Evening Tide

by Fox in the Stars

based on The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

2: Victory

On the train, I decide to just keep to my compartment and order my meals. Mags and Tully belong to this year's tributes from now on. With at least one of the tributes openly loathing me, I'd only be a nuisance, and once we're in the Capitol I probably won't have a spare moment to spend in the control room anyway.

As the train pulls out, I retrieve the candy from my coat pocket. Candy is a running battle that I have every time my stylist sees my mouth move on camera, but sometimes I don't care. I don't even worry about posing as I stare out the window; I'm sure there are cameras all around, but the view isn't worth putting on television.

The last thing you see as you leave is the vast, ugly building behind the hill where they process the fish — the Cannery. It's the lowest you can sink in District 4, at least the lowest this side of the grave, and opinions vary on which is worse. It's the threat the Boatman holds over the people he gets his hooks into. People who can't pay their debts, dock rats who aren't quite slippery enough, children whose parents can't feed them or adults who can't feed themselves — any of them can be taken away there, and all but the youngest are put to work. Those few lucky enough to come back at all come back completely used up, hollowed out by the bare-subsistence rations, sometimes maimed by the machinery, joints invariably crippled from endlessly repeating the same mindless tasks. My parents gave loans to keep the neighbors safe, then shook their heads over vanished dock rats and said something about the dignity of labor.

I idly wonder if there's anything I could possibly do at this point to be sent there, but I don't think there is. Old Killian must be the biggest debtor in the district — he's gambled away everything he won three times over — and no one touches him. We do have to keep up appearances, and besides, the Capitol would be sure to "save" me for some better use.

The fence finally covers the last Cannery smokestack and pivots slowly out of sight, then it's nothing but hills outside the window.

I let my breath out. It comes as a sigh of relief — relief to be leaving District 4 for the Capitol. For the Hunger Games.

I collapse into a chair. What have I come to?

But then, it was a strange sort of relief the first time, when I was fourteen and they were taking me away as a tribute. I couldn't dread being picked anymore, it was already done. I'd said goodbye to my parents and friends. I'd gotten parting advice from my trainer — she was a schoolteacher, so she had an excuse to say goodbye to her student. I knew that before I returned to District 4, my life would have either ended or been completely transformed. Either way, everything I was leaving behind was over and done with. I cut the past adrift. All I had to worry about was the present; it felt strangely light and free.

And that was when I realized that I hadn't inherited my parents' pride.

I'm still not sure why I didn't. The neighbors used to explain the lack of brothers and sisters with a joke, that everything my parents had to make children with had gone into giving me that pretty face; maybe it was all spent there before they got to the pride. Maybe they let me joke around with the dock rats too much. Maybe it was the training — spend eight years being strictly taught not to flinch from stabbing a twelve-year-old girl in the back and maybe the rules of halfway-up-the-slope pride start to look absurd.

Whatever the reason, as they took me away to the Games only one point of pride mattered. I knew that in the coming year, everyone who looked in the cupboard on Parcel Day and everyone who sailed out toward the Line would think of me. If I won they'd be eating better, the money they saved on food would help keep them afloat, they'd be safe in the best fishing grounds for a while, and they'd think I'd done that for them. If I didn't win, they'd think what a failure I was, what a fool to volunteer early, that if I'd waited my turn one of the bigger, stronger guys could have gone and maybe won. I hadn't seen anything like that in my parents' unwritten rule book, but it mattered to me more than life and death. I could be brave about dying, but for my one point of pride I'd have agreed to pay any price — and I did.

"You'll pay for it as long as you live." It's not as if I had no idea what Mags meant. I knew my angle was "alluring, willing, yet innocent," and they told me I played it perfectly — at one point in the interview, after shamelessly draping myself over the chair lamenting that everyone would think I was soft, I admitted that I would regret it if I didn't win because I'd never really been in love. But the innocence was too genuine for me to truly understand where I was headed. If somehow I could have known, I think my answer would still have been the same, even though the Parcel Day packages and warning buoys are fading into thin memories, and the celebrations just seem ironic now...

They weren't at the time, of course. The first half-year was wonderful.

Not flawless — I did have disturbing dreams about the arena for a while, but they all faded until just my one nightmare was left. I knew already from interviews as a trainee that the Victor's Village wasn't an ideal neighborhood, and I was given the whispered warnings about Stella and Hendrick and the apparent curse on our big, beautiful new house; if anyone gave my parents the warnings they never showed it.

But mostly, wonderful. To begin with, I was alive — I'd snatched that one chance in ten. I'd won my single point of pride, and it was everything I'd wished for. The train brought me home to a hero's welcome, to a life completely transformed. From the top of the slope to the water's edge, everyone was proud of me and grateful to me. When I smiled, everyone smiled back — and yes, lots of girls and a few boys fell over themselves to get my attention.

The Parcel Day packages started coming, full of canned fish, even a little shrimp and crab, fruit and vegetables, fine white flour and sugar, and for New Year's everyone would get a bottle of wine. We got sonar for our boat and went out and watched them installing the new buoys on the Line. The old neighbors weren't quite so comfortable taking loans from us anymore — we were suddenly so rich it was harder to keep up the required unspoken illusion that it would all come out even — but when it was important we could talk them into something; after all, it was only neighborly to let us give the Boatman a hard time. When my parents weren't looking, I gave dock rats as much money as I pleased, and sometimes I'd even see them playing with cans of sardines on Parcel Day when so many had come that people didn't want them all.

