With thanks to Technicolour Raincoat, MidnightRaven323, JadeRavenstone, L. Reginski and deathless . smile for your reviews of the last chapter.

THREE DAYS EARLIER

RE-EDUCATION BUREAU

He could hear Ganymede screaming- or was that him screaming? He could not tell. His hands were forced behind his back, handcuffed now- he felt a strip of tape cover his mouth and silence him. He gave way to his basest instincts and lashed out in all directions, but it was too little and too late.

The last thing Alec knew was a rough black bag covering his eyes, his nose, his mouth. An impact to the back of his head and the world went-

-Something primal, deep within him, told him when he woke up to be quiet. Stay down, stay silent, prey creature; predators are near.

Rough fabric scratched over his face as he shifted uncomfortably on the hard metal floor. The air filtering through the cloth was frustratingly warm, and saturated with more carbon dioxide than he was comfortable breathing- and with his mouth taped shut, he could only breathe through his nose. The fabric was loose across his face, pulled taut over the back of his head and came down to his neck, where it was fastened with some kind of belt. His wrists had been yanked behind him and crushed between his body and the metal ground, fastened together with handcuffs biting into his wrists. His ankles had been bound similarly.

Alec Taupe breathed shallowly through the black bag over his head and listened to the rattle of the truck hitting uneven roads, wincing as the hard suspension forced him up and down on top of his bound and painful hands.

What was this? Arrest? Fair, he wasn't sure how arrests really worked, but he had always been told by public information broadcasts that if you complied, offered up your wrists to the Peacekeepers, you'd be just fine.

So long as you hadn't broken the law.

Alec had known, all along, that his moment of charity to a District member, and later tribute, would be met with retribution. Perhaps on charges of smuggling, or helping Quint cheat in the Games; really, it could be blamed on anything the Capitol wished. But like this? He knew these weren't Peacekeepers. What had just happened to him was unmistakeable.

Capitol citizens lived a life of relative comfort and entertainment, with a single caveat; don't upset the system. This rule was warned and repeated, over and over, from school to adulthood, and while retribution was never publicly mentioned the stories were all the same.

If you broke the law; and really broke it; the Peacekeepers were not the ones that would arrive. The Capitol Guard, dressed in imperial black rather than Peacekeeper white, would arrive in the dead of night, black-bag you, and you would not face a fine, nor death; you were taken to the re-education bureau.

And while that bureau was never publicly discussed, whispers were exchanged in the dead of night.

The stories were ingrained in every Capitolian, the fears that sustained their desperation for distraction.

Better a tribute than them.

And he had ignored every warning and chosen instead to be kind; and where had that charity brought him? The floor of a truck, bound and bagged, being brought for re-education.

Re-education. He shivered minutely, unable to control himself. The words sounded tame, even mundane. They meant so much more.

The truck juddered to a halt. The engine stopped. Alec held his breath a moment and listened for motion.

The first clue he got of motion was of, behind him, a truck door swinging open. Feet crashing on gravel, and now he was being pulled from the truck, forced to stand upright and walk. The air was considerably cooler; he had blacked out multiple times in the truck, but it was clear to him now that the time must have been close to dawn.

And, more horrifying, he couldn't hear the city. Even on the Waterfront of the Capitol, the sound of carriages on monorails and buzzing people and loudspeakers declaring government broadcasts were never quiet; the only time of quiet would be, perhaps, occasional and carefully chaperoned holidays to past arenas, which Alec did little of.

But even then, there was a hum of electricity, a buzz of life. Tonight, there was the rustle of the bag at his ears, the whistling of mockingjays, and the crunch of the gravel beneath his feet.

Gravel gave way to paving, and then a faintly sticky linoleum. Alec was forced to stop by the hands on his shoulders that had not ceased holding him throughout his escort. He felt the belt loosen around his neck, and now he cowered into the overwhelming fluorescent lights and the vague outline of a person in a huge chair, elevated on a platform as a judge would be.

"Alexander Taupe," intoned the authoritative voice, "You have been charged of conspiracy to smuggle goods. Do you refute the charges?"

He tried to muffle out a response but could not articulate beneath the duct tape.

"Let the record reflect the charges have not been refuted. Alexander Taupe, you have been trialled by the Capitol and found guilty of conspiracy to smuggle goods into the Districts. You are sentenced to re-education. Henceforth your name is no longer your birthright; your titles and deeds have been relinquished to the Capitol, as has your right to the Capitolian Freedom Act of ADD1. Do you appeal?"

