I make it back to the Spire before midday without running into Beetee or anyone else I know. There's a message from Odelia reminding me about lunch at one and I manage to get myself cleaned up and clear-headed and to the café only a few minutes late. She's already at the table and grins as I hand her the folded dress I'd borrowed the night before, passing back the bag with the outfit I left at her place.

"Good night?" she asks and I blush, making an answer unnecessary.

"My boy was a bit disappointing in the end. No stamina at all." She grins again at my discomfort and qualifies, "He passed out about five minutes after we got back to his place. Didn't even get his pants off. I pinched a few of his pills to sober up a bit and took a cab home."

"Clara?" I ask as the waitress comes over to take my order.

"No idea," she says with a frown, glancing around. "Usually she's the first one here to rub it in our faces that she can outlast the rest of us and still spring back fine."

We pick at a plate of sandwiches for forty-five minutes with the occasional burst of conversation, but she's quiet by nature and I'm me, and eventually we give it up as a bad job and head our separate ways. I consider trying to call Clara when I get back to the Spire, but the number I have is a general one for her house and I don't really want to catch either of her parents.

I end up dozing on the couch until a sharp rap on the door startles me awake. Beetee, his bag slung over one shoulder, other arm full of notebooks, ready to catch a ride back to the train station.

"Late night?" he asks as I blink at him blearily, smothering a yawn behind one hand.

I nod, not wanting to go into details. "I'll just grab…"

I gesture to my bedroom and hesitate at the look he gives me. A mixture of disapproval and something darker, almost angry flits over his face and he very deliberately looks away.

I back away into the bedroom and quickly grab up the books and clothes lying around the floor. I glance in the mirror on the back of the door and wince. My hair is all puffed up in a fuzzy tangle where I was leaning against the couch, there's fairly obvious dark bags and a smudge of make-up that must be water-proof still around my eyes and a fairly blatant red-purple mark just peeking out on my collarbone that Beetee obviously spotted.

I find a sweater with a more enclosed neckline and pull it on before heading back out to face him. He doesn't quite meet my eyes as he leads the way down and out to the waiting car.

The silence lasts until the train clears the Capitol outskirts. I nudge his arm gently and he jumps half a foot in the air, but stops glowering out the window.

"What did…" I gesture to the pile of papers stacked beside him that he usually would be telling me all about already.

He blinks for a few seconds and looks between the papers and me twice. "What did Heavensbee want? Oh nothing much, just a completely new high end control chip made by one of his competitors that he wants me to reverse engineer and retrofit to their entire hovercraft range."

He makes a small harrumphing noise and taps his fingers on the pile of notes. I know him well enough now to know that he secretly will enjoy the challenge, regardless of how much he complains.

"The problem he actually had me shipped out for, why their efficiency model didn't match their testing data was a bit easier. One of his workers stuck a decimal in the wrong place and none of them bothered checking the calculations by hand."

I smile and after a moment he smiles back. I hold my hand out and he passes me the pile of notes with almost no hesitation. Electronics is much more his thing than mine, but I give the circuit board sketches and photos a brief glance over before settling in to his neat, precise letters describing the functionality and assumed workings of this new, mysterious chip.

"I won't ask," he says after a few minutes, once again not meeting my eyes when I look up at him. "I won't ask, just…be careful Wiress. Please."

I give him a quick smile and nod, glad that I'm not going to have this conversation. "I will. I'm not a…a…a…" he frowns, apparently unable to finish this sentence and lets me do so on my own.

"Not a little…little girl anymore."

"No," he says strangely as I get back to his notes. "You're not."

~xXx~

School starts again for Balia and Malcy in the first week of September and my routine falls back to more normal. I make sure to wear closed-necked shirts until the mark on my collarbone fades. Beetee apparently doesn't say anything to anyone else because I get no funny looks or comments.

I don't hear anything from either Lorcan or Clara for most of the month, and spend my time working on a spherical robot that can roll itself around, with a control piece that always stays on the top of the ball. I shrug when Ezra, up for a visit asks what it's for, and when Beetee chimes in from his workbench that it doesn't need a purpose to be worth making I know we're back to normal too.

