Diana was very glad to be in university and not school - when she returned, the school year still had a few days left, while she had been on summer vacation since mid-April. She could relax. Leonella was panicking about how she had done on her final exams, which would determine if she would make it into university (she would), excited about her graduation ball (she was the only one in her group of friends going with someone, but he was, alas, only a friend), and frantic about the all-District Games trivia competition, the last one she would compete in. Ever since Diana's victory, she had been consistently making it to that level, coming in the top ten last year. In Diana's opinion, her sister had it in the bag this year. Who else could memorize such a vast amount of facts? Diana herself couldn't even manage amino acids, and here was Leonella with all 1560 Tributes ever on the tip of her tongue!
"How do you know all this?" she marvelled one morning as she helped Leonella study for the competition, which was in a few days. "I don't even know the Victors!"
"Being autistic comes in handy sometimes, I guess."
"I'm also autistic, and all I got was being bad at flirting!" Leonella had been diagnosed by someone at her school, and Adam had said that Diana obviously had it too, but she hadn't bothered getting a formal diagnosis. She had made it this far, so it clearly wasn't that bad. Her family didn't believe them, but Grandpa's retort to the psychologist had been 'Leonella's perfectly normal, she's just like her father at that age!', so Diana suspected they had a skewed view of what normal was.
"You've been dating Francine for years, you can't be that bad."
"The trick was to finally find the person who doesn't mind." Sooty meowed on the windowsill and hopped onto Leonella's bed. The little ball of soot curled up a metre away from the two of them and went back to sleep. She, like Francine, was simply a part of Diana's life she could not imagine living without. By now, Diana had begun to seriously think of marriage, but she wanted to first see how Francine liked living in their house. Her parents didn't want her to move out before graduation, and she had one semester left. "Alright." She plucked a piece of paper from a box. "This Tribute was Reaped as the boy from One in the Nineteenth but was formally registered as non-binary."
"Isi Cuaron. Placed nineteenth, killed by the girl from Three with a spear at the Bloodbath. First ever Tribute to be formally registered as non-binary."
At the highschool level, the first round would ask for names, but the next two rounds demanded progressively more obscure bits of information. "How the hell do you know that?"
"It's all in the books."
Diana had once flipped through the statistical companion to her Games. It had been fascinating but also odd. Seeing the Tributes receive rankings had sat uneasily with her since her victory. There was no second place in the Games. Aut victoria, aut nihil, as Aunt Raisa said.
"Okay, fine." Diana made up a question in her head. "This amount of Tributes died of dehydration in the Thirty-First."
"Zero. There were clean streams all over the Arena."
"This Tribute fought for Two in the Third and was the first from the District to die."
"Jeanette Lundquist. Killed by-"
"Just answer my questions. I think it'll be more like the real thing. This Tribute was the girl from Eleven in the Sixtieth."
"Are you really going to be a judge in the competition?"
"Yes, but not for you." The organizers had asked, and Diana had agreed, even though it made her feel uneasy. Leonella had always been a massive Games fan, but now, the idea of memorizing as many facts about her near-death as possible unnerved Diana.
"Aww. But everyone else isn't coming, right?"
"No." Leonella preferred it that way.
"Phew. Bad enough everyone's coming to graduation."
"Are you going to the afterparty?"
"Of course not."
It really wasn't fair that Leonella had all the brains in the family.
Diana hated her sister's graduation because everyone was far more interested in her, and they kept on asking uncomfortable questions.
"Do you wish you could have graduated highschool, too?" a reporter asked after the ceremony.
"I wasn't one for schooling at that age," she said with a smile.
Leonella just looked vaguely bored. Her nice enough but very modest dress fit her perfectly, but she still managed to look a bit unkempt. Some of the others would be changing into different clothes for the ball, but she was too lazy for that. She met up with her friend, went to the ball, and was back two hours later in time to play cards with the cousins.
"Ready for the competition?" Mina asked. Michael was busy most days with Yeon-Joo, his newborn son, so he wasn't playing today. Yeon-Joo was very cute but also very noisy and tried to grab Sooty by the tail.
"I guess," Leonella said glumly.
"What do you mean, you guess?" Akash teased. "You won in your age category last year."
"I got lucky. The other one misspelled something."
"It's always about luck." Diana picked up her cards. "Practice is so that you can seize on good luck and compensate for bad luck."
