"Is that really all you know?" the interrogator asked. "You still haven't told me everything."
Taken aback, Irma didn't reply for a while. "What do you mean? You can put me on the television, I'll tell everyone to surrender. Everyone knows me," she said desperately. If they didn't need her, then what would they do to her?
The interrogator just looked at her. She was a woman of around fifty, with light-brown skin, short black hair, and dark, round eyes. Irma couldn't quite place where she was probably from. Her accent was typical Thirteen, as far as she could tell. In the month or so she had spent in the basement of what had once been an expensive cottage, the interrogator had revealed nothing about herself. "Come with me," she said in that flat voice.
Irma stood up, linking her wrists behind her back. A soldier who had been standing behind her put on handcuffs. The interrogator led her outside. What was happening? When Irma saw that they were headed towards a hovercraft, her legs nearly gave out. "Come on," she begged, "I could be useful!" They were taking her to Thirteen, she knew it. "Please!"
Neither the interrogator nor the two soldiers batted an eye. Irma was practically dragged into the hovercraft, which was full of severely injured soldiers and a few medical personnel, and cuffed to the floor. She tried to curl up against the wall, which was almost impossible to do with her hands cuffed behind her back. What did they want with her? Surely if they wanted her dead she'd have been shot weeks ago. What could happen in Thirteen but not in the semi-rural outskirts of the Capitol? Irma shivered from the cold as well as fear.
When they arrived, she had a bag placed over her head. That gave Irma hope. If there had been no plans for her to ever leave, they wouldn't have needed to take that precaution. They got into an elevator and went down until her ears hurt. Down a corridor, a left turn, a right turn, so many turns she soon lost track. Finally, though, she was made to sit down, and the bag was removed from her head. Irma blinked as the bright light hit her eyes. Across from her sat a young and colourless man. Despite being in his mid-thirties at the absolute latest his curly hair was completely white, and his eyes were a nearly transparent shade of blue.
"Sign this," he said, shoving a document into her hands. Irma glanced down at it, and blanched. It was asking her to practically sign her own death warrant!
"But I had nothing to do with any of that!" she wailed. "How can you accuse me of conspiring to commit the Hunger Games? Or firebomb Twelve?!" The accusations were total nonsense, and Irma started to worry that maybe they were planning to have her never leave this basement. She felt sick.
The man looked at her for a few seconds. "Take her to the bottom floor," he said off-handedly to the soldier who was hovering in the door frame. The bottom floor? Irma knew that in most jails, the bottom floor was where the torture chambers were.
"I don't understand!" she tried to protest. The soldier pushed her into the corridor and put the bag back over her head. Once again, she was walked to the elevator, then down, and then down a maze of corridors. When the bag was taken off, Irma nearly had a heart attack. She was standing less than a metre away from a tiny door that wasn't even as tall as her. "Please!" she begged. "Don't!"
"Sign the confession, and everything will be fine," the soldier said, unlocking her handcuffs and taking off her sweater. "Take off your shoes and socks."
Irma rushed to obey. "But then you'll just shoot me!" she protested, placing her socks inside her shoes on the cold floor. The soldier shrugged. He forced her into the tiny cell, locking the door behind her. No matter how hard Irma hammered on the door, there was no reaction. She sat down on a thin blanket at one end of the cell, if this tiny cupboard could be called a cell, and cradled her bruised hands against her chest.
From a sitting position, her elbows could touch both sides. It was too short to stretch out in fully, and likewise the ceiling was too low to stand in. The only thing in the cell besides the blanket was a large hole in the floor on the other end, which Irma supposed was a crude toilet. In the ceiling there were a few vents, though they were too thin to stick as much as a pinky into, and also a lightbulb. Irma ran her hands down the walls, feeling like they were going to crush her.
As she sat and sat, the feeling became worse. When she fell asleep, she dreamt that the walls were slowly creeping in towards her, and woke up crying and flailing around, hitting her hands on the constricting walls. Not having anything better to do, she adjusted the blanket around her – she was freezing cold in her thin shirt and bare feet – and tried to fall asleep again. She woke up when a rattling sound made her look up. A flap was open in the door, and a cup of water was handed through. "Please, let me out of here!" Irma begged, trying to reach through the flap. A painful smack to the fingers made her withdraw her hands.
"Sign the confession, and we'll let you out."
"But I'm innocent of all that!"
The flap closed with a sound of finality. Irma fell back against the wall, not thirsty anymore, but very hungry. Some time later, the flap opened again, and this time, the cup was full of not water but a strange, viscous liquid that had the texture of tea with half a kilo of sugar in it, but without the sweetness. Irma handed back the cup, leaned back, and fell asleep again, blanket over her face to keep out the glare of the lightbulb.
Irma knew she was suffering from depression. Knowing didn't help her, though. She sat on the floor, staring at the opposite wall. Half the time, she dumped the viscous drink into the hole, but nobody did anything, even though they could obviously see that she was extremely skinny. Irma raised a hand that felt like it weighed a million kilos and ran it over her chest. She could see every one of her ribs clearly when she looked down her shirt, which she seldom had the energy to do. Maybe she would die soon. That would be nice.
"Please," she told the person giving her water. "I'll confess to anything. Just get me out of here." Her voice was weak from disuse.
The sheet, as well as a pen, were immediately produced. With difficulty, Irma scrawled her signature. It looked completely wrong, but her fingers, covered in blood from fruitless banging on the door, were refusing to obey. She was lying on the floor in a fetal position, blanket under her head. When the door opened, bringing with it a gust of fresh air, she did not stir.
"You look terrible," the man said in a gentle tone. He crouched down and carefully shifted her to a sitting position with her back against the wall. "Why haven't you been drinking the nutrient sludge?"
Irma said nothing. Suddenly, she burst into tears. The man gave her a cup of the nutrient sludge, which she drank, nearly choking on it. "You know what?" he said. "I'm sure you'll feel much better once you clean yourself up a bit. Can you stand?" Irma slowly crawled out of the cell and got to her feet, feeling like gravity had quadrupled. The man led her down the corridor and opened up another door, a tall one. Inside was a basic shower.
Before letting her undress, the man shaved her bald. Not much of a loss, that. Her hair would need hours and hours of care to get back to normal from the state it was in. With lethargic movements, Irma undressed and stepped under the shower, not caring that the man was standing less than a metre from her. The water was warm, which made her start crying all over again.
When she turned around to step out, her old clothes were gone, replaced with a dark-grey outfit. She was taken to an interrogation that was more like a friendly conversation, the interrogator even offering her tea.
This strange interrogation lasted for a week or so. Irma slept in her old cell, but with the door open, and got more nutrient sludge to drink, though the interrogator often offered her tea, coffee, and MRE's. The stews and porridges tasted overwhelming after the weeks of tasteless sludge, and she often found herself unable to eat. Psychologically, at least, she was doing quite well, according to the interrogator.
"Do you know why you're here?" she asked one day.
Irma shook her head.
"They want you in the Capitol."
Irma tried not to outwardly panic. "What?" she asked. "But why?"
"You are to be a defendant at the trial of the key criminals."
It took a while for the information to sink in. "What? But I- I wasn't-" A horrible suspicion struck her. "Kren's dead, isn't he?"
The interrogator nodded.
"I will not be a replacement for Kren! He was two levels above me!"
"You said you were his deputy."
"There were sixteen deputies!" Irma exclaimed. "My actual role was a second-rate news show, surely you can find someone better from the Ministry of Information?"
The interrogator just stared at her for a while. "No," she said eventually. "We have Lark, and we have you." Irma sighed. Lark would be representing Lark, not the ministry. Would they seriously pin everything on her? "Read this." Irma took the thick document and nearly had a heart attack when she saw the first page. A group indictment? What was happening? She read the names. She had only met two of those people before, though she knew of nearly all of them. Her own name was at the very end. Was that a good sign or a bad one? "Please write down on the back what you think of this once you're done."
There were five counts on which they were indicted. The last four made some sense. The implementation of the Hunger Games, war crimes, other crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace or aggression. She had never heard of three of them before, but Irma understood what they were supposed to be about, even if the idea of war being a crime made scant sense. Irma was vaguely aware that before the Dark Days, Snow's predecessor had signed an international treaty banning aggressive war, but would that really apply here? The first charge, though, terrified Irma even as she struggled to understand it. A common plan or conspiracy...
Irma glanced down the list of names. It was absurd. How could she be accused of conspiring with all of these people like some sort of gangster? They had all been on such a higher level than her! Besides Count One, Irma was only being accused of Count Four, while a few of the others were being charged on all five, and others still - on only two, like her.
On the hovercraft to the Capitol, Irma wrote down 'I am not guilty of any of this' on the copy of the indictment provided to her by the psychologist, Dr. Aurelius, who must have gone on this trip just for that purpose. Others had written on it before her, saying anything from 'Is this some kind of bad joke?' to 'For a soldier, orders are orders' to 'I see reason behind all of these accusations'.
"Interesting," said Dr. Aurelius, smiling strangely. He was reading a book with a plain fabric cover. "I thought you'd be more unsettled by the charges of conspiracy."
Irma ran a hand over her bald head. "I think that there was some sort of conspiracy," she admitted. "I just had no part in any of that. It's absurd to imagine me conspiring with the leader of the NCIA and the Head Engineer of the Hunger Games."
"Interesting." Dr. Aurelius looked at his book, then to her, then back to his book. "Now, what do you think about the charges against your co-defendants?"
"I don't quite understand that bit about aggressive war," Irma said. "I get why they think that what happened after the Dark Days was an unprovoked invasion and occupation, but that ended long before any of us had any sort of meaningful role. Why did they include it when the Rebellion already fits the criteria?" If the interrogators had told the truth, it was the Capitol who had fired the first shots without provocation.
Dr. Aurelius closed his book, marking the page with a finger. "One of the legal historians working on the trial actually wrote a pamphlet on it," he said as he dug around in his bag and took out a small stapled booklet. "Would you like to read it?"
"Of course," Irma replied, taking the pamphlet. She needed to know what to defend herself against. Her mind spun at the thought of how much effort it would take to prove her innocence. Would they even be allowed to request documents? Odds were, this pamphlet would be the only information she got before the trial started, and that scared her.
Once the hovercraft landed, Irma was tossed into the back of a windowless van, which immediately sped off, bouncing badly over the potholes. After what felt like an eternity, the van stopped, Irma was dragged off to some room to be searched, and soon found herself standing before two soldiers.
