Antonius sat at his table and read the letter from his family as the radio blared, the guards trying to compensate for the fact that they couldn't play it in the evenings. Given that most of them could barely scrawl their names, Antonius doubted they were interested in a debate about taxes. Most likely, they were just playing the first thing they caught.

Achilleus wrote that he was doing well and enjoying helping out in the garden. Since the Big House was now a shelter, the spacious yard had been converted into a vegetable garden to help feed the unwashed hordes. Octavia was much less enthusiastic about having been forced to work the earth, but she knew it was pointless to argue.

Antonius kept on thinking about what he would have done had he been there, but there was no point to thoughts like that. Had he been with his family, none of this would have been happening.

The door opened. "Time for your walk."

Antonius had long stopped worrying about having others see him in T-shirt and shorts. They were all dressed the same way in any case, and the shapeless outfits flattered nobody but Bright and Thread, who somehow managed to do exercises in their cells every morning.

Warden Vance was not there - he had spent the night hovering in their wing to make sure the radio did not appear - which meant they could talk as they were marched down to the concrete cylinder.

"Wonder what's happening tomorrow," Lark mused.

"My lawyer said he and his team are working extra-hard," Verdant said with just a touch of smugness.

"Team?" Brack shot back. "You mean his one assistant?"

"As if yours has more than that."

Antonius stayed silent - his family was able to keep an entire staff of lawyers on payroll. Count Three so far was shaping up to be quite boring for Antonius, but Shaw said that her team was working overtime in anticipation of Count Four. To Antonius, the plan was simple - he had not been a micro-manager, his subordinates had decided themselves how to conduct policy. To Shaw, however, even something as simple as that required sifting through voluminous records that ought to have been destroyed.

"Alright, alright, settle down," Tiller said.

They reached the so-called yard and began to walk around, each of them two metres apart from their neighbours. Antonius looked up to where a grid of bars was overlaid with a fine mesh that dimmed the sunlight but did nothing to help with the heat. The concrete walls absorbed the heat and turned the cylinder into a stove.

If Tiller was supervising, they could chat, after a fashion. "How's your son going?" Blatt asked him.

He and Blatt were hardly on good terms, but if he shouted across the entire cylinder to talk to someone he liked more, even Tiller would clamp down. That left Antonius with two conversation partners - Blatt and Brack. "Fine," he said. "I just got a letter from my family. My son is enjoying gardening."

"That's nice," Blatt said wistfully. "There's not even a blade of grass here."

Blatt's other neighbour, Dijksterhuis, made the predictable pun about Grass, who overheard and glared at her.

"You would like to garden?" Antonius asked Blatt.

"I would like to do anything that would mean I'm not in here." She ran a hand over her grey hair. Few of them had hair that was still fully dark. Antonius only had a few strands of grey in his, but the bigger issue was that it was rapidly beating a retreat. "But I think I'd like to garden, yes. Actually see the sun, feel the wind."

It did sound alluring, now that Antonius thought about it. He had not felt the wind in so long. "Maybe you will get to garden," he said optimistically.

"Where - in the next world?" Blatt was perpetually pessimistic about her prospects, even if she was fighting tooth and nail to force the Tribunal to recognize she had been nothing more than a glorified shopkeeper. Her lawyer, Andric, was superbly skilled despite being a total nobody Antonius had never heard of.

Antonius had nothing to say to that, so he kept quiet. He walked, wrists cuffed behind his back, not allowed to speed up or slow down. There was nothing in the cylinder but concrete, guards, and his co-defendants. Dovek was criticizing Coll for something - Antonius could guess the reason well enough.

At this point, he was willing to accept that crimes were committed and that some of his co-defendants were guilty. There was no other way to respond to the evidence. Dovek, however, was not having any of that. He knew he was doomed and wanted to drag down the rest of them in a blaze of defiant glory. Even Talvian, who was even more doomed than he, knew that was a losing proposition.

Coll, however, was becoming completely unhinged. He talked about wanting to take responsibility. Antonius did not understand why he was so eager to place his neck in the noose. Everyone else was planning to fight for their lives, but here he was, giving up.

