One night before Reaping Day.


"Sir, you need to sit down while the train is approaching the station."

Long-shift workers sway dully together with the rocking of the bullet train. It's an old, regular heartbeat th-thump that most of them have been familiar with for years. Those are the ones able to sleep under their hats. When their station arrives, the men and women will rise in a profoundly quiet, shuffling wave, turned on automatic, like their springs have been wound by miles and miles of th-thump, th-thump. Caps settle flat over thinning pates again. The handlers move their crates. The wheels are never properly oriented on their carts, and the noise turns to a disorienting massed drumbeat as they push down the ramps into the cargo holds: thud-THUD-THUD-thud.

"Sir! For your safety, sit down. We're coming to an abrupt stop."

A few apathetic eyes turn toward the altercation by the left of the unloading door. Most just save their energy. The only sleep they'll get on this thirty-six hour cycle is between districts, and it's a long time before they'll be home...district-bound workers get their day off tomorrow, but even for the Reaping, essential goods don't slow down.

The peacekeeper gets hold of the absent, baggy-eyed man's shoulder and turns it hard. The baton on her hip is matte black in the rattling orange light of the boxcar. "Down. Now."

Lorne Møllesten had not actually heard her instructions before this point, and he shakes himself to it, alarmed by his drifted alertness. "I'm so sorry. I think I was asleep. Lose my own head next, I guess-'

"Just get down." The keen visor of her helmet turns away when she gets the latest notice from her earpiece. "District Six in four hundred metres. In three hundred metres. In two hundred metres."

Lorne has hastily pressed himself into the metal seatback behind him. The lurch of the slowing train knocks everyone forward, a collective shove by the form-fitting inertial hand. The tanned younger man at the end of the line to his right has got his arms looped around the seatback in a cunning way, and he isn't thrown so hard. He spares a chuckle and a bump for Lorne, once the peacekeeper's cleared off to rendezvous in the next car. "New on the line?"

"Oh, yes. Being from Nine. It's been all grain, not trains, right? Haha. I'm Ernie Reznick," he quavers, tucking his head like a tortoise's as the car judders to a halt. A splitting screech, and one more bump before a dead silence that interrupts the easy rhythm the train had provided them. Safe in the smog-drowned tureen of Six shipment land.

"Ernie Reznick. Sork Milhouse," the guy returns, swinging himself to his feet without offering any assistance. He clasps his hands over his head as two peacekeepers enter for the pre-check. Neither of them are the first woman with the baton. Lorne limply follows suit after Sork, linking his pudgy fingers overhead. "Let me put you to a few guesses, and if I'm right by the third one, you gotta buy us all breakfast when we hit break in Twelve."

"Don't take that up with another poor fella. There's not a lot of guesses," mutters the worker to his left, a stout hydrant-shaped woman with tufts of strawlike hair sprouting in every direction.

"You can shut it, Rie," he says amiably, and she jerks around with her lips pushed into a bud. "Now what about it, old man?"

Lorne shrugs, with gentle blue hangdog eyes mostly fixed on the peacekeepers moving through the line from the left side. "Shoot."

"You got transferred on account of...traumatic industrial death in the family." Sork sweeps his tongue across the front of his teeth.

"Ooh. Haha. Sorry, try again."

"No? Too grim. That's okay. Let's do a wide shot. You got transferred on penal contract...because a buddy of yours got caught for being in the seditious way."

Rie makes a warning hiss like a punctured balloon, and Lorne can't resist the eyebrow raise this time at the balls on him. The prosthetic piece that reforms his forehead wrinkles up, itching his hairline.

"Nuh-uh, not at all." He shakes his head decidedly. "My buddies would never get caught with nothing like that."

The peacekeepers are most of the way down the line. Rie will be up in two, and then Lorne. Sork has the presence to hush his voice by a hair. "Yeah, you're a real patriot, Ernie. Don't think I'm out — here's my last go. You have obviously gotten yourself transferred...on account of a debt you couldn't pay off."