"Hello," the higher-ranking soldier said. "I'm Lieutenant Vance, or Warden Vance to you." His affable tone contrasted with the brutal strip-search she had just been subjected to by two bored-looking nurses. The other soldier, a very young woman to whom Irma was cuffed, said nothing. "Now, we'll just get you settled in, you can have breakfast, and then you can go talk to your lawyer," the warden continued.
"Wait, I'm getting a lawyer?" Irma asked.
"Of course," the warden said. He was a slender man of average height, with dark skin and narrow eyes. "Can't have a trial with no defense lawyers." He sounded far too friendly for someone from Thirteen. "Now, this is your cell block," he said, passing through a gate that was locked behind them. Irma looked around, seeing twenty-odd soldiers staring through peepholes in doors. One of the doors was open, and it was there that Irma was led. "Someone will be around with breakfast soon. It'll be leftovers from yesterday, I'm afraid, it's still too early for breakfast, but I hope you'll find it satisfactory." Irma was uncuffed, and she walked into the cell.
Her first thought was that it was nicer than anything she had been in before. There was a table, though no chair, a small cot that was long enough for her to stretch out on, and a toilet/sink hidden out of the way. So there would be at least some privacy here. On a little shelf above the sink were a flimsy comb (not like she'd need one, as she was completely bald, at least for now), toothbrush, toothpaste, and pads. Irma tried to remember when her last period had been. Back in the basement in the cottage, as far as she could recall. Hopefully there was nothing seriously wrong with her.
A flap in the door opened, and breakfast was pushed through. Bean stew and canned apples, as well as a round little loaf of bread that turned out to be extremely sweet. "Lieutenant Vance got the roll just for you," the guard explained in a whisper. She couldn't have been older than sixteen, a lanky dark girl with an accent Irma didn't recognize. "Also, can I have your autograph? I'll give you chocolate."
Faced with such temptation, Irma signed the proffered piece of paper at once. She then began to pace madly, feeling an odd sense of whiplash. Why were they being so friendly all of a sudden? Wardens were suddenly fetching breakfast at some absurd hour of the morning - it was still pitch-black outside - guards wanted autographs, and nobody was even breathing a hint about the confession she had signed. Not to mention the fact that she would be getting a lawyer. What was going on?
Irma ate the chocolate slowly, delighting in the sweetness. There was nothing for her to do, so she continued to pace until the sun rose, enjoying the spaciousness of her new cell.
"Slice?" a soldier said. "Time for you to meet your lawyer." She was cuffed to the soldier and led down the corridor, down the stairs, and into a small room. Separated from her by a panel of glass was, of all people, the president of the Bar Association.
"Hello," Irma said, trying to hide her shock. "You're my lawyer?" She wasn't sure how to interpret this. Was this being done so that everyone thought that the trial was fair?
Dr. Baer nodded. "I am," she said, "and your assistant is going to be helping me." Irma felt some relief. At least Joy was fine. "Now, I've already started planning-"
Irma interrupted. "But I signed a confession in Thirteen!"
"Believe me," Dr. Baer said, "they're going to do everything they can to pretend that never happened."
"What?"
Dr. Baer proceeded to fill Irma in on everything that had happened since her arrest. In just five minutes, her head began to spin.
All Irma wanted was to talk to one of her co-defendants. She had hoped that they'd be able to talk while washing, but the deputy warden was having none of that.
"I said, silence!" Tiller shouted. The six women stopped whispering and stared at the floor. The only sounds were breathing and a quiet, distant hum that might have been the pipes. Irma didn't recognize any of the others, no matter how hard she tried to put names to faces. The only woman she was sure she'd recognize was Talvian, due to her height, but everyone in the washroom was normal-sized. "Now, undress!"
Irma took off her clothing. As soon as she put it down, a guard began to search through it. A few of the others turned out to have contraband hidden under the inner soles of their shoes and where lanyards had once been in hooded sweatshirts. Irma had nothing, though, as always. They were searched every day in their cells (it took hours to clean up afterwards), and Irma always had nothing.
The six of them were also searched. Nothing was found. Once that was done, Irma looked around to everyone. Four of the women were staring at the floor; two who had been pale before were now bright-red. One looked unconcerned. Irma herself didn't feel too bad, either. While she usually hated being touched, she didn't mind if it was in a medical context, and it had been easy enough to trick her brain into thinking that the searches were routine examinations.
"Go wash now," Tiller said.
The water turned out to be cold. Reluctantly, Irma positioned herself under the tall tap and began to scrub herself with her hands, shivering as she did so. The small container of liquid soap was in a small, locked cage. Irma wondered how one was supposed to kill themselves with a bottle of soap.
Just as the water was starting to warm up, Tiller shouted at them that their time was up. Reluctantly, Irma finished washing off the soap. The tap turned off automatically, and a blast of hot air hit Irma. She smiled at the warmth.
"Get dressed!"
Irma wished for clean clothes, but those were only handed out in the evenings. Once everyone was dressed, they were cuffed to guards and taken back to their cells, not allowed to say a word. Everything had been turned inside-out, and when Irma finished putting it in order, Warden Vance turned up and scolded her for being so sloppy.
Weeks later, when they were finally allowed to go for a walk in the concrete cylinder that was called a yard, they had to keep a distance of two metres from each other, and they were prohibited from talking. Irma wondered when she'd ever get to say a word to her co-defendants.
There were twenty-four of them, twelve men and twelve women. The irony wasn't lost on anyone, and it was obvious that it had been a deliberate choice. And Irma was clearly the odd person out. According to the guards she was only there because Alexandra Chaterhan, owner of the Steelworks conglomerate, was too ill to stand trial together with her grandson, Antonius, who was walking around a few metres away from Irma, dressed in a plaid shirt and denim trousers.
As Irma walked around under the watchful eyes of the guards, she glanced up at the large grille that was their ceiling, and then looked back at her co-defendants, taking them in for the first time. Guards had shown photos with names to her, as had Dr. Baer, and Irma was glad to finally be able to know who was who. For a second, Thread met her gaze before staring at the wall again. He was so stiff and upright, it was hard to imagine him personally whipping poachers and saboteurs or signing the order for the firebombing of Twelve. Even in a plain uniform with no badges of rank and thin canvas shoes, he still acted like the Head Peacekeeper he had been in Eleven and Twelve. His counterpart, dubbed the 'Butcher of Eight', likewise maintained her military bearing. She wore a Thirteen military jacket and combat boots without shoelaces (deemed a suicide risk), and rumour had it that Warden Vance had said that Bright would have made an excellent sergeant.
The former head of the Coast Guard and his predecessor were also clad in Thirteen cast-offs. While Best was elderly and the much-younger Verdant still recovering from his botched suicide attempt (he had leapt out a window, shattering one of his legs to pieces), they still walked like they had a steel column in place of a spine. Verdant pretended everything was fine, and his composure had only cracked when suffering from the cluster headaches that had plagued him every year for decades now.
All four of the Peacekeepers still listened to their former commander in everything. Lux didn't look like the person who had once commanded all of the Peacekeepers. Like the other four he stood at perfect attention whenever addressed by a guard and cleaned his cell with a fanatical neatness every morning, but he wasn't in the best of health, and constantly looked exhausted. He was also wearing a knit sweater, which made him look distinctly unmilitary.
As Irma looked around, Lark met her eye and glared at her. Irma glared back and continued walking. Coll caught her eyes and raised his eyebrows; Irma shrugged in response. The former Minister of Resources looked very unministerly in a tracksuit and hiking boots, which threatened to fall off at every step due to the lack of shoelaces. He stood next to Blues, who wore a rumpled jacket and cargo trousers. Irma wondered in what dump all of these clothes had even been dug up.
From the back, the diminutive Talvian looked like a child of eleven or twelve, with that bright-orange sweatshirt and running shoes. Next to her, the two-metre-tall Krechet, the most senior of her surviving attack dogs, looked like the sort of younger brother who teased his older sister for being shorter than him. The sleeves of his shabby Thirteen-issue jumpsuit barely reached halfway down his forearm.
If not for the mismatched clothes and buzz-cuts, they could have passed for a ministerial meeting. Blatt, the former Minister of Armaments, stared at the back of Dijksterhuis, the former Minister of Economics. Dovek, former Minister of Internal Affairs, and Oldsmith, Snow's former secretary, were rumoured to be continuing an old-standing feud about who had really been Snow's right hand. Everyone was avoiding Cotillion, who had headed the Institute for Genetic Research. While the way that she had rolled up to the Justice Building in a luxury car and surrendered herself was impressive, nobody wanted to be associated with the IGR and its mutts both animal and human.
Ledge, the former Minister of Finances, was hunched over and stared only at the ground. Lee, the former Minister of Health, stared upward, at the small patch of sky that was visible through the bars. Grass, former Minister of Justice, had her hands buried in the pockets of the overcoat that she wore open over a collarless shirt. Even Irma could tell that Kirji, who had headed the Department of Victors' Affairs, looked simultaneously terrified and resigned, or maybe that was just because that was the only way she could feel.
There were three deputies other than Irma on trial, each one simmering with barely-contained fury at the fact that they had been abandoned to this judicial charade by their bosses. Other than Kren, the Ministers of Education and District Affairs and the Head of the Training Centre had all killed themselves during the last phase of the fighting, along with many others. Brack, Pollman, and Toplak respectively could do nothing about the fact that they were being forced to answer for the actions of a ministry that had not been controlled by them. They were the ones Irma felt sorriest for.
Irma couldn't get her mind off the clothes they were wearing. Most of them were dressed in some sort of military castoffs from Thirteen or in whatever someone must have had dug up in a charity bin. She looked down at herself, at the neat and well-fitting grey outfit she had been given in Thirteen. It looked like a prison uniform.
"How are you?" Dr. Baer asked.
"Fine. You?"
"Mostly fine, but some youth from the Documents Division beat me at poker at the Witness House yesterday," she said. "It was us, Meersten, and an NCIA captain." Irma could only gape at the mental image of the trial's foremost defense lawyer, a clerk from the Documents Division, Snow's former photographer and social media expert, and an NCIA captain playing poker together. Although, from what she had heard so far, stranger encounters were had at the Witness House. Irma wanted to ask if that was a conflict of interest, but decided not to. "Now, have you finished the answers for the direct examination?" Dr. Baer had already begun preparing, on the assumption that the trial would be a quick one and there would be no time to prepare once the prosecution began to present its case.