"Hey, Diana, can we come for the movie showing?" Mina asked.
After the competition, the winners would be invited to watch the premiere of the film of her Games. The films were always released several years later, to remind people of that Victor's existence. "Elly said everyone can come."
"Even Sooty?" Akash asked.
"Especially Sooty."
Leonella giggled. "I don't think she'd like that."
Diana didn't think she'd like watching the movie, either, but nobody was asking her. Several days later, she drove Leonella to the competition, glad that the Games had been so short. Elly was here today, hovering in the background. Usually, he just texted her if she needed to do something specific and answered her fan mail, but this was not your usual event.
"Hey," she said to him. "You got a new tattoo?" He had a complicated design on the back of his hand that looked simultaneously like vines and metallic and skeletal. The black threads went down his wrist and across the hand until stopping with the fingertips.
"It's temporary. I'm trying to decide if I really want to get a visible tattoo. This one-" he pointed to his face "-I can cover up with hair easily enough."
"It looks beautiful."
"I know. I have a friend who owns her own studio, she's a real master. And someone wants to talk to you."
Diana took a deep breath and went off to mingle. Leonella had disappeared for some last-minute panic with her friends, but Diana couldn't do that. The banquet for the important people would be starting soon - they were only going to watch the last round. Diana shook hands with the District mayor, who as as prone to skimming the budget as his predecessor, as evidenced by his watch and multiple intricate earrings, the carved gems and intricately detailed gold a far cry from the small hoops of pure gold Diana had in, themselves not something an average person could afford. Keith Yao's makeup had obviously been professionally done, the eyeshadow going from dark blue to light blue in a way Diana would never have gotten right in a million years. She hadn't put on any today for fear of it being ruined during the long day, sticking to washing and moisturizing instead.
A parade of functionaries who wanted to get their picture taken with her later, she could finally go to the large room where the grade sevens were mostly gathered, with some trickling in. They were overwhelmingly middle-class and stared at her wide–eyed. Diana waved to them and they looked down, one particularly pale child as red as a beet.
"What an honour it is," the other two judges said, nearly tripping over each other in their haste to get up and shake her hand.
"Glad to be here." She really wasn't. These kids mostly either had or would be turning thirteen in this calendar year, which meant they had all stood in the Reaping Field less than two weeks ago, which meant that theoretically next year, she could be returning with a casket with one of them inside.
Diana redirected her thoughts by looking around the room. It was on the shabby side, but big enough to fit the hundred or so kids decently comfortably. They each had a lined sheet of paper and a pencil in front of them. A few minutes later, the kids were told to write down their names and to get ready, and the head judge, a local history teacher, asked the first question of the first round.
"This person was the Victor of the Twenty-Eighth Hunger Games."
Diana actually knew that one - Richard Smith of Five, the only living male Victor from Five, was always there during the Games. He was a quiet person prone to alcoholism who lived alone and seemed to be existing on autopilot.
"This Tribute from Eight was killed by the girl from Eleven in the Ninth." Already jumping into the difficult questions, since these were the finals.
"This male Tribute from Four was the only one to have his death be partially credited to the girl from Twelve." Even Leonella would have struggled with that one.
"This Tribute from Five was killed by the eventual Victor of the Sixty-First." Diana nearly choked, everyone glanced at her.
A total of fifty questions later, the sheets were collected and a photographer came in to take pictures of Diana with everyone. The two other judges then quickly went through the answers, the kids had a break, and Diana drank tea.
It was time for round two, which would be information about the Games themselves. Fifty questions along the lines of "this year's Arena featured giant isopods" (Diana actually remembered that one; the isopods had been adorable and harmless but the Tributes had been understandably terrified of them) later, the scores were tallied up and the top ten were announced, as well as individual rankings.
The third round took place in a larger room with an audience present. The top ten in each year wrote the answer on slates and held them up, the judges noting down who had made mistakes. Diana didn't have the answer sheet with her and the questions were ludicrously esoteric, so all she had to go off of was that Leonella, who had taken first in her grade, always had something written down and was usually among the majority.
"This District was the third eliminated in the second Arena to feature subzero temperatures."
The contestants had thirty seconds to recall which Arena that was and the order of deaths and to write down the answer. Leonella thought the answer was Five.
"This Tribute from Four died due to Amanita phalloides poisoning."
