Cecelia Bridgers, District 8

"XO, Mom

It's okay, it's alright, nothing's wrong."

Elliott Smith, Waltz #2 (XO)


Junior gamemaker, Juventas Sweet had her dream job.

She'd only just learned that her dream job had a death toll.

It didn't take much to doom a gamemaker. A girl from Six a little too good at hide-and-seek. A boy from Nine with a bad case of rabies and an even worse sense of humour. A girl from Three with her finger on the button that would deny Panem its victor. A boy from Twelve who saw weapons that really weren't meant to be there.

Juventas took comfort in the fact that she was only a junior gamemaker. Her only job was to monitor the tributes' vitals and tell someone else if any major happened. The games would have to be pretty disastrous for her to get killed.

Then, as the tributes' trackers were being injected, Juventas saw something that made her scream.

The girl from Eight had two heartbeats.

District Eight had always scared Juventas. Their most recent victor, Lachesis Dumont, hadn't been quite human. Their other victor, Woof Casino, was better but still not quite right in the head. As for this girl, Cecelia Bridgers, she'd been rigged into the games for stirring up some trouble.

There was something deeply weird about Cecelia. She had long, dark hair, pasty skin and wild, staring eyes. She hadn't been able to stop talking about ghosts and magic and all sorts of creepy things in her interview. Even weirder, she had a husband. Somebody loved her.

That would all be fine if she just had one heartbeat. But it was clear that she didn't.

Juventas' boss, Aristaeus, came over to ask her what the problem was. When he saw Cecelia's vitals, he turned white.

"What is it?" Juventas asked, her voice high, thin and panicked. "Is it witchcraft? Voodoo? Is she a monster?"

"Worse," Aristaeus muttered. "She's pregnant."

"Pregnant!" Juventas cried. She realised what this meant. If word got out that Cecelia's unborn child had died with their mother in the arena, there'd be a scandal. Normally, when pregnant women were reaped, they were given a choice between an abortion or to have the child placed in an incubator and given up for adoption. Normally, the Capitol's machines picked up irregularities like pregnancies during a tribute's health checks.

But there must've been a fault in the machines this year because Cecelia Bridgers was pregnant and it was too late to intervene. The girl was in the hovercraft right now.

"I am going to call the president," Aristaeus said, his voice quiet and distant. Juventas knew that this call could be the difference between life or death.

"Good morning, Mr President. It's come to our attention that one of the tributes this year is pregnant... Cecelia Bridgers, eighteen years old, District 8... Yes, the married one... There was a mechanical fault in one of our scans... Oh no, we didn't make the machine! It was the Hiroses. They make everything, these days... Oh, that's great, Mr President! I'll definitely make a note of it... What should we do about Bridgers?... Okay. I'll tell them right away. Thank you for your wise advice, President Snow."

The moment Aristaeus hung up, relief spread across his face.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" He declared, loudly and imperiously. "I have just had a conversation with President Snow. He has made the decision that this year's victor shall be Cecelia Bridgers from District 8. Let's make sure she doesn't die."

As the other gamemakers hurried to work, Aristaeus turned to Juventas.

"Juventas, can you please bring up the file on Ramona Hirose, District 3?"

Juventas returned to her computer and found the file. Aristaeus squinted at it over her shoulder.

"She's only nine years old," He muttered. "Why can't she be older?"

"What's wrong?" Juventas asked.

"The machine that's supposed to detect whether or not a tribute is pregnant was made by Yoji and Lupa Hirose. Since this mess is their fault, I'm supposed to put their daughter in the next games to punish them but she's too young."

"Then put her in the Sixty-Third," Juventas said, calmly. "They'll know what they did, even after three years. They're Threes. Threes are supposed to have good memories."

"That's a good point," Aristaeus said. "Put her on Diodato's List."

This was the first time that Juventas got to see Diodato's list. It was a document listing all the names of children rigged into the games, named after a rebel family from District 2 who'd had both their sons rigged in during the first decade of games. One had died. One had won and forsaken his parents. Opening it up, Juventas saw a grid, with a row for every type of tribute and a column for every year of the games. She was shocked by how many names were on it.

Every tribute from Eight since the Twenty-Sixth Games was on the list.

Juventas scrolled over to the column reading '63' and the row reading '3F'. She typed the girl's name with shaking hands.

Just like that, she'd sealed Ramona Hirose's fate.

Maybe her parents would think twice before building another faulty invention.

Juventas closed the list and returned to the present. The countdown had begun and a last-minute change had moved Cecelia to the other side of the circle of tributes, away from the Elites. She looked to be in a pretty good position. Juventas was relieved to see the arena - a circus tent. There would be plenty of mutts and traps that they could use to kill other tributes.

All Cecelia needed to do was to survive the bloodbath. Until the bloodbath ended, there was nothing the gamemakers could do.

The gamemakers all seemed to be holding their breath as Cecelia ran into the bloodbath. She picked up a knife and threw it straight into the head of the nearest tribute. A cheer rose up.

It seemed that Cecelia had a skill. That was good. It would make her victory seem less like dumb luck.

Cecelia threw a second knife. It was a direct hit on the girl from Four. She swung a backpack onto her back and ran away.

As the bloodbath cannons fired and Cecelia's two heartbeats - one for her and one for her child - remained beating, celebration erupted across the room.

Cecelia Bridgers had survived the hardest part of the games. The gamemakers would make the rest easy.


I can't quite believe it but I managed to bash out a chapter! Finally, District 8's victor drought ends! Even though Cecelia's totally unaware of it, she's forced the Capitol's hand. Since she won, it was easy for them to cover up her pregnancy, which meant that there wasn't a scandal like with Katniss in Catching Fire. In my first draft, there wasn't much more to Cecelia than being a young mother but I decided to make her a superstitious weirdo. I'll probably explore her a bit more in later chapters because District 8 gets another victor this decade and their chapter will be a bit more personal. Some victors work well from the perspective of random gamemakers but Eight's next victor definitely won't.

As for the other little storyline, we finally have a reason why twelve-year-old Ramona's one slip was picked out of millions in the District 3 bowl. She was rigged in. Luckily for her, someone volunteered (I don't think that even Ramona could've won the games aged twelve but she might've been able to come second or third) and Snow decided that her parents had been scared enough. This is kind of her origin story, since she definitely wouldn't have volunteered when she was seventeen if she hadn't been reaped when she was twelve.