Morbid Curiosity (Or, District 6)
x
I think, today,
I could be
corrupted. And beautiful.
And sunshine. And grey.
'Tell Me How It Makes You Feel', Valerie Hsiung
x
Livy Tanaka, District 6
There's a fire somewhere in the district. Not nearby. In the part where we live, pretty much in the place just before where the really nice houses lapse into slums, almost all of the structures are cinderblock. They don't burn easily, and if one of them had managed to go up in flames, the emergency siren would be an unignorable scream rather than a barely audible noise floating in on the wind.
Someone's having a bad night, but far away from here.
I look up from my novel and frown out into the dimly lit street, orange with the light from sodium lamps and not much else. My dad probably won't be home for a long time. That's what the siren, when it's not nearby, has come to mean. The only people in my house, until he makes his way back, armor smoke-stained and smelling like charred things and rubble, will be me and my grandparents.
Rather than my thoughts, I try to focus on the sounds coming from downstairs, which are muffled by my door. Can't piece out what they're doing just from this. Getting back to my novel, though, is nearly impossible, because the streetlamps are so orange that my mind keeps going to… well, fire, to the siren still in effect somewhere not-quite-far-away-enough. I wonder when my dad will get home.
That's a selfish thing to think, I know. I'm working on it. Both of my parents have important jobs to do, real things, meaningful things, for the district and the country, and it's not my place to complain about it. I know that. No one ever said it was easy to have two parents in the armed forces at once, though at least my dad comes home at night, usually.
My mom's been in the Capitol for years, now. Three years, since things started moving away from the hiatus and towards a new Hunger Games. A lot of District 2-born Peacekeepers were called into different terms of service, ended up moved around.
The rest of us are just sort of stuck here, waiting to learn when she'll come home.
I really miss her. But I know, I know, I know that's stupid and childish and selfish and awful. She wouldn't say that, not in so many words, and my dad's too soft-hearted to really tell me what he knows is true, but my grandparents are very clear on what we owe the country. Everything. Including parents, children, our own lives.
Dad says that's just a District 2 thing, that my mom's loyalty is something that he loves about her, but it's not how all of us have to be.
Not like I'll ever say it to him - not like he's home for dinner often enough to have that conversation - but that's just stupid. How are you supposed to admire someone and love them and not want to be like them, more than anything? Completely, in every way that matters?
Homework may be a lost cause. I catch myself reading the same sentence over and over again. Not like it'll be a big problem if I don't finish by tonight. I'm sort of ahead of the class on the book. It's about a pre-Panem world, where the people charged with protecting the weak wear armor made of metal rather than combat-grade plastic and questions of honor are settled with sword-fights instead of mostly ignored, as they are in District 6, where everyone's just supposed to put their heads down and forget about things when it's more convenient.
I like the book, which makes it even more frustrating that I'm physically too tense to read right now.
Giving up, I stand, stretch, do a set of tricep dips in my chair, and feel even worse, somehow. Have I been getting enough sleep?
Probably won't tonight, anyway. I won't be able to until my dad gets home. Both out of worry and out of a sweltering bath of unpleasant thoughts, wondering if my mom is safe, wherever she is, whether I would know if she wasn't. I mean, I definitely wouldn't.
Firefighting is one thing. The mystery of her assignment is another. What my dad's doing here is just part of the initiative to put a better face forward to the community, in addition to keeping the keep the half of the district still made of wood from burning down. Not all of the slums are crater-scarred cement, after all.
But we'll never talk about it. Not whatever he does tonight, not what my mom is doing, hundreds of miles away, even when she sometimes sends letters. It's never about what she's doing. Reminders that she misses us and loves us, affirmation that she feels her service is valuable and wishes us all the same sense of purpose.
I do wish I had a sense of purpose. So much.
Basically as much as I wish I had my mom back, but how stupid is that?
The house feels really empty and I don't like it. The emptiness is sometimes like a tangible thing, heavy and suffocating, especially in the darkness of nights like these, with the siren still wailing in the distance. A bad fire. Even if it's too far away to smell the smoke.
I close the novel, abandon my desk, and turn off the light in my room.
Downstairs, it turns out that my grandparents have been watching television in the living room, my grandmother sharpening a sword with a thin sheet of fine-grained sandpaper, her movements slightly irregular, a tremendous strain evident in her forearms as she fights to keep them still.
