The next morning, one of the psychologists was overheard at the bar telling a colleague that Paulson had spent the night hallucinating the victims of executions she had presided over. When Paulson took the witness stand, she looked like a limp ragdoll. There was none of her composure remaining as she answered questions in a dull, quiet voice.

Thumeka was still riding high from the success her article from yesterday enjoyed. Her parents had even called to congratulate her - and rant about how terrible the regime in Panem had been, as if Thumeka didn't know that very well herself. Unlike her, they were extremely pessimistic about its prospects for becoming a stable democracy, but they weren't here to see how the people of Panem were taking to being free.

"Well, then," Jiao said as Paulson left the courtroom. The press section was almost empty - few willing to sit there for eight hours a day and listen to the boring atrocities. That meant that they could stretch out. Jiao had migrated to Thumeka's side and kept her bag on the empty seat beside her. Two rows behind them was a lone correspondent for a local news channel in Whitehorse. Why his bosses hadn't transferred him to somewhere else was a mystery.

A prosecutor from Thirteen went up to the lectern and began a presentation about utility mafias and deceived buyers. Thumeka had been flabbergasted to hear that term - she associated it with that scandal ten years back when people had bought apartments in a building that was yet to be constructed and were left with nothing when the developer bailed. The developer was currently in prison. In Panem, however, deceived buyers were at best relocated into dilapidated buildings on the verge of collapse, at worst - left to be homeless.

Dry statistics about percent of households electrified (though electricity had often been off, so that was hardly something to be happy about). Reports about deaths from freezing and overheating, depending on geographical area - some places had both, freezing in the winter and heatstroke in the summer.

Something got Thumeka's attention. Most rural households were only being electrified now. So how, then, had they been able to watch television, which everyone claimed had been mandatory? She did a quick search on her phone and the answer popped up immediately. These people had received batteries every month, but not always.

That would be a good article. The priorities of the old regime, and how it sabotaged itself with the utility mafias preventing any development.

"You know things are bad when the corruption is so insane, it's a crime against humanity," Jiao joked.

"Good one," Thumeka said, chuckling appreciatively.

The prosecution switched to water. Even in the cities, there had been a large minority of people who had been forced to get water from pumps in the street. That water had often not been potable - there had been outbreaks of various diseases caused by people drinking unboiled water. But in the Capitol, everything had been much better, if still apocalyptic by Thumeka's standards. The rural parts were very badly off, and even in the Capitol proper, most suburbanites had outhouses, cooked and kept themselves warm with firewood, and got water from pumps.

Why? Because policy. Documents proved that there had been a clear bias against the Districts. Some niceties had to be maintained in the Capitol, but not in One or Ten. Granted, there was also the element of scant resources running out once the Capitol had gotten maybe a third of what it needed, but the fact that it was always the capital city that got all the available resources and the rest of the country was stuck with nothing established a pattern even without the documents with quotes from defendants about how the Districts could starve for all they cared.

Thumeka wondered how they'd fix the system. There had been a nationalization of the utilities - the railroads, water, and electricity had been taken away from the oligarchs. That was a disadvantage to chaining herself to the Lodgepole Justice Building - she couldn't go see how the rest of the country was doing.

On and on, the prosecution continued reciting documents. Thumeka sat back in her comfortable chair and focused on her phone, which was plugged into the socket by her feet. Another sign of inequality - Thumeka doubted there were sockets like this anywhere outside the Capitol. The three of them got a Scrabble game going, though it was hard to keep their faces even as they played.

After a presentation by Robert Wu of Eleven on plundering in the Districts - Peacekeepers had been allowed to loot and the works of District artists had often been stolen and sent to the Capitol - it was finally time for what Rye knew many people were waiting for. The repressive machinery and those who had stood up to it. Rye knew full well that the government had relied on consent and coercion in equal measure, but the courtroom was the place to discuss the latter.

A Death Squad member testified about Talvian bringing Krechet to high society functions to spy on the squad's next target - and play violin. There was a bitter irony to how Krechet had been born in the slums but grew up to become an artist and the father of highly accomplished young people, though at the cost of his soul. He and Stonesmith, the commander of the squad and an accomplished accordionist, had played duets at parties. It was hard to imagine this hulking man with his lower-class accent with a violin in his hands.

