"Listen closely, everyone!" the sergeant said. "The ones up there are looking for volunteers to transfer to Lodgepole to guard the criminals held in the Justice Building there."

Janie realized the potential and raised her hand instantly. Dusk looked at her weirdly, but, trusting her judgement, also put his hand up. Janie generally made sure to volunteer for nothing, but this was an exception.

"Two?" the sergeant asked. "Good enough. Report for reassignment tomorrow at 0430."

Alright, that just wasn't fair. Janie and Dusk agreed to that, because they had no other choice, and the sergeant left. Ignoring the odd looks they got, they went about preparing for the black market. Supplies acquired from the PX, from pencils to razor blades to chocolate, fetched a tidy helping of valuables her family could use.

Janie took a box of gum from under her cot. It came in all sorts of flavours, and was very popular in the Capitol because buying gum was cheaper than buying food, if you looked at for how long it made you less hungry.

They set up their goods on their cots and stood next to them. The door opened, and 'their' Capitolites trooped in. For a nice cut of the profits, they could sell as much as they wanted without worrying about being arrested. There was a minor screw-up with one of them - the building was not wheelchair-accessible, which meant that he had to be pushed through the narrow door. At least the chair fit in the door.

Janie handed off her box in bulk to a twitchy woman missing an arm. Dusk got rid of the warehouse of soap he had had under his own cot. The buyer was a man in elegant clothing with a baby on his back. The baby was, fortunately, asleep. If it had gotten through the bombings, it could probably sleep through anything.

In the last letter, her family had written that one of her older cousins had just had a baby. Janie wondered how old it would be when she got to see it. She didn't mind staying here, like some did - back in her town, she wouldn't be able to swagger around like the lady of the place with her uniform and armband - but she did miss her family.

The mishmash of small bits of jewelry Janie held in her hand was currently worth a pile of money taller than Tav. Next week, that pile would be taller than the barracks. Apparently, prices and wages all over Panem were supposed to be equalized somehow thanks to the free market's invisible hand, but Janie wasn't sure how that was supposed to happen. Back home, she had bought the same soup for a quarter that had once cost a dollar and a half here and now cost a million. Would they just add a bunch of zeroes to everything and call it a day? Or would they let the inflation eat everything and then...what?

It really wasn't fair that she still struggled to get through newspaper articles. If only she could read, then she'd be able to understand what was going on and where the dollar was headed. Though that much was obvious - the abyss.

Janie sat down on her cot, put the goods in an inner pocket, and watched. In Lodgepole, would they be selling autographed photos like this? Or did that Chime have the market cornered, and they'd have to go through her first or else get hit over the head in an alley? Or maybe lots of people sold, but Chime sold the best ones that were guaranteed to be real? Janie had sent off to her family the photos she had bought. The one with her was apparently hanging on the wall now.

"The fuck was that about?" Dusk whispered. "How d'you know it won't be worse than this?"

"Won't matter once we're rich from autographed photos of the key criminals," Janie explained. "Photos to chocolate to gold - and we're set for life."

"Won't matter if we have to do all that spit-and-polish stuff every day because we have to look good for the cameras," he grumbled. "And we won't know anyone there. I bet it's all already divvied up."

Janie huffed. "Why're you so pessimistic all of a sudden? We'll be able to go around, get the signatures ourselves. Maybe even snap a few pics of our own." Dusk had an expensive phone with a good camera, courtesy of a young office worker who had spent years saving up.

"I guess." He didn't sound convinced.

"C'mon, what's wrong with you?" she nudged him. "Your girl break up with you or what?" Janie and Tav were doing pretty well.

Dusk chuckled. "Nah. Just not feeling too well."

"That sucks."

"Yeah."

Dusk took out a magazine from under his blanket and began to leaf through it half-heartedly. On the cover, a woman who looked about a billion times better than Janie and a man who looked about a billion times better than Dusk were posing naked. Tav, though, didn't look too far off that man, even if his muscles weren't that insane. It was fun to poke through these mags, but the real deal was way better. Janie had once seen a photo of a man whose dick was nearly thirty centimetres. What was even the point of having so much? It wouldn't fit in any case.

"Hey, check this out," Dusk said, marginally more alert. "You think these tits are real?" He showed her a photo of a woman with tits the size of watermelons.

