Around the time of the Reaping for the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games

Narrow isn't broad, and Thirteen is not abroad.

That was what went through Decius' mind as he sat in his office, sorting smuggled documents. It had already been years since the day when he had hopped on that train from the Capitol to Six, armed with nothing but a book from a restricted floor of the university library and the knowledge of who to contact to get to Thirteen from there.

In hindsight, it was completely idiotic. As if one person and one book about the Tokyo Trial of all things meant anything in the grand scheme of things. Noticing his interest, he had been pushed to emigrate. Go abroad. Move to a place where he could spend his time researching and writing and attending conferences and begging for grants. But Decius had already abandoned his circle in the Capitol by defecting to Thirteen instead of staying to continue to spy, as he had promised. He didn't want to abandon Panem by fleeing abroad, as many others did.

Decius had thought he'd hate Thirteen, but he had grown to love the careful orderliness. He loved that his schedule was printed for him on his arm - no more messy notations in marker to do this or that. He loved the archives. He loved feeling like he was doing something, anything, to help Panem. He loved that everyone got three proper meals per day. He loved volunteering in the daycare and in the new-citizen classes, and he had loved the kids he had gone through basic training with, even if he had loathed basic training. He loved his wife Miryam, the daughter of defectors from Two and a statistician. As much as he loved her, though in a different way, he loved his two colleagues.

Latreya and Chee were both born-and-raised Thirteen but couldn't have been any more different from each other if they had tried. Latreya was stoic and careful. Chee...wasn't. They were the most irreverent person in the entire District, or at least that was what it seemed like to him. The two were both legal historians, and they were the only people who had reacted when Decius had showed off his book for the first time at the meeting of the historical association.

After the endless anxiety of wondering if the National Committee of Internal Affairs was after him, Thirteen was refreshingly boring. He had been so glad when basic was finally over. It seemed a waste that they had sent him, a middle-aged historian, to go be beaten up by fourteen-year-old children when he had the archives to deal with. But that was Thirteen for you. Miryam was currently romping through the woods on a retraining exercise that would go until next week.

Today would be the same day as always. Unlike before, though, the prospect of endless identical days stretching out before him didn't scare him. Ever since he was sixteen and spending his evenings complaining about the government with his elderly great-aunt, he had lived in fear of the wrong person overhearing, and now, he didn't even remember what it was like to be afraid of a knock at the door. And now, he knew exactly what he was working for. Thirteen supported all sorts of opposition movements all across Panem, and soon enough, one of them would topple the regime.

Though that would not be tomorrow, that was for sure. Decius looked up from the list of purchases and sighed, wondering why he was wasting his time on this. He couldn't see how propaganda could be made from a list of medical supplies bought by a hospital in Six. It was, of course, highly revealing when one compared it to similar lists from Capitol hospitals, but not quite what Coin wanted.

"Guess what's in the news today?" Chee asked as they put down their newspaper. The irreverent historian's short wavy hair was sticking out in all directions. As soon as Decius' basic had ended, he had regrown the crown of braids he had worn before.

"War," Latreya said dryly. Her own coily hair was extremely short and perfectly neat, as befitting a proper Thirteen patriot, but she had nothing but fondness for her transgressive colleague. Decius had quickly befriended the two, as they were all legal historians with a similar interest, and when Coin had ordered the creation of a documentary database from smuggled documents that could be used in agitation, the three of them had been assigned to the same office.

Chee rolled their eyes. "That's obvious. Something else?" They opened the newspaper again. Once a week or so, foreign newspapers were delivered to Thirteen, but few were interested in them. Those who were tended to leave Thirteen and go abroad.

Latreya sighed, attaching a slip of blue paper to a scan of a document with a paperclip. They were drowning in documents, most of them useless, and there were few people who could go through them, categorizing and summarizing. "So, what's going on in the world?" she asked.

"Glad you asked." Chee perused an article. "The government of Yakutsk was overthrown by a shaman-"

"What?" Decius and Latreya asked in unison. Northern Asia was a confusing mess in general, with huge swathes of territory whose borders were constantly being contested. This, however, was something new. "How did that happen?" Latreya asked.

Chee stared at his newspaper. "All it says was that the shaman got angry at corruption and hiked from his town to Yakutsk to, and I quote, 'chase out the unclean spirits that reside in the government'. Supporters joined him along the way, and it ended with a peaceful overthrow of the government." They chuckled quietly. "Maybe we should invite the shaman over. There's no shortage of corruption here."

Decius didn't laugh. Nobody was willing to help Panem as long as Snow did not try to invade anyone's economic interests. Thirteen's northern neighbours, though mostly the relatively powerful Eight Nations, sent in food and other supplies in exchange for the arms and armaments that made Thirteen famous the world over, and that was it. "I wonder how that went," he mused. He still couldn't imagine people being allowed to just go from one town to another, even after years in Thirteen where all you had to do to leave was sign off.

"Must have been amazing," Chee said. "We really need one of our own. They can go stand in the middle of the City Circle, hit a drum, and drive out Snow." Chee only knew what the City Circle looked like from photos.

Latreya set aside yet another document and shook her head. "I don't think religious leaders are going to be what it takes."

"I'll take whatever I can get," Chee insisted. They looked up at the ceiling and sighed. "I want to go outside," they complained.

"We're all going outside tomorrow."

"I'd even take military training," Chee said, glancing at Decius, whose retraining would be in a few months. He was already dreading it.

"No, you wouldn't."

Decius refocused on the list of medication in front of him, but he could not summon up within him the motivation to care. He forcefully reminded himself of the importance of even such innocuous documents and managed to concentrate for a little while. Tom Lamont, who was in charge of the archives, always upbraided them for constantly getting distracted.

What good would it do them to know that some small-town hospital had no ventilators? What they really needed was either something that would get people all over the country to rise up at once or extreme political instability (or international intervention, which would never happen). Decius knew it was horrible to wish for natural disasters massive enough to send the entire country into famine, but that was the only thing he could think of that would motivate people in every District to rise up simultaneously.

"Thumeka? It's starting!"

Yemurai's voice startled Thumeka out of her solitaire-playing. Glad to have a legitimate excuse to not work on that article, she ran to the living room and flopped into her wife's arms. It wasn't every day that a video from Panem appeared.

"So horrible horrors on television and you come running, but my parents are calling, and suddenly you have work?" Yemurai teased her as a newscaster explained the basics of what Panem was.

"Of course, sugar-stick." Thumeka was a foreign correspondent for one of Zimbabwe's largest newspapers. For the past six years, she had been in England, covering the civil war and then the equally violent aftermath. By some miracle, she had gotten two weeks of vacation, and was spending them at home.

It was thanks to Panem that Thumeka was a correspondent in the first place. As a teenager, she had been fascinated by the most isolationist country in the world, going so far as to learn English. That had grown into an interest in the wider world in general, resulting in her choosing to study journalism.

