It had been my mentor Blaze's idea to invite the Tributes form District One to dinner with us. 'Starting tomorrow, you'll need to work together,' she told me. 'You should get to know each other as much as possible.' Marvel's mentor had agreed, and so Clove and Cato had showed up around seven from the floor above us.

Two Capitol envoys, four mentors and four Tributes made for a full table. Food wasn't an issue though; the Avox servants had brought us enough for twenty. It was nothing like the food at home. There things were plain and filling; here, variety and presentation practically seemed more important than nutrition. They even gave us wine. After some whining on our part, Blaze permitted us to drink some.

Cato and Marvel fell into a discussion of unarmed combat tactics, and I was left to try to talk to Clove. The experience was a bit like talking to a particularly articulate wall. She requested food when her plate was empty, passed things when they were asked for, and that was about it. Finally I gave up, and we ate our delicious meal in silence.

After we'd eaten, Blaze looked up from her conversation with Enobaria. 'Glimmer, honey, why don't you go show Clove the clothes Augusta sent?'

Translation - they wanted to talk tactics without us here. 'Okay,' I said, rising. Clove followed suit. One of the Avox darted in immediately to take our plates. As we awkwardly started down the hall, we passed Cato and Marvel, who had become engrossed by an analysis of the betting odds on the television.

'Isn't this place amazing?' I gushed, trying to fill the silence.

The apartment was amazing. Upon arriving, Marvel and I had immediately started experimenting with the viewscreens which covered half of the walls. They were now all tuned to underwater scenes. Long-extinct tropical fish drifted slowly around coral reefs, scattering when I walked by. My heels clattered on the stone floors, echoing around the smooth lines of the apartment.

'I mean, I've seen it on the broadcasts, but I never imagined it would be so big,' I continued. The Games viewings always included at least one shot of the Tribute's apartments, complete with open-mouthed Tribute's staring in awe at the luxury they had been presented with. I had seen Blaze do it when she had competed. The Tribute last year had looked like she was going to cry with joy.

She had cried later, of course. Just before she was killed. Just like most of the people who stayed here were.

The door to my room opened silently on its own, like a magic portal. Clove collapsed onto a narrow sofa and started playing with the viewscreen on the wall. She flicked through mountains, beaches, and storm clouds before finally settling on more Games coverage. I took off my heavy earrings and carefully arranged them in the ornate jewelry box that sat on the sleek dresser. I had seen boxes like that in pieces in the factories a hundred times. Now I was getting to use one.

'I loved your dress in your interview,' I told Clove as I pulled open my closet. Truthfully, I had thought that the dress made her look too thin, but it seemed like the nice thing to say. I dug through the racks of clothes my stylist had sent me. Sparkles, shimmer, lace, beading. Just like on one of the Capitol fashion show broadcasts. 'Here, try this one,' I said, finally selecting a deep green knee-length cocktail dress.

Clove looked dubious, but she pulled herself up from the sofa and yanked the dress over her sad without bothering to take off the shirt she had on. After fumbling with the fastenings for a moment, she walked over to the mirror and examined herself critically.

'That looks great on you!' I said encouragingly, trying to get her to open up a little. It did look good on her too, even over her shirt and pants. The geometric cut of the dress gave her tall, thin body some shape, and the colour looked good against her pale skin and dark hair.

'Thanks.'

'Seriously. Stone cold fox.' I leaned over and started fixing her hair, tucking strands back in where it had fallen out of her loose bun. This was sort of fun. Almost like dressing one of my sisters at home. 'I have some nail liqueur too. Do you want some? It'll look great when you throw knives.'

Clove perked up a little at the mention of weaponry. 'Hey, thanks,' she said, more sincerely this time. I brought over the brightly coloured bottles and we sat down on the bed. 'Your stylist is great,' she said conversationally, grabbing a bottle of red polish.

I nodded, frowning as I tried to choose between pink and blue. 'She's the best.' Augusta was great. When the Tributes from Twelve came out in those flashy flaming clothes, she had told me that fancy clothes or not, I still looked better. I know she was probably just sticking up for her own work, but I had felt better anyways. She had actually hugged me before my interview, and said that no matter what, a girl as beautiful as me wouldn't be forgotten. The compliment had bolstered my confidence. It wasn't until later that I had wondered why her eyes had teared up when she said it.