Janie scratched her head. "Dunno," she said. "Mine are way smaller." Eating well for the past couple of months had made her fill out slightly, but she was still small in that department, and there was nothing to be done about her being way shorter than middle-class people. Dusk, though, had seriously filled out (though he was shorter than her, of course, rural people were super-short). Even when he was fully dressed, it was obvious that he had a hell of a body under that uniform. Had he not been in her squad, she'd have been into him.

"Yeah, but you know what tits are supposed to look like. Like, what's a real-looking shape or whatever."

Once, Janie had dated a girl with large breasts. She tried to remember what she had looked like. "They're too perky," Janie realized. "They'd have to have a hovercraft engine inside to not be drooping at all, at that size."

"I should draw that," another soldier muttered from close to Janie.

Dusk sighed, disappointed, and turned the page to a picture of a man whose dick was probably twice as long as his.

His new job was photocopying. Leon placed the pages onto the scanner bed one by one, pressed a sequence of buttons, and waited. The originals went into safes. Some of them were crumbling from having been stored in holes in the ground. The copies went to whoever needed them.

The prosecution was going through a mountain of documents, and the defense was starting to join in. The way that both teams sifted through the same papers was an odd parody of the normal discovery process. Not like Leon was an expert in that - he had seen lawyers go through discovery in television shows, and that was it.

The machine quieted. Leon stepped forward and took the copies, placing them on the table on its respective stacks. Photocopying a fifteen-page document one page at a time was a time-consuming process, and he had just finished with one. Leon took the original and put it inside a cardboard folder. The copies, he stapled together and attached a label, giving them the same number as the original.

By now, the Documents Department was a well-oiled machine. When a document arrived, a team went through it and gave it a file number. Then, people like Leon scanned and photocopied them, with copies going to a massive archive in the building of the basement, which had once been a conference hall. The hall had been picked because of its relative proximity to the Lodgepole Justice Building.

Lodgepole Municipality, the home of the university. Classes there would be starting up again in the summer. As a small child, Leon had dreamed of going to university - but all his parents had been able to afford was teachers' college for Marcellus.

The government was promising that not only would tuition be much less now, but nobody would be turned away because they couldn't afford it. And District universities would be put on an equal footing with the Capitol. Best of all, the money for that would be found by firing the corrupt civil servants - taxes were actually going to be lowered. No amount of raised taxes could compensate for one tax-dodging oligarch, and now it was the oligarchs' turn to fret.

Leon placed the copies onto a tray and went to pick up a new document. This one was even bigger - forty pages or so - and it was labelled 'FRAGILE'. Leon opened up the folder, took out the first sheet of paper, and placed it on the scanning bed. It was the minutes of a meeting of high officials in the Ministry of Finance.

Every ministry had somehow had its hand in wrecking the country. The noose was too good for those construction mafias that had sucked the budget dry, winning massive orders and then stealing all of the money. The utility mafias were the reason why Leon's family had never had hot water in the summer. Money had been stolen on food for Community Homes and Peacekeepers, the endless replacement of cobblestones and curbs, and even the Hunger Games.

Well, now they'd answer for it. Every day came the news over the radio that someone or other had been arrested. And the list of 'key criminals', the worst of the worst, would be published any day now. Leon had heard various rumours about who would go on trial.

The first sheet, the last page, was done. Leon put the original in the folder, placed the five copies on the table in a row, and went to get the next page. This was the easiest job ever, even if working with fragile documents was not something any untrained person could do - Leon had no idea how he had managed to fake having experience, but he supposed his fine motor skills were good enough. Marcellus, though, was currently teaching in a drafty classroom. According to him, it was the same as before, except without the ideology. Nobody talked about what was going on, even though some kids had lost their parents and others had had theirs arrested.

The second-to-last page now. Going backwards made it easier to put the copies together. This conference was an extremely old one. None of its participants were still alive. It had taken place shortly after the Dark Days, when the nation had finally shut itself off from the rest of the world completely.

A few pages later, it was clear that the conference had been about what would happen to the dollar if they left the world economy. They were having the opposite problem now - all of a sudden, exchange rates were a thing, and they had to worry about how many kilograms of wheat grain they could buy for so many rapidly devaluating dollars. Soon enough, the other countries would get fed up with helping them for free and demand payment, no matter that the exchange rate had fallen into the Atlantic ocean. The past few months had been enough to learn how the world worked. Nothing was given for free.

