There's No Plan (Or, District 8)
x
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
'Mad Girl's Love Song', Sylvia Plath
x
Songket Khan, District 8
We live in a grey and cloistered factory district. That's kind of the deal with Eight, what anyone would understand after spending so much as a few minutes here. Our architecture is inextricable from our identity. The uniform warehouses and brick-lined factory buildings, the too-narrow streets, the empty crows' nests that used to hold Peacekeepers 24/7 to keep people from getting too out of line. Now they're just kind of a monument to a time before, but a time that my dad has told me about at length.
Most of it isn't physically Rebellion-scarred anymore, at least not obviously.
The quiet during work days, though, is totally ominous. Just the sound of our pull-carts and me and Lotta's footsteps interrupts the thrum of factory noise muted by thick walls, nothing green or soft to keep them from bouncing off walls indefinitely as we drag the piles of posters out to the squares that connect the factories, which will actually be populated by workers in a few hours when the factories let out for the hour-long break that the Capitol put in place.
Lotta's breathing is getting progressively heavier and iffy-sounding, so I brake the cart and cross my arms.
"Come on," I remind her. "Pull it together, this is important."
"Sorry," she murmurs, looking up at me with her disarmingly large brown eyes. "Just… so heavy."
She's a good one, Lotta, really dedicated, doesn't flinch away from hard work, most of the time. I'm going to save the world for people like her, people who know how to follow when it's called for, as it is, now. Who know how to take what's true on faith.
"It'll be lighter once we put some of these up," I suggest, nodding towards the massive piles of posters in each of our carts.
Her parents have a printing studio of sorts, are responsible for most of the printed materials in the district, and they'd do anything for their little girl, since Lotta's been all sick and listless for the last few months, only really interested in the last important mission remaining to us: warning the district of what's coming if we don't come together and stop it. She's actually got some kind of disease or syndrome or something, though I'm not totally sure what. Either way, her folks, despite their weepiness about the whole deal, are willing to put their money where their mouths are and help her, and by extension, me.
The posters are my work. They're a little wordy, I guess, but they have to be to explain everything that's going on in the Capitol, that's been going on for years without us knowing. Not just the secret experiments to create humans out of animals and invent super-viruses as weapons, which everyone pretty much knows about or at very least suspects. There's something coming, and it has everything to do with the lack of Peacekeepers pointing guns at us these days, the seeming concessions with labor rights and all that stuff.
I've watched the news, I know what's happening. My dad taught me to ask questions about the kind of stuff we're spoon-fed. So if they're treating us so good now, what do they know that we don't?
Here's what's going on: they haven't been doing the Hunger Games for the last few years on account of the new weapons they've been coming up with, not just to control our minds, which they've already been doing for a long time, but to use the genetic information they collected before, at every reaping, to target us all and end humanity and replace us all with machines.
They want us to believe that the digging and the rebuilding that's been going on is so we'll have internet access and stuff, but anyone can tell that installing that kind of thing wouldn't take nearly so long, and my dad still talks about the time he saw one of those workers acting shifty, and even overheard some weird stuff that he didn't understand.
People aren't reading the right stuff and listening to the right programs and asking the right questions, is all.
I'm pretty sure the posters will make that clear enough to start a conversation, y'know? And even if I get sniped for it or whatever, which I probably will… for a long time, this has been all I've cared about. Even more than my dad does, really, once I've gotten my momentum going. And people like Lotta, and some before, are with me.
And they won't think I'm crazy once I get killed for it.
A good revolution needs a martyr, and if I can get enough stuff done before then… well. I'll need to get these posters up before I deal with that.
"Come on," I repeat, picking up the handle of my pull-cart and forging ahead as Lotta does the same, trailing behind.
Once we reach live space, the part of this particular square that people actually inhabit, where it's worth putting up posters and actually has a shot at garnering the kind of attention we need to get the ball rolling, put together some sort of solution to the unignorable threat looming over all of us, Lotta is pale and sweaty and wheezing.
"You don't look so good," I observe, taking the first bottle of adhesive from the bag over my shoulder and preparing the first poster, which is always the most exciting part, going from a bare wall to a statement, piece by piece.
"Don't… feel… great," she says, but she takes out her own adhesive and gets to work, plastering a second poster next to mine in short order.
"Have you been meditating?" I suggest. "My dad says if you elevate your energy you won't get sick as much."
"Does it work on leukemia?"
I shrug.
"Can't hurt, can it? Your energy has been seeming muted, lately."
"Oh. Sorry," she says, as we work our way down the wall, pausing to plaster streetlamps and telephone poles as well, just to cover all of our bases.
It would be easier with a bigger crew, of course, but things have been slowing down, lately. Right in the aftermath of the hiatus, I was able to get a lot of traction, get a lot of people in, since no one could deny that weird stuff was happening, that things seemed not-right. That was right around the time that a ton of weird infrastructure stuff started up, and my dad's radios, he says, picked up some weird transmissions about like… pods, and DNA, and blowing stuff up, which just put shape to everything he'd always been saying about doomsday.
Horrible though it was, learning that we would have to shoulder the truth ourselves, the obligation of being the only people who really understood what was happening, I've always known that I was destined for this kind of thing, to be the person who saved the district and the country.
My dad said so. My mom died when she was having me, and it was hard for him, until he realized what an amazing destiny I had. I never cried as a baby, didn't sleep or fuss, and it was his saving grace as a single father, to hear him tell about it. He realized a lot of things in the months after my mom died, about what the government is really all about, even after the Rebellion, with Reconstruction and all going on. He saw what nobody else saw, and so do I, now.
For a while, a lot of people saw it, too. Not just Lotta, who's all attachment-y and has always been a bit of a weird kid, but people like Satin and her boyfriend Bolton for a while, who started showing up to meetings, and Batting and Chevy and a whole group of other people who were like, in it, really in it.
