As if that order to give no quarter had not been bad enough, the prosecution presented a witness. William Demin was a short man with a squeaky voice who looked fearfully around the room as he was sworn in. Antonius looked at the clock. Still one hour to go.

Demin's background was quite simple - a farmer from Nine, he had joined up as soon as he could and ended up in combat shortly afterwards. He had been taken prisoner in his very first battle. Antonius tossed a glare at Lux, who was the reason why this was happening in the first place, and prepared to listen to a fresh portion of horrors.

"What happened once you were taken prisoner?"

"We were disarmed and marched somewhere," Demin squeaked. "It took maybe an hour, but there were wounded among us. They were shot when they couldn't walk fast enough to keep up."

"Where were you taken?"

Demin scratched his chin. "An empty lot of some sort. There was a brick wall there, marking the boundaries of a field. There was a crossroads nearby."

The prosecutor continued reading emotionlessly. "What happened next?"

Trembling, Demin licked at his lips. "I thought we were just going to wait for trucks to arrive or something. We were standing by- by the wall." He scratched at his neck. "We stood there and waited for a minute or so. It was dark - the night was more or less clear, but there wasn't any artificial light aside from a few flashlights the Peacekeepers were using." He paused, took a deep breath, and set his jaw. "All of a sudden, someone close to me started whispering gibberish," he said, words tumbling out of his mouth almost too fast to keep up with. "I was confused. I looked around and met the eyes of the person next to me. All of a sudden, her eyes went wide with shock - I remember that clearly - and she started reciting the Our Father."

"Witness, please speak slower."

"Sure." Demin drank some water. "So I was standing there, terrified out of my wits. No idea how much time passed. I prayed, too. All of a sudden, there was gunfire. I was hit and fell down. They kept on firing for a really long time, to make sure everyone was dead. I stayed there, frozen, until they left, and then until dawn. I didn't hear anyone else move around. I was bleeding from my wounds, though they were fairly light. I managed to climb over the wall and crawl to the house, which was inhabited."

The defendants seemed to be torn between horror at what they were hearing in the courtroom and hope. Some were flailing impotently, some still hoped the trial would fall apart, and others did both at once.

"I don't understand how I got mixed up in these sorts of things," Lux said, looking at the ground. "That stuff with the massacres. I was a soldier."

"You were a soldier."

Lux gnashed his teeth and hit his cot with his fist. "I shouldn't have hunted for those promotions. I could have been depurated and living my life, but I'm stuck here!"

Outside, it was raining, and pleasantly cool. The sound was soothing - but not to someone who hadn't been allowed outside for months, despite Miroslav's requests. "You wish you hadn't been promoted?"

Lux nodded. "If I could do it all over again, I'd have never joined the armed forces." His face crumpled, and Miroslav could see he was struggling not to cry. "I thought I was serving honourably. Doing my job. Keeping the nation safe." How he could have thought that given the orders his signature was on was a mystery, one Miroslav intended to probe.

"You thought that order to shoot children for a stalk of rice was keeping the nation safe?"

It took Lux some time to compose himself. "But what could I have done? I was taught that good soldiers followed orders."

"But you were the one who gave these orders," Miroslav reminded him.

"I was used to that level of harshness. I only knew one way of dealing with crime and unrest - cracking down."

"A child picking up a stalk of rice, though?"

Lux glared at him. "Doctor, are you here to help me or to drive me insane?" he snapped. "I wanted to stop theft. I didn't realize how it would be interpreted. There were always isolated fanatics taking things to some crazy level."

"Isolated fanatics - such as yourself early on?"

Lux opened his mouth and closed it. He ran a hand over his head, looked at the door, then at the window, and sighed. "I thought I was doing my duty," he insisted. "What do you want from me?"

"I want you to be honest with yourself."

"Honesty was never prized, now that I think about it," Lux said. "Everyone always lied in their reports to make themselves look better. It's ironic that even the NCIA wasn't immune to the chaos. But they did manage to kill many innocent people, incompetent as they were."

