CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE:

The Deep End

Drake Tyler

What I didn't anticipate was the swift reply I got from the boy. I was wary of him, obviously, but I was also expectant: expectant that he would refuse to come with me and the Wanderers, knowing that many of them were Wild Folk or cross-breeds of Wild Folk and Trappers. When he came into my tepee, though, he was adamant. I'll go. I've seen such certainty in the likes of Wild Folk, of Trappers and of Rebels, but in a Ranch Hand (or perhaps more appropriately a Fugitive) I've never seen such a spark. He reminded me of myself, and that made me even more edgy. Who truly enjoys seeing themselves in someone else? I sized him up, hoping he'd flinch and be proved unworthy of a place among the Wanderers, but he sized me up with an expression void of emotion. In my understanding of folks out here and around this District, such an expression means that either the person feels too much to communicate any one emotion clearly, or they are feeling nothing. The latter is risky because apathy is the forerunner of ruthlessness; the former is risky because passion is the forerunner of irrationality. Finally, I nodded, and he left.

He did not sit with us as we took our final meal at the camp. Delayed by an onset of overcast skies, hiding our precious navigational stars from view, we had convened a Wanderer's council to discuss many details concerning the forthcoming campaign. Deane had not been invited on my orders. By that time, the Wanderers knew he would be coming with us, but as was typical of them, no one made any attempts to approach him and make connections with him. They would size him up themselves, evaluate his usefulness to the group and decide where to slot him in when the raids began. If he wasn't deemed very useful, he'd be in the vanguard until he was disposed of; part of me wondered if that was the fate of this boy. Iffy was quite clear in her message to me: This Boy Must Live. What she wasn't clear on was for how long he must live. Before the Wanderer's council, I didn't feel any need to serve as a guide or guardian of the boy; I didn't really know if I liked him yet. That was the attitude I brought into the council.

The council was small: to my right was a man called Gurner – he was Wild Folk from the nation of the Diney, an expert hunter and tracker but also an unpredictable temperament; beside him was the reticent Alban (of the nation of the White Folk) sharpshooter, Carson – we called him Hawkeye; beside him and directly across from me, Joizi – an expert trader and barterer from the Pigeon Folk, those who are of mixed blood with the Wild Folk nations; and beside him was a good friend for many years, a man who's name we were never certain of but who we called Letherman – an expert watchman of the naturally observant and watchful Quinchey nation of the Wild Folk, but also a man of advanced age who's greatest asset was to lift morale through his colorful stories. Being a wizened man, Letherman was on the council because he had seen many raids and had been like a magic man in the most difficult campaigns, lifting the morale of our camp with stories of the heroes of old. Without ever picking up a weapon, Letherman had saved just about every man and woman in the Wanderers at least once; he'd seen me through the ranks before the Alban nation had any significant representation among the Wanderers. The Wanderer occupying the seat to my left was a woman called Mika; she was of the Diney nation, a scout and huntress. Unlike Carson's reticence, Mika's stoic personality contained something very deep inside that made everyone who looked at her fall silent. She was fierce both during raids and while in the camp, choosing her words carefully and saying very few of them. Carson seemed always at odds with her, though their arguments were largely silent.

The Wild Folk and the few Pigeon Folk among us spoke in a different sort of style to the Alban Folk, but I heard it as though we all spoke the same. Even now, as they spoke at council, so well practiced was I at rearranging their words that it came as though we were all the same. As was typical, Letherman initiated proceedings.

"We gather because we must reevaluate our campaign. Carson, Mika, you are both talented scouts with sharp eyes, but this weather has bested you. We cannot proceed blind. Gurner, Drake, you are both highly successful hunters, but the world beyond our world has become more dangerous and less predictable, and we cannot know what lies in store for us on each turn of the road. I urge the council not to press forward until more intelligence is gathered given our conditions so that our hunters and scouts are not led needlessly into harm's den. And of course, Joizi, your skill for negotiation is not forgotten, but without knowledge of our adversaries out there, how can you know what sort of negotiations to propose? Nay, I say. We must convene to decide how to adjust so that we are still in favor with the Wakan Tanka and the Fates, respectively. Let us begin such a decision now."

"We must send scouts in advance of our party," I said immediately after Letherman sat again. "We need to know what awaits us, which road to take. We are now too close to Mills, and with the presence of our two fugitives, we can't risk staying longer than one day at most seeing as the Alban Folk in Mills are already on high alert for unusual activity. We must also spirit away the fugitives. They cannot be anywhere near our camps."

"We can attack Mills and be done with them once and for all," Joizi said when I had taken my seat. "Then they will pose no threat to us."

"That's crazy. We can't defeat the gunpower of the Peacekeepers." Carson interrupts the few members who have jumped to their feet, I being one of them. "Mills is an endgame, not a starting point." He takes his seat voluntarily.