The peacekeeper jabs the needle into Rie's thumb and presses her blood print onto his database, waiting for it to process. His foot taps impatiently. Bump-BUMP-BUMP-bump.

"Their handheld shit never works the first time," Sork whispers, grinning like a cold skull backlit in reddish-orange. He is waiting on Lorne's answer like there is nothing more pressing to do tonight than rag on the buddies for a bit. "Couple weeks ago, they scanned a woman. Read A-OK the first time. Then their database glitched at the end of the line. Had to redo everyone. Flagged her the second time. She was posing as her twin sister. Blood was the same, but the thumbprint was bad. Real patriot like you's got nothing to worry about, Ernie, right? You sweating on your neck right there?"

Rie gets a double beep and a green light. Lorne brings his hands down from his head. He stretches his thumb out as taut as the tendons will go, tightening the pliable prosthetic layer to his skin. The needle goes in deep. He can feel it push against the slick layer that separates the fake from his real thumb, but it holds firm. He presses the small, punctured point hard against the database to well up the tiny blood reservoir.

A stall. The peacekeeper swears and smacks the back of the device. It turns out two beeps. Green. Ernie Reznick, District Nine citizen.

Sork has gone curiously silent while the peacekeeper moves on to him. Lorne smiles peaceably. "It's a powerful bad debt, it is. But I guess I'm putting that first pay on the breakfast. Haha."

"Don't bother that much about it. All the food's shit in Twelve." Sork shakes out his hand and crosses his arms. The workers are moving through the gate in staggered clumps now, under the stark floodlights of the station towers that illuminate every polluted drift in the air. Sour District Six petrol smell rolls in like food poisoning on a bad leg of groosling. It's been exactly the same since Lorne's hushed, perfunctory Victory Tour all that time ago, but for 'Ernie,' he breathes a shocked gasp of it, wrinkling his lumpy red nose.

"I have to say I don't much care for this," he says, marching short-legged through the oil-churned mud like a steadfast bull terrier. Rie smiles a little, though she doesn't turn around. "I hope Three'll be nice, I do. I heard it's circuitry everywhere. Buildings covered in wire! Holo-pictures in the sidewalk that turn colors when you walk on them."

"They only got those sidewalks outside the university. We aren't taking supplies up to there this time. But you'll see 'em on a few shifts, anyhow," Rie consoles. "They're really something at these hours."

Lorne has seen 'em. Pascale took him up to the university when he was a boy, on that Victory Tour that spelled no Victory, after he'd already been rammed through eight districts of fear and bleakness and the brutal, obvious effects of shutdowns — after what he'd seen in Eleven. The Nineteenth is not remembered for its Games that year. But Pascale, five years his senior with the palest, oldest eyes he'd ever seen in a person, took him to those tall silver spires to see the circuitry, and the clever computer intelligence that could answer all his questions, and she showed him how to play a holo-game about fighters in space. And she talked to him, while the goggles and helmets were on, because she'd fed a loop through the mouthpiece bugs. She talked to him about so many things, all couched in innocent commentary about the game and its space empire and its dissidents. She wasn't talking about Thirteen yet. But that came in time, with enough innocent conversation. She had to know if he was empire or dissident.

Ernie Reznick was a loyal citizen of Nine. Proud empire man. No living family, no complications. Lorne had been scoping him out for months. He arranged the blood, the thumbprint replicas, the shaped prosthetics. The real Ernie Reznick had to be removed for Lorne to play his part, unfortunately. But it will be for a good purpose. It was a necessity. There was no other possible time, and no other means, for Lorne to drop off the face of Panem. For him to reach Thirteen. He will pay off the powerful debt that he owes to Ernie Reznick there.

For Ernie, anyway, who never saw the colors outside the university, Lorne blows air through his lips and shakes his head with wonder. "I could just imagine that. Why don't you let me pick up that breakfast in Twelve? I bet there's plenty I could hear about what you've seen on this rail, there is."

"Things you're not like to believe," Rie unveils with great gravity. Lorne smiles with Ernie's yellow-capped teeth and follows along with her.

