At exactly seventeen hours, as requested, Dora walked into the small room. Inside were five people sitting in a circle, with eight extra chairs. They were drinking water from metal cups.

"You must be Rescu," one of them, a middle-aged balding man with brown skin and narrow eyes, said. He had a slight Capitol accent. "Welcome."

Dora sat down on an empty chair surrounded by two more empty chairs, trying not to show how out of place she was feeling. The vast underground structure that was Thirteen pressed down on her and made her feel like she was suffocating.

"Rescu?" someone asked. A younger woman, maybe forty or so, whose blonde hair and blue eyes gave her an exotic look, as did her near-albino skin colour. She was sitting next to the man who had just spoken and clearly admired him very much. "I read the transcripts of the trial of those Ministry of Resources people."

That trial had been the last one Dora had overseen before coming here. "What did you think?" she asked.

"It was awesome!" the young woman said enthusiastically. Taken aback, Dora couldn't think of a response. "I think it's really cool how you demanded trials by jury. I think trials by jury are really interesting. I mean, you'd think that having twelve impressionable people decide means that the better public speaker will win, right? But still, it's a constitutional right to be tried by a jury of one's peers."

As she talked, Dora's curiosity grew. "Who are you?" She didn't speak in an educated way at all and had an odd accent.

She shrugged. "They needed somebody from Twelve, and I was the best option." Ah.

"Let's discuss this once everyone gets here," the judge from the Capitol said as another person limped in, a dark man with dead eyes who sat down next to Dora and proceeded to stare off into space. His hands lay limply in his lap, but his makeup showed signs of having been applied with a badly shaking hand.

"Is everything alright?" Dora asked.

"No," the judge said. "Flare-up, my wrists are burning. And they changed my meds again, so I'm still getting used to them." He didn't fidget or twitch or look around. The middle-aged man sat like a puppet with its strings cut, eyes not moving when someone walked in and entered his field of view.

Once all the seats had been taken, the Capitol judge spoke up. "Welcome to Thirteen, everyone," he said. "My name is Raymond Sanchez, and I've been living in this lovely concrete tunnel for six years now." There was some laughter at that. So Sanchez was an old defector, then. Dora's opinion of him improved. "I'm sure some of us know of each other, but I have never met most of you, so how about we do some icebreakers? We'll go in a circle, introducing ourselves and giving a fun fact about ourselves."

Dora tried to think of a fun fact about herself and failed. The last time she had been in a new collective had been decades ago.

"I'll go first," Sanchez said. "My name is Raymond Sanchez, I'm originally from the Capitol, and the first time I appeared in a courtroom, I was completely bald because of a stupid bet."

Everyone chuckled, even the judge sitting next to Dora with an absent face. So it would be amusing facts, then. Perhaps something from her university years. That time her friend threw up on her at a party? No, that was hardly rare in their circles.

The judge from Twelve went next. "Um, hi everyone. My name is Rose Meadowcreek, I'm from Twelve, and when I was six, I fell off the roof of my house."

More scattered chuckles. "I'm Moira Xia, and I'm from Five. I like to play baseball." The speaker was a woman of fifty or sixty with several visible scars on her face. Now that Dora followed the international news, she could tell that Xia, with her dark-brown skin and round eyes, looked nothing like most people with that surname.

"I'm from Eleven, my name is Drexel Kitteridge. Uh, I have a garden on my balcony." Kitteridge was dark, with round eyes and the remnants of white coily hair.

The man next to Dora was next, and she still hadn't thought of anything. "I'm Daniel Chatterjee, from Six," he said in a surprisingly lively voice. "I have twenty-four digits." He lifted his hands to show that he did indeed have six fingers on them - it looked like he had an extra middle finger.

"Must be hard to buy gloves," Sanchez said.

"It is. Shoes, too, are hard, because my feet are wide at the toes. But I could afford it."

Dora realized it was her turn. "My name is Dora Rescu, I'm from Ten, and I once broke my toe when a textbook fell on it." The usual jokes about the size of those textbooks had had a new life breathed into them.

"Ouch," the next person said sympathetically. "I'm from One, my name is Juan Mendez, and I know some Spanish." Mendez wore his white hair in elaborate box braids Jack would have deemed to be showing off that he still had all his hair (unlike Jack).

