Don't Tell Me The Odds (or, District 5)

x

i can't stop bruising my knees
over what i can't have

in the absence of want
i am a colony of bees
with a dead queen

'Space Ratio', Cassandra De Alba

x

Kiran Patel, District 5

I painted the ceiling of my room light blue a few years ago, with Lumen's help. Had her over for a full weekend, basically, just messing around and getting utterly covered with paint for step one, the canvas. For the next part, the really fun part, we went in with some white paint, bits of yellow leftover from surrounding the light in the center of my bedroom with a halo of sunshine. So when I lay in bed and look up, it's like looking past the ceiling, into the clouds.

Not that I stay in here too much if I can avoid it, but I've always liked it, trying to divine meaning from something totally random. Things people have already totally figured out just aren't interesting. I don't think that's insane of me to think, right? Who wants to burn their whole life just doing the sort of thing a machine could do just as easily, if we've already got a line of code or twenty that'd just as easily solve the problem?

I still sleep here, like, for now, so I wake up and see the clouds I painted in more tolerable times, and the light streaming in from my second-floor window makes it clear that it's morning. Like, deep morning. And maybe it's finally finished raining.

The sun didn't interrupt my sleeping, though. That'd be my parents yelling at each other just downstairs. You can say a lot of things for District 5, honestly, but not much for the thickness of the walls of most of our houses. At some point, someone realized it was more trouble than it's worth trying to tornado-proof shit, I think, so here we are. Quick, cheap, and easy.

Ideally, I could roll over and go back to sleep, but the volume with which my dad is currently shouting - about me, delightfully enough - is making that a difficult prospect.

"You can't coddle him like this, Darya," he's insisting - clear enough who 'him' is, since I'm the only son, and Koyna and Kabini, my sisters, though barely out of daycare, are already showing the signs of overachieving in a way that my parents find quite amenable.

Really, it'd be obnoxious if the twins weren't so cute. And with the population expansion initiatives in effect, though my parents definitely can't take the hit to their pride necessary to admit it, their presence in our house is worth a small fortune in tax incentives.

Can't say I don't pay attention to things.

Though, evidently enough from the content of most of our disagreements, my dad would strongly prefer it if I turned my capacity to pay attention more constructively to schooling and finding a job for once graduation rolls up, rather than messing around with Lumen and watching reruns of the Games and current-runs of the increasingly fascinating lineup of shows about life in other districts, woundcare... hell, even fashion and shit.

All of it a lot more interesting than anything District 5 has to offer.

Last time we talked I got an earful for suggesting that if I ended up forced into hydroelectric operations, as seems to be his latest plan for me, I'd swan dive off a dam rather than spend a full year staring at spreadsheets like some kind of automaton.

He took that kind of personally, given that his job is essentially staring at spreadsheets like some kind of automaton, and it's a rough enough job, out there, that a few of his coworkers actually have kicked it in that sort of approach.

I want to be sympathetic, but my dad and I have kind of reached a stalemate lately in 'capacity to extend sympathy to each other', and I'm really not interested in being the one who cracks first.

"This won't work if we aren't in agreement!" he says adamantly, words echoing up the stairs as I try not to roll my eyes.

"Well, I'm not in agreement!" my mom shoots back. "He's still having a hard time after…"

"Five years ago, Darya! Half a decade! How long are you going to let him play you like a fiddle?"

Yeah, that's my cue to head out.

They're both sort of right, in the sense that my little sister Karha, ten at the time, did die five years ago, when some kind of fever sprung up in our area, and I don't like to think about that, yeah. But also, it's pretty much the best pretense to duck out of sweeping the kitchen, since it still gets to my mom a bit and it's not a total lie.

But it's not, like, my whole deal. I have a lot of other deals. Potentially. I just have to figure out, more concretely, what they are.

That's not going to happen in bed, so I roll out, make a halfhearted effort to toss my covers into place, and get dressed quickly. Our house is tucked up against a bluff, so I don't have to shimmy or jump or otherwise make a fool of myself making my escape through my bedroom window.

It's been my main entrance and exit to the house since my dad got the bright idea of imposing some kind of 'job search quota' after my eighteenth birthday a few weeks back. My footfalls are starting to permanently discolor the thick grass of the bluff with the amount of time I spend coming and going by this route.

The unseasonable rains that have been sweeping through Five, at least, obfuscate my typical path over the bluff, since, with just a little variation, it's easy to avoid leaving behind a trail of downtrodden vegetation. Even though I pretty much only go to one place.

Ten minutes' walk, pleasant in the early-afternoon sunlight of the cool and slightly windy Saturday, has me outside of Lumen's house.