I'm not sure when it all fell apart, but I figure someone got too mouthy about what we were doing in earshot of their parents, and not everyone is as cool as my dad. In fact, most of my friend's parents have been weird about letting them come over to my place pretty much ever, like they're scared of him.
People are always scared of the truth.
And now it's up to just me and Lotta to tell it, and I'll take what I can get, because no matter what anyone says, this is important, this is stuff people need to hear, and I'm the only one who can tell it to them.
I hit the corner of the first building and stop. Lotta looks exhausted already.
"I wish everyone else hadn't abandoned us," I tell her, sympathetically. "You shouldn't have to shoulder so much of the burden of this work, but you're the only person left with any faith."
Despite her bedraggled appearance, she still manages to look up and smile.
"Really, Songket?"
"Really. You're the best of them," I say, putting my hand on her shoulder, briefly. "Now come on. We've got another hour, and we need to share our message."
She nods fervently, and we get back to work.
My stomach growls. I've been fixating on this project all morning, trying to plan everything out, making sure that we have enough adhesive and all. My dad says that's the sign of what I am, someone put here to save us all, how I get weirdly deep-focused sometimes and can't pull out of it. Overall, it's not so bad when it's something useful like homework or a project like this to rescue Panem from the genocide the Capitol is definitely planning, with light, they're going to kill us all with light… but it can be miserable when it's something dumb, like fixating on old pictures of my mom for way too long and ignoring anything else I'm supposed to be doing.
And even though we've never really gone without food, since my dad's a real shopkeeper and keeps everything together well enough these days, I forget to eat sometimes, like I have this morning.
It's just another trial to press through to prove the worthiness of our cause, though. Like so many others.
We work diligently until the work is done, and our pull-carts are substantially lighter. At this point, Lotta and I are extremely efficient. This makes the ninth labor-sector square that we've plastered. Plus, we've gotten more strategic in our placement, so this means we have enough leftover to get from 5B to 6A after their lunch hour is over, though not necessarily enough time or energy to make it all the way home and back.
Once we've found a suitable place to stop and rest, we wait in the shade as the square behind us becomes a hive of sound and activity, shouting people and jostling crowds.
I think it seems right to prompt Lotta to talk about whatever her deal has been lately, and she spills for a while about blood tests and cells and bones, mostly stuff that I'm not interested in.
"You know," I interrupt as she mentions some kind of procedure her parents are paying through the nose for, "they're using that bone marrow or whatever to calibrate the pods they'll use to vaporize us, if they get away with it."
My interjection was more word-association than anything, but her face falls, regardless.
"I'm sorry," she says. "Do you think I could ask them to get rid of it? I got new marrow, I said, just from my dad, though…"
"Lotta," I warn her gravely. "You have to be careful. Your dad is already under their influence, you've heard how he talks about this stuff, right?"
"I just thought it was better than…"
"Be careful, that's all. Let me see your eyes."
I take her by the chin and tilt her face until I can see her pupils, narrow and tensed, even in the shadow of the alley. The observation makes me frown.
"I'll have to keep closer track of how you're behaving," I announce. "In case you're under influence, now."
"No!" she insists. "I'm not, I promise, Songket, I totally promise, I'm just…"
"The treatments aren't even working, are they?"
"They… said they might take a little while."
"I don't know if you should be doing that to yourself. It's a waste of resources, after all, if we're all just going to die without your contributions."
That's stretching it a little. Lotta's not vital to this operation, though she is kind of the only person other than my dad who's actually got my back on this. I don't want her getting all muddled with someone else's thoughts, since I usually like her thoughts, since they're usually the same as my thoughts.
"Well… maybe…"
"Just think about it," I direct her. "Maybe a good subject for meditation, huh?"
"Yeah," she agrees, looking down at her bony limbs with a sort of tragic sadness, like she's fully aware of the terrible fate awaiting all of us if we fail to truly raise the alarm about what's happening underground, under our very noses.
We carry on for hours more, until the pull-carts are completely empty. At this point, we're well into the factory sector, as far away from the Justice Building and the part of the district where we live and go to school as I think either of us has ever been.
Lotta is looking truly terrible, so I have her sit in the pull cart and drag her along for as long as I can. I'm starting to feel shaky from the heat and from missing all of my meals today, but the thing about righteous suffering, which is what this is, is that it strengthens not just my own resolve, but that of my allies.
Like Lotta, and my dad.
If something is worth doing, it's worth doing until your hands crack and bleed and your knees shake. It's worth doing it until you're dead in the dirt. That's how my dad explained my mom dying in the process of having me. She knew from the beginning that she didn't necessarily have the strength to get through it, since she'd always been pretty delicate, from the pictures, and her own mom had died having her.
But she knew it was worth it, to bring me into the world, and she held onto that, even when her family begged her not to do it. There are ways to avoid having babies, even in District 8. Especially in District 8, since there are so many people still living miserable lives, no matter what kind of promises the Capitol makes about that. The sort of lives you wouldn't want to share with a baby.
It's sad to know how I'll never do any of those things, never fall in love, never have a child of my own. But I've always known that, ever since I could know things, because my dad has known that. There's nothing like that waiting for me or anyone else, not Lotta and not any of the kids from school who abandoned the cause when they thought everything was going well enough without it…
Not with the terrible things looming, lurking beneath the streets of Panem.
A Two-born Peacekeeper, my dad says, once flashed him schematics for re-built pods, and he's heard whispers from others of them. It figures that no one from the outer districts would know. It's pure luck, after all, that he and I understand the threat we're all facing.
We have to pause, halfway home, for Lotta to vomit up bile into a trashcan. She's sweating like crazy even though she's not the one pulling the cart, and I don't think either of us have been, well, taking care of ourselves very well.
