A little over one year later

Suddenly, sirens began to wail.

Cursing, Mary made her way to the basement as her ears felt like they were going to explode, wishing that she was back in Thirteen and grading papers. She shouldn't have put her name forward. She was needed back home, to help already-liberated Districts rebuild their justice systems. But even fifty-year-old academics could be sent to the front if they volunteered, and Mary stupidly had.

The air tasted of grit and rot, but Mary was long-used to it by now. She had been in Eight's Centre for several weeks now, sent in as part of a small force to help out Paylor, the District commander. Technicians to repair infrastructure and instruct locals, for the most part, as well as fifty-year-old 'soldiers' to serve as stretcher-bearers and the like - a tokenistic gesture of support, but Eight had to know that it was not being abandoned.

Bombs fell, but not close enough to be an immediate danger to her. Still, Mary was afraid. She wasn't a fighter, she was a professor. Her only skill was turning a phrase, and that was of no help here, in this dusty, sweltering basement as bombs rained down on the city. The rest of the District was being mostly left alone, which allowed them to come up with a more decentralized network of communications and transportation. Eight was quite close to Thirteen, which made getting supplies - in and wounded - out relatively easily, even if the armoured trains were often strafed. The capital, though-

A bomb fell so close by, Mary was nearly thrown into the air. Dust rained down on her, clicking against the fabric-covered metal of her helmet. She wiped at her eyes, feeling it sting them, and cursed her misplaced patriotism. She should have been sent in after the fighting ended, not during the thick of it! Mary wished she hadn't won that argument with Rithvik.

Eight's capital city was being bombed. Terror-bombed, as Dr. Nurbeko, historian and fellow 'soldier' defending Eight, said. Sometimes, the hovercraft flew so low, they could be shot down with anti-tank guns, or, on one occasion, a semi-automatic. Usually, though, they flew high enough for the AA guns Thirteen supplied to be needed. They were firing now, adding to the cacophony.

Mary curled up into a ball as more bombs fell. She hated being stuck outside a proper shelter when the bombing began. As the ground shook, she sat in a concrete box that had once been a basement of a store, hands over her head.

She had been on her way to the nearby warehouse when the sirens had sounded. There would be no time for that now. As soon as the all-clear sounded, Mary climbed out of the basement, clambering over the rubble onto the street, its always-ruined pavement now covered in large potholes. Mary jogged to the Central Hospital, which was just metres from Paylor's HQ.

People were already being brought in, and Mary helped stack the dead bodies, wishing the cloth wrapped around her face could fully block out smells. She knew first aid, but there was no need for her help here. The head doctor used her as the messenger girl. Mary, do this. Mary, fetch that. Back in Thirteen, nobody had dared even think of treating her like that. In Eight, though, the rules were different. A fifty-year-old who had gone through a month-long retraining program was of no use here.

Several familiar faces walked up. Drs. Latreya Blueroot, Chee Nurbeko, and Decius Lee from the archives were approaching, carrying stretchers with wounded on them. Dr. Blueroot looked the most like a soldier of the trio. The legal historian with an area of expertise Mary didn't quite grasp (right now, she spent most of her time monologuing about the Armenian genocide) had her coily hair buzz-cut just like Mary. Dr. Lee, a pale man with narrow eyes and a historian of the twentieth-century Tokyo trial, still had his crown of braids in place. Dr. Nurbeko was darker, round-eyed, and had cut their curly hair somewhat but it was flopping all over the place again. Even under the bombs, their most common refrain was 'Well, in Nuremberg-' The trio of experts in the history of international law were even more useless than her, which was why they were here.

They weren't that much younger than her, and the fourth person - Ratko, their new friend - had to be at least sixty-five. Most of the city had fled to the rural outskirts once the last Peacekeepers had surrendered or withdrawn, outskirts Snow seldom attacked. He was still under the delusion that he would win, and then he'd need the people of Eight to toil for him all over again.

Only a small fraction of the city remained. People who wouldn't or couldn't leave for various reasons. The rest were soldiers keeping the hovercraft away, not letting Snow send in paratroopers to try and retake the District. Eight was right on the coast, which added another headache for the defenders. The Coast Guard had been stripped bare, aside from a few bases preventing people from leaving by sea, but Paylor was still forced to keep a large force in the east, watching for a potential invasion from there.