Irma gave the papers to the guard, who leafed through them before passing them on to the guard on the opposite side of the glass. Dr. Baer picked them up and began to read the first page. Feeling uncomfortable, Irma looked down. "What do you think?" she asked.
"You need to stress the show more," the lawyer said. "Anyone can see that you're only on the dock so that they can find someone not guilty, but there is always the possibility that they may want to hang all of you." Irma sighed, running a hand over her head. "The prosecution will build its case on the basis of you having had an official post in the Ministry of Information, trying to tie you to the conspiracy. We need to show that you were the host of a mildly popular show and nothing more, your post being of too junior rank to tie you to Kren himself."
Having heard that many times already, Irma only nodded as Dr. Baer continued to read. "Do you know when the trial will start?" she asked.
"Less than two weeks."
"That's something."
They discussed possible witnesses until their time ran out. "I'll write out some suggestions," Dr. Baer said as she held up the sheaf of papers, "and give them to you tomorrow."
"Thank you," Irma said. "Tell the other lawyers I say hi."
Dr. Baer smiled and nodded. She had told Irma about the café where all the defense lawyers liked to hang out whenever they could find an hour of free time. The building only had three walls and the roof was partially tarp, but the coffee was first-rate and the pastries even better.
The cell door opened, and Dr. Mallow stepped in. The psychiatrist from Eleven was holding a large bag.
"Good morning," Irma said, stopping in her tracks. Visits from the mental health team were a welcome distraction. "Take a seat. Would you like some sour sticks?"
Dr. Mallow sat down on the backless chair, which had just been returned to Irma for the day, and put her bag on the floor. "That would be lovely, thank you." Irma took out a few pieces of candy from her pocket and handed them to her.
"Are you doing anything specific today?" Irma asked as she sat down on her cot. Dr. Mallow sometimes made her do strange things. Occasionally it was another psychiatrist, but the key criminals were in the purview of Drs. Aurelius and Mallow, with their assistants dealing mostly will the smaller fry. Irma was visited nearly every other day, but Dr. Mallow spent half the time asking her about Kren, which drove her up the wall. At least the tests were fun.
"Yes," the psychiatrist replied, taking out a small box. "You will perform a few tests for me."
Irma's competitive spirit, long dormant, awoke. "What kind of test?" she asked, wishing her mind wasn't so foggy from the long time spent in cells. She always did worse than she should have.
"Just a test." Dr. Mallow opened the box, revealing a stack of cards and nine cubes. "Now, take these cubes and make this image," she said. Irma complied. It was easy, but the images became more and more complicated until she had to give up, which she did with great reluctance. She recognized the test - this was part of an IQ test - and she really wanted to beat the others.
After that, she was made to do mental math, which was even more difficult. She hadn't had to calculate if a car going 100 kilometres per hour would travel a distance of 250 kilometres faster than a car going for 150 kilometres at a speed of 75 km/h since highschool, and had to give up shortly after that. Fortunately, the next part was word definitions, which she breezed through. Dr. Mallow actually didn't know some of the words herself, but that was because Irma was taking the Capitol version of the test, not the Eleven one.
The general knowledge section was also fine, as were the similarities, though Irma struggled because a few of the things mentioned had simply been before her time. After only one of the digit span tests, Irma had a headache from trying to keep all the numbers in her head, and it grew worse and worse. "How much more?" she asked.
"Repeat the following numbers backward. Two, four, three, one, seven, nine, six, zero, eight."
"Eight, zero, six...uh..." Irma struggled to remember. "Nine?" Dr. Mallow nodded. "I give up. I'm tired." Her record had been six.
Fortunately, the test ended soon. Dr. Mallow did the calculations right there as a curious guard watched through the slit and Irma sipped lukewarm coffee from a thermos. "How did I do?" she asked as Dr. Mallow began to put away her things.
"One hundred and twenty-seven."
"But what does that mean?" She knew that one hundred was the average, but wasn't sure how good her score was. And in any case, the exact number mattered less than scoring higher than the others.
The psychiatrist offered her a sheet of paper on which everyone's scores were written. Irma was disappointed at having been the last to be tested, but at least it meant she was the first to see everyone's scores. They were listed in alphabetical order, but Dr. Mallow had penciled in their rank just now. Irma was below average, a measly eighteenth. The winner was, oddly enough, Talvian, with an extremely high score of one hundred forty-five. Dovek had gotten one hundred thirty-seven, and Oldsmith - one hundred thirty-six. "Wow, I did terrible," Irma said, trying to not show how upset she was. But how could she have done well, given how messed up her brain was?
"Actually," Dr. Mallow said, "the average score is one hundred, with a standard deviation of fifteen. You are in the ninety-sixth percentile."
"But everyone else did so much better than me!" Krechet, who hadn't been educated beyond highschool, got a hundred and twelve, the worst of them all but still an above-average result.
"It would be reasonable to assume that it takes intelligence to claw one's way to the highest levels of power and stay there, don't you think?" the psychiatrist asked.
"That's true," Irma admitted. It still stung to be eighteenth out of twenty-four.
"Dr. Baer?" Irma asked. It was the evening before the trial was due to begin. "I have a request."
"What is it?"
"During the morning recess, could you please give us a snack of some kind? It should cheer everyone up." She had come up with the idea after realizing how desperate all of them were to swap autographs for candy and coffee.
"I'll see what I can do," Dr. Baer said.
The next morning, they were woken up at six, as usual. After eating breakfast and cleaning her cell, Irma put on the nice clothes that had been issued to her the previous night. The jacket and trousers were drab, but in good repair, and putting on the dress shoes was enough to switch her into official mode. She walked confidently down the corridor, even though she was handcuffed to a guard. They were led down a corridor, a right turn, another corridor, and they were there.
One by one, they were led through a small door. Irma was at about the three-quarter mark. She waited as the others disappeared through the door, until it was finally her turn. On the other side of the door was a small staircase that led up to another door, as well as a guard. Taking a deep breath, Irma became the sort of person who enjoyed being the centre of attention, and then she was gently shoved through the door.
It was bright in the courtroom, with harsh lights competing with the sound of cameras and conversation to overwhelm her. Irma drifted for a few seconds on the rushing wave, not letting it overpower her senses.
"Sit down there," a guard said. Irma looked around the dock. Four small benches, arranged two by two, and Irma was in a corner. As she sat down, she realized that the biggest names were all clustered around the opposite corner, not in the middle as would have seemed logical. They were sitting in the order in which they were named in the indictment. To Irma's side was Grass and then Coll, in front of her was Blues, and diagonally from her was Chaterhan. Irma leaned back against the wall to which the bench was attached. She could already tell that sitting in it would not be enjoyable.
Everyone was enthusiastically talking to each other about their IQ scores and shaking hands, but Irma needed a few minutes to calm down until she was sure that conversation would not overwhelm her. She looked around the courtroom. At the opposite end was an empty table where the judges would sit. To one side was the press, and to the other - the viewing galleries. In the middle were long tables for the prosecution and defense. Irma realized that Dr. Wreath, defense lawyer for Best, was wearing a Peacekeeper dress uniform. "Good morning," Irma said to Grass, stretching out her hand. "How was Wreath even allowed to dress like this?" The military defendants, except for the retired Best, were likewise wearing their old uniforms, but with holes in the fabric where badges of rank had been unceremoniously torn off.
"Good morning to you, too." Grass took her hand and shook it with a strong grip. "I don't know. I'll ask Best." The question was passed down the line, and the response soon came. "He was kept on by the Rebellion to clear ocean pods, so he still has a right to wear his uniform."
"Interesting."
Less than a metre away from Irma sat Dr. Aurelius, armed with a clipboard and pen. On the opposite side of the dock was Dr. Mallow, who was standing and talking to Brack about something.
"How many numbers could you remember backwards?" Grass asked Irma.
"Six. You?"
"Eight," Grass said proudly.
"All rise!" sounded a powerful voice. Irma stood up as if pulled by a string as the judges filed in. There were thirteen of them, one from each District. When they sat down, everyone else sat as well.
"I see the judge from Thirteen is right across from me," Dovek said lightly. "How nice."
Irma wondered why she was there. Why was she being tried like a common criminal? She had done nothing wrong!
It was announced that the Inter-District Military Tribunal was now in session. The judge from Thirteen, Raymond Sanchez, was introduced as the presiding judge. He made a few brief introductory remarks, saying that the trial was unique in the history of jurisprudence but still had many precedents to draw on, and then announced that they would begin by reading the indictment. According to Dr. Baer, that was expected to last the entire day. Irma tried to sit more comfortably as one of the prosecutors from Eleven, a sturdy middle-aged woman, began to read the words Irma had nearly memorized.
While the audience listened attentively enough, Irma and her co-defendants soon drifted into a stupor. The other side of the dock was busy keeping track of how often everyone's name was being said; Irma was losing quite badly. She looked at the clock, wishing she had something to do with her hands. After about an hour of mind-numbing boredom, she borrowed a pencil and some paper from Chaterhan and began to doodle. After another hour of this cloying agony, a recess was finally called.
"Yet another reason why holding a group trial is a terrible idea," Dovek joked. Irma had always known that the slight man had a very expansive personality, but not to that extent. "How is everyone's morning so far?"
"This is an outrage," Oldsmith said. "I was Snow's right-hand person, but I'm only fifth in the rankings!" Irma decided he was probably joking, as Dovek didn't immediately explode.
"See?" he asked with a smile. "Even the judges accept it. Be grateful, it might yet save you from the noose."
"In my dreams," Oldsmith spat. "Can't you hear? They want our blood!"
Dovek laughed. "What blood? Clearly, they're trying to bore us to death." Everyone joined in the laughter.
At that moment, Dr. Baer began to pass around a box of donut holes, warning that there were two for each of them plus two extra for herself. Irma grinned when it got to her. Jam-filled, her favourite. She savoured the sweetness slowly, licking the powdered sugar off her fingers. Then, there was a mad dash to the bathroom as everyone realized that the next break would be in two more hours, for lunch.
As the audience trickled back in, the endless litany of atrocities began anew. The session had started at 8:00, and the break had been from 10:00 to 10:15. Lunch would be from 12:15 to 13:15, afternoon break from 15:15 to 15:30, and the day would end at 17:30. Following that, they'd eat dinner and be allowed to talk to their lawyers. Saturday would be a half-day if they were running late and needed to catch up, and at least Sundays would be for rest and planning defense strategies. Irma wondered how many hours she'd spend in this overheated courtroom on a hard bench.