Aside from that one year with the mass mushroom poisonings, there had been multiple cases of such deaths, but Diana did not recall the exact species of mushroom. Leonella did, or at least she thought she did. It would have been really unfortunate to lose because you mixed up Amanita phalloides and Amanita bisporigera. Usually, it didn't matter which one it was, because you needed to avoid both. Every year, someone in the District died because they mixed it up with a puffball.
After fifty questions, ten contestants advanced to the final round, which had a unique format. Unlike in other competitions of the sort, where points were tallied and announced at the end, here, a single wrong answer got you eliminated. Clearly, someone had thought it would be amusing to have it work similar to the Games themselves. One wrong move, and you're out. Diana took deep breaths, trying to dispel that stress. That was the one emotion she did remember. The gnawing anxiety, the knowledge that you were not making it out battling with the inability to accept that you were about to die.
The questions began easy. "This Victor won the Nineteenth."
Then, they got trickier. "This Victor won after their only remaining adversary died of blood loss in a different location."
Then, they became even more insane, and contestants began dropping out. "This Victor won the Games that featured the girl from Ten making an alliance in a lush Arena."
Soon enough, there were only two contestants remaining, Leonella being one of them.
"This Victor was the fourteenth-oldest."
Diana grinned. This was the exact sort of random information Leonella lived for. And indeed, when she held up her slate, it had a name on it, and the other contestant's was blank.
"Congratulations, Leonella Cohen."
Diana couldn't even feel happy for her sister like a normal person because she now had to present the certificates and shake hands and get her picture taken. Poor Leonella was interviewed by the District television channel that had aired the finals.
"Did your sister's victory inspire you to participate?" a journalist asked.
"Um, participation is mandatory," Leonella pointed out.
"But you never placed so highly before."
"Oh, right. Yeah, her being Reaped made me more curious about the Games. I wanted to know everything, and that reflected on how well I did in the competitions after that."
"Are you disappointed you were never Reaped?"
"No. I'm not really the martial sort." That was a good answer.
"What are your plans for the future?"
"I'm going to university next year."
"What are you studying?"
"Biology and math. I want to be a doctor - a phtisiatrist." Despite often having her head in the clouds, Leonella had decided on the more practical path.
"Best of luck with that."
"Thank you."
Diana finally congratulated her sister, who brushed it off. "It's whatever. It's nice to win in my last year, I guess."
"You studied so hard, I'm not surprised."
Leonella shrugged. "Where's the food?"
Diana usually avoided watching her Games on television. It was easy enough, with her family also reluctant to have the memories brought back. So this was the first time since her victory that she was seeing the Games onscreen.
This was a real documentary, though, not just some collated footage. It began with clips from Blake and Maria's Games, followed by a sequence of Tributes from Six dying as newscasters speculated about when Six would get another Victor.
"I don't think it'll be as long as a wait as we had for Maria," someone said as the screen faded to black and then turned into names being called out, the image slowly fading into Diana's Reaping. Diana had been caught on camera for all of two seconds, and that, of course, shown. She tuned out, not eager to relive that moment - Adam wouldn't be happy, but at least she'd be able to tell him she watched the movie without having a flashback.
The eight years between Maria and Diana really weren't much. She may not have been Leonella, but she did track some things, one of them being the last time each District had won. One had enjoyed two consecutive victories, and two years ago had been Two. Diana had won a mere three years ago, which felt like nothing and an eternity simultaneously. Four years ago the crown had gone to Eleven, and five years ago - Eight.
Nine had triumphed six years ago, Five - eight years ago, Seven - nine years ago. Three had last won twelve years ago, Ten - thirteen years, and Twelve - fourteen. Four was the outlier, its last Victor had won thirty years ago. Sometimes Tributes from the same District won shortly after each other, other times, there were droughts. When there was a drought, smart Mentors emphasized that fact when fundraising. The Gamemakers didn't care about those sorts of things, but audiences did, and when audiences cared, money flowed in.
On screen, it was still the Reaping, so Diana refocused on stats. The first Victor had been from Two, the second from Eight, the third from Nine. The fourth had been from Seven, the fifth from Eleven, the sixth from Ten. Diana did know her firsts. The seventh Victor had been from Four, the eighth from Five, the tenth from Twelve, the twelfth from One. Six had had to wait for the fourteenth Games for its first Victor and Three had had to wait the longest, until the Seventeenth.
Diana snapped out of her thoughts and focused on the screen, where her parents were being interviewed. She had forgotten how shabby their old building had been.