"My name is Rosalinda Wyatt, I'm from Nine, and my uncle once accidentally shot me while we were hunting." Wyatt had the same coily hair as Dora, but done up in intricate braids instead of Dora's short puff. Her hooked nose gave Dora the impression of an eagle surveying the lands it was flying over.

"Oh no," Sanchez said.

Wyatt shrugged. "It wasn't too bad. Er, who's next?"

"I'm from Seven. I'm Rosa Sprecher. I sing in a choir." Sprecher was very tall and very slender, with light-tan skin and medium-length black hair that was not coily, but curly enough to stand upright instead of flopping. It looked as if she had cropped it short a while back and was still trying to grow it out.

"I'm from Two, my name is Brutus Smith, and I have an identical twin sister." Smith was fully bald, with deep lines in his dark face.

"Er, what?" Meadowcreek asked, confused. "How is that possible?"

Smith raised his eyebrows, equally confused. "What do you mean? We were assigned the same gender at birth and one of us turned out to be transgender."

"Oh," she said.

"HRT and surgery was free in the Capitol," Sanchez said, making Smith gnash his teeth.

"What's HRT?" Meadowcreek wanted to know.

It took some time to explain to Meadowcreek how medical transitioning worked, and then they moved on, continuing around the circle.

"I'm Sean Gaudet, I'm from Four, and I once drowned in the ocean." Gaudet was medium-brown and had the remnants of his white hair trimmed very short.

"My name is Taylor Robertson, I'm from Eight, and I once skipped an exam to go fishing. Still passed the course." Robertson had an almost uncannily average appearance - medium-brown skin, grey curly hair in a braid, height that made them shorter than most men and taller than most women.

"My name is Cora Clemens, I'm from Three, and I once walked into the wrong exam hall and was halfway through the exam before I realized what was happening." Once, Dora had had nightmares like that. Clemens had the same skin colour as Dora, but her eyes were narrow and her white hair was wavy and in a single braid.

Sanchez smiled and took a drink of water. "So, now we know a little bit about each other."

"My apologies, but I do not see the point of this," Wyatt spoke up. "How will learning these little facts about each other help us become a better collective?"

"It's so we get to know each other better," Sanchez explained. "Let's do another question now. What did you want to be growing up?"

Meadowcreek snorted disdainfully. "I wanted to be nineteen. All of us did."

Sanchez looked like he had been punched in the stomach. Dora felt much the same way. To her, the Games had always been something that happened to other people. Unlike with most things, even Jack's attitude had been an uncaring dismissal of the threat the Reaping ball had been to child beggars and rural itinerant farmhands. But for someone from the village that was Twelve? The closest Dora had ever gotten to the Games was when someone from a neighbourhood not too far away had been Reaped, and she hadn't even known the name or face of the apprentice plumber before that. The would-have-been tradesperson was probably in the top ten most well-off Tributes in Ten's history.

"Not I," Kitteridge said, sounding pained. "I bribed my way out of every conceivable limitation, but it never even entered my mind to try to bribe my children's way out of the bowls. It never entered my mind that they could have been chosen." In any case it would not have worked. Slips had been printed in the Capitol, and from what Dora had been able to piece together from various interviews in the media, it had taken Snow's personal command to alter anything there, and not even a District mayor or the manager of the biggest latifundia had had that kind of pull.

"Not I, either," Robertson echoed. "Every single Tribute from Eight on my memory was either an agricultural or a sweatshop worker, or a Victor's child."

"Same," Xia said. "We did have a very rich manager's child get chosen when I was in my early thirties, but to my mind, that was the exception that proved the rule."

Kitteridge nodded. "We had the District mayor's child get chosen, but every last stray cat heard rumours that was on purpose - why, I can't say, she had never been anything other than loyal."

"They wanted to toss the lower classes a bone," Dora said. "Make it look like it wasn't only the children of single alcoholic parents with twenty tesserae who went in."

"Oh." Kitteridge looked surprised.

Meadowcreek looked upset, but hid it well.

"I apologize," Sanchez said in a sincere tone to her. "I should have thought before speaking."

"I honestly thought that the Games were the one thing we had in common," she said softly. "But even that was a lie."

Dora chuckled. "Even in the days of overseas colonies, local elites lived better than ninety percent of people in the colonizing country. That's just how it works. It's not a simple core-versus-periphery oppressor-versus-oppressed dichotomy, it's far more complicated than that."

