Reaping Day.


In a family of twelve, number and district both, the Reaping is only a waiting game. With the amount of tesserae she was taking out, Aster had been vaguely surprised to make it even past her first year. Not much further than that. The Thirty-Eighth saw a thirteen year old from deep in the Seam stumble dry-mouthed and clammy to the stage. Before she was on the train they'd already given her flat fifty-to-one odds, and the announcers called her Astrid twice. For comfort, her mother told her to keep a brave face and try to die silent.

She still sends her family a sufficient stipend. She doesn't owe them more than that. In her Victor's home, two stories higher than anything out of the slums, she chooses to share with one housemate.

"Murphy." The pale woman bends over the bed, tucking back her daughter's thick brown hair. She always looked more like Aster than she did Conrad, and that's well enough. Every girl in school said a merchant man would always leave for better prospects, though she'd assumed a Victor's stipend would take care of it. Foolish to think it would keep him in bed with her night terrors and the knife sheathed under her pillow. "Up now, Murph. I'm running your bath. Gonna fix us some coffee when you're done, how's that sound?"

The girl yawns wide enough to crack her jaw. "You never give me coffee."

"Well, today's a big day. If you get going and hop into your dress before half past, coffee. Otherwise, zilch."

"Okay. Can we eat at Corazon's place? I want to get spicy chips."

Aster kisses her forehead. "That's gonna take some real hurrying, little girl."

The sound of bare feet patters all the way down the hall, skids on the bath rug, and concludes in a thunk and an eruption of water. Aster winces and smiles. It's hard to stave off the fear about Murphy and Reaping Day, but there are three years left until she's eligible. She's safe for that long. And there's no way in hell that Aster would chance her going in blind. They prep in unsuspicious little ways: expeditions to the meadow, scavenger hunts for safe food, sports and gymnastics at school. They started to rewatch the Games together when Murphy was seven. That girl ran too close to the Cornucopia. She should've gotten away with the little backpack instead, she coached, countering her own queasiness with iron focus. This one is making a fire for the night. You shouldn't risk that when it's late. She thinks she can escape, but she'll never run as fast as the Career pack.

She doesn't give commentary on the Twelve tributes, and Murphy knows enough not to ask. Those ones are coached as well as she and Corazon can manage, sprinkled with small tactical gifts if they make it through the first day, but they always die. Aster's suffered enough to watch them the first time. It isn't worth it to pick them over for their mistakes; it feels like shifting bones she has already buried. Murphy cannot be another of those. The odds for Victors' children are perilous.

She doesn't show Murphy her own Games, either. They'll have to play it in school, and she's not about to keep her home instead, but that isn't something she should hold in her head while Aster's tucking her in at night. She doesn't want to touch her cheek and see her flinch.

This is Aster's twenty-fifth year out, and the wind still ghosts the same through the arc of houses in the Village, all but two of them hollow. And Corazon spends most of her time down at her restaurant anyway. A neighborhood without any neighbors. It's peaceful. In a horrible way, Aster likes the solitude. Sometimes she imagines she is living inside a snowglobe. Shake it once a year, send her to the Capitol, and then she can come home.

She's already set for the Reaping in old slacks, a white button-down, and Conrad's oversized boots, with the laces triple-knotted. The new tributes will be better-dressed than she is. But it's Twelve, and nobody will care. The morning sheds a gray, amorphous light that washes everyone out to forgettable anyway. She brews coffee while she listens to the rampant sloshing a floor above her.

Murphy doesn't know how to swim, she thinks, and jumps when she scalds her hand on the side of the kettle. The steam is rising busily. She runs her hand under cold water and hesitantly pats it dry. It's red, but not too swollen. By the time Murphy is down in her yellow dress and kneesocks, coffee and cream are waiting in canteens at the table.

"I thought we'd work on these suckers while we walk. Wanna feed the dogs real quick?"

Murphy enjoys dumping scraps into the bowls by the back door. The cats can generally hunt for themselves, but for Reaping Day, Aster has left them whole fish.

"When I get home this year, I'm going to see if I can get us a pool, and I'll teach you to do laps," she says on their way out.

Crunching through the gravel, with wet strips of hair batting at her ears, Murphy nods agreeably. She's taken to her treat like a squirrel to nuts. "I could do that pretty well. Mr. Duringham says I'm the most flexible kid in my grade, girls and boys. And I can beat most of them at the climbing rope, so my strength's keeping up too."

Childhood in terms of statistics, running counts, dodgeball rounds treated with deadly seriousness, analyzing the Games at night instead of spending time with friends. Adults praise her maturity level. They've got no real idea. It's not much of a way to grow up, and it can't seriously put her on a level with the upper districts. But Aster's not planning to let the best thing that ever happened to her die on the end of some goddamned harpoon.

Three years. Then six years. Then they can't hurt her. She's always kept her head down. She's good.

For now, Aster abides.