My grandmother has never quite figured out how to stop fighting, anything and everything, even after she and my grandfather left Two to move in with us. Before my mom got shipped out and effectively marooned them here. They can't get a visa back. It's a little sad, though I'd never say it. I thought she was about the coolest person alive when I first met her. Now, she spends most of her days just sharpening the collection of swords she'll never be able to use again, some kind of degenerative condition slowly eating away at her ability to walk, the steadiness of her hands and her temper.
"Done with your work for the night?" she asks, a little sharply, and I nod.
"Yeah, just reading ahead at this point," I say. "May I join you?"
"Of course, Livy," my grandfather says, smiling thinly but sincerely.
He's an enormous man with watery blue eyes and a thick head of very white hair. A former subcommander, who, while he's quiet about it, was part of the force that retook the Capitol twenty years ago, he's strict, but more consistent and steady than my grandmother. I settle onto the smaller section of the couch, tucking my knees under me and resting my weight on them. Not the most exciting evening in, but at least it's a distraction.
Onscreen, an episode of Intensive Care is wrapping up. I recognize it as a rerun; my grandmother probably doesn't realize that, and my grandfather, more likely than not, just doesn't care. It makes pleasant background noise, and there is something to it if you watch, usually.
In this one, a young man has gone mute after some kind of mining accident. From one of the last two seasons, which have been set in Two. Cora Davis is sitting next to his bed, losing track of the fact that, while he's been silenced by the accident, she can still speak, and is writing messages back and forth with him on a pad of paper.
"That's a strong boy," my grandmother announces, as he struggles upon realizing that because of whatever kind of nerve damage they've mentioned in the last cut-away to medical diagrams, he can't laugh at a joke, gritting his teeth rather than crying at the loss of the ability to make a noise of joy.
Not stronger than a quarry roof, I think, but I don't say it.
It'd be a petty thing to say, and I'm really working on outgrowing that kind of thing. And whether or not she's got the muscle control to swing it, it's a losing proposition to antagonize my grandmother when she's holding a sword.
We watch in unpleasant silence, and my thoughts float past the onscreen wrap-up. I don't think I can hear the siren anymore. So the worst of whatever's happening out there will be over.
"Here," my grandmother says, breaking the silence again. "Take it, Livy."
She gestures with the hilt of the sword, as though there was any confusion about what she meant. Onscreen, the credits roll, attributing the production of Intensive Care to a long list of people with Capitol and District 2-style names, not unlike my own.
"Here," she says again, thrusting the blade into my hands with her own, which are starting to spot with age, and tremble wildly now that she's no longer focusing on keeping them still.
"Oh," I observe, taking it carefully. "It's very light."
"It was a wedding gift," she explains.
"Yes," my grandfather cuts in. "Magnus Craig."
"Magnus… yes," she agrees, as I heft the blade, watching the way the light flickers off the glassy-polished surface. "It would have been Magnus. He knew a good sword, bless him."
"More for you than for me," he laughs. "Look, it's practically sized for little Livy."
I wish my mom could see me, holding a sword like this. Just the feel of my grandparents' gaze on me, on my grip and my posture, which I know is exactly right, exactly like she taught me before she left, if she could just see me...
"Not so little," my grandmother says, and I feel a flush of pride begin from my heart, spreading to my limbs, as I make a few cautious thrusts with the blade, showing off a bit, now.
Since my mom's been gone, I've had to be careful about this kind of thing. My dad hates it when my grandparents start handing me blades, always has, thinks there's something wrong about teaching a child this kind of stuff. He could deal with it when it was my mom. Something about them and him, though, makes too much friction to function.
So I can't show this kind of stuff to my friends, can hardly do it ever, just when he's not around.
I know it would make my mom proud, that just doing it is like a way of being more like her, even though she's so far away, called to service, because they want her so badly, they need her there…
With a start, I remember that it's been a long time since I heard the emergency siren in the background. That my dad will be home soon. The guilt at this, like I'm somehow running around behind his back, pulling a fast one on him by hanging out with my grandparents, is… immense.
I know he's been lonely too, without mom. And he doesn't even have his own grandparents to lean on, since no one from the slums where he comes from, really, has grandparents leftover from the Rebellion. Just me and him. He likes to say that. Me and him and the two old people from District 2 who don't even seem to like him very much.
Me and him, and no fighting with bladed weapons. No trying too hard to be like my mom.