He was not wrong there. They may have been laughable with their poisoned underwear, but they had still caused untold misery. "What do you think of Talvian?" Miroslav asked.

Lux huffed. "I went to her wedding. In all her photos where the guests were present, camera tricks were used to make her look taller. Did you hear that joke about life-sized miniature portraits?"

"I have." Four separate defendants had shared that one with him.

"I think I'm just impressed she managed to dig up a man as pocket-sized as her."

According to her, her husband's height had nothing to do with why she had fallen in love with him, but Miroslav was reasonably sure that was the reason why she found him physically attractive. It was different with the oversized Krechet - he had met his wife on a blind date set up by a mutual friend going off the instructions, given by both parties, that the other person must be at least a metre ninety.

The fact that Talvian and Krechet sat next to each other in the dock caused no end of jokes and helped Krechet's case a great deal. Look at me, Krechet seemed to say. I'm just a dumb log doing what I'm told. Just listen to my accent. If the superior orders defense was allowed, Krechet would benefit the most.

Lux may have used that excuse, as did the other military people, but they had given too many criminal orders that were not covered by it.

"Did you ever want a family of your own?" Miroslav asked.

"No," Lux said. "I was never interested in relationships or having children. But I do miss my family. One of my niblings just got back from Seven."

"Is that the one who needed the heart surgery?" Miroslav asked, checking his notes. He had entire family trees drawn up to keep track of everyone's cousins and what they were doing.

"Yes. They kept him until he was fully recovered and now he's back." Lux smiled slightly. "Doctor, do you think they'll let us see our families?"

"I'm sorry, but I'm still working on it." Vance's paranoia knew no bounds.

Lux sighed. "Oh, well. There's always letters. Doctor, what should I tell my brother about this all? Poor man is beside himself with worry."

Rye was irritated by how an investigation into Peacekeepers having been supplied with rotten food got more traction than testimony about how prisoners of war had been deliberately not given food, but she knew she shouldn't have been surprised. Half the Capitol had signed up to fight, so who they tended to sympathize with was obvious.

"Anything interesting?" Tina Hudson asked, looking up from her own computer.

"Not really."

"How's the cat doing?"

The well-being of Bao was the one thing Rye was not worried about. "Growing like on yeast. I'll get back and she'll be the size of a tiger."

Hudson laughed. "It's not even the kids whose growth you're missing. It's the cat."

"Don't remind me." Rye scrolled some more through the investigation. "Have you seen the investigation about the rotten food?"

"Hasn't everyone?" Hudson said bitterly. She, too, was upset at the locals' priorities. "If they're so worried about the food, maybe tomorrow will freak them out something fierce."

"Optimistic."

"Hello," Carver said from the doorframe. There was a book lying on her lap. "Are you working on anything?"

"Husband sent me pictures of the cat."

The phrase 'pictures of the cat' was enough to make even Carver want to leap up and rush over. Biology, however, could not be defeated, so she had to settle for moving over. "How's it going?" Carver asked. Rye pulled up the photos. "Oh, wow, I think she's going to be bigger than your daughter soon."

Bao spent most of her time lying in a tight ball on whichever high place Mitch and Flo couldn't reach. She looked so little, it was a shock to see her fully extended and massive. The tiny ball of floof was in reality very, very, long. And she wasn't so small anymore - she couldn't fit under the couch or between the living-room bookshelf and the wall.

"By the way," Hudson said, "I'm getting surgery next week. Thought I should notify you."

Hudson had never mentioned having medical problems severe enough to warrant surgery. "Is it major?" Rye asked, feeling worried.

"What kind of postoperative care will you need?" Carver asked. "Will you need your living arrangements temporarily changed? Will you need help with anything? I'm sure I can arrange for Lope to be paid extra, she spends most of her time waiting for me to need her anyway."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Hudson waved her hands in front of her. "I'll be fine on my own once I'm out of the hospital, I'll just have to stay there for a week or so, and avoid anything strenuous for six weeks. I'm not sick or anything, I'm just getting a vaginoplasty."

