His parents hadn't been too thrilled about him leaving, but Stephen had a new job. The assault on the Capitol would be beginning soon, and he was being tapped to deal with the prisoners. He had protested that he had no idea how to work without a pre-existing infrastructure, but the ones with the stars on their shoulders had simply sent him on a brief inspection tour of POW camps all over the country. He had already been to one in Eleven, where the more or less able-bodied were working on a cotton plantation, and he was now in a large city in Seven, approaching a hospital where severely injured prisoners were being kept during their recoveries.
This would be particularly interesting, as by the time Thirteen got its hands on someone, they were already well on the process of recovery. Stephen had studied up on how it worked, but seeing it with his own eyes and talking to people would be more helpful. He had talked to the prisoners in Thirteen and returned soldiers, and according to them, there was nothing to complain about.
The city was scarred from brief fighting, but it was more like pockmarks instead of gaping wounds. It had been abandoned quite quickly by the government forces due to its relative strategic uselessness. Seven's capital city was a burning husk, but in this town, life was quite normal, if cold. Why was it so cold so early in the fall?
"Is this sort of weather customary?" Stephen asked a fellow lieutenant who was supposed to be showing him around. At a store nearby, people were queueing with ration cards in their hands. If not for that, the street would have looked like something out of the books Stephen had read - and if not for the AA guns that still stood by, even though the thought of the government risking its few precious hovercraft was laughable.
The lieutenant nodded. "Bit chilly, but it'll probably jump back up for a week or so." Her voice was mushy - most likely, the result of the heavy scarring on the lower part of her face.
"The city, at least, looks quite good." No mass hunger or homelessness. It felt strange to be walking above-ground and seeing with his own eyes what he had only ever seen in newspapers and books. "How is the foreign aid coming in?" Countries were loading up ships with supplies and sending them to the West Coast. The Coast Guard was being stripped bare, which meant ships could go to Seven directly without needing to go through its neighbours to the north.
"It's a literal lifesaver," the lieutenant said. "People are eating better than they ever did before."
Typical. "That is good to hear, with the damage to infrastructure we're still incurring."
"And tell Thirteen we're doing fine about them. Soldiers should be on the front."
Coin wouldn't like the former statement, but she'd be the first to agree to the latter one. "I'll tell them how it is."
Soon, they arrived at the clinic, a sprawling multi-storey building. "This used to be the only hospital in the city," the lieutenant explained, "but we've managed to get more up and running, and this a rehabilitation centre of sorts now. I believe this is the purpose of your visit?"
Stephen nodded. "I am here on an inspection and intelligence-gathering mission of sorts, to see how you deal with the severely injured prisoners you've taken."
The lieutenant grimaced, touching her face with her hand. "If they're in here, there's no risk to life. Unless they kill themselves, of course. Not like many try. They seem to be delighted at the treatment they're receiving."
"It's the same in Thirteen. Not only are they glad to be treated well, but they're shocked at how much they'll be able to do despite their disabilities."
"Of course they are," the lieutenant said in a stiff voice. "Before, if you were in a wheelchair, you couldn't go anywhere. Unless you were important, in which case your building would be made accessible overnight."
That was not news to Stephen. "Terrible," he agreed.
Before he could go inspect the clinic, there was an interview he had to take. He had been promised that three people would testify about the biggest mass shooting in the District - a perpetrator, a witness, and a victim. What he had not been told, however, was that all three were twelve years old.
One of them saluted, even though they had another one on their back. They must have been the child soldier. The third was standing to the side. They waved awkwardly. "Hi," they said in a rural Seven accent.
"Hello," Stephen said, hiding his shock and taking out his notebook. He had not planned for this. Since a twelve-year-old could not be held accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity, the approach was completely different. "Are you all going to be interviewed together?"
"Yeah!" the one sitting on their friend's back piped up. They clambered down awkwardly, and Stephen noticed that their right arm was stiff and didn't move. "Why not?" They also had a Seven accent, though they were probably native to the city.
Stephen thought about it. If they were friends, that meant that it was likely that they had already influenced each other's memories by talking about it - he couldn't imagine them willing to be friends without that being a point of serious discussion at some point. If they started talking over one another, he'd cut it short. "Let's start with the basics. Name, age, gender, place and date of birth - your number for you, soldier." They complied, adding in more detail than he had asked for. The soldier was Azur, the survivor with the bad arm was Curt, and the witness was Ivy. All had been born in the same year; Ivy was still a few weeks away from turning twelve.
Soon enough, the picture was clear. Task forces had conducted a sweep of the city and its surroundings, snatching people up almost at random. Azur, a recent conscript, had been attached to one of these forces. Ivy was taken along to bury the bodies. Azur was able to confidently give ranks and descriptions, as was Ivy. Curt, however, did not remember the sweep and had only vague memories of the shooting.
"We were lined up against the pit," he said, all traces of playfulness gone, eyes staring at nothing. "All of a sudden, the machine-guns were firing away. I felt something hit me and fell down." He rubbed at his injured shoulder. "I thought I was dead, but I wasn't. Then, there was more shooting, and bodies fell on top of me. Then, dirt fell on top, but there wasn't much. I could breathe and everything."
"I only put on a little, on purpose," Ivy chimed in. "Maybe the others did the same thing."
Stephen would need to put out the call to find these 'others'.
"Then," Curt continued, "I passed out. Then I woke up and crawled out. My arm really hurt. I saw some others also climbing out, but I didn't talk to them. I walked around the forest for a few days, but then I got sick from drinking dirty water, so I went back. They were all gone by then. The Peacekeepers, I mean."