"Thanks, grandmother," I say, offering her the sword again. The case sits beside her on the couch, taking up more of the furniture than I did. "It's beautiful, and it handles like a dream, but I can't…"
She clucks her tongue.
"Koichi should get his act together, a girl your age should -"
"No," I interrupt, though I wince a little as I do it. "My dad is doing his best, I… I get it."
"He's going to get you killed," she complains, though she doesn't specify exactly how suboptimal swordswomanship is supposed to do that.
My grandfather laughs, stands, stretches.
"Let's all take our supplements and medicines for the night, alright, dear? Koichi will be home eventually, he'll want Livy to be in bed."
As he's in the kitchen, the doorbell rings.
That's odd. From the clock, it's clear it's too late for visitors, well after ten at night. He frowns and goes to the door.
"The rudeness," my grandmother comments, but something seems badly wrong about the situation, and I do something that shocks even me, and shush her.
She looks stunned, glancing up from putting the sword away in the fancy box, and I hold my ground.
A flash of a white uniform, visible even from the couch.
I stand before she can say anything else.
"Grandfather?" I call.
The interruption doesn't stop whoever's at the door from speaking. Unmuffled by a helmet. Why would the Peacekeeper take their helmet off? I know protocol well, my dad talks about it sometimes, my mom used to let me wear hers…
"I'm sorry," one of them says.
I bolt for the door.
"Sorry about what?" I demand, not caring, for once, that these are people to treat with respect and deference. I know that, I still know that, but I can't, and I can't hide the shake to my voice, the idiotic, childish whine of it, even though I know I should, I'm fifteen, I shouldn't sound this stupid…
It's Peacekeeper Nakamura and Peacekeeper Santos, two women about my dad's age, one Six-born, one shipped in from Ten. I know them, but somehow, that doesn't calm me down, just makes it worse, especially as Peacekeeper Nakamura's face falls when she makes eye contact.
"What happened?"
"I'm… sorry, Livy," she says.
"Tell me!"
Disrespectful, terrible, I know, I know, I can feel my grandfather making a reproachful face as I step forward, into the night air.
Out here, I can smell the smoke on the wind, still. Must have been a terrible fire. Must have been terrible -
"No," I say, just as Peacekeeper Santos opens her mouth to explain. "No, he… where is he? Is he in the hospital? Can I see him?"
She closes her mouth. Looks at Peacekeeper Nakamura. Shakes her head.
"Livy," she says gently. "Ah, you might want to sit down."
"Don't look at me like that!" I insist. "I'm not going to sit, just tell me where he is, tell me what happened, please!"
Why isn't my grandfather frantic, too? Why are no one else's eyes blurring with tears? I know what happened already. I know exactly what happened. But I want to preserve this moment of denying it almost as much as I want them to admit it, to just say it, come out with it, tell me I'm alone, tell me he's not coming back, just like my mom isn't coming back, and I'm stuck here, like my grandparents, in a place I never really wanted to be, and he…
"I'm sorry," she says again. "Peacekeeper Tanaka… Livy, he died heroically. He saved lives. He was a hero until the end. We found him after… it was the community home, Livy."
I can't hear what she's saying over the rush of blood in my ears, just that she keeps saying my name and I want her to stop.
"Come in, please," my grandfather says, opening the door wider to allow both Peacekeepers in. "We'll need to discuss -"
Without another second of hesitation, I run for my room, take the steps three at a time, slam the door behind me, lock it, consider pushing over my bookcase. And I fight back the tears. It's not something I usually do, weeping over something, even something like this, even the pressing loneliness of my mom, the fear that my grandmother's illness will take her, too, the feeling of not fitting, here... since I'm not a stupid baby anymore, I'm mature, I'm older than my mom was when she fought to retake the Capitol, older than my father was when his parents were killed, and I'm so soft and stupid, still, so stupid…
I fall asleep at my desk, my book damp from crying onto it, wishing to be anywhere but here.
Anywhere but District 6, where nothing means anything and nothing matters, really, nothing matters, here, my grandparents would leave if they could, my mom took the first train out she could get…
I dream of a way out.
x
Lorean Marchand, District 6
Noxious grey smoke rolls from a crack in the furnace, directly next to the mouth and I put my magazine down for a moment and consider the problem. Only half an hour into the last cremation of the night, and already something going wrong. How to fix this?
