"Horrifying," Thairo Muthinji kept on repeating to Thumeka as she showed him around Lodgepole. "Just horrifying." The journalist was originally from Kenya but had stayed in Zimbabwe after attending university there. The two of them were speaking in Shona, though it was hard to hear him through the scarf he had wrapped around his face. On his head he had a down kerchief, and he wore an overcoat that went to his knees. Thumeka was in a light jacket, like the locals.

"I'll come home and be shocked there's no rubble," Thumeka said ruefully.

Muthinji nodded, staring wide-eyed at the sight of a group of poorly dressed children playing as another begged. Homeless adults were one thing, but little children - an entirely different matter. "It's like the Cataclysm Wars never ended here. I can't believe it took only a few months to turn a city into- this." A streetcar passed by, passengers clinging to the outside. "Is that normal?" Muthinji asked, shocked.

"Oh, that was always normal."

Muthinji shook his head. Thumeka understood what he was feeling. This was nothing like back home. She had thought once that trying to get into the subway during rush hour was intense enough, but the way that people here elbowed and pushed to get onto a streetcar was something on an entirely different level. "And here I was thinking I'm an expert because I write about defectors." He had been working for some time in Venezuela and had a personal interest in the defectors coming in by sea. Thumeka had read his book on the topic. Before, she had talked to several people who had swum across la Manche, so the story of Hannah Bronstein (who had crossed the strait to Venezuela with only a lifejacket and flasks of sugar water) crossing a similar distance hadn't been anything new, but back home, people had been shocked. To swim forty-five kilometres aged just fifteen - Thumeka didn't know very many people who could run that distance.

"That's how it is for all of us."

"Are you sure you can't come with me to the billet?" he asked hopefully.

"Sorry - I need to do interviews today." She needed to write an article about what the occupying troops thought about the occupation. "I promise you won't get lost. The taxi will take you to the billet, and from there, just ask for the room where people from your parts are staying - and everyone here speaks English in any case."

Muthinji winced. "I, er, barely speak English. Only Spanish."

He could probably find plenty of Spanish speakers if he tried. "How much English do you know?"

"Maybe A2? But the languages are in the same family, so I can understand it pretty well, especially written English."

Thumeka had passed her A2 exam at the age of fourteen. Her parents hadn't been quite sure how to understand the certificates she kept on taping to the side of her bookcase, but they had been glad she was doing something productive. Back then, they had gotten into their heads that she wanted to be the ambassador to some country in Australia or North America. When she started going on about Panem at the dinner table and saying she wanted to be a journalist, they had decided she would be a foreign correspondent in Thunder Bay or Saskatoon or somewhere else like that. They had been right - for a while. England came as a massive shock.

"You are going to have problems," Thumeka said simply, trying to recall the A2 exam. "I can't imagine you trying to conduct an interview in English."

"Then I'll look for Spanish speakers." He giggled. "Or use the dictionary on my phone." Suddenly, his face fell, and he whipped around to the source of a high-pitched sound - a homeless child weakly calling for food. "Oh no!"

"Ignore them, someone's going to pick them up soon." Children were usually scooped up quickly if they weren't trying to hide from the authorities.

Muthinji gave her a baffled look before dashing over to the child and picking them up. They were skin and bones and had no legs, and they were shivering under their thin blanket. Thumeka spent a few seconds trying to figure out if they were that pale naturally or suffering from hypothermia before noticing the child's blue lips.

"How can I ignore a child lying in the street like that?" He cradled them to his chest and gave them some food from his bag.

"Great, now they'll all come begging."

Indeed, seconds later, they were swarmed. Eyes frantic, Muthinji gave the children (and adults) all the food from his bag, as well as his money, his gloves, kerchief, and scarf, and even his overcoat, jacket, and sweater.

"Why did you do that?"

Muthinji cradled the child to his chest, shivering. "I can always get more. Anyway. Have you read anything interesting lately?"

"Only astronauts' social media. A friend of mine told me about an interesting interview he read, but I haven't had time to get to it yet. It's with a man who got five years in prison for doing an abortion on his wife - they couldn't afford to get it done at the hospital."

"But why did he go to prison?"

"Performing medical procedures without a licence. Usually nobody knew or cared about low-income people going to some random person for medical care, but when someone died or nearly died, it could result in arrests. In this case, the abortion was botched and the woman required emergency hospitalization."

"And what happened to her?" Muthinji adjusted his grip on the child, who lay in his arms like a doll.

"Had to pay the medical bills and raise five children on her own for the next few years. I think she went bankrupt and had to move in with relatives. That's why they did the abortion in the first place, they couldn't afford another kid. It could have been worse, my friend mentioned reading about countless cases of men being executed for accidentally killing their wives and girlfriends."

Muthinji shook his head. "Insane."

"That's Panem for you."

Muthinji looked at the child. "I can see that."

Much to Stephen's surprise, Tiller had remembered it was his birthday. To his even greater surprise, the book she gave him was not The Ultimate Guide to Sex for Men who Love Men or something else of the sort, but the recently released autobiography of an interrogator from some country Stephen had never heard of who had achieved great success by avoiding torture and instead pretending to be the suspects' friend and drinking tea with them.