An alarm sounded. Five minutes. Finally. They were all being worked into the ground, and it was only getting worse and worse. The shifts were twelve hours long, from eight to eight. That was the same as working in the factory before, but Leon's commute was two hours instead of fifteen minutes. At least overtime was paid reliably.

Leon put his workstation in order and trooped out, not bothering to talk to anyone. He clocked out and stepped into the frigid air. It was late March, and the snow was gone, but the broken pavement was sodden from the melting snow and the rain. It was almost pitch-black. His parents worried about his safety. Leon consoled them that nobody had ever gotten robbed in the middle of a large street. He left out the roving bands of off-duty soldiers that were interested in something other than money.

If he had someone to walk with, he'd have felt safer. But he didn't have anyone. He had thought he had befriended Nilofar when they had worked together, but then he had been reassigned, and he didn't have the mental energy to go look for her when he had zero time off six days a week (his day off was Wednesday). Before, he had had plenty of friends, but they were all scattered now, and so Leon had nobody besides Marcellus.

Leon queued for the streetcar and climbed on when it arrived. After an hour and a half, he climbed off and went to a nearby bus stop, to wait for his bus. It came once every half hour, and with how his shifts worked, he always arrived just barely in time. It was horribly stressful, and he dreaded the day he missed it.

The bus was mostly empty, aside from a few other people coming home late. By the time Leon's stop was called out, only two others remained in it. Leon walked for ten minutes in the chilly damp air, making his way to his building. Already in the corridor, he could hear Marcellus complaining about something.

"Would you be quiet?" Leon demanded as soon as he walked into the apartment. "Half the building can hear you." He tossed him a paper bag. On his lunch break, he had bought his brother some black-market donut holes.

Marcellus put the bag on the table. "Why are you still working with that IDC?" he demanded. "Even clearing the streets didn't make you so tired."

"I'd be less tired if you shut up!"

"Leon!"

Leon ignored his parents and went into his room. He undressed, got ready for bed, and crawled under the covers. Just two more days, and it would be his day off. Maybe he'd find something interesting. Someone had found a document containing instructions from the Peacekeeper Commander-in-Chief to kill one hundred hostages for every killed Peacekeeper. And Marcellus said it was pointless. It wasn't pointless at all.

Leon fell asleep, mentally eviscerating his brother for his stupidity.

The informal opinion poll Thumeka had carried out was clear - an overwhelming majority of people in the Capitol were satisfied with the upcoming trials. An even bigger majority was convinced that it would not be fair, however, which was highly indicative of what people here thought about justice.

Of course, Thumeka herself did not have the highest hopes for the trials. She knew from experience that expecting a backwards country to democratize after a civil war was naive at best. The optimism coming from the television made her sigh and avert her eyes. They were all sincerely convinced that everything would be great from now on, and Thumeka worried about what would happen when they ran into problems.

To be fair, Panem was doing quite well, as backwards countries wracked by civil wars went. Before their unexpectedly short war, they had lived under brutal dictators for seventy-five years and more. Thumeka suspected that the country was chaos covered up with a thin shell of having enough to eat. If the humanitarian aid stopped, people would stop writing angry letters and take to the streets.

Thumeka sat on an overly ornate balcony of the press camp and typed up her findings. If she could convince her bosses that it was international support that was letting Panem develop, maybe that could help somehow. She remembered England, how the war had simply refused to end. There, the country had been split. Here, the government had been a husk that had only needed a light poke to become dust. The fanatically loyal military had started out giving no quarter, but it hadn't taken them much to drop their guns and plead for their lives.

And they had been granted them - another surprise. Every day, trainloads of released POWs arrived in the Capitol to be met by anxious relatives. Thumeka had gone out to witness one such scene of teary hugs. Others chose to stay in the Districts for one reason or another. Of course, many had been from Two, which should have caused greater friction than it was currently causing. The new District government was considering itself the heir of the District rebels and viewed the former soldiers as traitors and collaborators. Moods on the ground in Two were different, but Thumeka wasn't there.