"Banned-book aficionado or started learning just now?" Sprecher asked.

"Just now. I've read an article or two in foreign journals over the past weeks."

"So why are you all here, if you had it so good?" Meadowcreek asked.

Sanchez suddenly looked very small. "Because I found the wrong person not guilty."

"What? How?"

Sanchez shrugged. "It wasn't some grand gesture of defiance. Three young people were being charged with terrorism for having spray-painted 'Freedom' on a fence. Since that was an administrative violation meriting fifteen days at the most, I acquitted them. And then I was fired."

Dora felt a wave of pity for the Capitolian judge. He hadn't even been some kind of dedicated Rebel. He had just been a judge who had tried three young people in accordance with the law. Dora would have done the exact same thing - an inoffensive slogan did not merit much of a punishment. Fifteen days and a fine, to give them a good scare about damaging property, and forget about it.

"You didn't tell me that," Meadowcreek said softly. The two must have met after the survivors from Twelve had arrived.

"It's nothing to brag about. I did my job and was punished for it."

"The law was completely unconstitutional," Wyatt said, her words having an odd bite to them. "Nothing we did could get around the fact that we were working in a broken, criminal system."

Dora hated it when people spoke like that. Yes, there had been some patently unjust laws on the books. Yes, they needed to be changed, and the sooner, the better. But talk like that made her feel like the speaker was accusing her of having done...what? What else could Dora have done? At the end of the day, a bad law consistently enforced was better than many of the alternatives. "Not everyone who works in a criminal system is a criminal," she pointed out.

Mendez sighed. "A few bad apples spoil the bunch, that's how the proverb goes. If there's only a few good apples in there at all, it's even worse." He drank some water. "Mind you, this is not an insult to present company. I believe we have some real Rebels here?" he asked Sanchez questioningly.

"My actions and inactions aside," Xia said with a huff, "are irrelevant when slave labour existed, one of my closest colleagues had to regularly pay bribes to be allowed to see his family, and there were unconstitutional laws banning peaceful assembly. If we had to stand up for ourselves and not execute children - well, why was this even a point of contention in the first place?"

Dora had executed underage individuals, though to call them children would have been an insult to children. If someone was being tried as an adult for a capital crime, it would have been an absurdity to take the supreme penalty off the table just because they hadn't turned nineteen yet.

However, she had to admit to herself that Xia had a point. Why were there laws that directly contradicted the Constitution in ways even a child could understand? "Exactly," she said, unwilling to start a massive argument with someone who was most likely a decorated Rebel. "To kill outside of self-defense is illegal in a time of peace, not counting executions. The children Reaped for the Hunger Games had done nothing wrong but exist."

They continued in that vein for a while, Dora feeling worse and worse about herself for reasons she couldn't define. Was she really feeling guilty for not having put herself, and thus also her family, in danger?

"Alright," Sanchez said. "Why don't we go around and explain why it is that we're going to be judges, and not defendants?"

There were some scattered chuckles at that.

"I'll start first," Sanchez offered, taking a sip of water. "As I said, I acquitted the wrong people. I was fortunate enough to have some Rebels get in touch with me and offer to get me out." He paused. "Not that I had need to truly fear for my life, but I was never a courageous person. What about you, Mendez?"

Mendez sighed and ran his hands over his face. "I had the opposite - if a case against a Peacekeeper made it to trial, I didn't rubber-stamp their acquittals." He gulped down some water and sighed again, looking around the room hesitantly. "I didn't do it out of selfless reasons, though. I was no Rebel. It's because-"

"You don't have to say anything," Sanchez reassured him.

Mendez shook his head. "We're going to be working together for a long time. Might as well be honest. When I was fifteen, I was raped by a Peacekeeper." Dora winced, as did the others. "My parents were assistant prosecutors, so I didn't even bother telling them - they could do nothing against a major. In hindsight, they probably knew something was wrong." He smiled wryly. "When I became a judge, I became the biggest stickler for the law in the District when it came to crimes like that. There were even rumours I was a Rebel because I found Peacekeepers guilty. I managed to spin it right, so they never bothered me. I was just removing bad influences."

Dora felt as if she was looking into a mirror. She'd need to meet up with Mendez later, they certainly had things to talk about.

"Smith, what about you?"