Over the past few days, he had found the time to read a couple of pages, enough to determine that he had already hit on many of the same methods as Maria Kim. Unfortunately, she had never been a prison warden, so she couldn't help him there. There hadn't been any more break-ins and it was becoming more and more clear that there simply weren't any loyalist bands out there to assassinate anyone, only bandits willing to kill for money and supplies. Nevertheless, Stephen couldn't help but worry. A death would discredit the trial completely.

After a week of almost non-stop patrol and paperwork, Stephen finally had a window of opportunity when Angelo would finally have the apartment free for the afternoon - the family was going to the movies. Angelo had always had a tendency to stay at home alone (to be free of the usual circus for a few hours), so they didn't instantly assume he was meeting someone.

When Stephen walked into the apartment, he was not surprised to see both Feather and Angelo with paper cones on their heads. "Happy belated birthday!" his boyfriend exclaimed, swooping over for a kiss. "Congratulations. You're middle-aged now."

"Do I look middle-aged to you?" Stephen teased.

"The best kind of middle-aged."

"Ah, so that's why I waste time I could be spending writing papers on working out."

Angelo ran a hand down his arm. "I love you so much," he said quietly.

"Love you, too." Stephen embraced him, feeling his solid warmth. "You're the best." Feather wobbled over to rub against Stephen's legs, meowing. "Fine, fine, I concede it, you're the best."

"He's the real master in the house, isn't he?" Angelo said, crouching down to pet him. "Soon enough, he'll be jumping onto couches and bouncing off the walls."

"I don't want this to end," Stephen realized, one hand on Feather's squishy side, the other on Angelo's much leaner leg. "This trial feels like it's been going on forever. But I don't want this to end."

Angelo smiled at Feather, scratching behind his ear. "It doesn't have to end," he said quietly. "Us, I mean."

Stephen had never been in this situation before. He was glad about it now. It meant he had ended up here, with Angelo. "Of course," he said in a light tone. "How could I ever bear to be separated from Feather?"

"Is Feather going to give you your birthday present? I don't think so."

"Oh, and here I am thinking my present is His Aspicness allowing me to scratch his neck."

"No, I have something better." He went over to his bag, which was hanging from the wall, and took out a book wrapped in newsprint. Stephen unwrapped it, finding a copy of I Was the Nuremberg Jailer. "I know you really like the book, so I thought to get you your own copy so you can give back the one you're using to the historian."

'Like' wasn't exactly the correct word, it was simply a total lack of anything else Stephen could draw inspiration from. "That's very thoughtful of you," he said, putting the book in the inside pocket of his coat. "Dr. Nurbeko keeps on demanding I return their precious tome." Both they and Dr. Blueroot still hadn't recovered from the death of Dr. Lee. "Where did you get such an obscure book?"

Angelo shrugged. "Some book-seller. Pure luck - I was hoping for absolutely anything about running a jail, and then this comes up." That was good, because Stephen already had a pile of those, and he didn't think Angelo knew which ones he did and didn't have.

He didn't have the heart to complain about the black market when it came to books. How many people were actually willing in this economy to buy books of all things when libraries existed? And knowing Angelo, he had spent hours and hours scouring every single kiosk and pensioner with stacks of books. "You're the best," Stephen said, hugging him. "The absolute best."

"I was just thinking," Angelo said, still hugging. "We really need to think of what we want to do. Your trials might continue for years, and Grandma will walk in on us at some point if we continue sneaking around."

That bit about his grandmother was a joke, though Stephen was fully willing to believe her still capable of giving her grandson a good swat with her slipper. The rest was serious. "You think we should - what? There's no way you'll be able to get a decent place to live on your own and I need to stay in the jail." Angelo refused to have Stephen move in with him, citing being too old for that. People in the big country tended to live cheek-by-jowl with four generations crammed under one roof, but that did not mean they liked it. Urbanites dreamed of moving out once they got married, even if it was to a communal apartment with three other families sharing the kitchen and bathroom.

"I was thinking we should stop sneaking around. After the key criminals are dealt with, there'll be less press interest."

Optimistic of his boyfriend to think so. "I didn't think we'd be able to stay hidden for so long," Stephen admitted, stepping away and sitting down to pet Feather. "I can't believe your neighbours haven't informed half the world yet."

Angelo shrugged. "We've got good neighbours." He smiled. "Pity we couldn't have a proper birthday party for you."

"We never had much in the way of a party back home," Stephen said. "It was all just verbal congratulations." This year, all of his relatives had made sure to call on his actual birthday.

"That's also nice." Angelo took Stephen by the hand. Feather meowed. "Cat's probably thinking - silly human, why are you petting that other human when you can pet me instead?"

Stephen chuckled. "He probably reports to your grandmother. Complains that the human, instead of providing ear scritches like he is constitutionally obliged to, treacherously went to the other room, closed it, and proceeded to tie up a lieutenant."

"Don't even joke about it," Angelo said with a mock-shudder.

"What will your family think once they find out?" Stephen asked seriously, shuffling over to rest his head on Angelo's shoulder. "You said they're uneasy about the entire thing."

Angelo side-hugged him. "Who cares? I joke about grandparental wrath, but we're forty years old. Grandma can implode as much as she likes. She's a veteran of the civil war, she'll probably look at you and see your proverbial grandparent she shot at - but that's just her. Grandpa hasn't really cared about anything besides me getting married for the past fifteen years." He ran his hands over Stephen's neck. "You want to watch the news?"