"Except for me," Azur muttered sadly. "I stepped on a mine." She lifted up her trouser leg to show that her leg was metal. "But at least I have a new leg now. Back home, there was someone whose kid was born with no legs, but she couldn't afford to buy any."
"Why would a baby even need legs?" Ivy wondered. "It'd be easier if they couldn't crawl so fast. My little cousins disappear in an instant."
Azur shook her head. "He just crawled around on his arms. Even when he got big. Maybe when the Rebellion wins, he'll get cool metal legs like me."
"I certainly hope so." Stephen wondered what was going on in those brains of theirs. It was odd how children reacted to traumatic events. Some of them had so normalized what had happened to them, they showed no signs of trauma. Others were left obviously scarred in horrific ways. But it wasn't his job to deal with that, not with these three. If their outward playfulness was a front or a temporary phase was not his business. Stephen finished up the interviews and moved on to his next role.
He stood in front of a door that had the label 'An Arm and a Leg Society' tacked up next to it. It opened. A small group of people looked up from where they had been playing cards. All of them had severe physical disabilities, mostly missing limbs - and many missing limbs at that. The paper hanging by the door had been accurate in that regard.
"Hey," one person said, a man of around forty in an eyepatch. He was lying on a cot, legs stretched out in front of him. Both his feet were missing, and he struggled to hold his cards with multiple missing fingers. "I'd stand up and salute, but best to accept that my soldiering days are behind me."
"Are you the inspector?" another man asked, this one with both legs and one arm missing at the knees and shoulder. His face was completely untouched.
"Yes," Stephen said.
"Take a seat, then," he said, gesturing with his cards to an empty cot. "Most everyone's out doing this or that, but they kept us here to talk to you." He put down his cards, picked out one, and slapped it on a low table. "Welcome to the two-plus amputee ward. They keep us separate so that nobody goes around thinking they have no right to be sad because we're worse off than them."
Everyone glanced to another person, a woman that had no limbs at all. She had tiny stumps instead of legs and a slightly longer stump where her left arm had been. "Yeah," she said. "Everyone always thinks about how others are worse off than them. Whenever I'm sad I can't wipe my ass, I think to myself that at least I don't have your face."
They laughed at that, except the target of the barb, who folded his arm across his chest and turned away, chin in the air. "My girl doesn't think so," he said stubbornly.
"Your girl doesn't have eyes," another person, a woman missing her left leg and arm and the left side of her face, said with a barely stifled laugh.
"Yeah, well, she can feel my face!"
"What else does she feel?" the woman with no limbs asked, wagging her eyebrows. "Oh, don't tell me. It's nothing."
The man now turned bright-red, an odd thing for someone with such dark skin. "As if anyone except us and the orderlies have seen any of you," he muttered. "He doesn't even have a tongue!"
The woman wagged her eyebrows again. "He has fingers."
"Am I supposed to interpret your chattiness as a sign that your recoveries are going well?" Stephen interjected before they could break into a full-out gossip-fest. "Could you please introduce yourselves, since you're not sitting on your own cots?"
The six of them, three men and three women, introduced themselves. Stephen had visited the rehab hospital in Thirteen a few times to take down testimony, but he had never seen such a gathering before. It was odd, how little of a human was needed for them to be themselves. Jenny, the woman with no limbs who seemed to go by 'Stump', was just as whole as Stephen himself when it came to the mind. Other people seemed intact on the surface but were empty inside, either from a blow to the head or mental trauma. Strange, how that worked.
"Please describe how you got injured and your recovery process, specifically - the conditions you were kept in." Stephen had a suspicion that only the most cheerful had been allowed to talk to him, but there was a difference between optimism and flat-out lying.
Cards long ago forgotten, the six described their injuries. Only one - Jet, the man with no feet and no right thumb - had actually been a Peacekeeper before. Two had volunteered just months ago, the other three had been conscripts. Some had stepped on landmines, others had been the victims of grenade explosions and falling rubble. Stephen's suspicions were shortly confirmed - the mere fact that they had survived such extreme blood loss said a lot, given the conditions in the battle zones, and they weren't inclined to eye critically anyone who was offering them shiny new limbs.
Jenny went last. "My unit was ordered to take a group of striking loggers into the forest and shoot them. They pulled a fast one on us." She scratched her face with her shoulder. "All of a sudden, they ran for the trees. We opened fire, of course. Then, one shouted - 'if we burn, you burn with us!' Then, the world exploded. Next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground, surrounded by bits of flesh, and someone was robbing me of my body armour."
"Ah, yes, the ancient days when we had body armour," Jet snarked.
"In any case, there was a headless torso just centimetres from my face. I still had my arms then, but the next thing I remember is not having them anymore. My left arm was too wrecked by flying debris and I got gas gangrene in my right." She shrugged. "I don't know how I didn't bleed to death. My legs were literally shredded into pieces."
She hadn't lost them then, of course. When both their legs were blown off at their thighs, people died before anyone could even reach them.
"You should go to the ward across the corridor," Moira offered. She was lying against the wall, arms with no hands behind her head. Scars went up her neck and across her cheek and mouth, with a mass of scar tissue where her right ear had been. One of her legs was missing, and Stephen could see a compression stocking on the stump. The other foot was clad in a bright-yellow sock with 'MEDIUM' written on it in white rubber. Absently, Stephen wondered if people with one foot needed to buy half the socks. "That's where the kids who are like us are. War orphans and baby Peacekeepers."