She might as well be, like, my cousin, for all we look nothing alike. Literally, since her mom and my dad have been close friends for basically forever, moving from school to work on the dams and up into management in the same cohort, which is what passes for found family in District 5.

Unfortunately, because of that same oddly close relationship that brought us into each others' lives in the first place, I can't go in the front door, here, either, since her mom will likely as not drag me home by my ear for my dad to deal with, and I've learned quickly enough how to avoid that.

Instead of making any critical error I may have succumbed to in the past, I tap on Lumen's window, knowing she'll likely be around, pretending to study or reading or watching something on her mini-screen or whatever it is she's been up to since I last saw her on Wednesday, after school. We have a semi-weekly rock throwing contest established in the aftermath of our old tradition of getting together to watch the Games and shoot the shit.

"Hey!" In a second, her halo of fluffy brown hair is visible through her window, brown eyes bright with anticipation. "Thought you weren't coming! C'mon in."

"Aw, you missed me?" I half-whisper.

Her television isn't on, so I do sort of have to be quiet.

"Not on your life. Just figured you'd drowned and wasn't looking forward to dredging the river for your skinny ass. You'd slip through the net and it'd take months."

"Ouch! Right out of the gate," I say, feigning woundedness, an effect probably diminished by my grinning as I clutch my hands to my heart.

"Yeah, been sitting on that one for a while," she says, helping me through the window.

"Sweet how you have to work so hard to keep up," I tell her, landing on my feet as I roll into her room.

No painting on this ceiling. Lumen is no interior decorator, literal piles of stuff strewn on every available surface. I may not be very helpful around the house, but I'm interested in keeping my space habitable. It's borderline charming, borderline disturbing how she's never really seemed to give much of a damn.

"It's not easy dunking on you so hard literally all the time," she retorts. "I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a labor, though it's a labor of love."

I shift a stack of papers, two potted plants, and an empty water bottle off one of her chairs, and decide to let her have that one. Since I do love Lumen. How could I not love the only other person in this ridiculous sector of this ridiculous district with anything interesting to say, who's consistently willing to say it?

"You got anything going on today?" I say.

"Eh," she says. "Not feeling so hot."

She gestures vaguely at the room around her.

"Sorry, the train wreck of my living space matches the train wreck in my brain."

I try very hard not to frown at this. Lumen and I have our struggles, but it's rare that we're having particularly rough moments in synchroneity. I was actually really hoping she'd be outrageously-buoyant-Lumen, an iteration of herself so cheerful that it's impossible not to drop some of my self-important bullshit in her presence.

Something about the set of her shoulders and her expression, even discounting what she's saying, though, is conveying… well, defeat.

"Why don't we head out?" I say. "It's a really beautiful day, finally."

"Finally is right," she agrees, cracking a smile. "I think all the rain and whatever has been getting to me. Feels like forever since I saw the sun."

Weird as it is for me to be the one encouraging her to go out and do something, I help her back through the window and partially close it behind me. An almost palpable sense of relief accompanies the realization that she's pretty much supporting her own weight, doing her own thing, physically capable if not in a great brain-space.

It's really shaping up to be a lovely afternoon. The perfect kind of day for doing absolutely nothing, not getting in anyone's way, but also just… existing. While the weather was clear on my way over, the wind is beginning to whisk piles of fluffy clouds into the vault of sky. A sign of more rain, unfortunately.

The bad weather lately has actually been a problem in the district, and I've been kind of following it. We rely so much on the river, which everyone acknowledges is difficult to predict, even with people at the top of every graduating class getting funneled into teams working on modeling every conceivable interaction between the world and our hydroelectric stations. Tessera grain and oil has apparently been forfeit to the unseasonable flooding and, if you ask me, shoddy architecture, probably. Things are tighter than usual, and the newspapers reflect it.

See, I say shit like that to my dad, and he loses his mind, acting like there's something wrong with me because I can track the news but not, depending on the day, my grades or a job.

Neither of those are particularly interesting, though. Any idiot can do the work and turn in the assignments and get treated like a genius for doing what they're told. Half of what he's trying to get me into amounts, more or less, to self-limiting paths that would actually prevent me from thinking about things that are actually relevant and important. Hence my 'I'll jump off a bridge, don't push me' threats, which are utterly sincere.

We find a nice spot on the bluffs, high ground so the sun has had time to dry it out and we're not resting our heads in literal mud.

"I think the world might be going to hell," I say, settling into the grass, canting my head up so I can watch as the wind sweeps clouds in and out of my field of vision.

If I were going to do something - really, if there was a chance in hell at it - I'd want to apply for an inter-sector transfer, get into modelling if I could. I like to think I have sort of a knack for it. The problem, as I've told Lumen and basically no one else, is that I've dicked around so much in school for the last few years that I don't really have the means to get there.

