Evening Tide
by Fox in the Stars
based on The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
4: The Evening Tide
In the morning, Aquilia does give me the stonefish. I insist on an opaque container — to shield it from the disorienting changes of scenery until I get it home, I say — and she finds a large, squat, gold-patterned black vase big enough to put it in and ties a silk scarf over the mouth.
While she's doing that, I look at the other tanks again in better light and see why she didn't want to give me an octopus. Their tank is elaborately sealed; it would have been inconvenient to open the thing and get one. It's true that an octopus will crawl into any little gap it can find, and she's at least not insane enough to let them escape, but I'm going to pay dearly for sparing her the trouble. Not that the octopus would have made things pleasant, but I think I would have liked it better...
When I get back, there are more invitations waiting for me, but I just can't do it, not on the last day of my life. I try something I've never dared before — I call and beg off. Tully gets me on the phone with whoever it is I need to talk to, and I tell them I'm not feeling well, no I don't need a doctor, I'm just so tired... It can't possibly work; they'll give me drugs I don't want and send me back out. My hands are shaking again. In the end, I sound so pitiful that they actually let me go.
Most of the mentors have already lost out like Mags, and I find a lot of them together in the Training Center atrium, taking the chance to catch up with each other. The atmosphere isn't as mournful as I would have imagined. No one's talking about this year's dead tributes. In fact it's surprisingly jovial, with only a few threadbare spots where the grief and horror of it all show through a little. Some of our other victors from District 4 are around, and here in the Capitol they're a bit friendlier. Haymitch from District 12 is roaring drunk again, and this time he has an equally-drunk friend — who's missing a hand; it must be Chaff from District 11. I see the girl from District 5 who won last year. Her mentor is almost as old as Mags, and they don't have enough victors to tell her not to dare worry about it; by the heavy look on her face, I think she started learning the job this year, and she can't put it out of her head and smile like the older victors can.
She was seventeen when she won last year, and I've only just turned... I realize that I'm the youngest person in the room. I'm still the youngest victor, at least until this year's Games end. For the rest of my life, probably. It feels sadly ironic.
It also feels strangely light and free, like when I was fourteen and they were taking me away... But not quite the same. Both times there was something darker underneath; then it was fear, now it's sorrow, or not quite sorrow... Despair. Light and free, tied to an anchor of despair.
Mags is sitting in a chair crocheting, and I pull another chair around right beside her. "I'm sorry... that we didn't win," I tell her.
"Just a bad year," she says. "You learn not to get attached."
I can't help wondering if that will apply to me. I don't know whether to hope so or be crushed by the thought. She'll have a fourth picture on the mantel, but I don't know how she'll feel when she looks at it and I don't want to think about it...
"Free?" she asks.
"Yeah. I'm done." Done for good.
"Ooh, what are you making...?" comes an unfamiliar voice. It's a wispy woman with too-large eyes leaning over Mags' shoulder.
As we sit, other victors come over. Apparently the Outer districts' hatred of "Careers" doesn't extend into the victors' circle, or else we're somehow exempt. As they come to chat with Mags, I notice everything about them in a deep, open way. That wispy woman is from District 6 and obviously has a morphling problem; she gets fascinated by the colors in the yarn basket, and Mags makes her a little pink flower. A fat, loud-voiced woman even older than Mags has an unusually-old Avox trundle her over in a wheelchair; she's from District 7, rails at the no-accounts who stayed home, and fervently hopes for one more victor before she dies, hopefully a girl this time because men are useless. A smallish, middle-aged man with black hair and glasses comes by just long enough to agree to dinner on the train with us, which must mean he's from 3, the only other distict on the same line; after he leaves, Mags tells me his name is Beetee.
I don't know why I'm paying such attention. It's not that I want to leave some positive impression of myself behind with them; if that were the case I think I know something about how to charm people, and instead I'm mostly just watching quietly. Maybe I'm looking to them for a distraction from myself. Maybe I'm trying to cling to every moment because so few are left...