Smith shrugged. "I was like you. Never liked that children could be tossed into secret prisons. Always seemed wrong to me. I was never a Rebel, though - when the uprisings began, I had to pick a side, so I chose the one where I would not be expected to execute children for complaining about the economy. Combat was horrible, though. Wish I hadn't done it."

"That sounds like me," Clemens said. "I assume I'm going next? In order of District?" Sanchez nodded. "For decades, I played along, implemented the sentences I was told to." She fidgeted with her empty cup. "But then, in one of my cases, the prosecutor turned up drunk."

"Relatable," Wyatt muttered.

"He argued the case so badly, it seemed absurd to me to even think about convicting. But the next day, I was summoned to the carpet." Dora nodded sympathetically. The higher-ups had often been all too willing to provide vague instructions and then be angry when they weren't followed the way they had intended. "I think I just broke there. Gave up. What's even the point of the justice system if you don't even need to pretend to go through the motions? So I started making more and more undesirable decisions before being fired four years ago now." She smirked. "I think my husband is over the moon now at having me out of the house."

Dora laughed out loud. Had she been fired and spent four years moping around the house, Jack would have probably chased her out with a rolling pin after a month or two.

"You spent four years just sitting at home?" Sanchez asked with a smirk on his face.

Clemens shrugged, smiling slightly. "I got a pension."

Kitteridge laughed. "My wife would have killed me if I had tried that. That, or made me wash my own socks."

"A fate worse than death," Wyatt said sarcastically. "My man would have just gotten the Minister of Justice to reinstate me after the tenth time I managed to burn water."

Sanchez rolled his eyes. "You are going to struggle so much once we're in the Capitol. No spouses allowed." He paused. "And I won't be doing everything for you, either."

"Are you married?" Wyatt asked.

"No. Never felt the desire to."

"Wise decision," Clemens muttered. "I can't believe that I can't live without someone as annoying as my husband."

There was much laughter at that.

"What about you, Gaudet?" Sanchez asked.

Gaudet looked very awkward. "I wasn't like you," he said. "I was always the perfect telephone judge. I hated it, but I still did it." He reached behind him and poured some water out of a large metal bottle into his cup. "Thing is, when I was a child, my older sister signed up for what was unofficially known as the Career Academy." Dora winced. She had once hated the Careers for their seeming bloodthirst, but once her children had gotten to that age, she had realized that they were nothing more than confused adolescents brainwashed into seeking death. "She was actually selected to be a Tribute. Thirty-Sixth Games. Stabbed to death at the Cornucopia by the boy from Twelve - he snuck up on her as she was killing the boy from Three. A momentary lapse in attention, and I didn't have a sister anymore."

Everyone went very quiet at that. Dora didn't know anyone who had lost a sibling that way.

"The worst thing was," Gaudet snapped, running his hand over his eyes, "was that our mother was a doctor. My sister should have gone to university, like me. She wasn't like those street kids who tried out so they'd have a place to sleep for a few years. It was all so pointless!" He drank some water. "I hated it. Hated that the regime had convinced my sister that this is what people should do with their lives. But I did nothing until the Rebellion broke out. That's when I realized I had the chance to do something about everything. Fortunately, they didn't try to put a gun in my hands."

"I envy you," Smith muttered.

Xia nodded along. "My greatest act of rebellion was to give myself food poisoning so I didn't have to try someone who was actually an acquaintance of mine. Switched over to family law after that, went from executing people to taking away their children." She paused. "Or vice versa. Teenagers were often punished by being taken away from their parents."

Smith raised his eyebrows. "You forget how you blew up train tracks and even your own office."

Shocked, Dora looked at the judge from Five. Why was she being so demure about her achievements? They were acting like a group of adolescent friends, each one afraid of showing up the other. Xia was a real Rebel, but she was almost afraid to show it.

"Mr. Smith," Sanchez said kindly, "you have combat decorations."

Smith snorted. "For being injured. Doesn't take much heroism to get a bullet in your arm." He lifted his arms, showing that his right one couldn't go as high.

"What's this about train tracks?" Wyatt asked, curiosity evident in her voice.

Xia shrugged. "I had a pass to travel to nearby towns and villages at will. I'd jump off the train, meet up with my cell, and set a bomb. Then, I'd hop on another train and be back in my office before it all went kaboom." Dora struggled to imagine the fifty-year-old Xia jumping on and off trains.

"And your own office?" Wyatt continued.

