 2 was taken out, but so was the boy from 5 and the survivors scattered. Autus was chased by the boy from 11 across three entire floors, giving all of Six a heart attack for the better part of the eighth day. Our boy only escaped by quickly scaling a ladder into the ceiling scaffoldings and pulling the ladder up behind him. The boy from Eleven left him alone at that point, but only after searching for a rope or way to get up to him, and ran off.

Three mornings after, the Capitol, impatient for bloodshed after only the demise of the boy from 3 in the interim, called a Feast down in the boiler room on the basement floor of the tenement building. Autus stayed where he was up in his scaffolding, but the girls from 5 and 11 took the rickety elevators down to the boiler room and met the Careers for a rematch to claim the best supplies. Clangs of metal and cries of battle ensued, and the girl from One had the red flower of blood bloom across her chest when -

KABOOM!

The Gamemakers blew up the boiler and set much of the room ablaze. The last Career and the girl from 5 were vaporized instantly, and the girl from 11 had her clothes catch fire, but she dove into the elevator and shot it up to the higher floors as the basement level finally pancaked in on itself and the entire building shifted in collapse one level closer to the ground. The whole thing teetered dangerously, but amazingly, the rest of it didn't collapse. The quaking was enough to throw Autus from his ceiling scaffolding, cracking a rib, but he didn't look in danger – yet.

Final Four. Autus, both from 11 and the boy from 12. District 6 held its breath. The girl from 11 eventually died from her burn wounds the afternoon following the Feast. District 6 stayed up all night as they watched the boys from 11 and 12 do battle in a gutted apartment by the light of the full moon. Finally, District 11 tried to shove District 12 through a blown-out window. The kid from the mining district caught himself on the sill just in time, gripping a dangling piece of rope to break his fall. Unfortunately, this tugged the raised window shutter – pointy with glass shards – down on top of him, piercing him through his lungs.

As dawn broke on the twelfth day, District 6 held its breath. Its first Top Two in nineteen years. Would District 11, still trying to catch his breath, go and hunt Autus down for Round 2? Would the luck run dry and the curse continue then?

It happened so fast, everyone nearly missed it. District 11 suddenly seized up and howled in shock as a silver blade went through his back and out his heart. There was a mighty push and the black boy sagged forward, falling through the open window and hitting the pavement fourteen stories down. Autus Router peered down coldly from the window, a bloodied knife in his hands. The trumpets sounded.

Cue pandemonium.

The Sixatrons, our fan club in the Capitol, threw a binging party for a full 72 hours, all the way through Autus's Victory Ceremony. Then they gave him a parade to the train station to see him off for home. District 6 picked up right where the Capitol left off, giving Autus another parade and carrying him away on their shoulders to the now-no-longer-empty Victors' Village, where Tamora Night, a girl who'd had a crush on him for years, kissed him and proposed marriage. She and Autus were married the following spring.

Back under the statue of Autus Router, District 6's very first Victor who broke our curse, I glance up at the face of our initial champion cut from stone and then back down at his face printed on his Victor trading card.

"Can I trade you anything for it?" I ask Train.

"No way, Fender! That's the only one I got!"

"Not even for a Woof Rayon?"

Train's face goes darkly purple upon recalling the Victor from 8 who killed one of ours in the Top Three of the Twelfth, even as he deadpans, "Not on your life."

I show him my Vulcan Bronzedrop card, though, and when he shows off the one he has of Brutus, a trade is done and the cards change hands.