None of my teachers like me enough to vouch for me, which is perfectly valid of them, since I can be kind of a deadpan asshole in class, and my grades are… fine, really. As good as anyone doing the literal bare minimum could hope to do. Better, really, because I'm not stupid, just took a long time to figure out what I even might care about, finding patterns and sense in an immeasurably complicated world rather than just adhering to someone else's imagined rules, and by then it was too late.

I'm eighteen. My parents won't let me forget that. And it feels like, no matter how hard my dad is angling to shoehorn me into some miserable life path, the one who's fucked up my chances of being something worth being is me.

Though I don't especially want to get into that, now or ever.

It is what it is.

"How come the world's fucked?" Lumen asks. "Anything specifically fucked, I mean, or just a general observation? 'Cause I've been kinda feeling that way too, lately."

I sigh.

"We're like… rats in a cage, here."

"Nice analogy."

"Thanks, thought of it myself."

"That's nothing new, though," Lumen complains. "C'mon, if you didn't have that shit figured out around the same time you learned to like, spell 'dictatorship'..."

Even when she's down herself, Lumen's always had a remarkable way of making me laugh.

"I'll give you that," I agree.

"You been following the new Games thing?"

"Not really," I say.

About three weeks ago, they made a huge announcement. Lumen's family came over to my family's place to watch it all together, figure out what was going to happen, whether the finale was really finale, how bad things were actually going to be. I mean, if you ask my parents, it's all just some kind of horror show that they can't stand to watch.

Maybe I get it, Karha being dead and all. More dead kids. It's sad, of course. But it's also on the screen, not in front of you, and it's like… what are you going to do, just ignore some fact of the world, hide your head in the sand and refuse to face the way things work, even if it's not exactly the way you want it?

"I've been getting kind of into it, but I think it's bumming me out," she says, rolling over on her side to frown at me. "There's no updates on anyone from Five putting themselves in the running, yet."

"There's a running?"

"Yeah, the mayor's office has made some announcements. Incentives and stuff. They're trying to seal the deal fast, get this over with. It's just a big distraction from actually doing shit, y'know? I think I feel that. I keep having dreams about volunteering and waking up, like, terrified."

"...why would you be terrified?" I ask, curious, now, meeting her eyes.

"Dude, I can fuck around and joke, but I don't want to die. What, you got something to tell me?" she watches me appraisingly, pausing to take in my non-expression in response. When she next speaks, her tone is more obviously concerned. "Kiran…"

"Been thinking about it, but you don't have to worry about me," I reassure her.

"Kiran."

"Swear to god, not gonna hurl myself into a river any time soon," I insist, actually putting my hand up as though I'm making an oath. "Why are you watching the coverage if it makes you so miserable?"

"I…" She shrugs into the grass, looking back up at the sky. "There's some interesting stuff. Your favorite not-victor made it onscreen the other day."

"What, not another replayed interview?" I complain.

The last victor I accurately called, in what used to be an annual tradition with me and Lumen, was Sharon. Now, lots of people like to act like she was obviously the one lined up, and sure, in retrospect, but I actually felt pretty clever pulling that together from the clues they dropped. And I really thought I was going to be right the next year, the 88th, finding some of the same patterns in the way they portrayed Star from District 1, but well… that didn't go super well for her or for me.

We'd had a bet going, like usual, me and Lumen, and I'd had to jump naked into the river at sunrise as part of losing. She's not so much into picking specific people as I am; I said 'it'll be Star' and she said 'you're full of shit'. Her statement turned out to be right-er than mine, so I bit the bullet and jumped, because a bet is a bet.

It's not so much that I looked dumb as that I'm almost completely sure there was some funny business going on, the same as in the 89th, when I was ready to stake my fucking life on it being Manari - it was all there, every single lead-up, and then… well.

Here's the thing. He did technically live, though he's been on television like three times since then, once on Intensive Care talking about being a paraplegic, about as haughty as a person can be while describing their own paralysis, the absolute legend, and twice, weirdly enough, on shows that do commentary and lead-up to Presidential announcements, both times on TGN. Not to mention, when all the crazy shit came out about Head Gamemaker Neves and Lorca and whoever the fuck else colluding on all sorts of fucked up bullshit, one of the subtler pieces of news to come from it was that Manari had been tapped from the beginning to win.

I can't call his case a loss, which is a good thing, since the stakes I set were wildly high, originating from such ridiculous overconfidence that like, in hindsight, even I want to punch some sense into me.

The loser volunteers.