I felt as if I'd graduated from training, like I might have graduated from school. I never had to kill anyone again. I never had to watch a hanging again. Other trainees, most of them older than me, came to my house excited for interviews with me. The eager ones especially — even the guy we're sending this year — had favorite kills they wanted me to revisit for them, although they always seemed to know more about my tactics than I did. The best advice I actually had to give them was much less exciting. I told them to practice the interview with Tully; he had Caesar Flickerman down so well that the real thing was like déjà vu. Above all, I told them to trust Mags.

Now and then my father or mother would say something like "Did you really have to do that?" — to the girl I betrayed and stabbed in the back, to the starving boy I pinned down and garroted — but I could shrug it off and tell them, very honestly, that everything is different in the arena. I had such a wind at my back, I forgot to worry about things like that — or about the bill that I'd been told would come due.

The Victory Tour was where it all started to go wrong. A few months after the Games, my voice had started breaking, and the "miracle" throat spray Tully had sent me for it wasn't doing much, so I was already worried about getting through my speeches. I wish I could say I was worried for deeper reasons, at the thought of standing in front of the families of the tributes I'd killed — the thought of trying to shrug it off to their parents the way I shrugged it off to mine. More likely I saw it as an extension of the Games themselves, as something the Capitol had set aside that wasn't like real life, where horrible things happened and everyone knew the rules and just endured them. Honestly, I don't know. I can't remember what, if anything, I was thinking about that before the phone call came like a tidal wave and washed it all away.

My mother answered it first, and when she came to tell me the call was for me, I knew something was happening because she was nearly tittering with excitement. My father was waiting in view of the phone, and even he had a rare smile; his face was tense with genuine emotion. My parents held each other's hands and watched from across the room as I picked up the receiver.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Finnick."

The voice was familiar, but somehow I managed not to place it. "Who am I speaking to?" Mother clapped a hand to her head.

"Your mother didn't tell you?"

"No, she didn't."

"This is President Snow."

"Oh." I'd been told he might call before the tour and had thought of points I wanted to bring up, but when the moment came, my mind went completely blank. "I guess you sound different on the phone."

"I hear that occasionally. I wanted to call and congratulate you on your victory. Really, you were quite remarkable — the face that launched a thousand sponsorships."

"Oh, no," I laughed. "I didn't really..."

"Yes, I understand. You don't feel you can take credit for a natural gift, but you mustn't be too modest. It's important that you understand the effect you have on people. For there to have been such an outpouring, they must have been quite smitten with you, wouldn't you agree?"

"I guess so."

"Of course they were. Now that you understand that... There is something I must tell you very frankly." His voice had turned more serious. He waited for me to say something.

"What is it?"

"That natural gift of yours could easily become a curse."

"What do you mean — ?" I caught myself before repeating the word "curse" in front of my parents; suddenly I knew that I couldn't tell them what President Snow was saying to me.

"It could bring a great deal of trouble — for you, for me, for everyone possibly. Now, let me give you some advice. Things will go much more smoothly all around..." He paused, sharpening his next words to a keen edge. "...If the sponsors can expect to get what they've paid for. Do you understand? I would hate to resort to indelicate language."

I glanced at my parents. They were still watching from across the room, still smiling with joy and pride. I had to turn my back so they couldn't see my face. "I think so, but I—" My voice broke with an embarrassing squeak. I tried to think of a way to say it; I'd kissed some girls and a couple of boys but never come close to what he was implying. "I don't really know how that works..."

"Of course you don't. A degree of innocence is expected at your age. That was even part of your persona, as I recall — 'alluring, willing, yet innocent,' isn't that right?" He lifted the phrase right from the tape that they never showed on television but must have had somewhere. "Just add 'obliging' and you'll be fine. Do you think you can do that?"

"I... I think so."

"To be brutally frank, you don't have a choice. Are your parents still in the room?"

I glanced over my shoulder. They were still there, still beaming smiles. "Yes."

"Well then I'll spare you details of the alternatives. I wouldn't want them to see you looking too distressed."

I might have been less distressed if he had given me some details. This way I was left to fear everything my imagination could invent. They could crack down on poaching. They could hang all the trainers and leave us like the Outer districts. Fish isn't the only protein in the world if they wanted to leave us like District 13. Or — somehow the smallest possibility felt most horrible — if everyone heard an explosion over the horizon and a certain boat didn't come back, they would all just blame the Sirens and not ask any questions...

"Catullus has been told to introduce your sponsors on the Victory Tour, at each stop before dinner. I didn't give him any unnecessary details; I thought you might prefer it that way."

I nodded mutely as if he could see it over the phone.

"Is everyone enjoying the Parcel Day gifts?"

It was such an unexpected turn that I actually jumped. It took me a moment to remember that those existed and what they were. "Uh, yeah. They're great."

"Now, Finnick, just for appearances I think you should thank me for calling. Your parents seem to be very traditional about such things."

"Yeah." I struggled to form the words. "Thank you... for calling..."

"Good luck on your tour." With that, he hung up.

As I clumsily put the phone back on the cradle, my parents were set free.

"Ahh!" Mother sighed happily. "Our son got a phone call from the President!"

"Mom, no one likes the President," I said.

"Oh, shush," she told me, a parent's standard counter when the truth crops up where it doesn't belong.

Father clapped me on the back. "Even so, it's a proud thing. A proud thing."