Rye could only blink. Hudson had never mentioned that she didn't have a vagina - though in what context would that have been relevant to bring up? "You mean you're getting one created where there wasn't one before or you're getting an existing one fixed?" she clarified.

"I'm getting one made from scratch - or my existing genitals, I suppose. Honestly, I needed to have it done decades ago, but there was always something else I needed to pay for. Now that medically necessary procedures are actually free, I can just submit a psychiatrist's prescription of surgery to treat my dysphoria and get it done. I've been waiting for months to get a date set, but what's a few more months?"

"I'm glad," Rye said. "If it makes you feel better, we've been sharing a room for this entire time and the thought never entered my head that you could be anything but assigned female at birth." She couldn't imagine living for so long with a body that didn't match her mind, but it sounded agonizing.

"That's why I always wear at least a pair of shorts," Hudson muttered.

"Nah, that's basic politeness," Carver quipped. "Now if only I could convince Husk Goldfield that Anna's the only person in the world who wants to see him in just his underwear."

Hudson laughed. "You just here to procrastinate or is there something important?" she asked Carver.

Carver smiled slightly. "Both, but our lord and master just called me to ask the status of the presentations."

"Not me?" Rye asked irritably. Now that Anna Goldfield spent her days in another courtroom prosecuting the assistant Gamemakers, Rye was the one who was officially the second-in-command.

"He assumed you're busy with work."

"Bold of him," Hudson said. "What's that book?"

Carver looked at the book and fidgeted with the cover. She could read books, as long as they were put into her lap. "One of the historians ambushed me when Perry and I were at the black market. She somehow found out I'm doing the presentation on Camp R and gifted me a book about the nineteenth-century USA civil war. About some POW camp called Andersonville specifically - I managed to get out of her that conditions there were so bad, the camp commander was executed after the war for war crimes."

Given how mangled postwar justice had been after that one, that said a lot about the camp commander.

"Wait," Hudson said. "How did the historian find you?"

"No idea. Perry almost jumped out of his skin - didn't expect to be confronted by someone ranting about war crimes from half a millennium ago while buying sexy underwear."

"Already planning his triumphal return or trying to spice up the videocalls?" Rye asked. On the extremely rare occasions when she and Barrow could have that kind of call, they usually were both too tired for anything other than idle chitchat.

"Both, I think. He's under the delusion that it will make her pay attention to him. I told him she's fallen out of love at best and is cheating at worst, but he doesn't listen."

Carver and Torres were endless founts of gossip. "Maybe she's just not feeling well right now," Rye pointed out.

"And she doesn't say so? It doesn't bode well if she can't say something so basic at this state in their relationship." She leaned closer, or at least as close as she could without properly functioning abdominal muscles. "When Smith got a parcel from his husband and started doling out the treats to the men, Perry became upset and went to his room. It's a sign. Torres told me he was moping all of yesterday evening."

Hudson sat up. "Treats?"

"The men from Two joined in and ate them all."

"I bet they went stale in the post in any case," Hudson grumbled, slouching back down.

The next morning was Carver's presentation on the prisoner-of-war-camps. They had already gone over the mass shootings of POWs, but now it was time to give a voice to those who were lucky enough to survive the first few hours. Carver sat next to the lectern and scrolled through her phone. She wasn't the only wheelchair user on the prosecution, but the others all had full use of their upper bodies.

After the presentation of a signed order from the Head Peacekeeper Flora Katz, who was currently being tried in a different courtroom, to not 'waste food on the prisoners', a witness was brought in to explain what form that took.

"We were marched under light guard for half a day," Billie Tailor said. Both the name and the age - Billie was nineteen years old - made Rye think of her own daughter. This Billie still looked unwell, shaking as if cold, with bad skin, hollow eyes, and very thin. She looked simultaneously younger and older than her real age. "People were shot if they as much as paused, so nobody tried to run. We couldn't even stop to go to the bathroom. There was no food and water."

"Were there wounded among you?" Carver asked.

"Anyone who couldn't walk was shot."

"Were those who were capable of walking given medical treatment?"

"No."