Pulling the two pull carts at once, even with one empty, is getting progressively more challenging, and my arms ache, but I don't complain.
At least we're making good progress in getting home, or we are until I laboriously navigate the pull carts around a corner and find myself face to face with a pair of tired-looking Peacekeepers, their white uniforms coated in dust to the extent that they're unrecognizable at first.
I stop full in my tracks, not recognizing either of them, and Lotta nearly falls out of the cart.
"What is it now?" one of them, an unhelmeted woman, says, her voice heavy with exhaustion, adding as an afterthought, "and stop where you are, we'll need to see some identification for the both of you."
"It doesn't look like they've been involved in the riot, Vibenna," the other Peacekeeper says, removing her helmet to reveal the dark hair and eyes that often indicate a Two-born member of the force, which is a relief.
From what my dad says, they tend to be sympathetic to our cause. 'Vibenna' is also a very Two name, or a Capitol name, so that's sort of fifty-fifty.
Either way, I take out my ID card and gesture for Lotta to give me hers as well.
Luckily, it's too late in the day to ask why either of us aren't in school. That's a small relief.
"Ah," the first Peacekeeper, Vibenna, says upon looking at my card. "The Khan girl. I understand it's you we have to thank for the art installation in the factory squares?"
I stand to my full height, which is not especially substantial, and try to convey the gravitas of my work through my tone as I respond. I would never lie about something so important, not even if it gets us in trouble. People have to know the truth, and Peacekeepers will die just as easy as the rest of us if the Capitol gets a mind to wipe us out and be done with us.
"Yes," I say clearly. "Me and Lotta. We have to warn people. It's only right."
The second Peacekeeper sighs.
"She's Tjanting's kid," she tells Vibenna. "You know, the…"
"Ah."
"They're harmless."
I'm hardly harmless, I like to think. Information is its own kind of expression of power, but I know as well as anyone that someday I'm going to have to go out in a blaze of glory, either brought on by the Capitol's pods or just… raising the alarm in a way that no one can ignore. I have ideas about that, of course, ways that I could gain a real platform, not just the postered walls of the factories and the mild pity of the Peacekeepers.
A lot of ideas.
A while back, my dad somehow got ahold of a Peacekeeper's rifle. Not loaded or anything, not really usable, but I've been practicing with it, just thinking about how someday, if it really came down to it, I'd want to know how to take the safety off, point and shoot, know the weight of it.
Both of these Peacekeepers are armed. I have a very good idea of how long it would take me to lift the rifle off either of their hips. And they wouldn't expect it, either, because I look the way I do, because they think me and my dad are… harmless, and we are, to a point.
The Capitol has made the first move, though, and eventually we're going to have to retaliate beyond poster campaigns.
Not even Lotta knows that, but I do.
"Run along, you two," the first Peacekeeper directs us, handing back our IDs. "You may have missed the announcement, but there was a riot in this area, and citizens are directed to remain indoors."
"We understand," Lotta says weakly, and I nod along with her.
With that, we're free to go, and while my arms ache worse than before, after pausing to really feel them, I'm grateful to have made it out of that confrontation so easily.
"You're not harmless," Lotta adds as I pull her in the direction of home. "That's not true, Songket. If people could just hear you, if they understood… you would bring us all together and save the world. I know that. If people could just wake up…"
How, though, is the question?
The only thing that District 8 seems to understand is misery and subjugation, since they so easily return to it, given half an opportunity. My dad, until me, was the only one willing to stand against it, and they tried to grind him down into obedience, tried to silence him, have called him crazy…
I hate it when people call me crazy. There's nothing I hate more.
"This was a good start," I tell Lotta. "We did well today. But you're right. I need to do something bigger, before it's too late."
Something, but what?
x
Cambric Forsyth, District 8
"Who the fuck is plastering these fucking things everywhere?" Chenille complains, whipping out one of her collection of pocketknives and scraping at the corner of yet another poster promising our collective doom at the hands of… it's not totally clear from whence the doom is supposed to spring, but the doom itself is central and unignorable.
It wouldn't be a problem if it weren't so visually distracting, and, I guess, potentially an issue for our assembly, which relies on the structural integrity of these posts.
We don't have a lot of time to get our impromptu stage set up in the factory district square. Specifically, square 5A, between a quartet of unremarkable warehouses humming with the sound of machinery within. It's a drab sort of place, and we stick out like a rhinestone button on a homemade sweater with our carefully constructed fold-out stage and carefully balanced rigged-up curtain.
At least, the curtain would be all assembled, if it weren't for the goddamned posters making it impossible to balance it properly on the lamppost.
"You know who," I sigh, though there's a chance Chenille doesn't, since she's three years my senior and hasn't been in school for longer than I have.
Songket, the girl in question, never attended my actual school, but I heard enough stories through the grapevine to know she's the only one who could be responsible for this kind of thing at this scale.
"Yeah, yeah, but I mean, is the bitch made of money or something?" Chenille gripes, finally prying one meticulously glued poster from the lamppost, getting to work on another as I prep one of our larger stage tricks for use, making sure the device to mimic a breathing form in the pull-away box is functioning and nothing's been damaged in transport.
It's a great trick, so long as the boxes move smoothly. Three plywood cubes, one atop another, with a series of cut-aways that allow an audience to see and track the presence of a person in the box. Push one to the side, all the way, and you have the illusion of a person cut into thirds, easy enough to achieve for a scrawny kid who can compress their abdomen in the two or three inches of space leftover, stick a foot out one box, press a 'breathing' panel with a spare hand, and demonstrate the other hand and their animated face in the 'head box'.
All seems well. This done, I head over to help her strip the posters and get the curtain up.