"A little too proud for me," I said. "I think I need to lie down..."

I was still in bed the next day when Mother decided I'd gotten overexcited and made myself sick. When Mags came over to check on me and heard that President Snow had called, I didn't have to explain. She'd seen it coming from the start — and she'd seen past it. I remembered what she'd told me, and I knew that the Victory Tour was only the beginning of the rest of my life.

Before I got on the train, I broke things off with the last girl I'd been kissing. She's the last sweetheart I've ever had, although no one would believe me if I said that.

The first stop on the Victory Tour was District 12, and with one look at the place I knew I was safe at least for one day. Everyone there was just tired and wanted it over with. I had a crazy urge to go up to the microphone in front of their Justice Building and blurt out "Thank you all so much for not sponsoring me! From the heart, I swear!" but as it was, I was lucky just to get through my script. My voice was still breaking and the miracle throat spray still wasn't doing much, so I was already trying not to squeak, and then... I don't know if it's possible to be allergic to coal, but I apparently am, and the dust was everywhere. I rushed through the speech and managed to keep it to a few sniffles that could be passed off as emotion, but by the dinner I was miserable. I could even taste coal dust in the food. I sneezed into my napkin and it came up streaked with black.

After one particularly bad coughing fit, I found their only victor, Haymitch Abernathy, jabbing a finger at me and laughing. "We'll get you yet, you little golden brat!" he bellowed.

Mags laughed, too, and not just to be polite; she already knew him. All I knew was that he was very drunk. A few minutes later he'd passed out in the stuffed potatoes.

All the way through to District 3, it was basically the same, but without the drunken heckling. And thankfully without the coal dust, although the hay in District 10 was almost as bad.

District 2 was different. Until then the resentment had been tempered with resignation, but District 2 wins more than anyone else, and they feel entitled to win every year. They went all out with the festivities as a way to reassert their pride, but every smile and every gesture seethed with barely-controlled hatred of the "little golden brat" who'd snatched away what was rightfully theirs. No one there would have sponsored me — and if they had they wouldn't dare mention it.

I expected more of that in District 1, but they at least like to see District 2 lose, and they have more money to throw around than anyone except the Capitol. When their own tributes were gone and I was the favorite, a few of them had thrown their money behind me.

This despite the fact that I'd killed the girl from their district the very first night. Mags had told me to break away from the Career pack as soon as I could; she wanted me out before the gifts started making the others jealous. When the pack split up to hunt and it was just me and that girl, I waited for the nightly portraits so I'd have the whole second day before they suspected me, then after we killed some poor dock rat who'd probably never seen a dock, I caught her distracted and put a spear through the back of her head.

In her district, for the first time, Tully introduced me to a handful of sponsors. President Snow's words rang in my ears, that I only had to be obliging. Two of them said that killing the District 2 contingent was repayment enough, and a third, a big grim-faced man, insisted firmly that he wanted nothing from me. I wasn't about to argue. Only one, a woman, owned that I was rather fetching and requested a kiss.

"What kind of a kiss?" I asked.

"You decide," she told me.

I gave her the most passionate kiss I'd ever given anyone, just to be safe.

As we were leaving to get ready for dinner, the grim-faced man came over again, looking even grimmer, and tense. He had reconsidered.

"If you want to repay my kindness," he said, "there is one thing you can do."

"Of course!" I said.

His gaze hardened even more. "Close your eyes."

Every instinct told me not to do what he said, and a glance at Mags confirmed that it couldn't be going anywhere good, but I knew I didn't have a choice. I tried to look obliging, took a deep breath, and closed my eyes.

Before I even had time to wonder what was coming, he punched me in the stomach so hard it doubled me over. He knocked that deep breath completely out of me and left me gasping like a drowning man. I'd have been flat on the floor if my stylist hadn't caught me.

"That was for Ruby," the man announced, and he stormed away.

The girl I killed the first night. I had to admit it was fair, but I couldn't talk.

"Oh, that's not nice," someone scolded, as if a little boy had called me a name. The woman I'd kissed was laughing. At dinner, people who'd watched the whole scene kept chiding me for only picking at the exquisite food. On second thought, I decided that this place was more hateful than District 2.

Tully of course was scandalized and hastened to assure me that most sponsors weren't such brutes. No, I thought, most of them are probably worse.

The next stop was the Capitol, where the parties were most extravagant, the food was most incredible, and where I knew I was really going to start paying for my victory. When President Snow hosted me at his own mansion — the first time I ever stood close enough to him to smell the blood on his breath — he presented me with an identical twin of the trident I'd been given in the arena, encased in a slab of unbreakable crystal.

"How do I get it back out of here?" I asked him, jokingly scratching at an edge.

"You don't," he told me. "We're all frightened of you."

I wouldn't have thought President Snow had a sense of humor, but he gave it a perfect deadpan delivery, and it would have been a joke to think that the people in that room were frightened of me. They could make me do anything they wanted. This time it was Snow who introduced me to my sponsors, with here and there a well-chosen word or a look to remind me of my eternal gratitude. This time no one considered the debt already paid. They had no favorites, no enmities, no scores they'd already used me to settle; to them all tributes were the same, except as they were alluring and willing. I lost count of the invitations to go out on pleasure boats, to look at art collections... I had to accept them all.