A far cry from the articles returning POWs were writing for the news in the Capitol. Here, everyone gushed about how the treatment was perfectly good, they were very grateful to their captors for revealing to them that they had been serving an evil cause the entire time, and were now ready to forget it all and move on with life.

"Were there civilians among you?"

"Anyone not in uniform - fighters in our parts wore armbands and caps - was shot on the spot."

Rye felt extremely lucky to have lived in a large city, and one that had been quickly liberated on top of that.

Carver nodded. "Now, what happened once you arrived to your destination?"

Billie - Tailor - drank some water. "We got to a clearing surrounded by barbed wire and were dumped inside. It was by a creek, and that was all the water we got. There was no food and no latrines, no nothing. Only sometimes would they throw bits of something, and everyone had to fight over the scraps. When we got there, people were already dying like flies. The bodies got in the creek and made it dirty. We only had our hands to dig with."

Rye tried to imagine her Billie in a place like this. It was impossible. Her mind revolted against it.

"Did you attempt to ask the guards for supplies?"

Tailor nodded. "The camp commander said that his job was to hold us until we died. The only way to get clean food and water was to sleep with him or one of the higher-ranking guards. Thing is, they picked people unfit for combat for guard duty, and they were always insecure about that, and took it out on us. There was a man who approached one of the guards, and the guard and her friends gang-raped him and shoved a gun muzzle inside him and threatened to fire. He died of infection."

"Did you sleep with a guard?"

"Yes. He gave me his rations and let me drink from the kettle. I was also put into a different section of the camp, where it was cleaner."

"Was he cruel?"

"No. He just wanted to have sex, not hurt someone. I picked him because I never saw him hitting anyone. Some of the guards went around beating people to death, or shooting them, or whatever."

Carver nodded and scrolled through her notes. "What happened to those who could not secure food and water?"

"They drank from the dirty creek and died within days. There was nothing to boil water with. It was just a completely bare patch of ground that turned to mud where the creek started. People tried to escape, but there were pods all around, and if one went off, they shot ten people. When I first got there, I saw the dying crawling around. They were called worms, because they even ate the mud, until they became too weak to eat."

"Were there any ways besides sex work to get food and water?"

"No. Commander said we were supposed to die. Everyone knew that was the point of Camp R. We were only kept around if someone wanted to sleep with us. People were often brought in already sick and weak, after having marched for days. I'm lucky I was still attractive when I got there, else nobody would have wanted to sleep with me."

Rye wanted to put her head on the table, but the cameras would doubtlessly catch that. She settled for looking away from Billie.

Antonius' end of the dock was abuzz. "Horrible," Blues whispered.

"I don't understand," Krechet muttered to Talvian, whose face was carefully blank.

"What do you think?" Lee asked, showing the portrait of the witness he had drawn to Kirji. He demonstratively turned away from Coll, who had gone on about responsibility the other day at lunch.

"I don't think she wants a portrait from you," Grass pointed out.

"Rubbish. Everyone wants a portrait from me. I'm the most famous artist in Panem." Not because of skill - Lee could have lived off his art, had he wanted, but he would not have been even close to rich - but because of notoriety. Many were shocked to find out that one of the key criminals was an artist.

Coll leaned over to see the picture, arms draped over the back of the bench. "Why didn't you go into art? You're so skilled."

Lee put the picture down and added a few finishing touches. He was working with a pencil and no eraser. According to him, working in such a way was an interesting challenge - a medium where one could usually fix their mistakes becoming one where every line was permanent. "I did," he said. "I double-majored in university, studied visual art. But there was always an understanding that art was a hobby and I would work in the government, like my mother."

That made sense. Antonius turned back to look at the witness. He wondered if maybe she had something she would have rather done instead of being a tenant on someone else's land. Then, he wondered why he cared about that.

After the fiftieth time the prosecution presented information about atrocities, Mary listened to her colleagues with one ear while wondering what would be for lunch. When Sanchez announced lunch break, she stood up gratefully and went to eat. In the corridor, she saw an MP talking to the witness from earlier on during the session.

