+ A not-so-District 5-oriented chapter here as I play catch-up across Panem. Also, again thanks to FoxfaceFan1 and melliemoo for the great reviews! Good catch on my mix-up, mellie – I have a tendency to miss little details in pursuit of the big picture, so if you see any little things I've messed up, lemme know! Criticisms always welcome. As for Roan, well…heh. His parentage is interesting.
/ / / / /
"I've been getting some funny stuff out of 13."
Cyrus squinted at took a closer glance at the holographic displays. Peacekeeper Command was a Spartan place, its strategy rooms full of plain, gray steel, buzzing computer consoles, and complicated holographic maps littered with gray blocks and red and green dots. Rigel sat in a swivel chair in front of him, swiping his hand across the map to enlarge a section of the display rife with the gray squares. District 13, it read. Headquarters compound. Behind them, Varno Rensler looked on.
"Any signs of mobilizing?" Cyrus said, trying to make sense of the map. District 13 wasn't his specialty. He'd helped clean up the riots in District 8 and had overseen Districts 4 and 3 for a time, but nothing like the old, nuclear-armed rival out east.
Rigel shook his head. "Nah, look at this. We've kept patrols hovering ten miles off of their defensive perimeter for years now. We go any closer, they'd pick us up. There's always this weird distortion feedback we get from their sensor fence. Tells us it's on. But the last couple months, every now and then, it'll stop. Like someone's turning off their defense grid, but only for a few minutes at most."
"Typical tests," Cyrus said, dismissing it. "We do the same out at District 2 all the time."
"They never do this," Rigel said. "They've got two lines of detection, an inner fence and an outer fence. They've tested new sensors on the inner grid, but for as long as I've been here, they've never tested the outer. Then all the sudden, a bunch of black-outs – on both – for minutes at a time? Nah, there's something else going on at 13. I don't know if they're having troubles or what."
Varno walked up. "It's an opportune time, then," he suggested. "We've let them sit on a nuclear arsenal for a century. They can't win a war of attrition."
"That's the worst idea I've heard in a while," Rigel said. "The moment we move to attack, they fire off of their missiles. Mutually-assured destruction in a nutshell."
"You're thinking too much like a soldier. Why approach with a frontal assault when a covert attack – one or two warriors, even – can handle the district so much better?" Varno countered. "You watch your maps and your army all day, Rigel. I oversee our scientific developments. We've far outpaced District 13 in innovation, especially in our military wares. They never need know we've attacked until it's too late."
"And the risk is that we commit nuclear suicide. You're the science guru, not the Peacekeeper Captain-General, Varno. Don't tell me how to do my job."
"Wait a minute," Cyrus said. "I'm not saying we charge in there, but how long has our sterility virus hit them? Forty years?"
"Forty-five," Rigel said. "They're feeling it by now, if nothing else. Hard to keep up your numbers when no one can have babies, and you can't contact the other districts."
Cyrus nodded. "Right. So maybe it's some sort of diversion. Maybe they're desperate enough to pack up and move."
"Are you serious? Both of you?'
"Hear me out," Cyrus insisted. "Not their entire district, but a portion. Maybe, I don't know, District 12's been hit hard by two pox outbreaks in a half-decade. A quarter of the district killed off. Maybe District 13 thinks they can infiltrate 12, sneak out enough fertile men to get reproduction going again and stave off disaster. Throwing up some false data on their security fences might be a distraction."
"Assume that's true," said Varno. "You said it yourself. Forty-five years they've dealt with a rapidly declining birthrate. They don't have any contact with the other districts. We've never faced a better opportunity to wipe them out, and we have the weapons to do it."
"Bull," Rigel snorted. "We'd be throwing away a huge number of troops even on a successful frontal attack."
Cyrus held out a hand to stop him from going on. "What kind of weapons are you talking about?" he asked.
"Not anything as…" Varno looked down at Rigel with a mix of pity and contempt. "…valuable as Peacekeepers. Every year my workers and I create killing machines for the Hunger Games. They're cheap. Mindless. Better still, the beasts we create are expendable."
"This is a joke," Rigel said, holding a hand to his forehead. "You – you want to attempt to breach District 13's lines with a horde of – the districts call them mutts. Are you freakin' serious?"