Mary had known in advance that the witnesses for the naval case would be a problem. Wreath was not only a very skilled lawyer, he had as assistant a researcher of unmatched dedication and was no slouch himself. The slightest error, the smallest weakness, and he would latch on to it and make it out to be a sign that the entire case was hopelessly flawed.

Witnesses were easier for a lawyer to make into liars than documents. For that reason, Mary had most of those going first. Wreath, and to a lesser degree Alli, Verdant's lawyer, dissected their arguments with ease. The lieutenant made their decision independently. The ensigns were under extreme stress following an attack on them. Unrestricted submarine warfare was legal.

The press wrote that Wreath had torn the witnesses to shreds, but Mary was not so gloomy. Wreath had done nothing to disprove the fact that there had been an order signed by Best to fire at all craft in Panem waters, only insisting it was not an instruction to kill everyone in it. And there were still the documents.

Bethany Tahir, one of the prosecutors from Thirteen, was a naval officer. Wreath wore his Peacekeeper uniform - the former Coast Guard officer had been kept on to clear ocean pods and nobody had thought to tell him to take it off when he was hired as a lawyer. The presentation of dry documents about orders to shoot alleged spies with no trial and send all defectors to secret prisons no matter how young were devoid of drama, so the media manufactured interest in the two opposing lawyers.

Even Rithvik picked up on it, asking if the two were secretly together. Mary had to explain that they most definitely were not.

"...the order reads," Tahir said, "and I quote - 'Do not keep records of this order. Transmit it down the chain of command verbally. There are elements in society that would use it as propaganda against us; if it comes to it, we will be able to simply deny it.'"

Mary couldn't help but glance at Best, who did not look very happy. He'd have a hard time denying this now.

"What page of the document book is this on?" Wreath asked.

"Two hundred and three."

Wreath flipped through the book. "There are only one hundred and ninety-one pages in the one I have. Book 9A, am I correct?"

Tahir was now flipping frantically through the book. Mary couldn't help but sigh. Something always went wrong. Perhaps the media craved more drama, but drama could be waylaid by mistakes such as these. This recital of documents could be picked up tomorrow with no issue.

"Correct," Tahir said.

Mary realized what the problem was. "Your Honours," she said, standing up. "It appears the defense was not given copies of the updated books when some last-minute additions were made."

"How many copies of the books does the prosecution have?" Sanchez asked. This was not the first time something like this had happened.

"Several copies were given to the press. We can get them back and give them to the defense."

"How long will that take?"

Good question. Hopefully the press hadn't run off with them. "Half an hour."

Sanchez nodded. "In that case, we will recess early until our usual time of 15:30. Court adjourned."

Mary pounced on Tahir as soon as she was back at the table. "You were in charge of this section," she reminded her.

Tahir nodded. "I'm sorry. I was busy preparing the individual case against Verdant and got distracted."

"No worries. This isn't catastrophic." Just in case they weren't already on it, Mary texted a few people and asked them to get the press copies. Over in the dock, the defendants evaporated from the room, only a few remaining behind.

Rye wanted to throw her hands in the air. Another delay. At this rate, the trial would never end. "At least we get a longer break," she said to Rakesh, trying to convince herself.

Rakesh yanked on a lock of his hair. "Yeah. It's not like we've got a deadline. Though I'm starting to think the Peacekeepers will be sentenced before we get to the defense portion of the case."

At the table next to theirs, Levron from Four was complaining about the delay to Tahir - she should have done her presentation on Verdant today, but it would probably be pushed to tomorrow.

Rye decided to use the extra time productively and went for a bathroom break. On her way back, she was ambushed by a correspondent who asked her for Nine's perspective on the trials.

"I'm afraid you will have to ask someone who represents the District government that," she replied.

"Surely you must know something," the correspondent wheedled. Going by his accent, he must have been from somewhere in Newfoundland.

"No comment."

The correspondent realized he would get nothing from her and slunk away, disappointed.