"She's running a better con than we are with this shit," I comment, taking a moment to actually look over one of the posters as I slice it to ribbons with a razor blade in the process of dislodging it from the pole.
"What, you don't think the Capitol's gonna blow us all up with…" Chenille pauses, squinting at the small print on the densely-worded paper. "Secret reserves of our genetic material used to train lasers to target each of us at a cellular level?"
"Oh!" I snap my fingers, grinning over the plywood set piece as we hoist it up, Chenille doing most of the actual work since I'm one-handing it. "We could build a show around it! You know, that'd be a great bit, the idea that some kind of… you know, someone disappears based on predetermined… you're following me, right? It's a great expectation to play on, and everyone already knows the bit. I'll be the psycho Capitol scientist, you be the innocent district girl. And it'd be a great moment to break out the pyrotechnics."
"You're not gonna be happy until you've set us both on fire," she grumbles.
"I'm telling you, that crazy Songket chick would do half our publicity for us."
"Maybe let's finish up with the actual show prep, first, before the Peacekeepers come through and start asking about permits, huh?"
It's delicate timing, getting the whole works up and functioning before whichever factory we're staking out releases its workers for lunch, during the mid-day break to allow the machines to cool and the smaller shift of cleanup workers to sweep through and run safety checks. I know a little more about the whole thing than I'd care to, since it's kind of unavoidable if you stay in school too long, or if you don't, really, since the main alternative involves working a loom line in one of the same dingy warehouses that surround us as we hang drapes and finish bolstering the makeshift stage.
At the same time, Chenille is right about our entirely illegitimate operation being excellent Peacekeeper fodder, and therein lies the delicacy of the game we're playing.
Not exactly the straight-and-narrow or the well-traveled road to survival in Eight, but it's me and my sister, and it used to be her and me and my dad, and that's… well. That's what makes everything worth doing in the first place, right? Good people to go home to, full pockets, full stomachs, regardless of what we did to get there.
This part is mostly legit, if you don't count the fact that we absolutely didn't apply for the rights to perform here. The only entity we're pulling a fast one on in this context is the office of the mayor. It's more questionable when it's just normal people, the even-less-legal stuff, the kind of things we could get in real trouble over.
Just about in time, hustling, now, since de-postering the lampposts serving as impromptu balances to hold up several of the set pieces took more time than we typically budget, Chenille and I finish setting up the stage.
She grimaces, wiping the sheen of sweat from her pale brow with the sleeve of her performance shirt as the lunch bell rings simultaneously in four different factories, a noise that would be loud in its own but becomes positively cacophonous when echoed through the empty streets.
"How do I look?" she asks over the din, taking her hip-length red hair down, tossing it back, and then tying it into a fresh ponytail, which she slips under a moderately ratty bleached blonde wig.
"Little less ugly than usual, but there's no doing anything about your face," I say helpfully.
"Shut your mouth, Cam, dad should've left your scrawny ass with the midwife. Swear to god you get uglier every year."
"Mostly on account of spending so much time with you, I'd say. Dad's so handsome. What on earth happened to us?"
This is a sort of tradition we have, talking shit before we do a show. Dad would never stand for it, if he was able to stand for much of anything lately. Big on the 'positive attitude, be nice to your sister' thing, and the same deal with Chenille, though not quite so emphatic, since she doesn't fight if I don't poke at her. She's just a better person than I am - no harm in admitting it.
What he doesn't really get is that the two of us performing is a hugely different deal than him and an assistant. We're visibly a couple of kids, after all, even if neither of us is any kind of wilting violet of a person. Most of our audience, and most of the people we end up pickpocketing if they don't leave tips, like decent humans, is older than us, and right in thinking they could smash our skulls in if it came to a fight. This is a vulnerable position, and 'positive attitudes' or not, there's no way to project the kind of authority and gravitas a big middle-aged guy like him, experienced, grizzled with age, clearly commanding and in charge, could summon up with a snap of his fingers. Not a for scrawny seventeen year old boy and his equally scrawny older sister, who was just out of school herself when she started.
It was even worse, I know, though Chenille won't talk about it, when she tried to go at it all on her own for the first few weeks after dad got sick. She came home shaky and bruised and walking funny a few too many times, no recourse I could take, nothing I could do.
Well, something I could do.
I dropped out of school and started up as her partner, and now it's what we do, and it works, god damn it, it works, even if we can't get by playing by the same rulebook that dad used in his day.
So we pump each other up for the kind of hoots and shouts and heckles we sometimes get, and when it happens, we brush it off, keep smiling, and do our damned best to rob the person in question blind when the time comes.
I seem to have won this round with my retort. Workers begin to spill out onto the streets, effectively cutting off her reply. Knowing anything she says will be near inaudible in the immediate rush of activity, she opts to flip me off with a rueful smile, and I cheerfully reciprocate.
We cycle through locations on a fairly long loop, to avoid stepping on too many toes, and switch out roles as well, to keep things spicy for the crowds.
"Show time," Chenille mouths as I turn to the milling throng of people.
"People of District Eight!" I shout, even at top volume still inaudible to any but the nearest people in the crowd. "Good people of District Eight! Straight from the Capitol, a guest to entertain you!"
I set down our tip box near the front of the stage, close enough to square up with anyone who gets ideas before they can run off with it, though it's not usually an issue.
As usual, as things begin to calm down, a proper audience accumulates, tired-looking workers looking on mild interest, bag lunches purchased at factory canteens on their laps or in their hands. Chenille has fully taken on her character - a caricature of the District 8 escort, a woman named Alexas - and is waving and half-smiling with an air of haughty disinterest.
With some relief, I note a few people tossing their spare change into our tip box already, just with her hamming it up onstage as I pull in a few stragglers with promises of magic and intrigue.