"He made this for you," the MP said, handing the young woman a rolled-up sheet of paper.

"Who?" She unrolled it and gasped. "Wow. He's an amazing artist."

Mary stopped in her tracks to listen.

"Er, it was drawn by Lee." No reaction. "Fat man fourth from right on the back bench."

Tailor's mouth fell open. "One of the defendants drew this? Which one? I wasn't looking at them."

Mary moved on so that they wouldn't notice her eavesdropping. The defendants were certainly an odd bunch. But then again, nobody could appear in the courtroom every day without becoming decidedly odd.

For lunch, there was noodle soup, rice, canned fruits, and peanut butter sandwiches. The ones from Thirteen who had shown up that morning were joined by the ones working on the other trials and those who'd be there in the afternoon. More than the main trial, the other ones were being considered to be Thirteen-led - District people tended to be more interested in non-key criminals that were being tried where they had committed their crimes. Those who had more than one District clamouring for the right to try them fell through the cracks and were forgotten by the general public.

"Are you going to the restaurant tonight?" Reed asked her.

If she had forgotten about the arrival of some important person- "Who's visiting this time?"

"Nobody. I'm just wondering. You never go."

"Neither do you," Mary reminded him. The noodles tasted like cardboard.

"I'm busy all the time with four trials and need to call my wife." He ate some rice, hunched over the tray to avoid spilling even a single grain. For that reason, rice back home had always been sticky. "If I could bring her in-"

That same debate again. "Military government says no."

Reed huffed. "To put it very crudely, I don't think there will be issues in finding your husband a place to sleep."

It was a tempting thought. The others chuckled, doubtlessly thinking about that incident with the tapped phone, as Mary wondered why even Thirteeners were being stubborn about elementary rules. "Resources are stretched. The less food spent on people who don't need to be here, the better. Weren't you saying the other week that your wife's hospital is understaffed in any case? They'd never let her go." Reed's wife was a neurosurgeon.

"I guess," Reed sighed. "At least there's videocalls."

"How wholesome," muttered Emma Ilves, who was single and could thus openly sleep with half the Capitol.

"Is that an insult?" Reed wondered.

"Not if you're as old and boring as you." Emma led the prosecution in the Peacekeepers' trial, so the two were very friendly by now.

"You know," Lior cut in, "it's interesting how the same sort of things are perceived in different relationships. Nudes someone sent to their hookup? Scandalous. Nudes someone sent to their spouse? Everyone clucks about an invasion of privacy."

"Please," Mary said, "let's not talk about that." She was still asked by journalists from time to time about that failed blackmail attempt.

"Well, of course," Lavanya said. "Being married legitimizes a relationship and makes it automatically proper. Even in Thirteen, there's a faint stigma on premarital sex."

Jane picked up her sandwich. "Why are we discussing this?"

"Because it's interesting." Lavanya picked up a piece of apple with her spoon and stared at it as if the nuclear codes were written on the soft fruit. "In some parts of the country, it makes sense. Promiscuity raises one's chances of contracting a disease they will not be able to cure - but that does not apply to Thirteen, where someone with, say, AIDS could just use condoms, and that's not getting into the medications we had that made HIV+ people incapable of passing the virus on. If a woman with no access to birth control has sex with men, there is the risk of pregnancy, which is bad if she can't afford a child and has no access to safe abortion - but that wasn't an issue in Thirteen, either, and that doesn't apply to same-sex couples in any case. It's just a carryover of old worries in a setting where they don't apply anymore."

Mary said nothing. What Lavanya said was interesting, but Mary didn't have anything to contribute to the conversation.

"So how does getting married solve these problems?" Lior asked.

"In a heterosexual marriage, which are the vast majority, there is now an implicit guarantee that the man won't just ditch if the woman gets pregnant. Of course, not as big of an issue in Thirteen, where most people were infertile in any case for the past fifteen years. It becomes assumed that alright, now it's a real relationship." Lavanya scrutinized another piece of fruit, a plum slice. What was she looking for? "And if two people who are virgins get married, it's very unlikely they have a disease that can be transmitted via sexual contact."