When I sat on a couch for a rest, I was cornered by a few people who had a downright disturbing fascination with knot-tying, and they brought over some curtain cords for me to show them my tricks. One of the women wanted to see how to tie a noose; I'd left a pair of them in a tree once for District 2 to find, which didn't do me any good — I should have known those two were unshakeable — but these viewers at least must have liked it, so I showed it to them, the knot you never use on a boat, but all the kids knew how the Peacekeepers did it...

"Oh," the woman said, taking the finished product from my hands. "And then it slides like this?"

She put the loop over my head and pulled it snug, with the knot below my ear — just the way the Peacekeepers did it. For one moment of panic I wondered if the sponsors were actually allowed to kill me, but I gathered my wits and gave them all the best pleading, puppy-eyed "You wouldn't really hurt me, would you?" look I could muster. It worked. The woman kissed me a few times and let me go.

A little later I was taken to a quiet room in the mansion for the first of the "private appointments." I knew what was coming when I was led off alone, without Mags or Tully or anyone. It was everything President Snow had implied. And it was everything he had said; a degree of innocence was expected at my age, and I only had to do what they told me and keep up the act: alluring, willing, innocent — and obliging.

They kept me in the Capitol for a week of private appointments, punctuated with more parties for appearances. There were only two mercies: first that President Snow himself never touched me, and second that the strangeness of the Capitol and the special strangeness of the encounters made it all seem like just a bad dream. When I got back to our rooms every night and tumbled into bed exhausted and sore, it seemed as if none of it had really happened.

Every night Mags came in and sat beside my bed. Neither of us said anything, but while she was there I felt safe.

Finally, we got on the train for the last stop on the tour, District 4. Home. As we got close to it I stared out the windows for the very first glimpse. I had never imagined that I could be so happy to see the Cannery. All the celebrations we'd had before were just dress rehearsals for this one. The band was playing, expensive imported flowers were everywhere, fireworks burst over the ocean for hours, and people literally danced in the streets.

It was hard seeing Dana's family standing there during my speech. She was the girl who'd gone in with me. All those years of the trainers telling us "Never betray your partner; if your partner wins, you win," and when I split off from the pack, I abandoned her. When the others realized I'd killed Ruby, she unthinkingly tried to defend me, and they turned on her; she just managed to take the guy from District 1 with her. That was the one point in the final recap when I couldn't keep up my act; I already suspected that I'd gotten Dana killed, but it was another thing to see it happen before my eyes. Thankfully my parents had never asked me if I really had to do that — I probably did have to, but I couldn't have shrugged that one off. Her parents and brother and sister are the only one of the other tributes' families I remember. They'd never acted like they blamed me, but when I'd seen them before it was in front of my parents, and this time it was in front of the cameras; both times I couldn't say what I wanted to or beg forgiveness...

After that, I had one last round of sponsor introductions before dinner, and I dared to imagine that I was safe, but I couldn't be sure. Practically the entire district had chipped in money for me, but not many could afford what it took to be ranked as a "sponsor," and in fact, Tully only presented one: the mayor. When I asked him how I could ever thank him enough, he said "Don't be silly! You're the one who deserves all the thanks."

And with that I knew I was safe. Eventually I'd have to get back on the train for another journey through the Capitol's bizarre dream-world, but for the moment — for another half-year, until the next Reaping Day — it was over and I was back in my real life, surrounded by proud, smiling neighbors. The relief of it blotted out everything else I'd been feeling. The dinner was the best thing I'd ever eaten; I shamelessly stuffed myself with lobster in spiced cream sauce, and my mother had to make them stop giving me champagne. Everyone who came to talk to me after the meal was like an old friend I was overjoyed to finally see again. I even smiled and shook the hand of the Boatman, thinking how good it was to be back home with enough money to keep people out of his clutches...

But there was one person I couldn't save. He leaned his fat face close to my ear. "I sponsored you, you know."

My breath froze as if I'd been plunged into icy water. My mind went completely blank except the one fervent wish that somehow lightning would shoot straight through the roof and strike one or the other of us dead before he could touch me.

It didn't, and I couldn't suppress a shudder as he picked a bit of imaginary lint off my chest and grinned. "So surprised? I do have some district pride, you know."

He was telling me yes, I see that look on your face and grinning. That was part of the fun. You Odairs with your pride thought you were too good for me and my money, well, look at you now! This time the invitation was delivered in person, to go out with him on his private boat on Saturday — every Saturday.

When he was gone I went straight to Tully. "Was there a sponsor you didn't tell me about?" I tried to sound calm, but it was my last desperate hope.

"Oh, yes," he said, smiling brightly. "Portly fellow, rents boats. Wanted to tell you himself. Said he was an old family friend, couldn't wait to see the look on your face."

Not even when Tully picked me at the Reaping did I hate him as much as I did in that moment.

"Are you all right?" he asked me. Obliviousness had its limits, but that time it was better than the alternatives. I just told him I had to be more careful with the champagne, and he agreed I was a bit young for it, although his face was still uncharacteristically dark.

The next day Tully and the camera crews got back on the train for the Capitol, and when I saw him off at the station, I let him hug me and managed to smile. I was already trying to forgive him. He meant well. There was nothing he could have done...

When Saturday came, my parents only made it harder. To them, even speaking to the Boatman was a barely-tolerable concession, and they certainly didn't see why I should pay him a visit. More than ever, I couldn't tell them what had been said in that phone call they'd been so proud of, what had been happening since then, what was about to happen... All the way out the door I had to argue. I had to take the side of my own doom.

