Three of my squadmates had been wounded in the aftermath of what people now called the Nutcracker Action. Hook had quickly succumbed to his wounds. Wiress and Regina survived, and they would be healed as fast as District Thirteen medical technology could manage. The doctors would also rush to repair Johanna's lingering arm injury from the District Twelve evacuation. It was out of Ingrid and Prim's hands, although they likely could have handled those bullet wounds had the rebel battle plan allotted more time. It was mid-November, and we intended to land soldiers in the Capitol and return them safely to a free Panem by the time the year was out.
Chrome had done wonderful work for the resistance in District One and was now taking a more straightforward role in the rebellion. Sapphire had become an honorary member of our unit with that charge through the train station. She had done wonderful work with just a sword, although Gloss and Cashmere had cleared the way with modern weapons. Once given a rifle, the Capitol would have even more to fear from this one of their victims, especially if Cato's weaponry upgrade was any indication.
However, both of them retained their affection for the anachronistic weapons. "Duel?" Cato challenged. "I've taken very well to the rifle, but I do want to get my sword back out again, and I'm not afraid of you."
"Nor I of you," Sapphire answered. "Challenge accepted."
It not being a fight to the death, I honestly saw no problem with it. It could even be a public spectacle, but we refrained from making it one. Some might not see the distinction between this and the Games. Also, the District Two battle was a deadly serious military expedition, not a propaganda broadcast with the cameras rolling. If Sapphire, or Cato for that matter, were to make such a move later in the war, we wanted to retain the element of surprise. "Next time I fight people for real, I don't want them to know what I can do," Sapphire explained.
The Capitol knew what we could do in games, but not a real war. I hadn't exactly wanted that war, but our persecutors' long train of abuses and usurpations had made it the only option. They had started the depredations that wouldn't stop until we made them stop.
As it came time for Sapphire and Cato's planned sword fight, we needed the game of One and Two as a respite from the real war and its oncoming final stage. Cato retrieved his arena sword while Sapphire cleaned Amazon. It turns out their weapons were exactly the same in substance. For Sapphire's sake, United Steel had simply fixed their standard longsword blade to a different hilt.
The audience would be a few rebel soldiers such as myself. They were fighting with live steel, but in full armor, and plating that could absorb 6.59x42 slugs ought to be able to handle sword blades. The first touch of blade on armor would end it since that would be a victory is a real unarmed duel as well. They were both prepared to yield, or, more accurately, loudly talking about how their opponent would be doing so.
They both swung viciously. The problem with putting so much in the attack was leaving oneself vulnerable to a counterstrike. It seemed Sapphire had been exposed to that as she failed to parry quickly enough, but Cato's blade bounced harmlessly off his opponent's curved hilt. High-pitched echoes cascades through the hall for another few minutes, but we eventually heard the thud of Amazon against the plating topping Cato's left shoulder.
Victor Squad didn't need quite the drilling that the raw recruits did. The resistance certainly had a better use for me – combining my trapper's mind with Beetee's technological wizardry to produce devices that would give us a final edge. It was work I was born and raised for, but even given the gravity of the situation, I found the security checks at the District Thirteen labs ridiculous.
We kept that approach concealed until the very end. Similarly, Plutarch was only now informing me and my fellow victor soldiers of a key part of our mission. "Some of the Capitol's defenses are akin to arena traps. Who better to navigate that than those who have survived arenas?"
"The hubris, to think victors would be blinded by riches and glory to the bastards who had put them in that situation," I ranted.
"That," Plutarch admitted. "It's what they understand. It's what the Gamemakers did the rest of the year. I would know. I had to set some of them up to maintain my cover." He showed us schematics and said we'd be carrying a portable version into the field. Looking at the diagrams, it was clear this was one of the biggest intelligence coups of the war, and I marveled again at Gamemakers' skilled yet twisted minds.
Beetee and I remained diligent in developing ingenious weapons of our own. He successfully tested my idea for a double-explosion bomb. "Drop this on enemy infantry, the reserves march into the rubble wrongfully thinking the threat is gone," I suggested. For another idea, I wanted a hotter than usual fire, and Beetee taught me that certain light metals quickly reacted with simple air or water. "A fire that water will make worse?" I realized.
"Exactly," Beetee answered. "Hopefully, Peacekeepers won't figure out what you just did. "They don't exactly produce chemists over in District Two." We had so little to be proud of in the districts but intellectualism must be a point of pride in District Three. It's not surprising that sometimes manifested itself in sarcasm about other districts. It was primarily directed at the Capitol, but old habits die hard.
Although we were known as Victor Squad, District Thirteen military command called my unit Squad 451. They really meant to have 450 other such units for the climactic battle. We were the very tip of the arrow to be shot at the Capitol. The Peacekeeper defectors would anchor the vanguard, the rest of the arrowhead. Two companies, 20 squads, would be similarly close to the front lines. A full brigade, 300 squads with support and specialist personnel, formed the main line. A regiment was assigned to the rear, a hundred squads of our greener personnel, and we certainly had plenty of those. All told, we'd have well over six thousand infantry right in the Capitol, plus the air forces and support staff.
Gloss and Cashmere's younger brother Shine could well have been in next year's Games, but like Lustre, he had volunteered to fight against the system he had once planned to volunteer for. The youngest Goldman and Shinesmith were both assigned to Squad 402, placing them near as close to the front lines as us.