"Interesting," Lior said, jotting something down. "I'm going to have to look up some research on this. I wonder how religion affects it. Even a society like ours still has some carryovers when it comes to our understandings of morality."

"I just had a thought," Reed said, sandwich halfway to his mouth. "When your conversation was leaked," he nodded at Mary, "I bet everyone was just jealous of you."

"I certainly was," Emma said. "I hope my life is so good when I'm your age."

Mary had never before worked in a setting where it was appropriate to discuss each other's sex lives during lunch with one's coworkers. "Thank you," she said, and ate her sandwich. The bread was stale.

"So," Xander asked, "what's happening this afternoon?"

Thumeka sat down in her seat just in time. The doors were shut and the judges filed in, so she had to stand up all over again. Mikola and Jiao were already there. They had gone for lunch together, but Thumeka had stayed behind to buy some donut holes.

Once they could sit, she opened up the box of eighteen donut holes. There had only been three flavours at that point - chocolate, sour cream glazed, and plain - but any donut holes were better than no donut holes.

Yemurai didn't understand how they could eat overly sugary snacks during atrocity testimony, but what she also didn't understand was that Thumeka was so inured to the suffering, words could not stir her emotions anymore. She watched the prison guard take the stand, a tired-looking young woman that was just the slightest bit hunched over. The former guard, whose name was Lauren Fyre, according to the schedule on Thumeka's phone, raised her right hand to speak the oath with the precision of a salute. She spoke with a normal volume, unlike the officers, who could be heard even by some of the deaf.

Fyre explained that she was from a village in Two and had enlisted as soon as the war had begun. Due to a heart defect, she was assigned to be a guard at Camp R in District Nine, the same place the morning's witness had been held in. She described the conditions in the camp and what her fellow guards were like in an even tone.

"There were a few brutal ones," she said. "And there was always a handful that got there, refused to serve there, and requested reassignment. Most of us just went with the flow."

Thumeka noticed the psychiatrist taking careful notes. The psychologist who had been on duty that morning had been replaced. Thumeka had noticed him eating donuts at a table by the coffee shop during lunch.

"It was possible to refuse?" The prosecutor was the same one who had examined the survivor that morning, a woman from Nine in a motorized wheelchair.

"Yes."

Courtroom 7 would not be happy to hear that.

Jiao leaned over. "That disproves everything the soldiers are saying." She took out her phone, looked at the screen, and sighed. "They want me commenting on both of these once the testimony ends." She worked for a national television channel.

"Can we lurk in the background?" Thumeka joked. Both she and Mikola worked for newspapers, so they seldom had to appear in front of cameras.

The direct examination was still going on. "You say that you saw people being shot and kicked to death every day with no reasons given. Were you aware that that was murder?"

"Yes."

"Did you try to report it?"

Fyre's hands tightened around the sides of the witness stand. "It was obvious everyone knew about it already." She looked slightly lost now.

"Were there perhaps rules that one could not speak about this?"

"Yes," Fyre said gratefully. "We were told we'd be shot for revealing state secrets."

"But people were allowed to request reassignment?"

"Yes." She sounded less confident now. "That was different. They were already taking not the best human material for guard duty. They couldn't have weak people doing such a difficult job." Did she believe that herself or was she just parroting the slogans?

"What were signs of weakness?"

"Being nice to the prisoners, giving them food. We weren't supposed to give them food, but the commander slept with prisoners himself, so he couldn't stop us from doing the same."

The prosecutor took a sip of water from a bottle through a straw. "Did you give prisoners food?"

"Yes."

"Did you ask for anything in return?"

"I had sex with them," she said awkwardly, glancing around the courtroom as if expecting her parents to be sitting in the audience section.

"How did you pick who to have sex with?"

Fyre shrugged, looking down. "When there were new arrivals, I'd pick a good-looking one. I was kind to them," she said almost desperately. "I didn't hit them, like some of the others. And I gave them plenty of food. They'll testify they were healthy when the camp was liberated."