"He was a sponsor, I have to be nice to him."

My father was unmoved. "I don't think anyone needed his money. I certainly hope no one was asking for it."

It struck a spark of anger that I wasn't used to feeling. Did he mean Mags? Was she even allowed to say "no" to a sponsor? Even if she was, for all I knew, the Boatman might have bought me the trident when I'd lost my other weapons and thought I was done for.

"Look, would you rather—?" I started — then froze.

"Rather what?" Mother asked.

"Nothing. Never mind. I'll be back sometime tonight." I grabbed my coat and hurried out of the house.

I'd caught myself before I finished the question: "Would you rather I was dead?" Especially if they could have known what was about to happen, I didn't really want my parents to answer that.

Outside, a rare, gentle snow was falling. I have a strangely sharp memory of a snowflake falling on my cheek and melting into a tiny, cold drop, how good it felt... I never wanted the walk to end, but it had to, down by the dock.

The boat was beautiful. Its silvery sails reflected the soft, gray sky. Of course the one the Boatman kept for himself would be top-of-the-line, with not just sonar but solar sails and autopilot.

As he took me aboard and out onto the water, I didn't even try to keep up my act. I knew I wasn't allowed to resist, but this time I couldn't be alluring or willing — and those weren't what he wanted from me; once we were out of sight from shore, he was content to skip the pleasantries. From that day forward, every time he went walking along the docks and saw my father's stern, proud face, he would think of me in that moment and smile, and there was nothing I could do about it. Maybe if I had kept up the act, I could have salvaged some small shred of dignity, but no. I took President Snow's advice and gave the sponsor what he'd paid for.

When he was finished with me, he left me alone in the cabin, still trembling and sobbing with my wrists tied to the bed frame. As I lay there, for the first time the idea occurred to me. The knots at my wrists were so shoddy that I could have been free in a minute. It was a kind of fishing boat; he probably had nets and tridents on board somewhere, and I knew intimately how well they worked on people. I could have skewered the Boatman and his hired pilot and steered that beautiful thing into the Line, and then everyone back home would have said I'd heard the song of the Sirens. I was hearing something in my head, but it was certainly not music.

If I had it to do over again, I would be tempted, more than I was then. At the time it was just a wild notion. All I really wanted was to go home.

But when he dropped me off on the dock after nightfall, I realized I couldn't go home. I couldn't face my parents like that. I thought of going to our old house on the slope, but what would I do there? Sit in the dark, all alone — after I won, we'd even sold the chickens out of the back yard. I thought of going to my family's boat where at least our lucky cats would be there and wouldn't ask me any questions... And then I realized where I wanted to go.

I turned up my coat collar and left my flashlight off, hoping that no one would notice or recognize me as I walked up the slope past the fishermen's houses. I'd grown up in those streets and knew them so well I could find my way in the dark, but it felt like I might never get there. When I looked back, the cloudy sky and the ocean merged together into one huge black chasm. Only when I was near the square did I turn toward the Victor's Village, toward the house at the top of the hill.

I went around to Mags' back door and pounded. I'd have pounded on it all night before I went anywhere else, or maybe curled up behind her hedge, but she opened the door so quickly that I still wonder if she was waiting for me. She sat me on the couch, gave me hot chocolate, and sat beside me until I'd calmed down a bit.

When she got up and went to the phone, I was still too dazed to think whose number she was dialing. Instead, my eyes fell on the fireplace mantel. There was a lacy runner — crochet, Mags' official "talent" — a few seashells, and three framed pictures. Mags had never been married or had a family that I knew about; I think her parents died in the Dark Days. The pictures were of the three victors we'd lost. I recognized the curly-haired woman who'd won before Hendrick, who'd been famous for making everyone laugh before she killed herself and left me the house. In the picture, she was smiling...

The beginning of the phone call snapped me out of it. "Mags. Got your boy." She'd called my parents.

I caught her eye and shook my head desperately.

She patted the air to say Don't worry. "Came up through town. Flashlight quit him; saw my window. So tired I put him right to bed. ... No, don't you dare come wake him. I'll have him back tomorrow, evening maybe. Been wanting to go out; he can carry my stuff. ... No trouble at all. You have a good night."

After I'd finished the chocolate, she put me in a hot bath and then to bed, and she sat beside me the way she had in the Capitol.

For the first time, on a night like this, she spoke. "Shouldn't have taken his money."

I shook my head. "No, that's not..." I didn't want her to think like that. I knew she wouldn't rather see me dead. In the Games, she'd done what she had to to give me the best possible chance. That night she'd given me a place I could go to; she'd understood and bought me the time I needed. Tears came into my eyes again, and that time they weren't tears of pain. I thought, This is what it actually feels like to not know how to thank someone enough.

The next day, after breakfast, I did take her stuff down to the victors' private beach. The sky was still cloudy, but it bathed everything in a soft blue light that seemed more gentle and hopeful. The ocean was bracingly frigid, as if I could swim with my whole body immersed in that one sweet snowflake from the day before. As soon as I tested the water, I wanted to be in it, but I helped Mags get a fire going first. Then I went, staying close to shore and looking back at her as she gathered some of the yellow grasses left over from summer and wove them into a basket. I came back to the fire partly to warm up and partly so I could watch her thin, leathery fingers working smoothly and surely.

When she was finished she looked at me. "Ready to go back out?"

"Yeah." More than willing.

She handed me the basket. "Shellfish."