'So is he any good?' Clove pointed in the direction of the dining room with her nail polish brush, back where we had left the boys.

'Marvel?' Truthfully, Marvel wasn't the sharpest drill in the factory. He would definitely be able to keep up his end of the group, as long as that end wasn't the one where any heavy thinking was going on. Then again, she might be trying to assess him as a risk. Clove wasn't my friend, I reminded myself. 'Yeah, he's pretty good. What about Cato?' Cato had been worrying me. He was just too damn big.

'Oh, he's great,' she said lazily, stretching her skinny arms over her head. 'Best in the district, besides me. Don't worry about him.'

I remembered something Blaze, my mentor, had told me on the four-hour train ride to the Capitol. It had been assumed from the first that we would be teaming up with the Tributes from Two. The combat edge offered by a properly trained group was too good to pass up, and we'd all get more screen time if we stuck together. Blaze had quietly informed me of another advantage, one I hadn't thought of. Working in a group spared you the unpopular necessity of killing your District's other Tribute. Clove could be my way out of becoming known as a traitor at home.

'We've been training together for so long,' I said casually, trying to think of how to broach the subject. 'It's hard to think of Marvel as competition.' I watched her out of the corner of my eye, hoping she'd get the hint.

She twisted a strand of her straight dark hair tightly around one finger. 'Well, the Arena's a dangerous place,' she said, examining the tip of her finger as it went purple. 'That's sort of the point.' Relief flooded me. Going home to Marvel's family and knowing I'd been the one to do it was too uncomfortable to think about.

'What did you think of the Fours?' she asked. 'The boy looked pretty solid.'

I frowned. District Four wasn't as good as One or Two, but their Tributes were at least properly trained. The boy from Four had been good. His aim with the short fishing spear he favoured had been remarkable. 'He's redundant, though,' I pointed out. 'Marvel does spears. Too much of that will look dead boring.' Blaze had warned me about that too. A good group for television had a mix of personalities and styles, not just the best fighters.

'Enobaria warned us about that,' said Clove, nodding in agreement. 'Ugh. I can't stand this.' She rolled her eyes angrily. 'I could take anyone here in a fight. Why do they keep dressing it up? It's supposed to be about skill, not how good you look on television.'

I shrugged. 'I dunno. The interviews were always my favourite when I was little. The clothes and the parade and everything.' The Games had been fun - competition was always fun. The preshow had been magical, though. Seeing all those normal people at the Reaping as boring District dwellers like us. Then the Capitol's light would shine on them and they would be transformed. 'I used to watch it with my sisters. Now they'll be watching me.' Walking out onstage at my interview had been the best feeling in the world. The Capitol citizens were so beautiful. Watching them on television and at the Reaping, I had wanted to be one of them so much that it hurt. Onstage, I felt like I was even better. Like maybe there were Capitol girls who wanted to be me.

'Bring pride to your district,' Clove intoned, in a fairly good impression of the instructional videos we had to watch at training camp. 'Were your family proud?'

'Yes,' I answered automatically. And it was true. I was fairly sure it was true.

I had known from the day I started training camp when I was twelve that I would volunteer when I was eighteen, and so had my parents. They had encouraged me. Three other girls had volunteered at the Reaping. When they finally decided to accept my application, my father had called me his champion, and told me that he knew I could do it. My sisters had dissolved into a flurry of discussion about what I would wear at the parade.

My mother had cried. I was crying too, out of excitement, so when she hugged me I had pressed my face into her shoulder. She had been mumbling under her breath. That close, I could just make out the words. 'No, no, no my baby, please, no...' I had tried to let go, but she had clutched me tighter. The Peacekeepers finally had to pull her off. My father had said that she was just overexcited, and I had agreed, but the image of her crumpled face as the Peacekeepers walked her down the hall was stuck in my memory like a sliver.

'What about your parents?' I asked Clove, trying to clear my head. The wine was making me confused.

'They weren't around.' Her voice was emotionless. I wanted to ask what had happened, if they had died or just gone away somehow, but something in her face stopped me. Instead, I picked up the blue polish bottle and started painting my nails. The pink looked too much like flesh.

On the view screen, a montage from our training sessions came up. 'Can you believe some of the morons we're up against?' Clove said disdainfully, watching a girl miss her knife target three times in a row.

