Connor Merlyn, District Five male (18)

I'd never had a real problem in my life. What a spoiled, entitled thing to complain about- that I'd never had a problem in my life. I was born filthy rich. I went to private schools all my life. My lifetime employment was mapped out for me before I knew how to use a toilet. I should have been grateful and I was grateful. I knew how many opportunities and advantages my background gave me. I kind of just… I felt stupid and spoiled even thinking about it. I kind of just wished that some of it was mine. My money was my parents'. My scholastic achievements were because Mom and Dad bought a new wing for the school. I was glad for the head start in life but it made it so it wasn't a fight at all. I couldn't brag about winning a race if I started just in front of the finish line and everyone else started at the beginning. If I didn't do something amazing with my life I was a monumental failure. If I did do something amazing I was just meeting the bare minimum. Sometimes I didn't even think I could hit that.

That was part of the reason I loved Sabrina. It wasn't the only reason, of course. That would have been horribly deceitful. It wasn't even the biggest reason. It couldn't be, not when there were so many reasons to love her. She was smart and caring and it was crazy how humble she could be when the only reason I was passing our pre-med classes was her tutoring. And yeah she was smoking hot but that wasn't the biggest reason either. Which was hard to achieve because she was really hot. There was only one thing she wasn't: rich.

There was no reason for a chair to be too big for me. I was six feet tall and thanks to my father's insistence on proper rich people sports I was a well-built young man. It was funny how when my father sat in this chair it didn't seem too big for him. Across from a similarly-large desk my father sat in his own chair looking down on me despite being my same height. As a child I'd often wilted under that glare but as I matched it I realized those days were gone along with my childhood.

"I'm going to marry Sabrina," I told my father. I didn't need his permission. I held out no hope of getting his blessing. I was merely telling him what was going to happen.

My father had seen this coming for some time and met me with cold contempt instead of hot rage. "All this opportunity and you're throwing it away on a beggar," he sneered.

I gripped the chair arm to keep from leaping up. "I'm already prepared to lose my father. Talk about her like that again and that's what will happen," I said.

"I suppose you'll pay your bills with love and goodwill." In my mind I let my father go. I'd thought that would be his response. It still didn't prepare a son to see his father all at once reveal the truth about eighteen years of lies about love.

"No, I will live off Sabrina's pay. As an anesthesiologist I think we'll do fine." I saw the fire rising in my father's eyes and let myself do what I'd wanted to earlier. "After we've saved up enough I can continue my own studies. Or perhaps I'll like being a homemaker."

It was like a dog had sat up and called my father a bastard. He was ominously still with sheer incredulous fury. There was no trace of a father speaking to his son in his voice.

"I should have shot you down a whore's throat."

I pushed the chair away and turned my back on him.


Ingrid "Gigi" Sampson, District Five female (16)

I scooped Adam's feet into the bright-orange stripes he'd picked out. Adam was a little showman, all loud noises and bright clothes and big smiles. He was going to be a clown when he grew up. A clown or maybe an actor. Whatever got the most people looking at him. He didn't even fight me as I pulled the socks on. He wanted to look good even if he didn't know what a Reaping was.

Foster didn't care to match his twin. He wore no-nonsense white socks and was already trying to tug them on with his pudgy toddler fingers when I came over to help him. If Adam was the doer then Foster was the thinker. In a place like Five he'd grow up to be an engineer or an architect.

Moments like these were what made my life bright. Even though I was getting ready for the Reaping I still felt a spark of joy. There were so many people in Five. Surely we were good enough at math for me to know the odds were astronomical. No doubt it would happen to some kid I didn't even know. I told myself that and tried not to think about another girl getting ready for the Reaping and saying it would happen to someone she didn't even know.

My sister's home was a refuge. It seemed impossible that Vida and I had managed to pull off anything like this. We were a barely-adult single mother and her barely-not-a-child little sister, neither of us with any skills or connections. My sister quickly learned skills, stretching her mathematics skills to the limit to get herself a job. And I quickly made the connections. It was those exact connections I could hide from in our little house.

I didn't like who I had to be in the streets. It wasn't hard for me at all and that was another thing I didn't like. It wasn't right for a teenage girl to have a constant stream of underground data points running through her head. I didn't like brushing past other black market urchins and pulling up everything I knew about the dirt I had on them and the weaknesses I could exploit. So many times I'd told a competitor about a way to game the system and then told a Peacekeeper about that same person doing the very idea I'd put into their head. It wasn't right for someone my age to have to think about things like that.

I'd ruined lives. I'd probably ended some lives, the way punishments were in the Districts. I'd betrayed people who trusted me and some of them still obliviously thought I was their friend. All of that… and all I was was a penny-ante urchin. I wasn't a kingpin. I wasn't even a player. I was just another street rat looking for my opportunity to break in. So much conniving and betraying and scheming and all I had to show for it was a rathole apartment and enough boiled potatoes to feed two toddlers. But I'd do it forever for them.