It was an easy bet, since we both kind of knew going into it that it was a deliberately melodramatic move on my part, trying to make up for being so catastrophically wrong the previous year. Not just winning big, but winning big enough to get back at Lumen for the way she made fun of me for, she claimed, 'mooning over Star', which was not even remotely what was happening. So I could make fun of her for not going through with an un-go-throughable bet.

Even that wasn't the best remedial action, though, because she just spent the majority of the 89th accusing me of mooning over Manari, which I absolutely, adamantly wasn't doing. I just thought he was cool and clearly a better choice than the person who won, like, y'know, the one who couldn't string two sane-sounding sentences together, though it's been easier not to get annoyed with Cora now that she occasionally seems coherent on Intensive Care.

"No, he was in District Seven for some reason," Lumen says. "Talking about how stupid anyone volunteering would have to be, basically. I think they're involving him in some way and he seemed exasperated about it."

I look back at her, raising my eyebrows, like, tell me more.

"Yeah, knew that news was gonna get you all hot and bothered," she laughs.

"Fuck off," I say, reaching over to give her a push to the shoulder as she refuses to stop giggling. "You seem fine. Why were we talking about your issues? Mine are clearly more important if you can spare so much time chortling over your own… frankly, homophobic speculations."

"How the fuck is that… you know what? Fine, I'll bite, what's your damage this weekend?"

The cloud cover is getting denser overhead, the fluffy white clouds giving way to towering thunderheads blown in from the west. While there's no sunlight to get in my eyes, I find myself frowning up at the greying sky.

"I don't know."

"Of course you know, idiot, you spend eighty percent of your miserable life holed up inside your own head, acting like you understand everyone else's bullshit in between bouts of over-analyzing your own."

My frown deepens slightly.

"I don't think that's fair."

"Isn't it?" she prompts. "Prove me wrong, then, and externalize some shit for once instead of bottling it up."

"Do you ever feel like it's too late to do anything that matters?"

"Uh, only all the time," she says, though it comes out a little more subdued than her usual witty jabs. "Welcome to being eighteen."

"I think I want to…"

I can't easily bring myself to end the sentence, already knowing exactly what she's going to say. Lumen is smart, better company than most people, more understanding, in part because she, herself, is so weird. That's always been our point of connection. It's also kept us from connecting with anyone else, pretty much. Which is why our friendship is so solid, but also why… if I say this, it'll hurt her.

And I'm not sure yet.

"...do something. Something better," I say, more or less copping out of having this conversation with her.

"Like, bring your grades up?" she asks, poking me in the side. "You know you could, if you gave a shit."

"Not exactly," I say.

The first of a slow series of rain drops splashes into my face as thunder rumbles overhead. I'm not going to make this decision rashly, I don't think.

But, whether or not she'll be horrified to learn her part in it, Lumen has reminded me that there's more than one path I can take. I've been feeling trapped by the vision of my dad's office, the same clothes, the same moronic pencil-pushing every fucking day for the rest of my life. That's a fate worse than death, there. I know that much is true.

"Hey," I tell her. "I'm gonna head home before the sky opens up. My dad's been spoiling for a fight for a while. Things are just going to be unpleasant until I deal with that head-on."

"Don't do anything stupid," she warns me.

"What, me, stupid?"

"Yeah, in my experience."

"You wound me, Lumen. My pride is wounded."

"Seems like it worked, though, whatever I just said, huh?" she laughs. "Good for you. Take a little initiative. Can't hurt, can it? I'll stop watching depressing shit if you deal with… whatever's got you in a weird place, okay?"

"Okay," I agree, reaching out my hand to shake on it, the same way we always do for our bets.

It begins to rain in earnest as I give her a hug goodbye and head home. I'm drenched, my hair wrecked, as I approach my own front door for the first time in a long time, hearing my father's raised voice again. It's as though I never left.

The present seems as miserable as, in reality, it is.

But the future, for the first time in a good long while, glimmers with the possibility of something… interesting.

x

Styx, District 5

The river running past, like twenty feet from the place we're sheltering beneath the overpass, is swollen and brown from how hard it's been raining lately, including the fresh cloudburst that started like an hour ago. Loud enough to keep our voices from filtering to any surveillance equipment, though I bet there's not much out here. I did a runthrough while I was planning the move, looking for any cameras. None, though that doesn't rule out other recording stuff.

You gotta be careful.

It's a good way to get fucking nailed by Peacekeepers, bragging too loud somewhere about whatever shit you've been up to. A few of them are already on my case, not least of them that motherfucker Aldon, and in this case, I actually am up to kinda shady shit, since that's all I'd ever get up to with Kiff. He's leaning his whole weight against the lichen-studded cement strut that supports the train tracks running overhead, breathing heavily. A skinny little fucker, probably fifteenish, though I can't be fucked to ask, he could basically be my brother, same tanned skin and dark hair and hollow sort of look.