The prices are the most affordable in the district, and she'll often as not serve mining families on credit, to be paid if they ever come up with spare coins in the wallet. Often as not, they won't. It doesn't hurt Corazon to smudge their names off the tab. It's easy to believe she's too much a coward to come and collect.

Corazon isn't stupid, though. When she adopted, one by one, Willa and Gregor and Davies were seventeen. She wasn't going to live with their throats bared. They came from the same orphanage that raised her. People can say a lot of things about Corazon — sullen, superstitious, backhanded — but nobody can say she forgets her roots.

For the Quarter Quell, nobody else forgot hers either.

"You look handsome." Seated at the bright cedar countertop, Aster startles and turns. Corazon scrapes coal dust onto the doormat. "I remember somebody kicking those boots up on my table like butter wouldn't melt in 'em."

Aster smirks and flushes faintly. "Conrad never learned a lot of manners, for a man from town."

"He knew exactly what he was about. When miners came in for lunch break, I could see him drawing himself up real high. 'Look at all these guttersnipes.'"

"It wasn't that bad."

"'Look at these smudgy, slap-faced bastards. I think I'll get water and plain rice every time I come in here, just to be sure nobody tampered with it. Also, I think I'll try to stick my last name on my wife, who is a public figure and a Victor. I am just that important.' Did any of my guttersnipes take your order yet?"

"Yes, Gregor's got it. And Murphy is running around here...somewhere...with spicy chips." A faint look of alarm is cast around the quiet wood-paneled facility. Patrons are stationed here and there, taking what good they can from a morning off, but there's no wiry kid to be seen. "I told her not to go upstairs and spill over your things."

"A little curry's not going to do anything to my carpet that hasn't been did already." The older woman slides around the edge of the counter, pops down a tin pot, and perfunctorily starts on a fresh round of spiced tea. Cheek in hand, Aster watches her mentor with a distracted cast to her eyes.

"Don't go off the bend and drink this year."

Aster twitches back, betrayed. "I haven't-"

"Since the Fifty-Ninth? That could be so. I think it's so, or you've been keeping it from me very well. But it's not going to be that easy to keep it from your daughter. She doesn't need to see you come home and wax off again. Three days on the couch. She had to pound on my door and get me over there to drag you into a bath when you sicked yourself." Corazon's preparation never halts. She mixes dried leaves and petals and spices into the canister, grinding them with the butt of a knife. Leaning into the rhythmic motion. Her long grayed hair is pulled into a plain chignon that leaves a couple of curls loose to sway by her face. Willa helped her put it up. "Don't do that to her again. Or to my poor back."

Aster is checking on the other patrons, side to side, but Corazon's been quiet, and District Twelve, whatever you can say about it, has got a sense of discretion. Small spots of color burn in Aster's face. "I'm clean."

"Good. I'm trusting I won't need to press you about it." A stream of water raises fragrance from the spices. She rests a hand on Aster's shoulder. There's reluctance, but she allows it. "The tributes are going to die anyway-"

"Cora..."

"-no matter how guilty you do or don't get. And they're going to live on in something." Aster doesn't meet her eyes. The tightness in her brows is all the argument they've had before this, and there's no point raising it again. "The coil doesn't break. Understand? It twists, and frays, but it does not break. There is no end to this coil."

"I won't be bothered if they take away Murphy and spray her intestines across my screen, then. She's going to be a bird when she wakes up."

"Never said you aren't to be bothered. Value the time you've got with her. Every year of it. Gregor, I can take that. Thankya, dear." Corazon receives the bowl of flat, floury bread and yellow grain. After a diagnostic sniff, she stirs in a decent glob of hot sauce, and hands it to Aster.

"Don't quit on us," Aster says, tipping her bowl until the meal nearly edges over the top. A soft tide of pearly Nine flour, afforded on Corazon's Victor pension, and never made even by the meagre earnings she can get from Twelve. She does this on her own choice, for the district that spurned the orphan of loyalist watchdogs. They broke rebel cover during the Nineteenth and died for it by a faceless storm of mining picks. Not contented, it took until the Twenty-Fifth for them to send the thin, bleak girl to where they could not have imagined she'd return. "Don't think it's all right to 'twist your coil' and leave us behind."

"And leave Gregor manning my restaurant?" The faux outrage brings out a laugh contained in Aster's dimples. "The prices he'd gouge. Run it right into the ground. Guess neither of us better be heading out early."

Murphy's footsteps pound across the floor above them, shouldering straight through doors as far as Corazon can tell. The smell of breakfast airs through the restaurant, with the steam of chai tea beginning to cut through.

"I gave her coffee for the first time today." Aster looks ready to duck as the footsteps pour toward the staircase. "I'm realizing that might've been preempted-"

"What's the harm?" Corazon trickles brown sugar into her drink. "Everybody used to be a kid."


(I hope everyone's healthy and keeping safe out there. Wash your hands, my friends. Somehow we're going to make it through this.)