"Have you paid attention to what we're capable of?" Varno countered. "Mutts. We're far beyond animals, Rigel. Did you see the 96th Hunger Games? We had a beast whose closest analogue was a man. You have no idea what we're capable of. What we've created as you and your Peacekeepers have fallen back on traditional norms. Why risk human life when there's a much better solution?"
Cyrus stopped Rigel before he could protest further. "You sound like you have something in mind already, Varno."
"I have," the Capitol scientist said. "Right after last year's Games ended, Galan Greene contracted me to create something special for the fourth Quarter Quell. I think you'll find what we have far superior to the mere Peacekeepers."
Rigel gripped his arm's chair as if he was on the verge of strangling the man, but Cyrus kept him still. "We don't need to kill District 13 off –"
"Damn right," Rigel growled.
"- but what are you suggesting?"
"Containment," Varno answered. "If you want to detect any incursions by District 13 into our territory – incursions that some simple, backwards electric fence around District 12 can't account for, I already made that exact weapon for our Head Gamesmaker. It wouldn't take much to repurpose assets for the Hunger Games into military use."
"This is a terrible idea," Rigel groaned.
Cyrus cut him off: "I want to see."
"And you can," Varno said, grinning. "Let me spoil the surprise of this year's Games, gentlemen. For too long we've resorted to tried-and-true solutions for our problems. You'll be shocked by what our labs are capable of producing these days."
/ / / / /
"You lookin' for someone, pretty flower?"
I brushed my hair – not my hair, but Misty's messy blonde curls – behind my ear and folded my hands, nervous at the sight of the near-empty church. For two months I'd kept at Lucrezia's assignment, attending midday services, learning what I could about the Church, and forging a relationship with Blaze – an altogether different kind of relationship than the one I was deconstructing bit by bit as Terra. It felt mean and all sorts of wrong, but revealing at the same time: Blaze wasn't just the kid I knew at work. He was…different. Multilayered. Faithful in ways I was only beginning to understand, and I had a feeling not all of them were good.
Still, I wasn't doing this to learn about Blaze. I was no closer to getting a private audience with Pyre after all this time. I'd seen lights flickering in the church late at night when I'd talked with my brother or tromped down to the merchant quarter for an evening purchase. I'd never known crowds to gather at the church as the moon floated above the canyon and the sky darkened, and while I'd always ignored the building at this hour before, I was intrigued now. Did believers meet for late-night, private services? Meetings? More?
Did Pyre?
Intrigued, I'd taken a leap of faith, replaced Terra with Misty, and had gone for a stroll.
A cloudy night sky blanketed the canyon in thick darkness, with only flickering street lights and the glow from homes lighting up the rocks and river. The stained glass windows of the church didn't look so reverent and illustrative at this hour. Instead, the flickering light from within made the depiction of the Shadow god in particular look even more ominous than Pyre's sermons made the trickster and evildoer out to be. He – it – looked like more than just a two-dimensional glass painting, but like a real man in a long, dark cape stretching out from the building, his hands lit up as if they were wielding fistfuls of fire, his eyes black and his face as pale as a corpse's. The giant, five-pointed gold sun of the Church high above the front doors shivered in the flickering light. I'd seen it tattooed onto the arms of faithful and stamped on personal possessions, but tonight it burned dark red as if it bled. Its thin, tendril-like flares that made up the five points, branching away from the sun's central circle, writhed with the dancing light.
Two…totems, for I had no better words to call them…hung outside the door on a metal pole. Each was a thin piece of rope winding around a trio of glowing black paper balls. Whether small light bulbs inside lit them up, or whether something else did, I didn't know. Charred, tangled strands of paper hung below the balls, bits of ash flaking off of them with each puff of the breeze.
Inside the church, only a single soul stirred. A big, burly man with wild red hair lit candles along the perimeter of the great room as I stepped in. A gray eyepatch covered one eye, the other a deep, vivid green that almost glowed in the flickering candlelight. Long shadows twitched and spasmed all over the room – shades of the chandelier above, the pews, the front altar, all of them twisting and lurching to and fro in the light of the fire. The man's voice was soft, warm, friendly even, like a grandparent's, fitting for his flowing brown shirt and trousers and totally ill-fitting of his powerful, muscle-laden body.