Chenille is great with character work and stage presentation, though I tend to have her beat with sleight of hand. As I corral the crowd, my exaggerated patchwork coat fluttering behind me, I make easy pickings of change half-out of pockets and bags. Most of the crowd to the back won't bother dropping a credit in our box, so I don't think more than a second or two on the choice. It's old hat at this point.
"Welcome, welcome!" Chenille calls in an affected Capitol accent. Alexas is a very easy target - recognizable by the mess of near-white hair and greenish skin, easily mimicked with cheap stage makeup, and none of the people in this crowd would spit on our escort if she were on fire, so there's little chance of going too far. "Haven't you all missed me these last few years?"
Scattered laughs and boos already.
"Heathens!" she chides the crowd shrilly, waving her arms in a meticulously careful but seemingly casual gesture that releases a torrent of paper slips from each of her sleeves. "Ah, no, don't look at those - we're supposed to have a volunteer!"
"I volunteer!" I shout from the back of the crowd.
"A volunteer!" she feigns shock, casually sweeping together a small pile of the slips of paper for me with the toe of her shoe in advance of my part of the act.
"Yes, ma'am!"
I saunter to the stage, warmed by the sense of being watched, even in my over-exaggeratedly patchwork costume, dust smeared artistically on my face.
"And what would your name be, young man?"
"Batik Trainor, at your service!"
This is, of course, not my name. We're not stupid enough to make our legal names public knowledge. Not when my coat is already heavy with lifted credits from the less generous-looking members of the crowd.
I lean down to scoop up the handful of paper slips she's created, open a hidden button in my coat with a flick of my wrist, and release one of our remarkably well-behaved doves - this one named Saffron - from my sleeve. As the shower of paper slips falls anew, I release Basil after her.
"Oh dear," Chenille says, in exaggerated dismay. "They're not supposed to do that."
This gets a laugh, particularly as I flare my coattails and set two more doves free, these, Paprika and Anise, trained to land gently in her wig, though you wouldn't know that by the way she shrieks and tries to get them off. Now I'm bird-less and capable of fitting in the box, but our bit isn't quite done.
"You monsters!" my sister is insisting, her wig askew, the doves all waiting with well-mannered precision on the support cable holding up the set. "You're not fit for our beautiful Games!"
What's supposed to happen next is a sequence we've practiced a great many times, to vast success. I set the remainder of the slips of flash paper on fire, and tell Chenille-as-Alexas that all District 8 citizens possess powerful magic, accentuating this claim with some careful scarf-work. Everyone loves scarf-work, it's our industry and we're right to be proud about it.
All according to plan.
Then I insist on further proving my claim. I lead her to the box, and tell her that there's a trick to our collective ability to die with style. Which isn't exactly true, but there are two reasons someone will believe a lie, and the best one is a personal investment in it being true.
We all want to believe something like that, since it's less depressing than the alternative.
The other driver of a successful lie is personal investment in its being untrue, of course.
I make it into the box, and Chenille presses the center box of the three stacked one-atop-another until my abdomen is pressed into a space of two or three inches, which, thanks to the painstaking optical illusions painted onto the plywood frame, appears to be a totally negligible amount of room. One of my arms extends into the pressed-to-the-side box, and the other hangs languorously from an opening next to my head, as though this is the easiest thing I've ever done.
By all appearances, there is a massive empty space between my shoulders and my waist, and the rest of my body has been shifted two feet to the right.
Ideally, we would proceed to bring up a good mark from the audience, who would put their hand on the 'stomach' panel and feel me pressing on it, revealing to the crowd that I was authentically breathing-and-existing in the pulled-to-the-side box, would touch my hand and my face and put their hand in the empty space to verify the non-involvement of mirrors.
Then, I would usher Chenille into the box herself with promises that my magic would protect her and then shove the box across with feigned roughness, and she would crush a bodice full of fake blood pellets and fall out of the box, dead. At this point, the lunch break would be rolling to an end, so I would do my bows, make a few more jokes and do more fabric tricks, her increasingly bloodied body becoming funnier with every second I ignore it. People filing by to get a closer look at both her and the box would leave tips, and once they were called back into work, we would pack up the set quickly and cart it away, no one the wiser.
That isn't what happens this time.
My dad's warnings to me and Chenille, from birth, practically, most often on the days that even he would end up fucked over by an angry crowd, was that people hate to be made to feel ignorant, and when a magician makes his audience feel stupid, they'll do anything in their power to punish him for it.
(Him or her, Chenille likes to remind him now, when he's feeling up to these sorts of lectures.)
A crowd will punish a magician who pulls too many fast ones on them, which is why duo acts work so well. The patsy isn't the crowd, it's Chenille in a bad wig or me pretending to be a Capitol businessman or, on occasion, insisting I'm Mayor Lopez's son.
Sometimes individuals take things so personally that even the power of a good duo dynamic can't assuage their desire to outsmart the smart guy (or girl! Sorry, Chenille!) onstage, and that's when volunteers get dangerous. There's no perfect formula to pick a good one, but both of us have pretty strong track records.
So I'm loaded into the box, and Chenille ushers up a short young woman, perhaps in her early twenties, who looks a bit worn out, like she might be pregnant or recently so, based on the curve of her stomach. Mothers are often a good bet, though it's hard to guess who's what with only their appearance at work, in the factory uniforms, as a guide.
As Chenille leads her up to me, engaging in her typical patter about how she needs someone with better eyes, someone who can see through this basal district-level trickery, I catch an expression that I don't really like as the woman meets my eyes.
It's not delight or curiosity.
It's vindictive anger.
And there's nothing I can do, since I can barely so much as speak, squinched in the stacked crates, until she rips through the fabric panel meant as a facsimile for my shirt, grabs me by the hand, and twists my pale wrist out of the box.
Any wind I had left in me is fully knocked out as she wrenches powerfully at the plywood box, splinters it as the crowd gasps.