"There's even a baby Stump," Xavon, the man with the eyepatch, said with a sad smile.
"She and her boy are going to get married and adopt him," Moira said in a stage whisper. "They'll be the cutest family ever."
Xavon nearly choked. "I don't think that's most people's definition of cute."
"Who cares?" the last man, Arif, said. He had no legs whatsoever and, like Xavon, he had five fingers in total, none of them thumbs. "I think it's cute."
"Arif, you want to puke at the thought of someone touching your nonexistent dick," Jenny deadpanned. "I don't think you're the expert in relationships."
Arif rolled his eyes. "I still like people. Just not in that way. And stop cracking jokes like that, you'll confuse our distinguished guest." Turning to Stephen he explained, "I'm probably the only person ever who didn't flip out at losing their fun bits. Psychologist says I'm sex-repulsed. Makes sense." He shrugged. "And I have to sit down to pee in any case now."
"It's funny," Paula, the last of the little group and the quietest so far, said. "You lose your dick, and Alex is growing one. Maybe Alex is growing your dick?"
Everyone who had hands clapped them to their faces. Those that didn't were clearly facepalming with phantom limbs, going by their facial expressions and upper body twitches.
"In any case," Stephen said, "what kind of treatment are you currently receiving?"
Jenny shrugged. "Mostly just teaching us how to do stuff without limbs. There's an occupational therapist for legs instead of arms and one for arms instead of legs, plus another one for using your mouth for stuff." They giggled like twelve-year-olds. "Most of the three-limbed ones have already been released into normal POW camps, but we're not going to be cleaning rubble any time soon."
"Can you imagine us back at the quarry?" Arif wondered. "Now that would be something."
Moira lightly kicked him with her foot. "I don't think I can swing a pick. Or even falsify quotas." They laughed again.
"No, but really," Jenny said earnestly. "They've unleashed these crazy psychologists who have gotten us almost believing we'll be able to do something productive with our lives. I mean, it's obvious I'll never wipe my ass or scratch my back again, but just knowing I'll be able to work? That's insane. If I had gotten like this after an accident in the quarry and somehow survived, I'd just have sat in an armchair until I died. And that's because my family would have been able to afford to feed me." She shuffled a little bit forward. "Is it true that everyone works in Thirteen?"
Stephen nodded. "Anyone can be found an important and meaningful position."
He thought of the one-handed piano player in Thirteen. She had given a concert a week or so ago, playing a variety of pieces written for just the left hand. Many had teared up watching it. Stephen was no expert in music, but he had been to a few concerts, and he could tell that the colonel's playing was just different in some way he could not define.
"Well, I can do more than that," Arif said, crossing his arms. "I can walk around when they give me legs and everything. And that one can dance." He pointed at Jet. "Though I think you were lying about dancing with your girl."
"The blind one?" Stephen asked. "Is she another patient here?"
"Yeah. Though she's not just blind - her entire face is missing. Burns."
Jenny chuckled. "I thought that she'd feel too awkward about her ugliness and go for another blind person, but then again, she has the advantage of not having to see his face." Jet sputtered and glared at her.
Further prodding only resulted in more praise for the Rebellion (specifically - the good food and quality healthcare) and confusing gossip. Stephen went on a little tour of the place, listening to everyone. Satisfied that this place could not be used in a tu quoque defense of mistreatment of POWs, he hopped on the train to the outskirts of Two, to get a taste of what it was like dealing with the immediate aftermath of battle. After that, he'd go home, and after that, it would be the Capitol and his own camp.
"What are the papers saying?" Decius asked, looking up from the stack of documents he was sorting through.
Chee looked at them over the brim of their paper. "The last Jews in Austria gave an interview."
"And?" Latreya asked, hand frozen where she had been about to pick up a paper clip.
"They mention that their favourite book is The City Without Jews."
Decius nearly choked. He had read that book on Chee's suggestion - written in 1922, the story of how all of the Jews of Austria were deported out of the country was a satirical response to the attitudes of the time. Two years later, the author was shot by a far-right extremist. He never found out how accurate he had been. And after the Cataclysm? When Decius had started reading up on the area, he had found himself surprised that ethnic cleanses still occurred in Central Europe, as given the last half-century, one could have thought the countries should have been completely homogenous by now. "Do they say why?"
"They just think it's funny."
At that moment, Tom Lamont walked into the office. Noticing the newspaper, he proceeded to berate them for caring so much about other countries when they were fighting for their own nation's liberation.
"But it's for research!" Chee protested. "What if someone mentions something useful?"
Lamont huffed and walked over to the stack of sorted documents. Seeing its size made him calm down. "I don't understand," he grumbled, "how you are so productive and so lazy at the same time."
"Efficiency," Latreya absently said as she paper-clipped a piece of blue paper to a folder. "How's the war going?"
Lamont picked up the stack of folders and put them in a box. "Well enough. We won in Two, they're just mopping up now. Final assault's beginning in days."
"Final?" Decius asked. "Given the size of the Capitol, getting over the mountains is going to be just the first part of it all." The rather insensitive comparison was being made to writing a long essay - getting to the end eventually was guaranteed, the question was how much suffering it would involve.
Latreya set aside the folder. "Do you think they're really going to booby-trap the entire place? Even Snow has to understand how many civilians will be caught in the cross-fire."
"You think Snow cares about civilians?" Lamont's words were harsh and dismissive. "We're at a disadvantage here. Instead of bombing the place to smithereens like a normal army, we're going to tiptoe in and ask them politely to go away."