"Do you think your daughter will win?" a journalist asked Dad.
"I hope she returns, but we have to be realistic." Dad had tears in his eyes. "We are all very proud of her."
Her neighbourhood was shown from the most flattering angles, which still made it look not very impressive. Newscasters discussed if she had any advantages from her upbringing.
"Let's be realistic, she's an apprentice, not even a worker yet. What does she know? Sanchez at least has experience with real work."
"I think you've got it backwards. How is farming applicable to the Games? Cohen's family is well-off enough to keep her in school, which means she's well-fed, which means she won't weaken as fast as many, and being an apprentice, she's familiar with manual work. It's the best of both worlds."
The segment ended there, the implication obvious.
The parade recap focused on her, even though there wasn't much to focus on - her outfit had been good, but unremarkable. A Gamemaker described her performance in training.
"She did knives and first aid, but what really impressed us was her single-minded focus in group training. You'd have thought she had been preparing for this moment for years. Didn't show any emotion at all."
So she had gotten a seven because of her autism? Diana twisted her hands in her lap, unsure of what to think about that.
Some of the others who had placed highly were also described, and then it was time for the interviews. Of course, the singing was left out. That was one thing Diana didn't like. They had left out an entire part of her life. They hadn't mentioned that as a child, she had spent her summers at the synagogue learning Hebrew and Jewish history instead of working. While her friends had spent their days at workbenches or on the streets, Diana had sat entranced by stories of medieval Jewish life 'under the cross' and 'under the crescent' and read her way through primers Rabbi Simon made himself with the help of a typewriter and a library photocopier. The movie did not explain why she had had so many sponsors, because it could not do so without revealing who she was and why it mattered.
It was strange to see the Games from a more universal perspective. The camera heavily focused on the boy from Twelve struggling to survive with the limited resources he had grabbed at the Cornucopia and the Careers making their way across the Arena. Diana wondered what everyone thought about the food and water she had received regularly. What reasons did they come up with to explain it?
Having Francine move in wasn't much of a change, in the grand scheme of things. Her girlfriend had already stayed over countless times, and a bunch of her things were already in Diana's room. The only difference was that everyone was now on her case demanding marriage tomorrow.
"This is a trial run," Diana explained for the tenth time. "We want to see how we live together."
"Meow," Sooty said from the windowsill.
Aunt Nelly said nothing, but Diana had the feeling she did not approve. Well, she couldn't do anything about it. Diana preferred to take her time, because there was no rush. As the weeks went by, Francine began to slot nicely into the family routines, from the laundry to family outings. When the family was gifted a dehydrator by Diana's loyal corporate sponsor conditional on them participating in an advertisement, Francine was included.
"Worth it," she said. "Can you imagine having to dry all these mushrooms in the oven?"
The other day, the family had gone on a mushroom-hunting trip. They of all people didn't need to worry about food supplies, but Diana had to have gotten her anxiety from someone - Grandpa, to be exact. The failure of the potato crop, the second one in mere years, was already resulting in queues, high prices on everything else, and mass panic, and that wasn't even getting into the intensification of the purge 'up there', a topic discussed only in whispers.
"Yeah, that'd have been a nightmare."
Francine held up a bag of mushrooms. In the house, there was a small room dedicated to storing nonperishables. They had so many tomatoes this year, Aunt Nelly was going crazy trying to can all of them. "I hope there's no deathcaps in here."
Diana shuddered. "There better not be." There were a few edible mushrooms that looked like deathcaps, and Grandpa refused to as much as look at them. "Can you help me get the bags in the pantry?"
"Sure."
In the pantry, Diana paused to admire, as she often did, their stash of food. It made her feel calmer to know they'd have something to eat no matter what. Money was an abstract thing, it was hard for Diana to reassure herself with the thought of numbers, but the garlic hanging from the ceiling was something she could touch.
"What do you want to do now? It doesn't sound like the rain is letting up." It hammered on the house at such a loud volume, her head hurt.
"We could work on that programming problem you were talking about."
By that, Francine meant watching Diana work on the problem. "Sure, let's do that."
As the months went by, there were plenty of things Diana didn't pay attention to. The reshufflings up there hardly mattered when none of the people in question wanted to rent her, the queues outside the shops were in Aunt Sarah's sphere of competence, and the smallpox epidemic wasn't something to worry about. Until it was.