"Your lawyer is amazing," Blues whispered to her.
"Thank you," Irma said awkwardly. It was an open secret that Dr. Baer, the most skilled and experienced of the lawyers, had taken Irma's case because it was the only one that had even the slightest chance of being allowed to win. As soon as possible, Dr. Baer would make a statement explaining why the Tribunal had no right to judge any of them, though she had warned Irma that it would never work because there were too many precedents.
When the audience was on the verge of falling asleep, lunch was finally announced. One by one, the twenty-four were taken to a room on the same floor. Irma gasped out loud when she saw the large windows, as did many of the others. They crowded around, eager to get a glimpse of the city.
Irma had been shown photographs before, but to see the rubble with her own eyes was something else. She knew that only a couple of municipalities had been so destroyed, but it was still a sickening sight. No wonder the people wanted justice for those who had brought this all on them.
"Sit down!" came the command from Warden Vance. Everyone sat down, crowding around three small tables, as labelled trays were brought in on a cart. Irma picked the farthest edge, not keen on being crowded in. The middle table was, predictably, being presided over by Dovek, with Blatt and Oldsmith flanking him, and the military people occupied the last one. Irma looked from Cotillion to Brack, wondering who to talk to.
As they dug in, Brack broke the silence. "Good food," she said. It was indeed quite good, though the portion size was as small as ever.
A dashing young guard leaned in with a slight smile. "You think they'll feed you even better the day they hang you?" she asked.
Irma barely held back a scream of frustration. Putting on her best imperious airs, she snapped, "And who authorized you to talk to us?"
"Nice," Cotillion whispered.
The guard leaned over and whispered to another one, "I'm just waiting for one of them to start swinging their fists."
"No way," the other guard, a stocky young man, replied. "They've got the mental health team drilled. Nobody's going to try anything, believe me."
Dovek was trying to rally everyone's spirits, with the help of Oldsmith. "Our only crime was losing!" he declared. "If we are guilty of anything, then so is the victorious side. They bombed our children!" he said, as if his own children hadn't been safe and sound at his luxurious cottage.
"Exactly!" Oldsmith said, waving his spoon in the air. "Coin wanted to hold a Hunger Games with our children. Does Thirteen really have the right to judge us?"
"Yes." Everyone looked towards the source of the sound. Coll was glaring defiantly at Oldsmith. "Look what they did to Coin. Look what they did to their own war criminals. We're lucky by comparison." Having proclaimed that, he shoved a spoonful of stew into his mouth and stared at his tray.
The guard behind Irma chuckled. "And here I was thinking that this would be literally Tokyo."
Confused, Irma turned back to her bean stew.
The next day, Dr. Baer stated her objection, got shot down, everyone pled 'not guilty', and Irons, the Chief Prosecutor from Thirteen, stepped up to give the opening argument.
"The privilege of opening this trial," she began, "is a great burden. No words can do justice to the past seventy-five years."
It only got worse from there.
"The entirety of Twelve," the prosecutor said, "was burned up in the attack. This wasn't a normal bombing, it was the deliberate annihilation of a District. It was genocide."
Irma was confused for a second by the unfamiliar word, but then she figured it out. She glanced at Thread, who didn't move a muscle.
"Document 00-23 is the minutes of the conference at which the decision to firebomb Twelve was taken. They were taken by Carolus Netts." Snow's other secretary had wisely killed himself rather than face trial. "According to the list, the following defendants were present: Lux, Thread, Blatt, Coll, Oldsmith, and Pollman." Irma glanced at Pollman, wondering what a deputy had been doing at such a top-secret gathering. "I will now read to you from the minutes."
The witness was a young woman from Four with a large scar on her face who practically whispered the oath as she took the stand.
"How did you get that scar?" the prosecutor asked. The short man from Thirteen had a voice like steel.
"I turned around when being tied to the whipping block," the youth said in a dull voice.
"Are these the only scars you have?"
"No. Should I show you?"
Sanchez spoke up. "Unless one of the defense lawyers requests it, the witness need not undress in court." The defense lawyers looked like they'd rather jump out the window than say a word. Wreath was resting his face on his hand, covering his eyes.
"Why were you whipped?" the prosecutor continued.
"I put up some posters," the youth said in a dead voice. "Close to the District Peacekeepers' headquarters. We wanted to warn them. And everyone could read and write in that neighbourhood, so they would also learn."
The youth explained her background without once raising her eyes. Raised in an upper middle class family in Four's Centre, she had always liked to read, especially old (and preferably forbidden) books. At the age of twelve, she fell in with a small group of like-minded youths. Two years later, she was whipped for putting up posters critical of the Peacekeepers. All that was said in a sullen monologue, but as soon as the prosecutor held up a poster and asked her to explain it, her eyes lit up and her shoulders straightened out.
"We read a book about Yamashita," she said in a firm voice, pointing at the projector screen overhead. The image showed two men side-by-side, a Peacekeeper and someone who must have been Yamashita. They did look quite similar. A chart at the bottom listed off crimes, with both of them having tick marks in each category. At the very bottom, it said: 'Fate', with the word 'Death by hanging' and a question mark in the respective columns. "And we had this one officer, and he kind of reminded us of him. And it's a bit of an iffy precedent, but all we had was this one book, so we were stuck. Basically, Yamashita was this officer-"
Fortunately, the Chair broke in to say that the Tribunal was fully aware of the Yamashita precedent and its shortcomings, and the witness didn't need to elaborate any further about that. The youth continued to talk about what happened to her in dull, emotionless sentences. In a few minutes, it was clear to everyone that she had been whipped on orders which had been passed on by Lux, who was working off Snow's demand to deal with agitation most severely. Bright sat slumped over the low wall, Lux was taking notes, and Thread radiated menace.
"According to Document 10-98, the price of birth control had been kept deliberately high even though less than five percent of the District had been able to afford proper maternity care. According to Document 10-203, maternal mortality in Ten in the last five years of the regime had averaged nearly nine hundred per a hundred thousand live births, even as the figure for the Capitol rounds to zero per a hundred thousand, as per Document 00-9."
"The defense does not have any copies of Document 00-9," Dr. Baer spoke up, "or of any documents you have mentioned so far."
The prosecutor, an old man from Ten, scratched his head. "Uh, you can borrow mine for now?" he said. Irma sat up slightly. She was bored out of her mind, and these sorts of diversions provided some much-needed entertainment, though it was nowhere as funny as the constant mispronunciations of Dijksterhuis' name.
The Chair broke in to defuse the argument. "When can the Defense be furnished with copies of the documents?" he asked.
Someone from the Documents Division was called up to the stand. "The photocopiers broke, and it took us two days to fix them," she explained. "The backlog is being dealt with. The documents will be delivered in the next few days."
"And how many copies does the Prosecution have?"
"Twelve." Besides the judge, who had been a mere clerk before the Rebellion, Twelve had only sent in one other person, and he worked in the Witness House.
"In that case, five should be given to the Defense for now."
After a short scramble, the prosecutor continued reading. "Other medications were also priced far beyond the average person's ability to pay. Out of a hundred children with Type 1 diabetes, three would live to adulthood due to the high price of insulin. In the Capitol, by comparison, insulin was free and accessible." Irma leaned back against the wall, trying to fight off an intense desire to sleep.
"My parents were arrested for treason," the boy from Eleven said. He stared dully ahead. "That evening, Head Peacekeeper Thread came to our house. I knew it was him because one of the other Peacekeepers said so."
"What exactly did they say?" the lawyer for the prosecution asked.
"Something like 'The Head's here, now you'll get yours'."
"How many Peacekeepers were there?"
"Around five."
"What did they do?"
The boy stared at the ground, wringing his hands. "Head Peacekeeper Thread told me that my parents were going to die if I didn't listen," he said. "He marched around the house until he saw our cat, which had just given birth. Then, he took his pistol, pointed it at me, and told me that my parents would die that evening unless I killed the cat and the kittens." Irma heard the crowd gasp. "So I did. I wrung the mother cat's neck and smashed the kittens with a brick." The boy's hands were twisting madly; he shoved them under his armpits and hunched over. His tone remained completely dead. "Then, the Peacekeepers laughed and told me to clean it up."
"Were your parents released?" the lawyer asked.
"Yes, but my mom's kidneys never recovered after the beatings. And after they saw the bloodstains, they never loved me again." The boy looked at the dock as if noticing them for the first time. "I never told anyone about this because I was too afraid."
On cross-examination, the boy described Thread as black-haired, tan-skinned, and 'a metre eighty tall at least', but it was scant consolation that the sadist had not, in fact, been Thread himself.
"What happened on the ninth of April, 75?"
"We were ordered to put down a riot on Ranch 82," the former Peacekeeper replied in an excessively loud voice. "Major Cott cited orders from Head Peacekeeper Bassingwaithe and commanded us to surround the buildings and set fire to them."
"What?" Thread hissed. "That's nonsense. The major was just lying to cover up their own tracks. I'd have never stooped to worry about a riot on a single plantation!"
"You weren't in Ten!" Coll hissed back.
"It was the same everywhere!"
As they argued, it was revealed that Cott had been working off vague instructions from the Head Peacekeeper to "punish rebellion more severely".
"Then," she said, "Major Cott asked for volunteers. We all stepped forward, of course. The ranch was surrounded and set on fire." She was so loud, it was hurting Irma's ears. "One person tried to jump out the window, but Cott shot them mid-air."
"Witness," Sanchez broke in, "please speak in a quieter voice."
She quieted down, but that was temporary. Once the cross-examination began (spearheaded by Thread's and Bright's lawyers), she was back to shouting as if she was addressing her platoon on the parade ground. Irma could only wince and force herself to not cover her ears.
"This footage was filmed in Nine during the famine of 31-32." With those words, the middle-aged prosecutor from Four sat down.
"Are we seriously going to be digging through ancient history?" Dovek asked, throwing his hands in the air. "None of us had as much as an unpaid internship at that point!"
Oldsmith disagreed. "Yes, we did. Stop pretending you're not old."
The laughter in the dock faded away as the lights dimmed. On the screen, a low-quality black-and-white image appeared. In those days, quality colour film had been reserved for the Games. Irma watched the footage of a small village with trepidation, listening to the crackly sound of footsteps and breathing. Next to her, Dr. Aurelius was facing the dock, pencil hovering over notepad. Irma gulped, heart beating faster.
"Are they all dead?" a female voice asked off-camera.