I don't recognize her. Chenille is gaping as well, though I can see the gears in her head turning towards damage control, as I stumble out of the shattered box, feeling as though I might have a broken rib or two.
"You really want to cheer for a couple of fucking thieves?" the woman is demanding of the crowd, and she reaches down to grasp the hem of my jacket, shaking at it until the credits I've lifted spill free.
Which wouldn't be an issue if the whole situation hadn't riled everyone the whole way up, if the crowd wasn't already mostly done with their lunches and ready for more action, if the woman didn't throw the first punch and clock me full in the face, raising her fist to do it again as onlookers begin to approach the stage.
"Cambric!" Chenille cries, breaking character immediately to run to my side, whipping out her knife and slashing the woman across the face, pushing her, bleeding, into the crowd to hold them off.
"Get the curtains!" I insist, over the sound of my own wheezing breaths and the noise of the approaching crowd.
They're the most costly part, the most difficult to replace.
As Chenille tears them down, kicking and menacing away the first wave of angered audience-members, I scoop up everything in the tip box and sprint for the doves, still resting with a near-sedated sense of calm on the wire holding everything together.
They all fit in my coat, of course, and are accustomed to the experience.
We make our getaway as best we can. I go to salvage the cables, as well, but a chunk of loose pavement hits me hard in the side, jarring enough after my violent exit from the box to make me think it's drawn blood, to double me over.
Chenille half-hoists me on her shoulder, and we flat-out run, to the extent that I can. I'd say we know these routes better than any of the workers, and they'll have to return to their posts soon, so we really just have to keep up the pace until we get out of this particular square and get ourselves onto the alley route home.
Easier said than done.
A paving stone catches Chenille over her eye, and she damn near goes down. Soon enough, we're leaning on each other, neither of us really equipped to act as main support, especially once someone throws a literal fork at me, hard, and actually gets me in the back of the neck, hard enough to slice the skin.
We do make it, though, as we have before, the white-line scars on both of our bodies evidence that this isn't always the easiest life. It happens, we deal with the fallout, we debrief, we get back at it. That's just how our family does things.
Though in the past, dad hasn't been so sick, and Chenille's had a part time job other than running gambits like this with me.
By the time we make it back to our house, a little four-room structure that barely fits all of us, both me and my sister are bleeding, out of breath, exhausted, just about ready to drop.
And we do - collapse, I mean, in the sort-of-living-room, sort-of-me-and-Chenille's-room. Out of dad's sight, thankfully, since he's been sleeping in his room most of the day since he got sick.
"Christ," she complains, after we've slightly caught our breath. "Just me, or was it worse this time?"
"People are on-edge," I suggest, though my tone is only slightly above a murmur, thanks to the stabbing pains in my chest.
"Could we have avoided that?" she asks, staring up at the peeling paint on the ceiling.
"Dunno, honestly," I say. "She looked like a good mark, right up until she didn't."
"Fuck."
"Fuck," I agree.
"Well," Chenille says, pulling herself to her feet, wiping the blood from her eyes and looking me up and down. "Sit tight, I'll grab some temporary bandages and we can check out your ribs, and then I'll check in on dad. You just try to breathe it out, huh?"
I drag myself into a sitting position, wincing as something stabs even more terribly in my chest, and pull open my coat to release my doves. We have a little hutch in the corner of the room, next to the couch where I sleep. They're all named for seasonings, and they're all particularly well-behaved females from back when my dad bought a few off a guy selling pigeons for food and started breeding them into proper training birds.
They're my spice girls!
Saffron nuzzles her way out of my left sleeve, Basil from my right. Anise flutters out of my left pocket with an indignant noise.
Paprika doesn't move.
My heart sinks.
It appears that not all of the blood staining my side from where the brick hit me is my own.
Oh.
I'm still staring at her feathery little body when Chenille comes out of the bathroom, holding a roll of bandages and some disinfectant, one wrapped around her own forehead already.
"Alright, Cam, let's sort this out," she announces, but stops when she sees what I'm looking at. "Oh, dude, shit, I'm so sorry, is she..?"
Not really able to find the words, which is a rare enough state for me, I just nod. My eyes feel wet with tears, but I'd have to put Paprika down to dry them.
"Hey," she says, putting an arm around my shoulders. "Hey, hey, stop, we'll…"
"We're going to have to eat her," I whisper, which is the stupidest and most childish thing to get upset about, right now, when I still can't breathe properly and my sister's goddamned head wound is still oozing blood, but I just can't…
"No, we don't," she insists, nearly laughing, as though she didn't grit her teeth and pluck and roast the last dove that died, though that one just got mauled by a cat before we moved the hutch inside. "Let's check our haul before we start acting like there's anything we have to do, okay? Come on, Cam, we've had worse, lord knows I've had worse, chin up, you're tougher than this, okay?"
That's just the thing, though.
We've had worse afternoons than this one. We're not as good at this as my dad was. We've been trying to make this work for a year now, helping him out for longer, but on our own… it's increasingly clear that this isn't sustainable. That I can't protect Chenille, and she can't protect me out there.
And the thing is, I'm less than useless to her in here. If she wasn't stuck caring for me and dad, if I could pull my shit together and figure out how she… whatever she's doing to take care of him, I don't even know! If I wasn't holding her back, Chenille could be anything. She's crazy smart, good at basically everything, did better in school than I did, even, before she had to…
Here I am, her dumb kid brother crying over a bird, better at playing at being someone I'm not and waving sparklers at crowds than anything actually useful.
"Aw, come here," she says, pulling me into a hug that actually makes me feel much worse, thank-you-very-much.
The other thing is this.