Basically the only guy I'm willingly tolerating at the moment, and that's partially because of the massive crate we've just successfully lifted out of some kind of public warehouse after a full week of planning, from putting together a palet that could be dragged across the softened riverside earth to scoping out the place, making sure there was actually a shipment… it definitely says 'Tesserae' stamped a bunch of times across it, and it only had time to rest near the exit that we taped open for like a day before we managed to make off with it.

Not that I'd say any of that shit out loud, even with the river to drown it out.

I've gotten burned by my own big mouth too many times to fuck myself over. Seventeen, maybe, or whatever I am, is too old to be making idiot mistakes.

Once I've caught my breath, well before Kiff, I take my backpack from my shoulder and take out a pry bar to get the lid off the thing. He pauses, straightening out, to watch me work.

It's supposed to be oil. There's no way it's just grain, since it was so fucking heavy - that's good, because you can get more fencing Tessera oil than grain, for the most part. At least, that's what Jules said the last time I swung by her outfit, looking for tips on what could get a good price these days after my job at the bakery didn't pan out.

Nice way of putting it, huh? It wasn't too bad, working with the nice baker lady or whatever her name was, but I didn't do too well with customers, for the most part, and even though she was down to give me another chance, the thing is, the difference between one asshole with a bloody lip or two makes no fucking difference to me.

But it did for her, so now shit's gonna get thin real fast if I don't figure out a racket. Fuck me for trying to go legit, for like… the eighth time or so.

Figuring out some way to keep myself fed has never been a serious problem before, and it's not now. The crate creaks as I leverage it open with the steel tool.

...no oil inside.

Just… some stuff I don't even know on sight.

"Well that's… stupid," I say, staring at the contents without really understanding what the fuck I'm looking at. "Where's the oil? Dude, you said there was oil. Confirmation was your job. Who told you there was fucking oil in that warehouse?"

Kiff looks about as confused as I'm feeling right now, which is inexplicably frustrating, like, come on, dude, you fucking told me, what the fuck? But at the same time, I'm not, like, mad. Because it's not like the whole thing went to shit or anything, just… it's just a heavy crate filled with a bunch of dumb tech stuff that neither of us know how to resell, so what's the point?

He flits in to look at the mess of wires and metal boxes and shrugs.

"Look, I heard from Charles that they were storing Tessera shit, okay?" he says, defensiveness rising in his tone. "Dunno if something got switched around, or…"

He stops talking when I take one of the weird box-with-nubs-and-wires-and-shit things out of the box and chuck it at his head. It's heavier than I thought, and if he wasn't a spindly shit with near-superhuman ability to avoid hurled objects, it might have left behind a real dent. Instead, the metal box smashes into the concrete of the overpass with a sort of crunching noise behind where his head used to be.

Wisely, he doesn't say a word, just stands back up, crosses his arms, and waits for instructions.

"We gotta dump it," I say with a shrug. "All of it."

"But -"

It's not like Kiff to fuck around so much. Usually he knows the deal. Maybe it's just the fuckedness of the afternoon not going the way he thought it would. Maybe… maybe he feels guilty because he's got some shit to do with the switch from abundantly-resellable cooking oil to not-remotely-resellable wire-y box-looking things.

Wouldn't really put it past the mousy fucker. Gonna have to deal with that later, I guess.

Lucky, again, he shuts up as I reach for another box.

"We gotta," I insist. "Could be tracking shit or something in it."

I'm already in a mess for the last dick of a customer whose face I slammed down on a countertop, like, right before I got canned, so this is actually kind of fucking high stakes for me. Not like Kiff's got enough brains to figure that out from my tone.

He whines like a kicked dog.

"Styx, c'mon, we spent so much time getting this one stupid crate, can't we just try Baxter or Jules or something and see if either of them'll give us anything for it?"

"I'll fucking kill Baxter," I say, more thanks to word recognition than any particular impulse at the moment. The bastard likes to think he knows shit better than I do because he's still in school, like that makes him any less of a piece of trash the Peacekeepers'd love to sweep up and be done with us for good.

"So we can hit Jules, then…"

"Seriously, Kiff, don't fuck with me right now. I'm being straight. We're dumping this bullshit."

My long-suffering friend-ish is back to looking like he'd like to whine, but might have managed to scrounge up an ounce of dignity, so he'll have to settle for a sort of frustrated sigh. At least when I reach for my handle of the crate, he obediently picks up the lid, muscles it back into place, and grabs the opposite handle.

Good boy.