"Only the ones who couldn't run off," a male voice replied. An arm appeared in the video. A Peacekeeper uniform. "Hey, there's one!" he added in a quiet voice. The two ran towards one dilapidated house. The footage became blurry as they ran inside, and a hundred throats gasped in unison as they saw what was in the shack.
Two children, one maybe twelve and one who couldn't have been older than five, sat on the floor, licking bones. They themselves were hardly more than skeletons, and the small child had a grotesquely swollen stomach. Irma ran a hand over her head, taking in the huge empty eyes, the rags they were wearing, the protruding bones. The camera panned slightly, and Irma nearly threw up as she realized that they were eating a corpse. Someone next to her gagged. She heard sobbing.
"Hey, little one," the male Peacekeeper said, offering a bottle of something to the small child, who took it and began to drink greedily. The camera must have been lying on the ground.
"Are you the only ones left?" the female Peacekeeper asked the older child, likewise opening a bottle and handing it to them.
Neither of the children said a word. The footage then cut to the two Peacekeepers standing outside. "Today is the twenty-ninth of June, 32," the woman said. "Richie and Emma survived for a while because their family had a small stockpile of non-perishable food, but they died in a fight with the other inhabitants. After that, everyone who could walk tried to walk away, and Richie and Emma stayed behind, eating the corpses to survive." Tears were pouring out of her eyes.
"This year, only the children of the rich will be included in the Reaping in Nine, because McCollum doesn't want the rest of Panem to know what's going on here," the man said. He was cradling the small child with one hand and wiping at his face with the other. "But we are here, and we will bear witness. Panem will know. The world will know, and the guilty will be punished. If you are watching this and wear the white, take it off right now. It is not white. It is red with the blood of these children."
Before anyone could say a word, the next witness was called, an older man. When he introduced himself as the boy from the video, Irma thought she would pass out. She leaned against the wall, hands over her face.
"Didn't anyone know anything about any of this?" Dr. Wreath demanded of Best, who had been a young officer in Six at the time.
"I was patrolling the Lakes at the time!" Best hissed back. "How could I have known?"
Irma lowered her hands just in time to see Dr. Wreath crumple and rest his head on his elbow.
"This document, 06-402, shows that the forced labourers working on the Arenas had been fed 1,400 calories daily. I quote the words of Defendant Blues. 'If they slack off, feed them less. I will not waste resources on them when we're already struggling to get the tunnel dug in time.' A passage further down in the memorandum calls for alleged malingerers and saboteurs to be shot without trial."
"For three years, I worked in the Training Centre during Games season," a former Avox signed. Her words were translated into verbal speech by an old man. "It was from 72 to 75. During the off-season, I worked in an elite nightclub as a cleaner."
"When were you turned into an Avox?" the prosecutor asked. The old woman from One had to stand on a box to see over the lectern, which didn't take away from the weight of her words.
"Early 72. I pled guilty to fomenting Rebellion and expressed remorse, so judge Lophand spared my life and even labelled me as 'politically reliable', which resulted in my posting." Lophand had been the most infamous of the political judges and would have been in the dock with them if not for Grass already representing the justice system. Instead, he was the star defendant of the just-started and aptly nicknamed Judges' Trial.
"In this capacity, did you ever interact with any of the defendants?"
"I regularly saw Toplak. The Head of the Training Centre had delegated all of their responsibilities to her. She frequently told me herself that she was constantly being forced to deal with every little issue." Toplak wrote something on a piece of paper and passed it to her lawyer, who appeared to be half-deceased.
"Why would a high-ranking civil servant complain about their job to an Avox?"
"We were viewed as furniture," she explained. "Some couldn't imagine us ever being in a position to tell their secrets, while others were very careful and could even order one of us killed, though Snow needed to be persuaded in such a case."
"And in which category was Defendant Toplak?"
"The first."
Everyone turned towards Toplak, glad it wasn't them whose secrets were about to be exposed in front of everyone.
A worn-out man from Six testified about the battle he and his colleagues had waged to stop the downscaling of the only hospital in their town of thirty thousand.
"We were the only place to get a blood transfusion done within a hundred kilometres!" he whispered. "And they still tried to close down the centre."
"On whose orders was this closure?"
"Our chief doctor told us to not complain, because the order came directly from the Minister of Resources," the man said, glancing at Coll. "He wanted to achieve more efficiency and less wastage, that's what the chief doctor said."
"Was the closure carried out?"
"No," said the man, standing up straighter. "We went on strike. All of us. Doctors, nurses, technicians, ambulance drivers, janitors - everyone! The mayor sent in the Peacekeepers, but they knew they didn't want to escalate too far. Everyone knew that the other Districts were rebelling openly, so they didn't want to provoke us. We were beaten up, of course, but they backed down eventually. Our hospital is still functioning, and the blood bank is providing blood for the entire county!"
An old woman gave a lengthy overview of the suppression of Rebel activity in the Capitol. Fifteen years old when the First Rebellion had begun and seventeen when it ended, she wove an endless tale of fear and anxiety in a quiet voice.
"My wife was born and raised in Eleven," she began. "She moved to the Capitol to attend university. Things were already bad; she was in the last cohort of District people who were allowed entry into the Capitol. We met and fell in love." She sighed, adjusting the thick glasses she wore. "As the Rebellion was being crushed, we found out that everyone from the Districts who lived in the Capitol was to be deported." Irma felt dread at the thought of the witness rehashing what they all already knew from the documents that had been read. "We bribed an official to overlook our ages and got married, which saved my Heather from deportation. Many people did something similar, and as far as I know, ten or so are still alive."
"We immediately joined a local rebel group, though, in truth, we were nothing more than a small group of confused and angry children. During the first few Games, we participated in the Marches of the Disapproving." How odd, to hear documents from a bygone age brought to life by this little old woman with thick glasses. "Eventually, it became too dangerous."
"I did not come here to hear my grandma's boring stories," Oldsmith whispered loudly. "Will she ever get to the point?"
Fortunately, the Chair soon broke in to tell the witness that the Tribunal already knew the background. It went smoother from there, though Irma winced every time the propaganda machine was mentioned.
"In April 64, I was unexpectedly forced to retire," the former deputy Minister of Agriculture finished his thankfully brief testimony about the purge he had lived through. "First, a close personal friend of mine went missing without trace, and then the Minister of Agriculture of the time, Cloelia Radiant, died of a heart attack despite being only fifty-five with no pre-existing heart conditions. I took this to be a sign and handed in my resignation the day of the funeral."
"Does the prosecution wish to ask any more questions...does the defense wish to ask questions?"
"Were you directly threatened at any point?" Talvian's lawyer asked.
"No, though to one of my position, disappearances and deaths of friends and close colleagues were warning enough."
"What sort of pension did you receive?"
"A ministerial one, because Snow wanted to pretend that my retirement had been voluntary."
"Afterwards, were you invited to state functions?"
"Yes, for the same reason."
"And what of the others you claim were forcibly retired?"
"They, too, were treated as if the retirements had been voluntary. Of course, the ones arrested-"
"Witness, I ask you only about your own experiences. After your retirement, did you ever appear publicly and give interviews?"
"Yes." Irma smiled slightly. That particular bit had been cooked up with Dr. Baer's help, who had done the research. She was by far the ablest of them all, though she did not interfere with the purely military matters, which were Dr. Wreath's domain.
"And were you allowed to speak out against your retirement?" Digging up that particular segment had taken days.
"Yes, but-"
"And were you allowed to directly state, on the television, that your retirement had not been voluntary?"
"Yes." The lawyer didn't let him explain that it had been on the sort of channel where people claimed that there were mesmeric forces controlling the government, continuing the cross-examination with no pause.
Dovek and Oldsmith were miming applause. How could a deputy minister be so clumsy with words? It was a miracle he hadn't managed to mortally offend Snow at some point, if this was how he composed himself in a difficult conversation. Or had retirement not been too good for him?
The witness was completely covered up. They walked towards the witness stand pulling a black scarf closer around their face with one hand, and held a child of five or six by the hand with another. A folder was under one of their arms. After what looked like a brief argument between them and an MP, the child was handed over to the MP and the young person gracefully took the witness stand. Only a pair of dark glasses could be seen, everything else was loose, black fabric. In an adult, gender-neutral voice, they swore to tell the truth and only the truth. Irma glanced at Cotillion, who looked ready. Dr. Aurelius was hovering nearby with a weird expression on his face.
"Witness, please state your name, age, and address." The words were the same as always, but there was a subtle hint of something else in them.
The witness pulled up their scarf where it was threatening to show a part of their face. "I'm Subject 102-43 and I was created on the second of May, sixty-one," they said in an even voice. "I live in the Institute for Genetic Research, Wing One, Room Three."
Irma pressed herself into the wall of the dock, away from Cotillion. Blatt and Lux, who flanked her, were also trying to lean away. Subject 102-43? This was a human mutt. The documents had been vague, but this...this was a real person. Real people, if the child the youth had been with was also from the program.
"Witness, do you have any other name you call yourself?" The prosecutor from Thirteen sounded slightly pained.
The youth shimmied around in the witness stand. "Um, no? Should I? Well, Technician Antus calls me 'PhD' sometimes, because I'm his PhD - get it? - but that's a nickname, not a name. Well, he usually calls me 'Dee' for short, but that's also a nickname."
"That is no issue. Witness, do you recognize any of these people?" Irma exhaled in relief. She had never stepped foot into the Institute, had never even suspected that it was dedicated to anything beyond mutts for the Games or perhaps particularly cruel experiments done on criminals.
"Your Honor," the youth said, "I can't perceive things that are at a distance in that level of detail. Could you ask them to speak or something? Even if they just said 'Hello', that would be enough." Irma realized that the youth was either vision-impaired or blind. She had an unpleasant feeling that there was something more sinister to this than an accident or just being born that way.
The request was granted, and the defendants were ordered to go up to the microphone one by one and count to five. They dutifully clambered over each other and did as ordered. The youth's reaction to Cotillion was terrifying. "Oh!" they said, sitting up straighter and dropping their hands in their lap. "That's Godmother! Sorry, Your Honor, I meant that's Director Cotillion!"
"I'm confused," Dovek said to Cotillion. "You already had six children. Why did you need more?"
The witness recognized Talvian, and said that she had once visited and asked about the program the witness was in. Given what Talvian's old job had been, Irma was afraid to find out more about the program. The rest of them were not recognized by the youth, and the testimony continued.
"If I may ask, Witness, would you be willing to show your face? It would greatly help in understanding the situation."