Rye went for a little walk around the Justice Building until it was time to go back in. The document books had been found and the presentation could continue. When the court adjourned for the day, Rye made her way to the restaurant, where she and a few others had decided to meet up.

Trevor Hall, Eight's chief prosecutor, looked completely worn out. Ashford Pulzer, an assistant prosecutor from One, was a new arrival. He looked uncertainly around the restaurant as Rye and Hall confidently went towards a corner booth where you could have a decent amount of privacy.

"I see I got a welcoming committee," Pulzer said after they made their orders.

"Of course," Hall said. "We can't abandon you to figure out everything yourself. How are the Peacekeepers going?" He was going to be focusing on that trial.

"I did not expect that a trial for atrocities would feature a debate over paternity."

That was par for the course for the lower-ranking defendants, whose main defense was that someone else had raped the witness, not them. "Who was the father?" Rye asked.

"Someone the defendant was planning on calling as a witness."

Rye guffawed. "Of course it was."

"I bet the female half of the dock had a good laugh at that," Hall said.

Pulzer nodded. "They're always teasing each other."

The food arrived.

"That was fast," Rye remarked, taking her plate of rice and chicken in a sauce. She also had a plate of salad. Hall went for noodles in a black sauce and Pulzer had opted for rice and salmon. They also had a plate of spring rolls to share and were drinking mineral water. From where this expensive food came from was a mystery.

"All of this was already made," the server explained. Rye gave her a tip nevertheless. The young woman's eyes widened and she bowed in a servile way.

Rye dug into her salad first. It was made from fresh vegetables - lettuce, purple cabbage, cucumber, carrot. "The key criminals also do that," she said, "but there's an edge to that. I can tell they don't like each other. The Peacekeepers mostly didn't know each other before, so they don't have to worry about a backstab, but the key criminals are all plotting how to throw the rest under the bus."

"Is that the goal?" Pulzer asked, eating his salmon.

"It's certainly easier to prosecute a group trial when you're not faced with a wall of silence."

Hall drank some water. "It's odd, isn't it? They were like gods to us, but in reality, they are just people."

Pulzer's face twisted at that. "I don't know if that makes it better or worse. The shit I had to see - thinking that inhuman monsters were behind it is easier than accepting that it was just a person."

"What did you work as?" Rye asked.

"Criminal lawyer, did as much pro bono work as I could squeeze in. Mostly little things - stolen bag, gram of cocaine. You'd think those would be fair since they weren't political, but the entire thing was rotten. Manufactured evidence so that some major could get a new star on their shoulders, defendants had to consider themselves lucky if they got a public defender at all, the real criminals all wore the white in any case." He gulped down some water.

"Same," Hall said, wrapping noodles around his chopsticks. "The manufactured evidence, that is, I was hardly a philanthropist."

"Rakesh Kantaria was once warned to stop being a public defender," Rye said. That had been early on in his career. "Just like that. Told to break the law."

Pulzer nibbled on a spring roll. "Government didn't like charity much in general. They couldn't provide what they had promised and didn't want anyone else picking up the slack and making them look bad. In my city, there was one volunteer-run rehab centre for people with opioid addictions. One. In a city of one and a half million."

"Of course," said Hall, who was also from a big city. "Easier to shoot addicts in the middle of the street or to send them to secret prisons than to care for them."

"There wasn't any caring going on," Pulzer said with a chuckle. "I did some legal work for the centre, so I saw what went on there. They couldn't afford anything. Seriously, anything, even the psychologists were all volunteers. No methadone or anything of the sort, they handcuffed people to beds while they were going through withdrawal. People still queued outside the centre. It was that or doing it alone."

"Who ran that centre?" Rye asked. In her city, alcoholism had been extremely widespread among workers, especially once they hit middle age, with opiates being too expensive for most people.

"Ex-mayor. Best person we ever elected."

Rye nearly dropped her fork. "What? How? All the mayors I've ever heard of only retired into the grave."

"You could elect mayors?" Hall asked. "All of ours were appointed." In Rye's town, mayors and councillors had been 'elected', with ballots being counted in a way that resulted in turnouts of 146% of the electorate.