Whatever the reason, that kind of openness is exhausting, and the sleep I've had in the last two days really wasn't that good. I get such a watery ache in my eyes that I don't care what a ridiculous pose it is and curl up in the chair like a cat with my head on the armrest by Mags. A doze is still all I can manage with everyone coming around, but it's something. Now and then she reaches over and rubs under my hair with her fingertips, almost like I really was a cat and she was scratching my head.
The gesture inspires a comment from I think Chaff. "Hey, Mags. You brought the cute little doggie today, huh?"
The next voice is definitely Haymitch. "He ain't a cute little doggie, he's the golden brat! Aw, he's faking — he smiled!"
Chaff laughs louder than it deserves, but I did smile. That time in District 12 on my Victory Tour is pretty funny in hindsight. I wave at them without opening my eyes. "Come on, I got the day off because I was so tired."
"Yeah. Yeah, they'll wear y'out," Haymitch says, as if it isn't funny anymore. Suddenly, I think he knows exactly what they've been doing to wear me out and is just a little too drunk to pretend that he doesn't.
Most of them aren't leaving yet, so we say goodbye when we're called away to the train — which happens just in the nick of time. As we leave we pass a crowd of victors from District 2, all of them in a rage about the cowardly backstabbing of District 1. In the arena, the pair from 1 must have turned on their last ally and knocked District 2 out of the Games, but their anger is at having victory snatched away by a hated rival more than it's for the dead girl. It makes us their friends against the common enemy — for now — but thankfully there's no time to commiserate.
At the platform, I catch one of the porters with the vase and insist on taking it myself, which draws a question from a reporter. Naturally, the cameras have come to see us off, and I have to put on my face one last time.
"A gift from my one true love," I declare.
"And who's that today?" the reporter persists, getting a round of laughter.
"Oh, that's a secret." I blow a kiss into the nearest lens, not caring what Aquilia will think.
I thought I could spare a hand for the gesture, but my palms are sweating, and the vase is heavy with water. It slips. I nearly drop it. The normally-sedentary fish inside splashes at the jostling, and I see that Mags hears it...
The reporters laugh. I could never have faced my one true love again.
Tully's there to see us off, too, and after the near-miss I can't spare him a handshake. Instead, I give him a kiss on the cheek that smells of fake hair and makeup and leaves him comically flustered. As a last goodbye, I think it's enough.
On the train, it's just us and District 3 — the other district west of the Capitol, the other one in roughly the same halfway-up-the-slope place as us. For the purposes of the Games, though, they're practically an Outer district. Our victors far outnumber theirs; in fact, I don't see anyone from 3 except Beetee and a younger woman named Wiress who tends to get lost in the middle of her sentences. They're so comfortable together and he's so practiced at finishing her thoughts that I take them for a couple, but they say they aren't. Maybe he just took it upon himself to look after her, like Mags did with me.
We have dinner together, the two mismatched pairs of us. Beetee is peering at a menu and trying to keep Wiress on the line long enough to figure out what she wants when I give up on it, "hit special order," and just tell the server what I really want. I want the lobster in spiced cream sauce one more time, mint tea, seaweed salad for a taste of home, for dessert I'll want cake like birthday cake... I'm painfully aware of things I'm not ordering, can't order without raising suspicions — never any more fresh shellfish, never another breakfast with eggs and smoked fish... As it is I order so much the others notice, but the pair from 3 decides to join in.
"After all, we won't get another chance like this before..." Wiress drops off in a particularly bad place.
"Before next year," Beetee agrees.
When the food comes, I try to eat slowly enough to savor every bite, but not so slowly that I let it get cold.
"Shame about your girl this year," Mags says — the girl from District 3 who started getting the Outer district pack together.
Beetee sighs. "I tried to remind her of... all the risk factors."
"Maybe thought somebody had to try it just once," Mags supposes.