Then came the witnesses from the other side. The now-famous activist who had survived having her bra poisoned and investigated her own murder. A Capitol middle-manager who was so scared of the NCIA, she defected out of the country, became a meteorologist, and moved to Alert, a weather station in the far north that was the northernmost continuously inhabited point in the world. A student activist from Two who was kicked out of law school due to his suspicious calls for the defense of human rights. A factory overseer who had been blinded in an acid attack orchestrated by the NCIA. Carmen Maiolo, the would-be assassin of Snow - how everyone exploded at being reminded that action was always possible.

"I thought to myself," Maiolo said, "that nothing can be worse." She now used only a single cane, spoke with a clear voice, and the scars on her mouth were gone. "Before, I worried someone else would take over and it would be worse, but at that point, I realized that Talvian taking over wouldn't make it worse." Talvian glared.

"What caused your decision to make the attempt?"

Maiolo looked perplexed. "I just- I read some foreign books. I knew McCollum's fate was the likeliest one for Snow. But I also knew about all sorts of violent uprisings being crushed. I didn't know about Thirteen. I thought that eventually, there has to be some kind of really big uprising, and it'll be destroyed. I didn't want that. I wanted to destabilize the situation so that the regime wouldn't be able to coordinate its repression effectively. Perhaps even make the successor to Snow paranoid and prone to alienating their own surrounding."

"Did you expect to succeed?"

"I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't thought I could succeed."

As Rye listened to the direct examination, she still had no idea what made Maiolo into the only would-be assassin of Snow ever. Just an ordinary person, whose forbidden knowledge had been rare but by no means unique. A highly accessible method of assassination - bombs made from manuals set in a place anyone could have entered. Her justification that success could not have made the situation worse was not one Rye agreed with, she was convinced Talvian could have easily used this as a pretext for a purge the likes of which the nation had never seen, but Maiolo could hardly have been the only one thinking there was no way to make it worse. Being middle-class, she had had more to lose than the average person in case of failure, though being childless doubtless had made her more willing to take dramatic risks.

Not a high-ranking official who wanted the spot for themselves. Not someone who was routinely close to Snow. Not a spy with deep connections to Thirteen. Not someone with nothing to lose but their chains. Not an anarchist willing to carry out 'propaganda by the deed'. Not someone who had suffered personally and wanted revenge. Hell, not even someone with a pre-existing knowledge of how to assassinate.

And yet this was Panem's only would-be tyrannicide. Rye couldn't shake the wish that Maiolo hadn't done it, if only so it didn't make her own total inaction look bad in comparison.

Next up was an officer who had survived Talvian's purge by literally running away to Thirteen.

"Snow told me - you must obey my every order! I said, Mr. President, I will not shoot people. I will not violate the Constitution."

Everyone listened to Zhao open-mouthed. It was impossible to imagine any of the military people in the dock saying anything of the sort, and going by their expressions, they were aware of it. Rye herself could not fathom ever doing such a thing. It would never have entered her mind.

"Snow said: if you do not follow my orders, you will be placed in handcuffs." Zhao's voice was firm and calm, nothing like the parade-ground shouting of the other officers. "And that was how he made that compliant machine obediently clicking its heels. It was terrifying. It was more frightening than fascism."

Rye tried and failed to imagine the Peacekeepers from back home standing up to a direct threat from Snow himself. In her neighbourhood, they had been a quiet reminder. She had always crossed the street when she saw one of them walking towards her, but she could not claim to have experienced or witnessed police brutality herself. That simply did not happen in upper-middle-class neighbourhoods.

It was odd, just how much Rye had been sheltered from. Being urban, she had never had to worry about being killed over a bad harvest or because an alleged terrorist was spotted in the village. Rye had always had the typical urban disdain for rural people, considering them small-minded and unable to look beyond the good of their family, but she had to admit that they had suffered disproportionately. And even within cities - had she ever paused to think about what happened to the homeless people by the Justice Building she had worked at when they disappeared? According to the documents, they had been sent to secret prisons. Rye had heard rumours, of course, but she hadn't cared.

The one thing Rye's class had theoretically not spared her from was the terror of the Hunger Games. But even there, she had been spared ever knowing a single Tribute.