"Sure," Stephen said, standing up and heading towards the couch. Feather wobbled after him.

"To be honest, correspondent, we all hate the lieutenant's guts," the young guard said, looking around as if expecting Vance to jump out from an alley. "He's unbearable, with that spit-and-polish discipline and all that. Doesn't have any fun himself and doesn't let anyone else have any, either. No idea how Second Lieutenant Tiller stands him. Guess it's like when the favourite child thinks the harsh parent isn't too bad."

Thumeka wrote down the last words and nodded. She was currently interviewing an off-duty guard in a rubble-strewn parking lot. Hardly the ideal place for such an undertaking, it was hard to write in gloves and Thumeka was unpleasantly chilly despite her warm clothing. "What's the discipline like?" She knew that much already, but being able to cite an actual source, even an anonymous one, was better than openly relying on third-hand gossip. Nineteen-year-old Tommy Jackson had requested that his name be kept out of anything she published.

"It's kind of insane. Granted, I'm from Two, but all the Thirteeners say he's way beyond the pale. He explodes over the littlest things. Expects us to pull these crazy shifts, two hours on and one off four times in a row. Tears everyone a new one for drinking when off-duty, or hooking up with locals. He really flipped when those kids managed to get into the jail." Tommy snorted. "Serves him right. I hope some prisoner manages to kill themselves, just to piss him off. As long as it can't be blamed on me, of course."

"Have you had to experience his discipline yourself?"

Tommy shrugged. "Only as part of the squad. My parents always shouted at me, so now that I just have to do certain things to avoid it, I do them. I don't drink because of my parents, and with my Hep C and AIDS, it's for the best that I don't hook up."

"AIDS?"

"Yeah." He paused. "If not for the rebellion, I might have already been dead by now. I started experiencing the symptoms a couple weeks after getting here. Doctors had to get creative, 'cause you can't take the usual meds for Hep C if you're immunodeficient. Granted, the antiretrovirals are working pretty well. I thought if it got to AIDS, that was the end, but apparently not. Back in my village, people dropped left and right from it and nobody ever thought you could do anything about it. They'd say 'oh, if only we had those Capitol medications', but that wasn't really true. In the city close to us, the deputy mayor has been HIV positive since forever, and she's not going anywhere."

Thanks to recent advances, if the guard took his medications every day, he had a decent chance at a normal life expectancy. And who knew - maybe in a decade or so, even people with full-blown AIDS could recover to the point where they could not transmit the virus anymore. "You never had access to medications before?"

"I never knew I was sick before. I mean, I knew I was sick and everyone suspected Hep C, but it's not like Aunt Kira who helped out with births could magic up a testing kit. We didn't even have a paramedic-midwife station in our village. Granted, we did have Aunt Kira, but she was self-taught."

"If you are willing to share, do you know how you got the diseases?"

Tommy shrugged. "Either sex or needles. We couldn't really afford heroin or stuff like that, but my buddies and I sometimes chipped together and got a couple of doses. I lived in the city for a couple of years and worked burying treasure, but the money was only enough to buy alcohol."

Thumeka felt very grateful for having been born where she was. "How did you get that job?"

"Went to the help-wanted board and the reader said there were package-delivery jobs. I was just a village kid, so I fell for it. Didn't even think there was something odd about having to bury the packages in the courtyards behind apartment complexes. Figured out what was what eventually. Left after seeing a nine-year-old courier handcuffed and beaten by Peacekeepers. Just couldn't deal with seeing that. At least in our village, the Peacekeepers were mostly military pensioners who only beat their own spouses and kids. Like my mother. My father lost his wife, my biological mother, when I was two - TB - and there were five of us, so he married an ex-Peacekeeper even though she beats him every week."

"It's awful that you had to deal with that."

"Eh, that's just how it goes. Plus, I'm on meds now. So it balances out."

"Are your superiors aware of your HIV status?"

Tommy nodded. "Lieutenant exploded, obviously, but he refused to ship me home 'cause it'll be hard to get meds there. So I'm still in uniform. Asks me every time he sees me if I've taken my meds today." He paused. "That's pretty considerate of him. For once."

After living for some time with his new roommates, Leon realized something about himself - he was actually a very good cook. Back home, it had always been Marcellus trying to be 'just like at Dad's work', even when they had been very small, with Leon peeling potatoes and washing dishes. But compared to Nilofar, Danyal, and Zoe, he might as well have been the head chef at the restaurant.

"How did you make this out of rations?" Danyal asked incredulously as the four of them dug into their soup.

"I just did," Leon said awkwardly. The soup tasted pretty normal.

"Have you ever thought of doing this for a living?"

Leon shook his head frantically. "No. My father's schedule is insane, and he says it's not any better for actual cooks. I'd rather have a stable eight-to-six." Or at least a stable shift in a factory.

"That makes sense." Nilofar took a piece of bread. There had been no bread this week, only flour. Leon missed the fluffiness of loaf bread, but he didn't have the time or the ingredients to make it rise, so flat bread it was. "What is this made from?"

"Flour and water. Didn't you see me in the kitchen?" Somehow, Leon had found himself doing all the cooking in the household. He didn't mind, since it was easier than dusting or the laundry.