"They're bombing the city already," Latreya pointed out.
Lamont snorted. "With our advantage in firepower, we could flatten the damn place instead of dropping one little bomb here, one little bomb there. I honestly don't understand Coin. Do the nukes even work? I doubt it."
He had just hit on the real issue. Normal armies didn't have nukes. After the Cataclysm, everywhere else nations had either rejected atomic weapons or had been pressured into doing so. Only the hyper-isolationist Panem could afford to spit on the rest of the world and not suffer.
Decius remembered being under the bombs in Eight. Ratko was still re-learning how to walk with his new legs. After interacting with defectors other than Decius, he was now a fierce proponent of putting everyone who had been involved with the government on trial, because he feared that mob justice had resulted in the deaths of spies and people who had done everything they could to block bad laws from being implemented.
Did he want the Capitol to go through what he had endured? For the three historians, the answer was a firm 'no'. The common adage that there was no such thing as a civilian in wartime made Decius gnash his teeth in fury. He had seen children die already. No more. Some people, though, did not understand the difference between vengeance and sinking to their oppressors' level. More and more, Decius heard calls for the murder of everyone from the Capitol (they had shut up rather quickly after Decius had volunteered to go first), or even for that insane proposal, a final Hunger Games with the children of the Capitol.
What Decius hoped for was a straightforward revolution. Rebels turn up, toss the old government on its ass, and take over. Simple as that. By now, Decius couldn't even look at those photos of smiling soldiers in tanks waving flags. They made him too anxious.
But this couldn't be a straightforward revolution. Decius categorized the list of murdered hostages appropriately and set it aside. Some of the perpetrators were already in Thirteen, and still Mary Irons' Office for the Prosecution of War Crimes was dragging its feet, unwilling to start before hostilities ceased. In the Districts, chaos had quickly been replaced with law and order, thanks to foreign food shipments preventing panic. There, the wheels of justice were already turning.
"The court is adjourned until 7:00 tomorrow," Dora said, banging her gavel. With an astonishing rapidity, everyone disappeared out of the courtroom. The small audience trickled away, the defendants were led out by MPs, the prosecutor and the defense lawyer high-fived before leaving together - there was nobody to replace them and they were performing to the highest standards of professionalism - and the jury filed out.
Dora had insisted on trials by jury after finding out about the existence of the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, which had been technically valid this entire time. So far, she wasn't disappointed. People were leaping at the chance to sit in a courtroom for the same pay as hauling rubble, and by doing so, those of them who had been far from the levers of power learned about the dilemma many had been stuck in. Most people in her circle were unhappy at giving ordinary people such power, but had Dora tried to say such a thing, Jack would have set her straight.
With a sigh, Dora also got out of her chair and stretched. This was a rather complicated case - the officials from the Ministry of Resources were claiming as one that they had blocked onerous quota increases, but the quotas had still ended up being onerously high. They were stuck in that classical loop - why didn't you do anything to soften the decrees? I couldn't, it was all decided in the Capitol. So why didn't you quit? I wanted to soften the decrees. Every time the prosecutor called them out on it, Dora felt as if he was calling out her personally. A group of Thirteen legal advisors had arrived to sift through the judiciary, and Dora still couldn't believe that she was being considered to have been a very good judge simply because she had followed the Criminal Code.
Around and around the defendants went, each one more terrified than the previous. Citing the amount of executions for having failed to fulfill quotas several times in a row, the prosecution had demanded death for all five of them. The defense were calling for acquittal for two, short prison stints for two more, and fifteen years for the last.
Unlike courts-martial of Peacekeepers, which usually lasted from half a day to a week, the civil cases usually started at a week. That was due to the tendency of the IDC to push for group trials. The paper-pushers up there were under the delusion that that would be faster. Instead, it provided a lifeline to the relatively less guilty and doomed the more guilty, because the jury or judge ended up ranking the defendants and imposing punishments accordingly.
It was rather chilly outside. Fall was here. Dora put on her gloves and raised the collar of her coat against the piercing wind, wondering how the soldiers in the Capitol were faring. It wouldn't be able to hold out for long - had the military leadership willed it, it could have simply been starved out. Outside of it, the Peacekeepers had long since put down their guns. There would have been no second and third and fourth front, like during the Dark Days. Just a siege ring tightening and tightening.
However, the Capitol was being assaulted instead. The newspapers and radio claimed that the outlying villages and towns were either rushing to surrender or holding out to the last breath. A day didn't pass without the capture of some officer guilty of a major massacre or infamous for their cruelty. Dora bought a newspaper from a kiosk. They still focused on fear, hate, naked rear ends, and the weather forecast, but at least they weren't full of propaganda.
As Dora walked down the streets, she remarked, not for the first or hundredth time, how lucky they were to have the world on their side. The fighting for Ten had been harsh. The outlying villages and ranches had been subject to what Dora now knew was the usual tidal wave of task forces and reprisals, but Centre was very close to Two, and the Peacekeepers hadn't been interested in leaving it so easily. Fortunately, the countryside had turned out to be impossible to hold, and it was just weeks later that the last Peacekeepers had either surrendered or crossed the Wilds into Two.
The joke went that the only victim in Centre was the statue of John McCollum, who had ruled for nearly sixty years before picking Snow to inherit and dying of extreme old age only to have statues of him put up in every single village - and knocked down when the uprisings began. Of course, reality was nowhere near as amusing. Poorly aimed artillery had hit everything from empty lots to hospitals to inhabited apartment buildings, forcing Dora to practically live in the basement. In a twist of irony, the nicest neighbourhoods had borne the brunt of the fighting, doubtless to the delight of the workers.