I'd been doing it since I was little, but always before I'd sold them at the docks, and Mother had never bought them except in cans. I knew you were supposed to cook clams until the shells opened up, and I tried putting them as close to the fire as I could without burning my fingers.

Mags, on the other hand, broke one open with a rock and ripped the meat out. "Better fresh," she said. She poked the morsel toward me and I ate it right from her fingers. It was good.

After I swallowed it, I realized what I'd done; as a victor I probably could get away with keeping a swordshark, but there's no exemption on the books. I burst out laughing. "I'm a lawbreaker now! A capital criminal!"

"Worse things to be," she told me. She broke open another clam. "First time? Really?"

I nodded.

"Bli' me, your folks are strait-laced."

I laughed again. "Dad creaks when he walks." I loved my father, and I couldn't recall thinking those words before, but it felt as if I'd had the joke stored somewhere for years and finally had someone to tell it to. She didn't laugh, but the understanding smile was even better.

After we ate, I fetched more of the grass and had her teach me how she'd made the basket. Usually Mags is a woman of few words, but as we worked on those baskets, she told me she'd been making them since she was a little girl, during the Dark Days and right afterward, when District 4 wasn't much more than a pile of rubble. Back then, everyone lived at the water's edge, fishing and gathering with whatever nets and hooks and baskets they could make themselves, always on the lookout for swordsharks and for poisonous creatures the Capitol had brought from other waters and altered enough for them to thrive here.

Then the Capitol themselves decided that the swordsharks in particular were delicious and made attractive trophies. For years we were more servants than fisher-people, and most of what we got was from the Capitol citizens who came out to enjoy the ocean on their pleasure boats and hunt their own mutts for sport. Eventually they built themselves an artificial sea in the mountains and stocked it with the things they liked best to spare themselves the train-ride and keep the money out of our hands, but by then they'd let us become a Career district in the Games and thrown us enough coins that we could start fishing the way we do now.

It was only when they stopped coming here that they built the Line. Before that, there were hovercraft patrols, but a few people did slip through and sail away. No one knows whether they made it anywhere, because if they did they were smart enough not to come back.

Except — and here Mags leaned over to show me some trick of the weaving and whispered so quietly that only I could possibly hear her over the surf — just once, there was a woman who vanished for years and then one day reappeared saying that she'd seen a land far, far to the west, full of people who'd never heard of the Capitol. The Peacekeepers quickly shut her up, and then they built the Line so no one else could attempt the voyage, but Mags had been there when she came back and had heard her tell the story.

Naturally, none of that had been in my lessons at school. The last thing they wanted was for us to think that there could really be another land across the sea, or to consider that the Line hadn't always been there, the Hunger Games hadn't always been there, that there was someone alive among us who was older than either of them...

In the end we threw the grass baskets onto the last of the fire — "Not worth cluttering the house with," Mags said, and my first try wasn't very good anyway.

"Ready for your folks?" she asked.

"Ennh...?" I was mostly joking by then.

"Your house," she told me. "Kick 'em out if you have to."

It was funny at the time. Which showed that I was ready, recovered enough to shrug off any head-shaking and make excuses. She and the ocean had brought me back to life.

It became a routine — Saturdays with the Boatman, Sundays with Mags. She couldn't always snap me back so well from what he did to me, and my parents just kept making it harder, but somehow it was tolerable, and five days in the week I had my normal life or something that could pass for it.

I can even say that the Boatman did me a few horrible favors. After the first few Saturdays I usually didn't cry. Before long each appointment was a grim test of wills where I tried to close up inside like a clam and let it all flow over me, and he tried every insult he could think of and every physical attack he dared to get some kind of reaction out of me — but there were lines he wouldn't cross, and not because he didn't want to. Without meaning to, he gradually showed me that there were rules. The sponsors weren't allowed to kill me or leave visible marks; they had to let me walk away "camera-ready."

And when Reaping Day came again and it was time to go back to the Capitol, the scars where my innocence and pride had been were well-used. I'd gotten a lot of practice letting things flow over me. I was ready to start learning to play my part. A degree of innocence was expected at fourteen, but it wouldn't be expected forever, and I knew I'd be paying as long as I lived.

District 2 won that year. Our girl made it right to the end, and maybe with a sword she could have repeated Stella's achievement, but the only weapons to be had were morning stars. I had so many appointments that I never got a chance to see the control room, but I could hardly miss a moment of the Games, no matter how much I wanted to — televisions were tuned to them everywhere.

Before I went home, I was taken to the grand re-opening of my arena as a vacation park. That was when I found out that the trident I'd been given was a replica; the original was in the museum, also encased in crystal to preserve my last opponents' blood and brains on the tines. The crags jutting out of the river that only I'd been able get onto now had retractable walkways so tourists could stand where I'd stood without getting wet and have their pictures taken there. It felt unreal and in odd flashes nostalgic, revisiting the places where I'd killed other tributes and running my fingers over genuine rocks there, hearing genuine leaves and pine needles crunch under my feet. It might not have been so bad — there might even have been something there I wanted or needed to see and feel again if it had just been still and quiet, but I could only take so much of the footage on the monitors they'd installed everywhere.

The restaurant offered a special menu of all the meals Mags had sent me during the Games, with trivia notes on how much they had cost the sponsors. The numbers didn't do anything for my appetite, but at least I knew I hadn't been bought cheaply.