Unlike her, there had been people who had stood up to the government. Factory cells, student groups, individuals with links to Thirteen, and people like Carmen Maiolo who were simply too good for this world. And, apparently, a group dedicated to the health of Aunt Zephyra.

"Who is Aunt Zephyra?" Olivia Harris of Six asked the witness, Jessica Eichhorn. Eichhorn and a few friends and relatives had made the switch from complacent loyalty to scattering leaflets when her sister, a Peacekeeper, had died putting down a small-scale riot.

"My great-aunt," Eichhorn said. "We needed something innocuous we could discuss in public. So we chose our hypochondriac great-aunt."

"Was she the ringleader?" Harris asked.

Eichhorn chuckled. "Not at all. She didn't even know about it until after the Rebellion. To say she was horrified was an understatement."

"You used her name as a code?"

"Exactly. We'd say 'Aunt Zephyra isn't feeling too good' or something like that over the phone and not have to worry about being overheard. We had an entire list of code phrases we came up with one day."

Rye tried to imagine what her great-aunts and uncles would have done in Zephyra's place. It would have most likely resulted in someone being smacked with a slipper.

Mary sent off the request for more prosecutors. After the testimony about the IGR experiments had come to light, Mary could see no alternative other than a trial of everyone involved with that system.

"Chief Prosecutor, that isn't enough," Ilhan Dadin, the deputy chief prosecutor from Three, said.

"This is the most I can reasonably demand."

Ilhan held up the report she had made about covert assassinations in Three. "We cannot let this be dealt with piecemeal. The Death Squad is behind bars - as witnesses. Just look at this - local activist went missing, body found days later, deemed heart failure despite the presence of needle marks under his arm."

"I read the report," Mary said. "I agree that they need to be tried, but who's going to try them? Start collating material now if you wish, but we will need to wait for the main trial to end." Unless- "If you want, take over the case and find yourself a team. I will support you."

Ilhan's face lit up. "That will do." She was currently working on the Peacekeepers' trial. "Thank you. I will go now. Goodbye."

"Goodbye."

Mary watched Ilhan go. The younger prosecutor was right - the Death Squad had been consigned to the realm of whispers, and bringing them into the open would do a great deal for everyone's peace of mind. The case against Krechet had only dealt with Krechet personally, leaving everyone else out. The witness had testified in her own defense, which was entirely predictable but quite annoying.

Mary had actually talked to some of the Death Squad members. They were by and large not very educated and were convinced that they had just been doing their jobs. One of them, a forty-five-year-old man with the physique of someone twenty years younger, seemed to think he was a circus acrobat - when someone had asked him if he was willing to testify against Krechet, he did a double backflip in the air from a standing position.

Whatever was going on in the head of Gnaeus Li aside, there was not a drop of remorse to be had among any of them. Some reacted with anger to anything they deemed to be treasonous, others considered themselves to have the autonomy of a gun.

Of course, they had not been nearly as competent as they claimed now. Corruption had rotted the entire system, leaving nothing spared. Besides the fact that Zhao had been able to literally run away from them and the incident with the poisoned bra, there was now a myriad of evidence about assassinations not going as planned because the assassin got stuck in a subway delay, or the target 'unexpectedly' decided to reheat their takeout, destroying the poison in the process, or the getaway car broke down. Many lives had been destroyed by this gang of killers and their helpers, but they were not the omnipresent almighty presence people had feared to bring on their heads by telling kitchen-jokes.

"Joe?" Mary called out to her secretary.

"Yes?"

"Has anyone invited me anywhere this weekend?" She needed to focus on the IGR trial.

"Saturday afternoon, Dillon Beach. Some foreigners."

Now that was not just some politician's mixer. "Who exactly?"

"Foreign ministers of some places. I wasn't told what countries."

Hopefully this did not mean they were foreign ministers of irrelevant countries nobody cared about. Even if so, this could be valuable. Mary would need to put their collective best foot forward and prove to the dignitaries that Panem's path to rebuilding was a good one. "What do you mean by 'beach'?" she asked. She had only ever swam in pools, back in Thirteen. "Is there going to be swimming?"

"Yes. As well as sitting around sipping cocktails and trying to convince the foreign ministers to not stop the humanitarian aid."