I finally get word about Clara on the last Thursday of the month, when her mother's secretary calls to tell me my September trip to the Capitol has been cancelled. Apparently Minister Redfern caught her daughter sneaking back in drunk and drugged at half-past four in the morning that night we were out and grounded her for a month. I'd been hoping to see Lorcan again, but manage to hide my disappointment as I tell my mother. We spend Friday night as a family at one of the restaurants in town eating spicy meat and dumplings.

On Monday a package arrives in the mail for me with no sender name. Inside is a set of fine artists' sketch books and a set of fancy ink pens all tied up with a gold ribbon. Lorcan clearly saw me looking at his drawings while he made me breakfast. I spend all day trying them out and even let Balia and Malcon have a go in the evening. Balia manages to spill ink all over her hand twice in her attempt to sketch my basket of flowers, ready and waiting for the next morning and gives up when she accidentally manages to smear it across her face. Malcy, his little face screwed up in concentration draws our house and family. The stick figures are even in size proportion and he continues onto another page with a squarish blob for his school and all his classmates.

"Which ones are your friends?" Balia asks after he finishes adding hair to the twenty-eight stick figures squished in two blotchy rows. He frowns and shrugs and makes a vague hand gesture before dropping the pen to play with one of her hair clips that's sitting on the table.

My sister gives me a worried look, but I'm not concerned. I know the answer to that one: none of them are friends the way she would think of them, but he still knows who they all are. Sometimes I think I'm more like my little brother than anyone else.

October comes roaring in with a week-long storm that makes me very glad we can now afford waterproof jackets and proper heating. A lightning strike knocks out the power to a dozen factories for two days and Beetee and I are both called in to help set up proper bypasses and temporary generators, and to work on something to prevent it happening again in the future. Beetee even manages to joke about being something of a lightning-rod expert, earning a laugh from Mayor Redden and some of the other engineers who would have paid attention during his Games, over fifteen years ago now.

My next Capitol trip is quite tame. Clara calls me on Friday night and the two of us catch a late night movie (some nonsense with robots and explosions that we both spend the two hours rolling our eyes at during the numerous inaccuracies and impossibilities). Saturday is another shopping jaunt, again with just the two of us, though she doesn't really seem engaged and only buys one new outfit. She's a lot quieter than usual and I wonder as we sit down at a salad bar for lunch if this is some hold-over from her grounding and likely argument with her mother.

She doesn't say anything to me about my disappearing with Lorcan, doesn't mention Perry at all (highly unusual, as he generally is the topic of every other conversation with her) and seems listless when I ask her what she wants to do for the afternoon and evening.

"We're not going out tonight, unfortunately," she says with a scowl as I leave a large tip for our waiter. "My mother confiscated all my fake IDs and told me if she catches me again she'll pull me from my architecture course. Same if she finds out I've seen Perry at all."

"So you haven't…"

"What?" she blinks, and a small smile flits across her face. "Oh, no, I have seen him. Just not as much as I want to, and I have to be sneaky about it. She even has someone watching his flat. Royan managed to warn me before they saw me though. He's another one my parents want me to stop spending time with, and they fired his brother Terry as a driver. Said he knowingly aided me in sneaking into the clubs."

"Well," I say, knowing full well that Terry had been her fake ID card supplier. She pulls a face at me.

"Anyway, Gammy and Roy and Helia have all been busy with Games stuff. You know, with the Quarter Quell coming up. The boys won't tell me anything about the arena on the handful of times I've been able to speak to them. And I have no idea what Helia's up to. She normally works for the Heavensbees but they're involved in building something big and difficult for the arena this year too."

She seems to realize that this isn't a good topic for me and pastes a smile on her face as she leads me down another street towards a string of jewelry shops. She picks up a bit more of her old chatty self as we try on increasingly ridiculous necklaces and jeweled headdresses and eventually talks me into getting my ears pierced. She adds a new piercing of her own in the top of her ear while I admire the glittering green stones embedded in my earlobes in the mirror.

We pass a tattoo parlor next, and though I know it's a joking suggestion my memory flashes back to tracing the golden lines on Lorcan's body and I blush. She notices and finally starts in on my last time here, slowly dragging out all the details over giant chocolate milkshakes and a long walk up and back along the memorial plaza.