"No way. You made this in our kitchen from flour and water?"

The bread really wasn't anything special. Chewing it made Leon curse fate. "Have you considered that maybe you just really suck at cooking?" Leon asked in a teasing voice.

"That's true," Nilofar said, "but I've never met someone our age who could cook so well without real training."

Leon shrugged. "I guess my dad picked up some things at work, so I picked up some things from him."

"You remind me of our neighbour back home," Danyal said. "We didn't have anything there. Couldn't even afford anything, we were on tesserae. My parents, they couldn't make anything. Not that big of a problem when the grain was cookable, though plain rice or buckwheat's fucking boring. But rye, or wheat? They'd have burned water, let alone something that needs to cook for so long. They ground it up - badly - and made bread like this. Except that it was as tough as wood. One of the neighbours, they could make a feast out of nothing. Others couldn't." He shrugged.

"I used already-ground flour," Leon reminded him. "We didn't need to grind it."

Danyal tore off a piece of bread and dipped it in his soup. "I bet you'd be great at it."

"That," Zoe declared, "had to be deliberate. Flour was prohibitively more expensive in the Districts, if you adjust for average income."

"Yeah, because they could," Nilofar said. "It was all about money, not some grand conspiracy. You really think some villager on the outskirts of the Capitol lived better than me?"

"Grain wasn't a field-to-table monopoly, was it?" Danyal asked. "Far as I know, landowners sold it to middlepeople no matter if it was being ground or not. Not to mention the mills were also owned by someone."

"Yeah, but if you don't mill grain, that's a lot of wages that don't get paid."

They launched into an impassioned debate about that. Zoe was convinced that manufactured goods and things like flour had been hard to find in the Districts because of a deliberate government conspiracy to make the District poor spend time on just feeding and clothing themselves instead of potentially plotting, Nilofar thought that it had simply been corners being cut everywhere they could, and Danyal seemed to still be looking for something to consider the truth.

They finished their soup and moved on to canned fruits. Leon and Zoe had spent the entire morning queuing for rations. There had recently been a massive scandal over fake ration cards, so the cashiers were extra-paranoid.

"Look, it's obvious," Zoe said, waving around a piece of fruit impaled on a chopstick. "The Games were needed to foment hatred between the Districts. When did you ever hate the other Districts beyond that?"

"That's true," Danyal conceded. "And 'our' victory felt like my own, even though I didn't know the Tributes at all. So we basically cheered for the other Tribute's death, accepting that only one could come home."

"Not to mention the unifying effects of victory," Nilofar added. "Why d'you think they rigged it against the Careers? So the others had that release valve. So they cheered for the deaths of our Tributes and associated us with the government."

"But why?" Leon asked. "I just don't see how having anyone hate anyone benefits the government. Maybe if not for the Games, people wouldn't have been so willing to rise up."

Zoe chuckled. "It doesn't. But hatred is irrational." That much, Leon knew already.

"To be fair," Danyal said, "the Games were completely irrelevant to us. Class issues were the thing I got angry about."

"But that's the thing - why not pay workers a bit more so that they shut up, to put it crudely?" Leon asked, wondering what that piece of fruit he was about to eat was. It tasted sweet, but nothing like anything he knew.

"I think you think too highly of the powers that be," Zoe said cynically. "They just don't want to let long-term considerations get in the way of short-term profits."

Nilofar laughed out loud. "Bold of you to assume the government was capable of having any long-term considerations to ignore in the first place. You see conspiracy where there was only incompetence and basic greed. People at all levels grabbed what they could without a thought to next week. If prices are jacked up by monopolies - well, who cares, they're all Snow's friends anyways. But when complaints were heard in the Capitol middle class, something had to be done, and the Capitol as a whole benefited a little bit from that. The Capitol middle class lived like Eight Nations paupers, but they didn't have anything to compare it to - McCollum, at least, had half a brain, which was why he introduced isolationism, even if he didn't realize that he was the cause of most of the country's problems and his solutions made them worse. Leon, they weren't capable of thinking pragmatically at all. That's the only possible conclusion you can draw from the documents we scan."

Leon wished he could stop caring about politics. But to brush aside the issues his roommates brought up would have made him complicit in them, so he had to force himself to care. Granted, he was already complicit because he had watched the Games for his entire life without doing more than the occasional kitchen-joke, but he'd go crazy if he tried to contemplate that.

As Thumeka headed back to her billet, she caught sight of Daniel Chatterjee and raced towards him. A few days ago, she had reread an old favourite book about Panem in which he had been mentioned, and Thumeka could not believe she had forgotten all about it.

I finally asked Isaiah the question that had been with me for our entire conversation. While living in Panem, had he ever seen any defiance, any protest?

"Like how people march around the streets here or write on walls? Of course not. It would never enter anyone's mind. Nobody would ever do such a thing." I nodded, disappointed. I had wanted to believe that the countless people imprisoned and executed over the decades had been true ideological opponents. "No, wait, there was one time. I just couldn't believe it was real. A judge, Daniel Chatterjee - I knew him from the papers - marched out of the courthouse in his robe and began to say that the justice system was wrong, he would not condemn an innocent person, and that the entire government structure was rotten. Right in front of my eyes. I ran away, afraid I would be punished, too. No idea what happened to him. Probably shot a minute later."