First off, though, what the hell happened in the first place? I lean in and inspect the damage, which isn't really as bad as the billowing smoke would suggest. Aimon dealt with the last three himself, including one that the family sent in a fancy but very heavy wood coffin. He's not really equipped to handle any of this on his own, and odds are that he clipped the side of the furnace and smashed away already-age-weakened mortar from the crumbling bricks.
He wouldn't have said anything. Definitely not to me. Aimon's cagey as hell with me these days, especially on the subject of the family business.
Can't blame the guy, really.
I end up tracking down a bag of dry mortar, working it up as best I can, and shellacking it over the gap in the bricks, judging the work 'good enough for the moment'. The room stops filling up with corpse smoke, and I go back to reading my magazine.
"What's that sme-" my mother interrupts, walking in, her apron stained with blood and silicon, her gloves still wet and read. "Ah, looks like you've got a handle on things."
"Just some nick in the furnace," I say. "Alvah should probably take a look at it later, but I patched it for now."
My older sister has the patience for this sort of task, painstakingly piecing brickwork back into position and ensuring an airtight seal, what the sanctity of the furnace demands. I think if it started leaking again, I might just lump some more on. Then, because that seems like a great idea while I still have wet mortar, I pick up the bowl afresh and start adding more. More is better, probably.
"Great," my mom says, turning her head and coughing into her unbloodied elbow. "When you're done, I've got another ready for you."
"Is Alvah not home yet?"
"Out on retrieval," she explains with a sigh. "There was a fire. All hands on deck. You missed the sirens?"
"Can't hear a thing over the furnace," I say.
"Well, take care you're not breathing too much of this stuff," she suggests. "I'll try to get Mrs. Kobayashi fit for display before we're flooded with burnt corpses. At least half the job'll already be done for you once they roll in and we sort out identification."
"Are we displaying her?"
"No, the household is," my mom says with a grimace.
That's a bummer. We typically receive a stack of the decedent's belongings to use for display purposes, at least from families that are wealthy enough to have a viewing. When we host the viewing, and handle the burial, the shoes and jewelry end up resold to keep the lights on, since most of what we handle, in this part of District 6, are nameless bodies, scarred by overwork and morphling or the marks of suicide, no one showing up to claim them, no one capable of affording a burial.
Rich people, it turns out, die a lot less often than poor people.
Who woulda guessed it?
"We'll figure it out," I tell her. "I'll handle it tomorrow night."
Mrs. Kobayashi is the only named corpse we've had through the mortuary in the last week, apart from one of the three currently in the furnace. Things have been getting tight, and they'll only get tighter unless it's the mayor's house that's just gone up in smoke. Not super likely. That shit's made of stone.
What I'll handle is too potentially objectionable to be voiced aloud, even here, even between us, even by me. The fact of the matter is, dead people don't need the things they're buried with, and Mrs. Kobayashi isn't any kind of exception. The brass fixtures from the fancy coffin, after all, sit on a table to the side, where Aimon will have left them after prying them off.
The Marchand family makes it work.
My mom nods, averting her eyes just slightly as she does.
"We always do."
"Hey, I can help with her if you need, not like these guys are gonna walk up and go anywhere," I interject, gesturing at the furnace with my rolled-up magazine.
"Suit up, then," she says, "follow me."
The corpse on the dingy table is a very old woman, her hair long and greyed, tied up in a knot above her head, likely by my mother. Her skin has a waxy look to it, probably not too long dead, but still very dead-looking. I swing on a rust-stained apron and a pair of disposable gloves.
"No autopsy report," my mom says, checking the clipboard left by the woman's head. "Died in the hospital, a long time coming."
She smells like chemicals already, even without embalming intervention. Having seen hundreds if not thousands of bodies across this table, I think that I can pick up the sort of… meaty, but oddly sweet smell that comes from infection, and maybe a little something else, though it's hard to put my finger on it.
"Pneumonia?" I guess, leaning in and checking for any other immediate cause, breathing a little more deeply.
By now, I'm not sure there's anything I could do or say that would surprise my mom. After seventeen years of dealing with me, there's nothing to expect but the unexpected.
"Yes," she says, leafing through the clipboard. "Prediabetic, had a bad fall a few weeks back, hospitalized since, picked something up during her time in the ward… and now, here she is."
"Cool," I say.