While I was there, I got word from President Snow's office about my "talent." I ostensibly had until I was sixteen to pick one and was leaning toward taking up guitar, but I was informed that I had already decided on trophy fishing, which is better done in the Capitol's artificial sea than in District 4. Having me in the Capitol for the Games wasn't enough, so they created an excuse to invite me there whenever they liked.

From then on, I was away from home for a week most months, usually for fishing, sometimes for media appearances or to film commercials or whatever else they could think of, but always there were appointments. It could still seem like a respite if it kept me away from the Boatman for a Saturday or two; where he was vicious, the Capitol was mostly playful and bizarre, and the "camera-ready" rule spared me their worst. I never would have chosen what I did there for myself, but I could catch a bit of fun now and then. And there, bit by bit, I perfected my act and grew comfortable in it until I could easily slip in and out of that face.

When it was complete, I decided to show it to the Boatman, and I gave him all my best seductive, endlessly-willing lines with a special, mocking edge. I pretended to be the type who loved pain and purringly invited him make good every threat — because I knew by then that I could take more than he could safely do. He broke off our appointments after that. Either it spoiled the fun, or it let him know that he'd completed the work of ruining me.

I still spent Sundays with Mags when I could.

Without the Boatman it was more tolerable. My parents still asked awkward questions about all the trips to the Capitol, but nothing I couldn't handle. I thought I could just keep going on that way. I didn't realize that the most crushing blow was yet to come.

When I went to the next Hunger Games, I'd just turned sixteen — which meant that I was "legal." My youth had failed to protect me from so much, I'd forgotten what it actually did protect me from. The "camera-ready" rule had guarded me from so much, I'd forgotten what a cruel enemy it was keeping me "ready" for.

None of the Careers won that year. Their food was washed away in a flood, and they didn't know how to cope. Even two Feasts weren't enough to save them. I still didn't have a moment to help in the control room. I still couldn't escape the screens. I had to watch day after day as our tributes wasted away and I choked on memories of the meals Mags used to send me, so good they were still there in that arena on a restaurant menu. In the end, the victor was an older red-haired girl from District 5.

Through it all, I kept my face on. Being of legal age brought more invitations and private appointments than ever. I played my part. I caught a bit of fun where I could.

And then, when it was over, that face was reflected back at me from the television, like seeing myself in some viciously warped mirror. The men I'd been sold to were nowhere to be seen — maybe they'd been kept in reserve for a later scandal — but suddenly, all the women I'd been sold to were my sweethearts. With my practiced seductions and stolen moments of fun, suddenly I was the one using them for an evening and then going on my merry way. All of that was included in the Games' wrap-up programming, so strangely that I knew it had been done on purpose. President Snow made sure to package it into a single, brutal punch and put it in the required viewing so everyone back home in District 4 would watch and know that everyone in Panem was watching and seeing their shame. The entire country saw what I'd become: alluring, willing, no longer innocent.

Like my parents' house, District 4 has its own halfway-up-the-slope pride, its own strange, unwritten rules. Highest among them are the rules about the Capitol. You glory in any honors it gives, but you never forget that our ancestors were rebels. You take pride in our trainees and tributes and victors, but you never forget that the Hunger Games are a cruel punishment. If you're respectable, you don't stray too far outside the Capitol's laws, but all the while you despise it for its decadence and resent its domination.

You certainly don't become its alluring, willing toy.

For a second time, I came home from the Hunger Games to a life completely transformed. The instant the cameras were gone, the whole district turned its back on me. No one acknowledged me or spoke to me if they could help it. The more kindhearted ones, old neighbors, quietly lowered their eyes when they saw me and pretended they didn't hear me when I spoke. Others, old classmates, caught my eye only to make certain that I noticed them turning away in disgust. Friendly loans started coming back, hurriedly repaid down to the penny and by courier. Shopkeepers began pushing my change across counters to avoid touching my hands, as if I were literally filthy. Suddenly, even dock rats would rather spit on me than take my money — for once, District 4 ranked someone lower than them. If they lived at the water's edge, I'd been cast into the sea.

It was what they do to refusers, although it would have been easier hearing "coward" whispered loudly behind my back than the things I was hearing. It was what they'd done to the one woman who wouldn't take the money and keep quiet about Hendrick — as if she'd seduced him on purpose to bring shame on the district — but at least with her all the resentment of the Capitol wasn't mixed into it. At least her family took her side and tried to protect her.

As for me, my parents confronted me. My parents, for whom pride was everything. Mother wept. Father was unrelenting. I still couldn't tell them the truth about the phone call from President Snow. Even if I could have, who knows what they would have done? If I told them the truth, I was sure Mother would blame herself and never be happy again, Father would end up hanging on a gibbet down by the docks for sedition or treason or skewering the Boatman — or maybe for skewering me, maybe he really would think that was better...

I couldn't tell them, so I had to argue. It was surprisingly easy to start shouting horrible things at them. It was harder to stop where I should.

"You sent me to eight years of lessons so I could stab twelve-year-old girls in the back for the glory of the district — I guess you thought I'd turn out lily-white and respectable!" I remember shouting that, but I still don't know if I meant it or was really angry about it.

"That has nothing to do with it," Father insisted.

"Maybe you'd like it better if I'd turned out like Stella — or Hendrick!" They could walk through the square and buy groceries. I couldn't.

"Do you think insulting your neighbors will get you out of this!?"