"In our city, we could, for the longest time. And then we picked one who was a bit too independent, though only in our insane regime could he be considered independent-minded. He talked to people, went jogging in the mornings with them. You could actually go talk to him and he'd listen to you over tea and cakes he had made himself. That was when he got the idea of a rehab centre - everyone would come to ask where their arrested child was." Pulzer flapped his hand dismissively. "And then was forced to step down voluntarily, and that was it for our elected mayors. The rest were all appointed."

"Is he still alive?" Rye asked.

Pulzer nodded. "He's the governor of One."

"Oh, really?" Rye hadn't known that about him.

"Yeah." Pulzer got a distant look in his eyes. "He's maybe ten years older than me." Pulzer looked to be around her age. "He was the best thing to happen to the city. Nothing worked, of course, but it felt like things could get better. But they couldn't, not when the overarching system was what it was. Even in school, I realized there was nothing waiting for me."

"Did something happen?" Hall asked.

"Not to me. A classmate was bullied, I don't know why. I didn't notice - she was very taciturn and I didn't know the bullies, who kept it quiet. She fell into a deep depression and eventually killed herself, writing a stack of letters to random people shortly beforehand and tossing them in the mailbox. A few people showed the ones they got to others, you could see which ones had been written first because they were legible. You could see her breaking down more and more with every word, the paper was covered in tear stains." The poor girl. "I got one, it took me a while to decipher it. She basically told me it was my fault because I was a bystander. Apparently once, she was being raped in a bathroom and I walked in, saw what was happening, and walked out. I don't even remember that."

"I'd have done the same thing," Hall said.

"Same," Rye had to admit. She would have never stood up for a stranger, and it was friendless and lonely people who were preyed on most of the time.

"In any case," Pulzer said, looking more upset now, "I threw out the letter and didn't think about it until a defector returned from Nigeria and said how happy she was to see me still working in the law. That made me think about things like that. Being a bystander or whatever. I was seventeen when those letters arrived, were probably discarded without reading half the time, and the whole matter forgotten in a week. As if Lizzie had been arrested. On some level, I realized something was deeply wrong about everything. That nothing I could do would change anything or help anyone."

"And now you're here," Hall said with an undertone of triumph.

"And I don't even know why. Because of that pro bono work? Is that really enough to make up for a lifetime of benefiting from the system?"

"As if people like us benefited from the system," Rye said bitterly.

Pulzer nodded. "The fact that what we had could be considered benefiting says everything any foreign journalist needs to know about the old regime."

"You know," Hall said, "when I was in hospital, I got to know another inpatient. Very smart man. Seventh child out of twelve born to independent farmers in the middle of nowhere - he was very lucky his teacher arranged to send him to a bigger town for highschool. Hell, he was lucky his parents realized he'd do well in school and sent him there in the first place. When he went home after getting his diploma, half the hamlet turned out to congratulate him. He announced he'd be going to university, and everyone stood shocked - most of the village was illiterate, and here he was going to university."

"I don't understand what you're getting at," Pulzer said. His plate was empty and he was nibbling on a spring roll. Rye realized her rice and chicken were getting cold and focused on them.

"I'm explaining the backstory." Rye stirred the sauce into the rice. "So, he goes to university in Centre. Studies chemistry and excels at it despite constant money trouble. While working on his PhD, he has his first concussion - slips and falls on some ice and hits his head. Recovers quickly and gets back to work. He's married by this point, has a child. The next week, he gets in a car crash and is unconscious for hours. He wakes up completely different." Hall sighed. "Frontal lobe damage. He's now impulsive, aggressive, can't think before he speaks. Drinks too much. His wife leaves him. Still manages to defend his dissertation, though, and find a job in industry. Gets fired for showing up to work drunk and harassing his coworkers."

Pulzer chuckled darkly. "I never knew that PhDs were so easy to get, even someone with brain damage could do it."

Rye wanted to protest the insensitivity - impulse control and the ability to do chemistry were not linked - but, noticing that Hall looked ready to explode, she let him say it. "Are you mocking him?" he asked.