At the end of the Six supply run, in two hours, another set of workers boards for the beginning of their thirty-six. They are in a different car, and Lorne can't catch any of their faces, which wouldn't be much difference anyway. He doesn't know what Gill's own Ernie looks like.

In Three, they do not see the colorful sidewalks around the university, but Pascale boards near the front to tend the engine, rather than passing as a cargo handler. She always had more of an ego. Besides the fact that she's the oldest and brittlest of them.

In Eight, Lorne crashes into a young woman passing through the station, apologizing incessantly while she helps him up and apologizes at a rate to outdo him. When they part, Chenil has the tiny slip of paper concealed on her person. 13 is a go. The morning hours are bleeding in quite quickly now, and it will not be too long before the Reaping. But she walks casually out of the station, if wincing a little. There are cameras everywhere. Lorne doesn't look back.

In Twelve, Lorne buys breakfast for Rie and a couple of others he's chattered with, although Sork does not join. Lorne buys generously with Ernie's paycheck. He likes being Ernie. It's easy to chatter as this old, silly man, to be doleful, gentle, wistful, naïve. Ernie doesn't know a lot, and he'll trust others to tell him how things are. He doesn't mind when he's the butt of a joke. He's forgiving. He covers for Rie's exhausted water break without asking for anything back. Ernie is nothing like Lorne. When the workers ask him, with the sun of Reaping Day coming up on dust-strewn Twelve, if he will be following the Games, he has a simple answer for them.

"I'll watch 'em, oh yes. I got to watch. They're watching my television set, and they'll know, all right," he asides, with a big comical glance around the area. Probably nobody in this little curry place is about to dash out for the peacekeepers, who equally can't be buggered to do anything about it. Lorne taps on the rim of his mug. "But I don't follow 'em, to cheer about the killings or any kind of thing. I don't see why I should. I think..." Ernie's mocked-up face frowns, representing the clear process of chipping scattered pebbles of thought together to find a spark. Lorne could give them the rebels' speech. He could shout for them to wake up, get UP, if enough of you fought back, they couldn't stop all of you. Lorne would feel no guilt in gripping Rie's stolid shoulders until they bruised black, hammering the statistics and the atrocities into her. You're blind and you're content being blind. Is the Rebellion worth it for people like you? You won't care about any difference if we take Snow down. You'll go on working like this. You don't know how to do anything else. I've done so many things just to make it here, this far, on this day, to get into Thirteen for good. To do the rest of the work to save you...

Ernie shrugs dolefully, stirring another lump of sugar into his tea. "Just seems like an awful shame is all, I guess. Oh! Thank you, young fella."

One of Corazon's kids brings his Lorne his plate of eggs. He's grateful for the fact that Corazon isn't in the restaurant yet. They were only six years apart. There would have been a chance that she'd look too curiously at him. She's not in on this by any means. Not the loyalists' daughter. Not the girl who hid in that fine merchants' house while her mother and father turned in the Twelve agents who had infiltrated the Capitol. During the very time that Lorne was struggling for his life in his arena, hoping and believing in a rebel miracle.

Lorne doesn't forgive like Ernie would.

He separates from Rie and the group as they slug back toward the train, apologizing, making them promise that they won't leave without him. Haha. He just needs to use the little boy's outhouse. It's this old bladder, doesn't even warn him beforehand anymore...

Even on Reaping Day, the fence isn't charged. Panem bless District Twelve. He hurries out through the meadow, giddy with shift exhaustion, with sleeplessness, with nerves. Suppose a wildcat should come by and eat him in the forest after all of this. The possibility seems remote. Ridiculous. But he travels quietly. He knows Gill and Pascale will be following behind him.

There is a contact out here who will get all of them to Thirteen. Lorne will not see another district again for years. It may be that he will not live to the completion of the final Rebellion. He might never see his Victors in person again. His brilliant Milah and Zachary.

They will have to go it on their own from here. They will have to work very hard and terribly quickly. They'll learn.

He walks for a long time into the forest, an old man in an even older man's skin, but when he sees the silver flag between the leaves, he starts to run, as if all the weights have fallen off his feet.