"I know who you are, you know."

The train ride had been blissfully silent up until now. The world beyond the window was indecipherable, blurred by sheets of rain which had started about an hour ago. Still, Jonah had been satisfied to watch it roll by in little rivulets. But it seemed the boy sitting across from her hadn't been. Why did he have to ruin it with meaningless conversation? Didn't he have thoughts that he wanted to be left alone with? If he really didn't, couldn't he respect that she did? She sighed, responding without looking away from the window.

"I know who you are too. The announcer lady said you're Adrian Heely." The truth was, Jonah didn't know exactly who he was, but she had known of a Heely family living in District 5. They had been vital in the rebellion, leading the effort to re-route power away from the Capitol and towards District 13, and so forth. She wasn't sure of what had become of them, but she suspected they had been arrested when District 5 had surrendered. Presumed dead.

"Yeah, but I knew who you were before that. Jonah Rouen, the girl who became a captain. You're a legend," the boy went on, his voice hushed. Maybe it was reverence, although it sounded more like quiet frustration.

"Am I? You don't say," Jonah muttered. She had meant for it to sound dismissive, in the hopes that Adrian would understand that she was uninterested in this conversation. In the end, though, her sarcastic tone just made her come off as conceited, even to herself. It was as though she was saying, of course I'm a legend. There was no use trying to correct herself, though. The damage was already done; Adrian was obviously annoyed when he spoke.

"Yeah, my parents couldn't shut up about you. I got so sick of hearing it. Jonah who saved a baby, Jonah who took out a hovercraft, Jonah who escaped arrest," he grimaced. "I thought you'd be older by now, though. No matter how young you started leading rebels, I thought you'd be… I don't know, twentyish at least."

Jonah smiled wryly, finally turning to face him. "You're right. I'll be twenty in a week."

The boy furrowed his brow. "But… You aren't eighteen?"

Jonah considered explaining it to him. No, it would be more interesting to see if he could understand it by himself. "Why would I be eighteen?"

"The tributes will be between the ages of twelve and eighteen — isn't that what the announcer lady said?"

"Oh, sure." Jonah paused, keeping her eye on the boy. Last chance to figure it out, kid. Adrian's expression was blank. Apparently, he wasn't even going to try.

What a pain, Jonah thought, but the quiet grin never left her face. "And as far as the Capitol's concerned, I am eighteen. I am whatever age they decide to put on my birth certificate."

The boy's eyebrows went up slowly as it dawned on him. "… oh."

"There, you're getting it now, aren't you?"

He turned away from her, looking at his feet. He looked as though he was embarrassed, and for a moment Jonah regretted speaking so condescendingly to him. From the look of it, he couldn't be too much younger than her. She knew she would resent being spoken down to from someone only a bit older than her. Jonah frowned, unsure if she was frustrated with herself or with Adrian. Really, wasn't he being a bit thick? Couldn't he use his brain before he ran his mouth?

As though he could hear her thoughts, there was a long pause before he finally spoke again, mumbling without looking up at her, "I thought it was a bit suspicious."

"Hm?"

"That all the tributes were the people we were in prison with."

"… you just picked up on that now?"

"Well, I had an inkling when I saw that paper the lady drew when she was picking tributes. The paper which had my name."

The frown faded from Jonah's face. She hadn't been looking at the slips of paper. She raised an eyebrow, as if to say, go on.

"It was blank."

Jonah tried to call the scene back to mind. The little slips of paper couldn't have been any larger than her index finger. Frankly, she had been too distracted watching the crowd to pay much attention to them. As soon as the announcer mentioned the tributes, Jonah had assumed that she would be one of them. But this Adrian boy hadn't had any idea what was going on. He could have panicked, could have worried over his fate. But instead he had been paying enough attention to his surroundings that he was able to see that the little slip of paper didn't have his name written on it.

He was gathering intel on the enemy.

A grin crept onto Jonah's face. Maybe he's not so thick after all.

x/x/x/x/x/x/x/x/x/x/x/x

"Ugh, what are we going to do with all of this hair? It's in knots. Has it ever been washed? Gross. Can't we just cut it off?"

"No, no, it needs to be long! Otherwise the hairstyle won't work, stupid!"

"Can't we go with boyish-chic or something?"

"She'll look too much like her brother. The audience needs to know which is which."

The ceiling above Lyra's head was a bluish off-white. There was a row of lights just above her face, and she had to squint to see much of anything. It obscured the faces of the three Capitol-dwellers who had been crowing over the state of her legs, her nose, her fingernails, and now her hair, for the past hour or so.

When the Peacekeepers had first separated her from her brother and brought her into this sterile little room with a medical bed and a whole row of mysterious instruments lined up beside it, Lyra had been sure they were going to torture her. Inject her with some poisons, or cut off her fingers, or something. While she had been wrong about the methods, she was fairly sure this classified as some form of torture.

At first she had tried to cooperate. She lay on the bed silently. She let them inspect her for "imperfections," as they kept calling them. But when they started ripping the hair off of her legs, she had screamed, kicked, and made a break for the doorway. In the end, they had opted to sedate her, and had carried on with their business. One of the three seemed bizarrely concerned, though Lyra couldn't understand why.

"Be nice, you two, the girl can hear you," this third Capitol citizen now hissed at the others, patting Lyra on the forehead in what was probably meant to be a comforting manner. Lyra shivered. "We just want you to look good, you know?" Lyra tried to answer, but the sedative made her lips sluggish and her tongue tired. The effort made her stomach lurch, and she thought she might be ill.

She shut her eyes, thinking of how often she fell ill when she was a little child. It was usually just fevers and flus, but once she came down with a horrible cough that wouldn't go away. Her whole body would shake, and sometimes she would cough so hard she threw up. Once when that happened, her brother clapped her on the shoulder and said, "You should get some rest. But careful if you fall asleep — you could choke on your vomit and die."

She tried to keep herself up that whole night, and when she did sleep, she had nightmares where she was swimming, but someone's hand was on her head, holding her underwater. No matter how much she kicked or scratched at the person's hand, she couldn't surface. It felt like she might drown. It was just a terrifying dream back then; remembering it now, though, she wondered if that person had been trying to make her swim harder, to make her fight for her life as if it was truly at stake.

It was strange, really. She had never seen the person's face in that dream, but she had always been sure that it was Emil.

"Oh no, she's crying…"

"It's because you're brushing too roughly. You just want to pull the knots out, not the hair."

"There, there, dear, we're almost done. You're going to look lovely, really. Don't be sad."

If not for the sedative, Lyra might have smiled. I'm not sad. I'm relieved.