A video of two people pushing a cart of firewood down an unpaved road appeared on screen. "This," a voiceover said as Thumeka wrapped Yemurai's arms around herself, "is not a poor village. This is the outskirts of Panem's capital city."

Thumeka leaned over, trying to absorb every little bit of the image. The people appeared to be on the older side, a man and a woman - maybe a couple. They were both skinny and wore brightly coloured T-shirts and shorts, as well as flip-flops. The man was very pale and had a kerchief wrapped around his head, the woman was light-brown and had short grey hair. They looked dusty and were obviously very poor. It was agonizing to watch them from her comfortable couch, to know that right that moment people were suffering and she was watching television like nothing at all was amiss. It was so bitterly unfair. On assignment, Thumeka focused on doing her job, but going back home always reminded her that she had a home to return to and the people she was leaving behind were stuck with what they had.

The apartment Thumeka and Yemurai owned had a bedroom, a living room, a bathroom with running water, electricity, and air conditioning. Yemurai had never had to fear for her life beyond nearly getting run over by a careless driver once. There were people out there who would have given anything for such comfort and security, but they were stuck and Thumeka's government was doing nothing to help them. Like the Panemian cart-pushers who had to gather firewood to heat their homes and boil water.

The cart was dilapidated. It had three wheels and got stuck in every crack and crevice in the bumpy road. Thumeka watched the two people struggle to lift it up without spilling the firewood. Along the road were battered fences in front of small houses. The camera followed the two people as they walked, and three children squatting on the ground and playing with toys appeared in the frame. The children wore only brightly-coloured shorts, they were barefoot and bare-headed.

Thumeka wondered who had filmed this. The camera zoomed in on the children, not losing image quality - was this perhaps an amateur videographer who had blown all their money on a nice camera? Once, it would have been impossible for Thumeka to imagine people in Panem just living their lives, but her foreign assignments had taught her that people were people everywhere. Even in Panem, people had hobbies.

Clearly responding to a command, the children got up and scattered to their houses. The videographer turned around, showing the inside of the house. The only sign of modern technology was a small television in the corner. For a second, a large framed portrait of Coriolanus Snow appeared in the frame. The heavy gilt was out of place next to peeling wallpaper and tattered curtains.

"Honey? What are you doing?"

Thumeka nearly leapt into the air at hearing English, even if the accent was very different from what she was familiar with. The speaker sounded to be male and young.

"Hush, Nereus, I'm filming," a young woman said. The conversation was subtitled so that everyone else could follow it.

A man - Nereus - appeared in the frame. He was short and thin, with beige skin, rectangular glasses, and receding black hair. "Aw, come on, I'm not even dressed." He was wearing an undershirt tucked into tattered trackies.

"Not my fault you can't even get dressed for the Reapings." Having the word 'Reapings' be translated in the captions at the bottom of the screen gave Thumeka whiplash - in Shona, the word made her think of the harvest. Only in English did that word have that surreal second meaning, and only to those who studied Panem.

At that moment, a child barrelled into the room, tiny and covered in dust. It was one of the ones who had been playing in the street just minutes ago. Thumeka noticed that the wooden floor was painted a sort of rusty orange and covered with a threadbare carpet. The pattern of the carpet looked perfectly normal. More carpets hung on the walls, doubtlessly to keep the heat in during the winter.

The furniture was old, with peeling paint. The child climbed on the couch and sat curled into a ball. "Mommy, why are you filming?"

"I want to record the Reapings."

"But why?"

"Because."

The child was small enough to be mollified by that. The three sat down and began to watch the television, an outdated boxy contraption that stood on a little cushion. The videographer zoomed in so that little could be seen other than the propaganda. Thumeka had already seen several videos of the selection of children for the so-called Hunger Games, but this was the first viewpoint from the capital. She watched the proceedings, taking note of how everyone was dressed. The camera made sure to focus only on the well-fed faces, but Thumeka could catch their errors that snuck into the frame. That child wore rags. That child was clearly starving to death. Despite being eighteen years old at the most, these children had already been beaten down by the mines, factories, and sweatshops of Panem's District One.

In One, there were two volunteers. Brainwashed into seeking death, the eighteen-year-olds stepped forward for the sake of total strangers. Thumeka had to respect them for that even as her heart was torn apart by pity. She certainly would never have given her life for a stranger.

"Drat. Battery's low. I'll be back in a sec." The video stopped.

The announcer came back to explain that the video had been taken the day Shangari and Nereus Zhao had defected with their child into the unpatrolled areas between Districts, getting in touch with locals and eventually crossing the Panama strait in a smuggler's boat. They were currently safe in Venezuela.

"Horrible," Yemurai said weakly, clutching Thumeka's arm with her hands.

"I suppose so," Thumeka said.

"How can this go on? I'm not even talking about the escapees. That entire thing with the so-called 'Hunger Games-'" she used the English words for the term "-I don't understand how you can research that." Yemurai wiped her eyes and rested her head on Thumeka's shoulder.

After that one excavation of a mass grave in England (not to mention being shot at), this was nothing - and yet, Thumeka knew what would happen next, and it sickened her. Here she was, on an entirely different continent, knowing exactly what was going to happen - and doing nothing, because there was nothing she could do. Having grown up in a free country, she didn't know what it was like to go through something like this. How did Panemians cope? How could they watch this without falling into despair or doing something suicidal?

It hurt Thumeka to think that this could go on for many decades yet. District Thirteen, the underground city-state, claimed they needed a couple of years at most, but from her vantage point, Thumeka saw no reason to be optimistic.

The Reaping was the same as always. Volunteers from One, Two, and Four - check. Terrified children from the other Districts? Check. Leon was hardly a Games fan, but he had picked up enough through osmosis to know that an older sibling volunteered perhaps once every five years or so. You couldn't live in the Capitol without just knowing some things.

As a child, Leon had wondered why more older siblings didn't volunteer. He had wondered if Marcellus, who was three years older than him, would have volunteered if they lived in the Districts. But he was an adult now, and he knew full well that it was a rare teenager who was willing to basically step in front of a gun for their sibling. It was strange that he was only twenty-three and already felt like the eighteen-year-old Tributes were children, but he couldn't stop feeling like people old enough to be his younger siblings were actually young enough to be his children.

The Reapings over, the channel the television had been showing changed to self-congratulatory ministerial speeches. Leon reached for the remote, but his father got there first. He changed the channel to one where Lark, the country's most noxious television personality and the 'evening loudmouth' was loudmouthing as always, this time, about the significance of the Games. Leon wasn't sure if he was supposed to believe that the Games were an honour or a punishment. He believed whatever was expected of him at the moment, of course, but it was better to know what to say in advance.

"Really?" Marcellus snapped from his perch on the top of the couch, feet next to Leon. His brother was an elementary-school teacher who parroted propaganda during the day and exploded furiously in the evenings. "Come on, Dad, there's better things to watch." Leon winced - he hated it when his brother went on like that. What did he think it would achieve? Things were fine, more or less, and here he was practically asking for them to be worse.