"Cell leader decided it would send a message to assassinate a judge. I offered my own interpretation of things. They agreed." She sighed. "It was like I was two people at once. The judge in the robe and the Rebel setting up time bombs. After I blew up my office, that just made it worse. I just knew that I wanted to openly be both judge and Rebel."

Sanchez smiled. "I'm glad for you," he said.

With shaking hands, Xia poured herself some water. "Who's next? Mr. Chatterjee? Would you like to share your story?"

Chatterjee looked up. He was by no means old, he had to be fifty-five at most, but he was completely bald and his eyebrows were white. Deep wrinkles lined his face, and he appeared to be in pain. "Why not?" he said in a calm, even voice. "Ever since I was a child, I suffered from suicidal ideation. I even considered volunteering for the Games, but I was too afraid of pain. I'd lie in bed and try to think of the least painful but still suitably dramatic way to die. Still managed to become a judge, though. One day, I was told to sentence someone who had illegally moved to the city to prison, but he had a baby in his arms, and that baby would have died there. I called a recess and stood outside the courthouse, still in my robe, and denounced the justice system."

Dora had no idea what to feel. It was hard for her to wrap her head around someone doing something like that. The very thought would never have entered Dora's mind.

"I was arrested," Chatterjee continued in an even voice, "and tossed into a secret prison without trial. Didn't even get to die. Six years later, I was freed from the mine. I won't list everything that's wrong with me here, it'll take too long."

All that, and he had still been picked out of all the judges of Six. He must have been a truly skilled one.

"I, fortunately, didn't have anything nearly like that," Sprecher said. "I was more of a mute opponent. Since I'm here I suppose my decisions were softer than what had been expected of me, but until the uprisings began, I just kept quiet. I did listen to foreign radio, though. Soccer is great."

"Oh, yes," Wyatt agreed with a smile.

"Same," Robertson said, an expression of wistfulness on their face. "But I didn't even listen to the radio. I did nothing. Somehow, I became known as the 'good judge', and I was too afraid of letting them down for some reason. Unprofessional, perhaps, but in a topsy-turvy system, professionality is equal to criminality." Dora could only gnash her teeth at that.

"And that's a fact," Wyatt agreed. "I did nothing, too. I have no idea why I was chosen - maybe not being a fanatic was enough. I suppose I always disliked the regime deep down, though. When I was eighteen, someone named Rosalinda was called, and I think that's been with me my entire life."

"That's terrible," Mendez said sympathetically.

"Not really. Rosalinda is hardly the rarest of names, my friend Maria Torres had a full namesake called twice." She took a deep breath and drank some water. "Honestly, I did nothing. My life was good enough, so I didn't. I half-suspect I was picked because my kids fought."

Dora realized it was her turn. "I was always a stickler for the rules," she began uncertainly. What would they think of her? "All the other kids made fun of me, but quietly. I was the sort to tell on everyone."

"I think that's all of us," Smith grumbled. "I remember nobody wanted to be my friend in grade two because I had told the teacher who had thrown the rock at the window."

Feeling a little bit better, Dora continued. "I never aged out of it, though. My professors saw how much of a stickler for the letter of the law I was, and steered me towards criminal law." She chuckled at the memory. Her professors had had no idea what they were unleashing. "So the first time I was told to give some civil servant who had taken bribes a perfunctory sentence, I had them shot instead, as per the paragraph you all know."

Mendez nearly fell off his chair laughing. "And how did everyone react?"

"I followed it up by giving someone life for selling drugs, so I became known as the hanging judge who'd string up anybody, minister or hoodlum."

Xia looked disappointed. "The laws were written-"

"To advantage the writers. Yes. But a poor law will not become better by being inconsistently applied." Dora felt like she was the one on trial. "I didn't ignore the law. I minded extenuating circumstances. I didn't allow single parents of small children to be held in jail awaiting trial."

"I'm not accusing you of anything," Xia said. "If anything, we needed more letter-of-the-law judges. Most of my colleagues blatantly ignored what was written on the page and probably didn't remember what an extenuating circumstance is."

"Exactly!" Robertson exclaimed. "I'd be sitting there thinking - Mother of God, can't you follow your own laws, at least?"