It bugs him when I say that out loud, but honestly, that's the only way Kiff and me are ever gonna get along. I know what I'm about, and if someone's not ready to be about the same thing as me, there's nothing I can do with an extra pair of hands that I couldn't do with one and a little time to think it over.

Baxter and everyone else can take their heads out of their asses, I'm not stupid. I did pretty decent in school until the administration got all serious about some shit and… well. I don't do great with people telling me what to do, which is basically a sign of being smart, actually, since the only other smart people I know also manage their own shit and don't take it from anyone.

"Where to?" he asks, and I'd nod approvingly if the crate wasn't so fucking heavy, him barely carrying his end, reedy fucker.

"River," I say, the two syllables rolling out as one, in a sort of a huff, all of my strength in getting the box back onto the palet that lets us move the fucking thing.

After a few seconds of intense concentration, we get the dumb thing up. Just a few steps and the effort of actually getting the shit out of it, now. Good riddance. My stomach is growling, and if there's no oil to fence, I'm just gonna have to risk hitting the approved tourist area, maybe clean myself up a bit first, since I probably look like I just crawled out of the river, and have a go at conning some Capitol idiots out of their leftovers.

Which is just about my least favorite thing to do, scrounging around to fill my stomach like I'm too stupid to do anything else, and I'm not, seriously, but like… hungry is hungry, one of the few things I can't keep a handle on without… dealing with it in other ways.

Now that it's loaded, I take the improvised pull-device we added to the palet, according to plans Jules drew up a while back. To give her credit, her design works damn well. Though of course, Jules is one of those few street-adjacent fuckers who actually finished her schooling, and did some kind of fancy design competitions too, though from a house where her mom beat the shit out of her, if she's to be believed. And now she's one of us, ish.

I guess I believe her. Cagey enough for such a smart motherfucker. Gotta explain that somehow.

"C'mon," I say, gesturing to the palet-bound crate, pretty much stuck there with its own weight. "You push, I'll pull."

"Fine," Kiff pants, looking green at the thought of doing more work, though he complies.

Inch by inch, we get the palet moving over the sodden ground. It's rougher this time, since we planned our escape from the factory, making off with the crate of stolen shit, downhill. Like, on purpose. And this is the opposite of that, though it's sure further than either of us would've been able to move something this heavy half a fucking inch without it.

"How come it says Tessarae if it's not oil," Kiff complains aloud as we pause to breathe. "That's what that says, right?"

Too winded to speak, I nod, frowning bitterly at what might have been. It really was such a fucking fakeout. Since when has Kiff known how to read, also? Not like either of us talk about where we come from much, but we overlapped in the community home for a while back when we were too young to figure our shit out on our own. He was even better at getting out of going to school than I was.

There were things I liked about it, after all. Always food and shit, and I had a few decent teachers who were dumb enough, I guess, to think that if I put more effort into it, I could be something.

Well, I am something.

I'm a rain-soaked asshole in a dingy leather jacket dragging a pallet of stolen goods to a riverbank, but that's something. I've given up trying to make myself feel bad about fucking shit up. What's done is in the past, and what matters is the shit I'm lugging along right now and nothing else.

Especially once the crate starts beeping.

Like, beeping is kinda putting it mildly. An alarm goes off. Light is flashing from the base of the thing, a high-pitched peal of pure sound ripping out of the stupid box.

Kiff immediately lets go of the crate, and I stop being able to make progress, which, like, probably would have been the case anyway, because the beeping is so loud that I have this visceral impulse to drop everything and freeze and cover my ears until it passes, which is… dumb as hell, and as soon as I realize that it's not my choice, that the sound is freaking me out on some animal level, I put a stop to it.

"Motherfucker!" I snarl, as Kiff starts to edge away. "What the fuck did I say was gonna happen?"

We're still about ten feet from the dropoff to the roiling river, but I tear the lid off the crate and start chucking the boxes, one by one, checking each to see which is making the fucking noise. Halfway in, I find the box that's the culprit, which looks like all the others, apart from the flashing and alarm sounds.

Once that one splashes into the river, after a second of garbled noise, the only disturbances are once again thee rain and the river.

"Hey, Kiff," I add. "If you set this up, I'll fucking kill you, and that's a promise."

He shakes his head nervously, still looking disoriented.

"We should run, Styx."

"No!" I insist. "Whatever the fuck these things are… fuck them! Fuck whoever… fuck!"

I can't quite articulate my feelings, the rising and utterly irrational rage rising in my chest like the magma under the top layer of the earth that feeds the stupid geothermal plants, threatening to burst out in a shower of fire. No, it doesn't make sense, but… fuck this fuck this fuck this!

The crate has been lightened a bit in the process of my tossing out half its contents, and now I can drag it myself, and I do. A few more feet, then back to picking up the weird tech things, though tossing them into the river doesn't seem like enough anymore.