"Mind your tone," Dad snapped, setting the remote aside. Dad was a dishwasher at an upscale restaurant and kept an odd schedule, so he was often tired on days off. "And don't speak like that."

The walls were porous, of course, but Marcellus always spoke too quietly for the neighbours to hear. "Look, I'll have to go out there tomorrow and lie to the kids - let me say what I want here, at least."

"Maybe you shouldn't have become a teacher, then," Mom said worriedly, tapping her fingers against the couch and glancing around - ever since Anna-Ray Fields had been strung up at her workstation for theft, she had been twitchy. Mom, like Leon, was an unskilled worker at an oxygen factory the television never showed. It was always the poshest and most upscale neighbourhoods - according to Marcellus, that was on purpose, so that the Districts didn't know a third of the Capitol proper was industrial workers and most of the rest were office workers. Leon wasn't sure how that made any sense, but who knew.

Mom had taught herself to program from books, but every time they tried to save up the fee for the licensing exam, something went wrong and their ascent to the middle class in truth and not just in Marcellus' imagination was stopped again. It could have been worse. Most of Leon's friends had zero savings whatsoever.

Marcellus had finished ten grades and gone to college. Leon himself had dropped out after sixth grade, like almost everyone he knew. He regretted it now, but it was too late. Marcellus hated it when anyone brought up that his brother was an unskilled factory worker. He didn't want to be 'the good child', not when he had simply been lucky enough to be the eldest. Leon was grateful to his brother for that. It stung enough that he was 'hey, you!' and Marcellus was 'Mr. Shim' - had he tried to hold that over Leon's head, it'd have been unbearable.

"You're the one who told me it was the most affordable," Marcellus reminded her.

"We could have taken out more loans," Mom said. They had just finished paying off the micro-loan they had taken out to buy Dad new winter boots when his had fallen apart completely. Some of their friends took out loans to repay previous loans they had taken out to pay rent or buy groceries, and since all the payday-loan places were controlled by Peacekeeper generals, they were at constant risk of being pressured into enlisting, spending twenty years in the middle of nowhere, and coming back with five chronic illnesses. At least with Marcellus' college debt, they were able to meet their installment payments without too many problems. Though that was why they needed to take out loans to buy boots.

"Oh, so now you tell me we could have." Marcellus crossed his arms on his chest. "Look, I can't watch this."

"And if someone knocks?"

Marcellus rolled his eyes. "Is it illegal to go to the bathroom now?"

"Marcellus, you are far too old to treat this as a joke," Mom said, glancing at the portrait of Snow that hung on the wall. Despite the half-serious rumours that there was a camera behind every portrait, Leon knew full well that there was only ancient wallpaper there. He had checked himself, when he was five.

Dad changed the channel with a huff. On the screen, an analyst was going into detail about the Tributes from Twelve. Leon wasn't sure what merited the attention. So they were not on the verge of starvation this year - as if that was something they wanted everyone to discuss!

Marcellus, of course, decided to discuss just that. "Twelve's are decent this year," he said. "Though it's an outrage that this is what passes for decent." The girl didn't look decent, she looked extremely stunted and scrawny and much younger than her already very young sixteen years, but she did look better than the average Tribute - Leon tried not to think about that too much. The boy, too, had the same physique as Leon at that age, and every last Uncle Bob had fretted over how skinny he had been back then.

"The boy from Eleven also looks not too bad," Leon suggested. Thresh McCormack had a very youthful face that made him look younger than his eighteen years.

"No," Marcellus said. "He's smaller than me, and I think he's underweight. Mom, where's the calculator?"

Mom spread her hands out. "Isn't it at school?" Every school in the Capitol and probably ever shook down parents and teachers to pay for everything from pencils to curtains to heating. In poor schools, parents couldn't pay, with obvious results.

Marcellus grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil and did the calculation that way. Leon envied his brother his knowledge. Leon was hardly stupid himself, he read books every day and worked the library better than all his family members put together, but he did lack the academic kind of skills, like calculating what it meant that the electricity was now three percent more expensive. "Alright, if that thing's correct and he's a metre seventy-nine and fifty-eight kilograms, his body mass index is eighteen point one. Which makes him underweight, if not by much - if not for the Games, he'd have achieved a normal body weight with age, when his metabolism slowed."

Like them - Leon was still decidedly stick-shaped (and only a metre sixty-five - he blamed Mom's biological parents), but Marcellus, only a few years older and a very unfair twenty centimetres taller, looked like he could be ten years older than him.

"But he won't," Leon said softly. Sure, McCormack was bigger than most of his competition - and what? Going by his good clothes and well-nourished face, he was probably the son of decently well-off independent farmers or some kind of junior managers of the great estates, he knew nothing about fighting and surviving. Maybe if he got lucky and the Arena had a familiar climate, he'd recognize a few edible plants, but the farms the television showed were acres upon acres of rice or whatever, not the sort of place where you could learn the difference between puffballs and destroying angels. And if he was from a city - well, Leon could gather chanterelles and raspberries, and that was pretty much it.

"Boys, enough," Dad said, changing the channel to news from the fields. "Marcellus, if you really want, I heard just before the Reapings that there was a delivery of the good bologna to Asden's and-"

Marcellus leapt to his feet, put on his sandals, and ran out the door hat in hand. When deficit goods were delivered, speed was of the essence, and Marcellus' pretensions at being too good to queue in a working-class neighbourhood (as if the queues were any shorter in middle-class neighbourhoods, the pensioners less tenacious, and the cashiers - politer) disappeared when the good bologna finally graced the neighbourhood with its presence for the first time since three weeks ago.

Leon and his parents watched the program about how the 'soup set' - potatoes, onions, carrots, cabbage, and beets - was now five cents per kilogram cheaper. Usually, when the television said something like that, Marcellus could be counted on to recite every time that carrots became more expensive to no government fanfare, or to complain that meat was being considered a luxury even though it was the best source of protein, which children needed to not end up Leon-sized (he didn't actually say that but Leon could hear the subtext that the increased costs his existence had caused, and thus the poorer diet, was the real reason Leon was so short), but Mom and Dad stared silently at the television.

Leon preferred the silence. Sometimes, he worried that Marcellus would say the wrong thing at the wrong time and they'd all be shot. Was life really so bad that he had to complain all the time? That girl from Twelve looked half-dead, and Leon was willing to bet she worked sixteen hours a day in the mines they had there with no complaints.

Still, Leon couldn't help but wonder how people in the Districts were coping right now. Sure, the price of onions was extremely important, but that didn't matter to these kids anymore. Leon felt almost a little bit bad that the rumours the potato harvest would fail and they'd all have to queue for turnips like ten years ago were more important to him than twenty-three upcoming public executions. It wasn't really something he thought about much, but the day being what it was, the thoughts whirled around his head. To wonder, every single year, if maybe it would be your child going to their death this time? Even if the odds were literally one in millions, it still had to be horrifying.