I laughed. 'Freaking incompetent! That idiot who fell of the bars today!' Clove shook her head disparagingly.

Maybe it was the wine, but I found myself continuing. 'To be honest... I'm a little worried about some of the outliers.' Clove frowned at me. 'Some of them are so young.' And thin, and sick. I was reminded of the movies they had made us watch in training camp. Desensitization videos, they called them. Endless montages of limbs being hacked off and faces sliced, to reduce our innate reaction to seeing gore. The thought of killing the younger ones gave me the same feeling of nausea coupled with shame. They looked like they would barely make it through training, let alone the Games themselves. 'It seems...' I searched for the word. 'Dishonourable.'

'It's disgusting,' Clove said flatly. 'They send children.' Her usually cool face was drawn with anger and contempt. 'Can you imagine? No one in the whole district will step in and stop a little kid from being sent instead of a fighter.' I found myself picturing it. Once, one of my cousins had been the original draw, before the volunteers were called. He was thirteen. I tried to imagine how alone you would feel, knowing that you were going to die and no one was going to do anything about it.

'So no,' Clove continued, 'I've got no sympathy. The kindest thing we can do at this point is put them out of their misery.'

'There was that one girl from Twelve, though,' I mused. 'She volunteered.' The girl with the unnervingly high scores.

Clove's nostrils flared with rage. Her hand slipped, brushing red polish over her thumb and spilling it on her borrowed dress. 'Sorry,' she said, not sounding sorry at all. Her knuckles were white.

'That's okay.' I dabbed at the bloody-looking stain with the corner of my blanket. It just smeared more. 'I wasn't going to wear that one again anyways.' The words sounded morbid as soon as I said them.

Clove ignored me. Her jaw was set and her eyes were somewhere else. I wondered why she hated that girl so much. She was good, sure, but everyone knew that Districts One and Two were a class apart. We almost always won. What did Clove think this girl could do to her? I remembered what I had said about redundancy. Maybe that was the problem. She and Katniss were both quiet and intense. They even looked a little alike, although the District Twelve girl was much smaller. Maybe Clove was afraid of being written out of the show.

I had found the outliers threatening too. Maybe threatening was the wrong word - disturbing was more accurate. They were so plain and grey, like they didn't even want to look good. They looked like a whole different species than the people at home. Something about their sad eyes, however, made me feel like they knew something I didn't. You think you're different, they seemed to say. Don't you know that they think of you as the same as us?

'You've know what they call us, right?' Clove asked.

'Careers? Yeah.' It was an accurate enough name, and having a title was kind of flattering. It made me feel like I was someone to be feared.

Clove laughed, but her eyes were cold. 'Victor isn't much of a career choice, is it? Only going to work out for one of us.'

I squirmed uncomfortably. I knew I would be able to deal with the outliers. Thinking of the Tributes at our dinner table and imagining myself as the only one left was strange. Like I had been eating with ghosts. 'It looks pretty good to me,' I said, trying to sound nonchalant. 'That great big house.' My sisters would love that. I could picture them tearing up and down the stairs, arguing over who would get which room. 'Why, what would you be?' I asked Clove. ''If you could choose, I mean.' I was genuinely interested. None of the Tribute trainees in District One had ever talked about doing anything else.

'Peacekeeper.'

'Really? They're all Capitol though.' I had expected her to say foreman, or even mayor. We had always been told Peacekeepers came from the finest stock of the Capitol. I tried to picture Clove as one. She seemed too angry.

'There aren't many dream jobs out there if you're not Capitol,' she said, looking uncomfortable.

I hadn't thought about it before. Victor was the only dream anyone had ever suggested to me. The only one we were given. 'Well, I want to be Capitol, then,' I said decidedly. I meant it as a joke, but it sounded hollow.

They were showing the interviews on the view screen again. I watched myself walk out, in my sheer golden dress, beaming at the audience. 'Drop-dead gorgeous,' the announcer cooed. I looked great, I told myself, and tried to picture the Capitol audience sighing when they saw me. Instead all I could think of was Augusta's face, and my mother's, and the faces of the children who would die tomorrow, and how similar admiration looked to pity, when you were the one receiving it.

'They are beautiful, though,' I said, mostly to myself, watching the audience cheer for me. 'Like butterflies.'

Thank you for reading! I am very new to writing, so please, if you have time, leave me some concrit. I would really some advice!