Which seems like a very District 3 way to go out: come up with some innovative scheme and throw your life away just to see if it might work. I wonder if there's a District 4 way. Forgetting your training and defaulting to respectability under pressure, maybe, although if that's it, I missed the boat...
Wiress has gone silent. I think maybe she's gotten more permanently lost, but no. Instead, I catch her looking right at me with an air of grave concern that gives me a shudder, as if she can read my mind. It doesn't help when she starts humming nervously to herself.
After the cake, Beetee is still talking with Mags, and I can't really follow it. Partly it's over my head, but partly I'm getting more distracted as I realize that there's nothing left to do.
There really is nothing left to do... "I'm going to go to bed early," I tell Mags softly.
She nods toward me, just a little, very ordinary. "'Night."
It ought to be a better goodbye than this, but I don't want to raise suspicions. She at least gets my last kiss. I put it in the edge of her hair, and she pats the hand I've braced on her shoulder.
Wiress watches me all the way out the door.
Back in my compartment, the black vase is waiting for me. I confront it with the same quickened breath, the same hot ache of dread that I remember from the end of my Games, when all that was left was the fight with District 2, and I already knew back then that there was nothing better to do than march right in and get it over with before the feeling ate away at me. That didn't make it easy. Still doesn't. And this time I know I won't make it out alive... My hands are shaking as I start untying the scarf.
The best way would be to pour the vase out as if I'd spilled it, dump the stonefish on the floor, and then stomp on it as hard as I can. Or maybe do it in the bathtub. No one is really going to think it's an accident, at least no one who matters — don't want to think about Mags — so I may as well avoid getting water everywhere.
That's the hard part. After that it'll be done, except waiting for the end of the bad part. They say people have hallucinations from the sheer intensity of the pain... They say people scream for someone to cut off their leg where they were stung...
— They say people scream —
I've just gotten the first knot loose, only to cinch it back and throw myself down on the bed, somewhere between relief and frustration.
I can't do it. Not here, not now.
When I asked Aquilia for an octopus, I had it planned. I'd decided not to make it back to District 4 alive. With the octopus it would have worked; it would have been painful, but quiet. With the stonefish it won't work. With the stonefish I'm going to scream. Everyone will come running. They seem to have everything on these trains, maybe they even have what they'd need to save me. And if they don't...
I kept trying not to think about Mags. I'll be lucky if she isn't the one who finds me. I'd at least like it to be over by then.
I try to tell myself it's better this way. I get breakfast after all. I can watch the sun set over the ocean. The train is full of cameras; this way at least my agonizing death won't end up on television. This way I can set my house on fire since apparently it really is cursed and they'll just put someone else in it if I leave it there. Before that, maybe I'll take one last walk down by the docks by myself, and when people turn away or hurl insults at my back, I won't have to cling to thin memories of vanished buoys and Parcel Day packages. I can think, Yes, you're right, and I won't bother you anymore. I can tell myself, This is all going to go away...
It's not helping. The hot ache isn't dread anymore, but it's just getting worse and sinking deeper into my chest...
I finally don't want to deal with it anymore and order sleep syrup — so it's addictive; that hardly seems to matter now. On the train they hand it out one dose at a time, in tiny capsules. It's less of it than I want, but it'll have to do.
I don't want to resist the effects, but I can't help it. The stuff is supposed to calm you down, but it doesn't feel like that. It feels like a weight getting heavier and heavier as my mind stuggles to cling to that hot, aching misery. I can't stop it... I can't think... In my head I hear snatches of voices or something but they make no sense... By the time the weight drags me down, I have no idea what's happening...
I'm in my nightmare again.
The sleep syrup must be keeping me in it, because it seems to last forever. The tributes from my year, the ones we sent this year, they're circling me as the tide comes in. The sea is unnaturally calm, gentle as a swimming pool. Inch by inch it creeps up over my shoulders. It tickles the back of my neck. It laps around my throat, and I have to tip my head back further and further to keep my face above the surface. The water reaches my ears and I can hear their voices, not speaking but in a kind of song, surprisingly low and gentle.