I'm no shut-in, but I watch enough television to know what you get when you volunteer. We joked about it, actually, how the best thing you could offer someone from District 8 was the chance to leave. A lump sum of cash, and a set of visas out of the district for the family of the volunteer. Anywhere else that'll take them.
Which includes places with real hospitals, and Chenille with enough money to put dad up in one, stop burning herself out doing it on her own, could actually do something, anything…
I look down at the dead dove in my hands, and all I can see is something that trusted me, something that loved me, and something that, like so many things, I couldn't protect.
She's going to be so mad at me.
I smile at my sister, through my tears and through the pain of my rib, worse with every breath.
"I love you."
"I know, dumbass, stop crying," she says, holding me just a little tighter, careful to avoid my jacked-up ribcage. "Pull it together, act like yourself, come on."
"Okay."
I will.
x
Marina Trevino, The Capitol
Strangely enough, she found herself in Polly's studio office on a Friday afternoon, on her way back from a morning trip to District 8 to finalize their nominations in person, as Mayor Lopez had simply made the calls herself and announced that she could make her rulings at her own leisure. No real surprises, she felt, still with the weight of the folder in her shoulder-bag to remind her of the previous errand. Eventually the exposure to it, the two new faces in each folder, started to numb her.
Not a pleasant experience.
Also not what brought her to the… well, whatever it was, the space had the capacity to be well-lit, but was currently pitch dark, with blackout shades pulled over the massive windows, the principal light source a bright red laser humming on Polly's disorganized desk, scattering fragments of red light across a mess of papers, diagrams, and a single potted plant next to a variety of empty pill bottles.
Even with the protective glasses she'd accepted, it was bright, and she waited in silence for whatever was happening to be done. The project was time sensitive, of course, the sooner it could be completed, the better.
With a long sigh, Polly flicked the laser off the highest setting, turning the near-violent glow into a negligible bead of mostly-concealed red light beneath her microscope, and removed her thick protective goggles, snapping her fingers in the air to pull her shades up and illuminate the room.
In the sunlight, it was even messier, and contained Polly's small calico cat, Halogen, a demon in cat form, Marina speculated, which rarely left its mistress's side.
"Well?" she prompted. "Where are you on the project?"
It was an important piece of work. Pivotal, actually. Polly had let the metaphorical cat out of the bag when it came to the construction of the deadly array of modified pods beneath the Capitol, each capable of unfathomable destruction, and it couldn't easily be undone.
What she could do, with time and effort and resources, was design a material from which protective gear could be constructed, to defray the potential devastation, particularly the targeted genetic attacks that Polly had been very clear were possible. It didn't take a brilliant mind to think over who Claudia might want burned to ashes by a supercomputer suspended in pure light, after all.
"I'm testing the latest iteration under broad-spectrum visible wavelengths, though we'll be moving up in wavelength to vet under a wider scope of scenarios. The challenge, of course, is preserving the efficacy of the reflection technique without making the intention of the media explicit under scrutiny with the naked eye." Polly explained. "Are you… following this?"
"Hard to make it subtle but also work," Marina supplied, and Polly nodded approvingly.
"Yes. Alright, so at the moment I'm running trials on a polymer modeled on Peacekeeper uniforms, treated with various quartzite particle sizes, if you'd like to take a look," she said, offering her the microscope after flicking off a series of colored lasers that had been bathing the workspace in a moderately ominous red glow.
It looked more or less like the crystalline sand of the nicer beaches of District 4, even at such high magnification. Almost like finely-milled white glitter, really, though she understood that she was seeing the material at unfathomably close proximity.
"Wow," she said, and that was really all there was to say about it. "And it works?"
"So far, so good."
She'd have to get the ball rolling soon if she wanted to initiate any kind of mass production in District 8. It wasn't an ideal answer, but she didn't want to say that to Polly, either.
Shouldn't there be an easier solution? She wondered if she couldn't figure something out if she actually had any time or mental energy to expend on the problem, if everything wasn't so utterly agonizing all the goddamned time.
"That's good to hear. Anything else interesting in the works?" she asked conversationally, even though she hoped very much that the answer was 'no'.
"Of course not. You assigned this project singular priority," Polly said, actually looking up at her, almost meeting her eyes before looking away and frowning.
"Yes, I did."
"...then why would you ask?"
Polly looked sincerely curious, and far more concerned than she'd expected. It was easy to forget that Saxaul wasn't the only mentor who could be dangerously perceptive - under the right circumstances, at least, Polly's intelligence translated directly to blunt and sometimes very inconvenient observations of inconsistency in others' behavior.
"Just curious."
That was a lie.
She was lonely, and she didn't want to go home and be lonely and alone. Not with Hero being progressively weirder and cagier and more reluctant to talk about anything, which, damn it, she'd known that secrets were a mistake, she knew that it was better to communicate than not to communicate, but, well, too fucking late for that now! And he was more or less the only person she cared about who she had any expectations might not act like a lunatic nightmare with the Games drawing near, fair though the behavior was on the part of the people shouldering a sizable part of the burden of the impending suffering.
Cora had disappeared to Seven to visit the Otas, though for a much longer time than usual. Saxaul was Saxaul, and now he was running campaign ads, which was a little like watching a labradoodle sing an operatic composition. Manari hadn't been to the Capitol in nearly a year, and most of their correspondence was pure business, anyway, though her apartment was still tightly in accordance with accessibility metrics after their stint as roommates.
And that was really it. She'd never talked to her team of volunteers outside of work and logistics back when she'd been Wiltshire's field organizer. She could hardly talk to the President, who barely took visitors these days. It was difficult enough to get her signature, let alone a conversation longer than a few tired sentences.
She wondered if Lancaster might not be lonely as well.
Not much she could do about that.
At least Polly's weirdness was predictable.
"It's just abnormal for you is all," Polly said, as if in response to her thought. "You usually remember exactly what you asked me to do better than you do pretty much anything else. It can be obnoxious."