In Mary's opinion, the last part could be done with a quick hour-long meeting, but Thirteen was not the world. "I assume I need a plus-one," she said. "If I'm not going to be there then Reed needs to be present, so not him." Bringing along someone too junior would not be a good move. Which chief prosecutor to bring? "Let's go with Isabella. She's got a good team and she's an excellent cross-examiner."

"We need a cross-examiner at a beach party?" Joe asked.

"She's quick with a retort," Mary explained.

"Ah. By the way, Admin wants to see you because of the budget."

Of course they did. "When?"

Antonius had known, of course, that the section of the trial pertaining to industry would not be pleasant. He had not realized just how terrible it would be. Documents bearing his signature were read into the record in an endless stream - instructions on punishments, wage lists, requests for a heavier NCIA presence, orders to hire and fire city and District mayors, and so on and so on.

"I quote the words of Defendant Chaterhan," the prosecutor said. "Same document as just now, next paragraph down. 'If they do not come of their own volition, bring them in by force. Deal with any gossip most severely.' That was how the Steelworks built Snow a residence. Later on in the document, and I quote, 'Do not worry about paying them.' Several thousand people in northern District One aged between five and seventy-nine were loaded into trucks and taken to the building site."

Antonius tried to remember that, but could not. Why had these documents not been destroyed? Even Shaw was powerless in the face of some of these papers. Oh, it had been just the way business was done, but would these judges care about that? They were from good families all, but Antonius was coming around to realizing that Snow had alienated the District elites by treating them like trash. If not for the Hunger Games, he could have spoken to the judges like equals. But all of them bar the rabble-rousing Sanchez remembered the Reaping fields, which made it an unlikely prospect indeed that they would look upon him with any favour.

That was the real crime. All this that the prosecution was nattering about - that was just how business was conducted. If other countries had different standards then so be it, but Antonius was here for running a corporation like anyone else in Panem. Would they perhaps go after every single businessperson and put them in the dock?

If the copies of 'The Daily Worker' the guards delighted in showing Antonius were to be believed, the answer to that was yes.

Antonius leaned against the barrier. He was tired from eight hours of sitting in the courtroom and the prosecutor's words were infuriating. So what that six-year-olds had worked in mines? That had been the parents' decision to send their children to work!

The Steelworks (and thus Chaterhan-senior) had owned the mines used in Six as labour camps, which posed a massive problem with regards to Daniel's bias. He had promised he'd be able to stay objective, but as the prosecutor lifted up the torture devices used there, Dora's glances to the right showed a steadily deteriorating Daniel Chatterjee, with break over an hour away.

"Prosecution Exhibit 06-3," the prosecutor said, holding up a photograph, "punishment cells used in Federal Mine 07." He placed the photograph on a projector, revealing tiny cubbies Dora would not have been able to fit into at all, going by the measuring tape being held up by a young soldier. "Prosecution Exhibit 06-4, a closeup of two of the cubbies. Note that one of them is studded with nails on the inside." He used a rod to point out the nails.

Daniel was studying the photograph with fascination, but his wide eyes appeared to see nothing. He had an unearthly look about him. Raymond passed him a note, which Daniel ignored. His hands were tense as he took notes.

They needed to get Daniel out of there, but Dora understood full well that he would never stop of his own volition, for fear of accusations of bias. They needed another excuse to stop.

The prosecutor described for a while the cubbies and how people had been held in them, and then showed documents proving that Chaterhan had been shown them during a visit. He then moved on to the next exhibit - a steel whip that had been used to hit recalcitrant workers.

Dora glanced to the side and had to use all of her self-control to not react. Daniel was completely spaced out. His hands were now lying slack on the table and he was staring, fortunately, at the whip - journalists would assume that he was simply outraged.

"As a matter of policy," the prosecutor droned on, "overseers received these metal whips. The strips of sharp metal caused massive wounds after just one hit..."

They needed to somehow get an excuse to call a recess without drawing attention to Daniel's plight. As the prosecutor went on and on, Dora began to think that even drawing attention would be fine, this just needed to stop and they had to get Daniel out of here.

And then, fortunately, Shaw rose to give a completely inane and time-wasting objection.

"We will need to discuss this objection," Sanchez said as soon as she closed her mouth. "Court adjourned for fifteen minutes."

Shaw looked completely flabbergasted as she sat down, whispering to her neighbours. Dora practically leapt to her feet and followed Drexel out of the courtroom. She managed to sneak a glance backwards - Daniel had the presence of mind to get up with everyone else.