"Oh, I never should have let you go all those times with the Boatman!" Mother sobbed, too distraught to follow any kind of thread. "Was that what it was like with him? I'm sure he could bring along plenty of... Plenty of girls for you!"

She had no idea. Tully had come closer to figuring it out. I still couldn't tell her. "What if it was!?"

"You kept saying he was a sponsor," Father accused. "If this is what sponsors get for their money, then what does that make you?"

I turned on him, forgot to be cautious, and the question spilled out — "Would you rather I was dead!?"

The room went silent. They stared at me. I felt ready to cry boiling tears or tear myself to pieces. Mother said I needed to calm down. Father had the decency to take her and leave rather than answer me. They went back to our old house on the slope.

I did need to calm down. I finally told myself just this once, took sleep syrup and went to bed. My nightmare was waiting for me. The water was high and rough; all the dead tributes had to hold me up while waves kept washing over me. On shore, my parents' house was the only light. That was the night I realized what my nightmare meant and why it disturbed me so much. It was a dream that said, You will always be at sea, always looking toward shore, but you can never go there. You can never go home.

Mother came back the next day to get their things. She was still teary, but calmer, and she hugged me and kissed me and told me they loved me, to take care of myself and to never forget who I was and where I'd come from. And then my parents were gone. It was supposed to be some kind of tough love, to shock me into seeing reason, but after a week to calm down, it was easier without them.

One day I sat tallying everything they had spent on raising me. Rather, I tried for a while, then I calculated how much I could give them without starving before my next payment came and topped it up to that under the heading "Emotional Anguish." I sent the amount by courier with a letter to say that things were even and we were quits, and if they didn't want the money they should deep-six it because that's what I would do if they tried to give it back. I don't know if they kept it or not. I've run into Mother in town a few times this past year, but she only acknowledged me with a quiver of her chin. Father I haven't even seen; according to the loud whispers, he tells people that his son died in the Hunger Games.

But my house was quiet and safe. As it became completely my own, I even found that I enjoyed cooking and cleaning, although I resented that much more having to cover my walls with dead fish; I finally gave them my parents' old room and threw away any that didn't fit.

My house was safe, but everywhere else was unbearable. Going out to buy food was more painful than hunger. When I tried to placate people with a smile, they reacted as if I'd lifted a rock to reveal a dead rat. I reminded myself how well they'd had it the year I won the Games, that there were probably people alive today who would have died on the Line if it hadn't been for me, and it helped a little.

But not enough. I eventually stopped leaving the house without Mags, and we fell into our current routine. After all the years she's mentored our tributes and all the victors she's brought home, she has everyone's complete respect. If I travel in her wake I'm protected from the worst of it, and she can use a strong young pack animal. The only nice thing I've heard about myself in District 4 this past year was a remark made to her about what a "dutiful son" I was.

The money quickly piled up again, and there was nothing really good to do with it. I've built a nice music collection. I bought exercise equipment like I'd seen in the Capitol so at least I could keep myself in trim while living as a pathetic recluse. Last month, I decided that trips to the beach with Mags weren't enough and had a contractor out from the Capitol to rip up my basement and build an indoor swimming pool. That was so extravagant that even as a victor, I needed a friendly loan, but Mags offered it under the old familiar terms, just with dizzyingly large numbers. The pool makes me feel like a fish plucked from the ocean and dropped in a bowl, but it's better than being a fish stranded out of water. I'm sure it does nothing for my image at home, but that's beyond saving.

Really, it's beyond saving... Thinking back to this morning, it strikes me how creepy it must have looked to everyone to see me walking around in a wool coat in summer. I shouldn't have even tried. This evening, I'll be in the Capitol, where everyone would just take it as "some new 'Man of Mystery' look." Sometimes the air indoors is so chilled that a coat in summer wouldn't even be out of place.

I smile thinking of a time there a few months ago when I slipped through the net and went walking around a shopping mall by myself. No one acted like anything about me was out of place. In fact they treated me as if I were perfectly normal. That seemed strange, but it was too sweet a gift to question it. I bought candy. I bought more music. I bought clothes I picked myself just to defy my stylist. I was sitting by a fountain eating crab cakes when I found out why it was happening like that.

"Mom, look, it's him!"

"No, it's not, it's just an imitator."

It was a girl who looked about ten and was painted in tiger stripes, walking along with her mother.

"No, it's really him, I can tell!"

"Don't be silly. The real Finnick Odair wouldn't be sitting around in a place like this."

I couldn't resist going over to them to correct the misimpression. Nothing I said would convince the mother that it was really me. She admitted I had the District 4 accent down but swore my eye-coloring job was overdone and finally stumped me with some odd trivia question about myself, which I couldn't help finding funny.

Just then, Tully came running. Someone had called him to call the President's office to put a trace on me — I still have the tracker from the Games in my arm — and apparently he doesn't have imitators. Everyone could tell he was the real Tully Seabright, and he became my certificate of authenticity.

The mother blushed crimson. I just managed to give the girl a kiss before she fainted. It took us an hour to wade out of the mall through a sea of people hanging on my smile who wanted autographs, pictures with me, kisses that made a few more of the girls and one of the boys faint... It was fun, even if Tully did give me a stern talking-to afterward. I'd like to try it again, but during the Games doesn't seem like the right time...

My face falls at a sudden thought, vaguely-but-deeply disturbing like my nightmare: that time in the mall, was it really me? Or was that part of my act?

I don't know.

To Be Continued...