No Pyre. Just this man.
"I, um," I stammered, unsure of what I'd even intended to say when I got here, regardless of who met me. This was not well-planned, Terra. "I was just looking for someone."
He stepped back from lighting a candle on the altar, another one clutched in his big, paw-like hands. His dirt-streaked face blurred in the light. "Just me at this hour, hey. A humble follower. You lookin' for someone in particular?"
I shrugged. "Just a friend. I always saw the light on at nights and figured maybe he stopped by to…to worship or something."
The man smiled, a big, toothy grin. One of his upper canines had grown in at a sharp angle, crowding his incisors and leaving a large gap on one side of his smile. "Nah, this ain't a good time for prayer. The Darkness takes over in the night. The Moon's only a guardian, and even it casts its shadows. Especially on a night like this. Real dark. We gotta be with our own. You a new believer?"
"Sorta. Yeah. You?"
"Oh, nah, I've always been a follower. Even when I didn't know it. Even when others told me otherwise."
This man had really bought the whole song and dance. I hoped Blaze didn't go around spouting this level of bunk in private.
"Um…are you just lighting candles?" I said, debating between probing for more information and beating a retreat before the guy could give me a sermon.
He grinned and waved his candle towards the wall. "Someone's gotta keep the fire goin'. The battle won't ever end, y'know? Light vs. Darkness. It's always been that way. Always gonna be. 'Til the dark sun rises. I've seen how black it can be. The eyes of ones we think we know…black in 'em. Black centers. Black corners. Sometimes it takes a while to see it, and then we gotta steel ourselves for the fight."
His cryptic words unnerved me. "Do you – do you know where I can find Pyre?"
"At this hour? Nah, not here, girl. He's probably lookin' into Agartha right now."
"Where's that? Never heard of it."
"Oh, it's down below. Way, way down below. No darkness there. Only fire. The Flame judges."
I wasn't going to get anything more than enigmatic rambling from this guy. He was probably from Redhammer, homeless even. I guess if the Church was the only thing that had given him a handout in his life, he would eat up all its teachings, even the craziest of them.
"Who was that friend you's lookin' for?" he said, stopping me as I turned to leave. "Might be able to tell 'em you lookin' if I know 'em."
Hm. Couldn't hurt. "His name's Blaze. He –"
"Oh, yeah! I know the boy. Good young man. He's part o' that group that meets here a lot. Early mornin's."
What now? I feigned interested: "There's a group?"
"Oh yeah. Mostly young people. Y'know, fillin' their heads with knowledge. Some good kids. You should stop by. If you friends with him, you'd probably fit right in."
"Yeah? When's it meet?"
He rubbed a lump on his waist. It was probably a tool of some sort, wrench or hammer maybe, but in the faint light, it looked like a pistol. The flickering flames made everything seem scary.
"I know the first of the month," he said after a long pause. "Dunno how often after that. But that's in just a few days here, in'it?"
I nodded, turned, frowned, and looked back: "What's your name?"
"Oh, I don't got a name, pretty flower," he said. "I've seen the servants of Darkness, and they called me somethin' once. That ain't my name, though some o'them still call me it. I'm just a follower. Just like you. Like all us, no matter who we were once and who we thought we were. We just believe. Ain't that all there's to it?"
I tried to smile, but the corners of my mouth refused to curl up. Biting my lip, I nodded and turned away. All there was to it. Not if Lucrezia and Xanthia were right.
I hurried away from the church out into the dark night, racing for the safety of home.
/ / / / /
"So two teams?"
"Two teams. We board at the same time. First group goes in and gets the goods. Second group, that's us, sticks around and makes sure the ship malfunctions."
"So sinks?"
"Duh, Wade. I said that exact thing when Rio and I went over this."
Brooke ran her hand over her bone knife, the blade tied on to her belt with a thick cord. She hadn't felt this kind of nervousness since…well, since the Pale Man had seen her two and a half years ago, right before the Peacekeepers had torn down the Blue House and killed everyone inside. She'd watched her contact face off with them, hell, she'd watched him take a bullet, yet still he provided her and Rio with intelligence at a regular pace. Despite that, he'd never shown up in District 4 again since that point. The Pale Man had told Brooke several times that he had things to do away from here, but would it kill him to give the insurgents a heads-up in person every now and then?