It's not a song of revenge. It's the song of the Sirens. Come with us. You belong with us. The wordless notes mean something like that.
The tide closes over my face. Salt fills my mouth, and I wake up not with a scream but with a gasp for air.
I blink at the wide band of pink dawn light on the wall. Shadows slide lazily across it. I hear someone moving around in the room and recognize the shuffle of Mags' feet.
"Nngh. What time is it? Am I late?"
"No," she says, and the mattress dips where she sits down on the foot of my bed. "Woke up early. Wanted some company."
I scrub my face with my hand.
"Put your fish in a bowl."
Her words drift slowly down through the murk in my brain, but they hit bottom with a firm thud. For a moment I try to doubt it, but no, it's Mags. She knows exactly what it is. And she knows exactly why I have it.
There's nothing for it but to lever myself up. Over her shoulder I can see the black vase. Beside it, lurking in a crystal-clear glass fishbowl, is the ugly lump Aquilia gave me.
"Needs sun. And food," Mags tells me. "You end up paying for them as long as they live."
"...You'll pay for it as long as you live..."
"It's no good trying to get off cheap, eh?" We both know what we're really talking about.
She draws a deep breath. "It's you has to live with it if you kill it. Funny thing, seventy-odd years killing fish for a living, get one in the house and I always feel bad if it dies."
She's really saying "I've gotten attached to you. I would be hurt if you died."
"Said it was a present?" She glances back over her shoulder.
I nod.
"Awful waste, I say. You can wheedle presents out of them there, better things to do than drag a fish back to District Four. Ask me next time, give you a shopping list."
"What would you put on it?"
"Have to think about it a while. You think too. You'll come up with something good by next year."
The thought of there being a next year curls me up until I'm hugging my knees.
Mags notices. She reaches back to clasp my arm — which is what she can reach — and offers something more manageable. "We'll go down to the beach in a few days."
I nod in agreement. She deserves that much from me, at least.
As we're getting off the train in District 4, this year's Games come to an end. In front of the cameras, we watch it on the big screen above the station.
The pair from District 1 have finished clearing away the few Outer district stragglers. Now they're the last two left alive, although the guy has a nasty wound on his arm. As if this year's Games need one last absurd touch, they declare themselves sick of fighting and decide to end it with three rounds of rock-paper-scissors. The girl loses. She could have taken advantage of her partner's injury and probably won, but if it had been me and Dana at the end, I might have preferred something like that, too. She takes her death bravely.
After her partner wins they show his information again, including date of birth. He's seven months older than me. I'm still the youngest victor for another year. Or maybe for the rest of my life.
The rest of the day is interviews, and since the vase isn't hiding the stonefish anymore, I go ahead and introduce the audience to my new pet, all the while struggling to come up with a name because all I can think of is my horrible remark to Aquilia and I am absolutely not naming the thing after Mags.
"Charming and deadly, like District Four," I declare.
"You call that thing 'Charming'?" The reporter unwittingly comes to my rescue.
"Yeah, that's his name."
I try feeding him a live bait-fish — he doesn't take it, but I promise them he'll have the idea in time for next year — and I make certain to describe his awful poison. Hunger Games viewers love that sort of thing, and I may as well get them ready, put the idea in their heads. Everyone who matters has caught me already, but most of the viewers probably will think it's an accident...
That night I make certain to watch the sun set over the ocean. It's enough to take sunsets off any list of dying regrets, a rare and gloriously-cloudscaped blaze of red. Dawn the next morning is fresh and cold, so clear I can watch the shadow of the slope slowly pull itself ashore from somewhere far out at sea.
That afternoon, the cameras leave, and Mags takes me to town in her protective wake. It's the bad season for shellfish, so we just get food to carry with us down to the beach. I have a real swim until it starts getting dark, and then we eat and watch the stars come out.