Someone stepped onto the balcony. One of her acquaintances from the 'quiet' lounge where they played pool and videogames, Xia Jiao from China. "What are you working on?" Xia asked in English. That was, of course, the only language they had in common.

"Progress report," Thumeka said vaguely, staring out at the surroundings. They were a mess, though the darkness of the night hid the worst of the rubble and shielded the homeless from view.

"Why aren't you out with everyone else?"

The press camp was one giant party in the evenings. Thumeka was often woken in the middle of the night by her roommates stumbling back to their cots, which would have once sent her into a homicidal rage. "Never liked to party. You?"

"Me neither. I'd rather be here."

"Yeah," Thumeka said, gesturing at her colleague to sit down. She didn't actually know personally any of the journalists in the Capitol. Two others had been sent from her agency, but they were both in the Districts. The people from her area were the closest she could get. "How's your family? Your husband works for the same agency as you, right?"

"He does, but he's back home, working in an office."

"That's nice. And same." A cold breeze blew, and Thumeka shuddered. It was supposed to be spring, but it felt more like winter.

"And you?" Xia asked. "How's your family?"

If she wanted to make small talk, Thumeka was all for it. "Parents are fretting, wife wants souvenirs, older sister wants to know every detail."

"How much older?" Xia shoved her bare hands in her pockets.

"Five years. Do you have siblings?"

"No."

There was some movement below Thumeka. The lights of the building illuminated a man staggering over to a door. It was in moments like these that Thumeka thought normality was overrated. "Are you working on anything interesting right now?" she asked Xia, closing her laptop.

"Working on my material about the experience of people who are deaf and illiterate."

"Wouldn't that depend on the size of the place where they live?"

"Very much so. Out in the provinces, since you have to pay for everything, there were already higher rates of deafness because it would happen as the result of some kind of disease. More well-off people could take the time to learn sign language themselves and send their children to school, in big cities there were working-class associations for the deaf where children could also be taught, but in small towns, there was no way to learn for the poor, because they couldn't afford the books," Xia happily monologued.

Thumeka tried to imagine that, being unable to communicate with anyone. "They had to have figured something out, though. Lip-reading, or something like that."

Xia nodded. "I interviewed someone who lives in rural Three. He and his mother - she specifically wanted to adopt a deaf baby - are the only deaf people in the town. She's the only person he'd ever communicated with before the war, since he can't lip-read - just couldn't figure it out. He claims that he feels uncomfortable talking to others now, because he never learned more casual words and he comes across like someone who, in a village, speaks like they just stepped out of a university lecture hall."

"Better than the other way around," Thumeka said. Panem was socially stratified to an almost unimaginable extent.

"I suppose. And yeah, those who couldn't learn sign language have to rely on lip-reading and whatever improvised signs their families come up with."

A country where children weren't even taught to communicate and were forced to make up their own language. No amount of trials would be able to get at the heart of every single horror of the past seventy-five years.

"Here's the outline," Reed said, gulping down coffee and shoving a piece of paper at Mary. Mary set aside her own hot water - her own tastebuds were nowhere near as adaptable - and took it. She had asked him to put together an outline of what other trials the IDC should hold.

He had gone above and beyond, listing potential defendants, individuals who were currently at large or missing who also merited a seat in the dock, and saying how soon this or that trial could be theoretically held.

"You think we can start with the Peacekeepers at the same time as the key criminals?" Mary asked, uncertain if that would be possible. Next to her, Amber Vargas and Jocelyn Mikaelis, the chief prosecutors from One and Three respectively, were arguing about the best way to cook the pasta that was currently bubbling away in a large pot. They all got three meals a day, but some of them preferred to get black-market ingredients and cook it themselves.

"There's over fifty of them." The hunt for a 'representative sample' had resulted in that. Mary had a bad feeling about it all. Having generals and privates in the same dock would result in two different methods of prosecution - documentary for the generals, and witness testimony of individual brutal acts for the privates, because the lower in the chain of command one went, the more weight the 'orders are orders' defense held. The Peacekeepers had carried a little instruction manual that told them, among other things, to not obey criminal orders, and they had been trained only to obey, not go completely above and beyond. Obedience at the lowest levels was indicative only of a lack of heroism, but committing crimes of one's own volition was a different story. "And we have them all. And with all the documents we've captured, we're making good progress."