In their chambers, Daniel wandered towards the window as the other judges looked on, unsure of what to say. "Do you need to take the day off?" Raymond suggested.

"No. It's just - I had a flashback." Daniel leaned on his elbows as he continued to stare out the window. "They sent someone convicted of raping and killing a child to us. It was my first week there. The guards told us all the details - how she used a belt to strangle them, so on and so forth. After five minutes of working with her I knew that she could not have done it - she had problems with moving her arms. I tried to convince the others, but they had already made up their minds. The overseer had been molested as a child himself, so as soon as she began to fall behind, he used it as an excuse to beat her to death right before my eyes. There was so much blood. The guards did nothing. They were happy we did their job for them."

Dora was not surprised. She had often been pressured to convict people on flimsy evidence so that somebody could look good. It was scant consolation that she had never done it.

"And then," Daniel said, drawing in a ragged breath, "there was the officer. We called him Maniac. He killed himself just before liberation. He always went around hitting people with that whip. It was razor-sharp, you know. Covered with other people's blood. We could get twenty-five lashes for not standing up straight when we saw a guard, and that was a death sentence. Every day, that whip was there, and someone was screaming. I saw Maniac strangle people with the whip. It slit their throats at the same time."

"How about you take the rest of the day off?" Raymond suggested.

"I can't. They'll accuse me of bias." Daniel walked towards an armchair and flopped onto it. "It's not a problem. I'll just not pay attention during this presentation."

Moira glanced at her watch. "Is there anything we can do for you?"

Daniel shook his head. "It's just that I spent years being terrified of that whip. I dreaded feeling it hit my flesh every day that I was down there. And now it's right in front of me."

And Chaterhan was going to claim that all the policy had been set by the government. Dora wondered if maybe the problem with bias wasn't Daniel, but rather them. Seeing a close colleague suffer like that was not something she could just brush away.

"And you're sitting in judgement over the ones who gave the orders," Raymond reminded him.

That had an effect. Daniel sat up slightly, face more relaxed. "I am," he said, sounding surprised. "I survived. I won. I-I am-I'm sitting on the judges' bench and Chaterhan is in the dock. That's just too poetic." He then burst into tears.

"Raymond? The objection?" Dora said, eager to distract the others and give Daniel some space.

Raymond flapped his hand dismissively. "It's nonsense. I'd have cut it short on the spot."

A small smile lifted the corners of Daniel's mouth. "You must have been praying for someone to object." He wiped his eyes with his hands and dried them on the inside of his robe.

"I knew I could count on the defense to find something objectionable," Raymond replied, also smiling.

Daniel took out his notebook and wrote something down.

"Since we have a break," Brutus said, "I'm going to go to the bathroom."

Dora looked out the window. There was nothing but ruined buildings as far as the eye could see. Would the Capitol ever be as it was before? Not too far from the Justice Building, someone was sunning themselves in a third-floor apartment with no wall. Dora would have gotten vertigo, but they didn't seem to be bothered.

"I just realized," Daniel spoke up. "Imagine if they call a witness from the place I was in!"

"We have the lists," Cora reminded him.

"No, but imagine if they tried to call one of the guards. You'd have had to carry me out feet-first." Daniel seemed very amused by the prospect. "Hey, do you want to see pictures of my cat?" He took out his phone.

"Of course!"

Dora checked her watch, feeling the time trickle away. At least this pause accomplished something good.

The one good thing about the timing of the beach party was that it happened immediately after the presentation of the materials on the NCIA and Death Squad, as well as the individual cases against Talvian and Krechet. The horrors would be fresh in the minds of the foreign dignitaries.

Mary and Isabella arrived on time to a little house by the beach. A few people were already there, and they exchanged handshakes with them.

"I was at the trial yesterday," someone told them in heavily accented English. "The way people could be shot for a few stalks of rice - absolutely terrifying. I commend you for bringing this to light."

"Thank you."

"Care for a drink?"

Mary studied the row of bottles on a long table. "Mineral water, please."

"What do you have?" Isabella asked.

The person went down the line, reading the labels of all the bottles. "I'll have that," Isabella said when she reached a bottle of wine. Someone materialized out of nowhere and poured them the drinks.