When Diana threw up one night and woke up the next morning feverish, she assumed she had some kind of viral infection. Francine was duly evicted to a spare room more out of Grandpa's anxiety than anything else and Diana spent the next few days sleeping.
She woke up in the middle of the night and reached for the cup of water on her nightstand, which she had found outside her door the last time she had woken up. The cup had a large 'D' written on a piece of tape, not the 'X' Diana associated with the dishes set aside for the sick and quarantined apartments or even entire buildings. She could easily imagine Mom taking away the used dishes as always, but in a medical mask and gloves now, not gauze wrapped around her face. At least Diana was big enough to clean up after herself now - and at least she could quarantine in her own room, instead of cramming all the sick people into one room and the healthy into the other. And having her own bathroom instead of a bucket was an absolute godsend.
With shaking hands, Diana moved the cup closer to her and dropped in an ORT tablet from a little box - she still couldn't keep anything besides water down. The tablet dissolved quickly, making the water turn purple. She lifted the cup with difficulty, savouring the blackcurrant flavour, and dropped back on the bed gratefully, feeling like her muscles had turned to jelly. Her throat hurt badly.
Diana spent over a week in that state, presuming that she had the flu. She got vaccinated every year, but the flu changed so much, it didn't always work. Diana had always been sickly, so she wasn't surprised she was the only one in the household to come down with it. And honestly, better her than anyone else. If it came to it, she'd get the best treatment in the country, and even before, the flu had only ever been two weeks of forty-degree fever and feeling like you had been hit by a bus.
Her family put a television in her room so that she'd have something to do. It was hard to stay awake for long with a fever of thirty-nine point eight degrees. Diana woke up, reached for the water, and realized there was a rash on her arm.
Diana stumbled to the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror. She had had chickenpox as a child - most people didn't bother paying for the vaccine because of how low the risk of a bad outcome was - but this was different. Possible diseases ran through her mind. Typhus? Paratyphoid? Scarlet fever? No. Diana went back, fell into bed, picked up her phone, and called the family doctor - it was midmorning.
Dr. Bryson appeared on the scene quickly. Diana heard her family discussing in hushed voices - as a child, she had hated when they had done that, because she had associated the whispering with how everyone was quiet at a funeral. Now, it was just annoying to have everyone fret over her. It wasn't so bad when Francine did it, in fact Diana liked having Francine taking care of her, but seeing Mom and Dad's worried faces made her feel uncomfortable. Thankfully, smallpox was too contagious for them to even think of coming inside. Dr. Bryson perfunctorily looked her over and took a sample. That afternoon, they called to say it was ordinary smallpox. Diana had hoped for the nonlethal modified form, but at least it wasn't malignant or hemorrhagic - those might have killed even her and would have required immediate hospitalization.
With the ordinary form, which formed the vast majority of cases, unvaccinated people faced a mortality rate of up to 30%. Thankfully, even Yeon-Joo was fully vaccinated, which meant that even if he got sick, which was extremely unlikely, he had a 25% chance to get the modified form, and his overall probability of death was 1%.
Diana had had the shit luck to get sick, but with her vaccines, including the booster, having all been done on schedule, she also had a 99% chance of survival. A few days later, her fever began to fade, but the pustules were only forming. This was nothing like chickenpox. Then, she had been spotty all over and had to crawl because of the spots on the soles of her feet, which she later found out were uncommon in that disease and had confused some of her relatives into thinking she had modified smallpox. This was on an entirely different level. Diana had no idea how to get to the bathroom without pain because her extremities were covered in the pustules. She really wished she could fly. Instead, she scooted on her side. In the mirror, she could barely recognize herself. She had covered her pustules with brilliant-green like her parents had done when she had chickenpox, but the different distribution of pustules resulted in her face looking completely green.
Nobody in the Capitol would rent her now. There, as in Six, smallpox scars were a marker of low status, not something that would lure in potential buyers. Diana limped back to bed, wobbling from the balls of her feet to the sides to the heels. She gratefully collapsed onto the mattress - she had to change the bedding constantly - and turned on the television, which was talking about the epidemic. In what passed for good news, crews were going door-to-door in the slums and removing dead bodies so they wouldn't be dumped in the open.
Diana picked up her phone (what did sterilizing a phone look like?) and called Gloss. She didn't talk to her fellow Victors much, but she did get along with them, especially the ones around her age.