The youth crumpled again. "Um, alright," they said hesitantly, adjusting the huge shawl they were wearing. In a sudden move, they tore off their veil and sunglasses, and Irma nearly screamed in terror.
The youth was an albino and bald, but Irma barely noticed that. She was staring at the face. The eyeless face. The youth had no eyelids, no eyebrows, nothing whatsoever, only smooth, pale skin where eyes should be, but they still stared. Stared straight at the dock, at Cotillion, who was the only one of the defendants who did not look shocked. Even Talvian looked taken aback. Krechet clung to the wall surrounding the dock so tightly, Irma was afraid he'd break it. Irma heard a collective intake of breath from the crowd. Someone actually cried out in shock.
There was a strange sound. The youth was holding their head in their hands, and was sobbing. "I was supposed to be scary," they said in a thick voice. Could someone with no tear glands cry? "That's what they always told me. I strike dread into people with a single glance." They wiped at their nose with a sleeve and opened up the folder, running their hands down a piece of paper before putting it back. Everyone was awkwardly trying to move away from Cotillion. The youth paused, taking deep breaths.
"There were a hundred of us created," the youth said in a more confident tone. "Well, not really created, at that point. I don't know. Anyway, seventy-one were born, ten lived to one year of age, and I was the only one to make it to two, and indeed, the only one who ever left intensive care. So the project was a failure." The youth sounded extremely calm, but then again, this was just their life to them. Irma had known that experiments were being done on humans, but she had thought they were criminals or something. Not custom-made babies.
"A hundred embryos created - with what characteristics?" How was the prosecutor remaining so calm?
"I do not have eyeballs or optic nerves. Also, I'm bald, albino, and intersex for some reason. I'm not sure what Doctor Dacien was thinking. But I don't mind being me. Except when people are scared of me. Oh, and I can echolocate, but that wasn't on purpose. I figured it out when I was little, and the technicians just ran with it."
But...why? Why mess around with humans like that? Why create a child, a tiny, living, breathing person, just to inspire dread?
Irma felt herself shutting down.
"Do you know the full name of this Doctor Dacien?"
"Yeah. Lucian Dacien. I think he started out with animal mutts and tried to go into hybrids, but they failed as always, so he shifted to human mutts full-time. I think it was because someone committed suicide. Again."
"Could you describe the involvement of Defendant Talvian in the program?"
"She turned up from time to time, to talk to Director, I mean Defendant - is that right? - Cotillion. She met me a few times, but I always had to wear dark glasses and a scarf to not scare her. I overheard a bunch of their conversations, because they'd go into the Director's office and leave me on the couch outside. They complained about how all the others died and how I was terrible at fighting and useless. Also, they talked about the animal mutt program a lot, and talked about whether a mutt that did really well in the Games be used for other purposes. I'm not sure what other purposes. Sorry."
"Do you know if Defendant Blues was aware of the human mutt programs?"
"I don't know? I think she was only mentioned a few times. She said some sort of animal mutt was needed, or something, and a bunch of technicians were complaining that it was too short-notice."
"Please describe the responsibilities of Defendant Cotillion."
"Well, she was the Director of the IGR. She was the godmother of all the human mutts. She was really nice, always brought us candy when we did something well. She's the first person I remember. Whenever we did something new, she always wanted to know. Everything was recorded. We mostly lived in dorms, and she would visit and tell us stories and about the Games and whatnot. Thing is, she was also the one who decided if someone was useless. Like, the useless Avoxes, they could just be sent on to sewer maintenance or something-"
"What was the role of Avoxes in the program?"
"They were the wombs, and that was basically it. If one miscarried too often, she'd be fired, and nobody wanted to be fired because this was a really good position. Like, they got excellent healthcare, nobody ever died as a result of pregnancy. Well, I mean, that was normal for the Capitol, but the District people probably don't know. And they were mostly defectors who got caught and Rebels and whatnot, so it must have seemed like a good position. When I was little, I wanted to be an Avox, because they seemed to have nice lives to me, but then I found out I don't even have external genitalia, only gonads that don't really work properly. Anyway, it was the interns who raised us. I heard that normal people are birthed and raised by the same person, so I'm just clarifying. I had a really nice intern, his name was Intern Antus. Well, he was only an intern for a few years, he got promoted to Technician. Most of the other human mutts weren't so lucky, even the special ones who had their own. The interns kept on running away to the Rebellion or quitting or relocating to the plants department. By the way, what happened to Technician Antus? He was really nice. He was never scared of me and always told me I looked pretty, but some of the other human mutts called me creepy."
"Is that Severus Antus?"
"Yeah."
"He is currently in custody. Please continue with your description of Defendant Cotillion's role. You were mentioning how she decided what to do with those individuals considered useless."
"Really? That's nice. Can I meet him again? I mean, he's basically my dad, if I'm understanding what that is correctly. Anyway, the Director would evaluate everyone on their nineteenth birthday and decide what to do with them. If they were special, they had to pass a test, and if they did, they'd be used for something. Basically, there were two types of special - special as in unique, and special as in useful for something. I was both, so it might be confusing. Anyway, if they failed, they would be used for experiments and die, just like the people stolen from hospitals and prisons and the non-special ones. I wasn't really scared, though, because Doctor Dacien told me once I could be totally useless and still pass because my face is so scary."
"Does this mean that some human mutts were created to not be useful?"
"Oh, yeah, that was most of them. Doctor Dacien and his friends really liked to mess around and create random crap. I think they started out with mice but moved on to humans even though the gestational period is way longer because they wanted to make cool stuff. All the Doctors just wanted to have fun. The Director was always yelling at them for wasting resources that could have been used on making useful stuff, like more of me. She really wanted to create an actual human-animal intermediary, but the Doctors kinda gave up on that pretty quick. They said they wanted to push the boundary, not beat their heads against it. That was five years ago in the Director's office, by the way. There should be a record. The officer with the weird voice told me you have all the files. Anyway, the useless mutts would be used in experiments until they died."
"What was the role of the technicians and interns?"
"Well, I already said that the interns raised the human mutts. They washed and dressed us when we were little and whatnot. Like, Technician Antus raised me pretty much by himself. He was an intern then. Anyway, sometimes they said weird things, and we'd be punished if we repeated them. Like, they told us that the Games were evil and that District Thirteen existed. The Director had one publicly hanged after she put up anti-Snow leaflets everywhere. They were even in Braille, so I could read them. It was nice of her to do it just for me; all the other human mutts could see. The interns were mostly really nice, even if they were sad. The technicians were more important. They were actual professionals, and the interns were mostly PhD students. The technicians worked in the labs and did experiments on us. There was always someone getting fired because they refused to do something, but you had to be politically proper to get hired, so there were less anti-Snow people there. Or maybe they were super-sneaky and sent info to the Rebellion while pretending to be politically proper. The Director was always worried about that."
"What sort of experiments were performed?"
"Oh, all sorts of stuff. I don't know much about the experiments done on useless subjects, but it was mostly just killing them slowly and in different ways. The clones would be put in the same painful situation, and they'd see if there was a difference in how they reacted. They liked to take those of us with handicaps and force us to do things that were difficult for us. Like, they made me try to tell where a line drawn with pencil was on a piece of paper. Or they made me run around an unfamiliar room. They were mostly focused on making me some sort of super-soldier, but I was really bad at everything. Like, I couldn't shoot because I can't perceive things that are that far away, and it was super-hard for them to make me good at hand-to-hand because I have very little testosterone. More than a normal female, but less than a normal male. Anyway, I'd say I'm pretty good for my size, but not what they wanted. And they wanted to teach me how to skulk around and scare people so I could freak out enemies of the state, but they also didn't want to let me out of the compound so I just ran around the halls trying to ambush people until I gave the Deputy Director a heart attack when I jumped out of his wardrobe at night. He survived, but I was confined to the human mutt wing from then on. I mean, it was his fault for not locking his apartment door, anyway."
"Do you know the reasons for your other features that are rare in the general population?"
"What, like the baldness? No. Well, the baldness and albinism might have been to make me scarier. Or maybe it was an accident. Weird stuff always happened when a project first started. Not sure about being intersex, though. When I'm dressed, I look pretty normal neck-down. I think Doctor Dacien just wanted to see how much random crap he could shove into one body."
"When you say 'doctor', what do you mean by that? Were they all medical doctors?"
"Dunno. It was just 'Doctor this' and 'Doctor that'. I think Doctor Dacien was a geneticist. I mean, why else would he be creating human mutts?"
"Were you ever scared?"
"Like, ever? Well, I was often scared when I was told to run in an unfamiliar room, because I would often collide with stuff. I broke my nose once. If I ran slowly, the technicians and doctors yelled at me, so I had to be fast. And I was super-scared when I found out about what happens to the special human mutts, but then Doctor Dacien told me I was safe, so I stopped being scared for myself, but there were all those other human mutts and I was scared for them all the time. And when I gave the Deputy Director a heart attack, I was also really scared they'd shoot me or something. By the way, what happened to the Deputy Director?"
"He is in custody awaiting trial."
"Well, let him sleep with the light turned on, please. And don't have me testify, because he might have another heart attack. He always threatened to have one when someone told him to visit the human mutt wing. Anyway, the most scared I've been was when the Rebellion was coming. All the doctors ran off, and most of the technicians and interns. It was just the few who remained watching over us and stuff. Technician Antus had to deal with the little ones and I barely saw him. The older ones had to help out. I got to watch over Achik, he's the one over there. He has a name because that's the point of some experiment someone was doing. Anyway, I watch over Achik because the Rebellion sent in some people, but we're mostly still just kinda doing the same old thing, going to school and stuff, but all the interns and technicians got arrested and there's pretty much nobody watching over everyone. Some of the human mutts got adopted, but not the ones with the weird abnormalities. Everyone's just running around doing whatever. I think I'll adopt Achik as soon as I move out. Your Honor, where do I go to get a job?"
"The Chair does not deal with such issues, Witness, but I'm sure someone will help you and Achik. I have no more questions."
"Does the prosecution wish to ask more questions...does the defense wish to ask questions? Thank you, Witness, you are free to go."
"Okay!"
Someone was poking Irma. It was an MP armed with a truncheon. She got up on hesitant feet and walked where she was led, dazed. The youth's words were running through her mind. Human mutt. Human mutt. Human mutt... Back in her cell, she lay on the cot, trying to gather her thoughts. But...what? What was there to say to something like this? A child who had spent their entire life in a compound, raised to believe their only purpose in life was to terrify, raised by apathetic researchers and confused interns. This was the end. There was no way any of them were getting alive out of here. She wanted to pace, but couldn't even sit up.