Once the person wandered off, Mary was able to describe the room to Isabella.

"Hello," someone else said in clean, but oddly accented, English. Mary instantly recognized the foreign minister of Newfoundland.

"Hello. On behalf of our nation, I would like to thank you for all of the humanitarian aid you are so generously providing us in this difficult time."

The foreign minister nodded slightly. "We took in defectors and funded you for decades. It would have been inconceivable to do anything less than what we are doing now."

After more conversations along those lines, they went to the actual beach. Mary had half-expected that the dignitaries would play volleyball or something else along those lines, but they simply sat in chairs and admired the view. This small section of beach could only be reached through the house, so they had it all to themselves.

"The lake is quite lovely," someone said.

Isabella did not react. By now, she didn't mind it if people forgot she was blind.

"And the sound is so pleasing," he added belatedly. "I am rarely on the water, so it's always a surprise to me how loud it really is."

"I always forget about the sand," someone else said, upending her shoes.

Mary stretched out her bare feet, shoes standing by her hammock-chair. She and Isabella hadn't wanted to wear their uniforms due to the heat, but it would have looked odd if they hadn't.

"When is the trial going to end, do you know?" the Newfoundlander asked.

"We do not know," Mary said.

"That is unfortunate. Do you have any estimates?"

"I prefer not to guess."

The foreign minister smiled. "I suppose that is also an option."

Privately, Mary hoped that it would end before the New Year. Whether that would actually happen depended on many factors, most of which she could not control.

In the corridor, two of the neighbours were complaining about Depuration.

"That dratted questionnaire!" one of them said so loudly, Leon could hear him on the stairwell. "I don't even get what they took offense to!" Probably to the fact that Uncle Archie had organized Games watching parties.

"When was your hearing?" Aunt Cassandra asked.

"That's the thing," Uncle Archie thundered as Leon entered the corridor, "they fired me pending Depuration!" Uncle Archie worked in the municipal administration, where it worked that way. Usually, people were fired by Depuration tribunals directly, unless they were needed for reconstruction. Engineers and skilled construction workers and the like were usually just slapped with fines and community service.

Uncle Archie noticed Leon. "Oh, there's our clerk!" he exclaimed. The entire building section thought Leon was an expert on Depuration, war crimes trials, and government policy in general. "Leon, do you know what they'll give me?"

If he was polite - fellow traveller. If he wasn't - minor offender. "It depends on what the court thinks about you," Leon said. "Be contrite, just don't overact."

"During my hearing, the chairperson practically told me what to say," Aunt Cassandra added. "I could tell they like it about as much as we do."

"Then why are they keeping up this charade?" Uncle Archie demanded.

The elevator opened and Grandma Jane walked out, pulling a cart of rations. "Good evening," the three of them chorused. It was almost eight - Leon had gone out with friends after work.

"Good evening," Grandma Jane replied. "Archie, I hear you have your hearing coming up?"

"I do."

"Terrible. I remember when it was this much after the Dark Days, things were already back to normal. And now?"

Not having any desire to argue with someone who had actually been there, even if she was definitely misremembering - Leon's grandparents claimed that ten years after the Treaty of Treason, they had still gone hungry - Leon beat a retreat to his apartment, where Marcellus looked ready to explode.

"Forty," he snapped before Leon even closed the door.

Mom was writing code and listening to soccer through headphones Leon had bought her for her birthday, so she did not react.

"Where did they all come from?" Leon asked incredulously. There were still nearly two weeks until school began, but Marcellus had already been handed a preliminary list of the kids he would be teaching.

"Where do you think? Goddamn District rats, crawling in here as if we can afford to feed them all."

"You can't call humans rats!" Leon chided him.

"I'm not calling all District people rats. Only the ones who are moving here."

"So the engineer from the fifth floor is now a rat?"

"No - she works."

Leon wanted to throw his hands up in the air. "How do you know the parents of these kids don't work?" he demanded.

"There's no way all of them are employed," Marcellus insisted.

"How do you know that?"

"District people - they're not like us. They can survive on a non-worker's rations, so they don't work."

A non-worker's rations were too much to die on and not enough to live on. The average quadriplegic consumed more calories than that.

"How is that proof that they don't work?" Furious, Leon stalked off to the kitchen to see if dinner was ready. It was. "And where did you get that idea from? You talk like you've never seen a District person in your life."