"Why delay the inevitable?" Mika challenges. Letherman shakes his head, but Mika continues. "Mills is a strong position to strike from, especially with their concentration of Peacekeepers there. It is a major artery to the heart of District 10; we need to clot its blood flow to make it a place to draw Capitol forces in and pick them off."

"You are mistaking our purpose," Letherman silences Mika. "It is not to be attackers. We are a band of Wanderers intent on taking the surplus of the greedy and redistributing it to the majority of the needy in this District. Yes, a component of our campaigns is to launch attacks, but it is a small component, and you need not forget that detail, Mika. We raid, but we do not seek to conquer."

"It is all a mistake, then," Mika protests. She doesn't even stand up to speak.

"Attacking Mills is no longer an item for discussion," Letherman says firmly. "I am removing it from this council. You may appeal to have it brought up again at a later time, but for this council, it is inappropriate. We must proceed." He sits and the room falls silent. Joizi and Mika aren't pleased but they press the issue no further.

"We need to revisit Drake's idea of sending scouts," Gurner says to break the silence. "Let us form two small bands of three folks each. We need a tracker or hunter, a scout and a negotiator for each of our bands." No one rises to protest so Gurner carries on. "I propose two leaders, one for each band. I'll be the leader of one; I made this proposal so it is fair. I elect Drake to be the leader of the other band because he made the initial proposal and he is a good guide, though we've put so much on his shoulders already." I nod my thanks. "I elect Mika to be the tracker for my band, which leaves Carson to be the tracker for Drake's band. As to negotiators, I would gladly take Joizi if I could be sure that Drake could find a negotiator for his band." Letherman stands slowly and we all wait for him to rise.

"If this is the way we wish to go, I will join my friend and brother Drake as his negotiator." He takes a little time to sit again, and when he has nestled safely on his bench once more, Gurner concludes the council.

"So, we have two scouting bands. Are there any among us who find fault with this plan of action?" None raise their hands. "I request the conclusion of the council be made. I request that Drake stay behind with me for a short planning session which we will impart on our bands immediately following its conclusion. All out of favor say nay." There are none. Gurner sits.

"The council is concluded." Letherman says from his bench. Everyone around me rises and Carson helps Letherman up. Soon they are gone and Gurner and I remain.

"We should go north," Gurner says in a lower voice. "The herds are moving south so the herders will follow them, and that will draw attention from Mills to the south. With their eyes away from us, we can move freely in the north."

"The news from the north has not been good," I say. "The Albans are burning their fields in defiance of the Peacekeepers, who are returning the favor by executing the offenders. Soon there will be many orphans ripe for picking by the cow-men."

"Then we must go north. Perhaps we can bring some of these orphans into our camps."

"Do you think that's a good idea?" I ask, thinking of the fugitive boy.

"We're on purpose a charity to the needy of District 10. If all goes as you say, there are more needy folk than before. We can choose which camps to assign them to once we have them in our possession, but this is the time, I believe, to capitalize on the viciousness of our enemies, to turn their work against them."

"You are talking rebellion, Gurner," I say sternly. "Have you forgotten how well that went the last time?"

"Okay, but we need to find some way to use a large outpouring of orphans in the north."

"We don't know for certain how many count that is," I remind him.

"Then we should go north." I can't argue with him. "Agreed?" I think it over but there seems to be no other choice. I nod. "Good. We go at first light." As we are concluding, Letherman enters with the fugitive boy. He waits for Gurner to exit before speaking directly to me.

"I am bringing the boy with me to learn the art of negotiation. He has already told me he is joining the Wanderers, and I have seen this as an opportunity to give him a purpose." I glare at Deane.

"Is this true?" Deane nods. "Very well," I say following a heavy, disappointed sigh. "Very well."

Velvetta Cordwip

Mildred Hatch fawns over the boy. She's come for tea and had a surprise when both Elka and Thatcher appear in the kitchen. She likes Thatcher's light hair, saying that it reminds her of rolling straw bales when she was quite young. She has no way of noticing how bruised the boy is beneath the spare set of Drake's clothing I keep in a special drawer in my personal room. He's so skinny that any clothing would hang loose on him, but given Drake's musculature in opposition to Thatcher's leanness, he looks like he's drowning in the cloth. It hides the worst of his bruising and saves Millie from alarm. His facial wounds have healed nicely; Elka is more skilled with this work than I had thought initially. With the wound marks gone from Thatcher's face, his true features have emerged and he is an easy face to look on. Perhaps in my older age, like Millie Hatch, I look at the young men of District 10 and think that they are all winsome.