As always after a raid, Ratko was simmering. "What I wouldn't do to bomb them to smithereens like that," he hissed as they put down the stretchers. The hospitals were unsanitary places at the best of times and Mary didn't want to imagine what would happen if a bomb fell on one of them, but there weren't any other options besides evacuation, which was a slow trickle.

"During the First Rebellion," Blueroot lectured, "the Rebels actually laid siege to the Capitol. The problem was, they didn't have the rest of the country secured, so they weren't able to go through with it properly." Mary's grandparents had fought back then, her father's father driving an armoured train and her father's mother - in the Rockies; her mother's family had been farmers in Twelve and then refugees. Unlike now, when vast swathes of territories were being abandoned by government troops without a single shot being fired, there had been five or six different fronts at once, depending on how one counted. Even in history class it was usually presented as a straightforward civil war between two sides, but there had been five sides to that conflict, not two. Less of a heroic struggle against a tyrannical government and more of a bloody, violent, and horrific mess, with revolutionaries and reactionaries of all stripes fighting the people who were their allies the previous day.

"A siege?" Ratko asked. A sad smile came over his face. "Count me in."

The two people on the stretchers were both unconscious, and unlikely to wake up.

"When's the next supply train?" Ratko demanded of nobody in particular as they placed the wounded on the ground.

Mary tried to remember the schedule, but she was just a pair of boots on the ground here. "Ask the head doctor."

Ratko spat on the ground. "What's the point of you, then? Get a move on, you three." They picked up the stretchers and headed back into the ruins.

The bombings had been particularly nasty, and Mary had her hands full stacking corpses and running to fetch this or that. To cap it all off, the head doctor suddenly rushed outside to announce that the Mockingjay was coming, and Paylor would be there, too.

Mary had never seen the revolt's figurehead and did not have a particular desire to. The girl, who hadn't even turned nineteen yet, had just been a convenient catalyst. However, Mary had seen Paylor, and had walked away very impressed by the youthful commander. Not even forty yet, she was single-handedly preventing Eight from falling to pieces completely.

"Hey, you!" the head doctor snapped.

"Yes?" Mary asked.

"Go help the gravediggers."

That was a much better job. Mary jogged off, glad to be rid of the hunks of bloody and burned meat that had once been people. It was odd how a hand could go from a body part to a disgusting thing with a few swipes of a saw.

Mary stood in the waist-high pit in what had once been a park and tossed shovelfuls of dirt out of it. It was exhausting work, but at least there were no bodies here for now. She was a prosecutor (albeit one who hadn't prosecuted in decades) and a professor, not an investigator. Why was she dealing with the bodies? She shouldn't have been getting any closer to them than through a screen, or a photograph.

"I knew you'd be here," said a cheery voice. Nurbeko again. "How are you enjoying the day?"

Mary suspected that the irreverent historian had gone insane so as to not feel the gnawing agony of watching people die, over and over. Before she could reply, Ratko slapped them.

"Do you really think this is funny?" he demanded. The four of them were dragging a cart full of corpses. "How dare you speak that way?"

Ratko wouldn't have hit anyone else for using humour as a coping strategy. He was simply very unimpressed with Thirteen's perceived inaction.

"Have you seen the delegation?" someone asked next to Mary, who tossed another shovelful of dirt out of the pit.

"We did," Lee said. "Everdeen, a friend of hers - both so young - a colonel, couple of soldiers, film crew, a group of doctors, and a hovercraft stuffed full of supplies."

The reaction to that was predictable. "A hovercraft of supplies?" the same person, a woman around Ratko's age with a bandaged head, said. "For the entire District?"

Mary wondered what the colonel was doing there. For propaganda purposes, perhaps?

"What does she look like?" someone else asked.

"A child," Nurbeko said. "She's only eighteen."

"I'm eighteen," someone grumbled. "That's not a child. And what friend do you mean?"

"Some beanpole," Blueroot said, picking up a corpse with Lee and tossing it into an already dug pit. "Around her age, maybe a metre eighty or so, as skinny as you."

"Hey!"

Whatever anyone else had been planning to say was prevented by the wail of sirens. Everyone scrambled to get out of the pit, Mary tripping over the edge. Some ran for the AA guns, but the majority descended into the nearest air-raid shelter to wait.

"Again?" Nurbeko grumbled, handprint visible on their face.

"Again," Blueroot sighed. Ratko was more angry than anything else. He bounced his knee as hovercraft flew overhead. They were flying low - very low, this would be one for the delusional snipers. Fortunately, they weren't too close.

"Sounds like they're near HQ," someone said.