There was a short silence. Kitteridge began to speak. "I, like the rest of you, was raised in a bubble," he began. "I grew up in a four-bedroom apartment that had nothing in common with the shacks the vast mass of agricultural workers lived in." Dora nodded along sympathetically. She had seldom paused to think about how lucky she was until she had met Jack. "I only found out about quota riots when I had to sentence someone for them, and I'd be so confused - in a naive way. I suppose we all thought that way, but for some reason I don't know, my innocent outrage outweighed the fear of displeasing the boss. Everyone knew me as soft on Rebellion."

"What did the boss think?" Sanchez smiled.

"Gave the serious cases to someone more reliable."

Dora had been in that position. Her tough-on-everyone position had resulted in overworked secretaries often not knowing whether to send or not send someone to her.

"And what about you?" Sanchez asked Meadowcreek. Dora sat up straighter, curious to hear her story.

Meadowcreek scratched her head. "There was no legal system in Twelve. The Head Peacekeeper was judge, jury, and executioner. But I liked to read courtroom dramas in the library. I thought it was fascinating. I even memorized the Criminal Code when I was a teenager. I ended up being a clerk at the Justice Building. Barely got out during the firebombing, ended up taking legal classes with Professor Sanchez here."

"Impressive," Sprecher said.

"Thank you," the young not-judge replied awkwardly. "I was actually the shoemakers' third child, so my parents didn't pay much attention to what I did. Had I been the eldest, they'd have made me take over the business. I should have become a miner, but a position at the Justice Building opened just as I finished school." She paused. "When I was twelve years old, there were one thousand eight hundred eighty-one slips in the Reaping bowl, one of them - mine."

"I still have no idea what bowl mine were in," Robertson said.

"Half and half?" Meadowcreek suggested.

"Maybe." Robertson tapped their fingers against their empty cup. "They had me alternate sections every year. My friends would joke - oh, so you're a boy this year."

Dora had once worked with a lawyer who hadn't fit into the binary for a while. He had been born seemingly with a girl's body, but when he entered puberty, he began to develop as a male. He had grown facial hair and his voice began to crack. His parents were able to take him to a doctor, and it turned out that he was intersex, with one of each gonad and a rare set of chromosomes. Fortunately, he was very happy with presenting as male and experienced no dysphoria so all he had had to do was get his documents changed.

"That's a very small amount of slips," Xia pointed out. "Less than two thousand? Ours had millions."

"You must have known everyone Reaped," Smith realized, hand over his mouth. "That's terrible."

Meadowcreek shook her head. "Not knew, but knew of. Everyone in Twelve went to school until they were eighteen and there was only one school, so everyone Reaped was a sibling's classmate's friend, or something like that. That was the most distant it got."

"That was the closest I've ever been to the Games," Sprecher said. "Someone from my school of whom I had never heard before was picked."

Meadowcreek smiled weakly. "It was very strange. Every year, they'd take away someone whom I like as not knew of. When I aged out, I had to watch for the last names." She looked around them. "I never lost someone I was close to. That made me lucky. I did lose acquaintances. People I was friendly with."

Never before had Dora understood so well the old adage about safety in numbers.

"Once," Meadowcreek continued, "an identical twin was Reaped." Smith looked like he had been punched in the stomach. "They were eighteen but still so alike, only their parents could tell them apart, and they were too hysterical to say a word. Both boys insisted it wasn't them. The Head Peacekeeper grabbed one at random." Dora had never heard of any of Ten's Heads ever leaving their cozy office. "Hours later, the other killed himself. That was my last Reaping."

Smith ran a hand over his face. "Horrible," he said. "You know, when I was young, I thought it wasn't fair that we sent volunteers to kill twelve-year-olds. But when I became a father, I realized I didn't care. My children were safe. Not safe like the rest of yours, thanks to the odds, but completely and utterly."

"There were already Careers in your time?" Meadowcreek asked incredulously.

Dora nodded. "I was born in the year 13. The programs started off in the twenties, if I recall correctly, and in my last few Reapings, there were six volunteers each time."

"Exactly," Mendez said. "I was born a few years later than you. The last time I was actually in danger was when I was thirteen. I remember my siblings and I would go to church and put up two candles, as if they were already dead."

Gaudet nodded. "I remember all that propaganda about heroic sacrifices. Now that I'm older, I can't wrap my head around anyone signing up to die like that. Poor little Seara. She should have been fifty-eight now. She always did like science, she used to tell everyone she'd be a neurosurgeon."