Marcellus shook his head. "Come on. You've noticed that District people are smaller."

"And workers are smaller than middle-class people. And? I don't see how the judges are any smaller than someone from the Capitol." Leon poured himself a bowl of soup, which was made from macaroni, sausage, and corn.

Around and around they went until Leon began to suspect that his brother was prejudiced against lower-class people, not the Districts specifically. Marcellus had always been defensive of the family, not disdainful of them - what had changed?

Leon finished his soup. "Tastes great," he said.

Marcellus replied with a rant about the low quality of the sausage in it.

"Is something wrong?" Leon asked. "You seem on edge."

"I don't want to talk about it." Marcellus crossed his arms on his chest and glared at nothing in particular.

Leon sighed. "You're turning twenty-eight, not eighteen. Come on. Is it being overloaded at work? You had forty-five last term."

Marcellus looked down. "I just hoped it'd get better. But it isn't."

"It is," Leon pointed out. "You've got five less, and at least it'll be stable. None of that coming and going."

Marcellus traced a pattern in the wallpaper. "You try dealing with forty eleven-year-olds," he grumbled. "And they might dump more on me - there's still weeks to go. How was your date?"

Wait, what? "I didn't go on a date - I went with some friends to see a movie."

"Oh." Marcellus seemed disappointed. "What movie?"

"Foreign movie," Leon said vaguely. "It's a romantic comedy about a young couple who suddenly finds themselves having to adopt the niece of one of them."

"Sounds nice."

Mom was still intently focused on work.

"Anything interesting happen at the trial?" Leon asked.

Marcellus shook his head. "Just more atrocities."

Grass was not very happy when the judge took the stand, and even less happy when he began to testify. Next to her, Slice still looked a little bit shocked from yesterday. The prosecution had gone over the propaganda system, stedgehammering Lark, Brack, and Slice in the process.

It was strange to be reminded that this quiet person whose program Antonius had watched a time or two had also been in charge of arranging what the Districts could and could not see on their televisions. Lark had a perpetual scowl that made it easy to imagine him as a screaming loudmouth and Brack's tendency to blend into the background made her the archetypal functionary, but Slice acted nothing like a conventional TV host.

Antonius discreetly turned a page of his newspaper, leaving behind the report on yesterday's trial sessions - of all trials. That was the one thing 'The Daily Worker' was good for. It had an entire section where it gave updates on trials, even if absolutely nothing happened and they had to include large chunks of the transcript to have it fill up the space. Additionally, the newspaper was not a tabloid, even if it reached heights of bias Antonius had never suspected existed. It exaggerated and distorted, but did not make up news from whole cloth.

"Did you see this?" he whispered quietly to Coll, voice pitched so that the guards wouldn't be able to hear it. Some of the others were not as careful with their newspapers and had them confiscated by mid-morning break.

Coll leaned over, as if looking at a document Antonius was showing him. "I did, though not in such vivid descriptions." The article was about landowners convicted of crimes having their lands confiscated and redistributed.

Antonius knew that some of the defendants, especially Thread and Verdant, found it amusing that the guards foisted Communist newspapers on him at every turn. Even the middle-class Slice and Blues appeared to find it funny. "What did yours say?"

"Same thing, but minus praising the government for confiscating everything."

"The government did not confiscate it - the land was parcelled out to the tenants."

Coll gave him an odd look. "I know they're not planning to nationalize agriculture." Thank goodness for small mercies - many of his acquaintances were not only incarcerated pending Depuration, but also quite without a livelihood thanks to the nationalization of utilities, post, prisons, and the railway. "Huh. I didn't know it was so inequitable in Ten."

According to the article, one percent of landowners had owned ninety percent of the land in Ten. The rest had almost all been tiny parcels of land owned by local families. Antonius doubted that life on them had been as hard as the screaming tones of the article would have had him believe, but he had never given much thought to agriculture. That Coll did not know that, however, was extremely odd. "You were Minister of Resources," Antonius said.

"And? I set quotas, not worried about how much land some Capitol bigwig had." He pointed at the page. "That's a nice caricature."

One of those former landowners had ended up in Eleven - the young man who had taken over for his ill parents had enlisted and was taken prisoner. The cartoon imagined him picking cotton with his hands and wondering why there was no mechanization to make work easier. The implication was that he himself had resisted mechanization on his land to save money.