By the nearby hospital, then. Mary hoped they hadn't hit it.

They sat in the cellar, breathing the dusty air and waiting for it to end. Before the all-clear even sounded, Ratko and the historians were running out to start looking for casualties. The rest sat there in mostly-silence for a little bit longer before they were allowed out. Mary made her way to the hospital through the fresh rubble and found - a burning wreck.

Firefighters were working on extinguishing the blaze. A small crowd had gathered, and Mary made her way to the front, feeling the heat on her exposed face. The hovercraft had flown so low, this bombing had to have been deliberate. But why? They could have easily seen the red cross painted on the roof. Known what it meant. Why would even Snow want to bomb a hospital?

Mary took a few steps back and ran to the grave she had been digging before the bombing. There, she discovered that everyone was talking only about how Everdeen had made a passionate speech. Mary wondered why she wasn't more upset about how the dead were all mostly ignored. Maybe she, too, was simply too used to it.

The historians soon arrived bearing corpses, but no Ratko. He had suffered a badly broken leg when rubble had fallen on him and had been approved for evacuation, which would be the next day. Blueroot also told Mary that the four of them were also being recalled, because they were needed for something back in the District. Nurbeko appeared to be completely crushed.

"They did it on purpose!" they said through tears. "They had orders to bomb the hospital. How can you bomb a hospital on purpose?"

On the armored train heading north, Mary couldn't summon up any enthusiasm for whatever her new task would be or even seeing Rithvik again. She had gone only reluctantly, but now that she had been there, leaving felt like a betrayal.

Decius wanted to ask Latreya how the meeting had gone, but her facial expression made him stay silent. The other historian was furious.

"What happened?" Chee asked quietly. They were, as always, in the archive. Decius still hadn't gotten used to being back home without bombs falling on his head or dead bodies and rubble everywhere. Everything felt too clean and he kept on thinking he was hearing sirens or screaming. "Did Coin not listen?"

Latreya huffed and fell into her chair. She had been Coin's off-and-on historical advisor for quite a bit of time, and Decius and Chee had always been jealous. "Oh, no. She listened. She's always contemplated some sort of trials."

Decius sighed with relief. "So what's wrong?" he asked, pushing aside a pile of papers and leaning back in the chair. "Not the sort of trials we wanted?" He vaguely recalled Coin planning to try the currently-detained Victors with the 'other war criminals', which betrayed her lack of understanding of what a war criminal was. Come to think of it, when had she mentioned war criminals before? The average person in Thirteen had better things to contemplate, but surely the leadership had taken notice of the same books Latreya and Chee cooed about.

"I don't know." Latreya looked at her hands. "That's not even the biggest issue, though. At the beginning of the meeting, Coin said that, instead of mass executions, we should just hold another Hunger Games - with the children of the Capitol."

Decius nearly choked as all the things wrong with that idea tried to leave his throat at once and got stuck. He had heard that idea floated around, but had they really been serious? And what mass executions?

"What the actual fuck?" Chee demanded, suddenly furious. "How did everyone react?"

"Negatively. I don't know with whom Coin discussed the plan, because everyone gathered said in unison that it was a terrible idea." She scratched her head. "Then I leapt in and asked where she had even gotten the idea of mass executions from if the plan was trials. She didn't answer the question and asked if I had any other ideas, so we seized the chance to present the proposal." Before suddenly being thrown into combat, the three of them had co-written a memorandum on how criminals against humanity could be dealt with through a legal system and government structures - cleansed of corrupt officials.

All of a sudden, being excluded from official meetings didn't seem like such a bad thing to Decius. "And?" The leaders of Thirteen all had their own ideas of how things should go, but Coin had the decisive voice.

"Reluctantly agreed. She only wants to hold trials of Snow and the Gamemakers, but I think we sold her on transitional justice - if someone else does it."

It was exasperating to watch two grown adults fall over each other like schoolchildren. When he had told the captured officers they could work in the topside farms if they wanted to, he hadn't expected them to use the time for other amusements.

"I actually found a book of sheet music for people with only the left hand in the catalogue," the fifty-year-old colonel said. She was missing half her face. As Stephen walked by, making sure that his charges were not slacking off, he could see only the missing half of her head. It looked like ground meat. Here in Thirteen, she had gotten the surgery she needed to keep her functional, but when it came to cosmetic reconstruction, she was at the very bottom of the list. "I could get it for you. Um. If you like."