Tonight she had to pick up the leadership again. Rio wasn't the kind of man to go raiding unmanned drone cargo ships from District 3, and he knew that just as much as Brooke did. He was a charismatic man, the kind who could sell a fight for independence and liberty, but she had the fighting chops. She'd proven that from the arena to the Capitol train they'd boarded at the station just two months ago, staging an accident to ensure the clean getaway of a stolen crate of munitions and weapons – and to explain away a Peacekeeper's untimely demise at Brooke's hands. The intel of the Pale Man had panned out time and again. Their little freedom-fighting group was as well-stocked as it had ever been.
Brooke had no reason to doubt his information again tonight.
An inky blanket of clouds watched over the sea's sloshing black waves. Lights twinkled from the docks and trawlers at port off on the shore as six men rowed a sleek driftwood boat out to sea. Another, larger boat followed behind, lost in the fog rolling in as the nippy daytime temperatures gave way to the near-freezing chill of the evening. Off in the distance, maybe a mile away, a large, looming, block-like shape crept out of the fog, headed towards the docks.
Even the kid's jumpy. Brooke eyed Wade Fowler as he worked the nearest oar, his hands shaky. She put a lot of trust in the passionate, if overeager, kid from the richer parts of the district who was only too happy to accompany her on the insurgency's shadow campaign against the district's Peacekeeper garrison. Theft. Bribery. The occasional hit. They weren't well-equipped now to reveal themselves and fight out in the open, but soon, soon…
She had another reason for keeping Wade close, however. He was off-again, on-again friends with someone she wanted to win over very much – another victor, but one a lot younger. Her last attempt to do so hadn't been much of a success.
"Really gonna be no one onboard?" said one of the other rowers, a bear-like man with a thick, scruffy beard named Kason. "I dunno how you get a boat down from another district with no one onboard."
Brooke narrowed her eyes and watched as the Capitol supply ship inched closer and closer, emerging from the fog like a lazy whale too sleepy and dumb to see the sharks headed its way. "They use a computer to do it. Look, I don't know the details. It's from District 3. That enough?"
"Heh," Kason smirked, grunting with another pull of his oar. "Screw it. Makes everything easier."
"Then shut up and row. I don't like taking chances, and the more you gab, the more chances we take."
Brooke knelt down over the boat's prow and cradled a pistol. Capitolian-made, silenced, low-recoil, large-magazine – a Peacekeeper favorite amongst sidearms, these things also made it easy for Brooke and other insurgents to get a feel for guns without years of soldier training. Just point and shoot. Of course, easier to say when you've been in a life-or-death struggle before. None of these screwballs have gotten out of the Hunger Games.
That was what fighting came down to, after all. The man made the weapon, not the other way around.
As the supply ship loomed large, closer and closer, Brooke closed her eyes and went over the plan of attack one more time. Wait for the boat to pass, then snare the deck with a pair of grappling hooks. No resistance – drone-controlled ships had halls and other passages for dockworkers, but no sailors crewed these things while making the trek south down Panem's western coast from District 3 to District 4. Easy form there: According to the shipping manifests the Pale Man had sent, the ship would have a few large explosives in a trio of metal crates, each marked with a green flame symbol. Get them onto the second boat, wait for that crew to leave, and Brooke and her team would burn a hole in the boat as they made their escape. Quick in, quick out, and no one would be the wiser until the morning – when the ship would be a creaking wreckage on the seabed.
So why was she so nervous?
"Hold here," she said under her breath.
The rowboat rocked on the waves as the Capitol ship approached – two hundred meters, one hundred. Brooke reached down and picked up one of the grapplers, getting a firm grip on the rope and imagining her throw. The ship looked to have a high deck. She'd have to put her arm into it.
Fifty meters. Twenty. Ten.
"Now!"
Brooke stood up and hurled her grappler. The metal hook sailed through the air, disappearing into the darkness into a loud clank! sounded. She heaved on the rope, checked for tension, pulled it tight, and after snaring her end of the rope to a hook on the boat's bottom, gritted her teeth for the next part.
"You get yours?" she asked without looking up.
"Nah. Missed."
"Try again. I'm going up."