Alec had been desperately appealing throughout beneath the duct tape, but with his hands and legs tied he had no means of getting it off. He started to try and yell, but the duct tape wound around his head had been done so too tightly to permit this.

The judge almost seemed to chuckle. Alec could make out part of her form now; instead of wearing the robes of a judge, he realised, she wore the garb of a member of the Capitol Guard, black but for a bronze eagle on the lapel.

"Let the record reflect no appeal was lodged. Alexander Taupe is now the legal property of the Capitol, and re-education bureau designated asset number..." She held up a tablet. "Huh. Number 144,000. Looks like we have a milestone, boys." She seemed entirely disinterested in Alec's desperate muffled screams beneath the duct tape muting him. "Okay, we're done here. Take him to the education chamber."

His eyes had adjusted now, and he saw with awful clarity as he was half-escorted and half-pushed from the room to a corridor. He started to drag his feet, unwilling to move, unwilling to go towards what he knew lay behind the doors of the education chamber. One of the Capitol Guards growled in frustration.

"There's always one." His face was vaguely familiar; Alec seemed to remember it attached to some patron of his bar a week ago. It was horribly likely.

"Prob'ly some kinda rebel type," a clearly District 2 accent added in. "I think he needs being taught a little quicker."

The first punch winded him. The second broke a rib, and he screamed, collapsing to the ground.

"Get up." The Capitolian voice snapped.

Alec moaned on the ground. The District 2 guard sighed.

"Man, sometimes I wonder what they taught you guys to make half of you so soft."

"What did you just say about me?" The Capitol guard growled. Alec wailed beneath the duct tape as he saw the guard lash out, and a metal-soled bolt slammed into his stomach. Alec moaned helplessly, curling into a ball in a half-hearted attempt at saving himself from further harm.

"Dude, relax, I didn't mean you were soft," the District guard consoled. "No need to prove your worth or whatever, I've seen you bench-pressing shit, I'm not questioning you're tough, man."

"Better not be." The Capitol guard kicked Alec in the back, a little less passionately but with no less strength. "Come on, 144K, get up."

Knowing the next kick would be more brutal than the last, Alec tried to scramble up in compliance, but the District guard intervened and kicked out at Alec's face as he sat up. Alec was knocked backwards by the impact, feeling blood rush down his face from his nose. He moaned in pain and confusion.

"Hey, now his face matches his hair dye," the District guard commented with a laugh. The Capitolian joined in with the laughing as Alec felt the first of the tears burning in his face.

"A-a-ah, I think it's sinking in for little 144K here, wouldn't you say?" The Capitolian enunciated cruelly as he leaned in to inspect Alec, curled in a ball, covered in blood and crying with pain and fear. "See, you're ours now. And if you want us to stop kicking you, you have to do as we say, get it?"

Alec tried to scream obscenities at them but it was lost under the duct tape; it was futile and upsetting to be so powerless.

"Okay, let's try this again. Get up."

Alec, this time, decided to exercise what power he could. He lay still in the huddle he had created for himself; he wasn't obeying just to be subjected to more pain.

One of the guards sighed; they were starting to blur together in Alec's vision and perception of events. "He really wants to get to that education chamber, doesn't he?"

"And if only you'd complied, 144K. You could have had a lot less pain if you had just complied." The words were cruelly spoken, given that compliance and defiance alike seemed to be bringing the same punishment, and the unfairness of his situation hurt Alec almost as much as the kicks.

Roughly, he was forced to his feet; Alec could see that he was trailing blood down his pristine silk shirt, and dripping it on the floor.

The smell of disinfectant hanging in the corridor's air promised the blood would not be the first.

He was roughly pushed into a plastic-covered medical chair, uncuffed but strapped to the chair before he could lash out with any force. His head was restrained onto the chair. For the first time, a hand came to unwrap the duct tape on his mouth, and he let them do it until it came to the final centimeter of tape, and then he turned as much as the head restraint let him and bit down hard on the hand with his newly freed jaw.

The punch to loosen his hold was expected, but it hurt all the same.

However, he hadn't expected the needle in his neck coming from the other side, and his vision tipped; his head became lighter. He fought the feeling but it was hard to- he felt like he was being filled with helium and it was shorting out his brain. The anaesthetic surged through his bloodstream and now his whole body tingled and started to lose feeling. He frowned vaguely, then sighed, and the darkness crept into his vision.

He let it.

The next time he woke up, the seat beneath him was no longer rubbery plastic, and the restraints were gone. He lay on what felt like cool concrete.