Her companion was of the same age and rank, but hailed from the Capitol, where she had studied the piano before enlisting at nineteen. She was missing her right hand, which hadn't stopped her from volunteering for farm work. "Uh. Thanks! That's very nice of you!" she squeaked. Anything else she said was lost on Stephen, who was too far away from the flirting former officers to hear them.

When he had been ordered to interrogate the incoming officers, Stephen had assumed that someone was playing a bad joke on him. Higher-ups had never approved of his methods, thinking them a waste of time even as he had unmasked spies better than anyone else. Now, though, Stephen knew that Coin had finally come around to accepting his unorthodox style.

"How are things?" he asked one of the guards, a young man missing both his legs. All of the guards were disabled in one way or another.

"Going well, sir."

"The kids?" The Rebellion officially did not send the underage into combat (tragically, it still happened), but Snow had no scruples about putting children in uniform and handing them guns. Unsure of what to do with the child soldiers, the administration simply treated them like any other children, though they were kept separated from the others.

"Haven't seen any."

"Good." They may have been little soldiers, but they were still kids. They got everywhere.

Stephen walked down the path, past guards resting and former officers tending to the vegetables. He made his way to the large lot where the children were supposed to be playing sports. They were doing military exercises instead, looking like any other kids going through basic training. But any other kids had not already been in combat. They weren't missing limbs or covered in scars, didn't suffer from extreme mental trauma, didn't wake up screaming in the night. They hadn't killed and come close to dying themselves.

Most POWs were sent to the liberated Districts, to rebuild and bring in the harvest. Thirteen kept only the officers, for interrogation purposes, and the underage. A few were both. In Eleven, an entire company of underage soldiers had surrendered, led by their eighteen-year-old captain. Some sadistic bastard had decided to see if cadets could fight well on their own. A poor kid who had only ever commanded in war-games had ended up in charge of two hundred children, some of whom were shorter than their guns. Fortunately, the company had had an experienced First Sergeant attached, and she had been able to convince the captain to not perform a suicidal attack on a well-defended outpost.

"Are you ready to talk now?" Stephen asked Ajax, former Captain Kim. The boy was sitting under a tree and staring off into space.

Ajax looked like he wanted to stand up and salute, even though he actually outranked Stephen, who was a lieutenant. "Yes, sir."

Stephen sat down next to him on the dry grass. Inwardly, he was triumphant. Two weeks, and Ajax was finally willing to talk. "Tell me about your orders."

Hesitantly, Ajax tore at the yellowed stalks with his fingers. "We were told to fight to the end. Told that the Rebels are trying to bring back the Dark Days, and we need to treat them with the harshest severity if we are to have peace." His voice had a blank quality to it as he recited the orders. "We were told to not hold back." He fell silent.

Stephen dug in his pockets and took out a packet of peanut paste. He held it out to the boy, who took it, uncertainty written on his face.

"Why?"

"Growing boy like you needs plenty of food."

"We get enough to eat." Ajax sounded suspicious.

Stephen patted him on the shoulder. "Eat the peanuts." Ajax did as bid, still untrusting.

Some of the officers were convinced Rebels, others were fanatical loyalists. Most didn't care one way or the other, content to follow orders from anyone who claimed to be in control. It was the same with the kids, but when they argued, Stephen was exasperated instead of irritated. There was no other possible reaction to watching two thirteen-year-olds call each other traitors. Ajax had started out stubborn, but Stephen had noticed that he had been upset by the ages of the 'soldiers' under his command. That had given Stephen an opening, one he would use now.

"How are they doing?" he asked, gesturing to where the kids seemed to have abandoned anything resembling a coherent exercise in favour of a giant pile-up. Stephen could hear the laughter from where he was sitting.

Ajax smiled sadly, mouth full of paste. "The little ones seem to be happy. Though they miss their parents."

"Are your parents still living?" Stephen asked.

Ajax licked the wrapper clean and stuffed it in his pocket. "They were just a few weeks ago. We live in the total ass end of nowhere, so there shouldn't have been heavy fighting." Only in Two were government forces still, if barely, keeping a lid on the rebellion. In the Capitol, of course, it was even worse, but Stephen had nothing but adoration for those who dared protest openly in the Capitol. From what defectors said, that had always been suicide.