As Kason fished his missed grappler out of the water for another throw, Brooke grabbed the rope of her hook with both hands, turned around, and clutched her feet to the taut line. Inch by inch, she shimmied up the rope towards the deck high above. Higher, higher. Her hands burned, but Brooke bit her lip and vaulted the gunwale onto the deck. Crates rumbled all around her, but what she was looking for would be down in the lower hold. She rubbed her hands to ease the burn, let her breath out, and let her eyes wander up to the command station on the ship's bridge. On the manned Capitol boats that ferried troops between the coastal districts, a few bridge crew would use the station for navigation and communication. The bridge only housed the drone computer mind and a backup emergency manned control station on a ship like this, but the Capitol engineers left the superstructure in the ship's design and construction for modularity's sake.
As Brooke looked up to the windows of the bridge, however, she saw something she didn't expect. Rather than the blinking red lights of the drone station, a pair of incredulous, wide-eyed faces stared down at her.
"Oh shit! Get up here, now!" she screamed, ripping her gun off her belt and charging towards the bridge.
Brooke smashed open the door to the interior just as a man ducked down from a ladder. He was diminutive for a Peacekeeper, she thought, and he didn't wear armor – just plain, ordinary clothes. That didn't stop from him reaching for a pistol on his belt, however.
Kshew! Brooke knelt and fired before his hand reached the grip. A miss, but he panicked, stumbling, landing squarely in the path of Brooke's second bullet.
"Gayah!" he screamed, tumbling to the ground, a bloody hole bursting from his thigh. His gun skittered away along the metal deck. Brooke dashed forward to pick it up, keeping her pistol trained on the writhing man as she reached the ladder. A second man stood on top of it, looking down with a horrified expression as Brooke aimed her gun at him.
"Drop it!" she snarled. "I know you're armed! Drop it down here or end up like buddy-boy!"
He flailed, throwing his hands in the air as another gun clattered down the ladder well. Brooke stuffed it in her belt, keeping one gun trained on each man as Wade burst through the door.
"The hell…" he started.
She shook her head. "Keep an eye on him! He's not gonna die – make sure he doesn't try to crawl away."
"I thought no one was on board?"
"Yeah, well, guess again. You up there! Back the hell up. Anybody else up there?"
"N – nah –"
"Then back up!"
God, Brooke thought as she climbed the ladder to the bridge. Freakin' nightmare. The Pale Man's intel had let her down for once. Drone ship my rear.
The second Capitolian cowered in a corner of the bridge as Brooke entered. It was a small room, filled with lights and computer consoles that may as well have been gibberish. "How many of you are here?" Brooke growled, aiming her pistol at the man's face. "Got anyone below deck?" He shook his head, gulping. "Do I look like I'm screwing around?" Brooke barked. "How many more?"
"None! I swear, man. Miss. Please."
"Then why're you even here, huh?" she snarled. "You and your Capitol buddy just decide to go for a pleasure cruise?"
He shook his head, his lip – his entire face – trembling before Brooke's rage. "I'm not from the Capitol, miss, I swear! I work at one of the labs in 3. I'm just a tech developer. I swear!"
"You're screwing with me!"
"I swear! Please! I've got a couple kids! Please don't shoot!"
She considered shooting right then. God damn liars. Typical pity story. Oh, miss, I've got kids. I've got a cute little wife. A cat, too. A quaint house. Aging parents. Psh. Capitol fairy tale.
"What're you doing here, then?" Brooke said, keeping her finger off the trigger despite her eagerness to fire. "Just a damn cargo ship."
The man nodded and squeaked as Brooke waved the gun at him. "Please! It's – it's a – there's a thing they ordered. We made a – a package for the hovercraft here in your district. I'm not lying! I helped write the software! They wanted the two of us to come along to help instruct them in how to use it –"
"That's the lamest story I've ever heard," scoffed Brooke.
"I'm serious! They even – when I saw you jump on board, I –"
"You what?" Brooke shouted. She waved the gun at him again when he gaped in silence. "You what, asshole?"
Kason leapt up from the ladder. In her interrogation, Brooke hadn't even paid attention to the rest of the job. "The hell is this?" her companion breathed. "Wade said there're people and shit on here? We got the crates –"
Brooke wheeled on him. "They're here?"