He sat up in confusion and immediately regretted it; his head swam and his eyesight darkened with the sudden rush of blood from his head. He lay back again, moaning softly.

Where he lay was nothing more than a bare concrete room, windowless and with a single steel door. He could feel the cold too sharply on the back of his head; he slowly brought up a hand to inspect his hair and, yes, it was no longer shoulder-length; it was half an inch long at most. Alec went to curse.

It came out as nothing speech-like at all.

He gasped with horrifying realisation and both hands went from his hair to his mouth. He sat up and this time didn't regard the dizzying feeling that accompanied it. He had hoped, he had really, really hoped, that re-education wasn't what everyone had whispered about it being.

Now panicking, unashamedly and unrestrictedly, Alec tried to scream.

But his vocal cords would not vibrate; he physically couldn't make a sound beyond breathing. He put a hand to his throat, inhaled, tried again.

Nothing.

They had cut his vocal cords.

The whispers were true, Alec thought as he sat in the concrete cell. They were all true. Re-education is the Avox program.

The door opened behind him and he twisted painfully where he sat. The Capitolian Guard was back.

"Get up," he snapped.

Alec tried impulsively for a response but none could issue. He sat in fury and fear on the ground. They had done this to him. He would not comply.

The Capitol Guard in black and bronze tilted his head slightly.

Bang. The crack of a bullet against concrete, embedded in the floor beside him, and Alec scrambled up in shock more than compliance. The Guard grabbed him by the shoulder and marched him out into the corridor, down to a stark tiled room with grates on the floor and a bare pipe coming out of the wall halfway up.

The Guard shoved him sharply towards the pipe, and for a moment Alec thought it was going to be another punishment when he noted that the pipe had a shower dial next to it.

Alec looked back at the Guard. He frowned. He tried to say 'I don't shower with people present', but after the first syllable refused to issue from his mouth he stopped. The Guard snorted, marched forward, and held his gun to Alec's head.

Alec stripped down hastily, staring at himself in the grimy mirror set into the corner of the room to distract himself from the gun at his head and the silence in his throat. Shorn of his hair and now his Capitol trappings, the silks and cottons he was used to for a lifetime, the only clue he had ever been a Capitolian was the barest hint of red dye at the tip of his half-inch hair, and the crimson tattoos marking his back.

The Guard stepped back, gun still ready but not at his head.

Alec paused, hand on the shower dial.

He didn't want this. He was a Capitolian. He had done nothing wrong, not really. He didn't want this. He didn't-

The fear and denial in his veins told him to run, run from the Guard and from himself, and he obeyed without thinking. He would show them. They could take his voice, his hair, his clothes, but you couldn't take the will of a Capitolian, never, never. Alec rushed past the Guard, pushed him aside, slammed against the door, grit his teeth against the pain and flung himself through it, flying down the corridor as fast as his pained body would permit.

The corridors were a maze and he couldn't- couldn't remember where he had gone, where was he going? Alec twisted and turned, afraid and alone, truly scared for the first time in his life.

He spun and ran down another corridor, before-

Wait. Alec frowned. This looked familiar. Had he come back to the same corridor?

He turned and saw an open door, a tiled room. His blood ran cold. Stupid, stupid, you've gone down the same-

His thoughts turned electric and disappeared in smoke. His muscles contracted involuntarily and he went down to the ground, pain coursing through his injured chest.

In his peripheral vision as he blacked out he saw a Guard coming up to him.

When next he woke up, he was sitting up and in restraints. There were voices, soft and calm, behind him.

"-Just ran straight out," a low, male voice intoned; it sounded like a District 2 accent. "144k's fast, I'll give him that."

"That can be fixed," a female voice stated. Her voice was cool and calm; it did not resonate of any accent at all. The voice moved from behind him to beside him and Alec shut his eyes hastily. "Capitolians. They believe themselves so resolute, so unbreakable; the winners of a war." Even with his eyes shut, Alec could hear the smirk implied in the woman's tone. "They forget that we are the survivors."

A sharp crack and his injured chest was on fire. Alec jolted, his eyes wide open and betraying him, slamming bodily against his restraints; he tried to scream but nothing sounded except a sharp, prolonged exhalation. Impotent, voiceless. He was at the mercy of the woman holding the baton, who crossed now in front of him.

"Asset number 144,000," she stated calmly. Now she spoke more, it became clear that there was in fact the slightest accenting to her voice that her schooled tone could not hide; the stretching of her vowels, the clipped s, the drawled syllables. The clipped s was a Capitol accentuation, the extension of a word or vowel was an agricultural District tone; altogether, her voice was simultaneously unremarkable and distinctive.