"What?" Pulzer looked confused.

"Are you making fun of someone who got in a car crash?"

Pulzer looked uncomfortable. He scratched his head. "I'm just saying. How could he defend his dissertation if he was falling to pieces?"

"How? Because he didn't wake up unable to do brain work. He woke up with no impulse control. Those are different things. Imagine how hard it was for him to do the defense knowing that his own brain was up against him. It's a horrifically stressful environment, and he had to watch every word he said."

"I guess," Pulzer conceded.

"In any case," Hall went on, "things went downhill from there. He couldn't hold a steady job. He became infamous in his neighbourhood for groping young people. His ex-wife eventually paid for him to be institutionalized, and that's where I met him."

"And the moral of the story is?" Pulzer prompted.

Hall drank some water. "Up until the car crash, he was nothing but laudable. Even afterwards, he still got his PhD. But he also hurt a lot of people with his actions. He didn't go in for help even though he could have afforded it many times over." He ran his fork over his empty plate. "People are weird like that. Sympathetic and not sympathetic at once."

Rye still had no idea what was going on. "I think that the moral of the story is that rich people were institutionalized and poor people were shot. Pulzer, I'm willing to bet rich addicts paid to be treated at the hospital instead of queueing to be handcuffed to beds. How about we get dessert?"

"Sounds great," Hall said.

"I'd say it," Blatt said, "if I knew people would believe me."

"You think they won't believe you?" Miroslav asked.

Blatt nodded. "I can't shout 'Crucify him!' when yesterday, I cried 'Hosanna!' It just makes no sense."

"Why not?"

"Because I still don't quite believe it myself."

Count Three had made major cracks in the united front appear. Most of the defendants were now saying that they would condemn Snow and the regime in general, even if only two - Bright and Coll - were contemplating admitting some degree of personal responsibility. "What do you believe?"

"That the regime was wrong," Blatt said. "That testimony from today - if a government orders the killing of a child because it was carried over the border by its parents, that government has no right to exist."

"And how does that make you feel about the role you played in it?"

Blatt laced her hands together and put them in her lap. She was sitting cross-legged on her cot. Today, the temperature had dropped and it was raining, so there was no need for the fan fashioned out of a piece of paper. "I committed no crime," she said. "All I did was tell Chaterhan how many weapons to make."

As Minister of Armaments, Blatt had worked closely together with Chaterhan, in whose domain weapons production had been. That provided her with a ready-made excuse for everything. The prosecution claimed that she had had influence over more than she admitted to, but Blatt considered herself to be like a shopkeeper who had accidentally sold a gun to a criminal.

"But crimes were committed?"

"Not by me."

"By whom, then?"

Blatt shrugged. "I know it's not a good move to talk bad about people who can't defend themselves, but I can't stand Chaterhan's protestations of innocence. He was the one responsible for the conditions in the factories. He was the one who used slave labour." Prison inmates had sometimes worked for the armaments industry, and they had not been paid.

"Looking back, how do you feel about your role in the government?"

Blatt tapped her fingers against the blanket. "I suppose I wish I didn't get so close to the crimes." She claimed that she had never thought twice about the Hunger Games due to how normalized they were.

"Why?"

"Had I never risen so high, I wouldn't have ended up here."

They went on like that until the session ended and Miroslav could leave. When he got to his office, Mallow wasn't there - she must have still been at work. If they even had a division between work and not work. Miroslav sat down behind his desk, opened up a document so that he could pretend he was working, and checked his phone. On the screen of his brand-new smartphone, which Rody had acquired from a soldier and sent to him as a birthday present, was a message from her.

You're evil ;)

Miroslav smiled to himself. He had gotten the smartphone a few days ago and had been meaning to send his wife nudes that entire time, but his insecurity over his appearance had stopped him. Looking at the short message, Miroslav wondered why he had been so worried. Of course Rody thought he was attractive. She had always liked him the way he was, and he was now only five kilograms heavier, even if he felt as if it was at least fifty.

How so? Miroslav texted her.