As the sun starts setting I can hear the music from the various clubs in nearby streets start drifting up. Clara scowls again, her hands twitching, and reluctantly says she should probably go home early and show her mom what a good little girl she's being. She shoots me one last parting jab about giving me time to catch up with nameless blond cuties as we split and I do consider briefly trying to call up Lorcan. Last time it seemed so natural, but now, after nearly two months without contact I'm just not sure.

As I walk past one of the louder clubs I realize that I could go in by myself if I really wanted to and lose myself to the haze of noise and alcohol. I don't really like the thought of being alone though and as a cold breeze brushes through the street I decide a night of reading under a heating unit sounds perfectly fine.

~xXx~

Sunday buckets rain from dawn until I board the train back to Three. I spend the day with Clara and Odelia (the only one of Clara's good friends not currently on the banned list, though it was apparently a near thing) in one of the larger shopping malls, where they're sorting out Hallows Eve costumes for the upcoming holiday. We don't celebrate it at home, but here it seems to be a night of dressing up in sillier outfits than usual and eating candy. The two of them are planning on going to a scary movie marathon, though this seems to mostly be a cover for Clara to see her boyfriend as she figures they'll be harder to catch out in costumes in a dark theater.

Odelia apparently has some new boy she's meeting there too that doesn't have her mother's approval either, though she won't say why. This is news to Clara who spends most of the afternoon trying to scavenge details out of her friend the same way she did about me and Lorcan the previous night. Odelia's more stubborn than I am though, and won't say anything more than he's older and has opened her eyes to a new way of seeing things. I cover my ears and beg her not to go into details, making both of them laugh and they spend the next hour trying to drag me into one of the "adult" shops. Since they're both still underage this doesn't go down well and the three of us end up running from a grumpy shopkeeper who threatens to call security if we keep bothering him. He apparently doesn't recognize me or Clara and we end up out in the street laughing uncontrollably and soaking wet from the rain.

I spend the next week in bed with a cold while my mother doses me with chicken soup and spicy vegetable dishes. I make sure to stay away from Laney even when I'm up and better as she's getting very close to her time. There's a lot of jokes about what they're going to call the baby, though Laney is determined that the child will be at least partially named after members of the family. After we try multiple combinations of bits of our names they settle on Lezan for a boy or Baliss for a girl. Balia, who has been reading every book she can find on babies and has been learning to knit to make clothes for her soon-to-be niece or nephew, is glowing nearly as much as my sister-in-law and the two spend the hours of Laney and Ezra's visits planning out the child's life.

I actually end up missing the birth as the Victory Tour rolls into town with the accompanying media circus and, as the immediately previous victor, my presence is required at both the rally and the dinner. Beetee comes along for support, though Cupros opts out after the presentation in the square, where Brutus gives an uninspired speech about his victory. He gives a brief nod to Elmett, who at least died fighting (and took one of their Career pack down with him), but his gloating battle cries earn him no friends from the tributes families, forced as always to the front of the crowd.

I see Elmett's younger sister Soni open her mouth at one point, possibly to shout something and her father quickly clasps a hand over her face to stop her. She scowls and glares at the gray concrete ground for the rest of the ceremony, and I wonder idly if I'll be mentoring her for the Quell next year. At roughly sixteen, above average height and angry she'd probably be a better bet than most of our district. I shiver and force myself to focus on Mayor Redden's droning reply thanking Brutus for his generosity towards our fallen tributes.

I end up stuck next to the brawny man from Two, and expect to spend the whole dinner dealing with his aggressive and obnoxious outbursts and, from what Lorcan told me, groping hands. To my surprise he actually treats me with a margin of respect. He doesn't try to touch me at all, doesn't bring up the death of my other tribute Allasan (possibly because he doesn't remember her at all) and after a few drinks cheerfully informs me that I count as a "proper victor" by his district's standards.

"I mean, yeah you went at him from behind and no-one from Two would ever do that, but he was bigger so I guess it's fair enough," he slurs at me over dessert. "But you finished him off with a weapon in your own hand and looked him in the eye as he died. That's what really counts."