Dora's house, fortunately, had been mostly untouched, aside from bullet holes smashing all of the windows. She recognized it from afar by the solar panels on the roof. Also on the roof was Jack. One day, her silly husband would fall down and break his neck.
When he saw her coming, he gingerly made his way down the ladder, mindful of his bad back. "I picked up the rations," he said.
"Great." She gave him a quick peck on the cheek.
Inside the house, it was almost too dark to see. It wasn't quite dark enough to use their own precious electricity, and their neighbourhood got theirs turned on around this time. By feel, Dora took off her shoes and opened the cupboard. Her hands traced the letters scraped into the inside of the door - 'D+J'. Jack had done it decades ago.
Dora hung up her coat and went to her office to deposit her briefcase. An alarm clock rang. Jack immediately darted to the kitchen to start cooking dinner. "I got some black-market meat today," he said cheerfully. "I'll bake some bread, we'll have wraps."
In the kitchen, Dora saw a mortar and pestle with traces of flour on it. "They gave us corn again?" she complained.
"Yeah." Jack tossed several chicken limbs and what looked like a mishmash of random chicken organs into a pot of water. "It's not too bad. If the people who took out tesserae could do it, so can I."
"Why do we have to live like people who took out tesserae?" Dora asked pointedly. Jack had arthritis, he couldn't spend hours at the pestle.
"It's only temporary."
"By then, you'll have no hands."
Jack rolled his eyes and busied himself making dough. It would be rather cheap dough - no yeast, no baking soda, not even any salt. The sort of tasteless flat bread she associated firmly with poor people. "I heard that it'll be bread tomorrow."
The IDC couldn't decide what should be given as rations - grain, flour, or already-baked bread. The actual caloric count was satisfactory, at least. Dora could have done to lose some weight in any case, and Jack was the sort of person about whom her uncle would have said - 'nourished by the Holy Spirit'. Sometimes, Dora thought that her husband didn't need to eat at all.
"I heard the war will end tomorrow."
Jack smiled at her, lighting up the kitchen. The chaos in the little room had been better off in the darkness. "Maybe if Snow offs himself," he suggested.
"He's going to fight to the last second."
"Maybe one of his aides will off him," Jack stubbornly continued as he kneaded the sticky dough.
A coup would have been nice. So many lives would be saved if the government didn't fight to the end. "Maybe. Did you hear anything interesting in the queue?"
Jack nodded. "They're circulating a list of war criminals and telling them to surrender or it'll be worse." He added some flour and continued kneading. "Nobody has."
"Only the innocent are surrendering," Dora said. She had pieced that much together from news reports. "When villages surrender, those that have something to fear flee deeper into the Capitol. I heard that people are deliberately sneaking out to give themselves up, for fear of what might happen to them at the hands of less friendly soldiers." During the fighting in Centre, quite a few soldiers had taken the chance to get their hands on something nice from the rich houses. From the Capitol, all sorts of luxuries were already arriving by mail.
"It's a shame they're so undisciplined," Jack sighed, clearly recalling how they had nearly been robbed by their own side. Fortunately, just their presence had been enough to make the would-be thieves reluctant to take anything. "But that's what you get for sending sixteen-year-olds into combat." Dora knew that officially, only those nineteen and up could be sent to the front, but she had heard that even sixteen-year-olds could quite openly join now, or even younger children. "Faina's girl was sent home today. Arm gone above the elbow." He gestured at his own arm with a dough-covered hand, showing where the limb had been cut off or simply blown off.
Faina's girl, the daughter of one of Dora's acquaintances, had turned fifteen just months ago. "And?" Something in Jack's intonation made her suspect there was more to the story.
Jack tore off a piece of dough and began to roll it out. "Brought back an entire suitcase of things. Lightbulbs, watches, phones, clothing, candy. I saw her at the community centre. She was wearing a Capitol top that covered up as much as a bra and was showing off her scars for the boys."
"I'm sure it's not her candy they were interested in," Dora predicted darkly. Jack rolled his eyes. "Did you talk to her?"
"No," he said in an incredulous tone. "Why would I? Even if I had tried, I doubt she'd have been willing to talk to me when there was a gaggle of boys who were more interested - and not in talking." He began to roll out the dough, tearing off pieces and going over them with a rolling pin until they became quite flat.
"That's kids for you," Dora said, remembering when their own had been that age.
Jack placed the circle onto a flat metal tray and put it in the oven. "How was the trial?"
"Nothing you'd be interested in. One's already got the noose on their head, and another one's not too far off it."
"Good thing you've got the jury to decide for you."
Dora smiled. "I guess so."
"How are preparations going?" Coin asked. She and Mary were sitting in Command. "Have you come up with a structure for trying the Peacekeepers?"
Mary nodded. Coin thought that the 'other' trials were just a side-show to her quick and dirty trials of Snow and the Gamemakers, but she still showed plenty of interest in Mary's plans. Mary still had no idea why she had gotten the job, but she wasn't going to slack off even by a hair. "We have. First off, any who only committed crimes in one District will be sent there for trial. Thus, only a relatively small group will have to be dealt with by us. Of those, we are currently putting together a cross-section of all but the highest ranks to get a representative sample." Of course, the overwhelming majority of the regime's soldiers would live happily ever after. Mary's goal was to make sure there were as little war criminals in that category as possible.
"And what is your plan for the highest ranks?"