The reply was immediate. I was at work, and you distracted me! There was also an attachment. A video. Miroslav decided not to look at that. He tried to focus on writing about Oldsmith's personality, and managed to get through a paragraph before giving up and switching to playing solitaire instead, but before he could lose, someone called him. Grateful for the intrusion, Miroslav picked it up.

"Hello?" The caller was Simone Winder, a psychologist he vaguely knew of.

"Hello, Miroslav?"

"That's me. How are you doing?"

"If someone with a mental age of thirteen has sex with a thirteen-year-old, is it statutory rape?"

Well, he was a child psychologist, so at least this was vaguely within his specialization, but he really was not the person to ask questions like these. "I suggest you ask someone who's an expert in intellectual disabilities."

"Can you recommend someone to me? I don't know how to contact anyone I know. I had to reach you through the municipal government."

Miroslav reached for his phone book and read out several phone numbers. Out of morbid curiosity, he asked, "What happened there?"

"A POW, a former cadet, off-handedly mentioned having sex with a former volunteer that was later determined to be twenty-seven years old. She is noted for spending her free time playing with the young teenagers and has just now been diagnosed with an intellectual disability."

This was not enough information to make a decision - it would depend on whether the volunteer was capable of understanding what it meant that she was twenty-seven and her 'partner' was thirteen. Either way, this relationship needed to be ended. "I'm surprised that she was even accepted into the armed forces."

"Why?"

Miroslav was about to say 'because her behaviour and emotional responses are akin to those of a thirteen-year-old' but then it hit him that that didn't matter one jot when she would have been fighting side-by-side with actual thirteen-year-olds. "Well, I suppose she'd have fit right in with the child soldiers. Good luck with getting expert opinions."

"Thank you. Goodbye."

"Goodbye."

Miroslav sighed and went back to solitaire. After losing two games in a row, he checked his phone again, only to see that Rody had replied by now..

Did you watch it?

Maybe it was something else. Miroslav opened the video and immediately closed it, face burning. If Mallow walked in-

How do you know we're not being tapped? Miroslav texted Rody half-seriously. He didn't want to end up like Irons.

R: If the hackers want my nudes, they're welcome to them. What would they do with them, anyway?

M: What do you think? :)

R: Honey, we're beyond forty.

M: You're still as beautiful as ever.

R: So are you.

M: Flatterer :)

R: No, honest.

Miroslav was luckier than most people with body image issues - he had been married for fifteen years and trusted Rody completely. If she said she thought he was attractive, she thought he was attractive. A part of Miroslav's brain doubted her taste, but he also knew that someone considered him good-looking.

I need to get some work done - I'll call when I'm off shift.

You're the one who distracted me in the first place. Rody then added some suggestions that made Miroslav look around, making sure that Mallow hadn't materialized over his shoulder somehow.

So this is revenge?

Yes. :)

Miroslav opened up the video she had sent him. It was less than thirty seconds long, but by the end, his mouth was dry and his heart was pounding in his chest.

M: Please tell me you can have a proper chat tonight. I want to see you. I miss you so much.

R: I see someone watched the video…

I've got the room to myself tonight - roomie's off romancing some rubble-man.

I miss you, too.

I just want to hug you again.

M: I can think of a better use for my hands ;)

R: Don't put that mental image in my head while I'm at work

M: I'm also at work. Just imagine me. My hands. Touching you.

R: Then you imagine me touching you.

Running a hand down your collarbone.

You always liked that.

Miroslav couldn't chase away that mental image. He sent off a final 'love you' to Rody and tried to focus on Oldsmith, but his thoughts kept on drifting to somewhere very different. Even he was becoming quite sick of the death and suffering he was bombarded with every single day. And there was still more to come. There was still Count Four.

A/N: 146% is a meme in Russia. Once, due to a mistake, a news program had the percentages of votes cast for parties in a certain province add up to that number, and it rapidly became proverbial. There are frequent reports of votes being cast for people who don't live in that place anymore or are dead. Additionally, ballots are often disregarded completely, with the statistically impossible 99.7% being drawn up against all reason and logic.