"Yeah, why wouldn't they be? What's this about this guy? The other guy too?"
"What'd you do when you saw me?" Brooke yelled at her prisoner. "What'd you do?"
He shook his head, swallowed, and closed his eyes. "I hit the panic button."
"The what?"
"It – I'm sorry, please! I don't want to die! It's the Peacekeeper alert thing – "
Kason growled, raised his gun, and before Brooke could say anything, fired a single shot. Kshew! The ship supervisor jerked as the bullet hit him just under his eye. Blood squirted out, then gushed from his nose as he slumped over.
"Dammit," Brooke said, gritting her teeth. "Did you get the crates off?"
"Just finished up," Kason said. "Boat got away as I was coming up here. They got Peacekeepers coming? We gotta make this fast, Brooke."
"I know, I'm thinking –"
She didn't have two seconds before a low roar shook the glass of the bridge's windows. A sleek, delta-winged hovercraft rumbled overhead, almost invisible in the dark of the night.
"Get down below," Brooke murmured, her eyes wide. "Get down now. Kason, c'mon."
Brooke hustled down the ladder before he could reply. Wade still held his pistol against the other prisoner's head, but he'd heard it too. "What's going on?"
"Leave him," Brooke said, her chest heaving. "Kason, get down here!"
"They're doin' something!" her comrade-in-arms shouted down from the bridge. "They got a rope or a cable coming down from the hovercraft, hey!"
"Kason –"
"Dammit, Brooke, we gotta stand here and fight 'em! Those animals're coming down onto the deck! Peacekeepers!"
"Don't do something dumb! Get down here before they see you!"
The District 3 man whined in terror, and Wade pressed his pistol to the man's head. "You shut the hell up!"
"Don't shoot, dammit!" Brooke yelled. "Kason –"
Pow!
The bridge exploded. The tinkle of shattering glass gave way to the roar of fire as a burst of heat blasted Brooke back. Once she got up, she didn't bother checking on the bridge – Kason couldn't have survived that. She grabbed Wade as the District 3 man rolled around on the ground while clutching his injured leg. "Come on!"
"The hell are we gonna do?" Wade gasped. Two of their boat's crew rushed out of the door, guns drawn. "They're gonna kill us all!"
"Screw it!" Brooke said, gritting her teeth. "Leave that idiot! Forget about sinking the ship! We gotta go!"
"What about the others?"
"Dammit, Wade, come on!"
A loud scream accompanied the pop-pop-pop of rifle fire as Brooke pushed through the door to the deck. Flames gushed out of the bridge. She forced Wade to the gunwale and sized up the situation. The coast was maybe a mile off from here at its nearest point. It'd be a long swim, but not unmanageable. Rowing the boat back was an unthinkable proposition at this point – even if the other boat had gotten away with the cargo – and she had a feeling it had, given that the hovercraft focused its floodlights down at the deck – trying to paddle away would only draw unwanted attention.
No, swimming it was.
"Up you go!" Brooke said. As Wade protested, she grabbed his shoulder and forced him up and over the gunwale.
As Brooke prepared to jump overboard after him, a Peacekeeper rounded a pair of crates on her. He raised his rifle to his shoulder – bang! She tumbled and dove out of the way as a bullet ricocheted off of the deck, falling to the metal and raising her pistol. Kshew! She fired once, twice, three times – missing the first shot but clipping his shoulder with the second. As he fell, the third bullet drilled him straight under the chin.
No time to lose! Brooke didn't wait to see his body fall. She vaulted over the gunwale as a rocket from the hovercraft smashed into the ship's superstructure. Whoosh! Fire tickled her back as she plunged down, down to the sea, hitting the water and diving into the inky depths. Hot colors danced across the surface as engine oil and ammunition cooked off.
Brooke saw Wade swimming away a few feet in front of her. She threw her energy into her arms, gliding through the water and catching up with him. She got his attention and pointed down – they had to swim down here, avoid breaking the surface except to catch air. Long swim ahead, kid.
As she prepared to make her escape, Brooke glanced up one more time. Fire ruptured out of a gash in the ship's hull. She didn't need to worry about survivors, or sinking the ship, for that matter. The Peacekeepers were doing a pretty good job making sure no one was getting out of that mess of tangled steel and burning oil alive.