The moon is nearly full — nearly a spring tide. While Mags is chewing, I look out over the water, half-wondering if I'll see myself standing out there somewhere surrounded by circling shadows. The evening tide actually is coming in. The waves slowly grow louder as they wash up nearer to us.
I've finally stretched out on the blanket when Mags decides it's time to say what she wants to say.
She takes her sandal in her hand and slaps it down. "A stonefish! Bli' me! Can understand if you want out of it, but why in the world you want to do that to yourself?"
"She wouldn't give me the blue-ringed octopus." It's as if I want her to finally give up on me in disgust, but if Mags was ever going to do that, she would have already.
She shakes her head. "What happened?"
It seems like there should have been something, but what was it that sent me over the edge? We lost in the Games. It happens about four years in five. "Nothing special," I admit.
She grimly accepts that as an answer. "Still got it?"
"I brought it all the way back here. Am I supposed to kill it now?"
"Yes. Kill it. Then I can sleep," she says decidedly, now that the cameras are gone and we're not talking in code. She looks at me with sharp eyes, silently demanding a response.
I won't lie. "I'm still thinking about it."
Her sigh is deeper and sharper than the sighing of the waves. "Your life," she says, even so. "Still an awful waste. Awful waste."
Waste of what?
Of me. Somewhere inside I know or at least let myself imagine that what she means is that simple and that deep, but my mind won't accept it and turns to darker things.
Everything good that we got for my victory is finished. None of it is going to be taken away if I die. No one here at home wants the money they send me, and there's a rule that I can't even be a sponsor for our tributes. Apparently I can't be a mentor for them either; looking at myself the last few days, maybe Mags knew I wasn't mentally stable enough for it. As soon as I won the Games, I'd served my purpose, and now there's nothing left for me to do — nothing except what the Capitol wants, nothing good or useful. I'm like the dead fish on my wall, just a decoration, a trophy that the owners don't even like...
"You know," Mags tries to call me back to her, "somebody didn't mind dying could have some real fun. Lot better than that."
It's not helping. I've seen other victors having "fun" going to their graves and I'd rather just get it over with than end up like that.
"Nothing lasts forever."
I don't even know what she means. It won't always be like this, maybe. Refusers are forgiven eventually. People aren't quite so nasty to Hendrick's victim these days. None of them have the Capitol rubbing their crimes in everyone's faces again and again, but the Capitol is fickle. They'll get sick of me eventually. Maybe in ten or twenty years my life will be back to normal — if they don't find some new way to make me pay, and anyway I don't think I can last that long.
Ten or twenty years... Mags might not last that long. She won't last forever, and I bury my face in my arms because I have no idea what I'll do...
I feel her tough, thin fingers on my shoulder. She leans down low over my ear and whispers so softly that only I could possibly hear her over the surf...
"Even Games and Capitols. They don't last forever."
I catch my breath and look up at her. She's already sitting back again but she gives me a knowing glance to tell me that I really heard the impossible thing I thought I just heard. For a few minutes all I can do is listen to the waves while the words slowly soak through me.
She's talking about rebellion. She's talking about fighting the Capitol.
Everyone in District 4 respects our ancestors for fighting them. No one shakes their head when the Peacekeepers punish someone for treason, cut out their tongue so they can't spread any seditious talk and hang them up in a cage until their bones have been picked clean by seabirds and bleached in the sun. The trainers didn't tell us to watch when that happened; instead we were supposed to lower our eyes in respect. It's intended as the ultimate humiliation, but no one is ashamed.
No one does anything either. No one says anything like what Mags just said. How could they? To fight the Capitol is only to throw your life away, to risk every horrible punishment your imagination can invent — from becoming a second 13 to hearing a single explosion over the horizon...