Rye seldom thought of her city as small. In fact, she only did so once a year - when she, her husband Barrow, and their two younger children watched the Reaping. Nearly every single adolescent between twelve and eighteen gathered in a gigantic lot outside Nine's main city, a crowd many times bigger than the fifty thousand-strong city Rye and her family called home.

A key turning in the door - Billie was back. Her eldest daughter now had one more Reaping to go to. Mitch would have his first Reaping next year, and Flora was four years younger than him.

Four plus six. Ten years of this agony left.

"There you are," Barrow said, as easily as if Billie had spent the day with her friends. "Dinner's ready."

Next year, when Billie aged out, they'd invite over Rye's siblings and their families. Vadim was a judge in a different town, but a pass was easy enough to get by means of a bribe. And Delilah lived a few streets away from Rye and Barrow, though Delilah was a nurse, Rye - a prosecutor, and Barrow - a criminal attorney.

Barrow was always better at slipping by. Rye was clumsier. Barrow could allow himself to keep a distance from a political issue, while Rye often found herself hopelessly entangled. Barrow kept his mouth shut. Rye denounced (except when it came to Rakesh Kantaria, the senior prosecutor who spied for Thirteen and about whom she didn't tell Barrow). Neither of them could understand the other.

Billie, at least, was like her father. At the highschool that she attended, she flew under the radar so well, half of her classmates knew nothing about her.

"So," Billie said, sitting down at the table, "who has the 'honour' this year?" She would have heard the names being called out, but no more than that. Rye remembered well standing in that sea of people.

"Two rural workers of some sort," Rye said, ladling out the beef barley soup. As always. No statistics were available, but Nine was something like eighty percent rural, if the rumour mill was to be believed. Back when she had been in the Reapings, she had looked completely out of place in her felt hat and fine suit in the crowd of undersized girls in what passed for finery on the latifundia.

They had looked like a different species, hunchbacked and bow-legged, with missing teeth and bad skin. Now that Rye was in her forties, this year's Tributes just looked like sick children to her. But that was what they were - sick children. Had Billie been born on one of the great Capitolite-owned estates, she'd have also been ten centimetres shorter from malnourishment and with flat feet from not having shoes to wear.

"One from the northwest and one from the south, to be precise," Barrow said, eating his soup. That was as precise as it got.

"How old are they?" Billie poked at her own soup.

"Both fourteen," Mitch dumped a pinch of salt into his bowl. He took a piece of the expensive white bread they bought for special occasions and put some butter on it.

Only fourteen. A few months ago, hostages had been taken in the glue factory because of alleged sabotage, and one of them had been younger than that, but the ten unfortunate workers had been publicly shot - a much faster death than the Hunger Games.

"Eat your soup first," Barrow said to Mitch.

"I'm done," Flora said.

"What?" Rye realized that her daughter's bowl was empty. "Flora, you need to eat slower, it's not good for you to rush so fast."

Flora shrugged. "Can I have the pie now?"

Barrow handed her a knife so that she could cut herself a piece of fish-and-buckwheat pie. Having the day off meant they could get fancy - usually, everything that needed cooking was simply baked or boiled.

Looking at her children, Rye wanted to cry at the thought of them going to that dreadful field next year. How unfair it was, that the poorest beggars in the Capitol didn't have to fear Reaping Day when she and Barrow had to put up with it no matter what they did. Rye could do something to make sure her own children were never caught up in the hostage-taking operations. Bribes were only the most obvious one. But there was nothing she could do about the Hunger Games. Once her children aged out her eldest niblings would have children of her own, and on and on it would go.

Rye didn't remember a time when that fear was not buried in the back of her head. No matter how much she toed the line or what slogans she parroted, Billie's name would be in there seven times next year, and Mitch's - once. And there was nothing she could do to change that. A prosecutor was really a toothless creature. Now if Rakesh had had the ability to prosecute whomever he wanted, that would have been a very different story, but Rye wasn't going to hold her breath waiting for Thirteen to do something.

Miroslav missed Iqaluit. He knew he needed to be grateful for just having been allowed to go there - Thirteeners usually only left the city to emigrate or trade for fear of provoking Panem's government - and at least he was allowed to write letters to the researchers he had met there, but he missed the feeling of freedom.

Of course, he didn't miss how he had been completely unable to regulate his food intake for the entire conference, instead eating everything that had been offered to the point where he had thrown up, but even that just gave him some ideas for his work.

"And how are you adjusting to the food?" Miroslav asked the eighteen-year-old defector from Eleven who had arrived a few days ago. Miroslav was a child psychologist and focused on young defectors, about whom he had written a paper that had been published in one of the world's most prestigious journals.

Sara Birnbaum shrugged. "It's definitely odd, to be restricted like that, and many of the dishes are unfamiliar, but it tastes good and there's enough of it, so no complaints." She paused. "It's really good. I never knew food could be so tasty. I mean, my parents are great cooks, but we couldn't afford spices or anything."

Sara and her family had been small-town tailors. They had gotten enough to eat, but not much more than that. Thirteen provided basically the same, with the major difference that, recognizing the effect food had on morale, a lot of effort was put into making it taste good. Poorer defectors were amazed at never being hungry again, but that, at least, Birnbaum had been able to avoid so far, if barely.

"Do you ever feel unsatisfied with the portion sizes?"

"No. Sometimes I look at my tray and think there's no way that's enough, but by the time I'm done, I realize it's more than enough."

"That's good." Some defectors complained that they still felt hungry immediately after meals. Miroslav advised them to eat slower. "Now, how's school and basic going?"

"To be honest, Dr. Aurelius, I can't wait to turn nineteen and be done with it. Basic's alright, I guess. Odd to be with fourteen-year-olds."

In the rest of the country, the average person didn't attend school for even a day and was illiterate. Like most small business owners, the Birnbaums had sent their children to school for six years. In Thirteen, by comparison, everyone was supposed to complete twelve grades, but an adult couldn't be forced to do more than pass the basic literacy test. Most were perfectly fine with doing just that and no more, and a small handful seized on to the chance for education eagerly.

"Not interested in academics?" Miroslav asked.

Sara shook her head. "Even if I went to university, I'd still end up at the sewing machine - but with a degree."

Many people born in Thirteen did just that. Anyone whose marks were high enough could attend college or university, though, due to the lack of jobs requiring it, they'd stay in the factories or on the fields outside until a position opened up, if it ever did. Miroslav himself had planned to study psychology simply because he was interested in it - managing to find a permanent position had been quite a shock.

"There's nothing you'd want to study?"

"No."

"Well, we're not going to force you," Miroslav said with a smile. "Now, I know this is a sad time of year for everyone with relatives over in the big country."