"That's why the Academies targeted urchins," Mendez said bitterly. "So the children had nobody who'd be pushed into hating the government by their deaths."

"Alright," Sanchez said, "I see the conversation is shifting. How about we break up into groups of three or four, talk for ten minutes or so, and then come back and say one thing you learned about another person?"

Both Mendez and Smith began to walk towards Dora. Wyatt, Xia, Sprecher, and Gaudet were another group. Sanchez and Meadowcreek joined the silent Chatterjee. Robertson, Clemens, and Kitteridge were the final group.

"Hanging Peacekeepers?" Dora asked. "Impressive. I never saw any make it to trial. The prosecution would drop the charges - if any were even brought."

Mendez smiled mysteriously. "I suppose they were more willing to play by the rules in One."

"We never had Peacekeepers go on trial," Smith said. "If you tried to report rape, you'd be the one on trial - for slander."

"That's horrible!" Dora gasped. "We just had people turned away, the few that dared." They had to go to the Peacekeepers to report a crime committed by another Peacekeeper, and their solidarity had outweighed all common sense. Dora still had no idea why they had been willing to tolerate dangerous criminals in their ranks. "Was there some sort of custom about standing up for fellow Peacekeepers no matter what?" she asked Smith. Hopefully the judge from Two would now.

Smith shrugged. "Depends. My aunt served, she said that you could rape or kill anyone-"

"Except the teenage child of the richest people in the county," Mendez muttered with a slight smirk. "Bet those bastards didn't realize they're not the only ones who can pull strings."

"-but you had to be loyal. The more loyal, the more you could get away with. You could summarily execute anyone, and if you were in favour, nothing would happen to you. If you weren't, you'd be transferred to another city. And if some important person didn't like you, then our Judge Mendez would give you your just desserts."

"Horrible," Dora said. "We had a few good Peacekeepers, though."

Smith smiled. "Just like we had a few good judges. You can find good people anywhere. But it's scant consolation when they're part of something so bad." How could he say such things so casually?

"Why do you condemn yourself?" Dora asked. "You fought for your District's freedom."

"That doesn't make up for the decisions I made as judge," Smith said simply.

What strange company she had found herself in. In Ten, all of the non-depurated judges, a category that included Dora, preferred not to talk about the past at all.

"Let's talk about something else," Dora said uneasily. "Are you both married?"

Smith nodded. "Married when I was thirty-five, but my husband was worth the wait."

"Same," Mendez said. "I think my wife was my fifteenth partner, or something like that. Took a while, but I'm glad I kept looking for the right person. Almost had to break up because her pass was running out, but one bribe later, all was good."

"Typical," Dora said. "Always hated that prohibition on travel - I've got kids and siblings in different cities."

"Exactly," Smith said. "Never made sense to me. All these completely nonsensical laws meant to...what? Remind us of our place?"

Dora looked around the little gathering. "Maybe now we can use the law to remind them of their place," she said. "As defendants in a criminal case."

The two laughed appreciatively at that.

A/N: So, what do you think of the judges? Irritating? Worthy of respect? Loathsome? Sympathetic? Blinded by privilege? All of the above at once?

When Dora says 'an article or two', she means 'ten books, a hundred articles, and countless hours of documentaries'. Yes, she was once That Student Who Always Raises Their Bloody Hand, but then again she got through law school and became a judge without giving a single bribe.

Xia's combined identity as the heroic Rebel and the staid judge is inspired by Francois de Menthon, a French lawyer who was a resistance fighter in WW2 before becoming a prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal. The French participants all had the craziest life stories, since they had refused to collaborate despite being fairly important people. Robert Falco, the French alternate judge, had been fired in 1940 because of his Jewish background - I am very annoyed the Wikipedia article doesn't say what happened next, because if he had gotten fired over it, it was enough to get him killed. Did he buy fake papers? Hide at a friend's place? Make his way to a neutral country? Who knows, but I feel bad for him either way.

Chatterjee's extra digits are inspired by an IRL friend of mine who has an extra toe and always uses it as her go-to fun fact in icebreakers. Chatterjee's six fully functioning digits on all hands and feet, however, make him practically unique. Fortunately for him, a judge's salary is enough to commission gloves - and in the secret prison, when he was lucky enough to get gloves, the proportions of his hands allowed him to place two fingers into one and be decently comfortable.