Rather than talk any further, as she begins to get her tools together and assemble the various containers of embalming fluids, I begin to make the incisions on either side of the woman's neck. Even through the thin plastic of my gloves, I can feel the oddly papery way her skin yields, making it easy to find and slice open her left and right common carotid arteries.
The restricted cervical injection technique is favored for more delicate corpses that will be more closely viewed on display, especially those with potential damage to the arterial system due to disease. I place the thick drainage cannula in her right carotid, pin the left to prevent the pressure exerted by the old pump from blowing out Mrs. Kobayashi's facial features, and load up the first round of fluids with my mom's help.
We're used to working as a team at this sort of thing. Before I took an interest, she tried to train Alvah; my sister has a weak stomach, though, and that's kind of an anathema to any kind of embalming work. Silicon and preservatives flow in, and blood flows out. It's not a tremendously neat project, even when it goes perfectly.
My mom used to do this part alone, trained by her own mother, the one who passed the business on to us. It's funny how squeamishness runs through so many of my close relatives, given the nature of our work. My dad exclusively deals with the front-end stuff, my sister more inclined to maintenance and, when necessary, retrieval.
Aimon would probably prefer to wash his hands of the whole thing if he could, but he's just fourteen, and not quite old enough to put his foot down. Or to properly load a coffin into the furnace, I think, with a twinge of annoyance.
"Stop," my mom directs me, and I turn the pump off as the fluid begins to run out clear and pinkish.
No sense in using more than we need to.
"All good?" I ask, looking over the body myself as she makes the same appraisal.
"Yes. Well-placed," she adds, as I remove the cannula, tap off the embalming fluid, and set about closing up one side of the body.
She quickly gets to work on the other, and in no time, Mrs. Kobayashi could be washed out and waxen, yes, but has every appearance of sleeping soundly and being shaped like a human should be.
"Can you hold her jaw?" my mom directs.
I nod, slipping my fingers inside the dead woman's mouth, opening it from the inside as she produces a pair of pliers and turns on an additional lamp.
"Grip," she instructs me, and I hold. Mrs. Kobayashi firmly as she pulls out one, then two gold molars from the woman's lower jaw.
Exactly as finicky as I am about corpses, she then leans in, lifting the corpse's hard palate slightly, and checks for any in the upper row, with no luck.
"All good?" I suggest.
"All good," she sighs. "If you don't mind…"
I understand implicitly what she's asking, and scoop up the teeth, depositing them in a slightly bloody plastic bag to be washed and dealt with later. Gold is gold, fillings are fillings, and with enough effort, it's very possible to separate the metal from the enamel.
"I can handle the rest," my mom tells me. "Check in on the furnace, make sure it's not leaking again."
I put two fingers to my forehead to salute without realizing that they're covered in blood, and grimace, slightly, as my mom sighs. This is not the first time I've made this mistake, and it probably won't be the last.
"Lorean, some common sense, please," she says, without any real pleading tone to it. It's more an observation than anything, as she finds a clean cloth, dips it in disinfectant, and crosses the room to clean the smear of blood off my brow.
"I'll give it a try," I promise.
"No, you won't," she sighs, but stands up on tiptoes to kiss me on the forehead and muss my hair slightly with an ungloved hand. "Love you, baby."
It would actually be kind of disastrous if I were to develop any sort of sensibilities now, I think to myself as I return to the furnace room, relieved to find that the patch I devised is holding firm and the air is as free of corpse-ash as it ever is, which is… not.
Disastrous, but wildly unlikely.
There's a sink in the furnace room, and while I wait, I scrub my hands and then the teeth, cleaning each individually until it's clear where the gold ends and the tooth begins.
At some point, the furnaces finish their cycle and begin to cool, and now I can hear raised voices and semi-frantic movement going on back in the autopsy room. I'm actually glad to miss it; dad, Alvah, and Aimon bring a weirdly nervous energy to the space when they're all crowded in together. My mom's mentioned as much herself. She and I are more alike than almost anyone, though it's not exactly something we can talk about.
There's a sort of practical relationship with the world and what we want from it that she and I have, and the rest of my family kind of doesn't.
I whistle a tune as I dig the gold out of each of the molars in turn with the pocketknife. One contains a lot more than it appeared to, at first glance. The other is just sort of layered with the stuff, barely sliver in the scheme of things. Not a bad haul, though. I slip the gold into my pocket, and return to my magazine.