I take to smashing them on the rocky bank, then chucking the rest.

The roar of the river fills my ears.

Who the fuck would do that? Just put a bunch of useless shit in a box that's supposed to be useful shit and then put a fucking alarm in it and fuck me over on purpose, it's just so fucking fucked.

This isn't anything new.

It's the same shit that makes it impossible to work like a normal person in a normal job, even when I actually want to. You know what? Fuck the baker lady, too, and fuck everyone who's ever bought bread with money they earned, and fuck Kiff for his stupid fucking 'tip' about Tessera oil, and - and - and…

"Styx," Kiff calls urgently, and I swivel to face him, fully prepared to… I don't know. Beat him to death with one of the boxes left in the crate, I wouldn't fucking put it past myself.

"The fuck do you want?"

"We need to go…"

And then, from the precipice of the riverbank, he seems to disappear behind a bluff.

The anger in my chest goes white hot, scary-calm, like I know exactly what to do. Seizing the crate, much lighter now, I bolt the rest of the distance to the riverside. No more time to throw shit, I guess.

"Stop!" someone calls, and I see a distinct flash of white armor.

Fuck off, I think, dumping the rest of the shit into the tumultuous water, tossing the crate aside when I'm done and turning around triumphantly to flip off whoever the fuck thinks they can tell me what to do with both hands.

A bullet rips through my left shoulder, knocking me bodily to the ground, spraying blood over the rocks and shards of metal from my smashing up the boxes, some of which stab into the meat of my arm as I make impact.

My vision goes hazy.

It's like the blazing heat inside my chest fades as every beat of my fucking heart spills more blood out.

"Kiff!" I shout. "Kill them! Fucking kill them!"

As though he could do anything of the sort. Pliant little motherfucker's probably already got his tail between his legs, ready to whine his way out of the worst of the trouble. I may be a piece of shit, but I don't take shit lying down, don't take disrespect, not for a fucking second.

The shock is beginning to fade, and I can actually feel my arm, which is truly fucked, but I make a real go at standing, until a white armored boot pushes me back into the mud.

"Of course it's you," Peacekeeper Aldon says, and though my vision is too jacked to make out his expression, I can imagine his lip curling.

While I can't sit up, I have a real go at spitting on him, though I can't summon up much saliva, my mouth dry, shuddering from blood loss.

"Fuck… off…" I hiss, then try to bite his boot.

He kicks me in the teeth.

I think I feel one come loose, to the side. Asshole, motherfucker, piece of shit.

"I'll fucking kill you," I try to say, though through the ensuing mouthful of blood and with my head spinning from the kick, it comes out in a sort of garbled mess.

"Where you're going, I doubt you'll have a chance," he says, and I feel an armored fist close around the scruff of my neck, lifting me to my feet. "You've become a real nuisance, you know that? And wanted, now, for assault, violation of parole, theft of Tessera oil…"

"There wasn't any fucking oil!" I spit, easier now that I'm basically dangling from my collar, not quite choking on blood anymore.

He clucks his tongue.

"You certainly destroyed anything that would have proved that. Millions of credits worth of proof of that."

The collection of people waiting up on the bluffs as he drags me bodily back up, wriggling and hissing and spitting out blood all the way, sort of disturbingly don't all appear to be Peacekeepers. Not my first clue that something fucked is going on, but the first I've really consciously acknowledged.

"Wh… who… the fuck," I demand, fumbling the words, fading in and out of awareness.

"Bring her in. She destroyed all of it. Book it as Tessera theft," Aldon instructs a pair of helmeted Peacekeepers, who I'd probably recognize if I could see their faces.

"I'll kill you," I insist weakly.

"Call the mayor. Let her know we've got a candidate who's just desperate to kill people. Maybe bring in a medic, too. That arm look like a lost cause to you?"

He turns back to a pair of suit-wearing men, like, nice suits. People I don't recognize. Business-y looking fuckers. One of them eyeing me up and down, the other ignoring me to talk to Peacekeeper Aldon.

"Fucking… kill you," I repeat.

"No, you won't," he laughs, already absorbed in some kind of conversation about shipments and loss recovery or some shit with one of the guys.

I spit out a last mouthful of blood, manage to get some on the shoes of the guy who won't stop fucking looking at me as the two Peacekeepers drag me away, one maintaining an iron grip at the arm that's still fucking spewing blood.

"Get fucked," I declare, and then I pass out, without really processing that this time, at least, I'm kinda the one who's fucked, here.

x

Marina Trevino, The Capitol

A few outliers in the later districts had handed her volunteers within the first few weeks. District 5 was the last of this cohort. Two months after her first visit to establish, with Mayor Bastos, the incentives they would be offering to volunteers, which included a family stipend, an immediate paycheck, and re-entry into the district's housing lottery, including an option to transfer sectors, if any next of kin requested the rights.