I decide not to point out that by those standards he is not a "proper victor" as the last two tributes this year killed one-another off, and left him no-one to fight. He seems to hear it unspoken anyway and stabs at his cake with a fork for a few minutes before loudly announcing that electrocution doesn't count as a proper weapon and only a coward would kill people that way. Beetee just smiles vaguely on my other side and goes back to chatting with Mayor Redden's teenage son about VR games.

We both escape soon after the meal is finished, not wanting to stay after Brutus challenges his mentor Vikus to match him drink for drink. Ezra swings by the village the next afternoon to tell us all about how our newest victor managed to smash an antique wooden table and tore down one of the colorful tapestries in the Justice Building to wear as a cape during his drunken escapade. There's photos on the news to confirm this and a video clip of him and the daughter of one of our Capitol Liasons getting to know one-another quite well.

I don't follow the rest of the tour, trying hard not to think about how it's already half-way to the next Games and about how there will be two more (most likely) dead children in my nightmares soon. This year is probably going to be even worse as it's a Quell year, though we won't find out about what extra rules or twists they've added until February when the card is read.

I finally make contact with Lorcan when he takes me out to dinner on the Friday night of my November trip. He's friendly and talkative as always and is already working under Dido's instruction on designs for the next Games. My stylist will be back this year, which I guess means Marco will be relegated. I'm not too sad about this, though Lorcan does tell me that Marius has deserted us for the District One prep team. He doesn't know yet who the replacement will be, and one of his projects right now is interviewing people for the position.

My old escort Carmenius Fallow is still working for Four unfortunately and, as far as Lorcan knows, we still have the over-excitable Gloria Goldacre who, at least, isn't deliberately cruel or unkind to the tributes.

Lorcan takes me up on my offer to come back to the Spire, though we just end up sitting on the couch watching a silly gameshow which has the contestants compete against one another in tasks voted on by the audience. The final round has them all randomly paired up and working their way through a strange obstacle course, with the overall winners receiving a decent monetary prize and a funny gold crown. It's apparently become quite popular in the last two years and the host promises that the tenth run (scheduled for February) will be something special. I have a horrible sneaking suspicion that it will be something to do with the Games as the timing is right around the Quell Card reading.

Lorcan tells me apologetically that he can't stay as he has an early appointment with one of the prep-team hopefuls and gives me a brief kiss before leaving. It doesn't quite seem the same as last time though, and I suspect that our 'tragic long-distance romance' as Clara termed it isn't going to throw the stars out of orbit. Or any of the other bad clichés that heroines in Capitol movies tend to use. I still like him a lot, and I definitely enjoy spending time with him, but there's something missing, at least compared to what I've read about or seen between other couples. As long as he stays with the District Three prep team I'll be seeing him at least once a year anyway, and we can stay friends. The fact that I'm not heartbroken over this thought probably means it's for the best.

~xXx~

As a surprise, Clara got permission for me to join her architecture group on a field trip for the rest of the weekend. Along with two-dozen others, mostly boys my age or a little older, we travel to ruined city of St. Louis and spend most of the day examining the old, partially destroyed buildings and landmarks while the teacher describes some of the history. A giant metal arch still stands in the middle of the river, and we all take down sketches of two mostly-intact churches with their ornate carvings and windows and strange rows of pillars. The teacher isn't quite sure which of the old religions they belonged to and with an eye-roll suggests that it doesn't really matter since they all no longer exist for good reason. I remember my Grandma Tolsey teaching me and my siblings the words of old, forbidden songs and reading verses from the twenty-three raggedly ripped pages she had of her holy book, and keep silent.

We sleep on the hovercrafts that night and spend most of Sunday poking around a sports stadium, though the playing field itself is overgrown with shoulder-high grass and spiky plants. Clara's a little more talkative than the previous month but occasionally lapses into strange silences where she stares off into the distance, completely unaware of the goings-on around her. It's strange to be the one less prone to daydreams and I do my best to keep her with us mentally. We get a chance to wander down one of the corridors where the walls are still lined with old photographs of men in colorful uniforms. Clara stares at these for quite a while and mutters something about being happy and free before we're called back to the main group. I end up having to race for the afternoon train once we arrive back in the Capitol and barely make it in time. I spend the journey home flipping through my sketchbooks at my drawings of a time before Panem and wonder if any of those smiling faces in the old photographs ever imagined their country turning into what we have now.