But Mags did it anyway. From that look in her eye, I think she's been fighting for some time, and suddenly I'm not just a useless trophy but a blind, stupid coward. I never dared think of doing anything myself when all the time, right beside me, she was really fighting — and I know she was fighting for me. All this time she didn't tell me, and I'm sure it's because she wanted to protect me...
But now she is telling me. The stonefish must have shown her I'm so broken there's nothing left to protect. Maybe fighting the Capitol would be throwing my life away, but I'm at the point of throwing my life away as it is, and that would at least be a better way, wouldn't it? To toss my hair and smile at the cameras before President Snow gives the order to shoot? Or maybe they'd show everyone how they punish treason in District 4 and hang me up in a cage — but no, I'm sure I'd rate the firing squad televised live from the Capitol. They say they train them specially to aim for a slow, painful death, but it can't be any worse than stonefish venom.
What else is left to threaten me with? They have to know that my parents have nothing to do with me anymore, that no one in District 4 will have anything to do with me. What good would it do to punish them? They might even be happier that way. I'm sure my parents at least would rather suffer knowing that I was a rebel than live in comfort thinking I was the Capitol's toy. It would be a prouder thing.
And in the meantime, that would be something to tell myself when people turn their backs on me, when I hear the loud whispers: I'm fighting to liberate you from the Capitol, you just don't know it yet — because of course it would be a secret. That might even help.
The only person they could threaten to get to me is Mags, because I still have no idea what I'd do without her... But she doesn't need any rescue, and she's already made her decision.
"Real fun, huh?" I ask her.
"I find," she says.
For someone who "didn't mind dying"... But it's Mags. She wouldn't throw her life — or mine — away on a hopeless scheme. She's spent sixty years sharpening her instincts, doing what has to be done to give us the best possible chance. Maybe it's only one in ten or one in two dozen or one in a hundred, but it has to be possible. And when she says Games and Capitols don't last forever, she of all people would know.
Suddenly I'm sure we didn't have dinner on the train with District 3 just to be sociable, that when Beetee was talking over my head he was using some code Mags could understand. I actually smile thinking of her "shopping list." Now I know why she wouldn't talk about it on the train, and now I really want to know what she would put on it.
Now, if I think, I can come up with something good. I remember the gossip on the boat, the politician's suspicious death, the idea that President Snow drinks dead tributes' blood... Who knows what I might hear if I found the right place to fall "sound asleep"? Aquilia promised me anything I wanted — she didn't mean it, but who knows what I could have gotten if I'd kept her in that mood instead of haggling? I imagine myself turning toward her, looking into her eyes like what I really want most is just to be closer to her...
"Tell me a secret."
Who knows what she might have told me? I've been doing this long enough to know that people with secrets really long to tell them to someone, that they'll pay incredible amounts of money for someone who'll listen to the secrets their husbands and wives and friends can't know and would never understand...
"Stay and try it?" Mags asks me.
She catches me smiling like a cat with a fish, but as I come back from my fantasy, the smile falls. Tomorrow and the day after I'll still be hiding in my house because everyone I grew up with despises me. My mother will still be pained by the sight of me; my father will still be telling people his son is dead. Every month I'll get back on the train to be passed around the Capitol as a plaything; every year I'll watch another twenty-three tributes die. I'll still wake up some mornings knowing that I'll always be at sea and can never go home. Before the work is finished, either I'll be dead, or home will be completely transformed...
Like when I went to the Games. It's fear underneath again, and it doesn't feel so light and free, but it's something. It gives me one point of pride that really matters to me, one star to steer by that I can look for if I'm in danger of getting lost or forgetting who I am...
It's enough. No, more than that — tears well up in my eyes as I realize it — I want it to be enough.
I don't want to go on living the life I've had this past year — and somehow I know, now that I've heard the song of the Sirens, I'll never quite have that melody out of my head — but looking back now, it's obvious. If I'd really been resolved to end it, I'd have thought through the flaw in my plan sooner. When I realized the stonefish wouldn't work I'd have looked for another way; just the silk scarf that came with the vase would have done it with the simplest of knots, painful but quiet... Instead, I could barely think past the surface of it; I let myself be thwarted so easily because I didn't — because I don't — really want to do it. I don't want to live like this, but I don't want to die.