Elka is still very attentive to Thatcher, forcing him (sometimes) to sit for his treatments. With her aptitude for healing, I am able to carry on with my shop-keeping and business, knowing that Thatcher is in good hands. Of course, the day is coming when I will have to register him as an apprentice under my tutelage. It does make him more susceptible to selection into the next Hunger Games, but I'm keeping that fear to myself; Elka seems to think he is safe. She tells me things, sometimes, that sound crazy if I hadn't known my sister well enough to spot a similarity in her ravings and Elka's. The other day, she told me that the caves weren't real… the caves she'd seen Thatcher and Moxie in… but that the Capitol made them especially for the Games and that if Thatcher didn't move at least four times a day, he'd be killed by the caves before he'd be killed by any other Tribute. She also told me that Moxie isn't going to die in the Games. I think she sounds crazy, and I choose not to heed her statements. It does stick with me, as I watch Millie treating Thatcher like a pet while she has no trouble giving orders to the younger Elka, that Elka didn't say if Thatcher would die in the Games or not. If Moxie and Thatcher are in the Games together, though, and Elka is predicting the truth – that Moxie doesn't perish in them – then that leaves the only option to be that Thatcher dies. I'm glad Elka is still attentive to him then, because if I were left to the task, I wouldn't attend if I knew he was fated to die anyway.

I've become attached to these two children, and I don't mean that in a bad way: they are two personalities that really liven my day. Thatcher has an optimism I find unquenchable, especially after all he has had to endure. He reminds me too much of Bess. Elka treats him carefully but not without her own sense of humor. She's still so young and yet I see the sort of woman she's going to become: she's bound to be exactly like her mother. I've become more attached to her than I was before, perhaps for this very reason – seeing Violet Steward in her. It was just last night that I caught myself thinking about Violet again after so many years. I had closed the shop and the two children were upstairs in their room, my old sewing room, preparing for bed, and I had a moment where I was taken back to a time when Violet was still with us. I don't know why it happened like that, but I remembered seeing Miss Violet Steward sitting on the dusty floor of my Papa's shop, pulling the eyes out of a cloth doll she carried around with her. The eyes were made of pins from a sewing kit, and she wasn't in danger of pricking herself on account of the pins being blunt at their sharp end, but I remember thinking it was odd to see a girl in a frilly pink Sunday dress and bonnet, white socks and booties sprawled out in front of her, pulling out the eyes of her doll. The contrast of her dainty appearance with the crudeness of her activity threw me for a loop. As I got to know of her better, I discovered how much she had to suppress that crudeness as she grew up, the daughter of a well-to-do businessman and his wife, first; eventually, she became something much bigger than that, but I didn't think about her arc through life in that moment of pause last night.

Elka wasn't crude in her manner; only in her appearance did she reflect a sense of wildness. I had always thought she was fragile, being so small and seemingly breakable. My time with her in the last few months had proved me very wrong, and for that I was grateful. I had done her disservice to think she was breakable at all. She took everything that Thatcher threw at her – and sometimes that was a lot – and continued on without much fuss. I got to see her get stern with him once, but she never seemed to be capable of being angered. It was an incredible feat of mastering her emotions in order to keep her productivity up. I have to say, part of me admired her as well.

But then there were the times when she'd have her visions. Those times frightened me. After all, my sister had also had visions and dreams, and she'd been unable to stop herself from sharing them; it got her hunted, captured and killed. In those days most of the executions of the rebels were made public and were mandatory to attend unless those who refused wanted to be considered in collusion with the rebels and wished to be the stars of the next featured execution. With a case like Iffy's, it was more difficult because the folks in Town had been actively looking for her, to turn her in we all thought, and when Drake came to this house that dreadful night so long ago, I had thought he was there for protection. They'd sent him in to root out Iffy and to lead her to her capture once and for all. I should never have forgiven him for that, but then – as always – the roads crisscrossed and paths that should not have intersected were given no other choice but to intersect. Drake's path and Violet Steward's path collided, and much of the division of District 10 was bridged with their wedding.

No, I don't want to recall those days anymore. It's hard not to, if I'm honest, when I look at these two children from very different worlds suddenly brought together in my world – also different from theirs. I can't help seeing their paths colliding like so many others have done before them. Even mine; even my path collided with another person's path unnecessarily, once. But I don't want to think about that these days. Whenever paths have collided in the past, it has been at the doorstep of catastrophe, and while we don't have much more to lose in District 10, the Capitol always seems to find a way to increase our sorrows.

Atoka Menzies

I pulled the mattress out from the dark and dank little room (if it could be called that) in the back of the house (if it could be called that) and dragged it up to where Moxie was bedding down. She was stoking the fire so her back was to me, but I could sense that she picked up on the noise I was making (which wasn't much, honestly) because her body language changed slightly when I entered her space. She didn't seem surprised to see me when she was finished working the fire. I pulled the mattress up to where she'd constructed her own bedding and sat down on it.

"Why did you say that at supper?" she asked me.

"Say what?" I asked.

