Chapter 16: Revelations Of A Peacekeeper's Daughter
Susanna Xavier buried the blade of the knife into Martha's heart to the hilt and held it there for a short moment. She withdrew the bloody knife and tossed Martha's body aside. She knelt down beside Hector and looked at him with sorrow and regret. She removed the gag from his mouth.
"I'm sorry." she said with sadness.
"It was bound to happen sooner or later." said Hector matter-of-factly in a weak voice.
"I can't save you." said Susanna, "You're too badly wounded. You have only minutes."
'BOOM!' Went the cannon, indicating Martha Filmer was dead.
"My allies will have heard that." said Hector, "They will be here in a few moments."
"Then I will stay with you until they get here." said Susanna.
"I do have one question," said Hector, blood coming out of his mouth, "why are you so friendly? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad you are, it's just, everyone expected you to be different?"
Suzanne Xavier paused for a moment as she thought of her answer.
"This is a secret that has been kept from everyone," said Susanna, "it turns out that I am not your run-of-the-mill, Capitol breed. You see, I am a very, very, very rare breed that is known to almost no one. There was a lot of propaganda in the Capitol for people to volunteer to become peacekeepers in the Districts. Of course very few people actually did volunteer to become peacekeepers in the Districts. Most of the District peacekeepers came from District 2, the rest were people from the Capitol who filed for bankruptcy because they had too much debt; they committed to a 20 year career as a District peacekeeper, no marriage, no children allowed.
"My father however enjoyed hurting people for the fun of it." Susanna was talking very loud so the cameras would pick up everything she said, "He was one of the few who volunteered to become a peacekeeper for the honor of the thing, he had no debt to be forgiven, so he was not bound to the 20 year commitment of no marriage and no children. He graduated the Peacekeepers Training at the top of the class and made Head Peacekeeper very quickly, he was the youngest Head Peacekeeper ever. He was sent to District 5 where he would then publicly whip people and execute people on silly little trumped up charges because he thought it was fun. He however had other little… 'distractions', for himself among the District citizens. My mother was a District citizen. My father knew that she was not sexually active with anyone else except for him when she became pregnant, so of course he knew that the baby was his. My mother and her baby died in a mysterious accident only a few days after she gave birth… at least that's what the official record says. The baby of course was me, he had saved me, and wrote up some kind of false records saying that I was the daughter of his girlfriend back in the Capitol. My father sent me off to live in the Capitol, and I was raised by my avox nanny.
"My father and I visited each other often. He taught me everything about how to be a head peacekeeper and hoped that I would one day be his successor. He taught me how the people of the Districts were out of control and needed a firm hand. I don't know what it was, but I never enjoyed hurting people, maybe it's my biology, maybe when I was born, the area of my brain that interprets right from wrong underwent some kind of radical mutation to become supercharged, I don't know, I'm just guessing here on that. I one day decided to try and track down my real mother. Finding the computer records was not that difficult, however I was something of a computer expert and I was able to tell that the records were falsified, I did a little digging and found out who my real mother was. The records didn't actually say that she was my mother or that I was her daughter, but there were clues and evidence, and when I followed them and put two and two together I realized that my mother had been a District 5 girl. I then couldn't help thinking of the people of District 5 as my own people.
"Then one day when I was visiting my father in District 5, I saw him give 40 lashes to a 12-year-old girl for showing up one minute late for her shift at the power plant. My father had always taught me that that was the right thing to do, but all I could think of was that 'this was wrong'… I then realized that my father was not a 'keeper of the peace' by the meanings and definitions of the word, my father was the very thing that I hated… my father was a bully. I hate bullies. The girl then died from the whipping."
Susanna then smiled a look of sadistic satisfaction at her next memory.
"When District 5 chose to revolt two years ago, the rebels captured my father alive, I wasn't there at the time, but I heard that a lot of angry people slathering for justice tortured him for hours for the fun of it until they finally killed him. I didn't shed any tears. I knew he deserved it. But even still, it got 20 slips of paper with my name on it put into the reaping bowl."
Hector smiled as he coughed up blood.
"Thank you for making me understand." said Hector, "You're nothing like your father. You're all right... Susanna."
Hector closed his eyes and his heart beat no more.
'BOOM!' went the cannon.
Susanna sniffled hard as a tear rolled down her face from each eye.
"Rest in peace... Hector Ardamin." said Susanna with sincerity in a cracked voice.
It was a moment later that Amanda and Blaze came into the clearing, Amanda holding her sword, and Blaze holding a wooden spear.
Amanda looked at Hector with Susanna kneeling beside him with a bloody knife.
"What have you done?!" said Amanda with fury.
"I didn't!" said Susanna, pointing at the dead body of Martha Filmer. "I came upon Hector being gagged and tortured by Martha with this knife. I disarmed her and stabbed her with her own weapon. He was too far gone to save him after I killed her."
Amanda looked at Suzanna's non aggressive posture as well as her tear streaked face and felt that she was being truthful.