Mary took a sip of her water, enjoying the warmth. Someone had stolen her slippers, so she was standing in socked feet on the cold floor. "Do they have lawyers?"

Reed scratched his head. "We're trying. Volunteers are trickling in because of the incentives, but we're trying to deal with the key criminals for now. There's a huge mix-up over Wreath, that Coast Guard judge. I went through his records myself, I'll stake everything I own on him having been a mute objector, but some people just can't look past the uniform."

The military establishment from Thirteen had a different problem - despite their disdain for the Peacekeepers, they thought that having generals be defendants in a criminal trial was an insult to the noble profession of arms. Their foreign colleagues agreed, probably imagining themselves in the dock following any conflict that got 'out of hand', as they put it. That drove Mary round the bend - she was a reserve officer herself, but she didn't understand this strange solidarity.

"Exactly," Isabella agreed. Goran Briscoe of Six was standing next to her and melting black-market sugar in a ladle as she walked him through the process. "Some people from my team had issues because they had worn the white. I sorted it out, though." She turned her face to Goran. "Has it started melting?"

"A little bit on the outside has."

"Start stirring. Be careful not to have any fall on the hot coil."

Joe walked into the kitchen, wearing a bathrobe over the rags he slept in. Several people glanced suspiciously at Mary. "Guess who I just talked to," he said.

"A journalist," Mary replied. They had found out that the prosecutors were being billeted here and were besieging the place. Good thing they were moving out in a few days. Several new arrivals had deemed the place too cramped and were instead commandeering rooms from random Capitol citizens.

"Not just any journalist," Joe said with a slight smirk. "His name is Ante Pavelic."

The prosecutors who knew their Europe chuckled. "I wonder what political party his parents vote for," Aoife Levron, who had been leaning against the wall with a cup of coffee in hand, joked.

"Speaking of political parties," Goran spoke up, "the Liberals are planning a gathering today." The party of small businesses and self-employed professionals had the fewest ties to Thirteen's old discussion groups, due there having been none of either before. Thirteen was changing much faster than the big country, though - outdoor buildings were soaring into the air, and soon, Rithvik would be living above-ground.

"Of course they are," Isabella said. "Now that these activists are back in the country, they're going all-out."

"How is the indictment going?" Mary asked. Last night, she had been in IDC meetings until late at night. The Districts were behaving more like thirteen different countries that refused to get along and bickered over every little thing. The Capitol was lucky that it was under military government.

Reed stole a pinch of sugar from the bag next to Isabella and dumped it in his coffee.

"I heard that!" Isabella complained. Goran was pouring the sugar onto a piece of wax-paper, making little puddles a centimetre or two in diameter.

"Progress is good," Reed said. "But the interrogators will be thrilled - it'll be weeks until we can indict them." Until that happened, they were technically POWs and could be interrogated at will. That was not very good, but Mary had made it clear that nobody was to be tortured or threatened with being extradited to somewhere the locals had a very low opinion of them.

Joe poured himself some coffee. "You want to hear an interesting story about Talvian?"

"If it's a joke about her height, not interested," said Goran, who was a metre fifty himself.

"It's not. Apparently, she's very disappointed at the low skill of the interrogators and is almost offended to have been captured by someone so incompetent. She expected waterboarding and rape, and they're only capable of clumsy confusion strategies."

Mary drank some hot water, which was rapidly becoming lukewarm. A disadvantage of the relaxed mealtimes here. "These clumsy strategies are making her say everything the interrogators want, so I don't see what she's complaining about." She paused. "Though I suppose she thinks she's just sharing the tricks of the trade with them, not admitting to crimes." From the interrogation transcripts, it was clear that Talvian was convinced she had done everything like any other internal intelligence agency did. She was also not too upset with her own arrest, thinking it just a normal part of having that position. Her own predecessor had died under torture on her orders, and now she thought it was her turn.

Reed picked up a piece of sugar candy and popped it in his mouth. "Mmm, it's great!" he said, rolling it around his mouth. Mary could hear the candy click against his teeth.

"I still think we need some black pepper, at least," Amber said, staring at the pot of pasta with a look of infinite sadness on her face.