It's a home and garden lifestyle thing, one of the stacks we usually keep on display in the waiting room, for the kinds of families that can afford to pay for a burial. Random decorative objects, fancy clocks, recipes, articles on style trends in the Capitol and a few sections on District 6 specifically, though not as many.
Apparently, squash is all the rage in the Capitol these days, and there's about three million things you can do with it. Who'd have guessed? Definitely not me. I'm not sure I've ever seen a squash. Wouldn't know one if I did.
Once the furnace has gone cold, I open each of the three doors, preparing a metal bin in which to collect the ashes, already tagged with the names and information of each decedent, or as much as we can get, anway. Cremation isn't classy. The height of class, as I understand it, is to get embalmed and dealt with like Mrs. Kobayashi's body, for display and ceremony, like, ideally in someone's own home. Even I think that's kinda messed up. Bodies are just bodies, after all. Can't imagine spending that much money on a dead person when they could just be ash and then you could be done with it all. The cardboard boxes we burn them in are a lot cheaper than coffins, after all.
"Hey, Lorean?" my brother calls, interrupting just as I finish binning the last of the ashes.
"Yeah, what's up?"
"Can you come help? There's a lot of them this time, and it's…"
"Gotcha, little bro."
I wash my hands, wipe the sweat from proximity to the furnaces out of my eyes, and head back up.
At first, it's like I haven't even left. The autopsy room smells like charred meat, no medical or health information to be divined from the smell of these corpses. There's an especially wretched undertone of burned plastic, and now that I'm in the room, I realize that it's not just my family standing around, making things uncomfortable.
There's a pair of armored Peacekeepers in smoke-stained uniformed, arms crossed, weapons worryingly visible.
"Hey guys," I say, specifically to the Peacekeepers. "How's it hanging?"
If they weren't helmeted, I think I'd see some eyebrows raised. Reading the tone of the room has never really been my deal.
As if in response to my greeting, one of them removed her helmet. She has the look of Six's upper class, clear dark eyes and straight black hair and a frown that could wither a field of wildflowers. So not a party mood.
Surrounded by corpses in varying stages of horrifically-burnt, I guess I probably could have guessed that.
"As I was saying," the now-helmetless Peacekeeper intones. "Mr. Tanaka's preparations will take precedence. We'll return in three hours to begin internment proceedings. Please conduct your business accordingly."
My mom bows, my dad bows, I figure I should probably bow, too, but I end up nearly knocking over one of the display urns from a rack we keep down here, since they don't all fit upstairs.
The Peacekeeper glares at me.
I smile.
"Sorry for your loss," I add, after a second.
"Koichi Tanaka's death was a tragedy," she observes. "We expect the highest standard of treatment in its aftermath. He has a young daughter. A viewable body is important."
My eyes flicker to the body in question, the only one wearing white armor, though it's blackened and peeling at the edges. The odds of a body this mutilated being display ready in three hours are… low, though I imagine the uniform has protected most of the internal structures.
Hasn't done a thing for his face, which is pretty much non-existent at this point. More a charred skull than something you'd recognize if you were, for instance, a young daughter of the corpse in question.
"Dunno what your standard of 'viewable' is," I say, perhaps stupidly, given that my father shoots me a 'what the fuck is wrong with you' look - not an unfamiliar expression to have directed at me.
"High," the Peacekeeper snaps.
On closer inspection, her ID reads 'Nakamura'.
"Well, Peacekeeper Nakamura, thank you for you counsel," my mom cuts in, before I can say something else unhelpful. "We'll do our utmost."
"See that you do," she says briskly, then turns on her heel and ushers out the still-helmeted Peacekeeper behind her.
"Hey, Aimon, just a question, uh, why the fuck did you think it was a good idea to bring Lorean in here?" Alvah says, crossing her arms and looking about ready to start her own fire.
Aimon isn't looking at her. He's looking at the flame-twisted bodies, many of them charred down to the bone.
"Ease off, Alvah, he's freaked out," I say.
"Yeah, and you getting us all shot or some shit is going to make everything a whole lot better."
"Alvah," my father interrupts. "Help me assemble the boxes for the next round of cremations."
She shoots me another annoyed look, but complies. Aimon disappears down to the furnace room to get them started again, and I turn to my mom.
"So, three hours," I say.
"Three hours," she agrees, looking appraisingly at the white armored body. "Best to get started."