Sara drooped slightly. "They weren't from my town." The Reaping had been yesterday - the list of names had been shown on the CCTV and they had observed a moment of silence, as if the children were already dead. "You know, Dr. Aurelius, I only ever wanted to be one thing - nineteen. It feels strange to be free a year early. And my siblings, too."

Miroslav's daughter Biljana was fourteen years old. He and his wife Rody had both been rendered infertile during the epidemic fifteen years back, but the surrogacy program had been established fast, and their request for adoption - rapidly filled. He couldn't imagine having to fear for his daughter's life every single year. It just felt wrong.

What was the effect of the Hunger Games on long-term psychological development? What did it do to a person to constantly be living with mortal danger, no matter how unlikely? And what in the world did the perpetrators tell themselves for justification?

The third question was one Miroslav would give a lot to answer, but even the first two were enough to guarantee him material for papers for the rest of his life.

And that was that. Ricky still had four more years and Annie and Jo hadn't even entered the Reapings yet, but Janie was safe. She hadn't thought it would feel so normal, but then again, everyone had aged out. The Tributes for District Six this year were both seventeen, and Janie was done with the Reapings.

Of course, Ricky, Annie, and Jo were not. Janie half-heartedly ground corn in the pestle that stood in the corner of the courtyard, wishing she could be down hanging out with her friends instead. The Reapings had literally been yesterday, and here she was grinding flour, because Mom and Dad's anniversary was in a few days and they wanted bread for the party. From her vantage point, she could see her friends Michael and Dana playing catch and her parents on their second-floor balcony. In June, there was enough light in the evenings to go outside after work. And the bosses usually didn't give too much overtime from the Reapings until the end of the Games, so they had only spent twelve hours in the steel mill.

"When's mandatory?" Ricky asked. He was squatting next to her and sifting the flour. Usually, they cooked their grain whole and made soup or whatever out of it, because they paid way too much money for rent and couldn't afford to buy flour, but that wasn't fancy enough for an anniversary.

"No idea."

Of course, her uncle could also do it, or her grandparents, but they took turns with chores. Which was why Janie was stuck grinding flour literally the day after aging out of the Reapings. Well, it's not like it was that happy of an occasion, given how many eligible kids she knew. Might as well add chores to it.

Janie slammed the pestle against the corn and twisted it, rubbing the grains against each other and the stone. So she was an adult now. She didn't feel any different. It had been the same when she had turned twelve. So ten slips of paper had been in a bowl containing millions. Yesterday, it had been seventy. And what? Community Home kids were forced to take out hundreds of tesserae, and neither of the Tributes this year were from a Community Home. Devon Zalgiris was a farmer from the ass end of nowhere and Erin Lake was an apprentice joiner from a large city whose name wasn't given on television. Janie was willing to bet neither had taken out tesserae.

It was kind of funny that there was an entire special category because of the Games. It didn't really matter if you were eleven or twelve, eighteen or nineteen - Janie had been in the steel mill since the age of five just like most everyone she knew. But standing in that field made you something else. Eligible.

Well, Janie was an adult now, even if her nineteenth birthday was some months off. Even if she was doing the same thing now she had done for years and would do for forever.

"When are we gonna be done?" Ricky asked. "Grandma Ferguson said she wanted me to spin." They couldn't afford yarn, either, they had to buy wool, spin the yarn, and then knit with it, which took up way too much time. Grandma Guerra had an entire elaborate theory about how rich people could buy premade clothes and that saved them time, which was really unfair.

"Look, I really don't know. We just started."

"But what about mandatory?"

Mandatory could go fuck itself with a red-hot rod, not like Janie was going to say that out loud. There was always that one person reporting to the Peacekeepers. "They'll call us in when it starts."

The smell of stew was coming in from someone's apartment. Electricity was usually on a strict schedule that wasn't observed half the time, but in honour of the Games, it would be on for four hours each evening. Cooking was usually a huge pain in the ass with all the shut-offs. Sometimes, Grandma and Grandpa Ferguson had to get up in the middle of the night to cook. Janie wondered what they'd do if Grandma and Grandpa died. They acted like that would happen at any moment, even though they were fifteen years younger than President Snow. Would President Snow also die at any moment?

Janie focused on her grinding, hoping Ricky hadn't been able to tell what she was thinking. That was the sort of thing you said in a whisper in the kitchen, not in the courtyard when the neighbour was hanging up the laundry, tying their personal line to the rusted poles.

"Mandatory in ten minutes!" someone shouted from the building opposite theirs. People began to half-heartedly trickle away.

"See?" Janie said. She hit the corn half-heartedly and set aside the pestle. Bread for a party couldn't be coarse, but it was hard for Janie to care when her arms hurt.

"Nira!" the neighbour shouted from his balcony at Mom. "I need to use the pestle, too! Why'd you take so long?"

"Tomorrow!" Mom said. She didn't like her full name, Deianira, because it sounded too Capitol. Grandma and Grandpa Guerra were the only ones who called her that.

"What do you mean, tomorrow? We agreed it's my turn!"

"Mandatory's soon!"

"Look, I can't serve my grandfather-in-law cooked tesserae rye for his hundredth birthday!" Tesserae was a mishmash of all sorts of grains. The past month, it was rye, rice, and buckwheat. Two of the three were easy enough to cook, even if sorting was a pain in the ass, but rye took way too much time. And in any case there would be no more tesserae after this. Janie had signed up when she was twelve, but by the time Ricky turned that age, Annie was also working and Mom had long since recovered from having Jo and also back at the steel mill. So no need to queue for the universe's shittiest grain.

Mom grumbled something Janie couldn't hear from the ground. "Just wait until tomorrow."

"Fine!"

There were several pestles in the courtyard, but the one Janie was using could only be used by their building section. The buildings here only had four floors, nothing like the anthills closer to the steel mill. Janie liked that it was quieter, even if the commute was longer, and that they could afford to rent an apartment big enough for three people to share a room. The neighbours usually didn't have the time or money to make bread, and they rented a two-room apartment. It was just two people and their six little children, the eldest barely old enough for tesserae.

Ricky tipped the flour into the sieve and shook it inside a large sack. He put the leftovers into another sack of corn they'd have to grind again. Janie was hit with a sudden burst of fear that he would be Reaped next year. And it would be the Quell, too, who knew what sort of creativity Snow would unleash.

Aging out really wasn't as fun as she had thought. Not when you had little siblings. But then again, was there anyone out there who didn't hold their breath on Reaping Day?

Stephen inserted the key into the elevator and pressed the button for the fortieth floor. A few people nodded respectfully at him - his insignia marked him as being on active duty, even if he spent less time training to defend Thirteen and more - doing paperwork.

Down the small personnel elevator, for individual trips, went. People went in and out. Eventually, it reached the fortieth floor, where the detention cells were. Stephen exchanged salutes with the sergeant on duty and went to the cell indicated on his schedule. Julia Gozhita had arrived from the Capitol a few days ago, but a preliminary interview had turned up some gaps in the story, so she had been detained.