Janie stood at attention, uniform pressed and shoes polished, as Lieutenant Stephen Vance explained their new duties. Janie wished she could look over at Dusk, but the lieutenant was not someone you could do that in front of.

Lieutenant Vance had once been an interrogator, and it showed. He barked commands at them as if he hadn't spoken gently to a POW janitor just minutes ago, asking how his family was doing. It took all of Janie's effort to not wither as the lieutenant explained exactly what he thought about the discipline of the occupying troops.

"You will be guarding the most dangerous criminals the world has ever seen!" he said, marching up and down the line. "Less than a year ago, many of you were suffering under their yoke. You are their jailers, not their servants. I will not stand for any chatting or contraband, and if I find that my troops have lowered themselves to the status of courier, the miscreant will be sternly punished."

All of a sudden, the plan to get Chaterhan's autographs felt like a really stupid idea. Janie remembered what it had been like in the steel mill. How people had been executed on the spot for underfulfilling quotas one too many times. How, when her little siblings had been born, her parents had been forced to go work in the noise and heat with the little ones strapped to their backs.

Still, though, what did Vance know? It was Janie's own business, how she got her revenge. Maybe she just wanted to laugh at Chaterhan and make money off him. It'd serve him right.

Lieutenant Vance continued describing the routine they would be living. The key criminals would be observed around the clock in twelve-hour shifts - two hours on, one hour off, repeat four times. The other wings would be patrolled in a more relaxed way, with one person patrolling four cells for six hours. There was also sentry duty, looking impressive in the Justice Building proper, and all sorts of other things. Laundry and cleaning would be taken care of by POW workers.

Vance went on a little rant about how angry he was about all the good soldiers demobbing. "I understand that many of you have families you want to go back to," he said in a gentler voice. "But until then, you are under my command. Act like it."

He then continued to explain the routine. A makeshift barracks had been constructed, where they would live. He had already instructed the NCOs that he wouldn't tolerate black-market activity. Janie doubted that, but she really didn't want to be caught by Lieutenant Vance. From his decorations, it was clear that he had never been in combat - officers like that tended to be very insecure.

Janie wished she was in Tav's bed, and not here.

At all times, there would be two NCOs in each cell block, to keep an eye on prisoners and guards alike. Janie hoped they'd soften up quickly. She had gotten used to sergeants who sold perfume from under their cots.

Threats done, Lieutenant Vance began to explain day-to-day life in the jail. The detained witnesses, 'lesser' criminals, and the soon-to-be-arriving key criminals all needed a different level of supervision. "As I just said, the witnesses and so-called lesser criminals are being patrolled four cells at a time. If the mental health team finds it necessary, they will be put under closer surveillance. I will not have anyone thumbing their nose at me by killing themselves before they face their just punishment." He thundered that as if convinced everyone would be trying to do just that. "Daily schedules are posted in your barracks, if you cannot read well enough to understand them, ask someone. Classes are being offered here."

Despite that, he explained the schedule in detail until Janie's knees began to feel sore from all the standing. She carefully unlocked her knees just a tiny bit, making sure not to sag. The detainees had to wake up at six and wash up. Someone would be over to shave the men three times a week. The witnesses and lesser criminals ate standard rations in a cafeteria, the key criminals would eat in their cells for security reasons. After that, there was a complicated schedule of which batch of prisoners could go outside while the others sat in their cells or were interrogated. The key criminals wouldn't go outside until Lieutenant Vance made sure that the internal yard they would be using was suicide-proof.

The prisoners could read books (preferably foreign or pre-unification), but absolutely no newspapers. If Lieutenant Vance found a prisoner with one, the guard would be found and punished. The prisoners were allowed to talk to a doctor if they felt the need, and mental health experts would be dropping by at will to do their research.

Prisoners' cells were being searched daily, and the prisoners themselves - every week, when they went to have a proper shower. Of course, that wasn't enough for the key criminals, who were going to be searched every day. Lieutenant Vance rattled off a list of things the detainees at his centre had managed to hamster away - paper clips, bits of wire and paper, string, nails, pebbles, glass, soap. Janie realized that if someone died on her watch, she'd be blamed, and gulped.