"Ah, sorry," she said, a little awkwardly. "That's not intentional. I mean, the constant threat of genocide…"
"Always with the genocide," Polly sighed. "Live with the threat of genocide long enough and it loses some of the punch."
Polly, of course, had known about the pods longer than anyone, having effectively designed them herself. Under the supervision of Claudia and the helpful house-arrest previously enforced by Mayor Rhodes, of course, for all that mattered in the scheme of things. The pods were retrofitted, they could definitely kill, indiscriminately or deliberately, and Claudia was the person with her finger on the trigger.
"Suppose so," Marina agreed, somewhat reluctantly.
What a nightmare. She'd been really hoping for some nightmare-ending news, but it seemed like that was in short supply.
Likely she was doing a poorer job than usual of holding herself together, because Polly continued to glance up at her every few seconds, never quite meeting her eyes, bearing an expression of concern.
"Are things… is there something wrong?" she asked, after several moments of awkward silence.
"Nothing is any wronger than it's been lately."
"Oh," Polly said hesitantly. "I mean, that's not exceptionally reassuring, as far as comments go."
She sighed, wishing for an easy way to hide her face.
"You've made great progress. Please don't think I'm diminishing… I don't know. It's been a long day. I've come back from District Eight, and that's never… I wonder how anyone survives that place. You know, among their volunteering incentives, they included the relocation of the volunteer's family? I was only there an hour and I wanted nothing more than to leave. How have things gotten so terrible?"
"Oh," Polly repeated.
Definitely not the person to be venting to, then.
But she couldn't entirely figure out how to stop.
"I have two more children in my bag," she added. "And I'm going to give their files to Hero, and he's going to grimace and say nothing and bow and disappear into his apartment. These children are going to die. It's pathetic how I keep realizing that. So many of them simply don't have a chance, volunteers or not, and that's how it has to be. That's how it's always been, and I can't change the script now. But it's so fucking miserable, and there's no one left I can talk to about it."
Polly blinked up at her, expression totally unreadable. Then reached out her hand to pat Marina's arm.
"There, there," she said quietly. "It will be okay."
It wouldn't, though. That was the problem. It would only get worse when she received the entries for District 9, when whatever train wreck was brewing within the fractured group of victors reached its peak, when everything inevitably fell apart.
By design. It was supposed to fall apart. It was supposed to be miserable. It was supposed to cure all of them of any desire to ever mount this kind of undertaking ever again.
Starting, it seemed, with her.
Polly continued to pat her arm for an awkwardly long period of time, and she cleared her throat.
"You've done well so far, I think," she suggested, smiling uncomfortably at Marina, looking as though she would very much prefer staring down one of the death lasers to this kind of emotional moment.
Surprisingly, it was not totally ineffective, though.
She smiled back halfheartedly at Three's only victor.
"What's going to happen to these children… Eight's, and yours, I've given you Nine, I don't know how you're supposed to…"
"I'll look after them as well as I can. You know that, Marina. I said I would, and I do the things I say I will." Polly paused, looking back at her microscope with near-palpable relief. "Well, when I remember."
At least she was upfront about being unreliable, though in a way, it sometimes felt that everyone she cared about was much the same. Truly, what else had she ever expected from the victors? It was unfair, honestly, to ask them to be reliable. They weren't fundamentally reliable people, and if they ever had been, the Games and their aftermath had cured them of that particular personality trait.
While she understood that, of course, it still turned her stomach, because if she failed to be reliable, the initiative to end the Games fell apart, and the world might as well go with it. If she stopped spinning plates, she wouldn't find them safely in her cupboard the next morning. They were all over her head, held there tenuously through centripetal force that she herself exerted. If they fell, they shattered.
But didn't she have as much excuse as any of them to be a mess?
Why couldn't she be a mess, damn it?
Perhaps even more, how was it that of all of them, all the victors and all the people whose lives had been so drastically affected by the Games and the way their structure changed society, changed people, changed them… how the hell was Claudia the only one who seemed totally unaffected by everything? And how was that fair, when she went on to use that put-togetherness, more or less, to torment the rest of them?
"I will try," Polly added, apparently concerned by her long silence in response. "Really, I'm, well, in a better place than I sometimes have been with all this. I've been preparing. I…"
"I trust you," she said, which she probably shouldn't, but who else was she supposed to trust right now?
Polly wasn't not her friend, after all. At the moment, she felt like the closest friend she had.
Halogen mewed in approval, weaving between her legs in a figure-eight pattern and getting calico fur all over her boots. She sighed, then leaned down to pet the little cat, a sort of peace offering, since usually they were so at odds.
"Take care of your mom," she whispered to the little beast, which gazed at her inscrutably with yellow-green eyes and then tried to bite her hand.
Polly scooped her cat onto her lap, somehow running her hands over Halogen's head in a way that reduced the cat to a puddle of fur, purring like an idling motor.
"She always does," Polly said quietly, with something approximating a smile.
On her way out, Marina found herself swallowing an unpleasant tightness in her throat. The sun was beginning to set. She'd put off returning to her empty apartment long enough. It had never bothered her before, but… was it weak, admitting that it was beginning to? That it hurt, in the most undignified way, knowing that the aloneness was something that could be theoretically remedied, but not in practice?
Who was taking care of her?
x
We are now …. two thirds of the way through the intros! Can I get a hell yeah for intros, a hell yeah for avoiding writing my final papers and lab reports, and an additional hell yeah for the Dunkin Donuts employees who know my order by heart?
Also #tbt when my intro chapters were like 2-3k words? I guess at the same time I was doing one character at a time, and the subsections do lean 3-4k + a 1k-ish Capitol bit. Updates will be a lot faster after I pass my cell bio class and #graduate.