I don't want to die.
It echoes in some tender, neglected part of my mind. I actually said those words in my Games once.
I don't know how I ever got away with it. A week in, I managed to lose all my weapons. The pair from District 2 had made sure there were none left at the Cornucopia for me to find, and for the rest of the day I kept looking up into a suddenly-empty sky. Even the food stopped coming; there I was in "The Hunger Games," and for the first time I was actually hungry. I couldn't know then that Mags was actually scraping together that impossible sum I saw on the control room screen. I thought the money had run out, that such a stupid mistake had shown the sponsors I didn't deserve to win after all. I thought that that year in District 4, everyone who looked in the cupboard on Parcel Day and everyone who sailed out toward the Line would think of me, how I'd had the best possible chance, better than I deserved, and how I'd blundered it away. I was sure the sponsors would only be more disgusted if I cried or begged, but I finally couldn't keep up the act anymore, couldn't hold back the tears anymore, and I said it aloud to the air: "I don't want to die."
And that was when Mags sent the trident.
It was the same thing she's doing now. Just when I was sinking into despair, she gave me what I needed — not a rescue, although I'm sure she wished and wishes still that she could just save me. Not a rescue, but enough. A way to fight. A way to go on.
When I sniffle and wipe my eyes, Mags lays her hand on my shoulder, but that isn't enough. I pull myself up, out from under her touch, and I wrap my arms around her. I've never done it before. I don't know why I haven't. She's so tiny there's no way to do it except to hold her against my chest, although really she's the one holding me up.
She finds my hand, gives it a firm squeeze. "Stay with me?" Her voice is quiet, not quite steady. I've never heard her sound like that.
I hold on tighter, not trusting myself to talk.
We finally walk home by flashlights. When we've arrived at my house and I've had a bath, I'm ready to drop under my own weight, but Mags gives me a spoonful of sleep syrup. She doesn't trust me. I do trust her, and I take it without complaint.
It keeps me asleep the next morning until the sun is falling strong and hot through the windows. I get out of bed, open the room up for some breeze and lean on the windowsill, savoring the view of the already-busy ocean.
I hear someone walking by on the street below. It's my old trainer, leading a vaguely-familiar girl with beautiful brown hair. The girl looks up, and I smile and wave. She of course turns away, but she's kind enough to look just awkward, not disgusted. She's about the same age I was when I went to the Games, and by the look of her, I don't think she's one of the eager ones. I hope they never pick her.
When I go downstairs, the first thing I see under the stairway lintel is the hem of Mags' dress by the foot of an accent table — the one where I left the fishbowl. I hear a slosh of water.
"MAGS, DON'T TOUCH IT!" I'm sprinting down the stairs —
A cleaver appears above her shoulder. It falls onto a board with a solid whack.
"Good eating," she tells me, and shows me my stonefish's ugly head on a meat fork.
I totter on my feet. The moment of panic passes, and into the emptiness it leaves behind settles the realization of just how selfish I've been. She cares about me as much as I do about her — by all evidence, more; I have certainly been a high-maintenance pet this past year — and I was terrified just now. She must have felt the same harpoon through the heart when she dumped the black vase into that fishbowl and saw what I had. In the Dark Days, when the Capitol brought those things here, she must have seen people die that way... I don't know where she got the strength not to shake me awake right then and start screaming, to instead just sigh at me and say "It's your life" — because that was strength and nothing less, I'm sure of it...
Properly chastened, I shuffle over to her and drape myself over her bony shoulders. "I'm sorry I'm such a pathetic brat."
"Only seventeen," she says, and she rubs her fingertips under my hair. "Still growing."
I hope she's right.
She always is.
THE END