Thumeka seriously doubted anyone would ever go after an ordinary guard who hadn't been noticeably brutal. In other countries, she would have had to fear being made into a scapegoat, but responsibility was being flipped on its head here. The government leaders and generals were in the dock, and ordinary guards were only there as witnesses for the prosecution.

"How many such partners did you have?" the prosecutor asked.

Baer spoke up. "I fail to see how that is relevant."

"It is very relevant. The Tribunal needs to know what sort of behaviour was condoned and tolerated at Camp R."

"The prosecution has already established that the witness had sexual liaisons with prisoners. Questions about frequency or amount of partners will only serve to influence the Tribunal's opinion on her personal character; the mere fact of the existence of these liaisons is enough for the purposes of this examination."

Sanchez thought for a second. "Prosecutor Carver, please rephrase the question so that it is less focused on the details of who the Witness chose to coerce into sexual intercourse, as the Tribunal has already heard everything it wants to hear on that matter."

Carver nodded. "Yes, Your Honour. Witness, did many guards sleep with prisoners?"

"Yes. Almost everyone had at least one person."

"You say 'at least one'. Was it common to have multiple partners?"

"Yes."

"And did any of them have multiple partners in ordinary life?"

Baer stood up again. "This is speculating about the personal lives of people the witness is not known to have been close enough to to discuss such topics."

"Objection sustained. Counsel, refrain from asking questions that invite the Witness to speculate."

"Of course," Carver said. "You said you were not cruel like some of the others. Did others mistreat the prisoners they slept with?"

"Some did. Our prisoners were kept in a separate enclosure, and you could see that some of them had bruises, couldn't walk properly, had finger marks on their necks. These people would use a prisoner until they became unappealing and then they'd grab another one."

"Guards shot prisoners of their own volition?"

"Yes."

"Were guards ever ordered to shoot prisoners?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because of the overcrowding."

"How did the shootings happen?"

Fyre wrung her hands. "Commander would tell an officer that there were too many people. I remember he mentioned an order from the C-in-C a few times." Lux tensed almost imperceptibly and wrote something down. "Officer would gather a team. Offer us extra alcohol. That's why I agreed to testify, I have to say this, I can't just console myself by knowing I was following orders. We'd take them to a ravine in the forest. Make them stand on an embankment and shoot them dead. What sticks with me the most is how once I had to shoot a ten-year-old guerrilla. He was just a little boy and he was screaming so terribly, I still hear him screaming in my dreams. I thought maybe if I tell about this in court I will feel better."

Carver entered that order into evidence and continued. "How do you know the child was a boy?"

"The prisoners were stripped naked before their executions. We executioners were given the clothes as a reward and sent them home. My little cousin wears the boy's clothes now. She has no idea where it came from."

If Thumeka thought about it, this was absolutely horrifying. Prisoners of war had been dumped onto a barren patch of mud, their only hope of survival being sleeping with guards who could turn out to be maniacs. This was worse than in England, and it had been bad enough there. The only consolation was that the Panem civil war had been so fast, relatively few people died.

After the direct examination, it was time for cross. The lawyers were firmer with the guard than they had been with the survivor. With Tailor, they had been clearly hesitant and keeping themselves back, as if this was a political trial and an important person was in the stand. On one hand, it was good that the lawyers weren't harassing survivors of atrocities in court, but on the other, they were like an animal that had lived its life in a cage and couldn't step beyond the boundary even when the cage was removed.

On second thought, that was the entirety of Panem. In some ways, they had taken to democracy well. They voted in elections, organized themselves on the Web, unionized, formed political parties. But on the other, they still looked over their shoulders before complaining about the government, still leapt into the air from shock when seeing a politician in a ration queue. The more time Thumeka spent in Panem, the gladder she was that she would be able to leave one day. But these people would be stuck with whatever they could make of it.

A/N: The investigation into rotten food is inspired by the Anti-Corruption Foundation's investigation of how Evgeni Prigozhin makes money off contracts with the National Guard.

Fyre's testimony is inspired by 'K-41' and Drazen Erdemovič, ICTY witnesses who testified about participating in massacres.