At the beginning, Dr. Nurbeko and Dr. Lee had practically thrown books at her in their desperation to have her hear them out. Mary herself had come up with a similar idea independently, but it was nice to have confirmation that it had worked before - up to a point. "They will be tried with the leaders of other fields. Ministers, Snow's closest advisors, the like."
"Group trials all the way, then?" Coin's calm expression gave away nothing.
"Yes," Mary said. "For the main criminals - yes. Those not as major can be dealt with later. In the same way that we are already investigating people who want to assume positions of responsibility in the Districts, we will investigate everyone in the Capitol who wants to work in government, the armed forces, or the higher ranks of business. The team has also drawn up lists of people heavily implicated with the regime's crimes who will be arrested as soon as possible."
Coin jotted something down on a notepad. "Will it be feasible to investigate so many people?"
The answer to that, according to the old books, was 'let's hope that not having a language barrier will make it easier'. "Nobody who does not deserve to live will do so," she replied diplomatically.
"You would let the average Capitolite get away with their crimes?" Coin asked, catching on to the real meaning of her statement.
Mary shook her head. "They committed no crimes," she said. "Absolutely nothing separates them from people in One, Two, and Four but the fact they were a hair better off in some facets of their life." And even there, the level of corruption in every single structure had meant that people still had to pay for things as elementary as proper prosthetic limbs.
"Do you really think the Districts will be fine with having the crowds who once cheered the Games go on as if nothing happened?"
According to the books about revolutions Mary had read, the answer was 'yes'. "There, I fear, it will be impossible to sort through so many people - how would you determine who did and did not cheer for the Games?"
"The Capitolites need to learn what they put the Districts through."
"What Capitolites? Our spies? The anonymous leafleters covered in scars from NCIA tortures? Either way, we will need to sort the wheat from the chaff." A distasteful analogy, but it worked.
Coin did not look impressed. "What sort of a lesson would it send, to allow the little criminals to escape?"
That nonsense again. "Civil wars end in purges of those in a position of authority," Mary warned. "Not more massacres. If they do, then they do not end. We will focus on the authorities, and go after progressively lower-ranking people once we have the resources. If all these little Snow supporters start to support democracy - great. We'll let them keep their jobs. We will be building a state here, we cannot be motivated solely by revenge or we will never build a stable country."
Coin saw through her dissembling again. "My proposal-"
"I will never sanction that and neither would the general public," Mary said point-blank. She didn't care that it was improper to talk back like that. "The Inter-District Committee performed surveys. The Districts want the responsible to pay. Not the death of innocents and adolescent Rebels."
Coin looked like she wanted to argue but there was nothing she could do about surveys. While they were under military law, they still had elections, and three years ago, Coin had won thirty-five percent of the votes in the first round and seventy-five - in the second. While Mary did suspect the president to be more fond of power than she would have liked, public opinion was one thing Coin would never ignore. "What if we held a symbolic Hunger Games with convicted war criminals?"
"Over my dead body. I will not let justice be marred with the greatest form of injustice the world has seen since the Cataclysm." If Coin was going to go there, Mary presumed that politeness had gone out the window. Why was she so attached to that crazy idea?
Coin's face showed nothing. "How many trials do you have so far and how will they be run?"
On firmer ground now, Mary took a brief pause to calm down her racing heart and began. "So far, we have lists of alleged criminals in various categories. Some preliminary selecting is already happening, but only of those who are already in our custody. We have eleven trials we are gathering materials for. We have also contacted several judges from the Districts who will be a good fit for the trial of the key criminals."
"Key criminals?"
It had taken far too long to come up with an appropriate name. "The main criminals against humanity, the leaders of their fields. They will be tried by thirteen judges, one from each District. Other trials will be run by a smaller panel of inter-District judges - perhaps three or four."
"Forgive me for the doubtlessly simplistic question, but why thirteen judges? Isn't one enough to pronounce sentence?"
Somewhere in the distance, the legal historians just felt a sudden burst of panic and didn't know why. "Because it will be a powerful symbolic statement," Mary said. "The Districts, united as never before, sitting in judgement of their oppressors." A lot of time had been spent on whether it would be appropriate to try Peacekeepers from Two together with their Capitol counterparts. Putting together the oppressors and the collaborators who had nevertheless been oppressed themselves left an unpleasant taste in Mary's mouth. Fortunately, Two had weighed in and said point-blank that war criminal Peacekeepers were traitors to everything Two stood for and did not deserve any clemency or sympathy.
Coin nodded, hint of a smile playing over her face. "Who is being considered for the position of judge from Thirteen?"
"Raymond Sanchez, the defector of six years."
"Why not someone from Thirteen?" Coin shot back.
"Because Thirteen is the only place where a foreigner is one of us," Mary parried with equal rapidity. "Sanchez was forced to flee after finding three Rebels not guilty even though he had been directly ordered to have them shot. He is a respected professor and his judgements are beyond reproach. It will be a powerful reminder to the Capitol that this is what they could have done, instead of keeping their heads down." He was her colleague at the law school and the two got along well.
Coin seemed slightly disappointed as she nodded. "About that Peacekeepers' trial - how many defendants are you planning to have?"
"Between forty and fifty." Mary let her irritation at the thought show on her face. "I've been talking to some IDC people, and nobody can think of a better way to hold such a group trial."
"That should be satisfactory. And what about lower-ranking Capitol corrupt officials?"