Stephen pushed open the door. Inside the small cell, Gozhita was lying on a futon and reading a book. There was a bracelet on her ankle. If she tried to leave the cell, the bracelet would give her progressively more severe electric shocks the further she got. Stephen had tried it on himself, the mild ones were harmless warnings but they soon got to the point where he couldn't walk.

Gozhita didn't seem to be interested in trying to run away. She sat up, eyes darting around the cell. Usually, Stephen's opinion of the Capitol and its inhabitants was that the world would be a better place without them, but it was impossible to hold on to such a simplistic worldview with people like Gozhita around.

"You can stay sitting," Stephen sat down beside her. Her eyes went to the bag he took off his back and set down next to him. "You doing alright? I know it can't be easy to stay in a tiny cell for several days."

"I get books to read," Gozhita said with a shrug. "It's alright. How's Karim Azar?"

Karim Azar was her friend, coworker, and fellow defector. "Settling in." There had been a minor hiccup when he had thought he would be forced to shave his beard, but Thirteen was a free city, anyone could wear their hair however they liked. It was simply custom to be groomed in the military fashion, even for non-combatants like the one-legged Azar.

"Good." She set the book aside - it was a translation of an Indian novel that had come out last year and become an international bestseller. Defectors were often shocked by the existence of other countries. They simply had never thought about it. "Er, what do you want from me?"

Stephen reached into his bag and took out a packet of peanut paste. The ones with the stars on their shoulders believed in torture as a method of extracting information, but Stephen was of the opinion that it only extracted confessions, which was not what he was after. Sure, he could easily get her to admit to being a spy and send her to Ottawa with the next cargo train, but why discard someone like that without being sure?

"Here you go."

Gozhita looked at it suspiciously but opened the packet and ate some paste. "Tastes good," she said.

"You want some tea?"

"Why?"

Stephen shrugged. "I thought you might be missing things like that. Sitting down, having a cup of tea." He took a thermos and two cups from his bag and poured them both some steaming tea. "Here you go."

Gozhita took a small sip. "What do you want from me?"

Stephen smiled and gestured expansively. "Your story."

Half an hour later, Stephen was reasonably sure that she was not a spy, though he would not have bet anything of importance on it. He was quite good at cold-reading and finding holes in stories, but he was very far from perfect.

"Well, then," he said, clapping his hands together and pouring himself more tea. "I suppose I have the privilege of being the first person to welcome you to the free city of Thirteen." Of course, if information started leaking, Gozhita would be a prime suspect, but Coin didn't want to endanger morale by having Thirteeners spy on each other. Even a dubious person would be left alone - unless something major happened to draw attention, of course.

Gozhita nodded, looking much relieved. "But what do I do now?" she asked.

Now came Stephen's favourite part. "Whatever you want," he said simply.

"And if I said I wanted my tenured position as a professor of philosophy back?"

"Done." Thirteeners interested in disciplines whose practical use was not so obvious, like the humanities or business, often went abroad to study - and then simply stayed there. The universities in Thirteen would appreciate a professor of philosophy.

Gozhita's eyes almost fell out of their sockets. "What's the catch?"

"There is none." Being fifty-eight, she was not expected to do military training. "However, if you are willing, there is one thing our society would welcome your aid in." She nodded slightly, confused. "Are you aware of the demographic situation here?"

"The mass infertility? I am." She paused. "Do they want me to be a surrogate?"

"Only if you wish."

Gozhita scratched her head. "I mean, I'm sure I theoretically could give birth, especially with IVF - but I don't want to." There was a slight challenge in her voice when she said that. She didn't believe that something like that could be voluntary.

"No problem," Stephen said. "The last thing we want is to force someone into something they don't want."

"Alright." She still didn't quite believe him. "Anything else?"

"You may find our way of life stifling at first," Stephen said, showing her the schedule on his arm. "Everything is quite strictly regimented, but I assure you, there is plenty of room for expression. Art, sports, academia, crafts - you won't have to give up anything that makes you you."

"I'm not in the mood for doing anything, I'm afraid, with the Hunger Games going on."

That was an understandable sentiment. Stephen often wondered how in the world something like the Games could come to pass. There were plenty of other horrors, of course, but Panem was hardly the only place to have mass shootings and stark inequality. The Games, however, were completely unique, and even though Stephen didn't know the names of the Tributes, he still spared a thought for them as he packed away his thermos and cups.

The phone rang as Dora was writing the judgement. "Hello?" she said, picking up the phone.

"Judge Dora Rescu?" an unfamiliar voice asked.

"That is I." This was not her first phone call, nor would this be her last. "Who are you?"

"I am Paulina Bryant from the District Attorney's office."

The District Attorney? "Who is this about?" Dora asked. She wasn't dealing with any particularly high-profile cases at the moment. Living and working in the capital of Ten, she did have the sort of cases where up there summoned her to the carpet, but that was rare. One needed to pull strings and grease palms to be allowed into that rarified air, and while Dora did know people, she refused to do anything besides her job.

"I am calling to inform you that it would be best to go light on Jonathan Yao and Elle Findlay," Bryant said. Usually, Dora was handed the judgement in a folder or had it placed on her desk, but once in a while, the proverbial telephone call was very much the reality.

Dora glanced down at the judgement against Yao she was currently writing. "I will take your words into consideration," she said neutrally before hanging up without a goodbye - if Bryant was calling from the DA's office, Dora did not have to be polite to her.

Why was the DA worried about a working-class drunk driver and an adolescent vandalist? Or perhaps Bryant knew them personally and was using her position as leverage? But the entire city knew phone calls to Dora were a fifty-fifty chance at best. They did not know that the other fifty percent, the wishes of the caller and Dora's own plans were the same.

Way back when Dora had been a young judge starting her career during a purge, an adolescent had been charged with anti-government agitation for shouting 'Lick, don't bite, the clitoris is sensitive!' in a public place. Dora had been handed the judgement - the supreme penalty. She had thrown it in the trash and found the youth guilty only of causing a public disturbance, acquitting her on the other counts and giving her a fine. 'Up there' had broadcast it everywhere as a sign of their magnanimous lenience, the gossips had joked about what her husband Jack could do with the clitoris, and the matter had been swiftly forgotten.

Dora had no idea what had possessed her to stick to the letter of the law back then - or now. This time, she had no intention to let Yao keep his driver's licence, or his life. Findlay, too, was looking at some time behind bars, though it would only be thirty days for petty hooliganism, and not the twenty-five years' hard labour for anti-government agitation the prosecution had demanded. Bryant would have to be disappointed.

Several days later, Dora was shocked to find out that someone had been arrested for calling up judges and demanding acquittals for everyone she considered to have been 'unfairly arrested'. She was even more shocked to find out that most judges had gone along with Carrie Moon's demands!