Sirens began to wail. Level Five alert. Stephen stood up, wondering what was going on - there had been several attempted raids but Thirteen's fighter pilots had sent them packing before they neared every time. Had a bomber raid managed to break through? "Get your soldiers," he told Ajax before hurrying over to make sure that the officers were all heading in the right direction. Topside, signs pointing to the nearest air-raid shelter were everywhere, but it was good to be cautious.

"Sir, do you know what's going on?" a guard asked.

"No," Stephen said, watching the prisoners anxiously. They had been scattered over a large area, and many could only walk very slowly. Fortunately, there were many entrances, and his charges were a disciplined lot. Stephen joined the tail end of one queue that was rapidly disappearing under the ground. Looking around, he couldn't see anyone who wasn't about to descend. Good. If this was an actual raid, there was no time to lose.

The entrance was a veritable hole, a staircase leading down. Stephen's boots clanged on the metal steps as he pressed a button that would close the hatch. Now, he could only see thanks to the dim lamps in the walls. As if by agreement, everyone had split into two queues - a fast one and a slow one. The slow one was on the inside of the spiral staircase, many of them clutching at the railing. Stephen joined it. Once the able-bodied had all disappeared into the darkness, the queue split again.

"I'm sorry," the person in front of Stephen said. They had two prosthetic legs, the real ones having been blown off above the knee. "I shouldn't have gone out. I still can't walk properly."

"Don't worry," Stephen said consolingly. "You have the right to enjoy some sunshine."

After what felt like an eternity to the anxious Stephen, he was finally at the bottom of the staircase. They were in the shelter for whoever had been topside, which also took some overflow from the closest sections. Stephen absently wondered how his family was doing as he waited to scan his arm. Some of the others struggled with it, but the guards helped them out.

In the shelter, Stephen was greeted with a mass of people either sitting on bunks and waiting to be told what to do or still trying to find one. They were certainly more disciplined than defectors were, but that did not mean they were used to Thirteen discipline. Some had clearly been unsettled by the sirens, or worse. Others calmly found a place and sat down silently.

They were in a massive reinforced cave, illuminated by the same lights as the rest of Thirteen. Four-tiered bunks were lined up in a way that left clear corridors. Stephen was not surprised to see that bottom bunks had been left free for the physically disabled, the last of whom were taking their places now. Guards had places at regular intervals - they would not enjoy sleeping next to their enemies, but it was that or the floor. The nearest storage room, labelled 'A', already had someone standing at the counter. A guard gave Stephen a thumbs-up and closed the door. Several people jumped at the loud sound.

Stephen walked up to the internal comm and turned it on. "This was an orderly and disciplined descent," he said. "I am very pleased. All of your bunks are labelled with a letter and number. The letters correspond to the storage room where you will get supplies. On my command, form orderly queues to get your supplies. If you are in need of medical help, make your way to the medical bay. Further instructions forthcoming. Dismissed."

In his own bag, Stephen was confronted with a set of generic supplies. That was a disadvantage of having been topside when the sirens had sounded. Farther away from Thirteen proper, there were thousands of farmers sheltering many kilometres away from anyone else, but farmers didn't wear anything but the generic jumpsuit. Stephen stowed his bag under his bunk - he had a bottom bunk, with three of his most senior officers above him - firmly telling himself that it was not his shoulderboards and decorations that gave him authority.

The faint sirens suddenly stopped, and Coin's voice came on. She thanked everyone for evacuating promptly and announced this was not a drill, fighter crews were fighting and dying at that very moment, and they had been forewarned before the early-warning systems could even catch the incoming bombers by, of all possible people, Peeta Mellark.

"What?" the second lieutenant above Stephen hissed. "How did that happen?"

"I don't know," Stephen said. He had seen Mellark give that horrible forced confession a while back - with how badly pressured he doubtless was, it would have been suicidal to deviate from the script.

At that moment, the first bomb fell, and the lights went out. Some people screamed, and it was impossible to tell what age they were. A dim light came on, illuminating the shelter in an uneven glow.

A bunker bomb. Had the evacuation not been carried out so quickly, tens of thousands would have died in just that one blast. Stephen thought about the people still locked up in the torture cells of floor 40. Hopefully, they were deep enough to be safe.

Coin announced that the bomb had not been nuclear. Stephen stopped himself from sighing with relief and wondered what he was supposed to do now. He had his notepad in his pocket, so he could continue his interrogations, but there would be no privacy here. Perhaps he could hold group interrogations. His charges didn't shy back from confessing to war crimes - they were utterly convinced that they had been in the right.