Our interview ended shortly afterwards, but that moment has stuck with me since. So there was a person who disagreed openly. Panem is not made up of mindless Snow supporters.

I told myself later that day that if by some stroke of luck Panem becomes free in my lifetime, I will go there and seek out Daniel Chatterjee's grave, if he has one, or the man himself, if he is so lucky as to still be alive. Then, I will bow down to the one who spoke in public in the most silent nation in the world.

Peng Mengting had died a few years ago, but there was still Thumeka. She ran as fast as she could towards the stooped figure. "Hello, Mr. Chatterjee," she said as respectfully as possible.

"Hello - er - you're the journalist Makwetu, correct?"

"Correct. I just want to say thank you and shake your hand."

"For what?"

He offered his hand. Thumeka took it, acutely aware of the weak, floppy grip, and inclined her head. "For what you did. You made foreigners understand that there was dissent in Panem."

Chatterjee shrugged. "I was just mad about my boss' demands. I don't think I even said anything about actual higher-ups. Anyway. Would you like to see pictures of my cat? He's a polydactyl just like me." Chatterjee gingerly raised a hand encased in a glove that must have been custom-made. "And he also has joint problems."

Ten minutes of Pumpkin the cat later, Thumeka stood on the steps of the billet, bowl of pilaf in one hand, and wondered whether to go downstairs. In the end, she decided not to. The basement was poorly ventilated and stuffy, not to mention that it was already packed despite it only being lunch. Thumeka went upstairs instead, to her room.

The room was completely empty, and someone had been considerate enough to open the windows. Thumeka closed them, glad for the fresh air but wanting to be a bit warmer. She sat down on her bunk, took out her computer, and read the news while eating the pilaf.

One of the others had complained that this wasn't pilaf - it was just rice, carrots, onions, and a few bits of chicken. Thumeka herself found it rather bland but tasty - not being from Georgia, she was not an expert. Now if they had offered what was ostensibly 'authentic nhedzi, I swear I looked up the recipe on the Web' but was in reality stew made from dried mushrooms picked around these parts ten years ago, she would not have been happy.

Once she finished eating, Thumeka went back to the kitchen to hand back the bowl (unlike some people) and began to work on her article. She had spent the entire morning walking around talking to people, and now had some excellent material. The participants were, for the most part, not particularly eager by this point, if they ever had been. The legal teams just wanted to do their job well, as if this was any other trial. The guards either wanted to go home or liked it here just fine, depending on temperament. And the local civilians preferred to not care about it all. Nobody was against the key criminals trial per se, but they were upset with Depuration and thought that some of the IDC trials were going too far.

Thumeka wondered what the people back home would think of her article. Then, she remembered it was Sunday, which meant she needed to call Yemurai. She closed the tabs she didn't need to actually work and focused on the article, trying to get it done as fast as possible. It wasn't too difficult, given the topic and amount of information she had. Once she was done, she sent the draft off for editing and called her wife.

Yemurai picked up almost instantly. "Yes?"

"See - I didn't forget this time."

"Such time management," Yemurai said, eyes sparkling with mirth. "I miss you so much!"

Thumeka wished she could reach through the screen and embrace her. Usually, she didn't get homesick when abroad, cold weather and strange food didn't faze her. Talking to Yemurai was an exception. "I miss you too, sugar-stick."

"Did you go to the bar like you planned?"

Thumeka winced. That had been a stupid idea. "Left after fifteen minutes. Too overwhelming."

"Ah, well, it's for the best. You know what they say about the servers in those bars."

"Not nearly as attractive as you?"

Yemurai nearly spilled the water she had been drinking. "Smooth," she said, laughing. Turning serious, she added, "I hope you weren't too upset."

"I guess I was," Thumeka admitted. "It was for a colleague's birthday, he invited everyone who speaks one of his languages - besides English, of course. I thought it'd be a fun local get-together, but I had to leave before the first toast was even made. It was on Tuesday in any case, I had to get up early the next day to go to the trial."

"Come on, the trial's nowhere near as fun as a party."

Thumeka lay back against the pole and adjusted her screen so that her face was fully visible. "Depends on who's testifying. But you're right. I'm annoyed everyone goes out and has fun and I get back to the billet and crash immediately. I don't even know anyone here that well, aside from my foreign friends." Granted, she was terrible at making friends for the same reason as her inability to be in a bar. Had she, Mikola, and Jiao not had that forced interaction of sitting next to each other for months, they would never have become close.

"At least it's not England."

Thumeka chuckled. "Are my parents in earshot?"

"No."

"Then thank God it's not England. Last thing we need is terrorists trying to blow up Tanaka Kenryo's favourite bar." The Japanese war correspondent was known the world over for his daring reportages. He had spent some time here before realizing it was too peaceful for someone like him to cover and going off to the Rocky Mountains to document a hunt for alleged Death Squad members who may or may not have existed.

"Maybe if the bar got blown up, you'd have a better excuse not to go," Yemurai joked.

Thumeka smiled. "Being on the spectrum is excuse enough." Problem was, people saw that she worked in journalism and decided there was nothing she couldn't cope with. It didn't work that way. Yes, she could handle social interaction, yes, she could work in a job fundamentally involving constant communication. But interviews, meetings, and discussions were very different from a noisy and stuffy bar. Even that, she could handle if she had to, but she didn't have to go to Mokgweetsi Maano's party and endure someone badly singing karaoke in Yoruba. "Though there's so many bars here, it'd take a long time to blow them all up."