"Same as in the rest of the country - ordinary corruption, bribery, protection rackets and the like will be dealt with by Depuration courts and eventually rolled into the regular justice system, which will also be purged that way." Fortunately, most judges were perfectly competent as soon as the telephone was removed and unjust laws repealed (Mary and many others were using the abolition of corporal punishment in the big country to demand the same in Thirteen, and it would happen at any moment now), but anyone who had risen too high had made themselves complicit and ended up fired.
"You would let the Capitol judge the Capitol?"
Talking to Coin was still easier than to the generals who couldn't get it into their skulls that nobody was going to try soldiers for momentary lapses of judgement and bad decisions under fire, only for deliberate and planned crimes. There was a difference between giving no quarter in a particularly difficult situation and taking prisoners only to systematically massacre them, just as there was a difference between carefully managed transitional justice and letting everyone go. "We have decided to have Sanchez sit in an inter-District tribunal. By what right would we bar other defectors, our spies, independent Rebels, and mute opponents from doing likewise? This will be a didactic proceeding twice over, teaching people not only what happened in their country over the past seventy-five years, but also that even among the most privileged sections of the population, there were people who realized that they would be much better off under a democracy. If anything, this will defuse intranational tensions and make blanket condemnations of the Capitol impossible."
"I see the wisdom in that," Coin said.
"How is the situation on the front?" Mary asked after a pause. "I know Katniss Everdeen and her squad have gone missing, but that's hardly relevant to the war effort." The poor girl hadn't even turned nineteen.
Coin nodded. "Between you and me - everything is going not too far off the plan, strange as that is to say about a military campaign. We are on pace to hold the entire Capitol before the year ends."
That was shockingly soon, by civil war standards. The televisions showed confusing images of different parts of the Capitol taken by drone and by soldiers with cameras, the traditional chroniclers of wars.
"Now," Coin said, looking at the clock, "I believe it is time for us to wrap up. Is there anything else you would like to say to me?"
"No."
"Very well, then." They shook hands and Mary departed the room, still unsure of what to think about Coin. It should not have been so hard - Coin had been in power for fifteen years, a not insignificant portion of Mary's life. Still, a peacetime president, even in a cold war sort of peace, was very different from a wartime one, especially when they were one of the sides in a civil war.
Once Mary had become a professor, she had moved to the university quarter, just half an hour's walk from Command. Visiting her siblings, however, meant several hours on foot and by elevators. Mary checked her wrist. She would be home for Reflection. After that, dinner, followed by work and then free time. Hopefully, Rithvik hadn't forgotten to borrow some board games from the library.
Mary scanned her hand, and her compartment door opened. It was empty, so Mary did some paperwork as she waited for her husband to arrive. Finally, he did, and just in time. Mary smiled when Rithvik walked into the room. "How were things?" she asked. Rithvik worked in the administration, making sure that Thirteen had enough of everything. His farmer relatives sometimes teased him for spending his time counting socks, but Mary understood how crucial his work was to the continued existence of Thirteen.
Rithvik shrugged. At fifty, he was the same age as her, but his hair was still completely black, which struck Mary as ridiculously unfair. "You know me," he said playfully, taking off his shoes and walking across the compartment to kiss her on the cheek. "Not a sock will go missing while I'm here."
"That reminds me, we need to pick up clothes for the week."
Rithvik sat down on their bed and took out a small chess set labelled 'LIBRARY' out of his pocket. "Shame to cut into our alone time," he said.
Mary put her papers into her folder. "Rithvik, we live alone," she reminded him. They had once wanted children, but they had married quite late and after just a few years of trying, the pox had left them both infertile. After a few years of being on the waitlist for adoption, they had taken themselves off it. "All time is alone time."
"I guess," Rithvik said, lying down on the bed. "How was Coin?"
"I don't know." Mary lay down and put an arm over Rithvik's chest. It was so nice to just lie there next to him. Mary felt all of her troubles fading into the background as she listened to his breathing, felt the warmth of his body. "I think she'll defer to the experts to do their jobs."
"You think?" Rithvik was far too junior to deal with Coin, so he only knew her from when she made announcements on the CCTV.
"That's the most I can do, for now."
"I'm sure that will be alright." Rithvik turned on his side and leaned forward for a kiss.
Leon pumped water, trying to not look at the dead body hanging from a nearby building. He could barely see the figure, as all the lamps had long been broken and it was already night out, but he knew that it was there. What had the unfortunate person done? Said the wrong thing? Tried to desert? Looked wrong at a NCIA operative? Leon had no idea.
How fast things had changed. It was as if it had been an eternity ago that Everdeen blew up the arena and the electricity all flickered - the forcefield had eaten as much power as a city of half a million - only for the television to come back on, showing Swan Lake on every channel. But it had only been half a year or so. It had started out as usual, with rumours about uprisings, but never before had riots and strikes been massive enough to be shown on television. And then Thirteen came into the open - Leon would never be shocked again in his life, not after that.
The buckets were full. Leon let go of the pump handle, carefully picked up the buckets, and walked off in the direction of home over the broken street. By now, everyone was long-used to the never-ending artillery bombardments. There was one going on in the distance right now, but as long as it didn't come close, he didn't need to seek shelter. As he walked, his arms protested. Not only were the buckets heavy, but the entire family had spent fifteen hours in a munitions factory, so Leon was already exhausted. He walked past ruined buildings, bloodstains, anti-government graffiti, and homeless people with nowhere to go. People with babies in their arms begged him for help, but Leon ignored them.