And even more shock was caused to Dora by the atmosphere in the Justice Building that made it clear to her that this was not a matter one ought to discuss. This was an outrage. Some clerk got it into her head that a drunk driver who had killed three people, a thief who had stolen twenty dollars - the entire life savings - of a hundred-year-old Dark Days veteran, and a variety of petty crooks, drug dealers, and the like deserved to be out on the streets, and not only did she have the temerity to try to interfere with the due process of the law, the judges mostly went along with it! And then, to cap it off, the acquitted were dragged back into court and found guilty of a crime they had just been acquitted of by the same judges!

An outrage. An outrage pure and simple. Her colleagues needed to be in the dock, not on the judges' bench. But what could Dora do? She tried to judge the people brought before her as fairly as she could. It still stung that there were criminals she could not reach.

Antonius checked his watch - he was right on time. He reached out and knocked on the door.

"Come in!" Achilleus, his eight-year-old son, replied.

Smiling to himself, Antonius opened the door to his son's room. The boy was sitting primly on the floor, surrounded by toys. On the table lay his homework folder. "How are you?" he asked, walking over to his son, who had jumped up for a hug. Even after all these years, Antonius felt like a fake. He reached out and embraced him. That, at least, felt real.

"Good," Achilleus said.

"That is good. How was school?" Antonius walked over to the table and went through the folder. In the mornings, a tutor came over to instruct Achilleus in various subjects. When he had been a child, Antonius had hated having school during the summer, but looking back, Grandma had made the right decision.

Parenting, to Antonius, was an imitation game. Whenever he was confronted with a crisis of some sort, he did what Grandma would have done with him. His own parents had always been away for this or that, and Octavia, too, was busy with functions. Grandma, however, was a hundred and six years old now and could not do much of what she had done before. It was not that Antonius needed a reason to spend time with his son, of course. Some of his acquaintances joked about never seeing their children - Antonius could not imagine never seeing someone as amazing as his son.

"Fine."

Better than fine - the tutor had tested him in math, and Achilleus had not made a single mistake in thirty questions! "You did very well on the math test," Antonius praised his son, feeling a warm glow in his chest. "I am very proud of you."

Saying such things did not come easy to Antonius. Grandma could make it sound natural - as a child, he had lived for her praise. His mother had been a disappointment as heir, constantly tardy and sloppy already when working summer jobs at one of the Steelworks plants as a teenager, and Grandma had always said how much better he was at the job than her. But that was Grandma. Antonius could not fill her shoes, not as Steelworks CEO and not as a parent of a child of his own.

Achilleus did not seem to notice his hesitation. He just smiled, and something twisted in Antonius' chest where he had once half-jokingly told an acquaintance there was only a lump of stainless steel. "Thank you," the boy said.

"And what are you doing right now?" Antonius asked, sitting down gingerly on the floor. His suit would need to be ironed again after this. "How is the company doing?" He picked up his son's notebook. Just like he himself had done as a small boy, Achilleus played at CEO with his dolls, carefully jotting down imaginary transactions.

"Rebels infiltrated the car factory, convinced everyone that their working conditions were bad, and blew up the factory," Achilleus said, plopping down and moving a plush bear a few centimetres to the side. "It didn't get too badly damaged, so I guess they'll fix it in a week or so."

His son, however, was more creative than Antonius had ever been. Or perhaps he was failing at shielding Achilleus from what he did not need to know yet. "What measures will you take against infiltration in the future?"

Achilleus paused for a few seconds, glancing at a doll of a Peacekeeper. "They also tried to sneak into another factory, but someone told the boss, so the Rebels were dealt with."

Unfortunately, real-life saboteurs and wreckers were not so simple to deal with. Antonius prompted his son to elaborate about why the two attacks went differently, resulting in a lengthy monologue with a cast of characters almost as complicated as the actual Steelworks roster.

Achilleus' trousers were already too short for him, Antonius suddenly noticed. They would have to replace his wardrobe again. Octavia was unhappy that their son wore cheap clothing, but Antonius had been raised to be frugal. A growing child did not need expensive clothing, especially when it was summer and Achilleus liked to spend his afternoons playing soccer with his cousins.

It was summer again. It felt like yesterday that the previous year's Games had ended, but in reality, yesterday had been Reaping Day. The following week would be a flurry of meetings. It was the Steelworks that built the grand Arenas, and with Grandma handing over more and more power to him with every passing year, it was Antonius who would report to the Gamemakers and even Snow himself.

Summer. Antonius was the eldest of his generation. He had always been the one spending his rare hours of free time making sure that his cousins did not hurt themselves. From those early years, responsibility had been drilled into him until it was second nature. Great wealth brought with it duty and hard work, not idleness, as his youngest uncle was wont to think. Achilleus got a gentler upbringing. Now that the corridors of the Big House were echoing with children's laughter, he got to play as well.

"When can I get a job?" his son abruptly asked, breaking off a monologue about the invention of stainless steel - Octavia had chosen a good history tutor this summer, he had never been so interested in the past before, other than humourous stories about the old days of the Steelworks.

Antonius smiled at Achilleus' enthusiasm. "I got my first job when I was fourteen," he said. "You will have to wait a while." During his highschool summers, he had worked in a tank factory, side by side with ordinary workers. His mother had not been able to stand the discipline and Grandma had always had different plans for his uncles, but Antonius had diligently clocked in every day and done his job. After that, he had double-majored in mechanical engineering and business, pursuing a Master's in management before being placed in a relatively low position. Grandma had promoted him following criteria he only knew as the simple instruction to do his job well.

"Oh." He fidgeted with a doll. "But Cousin Juno-"

"You are not Cousin Juno."

"Cousin Juno gets to meet the president," Achilleus wheedled.

Antonius shook his head. "You will meet President Snow at the opening ceremonies." In his son's place, Antonius would not have been so enthusiastic. Snow had long ago gone slightly off-kilter from being surrounded by yes-people all the time, and it always felt strange to lie so brazenly to him about steel production and get away with it every time. But then again, the man had been in total control for twenty-six years now, and the more Antonius could get away with not doing, the better.

"Alright. When's Mom coming home?"

"Two hours and seventeen minutes," Antonius said, checking his watch. "We will eat dinner together." Another one of Grandma's old habits. Dinner must be eaten with family. Family over everything - another one of her mottoes Antonius kept close to heart.

"Um, Dad?" Achilleus sounded hesitant all of a sudden.

"What is it?" he replied in a gentle tone. He could not help but feel a stab of panic whenever his son approached him like that.

"Uncle Augustus says there's going to be a Games-watching party. All the other kids will be there," he said in a pleading tone.

A Games-watching party, with Uncle Augustus - he was his mother's youngest brother - hosting. Antonius had not been told of his uncle's plans to bring along Achilleus. Eight was a tad too young for the Hunger Games. Antonius himself did not recall a time before he watched them, but he could not imagine letting his little son watch death on live television. "Mom and I will discuss it," he said. If all the children of the elite would be there, it would be good to allow Achilleus to start making contacts. Childhood friendships had a way of growing into lifelong partnerships.