The door opened, and the psychologist stepped in. Irma motioned him towards the chair, and he sat, clipboard at the ready. "I would like to know your reaction-"
"To that witness?" she said. "No. I can't do this anymore. It's too much. They're killing us." Dr. Aurelius watched her. "There are no words for this. Did you hear their style of speech? Like any normal teenager in an informal setting, but with a lot of technical vocabulary. They were raised by interns, after all, and never taught how to behave in different settings. Such a little thing to notice, I know, but it's just - I don't know, A foolish thing to notice, I understand."
"No, no," said Dr. Aurelius. "It jumped out at me, too."
"It's just...the poor children."
"Indeed."
"I do not understand," Irma said, wringing her hands. "I just do not understand. Why am I being tried with people like Cotillion? This is- I don't have the words." She sagged back. "Please. I need to think about this on my own."
"I will be back later today," said Dr. Aurelius, and left. The door slammed shut, leaving Irma alone with her thoughts.
The next day, the torture continued. An entire movie was shown about the IGR, and just when everyone thought they could take no more, an elderly technician testified about an experiment he had been ordered to participate in.
"That was a long time ago," he said, "but I remember it like yesterday. A room full of children starving to death." He wiped at his eyes. "They told me they were doing research on how long it took someone to die when given a certain amount of calories. They wanted to know how much they could shrink tesserae by. The children didn't cry, because they had no energy to cry. They just lay there. I remember their tiny hands. Their fingers felt like twigs when I tried to comfort them."
Lunch was a dismal affair that day. Coll got into a screaming fight with Dovek. A journalist tried to get too close, and Krechet threw his tea at them. Everyone laughed hysterically. By the time Irma calmed down enough to continue eating, her stomach and cheeks hurt.
Krechet was banned from tea for two weeks, but all of the guards warmed up to him from that moment on and began to offer him tea at every turn. Irma heard a rumour that when one of the researchers found out about the incident, they began to laugh uncontrollably, and couldn't stop for a solid ten minutes.
"Hey, Slice," the guard whispered, "could you sign this for me?"
Irma took the brochure from her. It showed the mugshots of the twenty-four defendants, as well as the crimes they were being accused of. Under that was a small blank space that enterprising guards had realized could be used for signatures.
Several of the others had scratched out the charges on which they were being tried, or written pithy one-liners. Irma simply circled the words 'Count One', wrote 'Makes no sense even in theory', and scrawled her signature. The soldier smiled when Irma gave it back and handed a cup of coffee through the square hole. A complete set of signatures fetched a sizable sum of money on the black market. Equally popular were the cards that had a diagram of the courtroom printed on them, with the defendants and judges labelled.
The guards were a highly unprofessional lot. Irma had heard that Warden Vance was unhappy with how little support he was getting. When he got combat veterans for his unit they tended to go home as soon as possible, and the inexperienced call-ups were incapable of taking anything seriously. They blasted songs in the middle of the night, and while the thought of Lark having to listen to Evening Loudmouth put a smile on Irma's face, not being able to fall asleep sent her into homicidal fantasies. Only when she had had a meltdown and complained to the warden while crying had the endless singing of Don't Lock Me Away, Deep in the Heart of Texas, and many other songs both modern and classic finally ceased, if only from twenty onwards.
The chief warden was disliked by the guards because of his tendency to micromanage. They preferred duty in other wings, where he didn't hover as much. His deputy's only qualification for the job was that she was female, and thus could be present when the women were being searched. She was nowhere near as demanding, and had amassed her own collection of autographs from every single person held in the jail, from the key criminals to the witnesses whose trials wouldn't be starting for years, as well as from many of the famous witnesses who weren't detained.
Vance and Tiller were responsible for the entire prison, and constantly complained about the workload. When given the assignment, three researchers had appeared to give them a memo with extremely cryptic advice before slinking back to the library where they allegedly lived. The wardens had then complained that they were fully aware of the danger of suicide, given how many potential defendants had taken their own lives during the last phase of the fighting, and claimed that they didn't need advice from some legal historian of all things on how to set up security measures. Irma, however, suspected that she owed the inability to sleep in any way but on her back with face facing the door and hands above the blanket to the memo, as she had never heard of such an absurd arrangement before in her life and neither had anyone else, including Vance and Tiller. Stranger yet had been the demand that air conditioning be fixed as soon as possible.
The researchers had managed to stick their noses into everyone's business, warning the psychologists about the danger of faked mental illness and telling the Inter-District Committee whom to indict and not indict between frantic calls to Ankara and Buenos Aires to demand documents that nobody had ever heard of and of which no English translations existed. They cryptically referred to various individuals as being "literally Itagaki" and "a slightly less homicidal version of Ohlendorf", and allegedly had insisted to Paylor that the collapse of the trial would lead to immediate revanchism.
All hopes of the trial falling apart were gone by now, though. The Tribunal kept on going as if the Districts weren't constantly teetering on the brink of falling out, month by month until the steady drip of atrocities threatened to drive Irma to insanity. It was looking like the trial would take half a year, at least, and several other IDC trials had already begun, to the researchers' relief. Other countries were sending in humanitarian aid to help with the food shortages, letting the new government continue with the trials unimpeded. Most of the defendants were by now in agreement that something of this sort was necessary in any case, though Irma was sure that she wasn't the only one hoping for something to split the Districts irreconcilably.
Despite the tensions, an entire industry seemed to be popping up around the trial like mushrooms after a rain. Journalists from all over the world bought souvenirs from guards and tried to sneak inside the prison to get a photo, or even better, an interview. Meersten was overwhelmed with soldiers begging him for funny photos and videos even as he sorted and labelled endless photos for the Evidence Division. Chime, the former archivist in the Presidential Archives, had spent months finding this or that document for the prosecution and defense teams. When the IDC had discovered that she was spending hours peddling Meersten's photos practically on the steps of the Justice Building to pay her rent, she was immediately billeted in the Witness House, where former Peacekeeper officers stayed in the same room as survivors from Twelve without coming to blows somehow.
Irma had seen photos of the mini-markets that sprung up anywhere soldiers were stationed, where they could buy anything from a prostitute to hot soup to fake Peacekeeper medals. Far from resisting to the last breath, the people of the Capitol had instead chosen to grovel at the feet of the triumphant Rebels, hoping that it would help them. Given the sort of retribution they had all feared during the beginning of the assault on the Capitol, it had somewhat worked. Anti-government Capitolians of all sorts, from unorganized Rebels to civil servants who had done everything they could to soften cruel decrees, had leapt to greet the invaders as liberators. While many individual interactions between conquerors and conquered had been positive, resulting in a much less harsh general perception of the Capitol, the situation on the ground had not been so rosy.
Soldiers had been under strict orders to not touch civilians, and indeed the few cases of rape and murder had been swiftly and harshly punished, but the destructive energy had simply been funneled into looting everything that wasn't nailed down and bringing a crowbar for the rest. The courtrooms being used for the several IDC trials in progress were quite possibly the only places in the Capitol that had air conditioning, thanks to the threat from the researchers that pauses in the trial would somehow result in the end of everything.
According to the guards themselves, everything of use had been piled onto trains and hovercraft and taken home, to rebuild. How the Capitol was supposed to rebuild when the very rubble was being shipped to Twelve was not a question they answered. They preferred to swap stories about the most outrageous loot their commanding officers had surprised their families with, from bookcases to bathtubs to entire greenhouses. The ordinary guards had been forced to settle for lightbulbs literally screwed out of stairwell ceilings, non-perishable food, clothes, and electronics. If they were even halfway truthful, then there probably wasn't a single wristwatch or phone left in the Capitol.
Besides loot, the guards loved to discuss the day's proceedings, quoting particularly audacious quips by Dovek and Oldsmith over and over. As Irma sat at her table, writing a brief guideline for her co-defendants, she could hear the guards laughing. She had come up with the idea of writing a guide to public speaking after hearing endless complaints about the shouting Peacekeepers. Putting her experience to good use, Irma was now writing down some advice to pass it on to the others, as many of them had never spoken publicly in such high-stakes situations before, and she didn't want them to make a bad impression.
"Hey, Slice, what are you writing?" a guard asked through the slot.
"Public speaking advice, for the others."
"The historians will die laughing," the guard said cryptically. "Hey, can you sign this dollar bill for me?"
Irma complied, receiving a large chocolate bar for her troubles. She put it in her pocket, to share with the others. As the presentation of the evidence dragged on, it was becoming more and more clear that Irma was in a class of her own, and she felt like she had to do something to cheer up the others.
Sitting in the dock was unbearably boring, horror piling on top of horror as documents were read into evidence and witnesses testified until nobody could care anymore. The first time Irma had seen footage of starving children it had been with disbelief, the tenth witness was heard with sadness, and when the hundredth document about starvation in the Districts was read, the defendants listened to it while being more concerned with what would be for dinner. Irma was also keeping track of who made how many quips. So far, Dovek was in the lead by far, Oldsmith right on his heels, and the rest had no chance of catching up. She herself was last, as in everything else they kept track of.
Irma wondered what prosecutor would be going the next day. They had just finished with the systematic abuse of the Victors, and it had been almost embarrassing to see the unfortunates struggle to recall names and dates and pass off outrageous gossip as fact. The defense lawyers, led by Dr. Baer, had made short work of their testimony. It was looking like their cases would be permanently shelved, despite the fact that it had been enough to guarantee death for Kirji, according to all of the journalists. The upcoming day, though, would be less enjoyable for Talvian, Dovek, and, especially, Krechet. Irma was torn between not wanting to know the details of the Death Squad's operation, and just being glad that she had had nothing to do with any of it.
"Hey, you want to give us a song?" a female voice shouted in the corridor.
"Which one?" a male voice replied.
"The one with the 'hey-hey'!" a gender-neutral voice shouted back.
"Alright!"
Irma sighed, putting down her pen and rubbing her temples.
"Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, ho!" the man began.
"Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, ho!" the others replied.
Hey, ha-a, ha, ha, hey, hey, ho!
Hey, ha-a, ha, ha, hey, hey, ho!
Hey, hey, ha, ha, hey, hey, hey!
Hey, hey, ha, ha, hey, hey, hey!
Hey, ha-a, ha, ha, hey, hey, ho!