I nod agreement, and we begin to strip the body of armor. A layer of congealed blood and skin, at least on the plates I remove from the extremities, comes off along with it. My mom begins to inspect the body and the face as I scrub and discard the armor, suiting up in the process, which had slipped my mind during the removal process.
She has a clipboard, looks over the largely undamaged torso, checks the mouth, eyes, stomach for irregularities.
"Lorean," she says hesitantly. "This might be a good one."
That stops me in my tracks.
We usually stick to teeth and jewelry, after all.
I didn't realize she knew about the rest. That was deliberate, after all, her not knowing.
"Smoke inhalation wouldn't affect the heart," she observes. "A lot is salvageable, here. If you work quickly."
So she knows about the organs.
My mom does know me better than pretty much anyone else in the world.
"You're right," I agree, seeing no point in lying about it, if she's not shouting me down or disowning me or anything, which was a bit of a worry with my dad, I guess, but not her style at all.
I look up at her over the body, the bruised hollows under her eyes, the gauntness of her cheeks. We work to the bone over this, work no one else in the district wants to do. And where has it ever gotten us? Elbow deep in blood and char, going to sleep hungry at night, not always, but enough.
For lack of a gentler way of saying it, I prepare a cooler of ice from the humming old ice machine, and for the first time with my mother's help, though definitely not my first time in general, I strip the body of usable organs. Crack open ribs, sever connective tissue, stitch it all back together again once the good stuff is safely in the cooler.
"Can you handle the rest?" I say, as she prepares a series of syringes for a far more complicated embalming technique than usual, more difficult, of course, without a heart.
"Yes," she says. "You take care of this. If you can… if you're okay with…"
From the way she doesn't look at me, I know that she probably knows less than I suspected she might. Probably not the mechanics of it. Probably imagines me handing off a cooler to some shady character in a hat in the back of some darkened room, filled with cigar smoke and the sharp smell of morphling.
It's just the hospital, though. I just take them to the hospital, and trade them for a stack of credits the likes of which I wouldn't be likely to get from ten corpses' worth of jewelry, once the attendant has verified their health and usefulness in transplants.
And then I disappear into the night, and leave the credits on the table the next morning, and no one has to be the wiser. They just have to be good organs, and by the looks of it, this guy lived a damn clean life for someone dead by his mid-thirties, even if he did manage to end it in such a messy way.
"Oh, it's cool, it's generally cool," I say, taking the cooler - heavy, but not too heavy to manage, since I couldn't take the lungs of someone who died of smoke inhalation - and heading for the exit. "Don't worry, I gotcha."
I bump into Aimon on my way out, hurrying between my dad and Alvah and the autopsy room where my mother is waiting for him. He's cleverly dug up a tin of the putty we use to reshape features, correctly assuming that reconstructing the burned-up Peacekeeper's face is going to take more than the half-full vessel of material my mom typically keeps on hand.
He sees the cooler and goes white as a sheet.
"You said you weren't going to do that again," he says, so quietly that Alvah and my dad couldn't possibly hear.
I shrug with my free hand.
"Go to mom, little dude, it's not your problem."
This time. It's not his problem this time.
Last time I needed help, and I sure as hell wasn't going to ask Alvah to help me bring the lungs and liver of a brutally stabbed young woman to Watanabe General.
"Lorean, you can't," he says, voice wavering. "You said it was just once."
I lied. It was more than once by the time he had to get involved. It's been a lot more than once since then. What he doesn't know won't hurt him, y'know? And what he doesn't know keeps him fed and ensures we have clothes and electricity and heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer - do you know how bad a morgue can smell without air conditioning when the temperature is pushing 100?
It helps. I've been helping, the best way I know how.
We don't live a life like the people we dress up for death. We're never going to be the kind of people in home and garden magazines.
Not that I want him to cotton onto that. Shit would be a lot less depressing if I could go back to not understanding the way the world has to work. I figure the longer I can keep him ignorant, and comfortable, and well-fed, the better. He's a good kid, even if he doesn't have much of a spine.
Kids are just kind of like that.
"Help mom," I tell him, and lug the cooler out.
He's not wrong to worry. I know this isn't going to work forever. Behind me, even in the dark of night, the smoke belching out of the furnaces has begun afresh, turning the black sky grey and blocking out the stars.