The District Twelve Peacekeepers would be reinforced up to 30 full squads, their original battalion strength. Many of their reinforcements were people who had once been their civilian charges, notably Jack Barton, now of Squad 422. A few people from other districts stepped into those ranks, especially Rock Clayton and Raspberry Mackey of 424. Fewer still were Peacekeeper defectors from elsewhere in the force. However, my Hob acquaintances weren't the only ones to cross the lines. "Welcome, Soldier Schumann," said Lieutenant Artemis. He had evaded the District Eleven border fence to turn himself in to District Ten rebels.
"May our former comrades be welcomed to the grave," he said to angrily return the greeting. "When the riots broke out, I could not bring myself to actually shoot at our own people like we had been trained to. Thousands of others pulled those triggers as if it was a simulator, and the dust of my posted district was kept down with sprays of blood."
Supposedly Clove's brother Lieutenant Alexander Hawkins saw the truth just as clearly, but he remained undercover with a force that had evacuated District Two VIP's to the Capitol. The mayor's son and daughter were Career trainees. "Insanity," Mayor Undersee muttered, and his daughter agreed.
We had many reaping-eligible kids armed. Capitol propaganda said our enlistment age showed we were barbarians compared to how they took 'only' 24 a year. They were the truly primitive minds despite their fancy technology, as I and other rebel propagandists were glad to remind them. Snow's broadcasts also said it was a sign of our desperation. They were the ones in a truly dire situation, but not letting that on to their people.
The Capitol didn't enlist those our age, holding to the twisted hope that there would be more reapings. While there would be volunteers, the protocol was to pretend there might not be. Besides, the younger ones might not be ideologically reliable, especially with indoctrination rushed along with the rest of training. They'd be facing their fellow youngsters, and many of them had seen the Games as a way out of the Peacekeepers anyway.
Most Peacekeepers not only came from District Two, but enlisted right after their last Reaping. This year had been no exception. Many had been deployed, and many had died. Some early graduates, green infantry with experienced officers set over them, had even been part of the District Twelve reinforcements that we had beat to the punch. We fought that unit anyway, at a railroad crossing in District Eleven. Undoubtedly others of this year's recruits were amongst the anonymous faces in the other districts. Some aiming for higher ranks or more complex specialties were still in training.
As we had approached District Two, the Capitol evacuated the training camps near the district border, and destroyed what they couldn't take with them, clearing space for the recruits in the Capitol itself. I wonder how much of a shock that had been the Capitolites' insulated world.
There had always been some enlistees throughout the year from various districts and even desperate or brainwashed people from the Capitol itself, but that like everything else had been amplified this year. While there had been an outpouring of rebel sentiment in the wake of August 19th, there had also been some people agitated by the Capitol's fear of chaos.
There had even been a few District Twelve recruits, and that had always made me furious, but I refrained from trying to dissuade them in case they went through with it and proceeded to report me.
I remember that a townie by the name of Roadrunner Castle had once speculated about an assignment in the Peacekeeper Engineer Corps. Fortunately, he thought better of it. He ended up doing the same kind of work for the rebellion. His family was in the construction business, after all; Roadrunner was joined by his older brother Razorbill and father Russel. His mother Ruth was an architect, and all four of them were pleased to have good resources to work with instead of the crap that the Capitol budgeted for the districts.
His twin sisters Raven and Robin were no good at it. "They may not know how to use a hammer, but they're experienced at getting nailed," Peeta's oldest brother Pan joked. It was him I had seen with Raven, the freckled older yet shorter Castle girl back at the slag heap during the District Twelve evacuation. Since then, he had introduced his younger twin brother to her younger twin sister. They were hardly the first guys the Castle twins had put out for. The gals were known for an odd sort of egalitarianism, although their two current lovers were fellow Townies. Most Town girls ignored Seam guys, but these two gave us far more than just the time of day. I had probably kissed them sometimes; that was lost in the fog of memory for all three of us.
The competent Castle constructors had all too much work to do. The Capitol had taken to bombing the surface of District Thirteen. Their hovercraft fleet had been nearly destroyed, and we held air superiority so close to our base anyway, but they still had plenty of missile launchers. Fortunately, they had the sense to not load nuclear warheads on them. However, the regular sirens came to be far more than just a drill, and the upper levels of District Thirteen were devastated. It was up to Builder units to repair the damage to essential facilities, especially with the timetable of maneuvers for our imminent attack on the Capitol.
Glimmer Adams was collaborating with Peeta Mellark more and more on rebel speechwriting. I was the one with the fiery delivery, so I sat near them in a District Thirteen library as they prepared words I'd deliver. I overheard them talking excitedly. "This is beautiful!" Glimmer exclaimed.
"This guy wrote ever so eloquently, yes," Peeta agreed. "Although to his own time, it could be adapted to ours."
And so we had one more message with words before we went to send the Capitol a message with weapons. "We have long since passed the point in history at which it became time to break our chains and stand by ourselves. We consider it self-evident that all people are born equal with the same rights to such things as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Government should defend such rights, not destroy them, and ought be destroyed and replaced if it does. This ought not be done for light and transient reasons, those are to be suffered, but when a government fails as spectacularly as ours, it is our right, our duty, to abolish it. We have suffered through it for decades, for centuries, and finally realized we could take no more. We're coming for you and you know why."