It was a voice, he realised, he had heard before; just never attached to a face.

Anamaria Dimitri, Head of the Capitol Guard and the Peacekeeper Guild- the Panem Secretary of War, a title held even in their peacetime. She existed, every Capitol citizen knew that, she was often mentioned in official soundbites on the news. Who she actually was, on the other hand, had always been a mystery.

As it turned out, she was a woman in her mid-forties, austere and disciplined but with a flash of something far darker in her eyes. She wore the black and bronze of the Capitol Guard despite heading both that and the Peacekeeper's Guild; clearly, her loyalty lay with one more than the other. Her strangely accented voice, District and Capitolian and nameless all at the same time, began to speak again.

"Asset 144,000, you attempted to run, violating several Capitol laws in doing so. It appears you have not yet understood the parameters of your position, and must be subjected to the Intensive Procedure." She took a small piece of cloth, forcing it into a knot and then forcing that over his eyes as a crude blindfold. "Open your mouth."

He heard a soft 'shwing' of metal sharpening metal.

He bit his lip, shaking his head. A slam of leather-covered steel into his broken rib and he screamed silently through his nose, inhaling and exhaling rapidly but refusing to open his mouth, no, no-

Metal sharpening against metal. A hand on his jaw. A cold, high voice, sharp as a Capitolian's and snarling as a District's and enjoying this.

"Open your-"

Meagre light filtered through his blindfold as behind him the door opened again.

"Commander Dimitri?"

The hand left his jaw and the voice lost its edge of sadistic enjoyment. "I'm busy, Lieutenant."

"I understand, ma'am, but the Border Guards have apprehended the escapee arena hovercraft. They're waiting on your order."

"Tell them-" she paused. Her tone seemed to mull her options with just a hint of the terrifying enjoyment that had brought Alec to still be inhaling and exhaling at a rate that couldn't sustain oxygen flow. "Actually, why not kill two birds with one stone? This doesn't happen every day. Tell them to apprehend but not charge; tell them I and the Elite Guard are on our way to their location. And I'm bringing asset 144k."

The Lieutenant's tone was confused. "Ma'am?"

"I don't typically get the opportunity to break in new assets, and frankly the Intensive Procedure is a little clinical for my tastes. This will work just as well."

"As you wish, Commander."

Alec frowned into his blindfold, realising he had bitten into his tongue slightly in pain and fear. He was still probing the blood in his mouth when a needle stuck in his neck again.

The next time he woke up he was strapped sitting upright again, but this time with more clothing, and more juddering around him. His blindfold was off, as he discovered when he opened his eyes; he found himself in what looked like the interior to a cargo plane, strapped to the fuselage next to some crates. A final clattering and a sink in his bruised stomach and the plane landed; a marching from the side and suddenly the straps on his arms were undone and he was being frog-marched to an opening cargo bay door.

Half-shoved through the opening Alec found himself in a strange place. For someone who had grown up and lived his entire life surrounded by a single city, to see a forest clearing was beyond the unusual. He could see no cities nearby; except, perhaps, a trickle of smoke a few miles to his west. A Kevlar-gloved hand gripped his arm to stop him running and he was marched to the side as twenty troops, headed by Anamaria Dimitri, walked to an edge of the clearing.

"Do not run," the Guard hissed in his ear. Alec had had enough of running; his wounded chest was telling him he was almost done with even walking. It was only the threat of retribution that kept him standing there.

On the edge of the clearing, the grass still flattened by the rotors that had landed on it, a hovercraft sat; a large one, the type used only by military and high-ranking government personnel. Alec didn't recognise it, but he recognised the people kneeling in lines, gags, and blindfolds beside the craft.

At the front, his arms tied behind him and his head held high, knelt what could only be the curly-haired Games Director of Communications, Josiah Lyman. He repeatedly tilted his head as if to try and follow the hushed conversations of the guards around him, and made muffled moans through the gag as if to try and appeal what was happening to him.

Alec knew now that the Guards did not care what Josiah wanted to say; nor that of the muffled cries of three hundred other people. Alec realised after a moment he knew them, not all by name but certainly many by face. It was the Gamemaking department, the administrative team of the arena.

And now all of them kneeled at the mercy of the people they had served.

"Administrative branch of the 76th Hunger Games," Anamaria announced to them in her high, cold voice after a brief conversation. The Guards began taking positions, marking themselves out in a parallel line facing the kneeling Capitolians. "You have been accused of high treason to the country of Panem and to the President, and of furthermore resisting arrest, upon the orders of Gamemaker Josiah Lyman and his traitorous allies, Lexus Valerian and Seneca Crane. Do you appeal the charges?"