It's going to work for now. And one of these days, I'm going to figure out a way out of here that isn't up the smokestack of a crematorium, into the cool night air above District 6. I've seen a lot of people die here, a lot of them my age, most of them already drugged up or strung out or scraped off the front of a train.
That's not going to be me.
Death is inevitable - dark, sure, but also true. An ad in the rolled-up magazine still in my pocket has been occupying my attention all day. Placed by the office of Mayor Tsuchiya. Making a whole set of promises for the brave soul who volunteers for the Hunger Games.
I dunno. I'm thinking about it. Been in the back of my mind all day.
Death, I mean.
And particularly ways I might be able to make mine count. Whether that's for my family or just for the fuck of it.
x
Marina Trevino, The Capitol
Another young one. On the precipice of the public announcement of the victors' reassignments as mentors, nonetheless, District 6 submitted all completed paperwork. Perfectly formatted, specifications exceeded rather than met.
She typically liked Mayor Tsuchiya, though An was impenetrably frosty. That was understandable. Even with the ace of Yuna's survival up her sleeve, she couldn't bring herself to try to push past the abrasive mentor's cold exterior. Perhaps, she mused, she was worried about what she'd find there.
After all, didn't they both have the reputations of poisoners to live down?
Not enough in common to start a friendship, of course, though for the moment, circumstances forced An to tolerate her whether she liked it or not. All of the mentors, really, though she continued to exercise almost superhuman caution with Saxaul, at Hero's behest. They had, after all, had their meeting. And while she and Hero endeavored not to keep secrets between them (secrets being a particularly potent toxin beyond anything that could come out of a lab) he had avoided discussing the content of that particular conversation ever since.
He got cagey when she so much as referenced it.
So she dropped the issue. No great loss. As likely as not, she wouldn't like what she were to find if she started to pry.
District 6, though, didn't seem to keep any secrets of the proposed volunteers. One, the first to apply, Livy Tanaka, only fifteen… had recently lost her father, an in-district Peacekeeper, to some kind of terrible fire. Sad, and potentially a compromising factor that might have prompted Marina to demand she be excluded, but the active-duty Peacekeeper mother made a compelling non-grief reason of its own. Lorean Marchand, older, at seventeen, had turned himself in for a long list of deeply unfortunate accusations, months later, in exchange for amnesty and the family support provisions that had been put in place by District 6's mayoral office.
They made sense, in a way. These would be Cora's tributes, and she wondered what her… well, increasingly her friend… might be getting into.
New mentors, Saxaul and Hero had both warned her at different intervals, always flamed out. Not a single first-year-out had managed to bring home a tribute. Not even Claudia, who'd waited years for her first victory outside of herself; not even Cereus.
Though some of that, she suspected, was more to do with politicking than skill or the misfortune of new mentors.
She didn't have any intentions of bringing politics into death order, at least. This would be a work of art. A horrible work of art, and of pure intentions. None of the standard dogfighting that she understood had been the norm during Head Gamemaker Chiron Rometo's tenure, and had persisted, in its way, through the reign of Annia Neves.
That was something she wouldn't have done, not by Hero and not by herself. She wouldn't choose a victor. She would simply choose a story, and the victor would be… the moral of it, not necessarily the hero.
And wasn't that how it was supposed to be, really?
Livy was fifteen, among the youngest she'd seen so far, but in the past the tributes had been thirteen, twelve. It was a balancing act, the humanity and the horror. Because too humane and the horror was muted, and too horrible and the indictment of the Games became an inescapable indictment of herself.
For now, she was okay. She was steady on the tightrope. Would approve these tributes immediately and move on, businesslike, pragmatic, to the next task, as it should be.
How should it be?
Over. It should be over.
And she was well on her way to making that happen.
With a tired noise, she closed the hard copy folder, stared up at the wall, where her degrees hung neatly, and bit her lip until it bled.
It would be over. Eventually. For good.
x
Blogs are hard, have another intro chapter, I'm workin' on it, I promise! Thank you to those of you letting me know your #thoughts, I've been getting hardcore into the planning, and while I plan flexibly (Memento Mori had like four different Explicitly Planned Victors over the course of writing it) your feedback matters a lot as these things get put into motion!
Halfway in, I'm really interested in who you're liking, who you want to hear more from, who you think might make good allies (or might rip each other limb from limb) and, just for the fun of it, if you had to guess at a victor from this crew… who do you think might make a good moral to the story of the final Games?