"Let's not talk about explosions. Anything interesting happening in the trial?"

"No," Thumeka said. "They've got the cabinet rats going up now, I think I'm the only person who can tell them apart. And their excuses are the same, too. They've got the 'Hunger Games' functionaries this week, so that should draw more of a crowd. And the Chief of Counsel is going to be cross-examining Toplak - that's the next one up - so looks like the bus will be full for the next few days. You doing anything interesting?"

Yemurai shook her head. "Same old, same old. Dropped by Zandile's place yesterday, haven't been hungry since then." That was par for the course with her sister. "How are your friends doing?"

"Mikola found co-religionists and Jiao successfully played matchmaker for two colleagues. No idea which one is happier."

"Mikola - that's the Ukrainian Jew?"

"No, Belarusian."

"There's Jews in Belarus?"

"As Mikola told me once - since he's here, there's two, his parents." That was an exaggeration, but not by that much. Eastern Europe was a notoriously homogenous place.

"Huh. And the other one? She's from China, right?"

"She is. I said 'matchmaker', but I think it's more short-term than that - he's a correspondent for a Quebec news agency and she's from Brazil, I don't see it lasting beyond their assignments."

Yemurai nodded. For some reason, she liked hearing gossip about people she had never met. And if she told Uncle, then half of Harare would know Tereza Lemos and Pierre Delacroix were hooking up. "How do they talk to each other?"

"In English, of course."

"I keep on forgetting people other than you speak English," Yemurai said with a laugh. "Well, then. Any other fresh gossip?"

Mary couldn't help but feel anxious as Toplak's defense went underway. Tornabene did an excellent job in her opening statement, making Toplak out to have been a kind of hotel manager who did not particularly care what the guests got up to. There were three counts the former deputy head of the 'Training Centre' was being charged with - conspiracy, the implementation of the 'Hunger Games', and crimes against humanity. Even the second was not a given, as it would have been foolish to accuse the janitor of the 'Training Centre' of that crime - and Tornabene was doing everything she could to paint Toplak as not being too different from a janitor or other maintenance worker.

Of course, the deputy head of the entire process was very far from a maintenance worker fixing leaky pipes. Not only had she kept it going, but she had participated in various planning conferences. To claim she had done purely administrative tasks was a lie.

There were only a couple of witnesses willing to testify in Toplak's favour. The first one, her onetime assistant, insisted that it was her boss who had made decisions and Toplak had simply pushed around papers.

When Mary stood up to take the stand, the anxiety vanished. The sizeable audience - everyone wanted to see the functionaries of the 'Hunger Games' defend themselves - was silent, but Mary couldn't have felt more energized by their presence if they had been cheering her on. She let herself bask in the limelight as she exchanged a few casual sentences with the witness, setting him at ease.

He had insisted that Toplak had never made decisions, which was patently false. Mary carefully led him around, eventually eliciting an admission that she had indeed been the one to decide on what the conditions in the 'Training Centre' would be like and what kind of training would be provided. Far from being the kind of deputy who exists only to serve as a glorified secretary, Toplak had been the kind of deputy who did everything as the boss lounged in a resort somewhere.

The next two witnesses tried a similar tack, and were both dispatched without too much difficulty. Toplak herself went up next, and offered a much longer version of what had already been said. Mary had to force herself to take careful notes. Lack of preparation had always played a bad joke on her before, she couldn't let herself mess up the real deal. Perhaps she should have spent more time on the cross-examination, instead of assuming it would be trivial and jumping forwards to the concluding statement instead.

Too late to regret it now. Mary added some points from the day's testimony into her outline that evening and went to bed.

It was with difficulty that Miroslav managed to find the time to talk to his family. Everyone wanted to talk that afternoon. Finally, after listening to Toplak's worries about tomorrow's cross-examination, he was able to go back to his office and call.

Biljana answered. "Hey."

"Hey. Sorry I've been busy for so long."

"No problem - I'm also busy."

"How's school going? Where's everyone else?"

Biljana shrugged. "Everyone else is busy and school is going fine." She paused, tapping her fingers on the table in front of her. On the back wall, Miroslav could see reproductions of paintings. It looked very nice. He couldn't wait to get back to his new home. "Though there's one thing. A friend of mine just got diagnosed with bulimia."

"Are they going to be alright?" Miroslav asked, heart going out to this teenager he didn't know.

"That's the thing - I don't know!"

Miroslav nodded, wishing he could be with his daughter. "My personal experience will probably not be of too much use-"

"Personal experience?"

It was Miroslav's turn to look confused. "I never told you?"

"No," Biljana said with a shake of her head. "What experience? You had bulimia before?"

"Actually, I have it right now." Biljana looked completely shocked. Had he really never mentioned it to his family before? It was like his life was splitting into two. "Granted, it's caused by an inability to control myself around food and the ensuing guilt, due to my upbringing. I gave my wallet to my colleague, which made me unable to buy extra food. I only have an episode one or two times a month now."

"Huh. That sucks. You're getting better, right?" she asked hopefully.