"I'm sorry about your friend Lisa," said Susanna, "I saw her face in the sky."
Amanda looked at Hector's face as she knelt on the ground, he was covered in blood.
"Perhaps it's for the best this way," said Amanda her voice cracking with wanting to cry, "this way we don't have to kill either of them ourselves."
"We had better get away from this area so that they can collect the bodies of these two," said Blaze.
They searched Martha for any useful items that she had. Amanda retrieved the knife that she had given to Hector from Hector's breast pocket of his jacket.
They walk a distance away from the bodies and as Susanna Xavier looked in Hector's direction, feeling herself more District than Capitol, she felt to express sorrow to a fallen innocent 12 year old with a District custom, she placed the three fingers of her left hand against her lips and then held them out up in the air in his direction. A moment later a hovercraft appeared and retrieved the two bodies.
"You wouldn't by any chance have any water do you?" Susanna asked. "I haven't had any water since yesterday morning."
Blaze and Amanda led to Susanna back to the pool.
"It's a freshwater pool." said Blaze.
They had built a fire. It was sometime later while they were eating some rodents that they had killed and then cooked over the fire. At first they speculated why Martha Filmer was not with the rest of the Career Pack. Amanda and Blaze told Susanna about their time in the arena so far. Susanna told Amanda and Blaze everything that she had told Hector about her less than pure Capitol genealogy, and then her time in the arena.
After Susanna had broken Breanna Crane's nose and knocked her out with the heel of her boot, she ran to the east, came across the salt water river, and then crossed the bridge to island G6. It took a little while for her to realize that she was in the middle of an archipelago.
She told them about trudging through one island that was waist high in mud. Another island that was a maze of a garbage dump of useless junk. Then a few days earlier from now, barely escaping an island that she was on that apparently became flooded and then sank into the sea, and she lost most of her stuff. And then she stumbled across this place and by mere coincidence, came across the path of Martha Filmer torturing Hector. Susanna explained to Amanda and Blaze that she became so angry on the spot she wanted to kill the girl who was nothing more than a bully.
"It was a little unsatisfying to just kill her," said Susanna, "I wanted to teach her a lesson, I wanted her to see how it felt. I wanted her to suffer. But that would've made me no better than her, so I just stabbed her in the heart once, and tossed her body aside."
Amanda looked at Susanna with interest.
"Thank you," said Amanda, "for trying to help Hector, and for stopping Martha."
Susanna smiled and shrugged it off.
"I'm sure you'll would have done the same for me." said Susanna.
Amanda kept a somber demeanor as she kept on eating the dead rodent that she cooked. Susanna looked at Amanda's expression with a smile of amused interest.
"You wouldn't have," Susanna said, a statement of fact, correcting her own last statement, "you would've seen me as just another tribute and killed me on site if you had the chance."
"When I saw you standing over Hector with the bloody knife I felt compelled to question you, rather than just attacking straight on." said Amanda.
Susanna smiled.
"I never gloat about my strength and my skill," said Susanna, "but you're no match for me."
Amanda smiled back with a devious grin.
"We shall see!" said Amanda. Amanda went on, "So, your half District half Capitol? My grandfather must not have known. He told me that they were rare, and also completely illegal, that he had a strict breeding system that was set down by his predecessor. Coal miners have children only with coal miners, farmers have children only with farmers, textile workers have children only with textile workers, so on and so forth. Capitol Peacekeepers do not have children with power plant workers. Anyone found to be half District half Capitol was be put to death, on the legal grounds of genetic impurities."
"So what you're saying is, is that I should thank my father for covering up my true identity for my entire life?" said Susanna in a half mocking half sarcastic tone of voice.
"Only for some things," said Amanda, "I'm sure your father loved you because you were his daughter and as mean and evil and sadistic as he was, he obviously loved you enough the day that you were born to want to save you and claim you as his own. Most people might suspect that a man like him would be just disgusted at his biological daughter being half District. I'm not excusing your father for the crimes that he committed against the people, no, I'm merely saying that your father's love for you saved your life. And now that old law has no meaning anymore under the new regime. Plus, if you win the Hunger Games whatever crime you've committed simply for having the DNA of it will be negated."
"Thank you," said Susanna, "you're probably right."
She had a look of melancholy, "I never had many friends." said Susanna, "All my life I was branded as being just like my father. I was always friendly, and always tried being more social, but people never saw my niceness, they only saw my supposed reputation. I'm afraid it has made me a bit of a sucker for anyone who's been even a little nice to me."
She looked at Amanda and Blaze shyly, "Thanks for being my friends."
Amanda and Blaze both smiled and nodded.
"So, what exactly were you two doing back here by yourself anyway that you allowed Hector to go off by himself in the first place?" asked Susanna.
They spent the rest of the evening together. Midnight came around and then the faces of the fallen tributes appeared in sky, first Hector's face and then Martha's.
Please review!