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THE PREP ROOMS
When the glittering spires of the Capitol rose into view - when the crowds surged through the streets, waving and shouting encouragement like lumberjacks placing bets at a cockfight, eager for first blood - when she saw their strange and colorful faces, bright as spring flowers and splashes of blood - all Merida could think was, I won't let ye change me. I won't let ye beat me into something I'm not.
She didn't hesitate when they called her name, when they led her onto the train, when they fed her unfamiliar food and quizzed her for everything she knew about how to kill.
The first thing to stop her short was not the sight of her opponents on the reaping recap - not even the massive boy from District Two who elbows his twin out of the way in his eagerness to volunteer and climb the stage.
Not even Duncan Macintosh, her supposed partner from the western woods, who has spoken all of two words to her since the reaping, who spent the trip to the Capitol glowering out the window and pocketing the cutlery, and who seems to have swiftly forgotten that their fathers knew each other or that he was among the boys clamoring to dance with her at the Harvest Festival last year.
No, what shakes Merida is not the promise of battle.
She walks into that pristine operating-room atmosphere all unawares. Her main concern is the flimsy medical gown they've dressed her in, flapping open at the back. And then she sees what is happening behind those clean white curtains, and her legs bolt before her head remembers where she is.
It takes two Peacekeepers to carry her there and hold her limbs while her prep team belts her to the table with padded straps, cinched down across waist and thighs and ankles and on and on. Still she struggles and bucks against the cold steel surface, shouting every rude word her brothers and father ever taught her. She doesn't plead and she doesn't beg, but she tells the strange iridescent people around her exactly what she thinks of their work. Whatever the Capitol wants them to make of her, it is a lie, and she refuses to make it easy for them.
The flash of a silver needle, unseen at the corner of her vision until - too late - it nips sharply at one immobilized arm, makes her lie limp at last.
Merida stares dully at the ceiling, under a blanket of drugged torpor, while her prep team strips the hair from her body, bleaches away her freckles, and douses her head in chemicals and lotions that turn her frizzy locks into a sleek tumble of red-gold curls. The unfortunate woman assigned to file her bitten nails into perfect ovals discovers, with a gasp of offense, that she must first pry loose all but one extended finger from the girl's drowsily clenched fist.