"I am. I go in for counselling, though it was quite hard to find a therapist I don't know professionally." As it was, they had still ended up meeting professionally, which was horribly awkward.

"I guess that's convenient - you know how it works, so you don't have to be convinced you have a problem."

Miroslav chuckled. "But then I feel extra-terrible because I'm supposed to be a fixer of minds but I can't even fix my own."

"Well, feel better soon, I guess?"

"Thanks. How about we stop talking about me? How's school?"

"I have an essay I need to write," Biljana said, the implication evident.

Granted, Miroslav had a book he needed to write. "I won't hold you up, then. Do you know if Mom is planning to call?"

"She told me last week she wants to have a big call next Saturday evening."

"Alright. Bye!"

"Bye."

Her image disappeared. Miroslav was hit with a sudden wave of homesickness as he tried to recall what the apartment had looked like. He missed them all - Biljana, Rody, Mom and Dad, Nettie and Robert. Mallow was a good friend, but hardly enough to make up for his entire family.

With a heavy heart, Miroslav checked the clock and decided to try to work a little bit more on his book. That, of course, rapidly morphed into reading the news with the chapter open in another document. Someone he had gone to university with had written an article called 'Rural Capitolian Views of the Districts' - that looked fascinating. Back home, everyone had always seen 'the big country' as one giant monolith, but on the ground, there had been so many divisions.

The thought of having everyone read his book spurred Miroslav to write a few sentences. He wasn't sure if it was good that Mallow was as slow as him. On one hand, it meant he didn't constantly feel guilty for dragging her down, but on the other, it meant the book would probably be finished around the year 3000.

"Er, warden?" one of the prisoners called out in an imperious tone. "I need another blanket. It's freezing in my cell."

As if everyone else wasn't cold, and they weren't complaining! Stephen turned around to face Komal Lophand, one of the most-hated defendants of the entire trial process. While most of the others in the block were outside, a couple had been held back, like always, to clean everyone's cells. While Lophand's name was apt only metaphorically, he was still one of the laziest. Stephen would have gladly strangled all of the jail's inhabitants, and had he had the option, Lophand would have been one of the first.

"Of course," Stephen said. "We'll get you a blanket."

Lophand nodded and went back to half-heartedly mopping the floor. He had looked arrogant before - at the judges' trial, the prosecution had shown clips of Lophand 'presiding' over a trial, or rather insulting the defendants, threatening the defense counsel, and acting more like a prosecutor than a judge. Now, he just looked like a man in late middle age. The grey jumpsuit fit him better than the robe, in Stephen's opinion, and the mop looked better in his hands than the gavel.

When supervising Courtroom 7, Stephen had observed that there were always a lot of legal professionals present. He understood their motivations - there was an NCIA trial in the works, and Stephen already knew he would want to attend it as much as possible, to look at the people he could have been part of had he been born in the big country. Unlike him, though, these curious judges and lawyers had actually been educated in a system rotten to the core - and had managed to become fair and just nevertheless. They wanted to wonder why it was so, why their dedication to justice hadn't been swept away by the allure of bribe money.

Watching Lophand mop made Stephen wonder what the judges overseeing his trial thought. He knew some of it, of course - the prosecution had stated they considered the defendants a stain on the good name of legal professionals worldwide, and the judges were probably also thinking along the same lines. But what was it like for someone who had always felt out of place because of their integrity to suddenly be rewarded for it? For someone who had been fired for following the law to sit in judgement over those who had profited from their dismissal? It sounded overblown even in Stephen's mind, but he couldn't help but think of it as a triumph of good over evil.

"Er, warden?" Lophand again.

"Yes?"

"How are you doing?"

Was he seriously thinking that Stephen could be cajoled into fetching him coffee like one of the guards? Stephen looked around the corridor. Because of a lack of cadres - several had been kicked out for contraband - he was the only one supervising the second floor, which meant that nobody would overhear them, if they kept their voices low. "I am doing well," Stephen said, playing along. If Lophand was planning something, best pull it out of him now. "And you?"

"Thinking about how lucky I am. I understand what's going on in that courtroom, I can work together with my lawyer to plan a defense strategy." His lawyer had used to defend child molesters and serial killers out of a deep respect for due process and a professional love of the challenge - Stephen suspected she was working on IDC trials for more of the same. "Some of the others, those Ministry of Justice hacks with no legal training, are completely lost."

Now if only he extended that to the small children who had been sentenced in his courtroom. Bizarrely enough, the only time Lophand did not pronounce the supreme penalty when the prosecution had asked for it was when Lucius Fisher, Blues' lawyer, was the defense counsel for a five-year-old who had been brought by her family to the Capitol. Despite his irritation at Fisher's casuistry, Stephen couldn't help but want to bow to the one who had made the almighty telephone relent.

"Very true," Stephen said. "But that's why public defenders exist - so that nobody is left to face the justice system alone."

"Public defenders," Lophand said with a dismissive huff. "If a public defender didn't ask for a plea deal, that was an event." Stephen had been trying to get him to consider that most people hadn't even had one, especially outside the Capitol proper, but perhaps that was too much of a reach. "I've seen public defenders get their clients to plead guilty to murder. In the first degree! When there is an automatic death penalty for that!"

The reason for that was the bribes public defenders got to achieve faster convictions and a more impressive conviction rate. "Nobody pled guilty here," Stephen said.