It took half an hour to get home. Leon slowly walked up the stairs, cursing the government with his every breath for not surrendering. Rumour had it that the outlying towns and villages were surrounding in droves, and even the propaganda couldn't deny that Two was in Rebel hands. Rebels had apparently driven deep into the city proper somewhere else, but where that somewhere else was or if the rumour was true was a mystery to Leon. The electricity was long-gone, and so was the television - the one good thing that had resulted from the fighting.
At this point, Leon was looking forward to defeat, because that would mean peace. On the stairs leading to the third floor, a dead body was hanging from the railing. If Uncle Marius had killed himself a year ago, Leon would have assumed that constant indebtedness had driven him to suicide, but now, people were constantly killing themselves out of desperation. Leon didn't understand that. The one thing he was certain about was that he wanted to live. He walked up the stairs, hands screaming with pain, looking forward to falling into bed and sleeping for as long as he could.
Leon set down the buckets and unlocked the apartment door. It was silent in the freezing apartment - the windows had all blown out, the walls and furniture damaged. Everyone was sleeping, and a plate was waiting for him. Potatoes, a bit of vegetable mush, and a cup of weak tea - the same things as before, just less of them. He put the buckets in the kitchen and ate without undressing.
Would Snow really keep on fighting even in the Capitol proper? Leon felt sick at the thought of being cut down by a stray bullet or stepping on a pod. They were on the outskirts, so hopefully it'd all be over soon. At the onset, Leon had believed all that stuff about dangerous terrorists and had seriously planned on enlisting, but Marcellus had convinced him not to. As it was, they could be conscripted at any moment in any case, handed a gun (and if they got lucky, a helmet) and tossed into the meatgrinder. Even Mom and Dad could. Even the grandparents.
As Leon ate the last piece of potato, sirens began to wail. He tossed back the rest of the tea and ran out of the apartment, his parents and Marcellus pausing only to put on shoes and overcoats. By the time they were in the air-raid shelter (the acronym ARS on the wall was accurately deciphered as 'all Rebel supporters' or 'accept Rebel solicitations'), Leon could hear explosions right in the vicinity. Night after night, and more and more often during the day, they had to spend hours huddling underground from bombs. And at least they had warning when death came from the sky. With artillery bombardments, by the time the sirens sounded, the shells were falling on your head.
"I just want to sleep properly for once in my life!" Marcellus raged. His brother could express his fury less and less now, because the NCIA was becoming more and more unhinged with every passing day. They had always jumped when someone knocked on the door, but now, everyone introduced themselves after knocking, to reassure the person they were visiting.
Leon yawned, hoping a bomb wouldn't fall on them - or on their building. A while back, hovercraft had tried to destroy the munitions factory the family worked at and succeeded only in completely flattening Lodgepole municipality, where everyone was now homeless.
"Did you eat dinner, at least?" Dad asked worriedly.
"Yeah. Didn't have time to cover up the buckets, though."
"We're going to have to boil the water regardless," Mom said with a shrug. The water was officially supposed to be potable, but there had been incidents of people dying from drinking it.
"I guess."
An almighty crash shook the entire building to its foundations as babies wailed and Leon covered his head, as if that would do anything if the shelter collapsed around them. The booming of the bomb, the shockwave - that was one thing he just couldn't get used to. He took a book out of his pocket and settled back to read it, but he was so tired, it was hard to focus.
Leon remembered a joke Marcellus had told him last week.
Two friends meet up. One says, 'we had a really bad bombardment the other night - half an hour after the end, glass was still flying out of windows! The other says, 'that's nothing - when we were bombed, a week later, portraits of Snow were still flying out the windows!'
Their own portrait was still up, of course, just in case.
Another bomb fell. He'd be too tired to work tomorrow. The Peacekeepers would get faulty ammunition - and Leon could be executed for sabotage if he got unlucky. It was so exhausting, to be afraid all the time. Why couldn't Snow just surrender already?
A/N: 'Tu quoque' (literally, 'you too') is an informal fallacy often seen in legal proceedings dealing with war crimes and crimes against humanity, where the defendant claims that the country the judge or judges are from did the same thing as them. It's not going to be accepted by the court, but it does win them political points among their supporters.
The basic template of the fallacy is as follows:
Person A claims that statement X is true.
Person B asserts that A's actions or past claims are inconsistent with the claim of X.
Therefore, X is false.
Another common example is a person saying something like 'Politician A does take bribes, but everyone takes bribes, so it's no big deal.'
This is all from Wikipedia, by the way, which provides the example of Jacques Verges' defense of Klaus Barbie.
'The City Without Jews' is basically what I said in the chapter. I've read it, it's a great book, though it has a very harsh dark humour as a result of having aged so badly. There was actually another book written shortly afterward ('Berlin Without Jews') with a very similar premise - the author of that one killed himself several months after Hitler came to power.
The lonely Jews in Austria are a reference to the last Jew in Afghanistan, who was the only Jew in that country from 2005 to September 7, 2021, when he finally agreed to move to Israel.
The statues of John McCollum are a reference to the statues of Lenin that are omnipresent in several post-Soviet countries and were knocked down in Ukraine after the revolution in 2014.
Readers from post-Soviet countries may get the joke about Swan Lake on every channel (though there will be no Yeltsin on a tank in the story, sadly).
Leon's deciphering of the acronym is inspired by something similar that happened in 1944-5 Germany. 'LSR', or 'Luftschutzraum' (air-raid shelter), was rendered as 'Lernt schnell Russisch' (learn Russian quickly).
Wow, this is a long A/N. Do you like having them or are they too distracting?