Hey, ha-a, ha, ha, hey, hey, ho!
Irma prepared to hum along to the song.
Hail, hail, we are here
Rowing through the backwaters
Spirited in song are we
Sailing through to victory!
Keep the rhythm, song, and beat
Through the splashing of the oars
Moving hands and moving feet
Yes, we will succeed!
The chorus began anew, all of the guards joining in.
Our boat is sailing fast
Like the river to the sea
Like the trotting of the mare
Galloping to victory!
Lads and lasses in the fields
Beat the drum and sound the horn
Get the people out to see
This, our victory!
"Oh, could you be silent for just an hour?" Lux demanded. "One can't hear themselves think with this racket!" The former Commander-in-Chief felt personally insulted by the lack of discipline among the forces that had defeated him, and had recently acquired the ability to stand up for himself instead of simply replying 'yes, sir' to everything.
Bright didn't twitch as the prosecutor, an extremely elderly woman from Eight, fired off question after question, but she did look like she wanted to crumple. By now, Irma could tell what her co-defendants were feeling just by looking at them. None of the witnesses Bright had called had helped her much. The Peacekeeper officers had predictably deafened the courtroom with their shouting, annoying everyone and driving Irma to tears. Bright, however, was much quieter, thanks to Irma's advice.
"What was your reaction to being given the order shown in Document 08-481?" This was what felt like the millionth document with her signature on it. So far, the prosecutor had just asked questions that went nowhere.
"I disapproved," Bright said in a steely voice. "This was not pacification; it was pouring fuel onto the fire."
"How did you express your disapproval?" the prosecutor asked. This was a trick, Irma could see it. The instructions had come down from Lux himself, and none of the Peacekeepers dared say a bad word about him. But when was the prosecutor going to spring the trap? Looking around the dock, Irma could see that everyone just wanted this to end.
"How could I have?" Bright answered a question with a question. "It was a direct order."
"But why did you obey?"
There was a pause. Everyone sat up, digesting the simple question. Lux, who was going to go immediately after her, looked sick as he continued to take notes. Irma fidgeted with the pencil she was holding. Grass pretended to be perusing some documents, but was in reality reading a newspaper.
"I do not understand," Bright said, sounding confused more than anything else. "All my life, I was raised to believe in duty and loyalty. In such circumstances, the idea of disobedience to direct authority was tantamount to treason."
"Even if ordered to shoot children?"
"The order was given by superior authority. The question of personal scruples was irrelevant, as we had sworn obedience to the people who had issued those orders." The answer was given in a rehearsed tone.
The prosecutor held up a small book. "Is there not a paragraph in the Peacekeeper's handbook that directly says that only lawful orders must be obeyed?"
Bright nodded, suddenly looking much younger than her fifty-four years. "But what is the law?" she asked in a high voice. "When we were instructed, we barely went over that passage."
The prosecutor didn't bat an eye. "Is there or is there not such a paragraph?"
"There is." Bright glanced at the dock, looking for reassurance from Lux.
The cross-examination abruptly shifted to how deserters had been punished under her command. Irma realized that this was an attempt to show that disobedience had been easier and more widespread than Bright was suggesting. Several days later, Bright ended up admitting responsibility for the orders she had signed.
"Yes," she said, far too loudly, "there is such a thing as taking obedience too far. That is my guilt, that I was not able to tell the two apart. Our loyalty was abused and betrayed. We were taught to become the executioners of our own people. I am ashamed to admit that every single positive quality I ever strove to uphold in myself was twisted into something I can only recoil in horror at."
As the days passed, Blues and Coll became more and more convinced that they needed to take responsibility, and by the time Blues took the stand, half the world was aware that something interesting would happen. It didn't happen during the direct examination, though, and as the cross-examination began, Irma started to feel like it had all been a bluff.
"I was not responsible for what went on during the Games, especially the ones that came before my time," the former Head Engineer insisted.
"And what of the ones that happened during your time?" That was a mistake. Irma had by now picked up a basic maxim - that a lawyer should never ask a question they did not know the answer to. This one was so vague, Blues would be able to say anything. Irma wondered how the lawyer would be able to come back.
Blues looked utterly calm. "I wasn't involved in the planning, only the execution. However, I am still in some way responsible for all of the deaths of the Tributes in the arenas I worked on, the same way that I bear partial responsibility for any crimes that may have been committed by those under my command."
As the lawyer seized on the 'partial responsibility' bit, throwing what looked like kilograms of documents about the mistreatment of forced labourers at the Tribunal, Irma winced and looked down. It was always painful to watch her co-defendants be humiliated. Glancing to the side, she saw that Coll was leaning forward, hands clasped together tightly. He looked resigned.
A few minutes later, it was time for lunch. As always, Irma sat down at the very end. Next to her sat Coll, and Blues sat on his side. "I was very impressed by your performance this morning," Coll said. "You have inspired me."
"Thank you, Mr. Coll." Blues poked at her vegetable stew with a spoon.
"Oh, no, no, call me Theodosius," Coll replied.
Blues looked up, looking utterly perplexed. "Alright, then. I'm Donna." She stuck out her hand, and Coll shook it. Irma wondered how long this new friendship would last for. Oldsmith started criticizing Blues for breaking up the united front, and she fired back with vehemence. Irma ate her stew.
Thread turned out to be wilier than Bright. Even when confronted with an entire thirty-minute movie of himself personally hanging and whipping alleged saboteurs, poachers, and Rebels all over Eleven and Twelve, he did not crack, emphasizing the legality of his acts.
"You see," he said, "if I had let subordinates carry out the sentences, then they'd be the ones here!"
Coll ended up being even more creative, taking partial responsibility for everything the government had done during his time as Minister. Irma wondered why he was so insistent on shoving his neck into the noose.
"How did I do?" Irma asked Dr. Baer the evening after her cross-examination was over.
"You did well."
Irma tapped her fingers against the table. "They made me out to be Kren's shadow, or something like that." No matter how much she had tried, the prosecutor had twisted her words inside and out. She had made her sound like a liar even when she had told the exact truth!
"Nevertheless, you did much, much better than most." That could be chalked up to the fact that there was simply nothing to throw at Irma.
"What are my chances?" Irma asked directly. She looked her lawyer right between the eyes, heart hammering.
"With the way the trial was conducted? I would put any amount of money on your acquittal."
Irma found that hard to believe. Even though most of them had had to admit that the trial was scrupulously fair, there was no way that one of the key criminals would be simply let go.
"Hi," Irma said awkwardly.
"Hi," Mom, Dad, and Uncle Ant replied in unison. This was only their second visit. During the break for New Year's not too long ago, they had also visited, together with what had felt like her entire extended family. The guards had been unimpressed with all the children running around (Blues and Coll had eleven children twelve and under put together), and had limited the amount of relatives for the next time. However, they would be able to visit again the next day, and the next, as the judges deliberated.
"How are you?"
Uncle Ant sighed. "We're fine. How are you?"
"As fine as I could be given the circumstances."
There was a pause. Uncle Ant chuckled. "We saw you on the television," Mom said. "They'll have to acquit you. It would be crazy to do anything else."
"I know that," Irma said with a weak smile, running a hand over her hair. "But do they?"
They all laughed at that, but it sounded more like they were crying. "You're witty all of a sudden," Dad said. He twirled a braid around his finger as Irma ran a hand over her head.
"That's nice."
Next to Irma, Blues was horrifying her parents by telling them that she knew she was going to be executed.
"How else am I supposed to respond to the boredom?" Irma tried to keep the levity going. "By my last count, Dijksterhuis' name was mispronounced two hundred and thirty-six times, and only two prosecutors were able to consistently say it correctly." Dijksterhuis leaned over to glare at her before looking back at his teenage son.
Uncle Ant laughed. "When you get back, we'll never be gloomy again."
Irma wondered if she ever would. She felt sick at the thought.
For the last time, they took their seats in the dock. The judgement had been read the previous day, and now it was time for the verdicts. Irma sat up slightly, still leaning against the wall, and tried to fidget with her hair, which was too short to fidget with. In her pocket was the breakfast they had been given. Irma wondered what she'd be feeling when she ate it.
The Chair began to read out the verdicts, one person at a time. Guilty, guilty, guilty. Every repetition of the word hit her like a gut punch, making her want to curl up. She knew she was innocent, but the hope was now replaced with the sickening fear that they might not care.
What if they found her guilty? Would they hang her? Irma's mind refused to consider the possibility, but there was no other possibility. She regretted her old pessimism, wishing that she had at least gotten the illusion of life to cling to for a few months. She wanted to scream at the Chair to just get on with it. One by one, her co-defendants were all found guilty, and then it was her turn. She listened, heart hammering, as the Chair practically repeated the indictment word-for-word, though he did soften up by the end and say that she had been nowhere near as powerful as it could have been expected from a minister's deputy. He paused, and Irma braced herself, feeling lightheaded.
"Irma Slice, you are found not guilty of the charges brought against you and will be released once the Tribunal adjourns."
A wave of relief rushed through Irma, followed by the harsh slap of the realization that they wouldn't just let her go like that. Still, though, not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty. Even they themselves admitted it! She wasn't guilty! Now, no matter what they did, they'd have no justification in hanging her. Irma realized that she would live.
She took out the wrap from her pocket and ate it. Who knew what they'd do to her later, best to eat while she could. Everyone was staring at her. Slowly, they began to offer handshakes and congratulations. Irma tried to thank them, but found that her heart wasn't in it. After all, these people would be dead soon.
When they were taken out, Irma was drawn aside and ordered to pack her things. Still wearing her court clothes, Irma did as she was told. When she left her cell holding her box, she was arrested again. This time, she was put in the back of a police car and driven to a station. Her things were confiscated and she was searched, though she did get to keep her nice clothes. Irma sat down on the cot in the small, dingy cell, wondering what now. It was obvious that they were going to charge her all over again, and this time, the charges wouldn't be so blatantly inapplicable to her.
She spent months in that cell waiting for her trial, but the actual trial took a single day. As Dr. Baer sipped her coffee and Irma tried to twirl her too-short hair, the jury filed into the courtroom, each of them looking more sleep-deprived than the previous.
"Of inciting hatred, guilty. Of hate speech, guilty. Of being an accessory to the implementation of the Hunger Games, guilty." So they had found her broadcasts to be Games propaganda, then, even though she had never really mentioned them.
"Irma Slice, you are sentenced to nine years' imprisonment and confiscation of property," the judge read in a dead voice.