"Because any of these crimes is a capital one, and we know better than to try for a plea deal."

The proverb had it that evil couldn't comprehend good. Lophand was so used to plea deals being used to secure faster executions, he didn't understand that the entire point of them was so that the person was quickly found guilty, but given a lesser sentence than if they had lost the trial.

"You've stopped mopping," Stephen reminded him.

"Oh. Yes. I'm sorry." Lophand stepped into the cell and resumed cleaning the floors. It seemed impossible that Sanchez from the key criminals trial had come from the same judiciary as him.

"What did you think?" Mary asked Reed as she sat down after the cross-examination of Toplak was over.

"Uninspired but competent."

Mary wanted to be upset, but she knew not to take being called competent for granted. "I'm glad. Let's see what the press thinks." She took out her phone and browsed through news sites and social media - she struggled to comprehend the latter, but as long as she had a few links open she could simply refresh, it worked alright.

It seemed that the massive interest in seeing the Chief of Counsel cross-examine had been a dud. The handful of journalists who kept up running reportages of the trial of the key criminals had done their usual, and that was it. It was as if Toplak hadn't been cross-examined.

The audience was mostly gone by now. They had been bored by the back-and-forth about who had been responsible for what duties. Mary couldn't help but feel disappointed - she had hoped the trial would be a learning experience for the world, and nobody wanted to show up. On the plus side, at least the cross-examination hadn't been a total catastrophe. Toplak wasn't Dovek, but bungling her cross would have still merited quite a few mocking articles in newspapers.

"Anything?" Reed asked.

"Maybe there'll be some articles by next morning."

"Look on the bright side - there's no flood of complaints about how you handled it."

"That's what I was thinking, too. Silence is better for the trial than discreditation."

"Yeah." Reed jotted down some notes. It was now Kirji's lawyer at the lectern, arguing why her client's actions hadn't consisted of anything criminal. Much to her own surprise, Mary realized that after Kirji, there were only four defendants left. The end was close.

Nothing ruined a Sunday for Antonius like getting his head shaved. Even a few days later, running his hand over his head and feeling the short stubble there made him feel like a convict. A few of the others - Cotillion, Pollman, Slice, and the military people - did not mind so much, but the former Peacekeepers were used to it and the others had coily hair that would have been impossible to maintain in a jail with no supplies.

Antonius did not understand - why did he need to have his hair buzzed almost into nonexistence? He most certainly did not have lice, and neither did the jail, as even parasites were too afraid of Warden Vance's wrath. Surely he could be trusted to take a minute or so to comb his hair in the mornings! He knew that head-shaving had been policy in jails and prisons for decades, but it felt wrong to be treated like a common criminal.

Of course, they were treating him like a common criminal by putting him in this dock. Antonius ran his hand over his head again - was it his imagination or had more of his hair fallen out? One more reason to hate this enforced haircut. His neighbours, being female, were spared that particular issue, though both Blues and Talvian looked rather unimpressive.

Talvian, as always being loomed over by Krechet, was perusing a newspaper while pretending to be taking notes. "Did you hear about the trials they're planning for other industrialists?" she whispered to Antonius.

"I did. It is an outrage. They are trying to indict everyone who had even a semblance of authority."

Talvian nodded and deftly turned the page. "But not the landowners."

"I am in agreement with Congress on this one," Antonius said. "They did nothing but idle their lives away. It was local managers who truly oversaw the lands and were responsible for any misdeeds. It is wrong to simply take one's property away from them, of course, but I agree with the government that agriculture needs to be modernized. No more of this inefficient nonsense with quasi-serfs using hand tools."

"There it is - the rivalry between big business and big landowners," Talvian said with a small smile.

Antonius smiled back. Without power over life and death, Talvian was a perfectly nice person.

In the meanwhile, Marcellus Zhu began to call witnesses. Antonius could not see how the prosecution could justify death for Kirji. Perhaps she had attended a planning conference or two, but all she had power over had been a small PR organization dedicated to the Victors. Hardly someone who could be placed in the same line as Dovek.

If Antonius had always disliked the landowners for their idleness, that went double for the functionaries of the Hunger Games. They had overseen a glorified hostage-taking operation and earned millions for it. A more pointless group of people there had never existed. And all that nonsense that had been done to the Victors - what a waste of resources. By taking a farmer or a factory worker and turning them into a national celebrity, the government itself had given people the wrong ideas about their place in society, especially in the Districts where volunteers had been trained. Had Antonius been in charge, there would have been no Hunger Games, and everyone would have known their place and stayed there.

But Antonius had not been in charge, and the likes of Kirji had made celebrities out of adolescent rural workers. The witnesses' testimony about her lack of power would not help her, Antonius realized. It did not matter what she would say. Kirji would be hanged for her job description alone.

A/N: The book Thumeka recalls is inspired by a book about North Korea I read once. It included a segment of an interview from a defector who once saw 'Down with Kim Jong-il' written on a wall.

I do apologize for showing so little of the actual trial. In my defense, even non-fiction books about trials like these tend to gloss over most of the defendants (I have read a grand total of 1 book about the IMTFE that actually describes every single defendant in any detail at all; am always open to recommendations if you know any), and they don't have to worry about making up twenty-four distinct personalities.