That seemed reasonable to her. Mayor Bastos was a pleasant, late-middle-aged, extensively greyed woman, who she knew from her files had a background in photovoltaic cell design, and had taken up politics in the aftermath of the Mockingjay Rebellion. District 5 was, perhaps as a result, governed with the sort of near-ruthless, impersonal efficiency that one might expect of an engineer.

Her overwhelming impression was that District 5's government wanted little more than for the whole business of the Games to be forgotten. She found that relatable, though she couldn't say for sure that she'd arrived at the conclusion with the same motivations.

Both of their selected applicants were eighteen, relatively normal looking. One a seemingly well-adjusted young man with average grades, from the hydroelectric sector, solidly middle class - of course, how well-adjusted could a volunteer really be? The other, an ex-community-home fugitive who insisted on being referred to mononymously as 'Styx', and was otherwise uncooperative in supplying background information. It didn't matter much; she'd signed the necessary paperwork, in chickenscratch, yes, but it was complete, and Herodotus would take care of the rest of things.

This, at least, she could safely pass off to her cousin: the matter of unraveling these children's stories in advance of the Games. He was an incredibly reliable researcher, and even if they'd had no relation at all, she felt that she'd have been impressed enough by his storywork on extra-Games coverage at TGN to get to know him. With a little luck, the process would be revealing enough to assuage some of his worries about the sheer scale of the challenge of the Games.

At this point, they'd received and accepted nominations from the trainee districts, of course, as well as District 3, District 5, District 9, and, predictably, District 11, which had actually filed paperwork before District 4, to almost no one's surprise.

She worked fast, but when it came to Eleven's honor, Cereus and Sharon worked faster. It didn't quite feel right to separate them from their district of origin, but their talents were certainly needed elsewhere with the strength of their volunteers, and Sequin seemed to be relieved by the prospect of an easy task that would nonetheless afford her the chance to have a real hand in the progression of the Games.

A lot of it was working out.

Reexamining the pictures of the two volunteers from Five, she grimaced internally, knowing that she wasn't exactly handing them off into Sharon or Cereus' capable hands.

They'd be mentored by Corsage.

She had no idea, really, how that was going to go. The alternative was Finish, who, having produced Corsage, she felt debatably had the potential to be just as bad. And it just made more sense. Surely there were some limitations to her perspective, but it felt like the only option. A very neutral district. Mayor Bastos wouldn't make a fuss.

And Niagara was too dead to care much about anything.

Perhaps District 5 had already learned all of the necessary lessons about winning the Games and what that was worth in the grand scheme of things.

Logistically, yes, she had a handle on this. She could prepare at every interval for the worst potentialities of Corsage's behavior, extend that attentiveness to the other mentors, put Hero in charge of drafting, initially, background projections of the victors in her care. He'd done good work with that. Caught some things that she didn't quite see herself, but made sense in context. They were as prepared as two people essentially co-acting as Head Gamemaker could be, practically speaking.

Morally speaking…

Styx's dark eyes met hers unhesitantly from the holographic projection of her tablet. It would be her or it would be someone else, she knew. Flicked through. Kiran's expression was inscrutable, unknowable. Why did he do it?

Hero would know soon enough.

There were no red flags, regardless. The concerns being that rebels or particularly ardent supporters of Capitolist supremacy might deliberately make their way into the Games with the intention to upset the finale in some way that would bring the whole thing off the rails. The Games could accommodate chaos; they always did. Her vision for the Games was to elevate the chaotic element of the people involved. The only element from within the arena that might actively be set at odds with their objectives, it seemed, was someone with a concrete goal other than winning prior to entering the arena.

They'd just have to be careful about that.

She put her head in her hands, which she'd been doing a lot lately, and breathed. Closed down her tablet, poured a cup of tea from a cooling kettle on her stove, and considered going to sleep early. The skyline, from out her window, was as dark as the Capitol ever was.

Sipping the lukewarm beverage, she shook her head brusquely and reopened the holopad, beginning to draft a message to Hero. If she really cared about preserving some kind of stainless morality, she wouldn't be doing this in the first place. She would just let things dissolve and go to shit on their own from a beach in District 4. Would probably alienate fewer friends that way, but they'd be dead in a few years if the Capitolists got their way in rolling back Lancaster's reforms, so it was a double-edged sword.

"Hey, Hero," she began. "We have two more."

At least there was no complicated moral debate on that much, though what it meant, the way she'd said it… that was a different story.

Two more.