Muffled screams beneath the gags; and they really, truly were screams. Josiah was trying to yell words, but most had long since abandoned reason for fear instead. Prolonged, muffled notes of fear, like an aria, swept over the dusk-lit clearing.

"Let the record reflect no appeal was lodged," Anamaria said with a cruel smile. She looked across at Alec, then, and made full eye contact with him.

She smiled.

And the unthinkable finally crossed his mind- what Anamaria was about to do. He opened his mouth and screamed at them to run but he was powerless, he couldn't run to them when he could barely stand and the Guard slammed his baton once again into Alec's broken chest, forcing him to collapse on his knees on the ground. The Capitol Guards began silently drawing their guns as they stood opposite the line of the former staff of the 76th Hunger Games.

"You have been trialled by the Capitol, and found guilty of your crimes," Dimitri said. "You have been sentenced to death."

A few, the cleverer or braver ones, Josiah Lyman included, tried to stagger to their feet and run despite the odds being against them. Anamaria was already barking orders.

"READY-"

The Guards drew their machine guns and Anamaria drew her pistol, aiming it at Josiah Lyman's back.

"-AIM-"

The guns were cocked with mechanical precision and now the entire crowd was trying to surge to its feet, run, but they had been corralled and they didn't know where to go-

"-FIRE!"

An unholy clatter of bullets that made Alec's eyes water even more from where he knelt on the ground. Bang- bang- bang- bang- went the bullets, hailing upon the crowd. Blood spattered here and there but mostly poured onto the grass as they hit the ground. Josiah Lyman, hit by a stray bullet or perhaps Anamaria's precise aim, crumpled on the ground like a puppet with his strings cut. The fleeing, muffled, blind people were cut down like wheat to a scythe, falling in bloodied heaps, choking on their own blood.

Silence came from the dead, just as it came from Alec's screaming. He collapsed on his knees, screaming and then coughing, spluttering, throwing up even though he had nothing to give but bile. The stench of blood weighed on his senses like a thick, wet blanket; he could taste the copper on his tongue.

Impotent, voiceless, he had watched a massacre of his own people and done nothing.

Something inside him snapped.

"Get up," came a voice, far away. Alec's mind was blank but for the taste and smell of blood. He started to stand up, only to feel a baton smash against his face and now the blood he could taste was his. He collapsed back on the grass.

"Get up." This time the pain told him to stop but he could barely heed it over his own guilt and terror. He struggled upwards; the baton hit him again and now the pain was overwhelming as he crumpled backwards on the grass.

This time, he knew the voice was Anamaria's; the snap and crack of her voice was unmistakeable. "Get up."

Two minutes ago, Alec would have refused. He would have struggled. His life as a Capitolian, a life privileged and shining, a life that had told him he was the winner of a war; that would have stopped him from obeying.

But two minutes had stripped him bare, finally, completely. He had stood and watched the destruction of his people and done nothing, and it had destroyed his last vestiges of pride.

He struggled, wobbling, onto his knees; then slowly, painfully, forced himself upright. He could not look Anamaria in the eye; his eyes cast naturally downwards at her feet. Her baton rested on his broken cheekbone like a caress, and he shivered but did not move.

"Good," she murmured. "Good."

She stepped back, admired her handiwork a moment, then barked an order.

"Avox 144,000. Get in the hovercraft."

He was not strapped down when he entered the hovercraft and sat back by the cargo.

They did not need to restrain him any longer.

Guess who, kids? That's right, it's screening, back with another of her on-time daily updates!

Uh.

Okay, this is so late it borders on unacceptable. I had the majority of this done in a day! I was so ready to get this done! But then- myeh. I couldn't break the chapter beyond the Intensive Procedure, and I wrote about six different drafts before I realised I could kill two birds with one stone this chapter and reveal both the events of Alec's storyline and the fate of the arena hovercraft. I'm still not happy with it, but I'm so, so tired. Fun fact, though- I've plotted the next six chapters in detail, and I'm not busy hobbling around universities on my thrice-damned crutches, and so I finally have the time and health to start daily updates! Hooray!

I apologise, though, new readers. I swear I'm usually more diligent than this, you've caught me on an off month.

IN ANY CASE. Next chapter I finally start introducing the new characters with the old! So be excited for tomorrow, kids!

And as ever, thank you for reading this far.