As Stephen discussed with his fellow interrogators, someone came over with the video of Mellark's warning - with how badly the government forces were being beaten all over the country, Coin had unbanned devices that could access the Web, as they didn't have to fear hacking anymore. The recording must have been subtitled for foreign viewers. The names, 'Caesar Flickerman - Propagandist' and 'Peter "Peeta" Mellark - "Hunger Games" survivor, 18 years old' were certainly not how official TV did things.

It was a horrifying watch. Stephen could guess at what had been done to the boy to force him to talk, and it was disgusting to see Flickerman talking to him as if nothing at all was amiss.

"I thought the propagandists can't shock me anymore," a fellow lieutenant said hollowly, "but this just smashed through rock-bottom."

"I'd strangle that coiffed bastard myself," a reservist whose rank Stephen didn't know hissed.

"I don't need to see this," Stephen said, standing up and taking out his notebook. "Don't further the poor boy's humiliation by watching this." The others had said what Stephen thought - Flickerman's behaviour was so loathsome as to be unimaginable. To sit a bare metre away from a eighteen-year-old boy shaking with pain and terror and have the utter temerity to chide him for something? Stephen wanted to throw up. He wanted to burn the Capitol to the ground.

Stephen made his way to where a group of officers were playing cards on the floor. On one of the bunks, two of the kids were lying under the blanket together. It was an adorable sight and lifted his spirits somewhat - they were curled up like pillbugs, content little smiles on their faces. Stephen walked up to the bunk, looming over them.

"Up, you two!" he said. "One person to a bunk!"

One of the kids leapt up so fast, she nearly fell off. The officers laughed. Seizing his chance, Stephen sat down on the floor next to them.

"Did any of you ever work with children?" he asked them, adopting a professional attitude. There were four of them, all middle-aged at least. Stephen didn't know their names off the top of his head, but he did know that they had worked on the Head Peacekeeper's staff in Nine.

One of them, a bald man with a pink face, nodded. "The last replacements I ever got were mostly underage. That's when I knew I had to surrender." He slapped down a card. "I've got niblings that age. Imagine if I had to command my own flesh and blood!"

"You had to surrender?" another officer, this one a paper-white woman around Stephen's age. "The child soldiers - that crossed a line, I admit. But we're soldiers. It is not in our place to question our commanders."

"Not ever?" Stephen asked in a pointed tone.

The officer looked at her cards. "What could I have done?" she asked, taking the bait. "I'd have been discharged, and rightfully - during a crisis! An officer can't abandon their nation in a time of crisis no matter how little they like the orders they receive."

"But there were still ways to express your disapproval of such a senseless order. What did your superiors say?"

Another officer took a few cards from the pile with a maimed hand. "It was a direct written order from the Head Peacekeeper himself, what could anyone have done? Orders-"

"-are orders," Stephen finished for her. "Your handbook directly prohibits you from obeying criminal orders."

"And? I'm not going to tell my commander I think their orders are criminal. It's not in my position to decide what is right and wrong."

"Even if ordered to lock children in a barn and set it on fire?"

The officer glared at Stephen. "I wasn't responsible for that."

Before Stephen could open his mouth, the fourth card player cut in. "How dare you push the blame on me?" he demanded in a raspy voice. His vocal chords had been damaged by smoke.

"You set children on fire?" a child asked from a top bunk.

Stephen told everyone to be silent. That was the problem with keeping all of the officers in the same place - with their notions of honour, it was impossible to get one of them to say a bad thing about another. Blame was universally assigned to the dead and missing - Stephen was lucky the officer with the bad voice had jumped the gun and assumed the worst.

The massacre of Plantation 45 was just one of the many war crimes Stephen and his people were supposed to be investigating. He looked around the cramped room. Several people were watching the conversation with interest. "You two," he said, pointing them out, "come with me. We'll get to the bottom of this."

A/N: I view the Dark Days as having been a Russian Civil War-esque conflict, with multiple sides, confusing fronts, foreign intervention, armored trains, mass requisitions of crops causing famine, and typhus outbreaks.

The reaction to Peeta's second interview is based on how people reacted to the 'interview' Raman Pratasevich gave under duress. Nobody believed that Pratasevich was doing this voluntarily even for a second, so in my headcanon, the response in Thirteen is pity, horror, and a desire to throttle Flickerman.

For the record, I will state that this is my first time ever writing a multi-POV story, so if the pacing wrecks your enjoyment of the story or a character doesn't show up for so long you forget who they are, I apologize in advance.