"It is," Antonius said. He had never had a very high opinion of the landowners. They left management entirely in the hands of locals and spent their lives doing nothing.

Antonius wondered how his cousins were doing. Rumour had it that the POWs working in agriculture would all be sent home after the harvest, but would that apply to those working in parts of the country where harvests could be gathered year-round? Cousin Troilus was somewhere in Eleven. Antonius had tried to convince him that forty-three was too old for combat, but Grandma had taught him too well. Troilus refused to even hear of sitting the uprising out. And now, Antonius had a photograph in his cell showing his eldest cousin in a rice field.

And Cousin Aimee was still in Eight, rebuilding. Nobody knew when those would be returned, though there was a steady trickle of returnees. She might have been on the next train home, for all Antonius knew.

"Can I borrow the paper?" Blues whispered to him.

"Of course." Antonius handed it to her. "Why?"

Blues shrugged. "Just curious to see what they think of us."

On the witness stand, the former and current judge was describing his arrest. Having heard it all before, Antonius paid no attention to him. A guard had told him what he must have thought was a funny story that morning, about a Depuration judge who had spent ten years in prison presiding over the hearing of the judge who had sent her there.

Antonius used that opportunity to borrow a much more respectable paper from Talvian, who was doing an excellent job of pretending to not be asleep. Behind him, Grass was still steaming.

It had already been explained that the armed forces had been involved in all sorts of crimes, from drug-smuggling to human trafficking, but the prosecution decided to really hammer it home by putting an activist on the stand to testify about how they had bought a child a few years ago.

The press section had been mostly empty just minutes ago, but now, there was barely an empty space. Glad for her front-row seat, Thumeka took careful notes. This would make a good article - as long as no one beat her to the punch, of course.

The statistics had already been given. Ninety percent of orphanage graduates were either dead or in prison by the age of twenty-five, to say nothing of those who didn't make it to nineteen, Panem's age of majority. And added to that had been the prospect of literally being sold. The activist described how easy it had been. Adoption had already been trivial, requiring only a few signatures on a form, and paying money had made the child's records go away. The sinister reasons for why someone would buy a child that way instead of simply adopting did not need to be stated, but that was what the prosecution did once the witness departed.

So the Commander-in-Chief had been a drug lord, the owner of a massive gambling empire, and a pimp of children. Lux took notes angrily as the prosecution read documents into evidence, obviously aware that this was not how he had wanted to go down in history.

Thumeka saw former child soldiers on the street from time to time. She was used to it by now, even though back home, there were no child beggars, as homeless youths tended to avoid publicly begging. Here, they were everywhere, and it was an eerie sight, if she thought about it. Child beggars were one thing, homeless veterans another, and a twelve-year-old in a uniform with an empty sleeve crying 'Auntie, give me money!' was on an entirely different level. The prosecution had stressed that official policy in Thirteen had been to start training at fourteen and allow into combat at nineteen, a far cry from Lux's order to recruit anyone capable of holding a gun and send them to the front.

"Poor kids," Mikola whispered next to her.

Panem had been a terrible place to be a child. "Poor kids indeed," Thumeka agreed. Jiao was typing away on her phone, but the grimace on her face showed everything she thought about the previous regime.

A/N:

"I tell him: Aleksandr Grigorievich, I will not shoot people, I will not violate the Constitution."

Yuri Zaharanka (alternative spelling: Zaharenko) was a Belarusian officer and onetime minister of internal affairs. He fell out of favour with Lukashenko, joined an opposition party, and was kidnapped and murdered in 1999. Also killed around the same time were Viktar Hanchar, the former head of the Central Electoral Committee, Anatoli Krasouski, a businessman and friend of Hanchar, and Dzmitry Zavadski, a journalist. Zhao's testimony is paraphrased from an interview Zaharanka gave several years before his death.

The title of this chapter is the title of a book by Hans Fallada that in English is called 'Every Man Dies Alone'. It's inspired by the true story of Otto and Elise Humpel, who were perfectly loyal to the Nazi regime until Elise's brother died in the war. Then, they began to scatter leaflets, eventually being caught and executed.

'Deceived buyers' is the best translation I could think of for the Russian 'обманутые дольщики'.