"That you think I was happy here."

"Weren't you?"

"Well, yes. And no." she stopped talking and then looked at me quickly. "Actually, I spent a lot of the time wondering how much better you lived."

"Me?" I ask, puzzled.

"Yeah. You are a celebrity, Miss Atoka," she said and I detected a slight falter in her voice, a slight blush come to her cheeks.

"I'm just a girl from District 10," I said, blushing.

"No," she said bluntly. "You're a Victor of the Hunger Games."

"That's not me," I said, self-consciously.

"Who are you then," Moxie asked after a long and painful (for me) pause.

"I'm going to be a mother, maybe. Hopefully a wife too," I began, and that was when Moxie looked up at me with the most inexpressible look of curiosity on her face. "What?" I asked.

"Nothing," she said. "It's just…well…I can't imagine you being married. Maybe its because I don't really understand the point of getting married, or maybe it's because I don't really understand what getting married is, but whatever it is, I can't see you being married." She paused for a second, her mouth forming the words she wanted to say even though no voice was lent to them. "Who?" she asked finally.

"Who am I getting married to?" I asked for clarification.

"Yeah. Is it another Victor?" I shook my head.

"It's a man from the Capitol." Moxie makes a face of disgust, at which I laugh. "Not all of the Capitol folk are bad or ridiculous." Moxie frowns.

"I don't think that's true," she said plainly. I let her believe what she wants, knowing that Cor could probably change her mind if she met him. Maybe she will meet him someday. "I guess it's not just Capitol folk," she said suddenly, out of the silence. "I just don't think people can change." Now, it seems, we are in agreement on something. "They're either good or they're rotten." She continued. "But I think the way we look at each other can change, does change a lot. And I think we mistake that changing of opinions as a changing of the person. But really, I think, we're only either good or rotten."

"Which do you think you are, Moxie?" I asked, making it a personal conversation. She answers immediately.

"Oh, I'm rotten, no doubt. Folks just look at me and see good. They're blind."

"They are blind," I agreed. "They look at me and see a strong woman who won the Hunger Games by killing 23 other Tributes." Moxie sized me up; I wonder what she is thinking. "The truth: I killed three Tributes and managed to outlive the rest, including Denton."

"But you did kill," she said softly. "That means you played the Games, and you can't win if you don't play, right?"

"I never won," I snapped. "I'm still playing the Games every day." Moxie didn't say anything for a long time after that. I was composed again when she did reply.

"You're not like I thought you would be," she said. "I thought you'd be…actually, I don't know what I thought you'd be. Better than is probably what I thought. Better than District 10 folks; better than us; better than me."

"I just want to be a girl from 10," I said. "I don't want to be a celebrity. I don't want to play the Games anymore. And I don't want to be a mentor."

"That must be hard," Moxie said softly. "It's tough to see a boy and girl from 10 die each year from here, but I can't imagine what it's like for you, having to get to know them and then watching them die. That must be hard." I think Moxie and I see each other in a new way.

"I want to do something to make District 10 proud of me, not because the Capitol says they should but because they say they should." I said to her some minutes later when we had both positioned ourselves laying down. "What do you want out of life. Moxie?"

"I don't know anymore," she said. "My family back, I guess. If they're still alive. I have no way of knowing."

"All those scarecrows out there," I said. "They're really all dead Prairie Dogs and Peacekeepers?" Moxie nodded. An idea came to me then. "We should take them down. I can't foresee anyone wanting to return from hiding to a place guarded by the dead. We should take them down."

"What good will that do?" Moxie asked.

"Maybe none, but it will bring back some of the old familiarity of this place so you might begin to see it as it was. Maybe if others are hiding, they might see it as it was and want to come back too."

"Why? Just so the Peacekeepers can come back and finish us off?"

"Well, who says we can't make the Peacekeepers pay for their wickedness?" I said, a second plot hatching in my head. This one, though, was rebellious at nature, and it might break what fragile relationship Moxie and I shared. To my good fortune, though, she nodded.

"They should pay. You're right. I suppose the thing to decide is how."

"Yeah," I agreed. "How. First, we ought to take down the scarecrows. We should do that tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," she repeated, and with a sense of purpose, I think, we both fell quiet and eventually went to sleep.

In the morning, we talked about pushing District 10 into a change for the better, and it was going to begin right here in the Compound. The District 10 of the future, I thought, would be one worth bringing a child into, one worth marrying in; it was a District 10 that stood no longer afraid of its oppressive neighbors to the North. In the morning, I lost my fear of losing Cor; I lost my reservations against killing Mrs. Dickson, I lost my desire to destroy my baby…Cor's and my baby… and I believe I also lost just a small fraction of myself. Perhaps, though, that piece of me I think I lost that morning wasn't there to start. The Capitol never spits you out whole, I guess. They keep on gnawing on you.