"Alright. Can we play Monopoly now?"

"Just the two of us?"

"We can get the cleaners to play," Achilleus offered.

Antonius could not help but smile indulgently. "They are at work," he said. "We cannot distract them while they are working. How about you tell me what you have been reading recently?"

"So, how did the debate go?" Alan asked, slapping down a card.

"You could have gone yourself, you know," Mary replied, looking at her own cards and picking out one. Every Saturday evening, she met up with her siblings at the local library to play thousand. They had gotten into the habit decades ago, when John, who was two years older than the forty-eight-year-old Mary, had begun work with Thirteen's complicated bureaucracy and moved out of their compartment.

"But who would write up schedules if not me?" Wendy asked sarcastically, studying her own cards with an expression of slight irritation on her face. She was nine years younger than Mary and four years younger than Alan, who was keeping the score today. All three of her siblings worked for the government, as did Mary's husband Rithvik. Mary was a professor of law at the university - and an avid debater.

"Alright," Mary said, waiting for Wendy to pick a card. "Made it into the municipal finals, but barely."

"Oh, so you've made it into the all-Thirteen competition?" John asked. Mary nodded. "Nice!"

"Try to not procrastinate too much this year," Alan needled her.

"Ha-ha." Her brother was, unfortunately, right. Mary's tendency to procrastinate played a nasty trick on her year after year. Despite speaking more convincingly and deploying various rhetorical tricks, the judges would dock her points on substance. If only the average person listened to politicians with the same detached wariness, the world would have been a much better place. "The finals are going to be about whether railroads need to be publicly or privately owned - I'll grab some books before leaving."

"Hardly relevant for us," Wendy said as she finally put down a card, "when we're living in a right-winger's nightmare of what Communism is."

The siblings laughed at that. Thirteen's political structure was unique, and while Mary and most people she interacted with were satisfied with living the way they did until reunification, that was because anyone who didn't like it could simply leave and be replaced by defectors who did want to stay. And in the big country, of course, everything was owned by Snow's oligarchs in a system that combined the worst of both worlds.

"What was the topic today?" Alan asked.

"Didn't I tell you? The Universe's Worst Reunification Proposal."

John nearly dropped his cards. He recovered just in time and placed one. Alan won that hand and put down another card - it seemed that he had all of the hearts. "Isn't that a bad joke?" The idea to hold a Hunger Games with Capitol children after reunification was usually stated sarcastically and in the same vein as unserious 'proposals' to level the Capitol to the ground and create a lake in its place. While many wanted harsh vengeance, the presence of Capitol defectors and constant news of one or another activist or resistor in the Capitol being shot meant that there was little desire for something that did not take nuance into account.

"I guess the organizers decided to take it seriously," Mary said. Her siblings focused on her, cards forgotten. "In any case, neither of us managed to make much of an argument for pro. I won because I argued con better."

"How did you do on pro?" John asked.

"Well-"

Alan laughed. "You tore your opponent to shreds, didn't you?"

"That's going too far."

He threw his hands in the air in mock exasperation. "How do you manage to create silk purses out of sow's ears like that? And here I am unable to convince Sungjae that he doesn't need to move out to a barracks the moment he's nineteen." Sungjae was his second-youngest child. All of Mary's siblings had gotten married and had children long before the epidemic fifteen years back had sterilized her and Rithvik. They had been on the adoption list for the better part of a decade before taking themselves off it.

"That's certainly more useful than those railroads leading to castles in the sky," Mary said wryly as she checked the time.

"You never know," John said seriously. "Everything's falling to pieces in the big country. Any big problem, and we swoop in and pick up the pieces. Even a little thing might be the catalyst that causes the explosion."

"Still feels like dividing a pot of soup that hasn't been cooked yet."

"Aren't lawyers always preparing for every eventuality?" Wendy asked.

"No, that's you paper-pushers."

"Oi!"

John was right, though. These railroads were leading to castles in the sky, but there would be high government officials in the audience, and if she could encourage them to think about what the Panem of tomorrow would look like (whether struck by an epidemic, starving from crop failure, struggling to survive in the midst of an economic crisis, or whatever other calamity resulted in drastic weakening of the repressive machinery), then perhaps a total collapse would be averted, and a beautiful future Panem could take shape - which was all that Mary wanted.

A/N: Welcome to my longfic! This is the prequel to my story 'In Place of a Life'; if you've read that one already, you know how a few things will turn out but by no means all. The draft is complete, updates will be Sundays around 11:30 GMT bar some sort of catastrophe on my end. Mind the warnings - there will definitely be POV character deaths, and the tag 'crimes against humanity' should speak for itself.

These ten characters will be the POVs of the story, though it will take some time for some of them to show up again.

I did most of my worldbuilding before BSS came out, so there will be some details not compliant with that book - most significantly, the name of Snow's predecessor as president, and how Snow's career began. In my story, Snow had nothing to do with the Games, he studied political science and carried the briefcase for a senator. Lucy Gray is still the survivor of the Tenth Games, though she did not use poison to survive; she still attempted to run away from Twelve and died of exposure on the way to Thirteen.

The first line is inspired by a Soviet saying - 'Chicken isn't fowl, and Poland isn't abroad'. The government-overthrowing shaman is inspired by Aleksandr Gabyshev, who attempted to hike to Moscow to drive out Putin but got detained and forcibly hospitalized.

As of time of publishing (August 2021), same-sex marriage is illegal in Zimbabwe, and male homosexuality is punished by 14 years' imprisonment. So Thumeka and Yemurai are lucky to live in the twenty-fourth century and not the twenty-first.

People of a certain generation will get the reference to queueing for the good bologna. At a metre sixty-five, Leon would be in the 7th percentile for height in the USA.

Dora's would-be pranker is based on a Russian pranker who called up judges to get them to acquit people. Unfortunately, they showed about as much integrity as Dora's colleagues. The line about a Dark Days veteran who got the twenty dollars that were his life savings stolen is based on a Russian WW2 vet. The person shouting sex advice in the middle of the street is based off a Russian rapper who did just that and got sentenced to several days in jail.

For comparison with Snow, Lukashenko, at time of writing, has been in power for 27 years, and he lives in a parallel reality. Putin, at 21 years in power, is hardly better with his rants about the State Department and coloured revolutions. There is no way that Snow is actually aware of what is going on. He has built himself a bubble of reassuring lies about everything from the loyalty of farmers in One to how the smallpox outbreak in Seven is being handled, and the quickest way to gain favour with him is to make up a bunch of reassuring statistics. Bearers of bad news about unrest are exiled to obscure and irrelevant offices, and corruption and incompetence just spread and spread.

'Thousand' is a popular card game in the Russian-speaking world.

All comments are very welcome :)