The key criminals would be monitored in a way that'd have driven Janie to insanity. No chair at night, not allowed to touch the window without permission, hands must be kept above the blanket when sleeping no matter the temperature and they had to sleep on their backs even though the light would never be turned off, glasses only under supervision, every sheaf of paper passing between them and their lawyer would be searched, and only one letter sent and received weekly, strictly censored.

"Unfortunately," Lieutenant Vance said, "I do not have the human power to supervise the rest of the jail so closely. When you are stationed there, I expect you to adhere as closely to the guidelines as possible."

Several hours later, they arrived at the barracks holding their things. Once again, there was not enough space to divide up, so women were on one side of the building, and men - on the other. Janie and Dusk got spaces right on the border.

Their fellow guards were for the most part rejects volunteered by their higher-ups. Others had volunteered thinking of the money that could be made, like Dusk and Janie. One had volunteered out of a sincere desire to witness the trial. Everyone was mostly really young. Lieutenant Vance had complained about how using underage guards made them look like hypocrites, but Janie didn't understand what he was worried about. It's not like the underage had been sent into combat, like with the Peacekeepers, and war orphans had to go somewhere.

And in any case, there weren't that many blatantly underage guards. Most were around Janie's age, barely underage or barely of age. Some were slightly older - the much-older had been demobbed - and Janie didn't like them on sight. All of them had some sort of disciplinary issues, and acted like it. There were some older adolescents, sixteen to eighteen, and a cluster of kids so small, it was impossible to tell what gender they were by looking at them. Right now, they were sitting on the floor and giggling about something.

Someone was already taking out a case of beer from their bag. An older man who had his cot next to Dusk's. "So," he said. "I see we're a team now." A fourteen-year-old hand reached for the beer and was slapped gently away. "Nuh-uh," the man, who was probably in his mid-twenties, said with a twinkle in his eye. "I don't think you're nineteen."

The little guard crossed their arms on their chest. Watching them, Janie thought of her siblings. "So what?" they asked in a squeaky voice. "I was in combat." They pointed to a ribbon on their chest. They had participated in the liberation of Six.

The man raised his eyebrows in pretend surprise. "Well, I can't refuse a hero like you."

"You're making fun of me." The little soldier glared at the man before stomping off to join their new friends.

"They're so cute," the man giggled, looking much nicer when he wasn't glaring at everything. He looked around him. "Do any of you want to see a funny picture of one of the lawyers?" Nods all around. "Here," he said, taking it out of his pocket.

In the photo, a child of twelve or so was posing in a cadet uniform. "Aww," everyone said in unison. The child had adorably pinchable round cheeks, and their serious expression just made Janie want to ruffle their short-cropped hair. "Who's that?"

The guard checked the back of the picture. "Michael Wreath, aged twelve. He's going to be representing one of the admirals. Was a judge or something."

A judge. Janie had a hard time believing that a judge could have once been so cute. But then again, wasn't everyone tiny and cute once? Even the key criminals had once been babies cooed over by proud parents. Weird to think about.

Janie went back to her cot. She unpacked her things, wondering what the key criminals' parents were thinking of them now. Now that was a thought to give you nightmares.

A/N: Janie's musings on the free market equalizing prices and wages nationwide is mostly how it will happen once rationing ends and proper transport links are built. Of course, differences will remain, due to transport costs and the like - see the extremely high cost of living in the Canadian arctic.

Macleans dot ca/society/health/the-inuk-woman-using-tiktok-to-expose-high-food-prices-in-the-north/

Fortunately for Panemians, the country seldom reaches the 49th parallel (which marks a chunk of the modern US-Canada border) so they don't have to deal with anything like that, but there are plenty of people in remote communities who will be upset that the amazing new goods they now have access to are practically unaffordable. Wages and salaries will become relatively equitable, but the poorest will get the short end of the stick - nobody wants their skilled workers and employees to leave, but there's always no shortage of people ready to do minimum-wage work (of course, minimum wages are a creation of the new Panem), so what they want can be disregarded.

The money being stolen on 'the endless replacement of cobblestones and curbs' is a direct shoutout to Moscow's infamous corruption. Thank you, Sergey 'Curbstone' Sobyanin.

The small-town deaf man in Three who signs very formally is similar to how I, who only speak my native language with my family, don't sound like a young person at all due to a total lack of contact with peers I could have picked up slang and whatnot from.