"Hello, Diana."
"Hey. I was wondering - do you also have smallpox in One?"
"Yeah. I think the entire country has it."
"That's unfortunate." According to Rabbi Miller, even poor countries didn't have smallpox anymore, it only existed in a couple of war-torn countries vaccines physically couldn't be delivered to. But because Panem was so cut off from the rest of the world, nobody helped them with vaccines, which they could only produce in small numbers. Too small for everyone. Enough if you slapped a large price tag on them.
Maybe the Minister of Health would get hemorrhagic smallpox and die.
Diana talked to Gloss for a little while until someone knocked on the door. She ended the call and went to pick up her tray of food, pushing it along the ground. She couldn't wait to get better, swallowing was agony.
Being sick was so boring. Diana lay around waiting for the pustules to scab over - she would remain contagious until the last scab fell off. They'd probably hire professionals to disinfect her room after that. Diana missed Francine. It felt so lonely in the room without her. Outside the window, winter began to turn to spring, but it didn't matter, because she couldn't as much as crack open the window.
Diana read a novel Leonella had lent her a few weeks ago - her sister had expected it to be about war, but there was too much romance in the 'based-on-a-true-story tale of the Dark Days' in it for her liking. It was about James 'Raven' Roberts, who had commanded the Green Ravens, a loyalist mercenary group, during the Dark Days. Much to Leonella's disappointment, the book was about not only Raven's military heroics, but also about his romancing of Mahmoud 'Sledgehammer' Abubakarov, who had led a volunteer detachment mostly made up of his mosque's congregants. Diana liked the book, even if she was fairly sure the details had been exaggerated for dramatic effect. At the end there was a photo of the actual Raven and Sledgehammer after the Dark Days with the war orphans they adopted after getting married. It was very sweet.
Diana took a nap after she finished reading, waking up when she heard a letter slide under the door. It was from Rabbi Miller, and was actually a compilation of various articles from the international press, in English and Hebrew. They had headlines like 'Scenes of horror not seen in the world in forty years' and 'Consequence of isolationism - catastrophic vaccine shortage'. It was strange to read those articles. They talked about Panem like it was some crazy thing you couldn't understand, when Diana literally lived in it and was used to it. According to one graph, 99% of smallpox fatalities worldwide were in Panem. The photograph next to it depicted what Diana thought was a typical small-town ambulance crew taking a patient from their home, and what the journalist thought was the most horrifying thing they had ever seen. Diana studied the picture, unsure of what was so upsetting about it. It was just a house and an ambulance.
Another article described how defectors from Panem arriving in South America were being quarantined on arrival. Diana wondered if the same thing was happening up north. She envied people who could leave the country. She wasn't even allowed to leave her room.
When Diana recovered, she began to wish she hadn't, because of all the classwork she had missed. Most of her professors showed leniency, but that was because she was a Victor, not because she had had smallpox. Everyone looked at her oddly in the corridors, and someone even asked without prompting if she was immunocompromised.
"I'd be dead if I was," she said. "I just got unlucky."
"Yeah, that sucks."
Diana now looked kind of like she had acne scars, but the bumps in her skin were more pitted, more disfiguring. It wasn't as bad as some of the people she had seen growing up, whose faces were completely covered with pockmarks, but it was still obvious she had had the disease. It could have been worse. Most likely, she had gotten it giving a speech in an elementary school - and there, out of a class of forty-one ten-year-olds, seven had died. It really wasn't fair how few vaccines were available. One neighbourhood only had a few infants and immunocompromised people die, another got flattened.
The epidemic was over by the time the Reapings came around. Hopefully the lists were all up-to-date, she had heard stories about the escort drawing name after name only to have an assistant run in and whisper in their ear that this youth was near death or had passed away hours ago.
At least in Six it went smoothly. Julius Anderson, seventeen, and Emma Simpson, sixteen. Both rural, both small but mostly healthy-looking. As always now, the first thing that jumped out at Diana when seeing Julius was that he was lightly pockmarked.
"Did you get smallpox this year?" Diana asked.
"No, as a kid. I caught everything you can catch - smallpox, polio, scarlet fever, you name it."
"Any complications?"
Julius shrugged. "I get sick easily and I'm tired all the time. And my breathing isn't great."
Depending on terrain, that could be a minor problem or a life-ender. "As long as you can walk long distances, you should be good."
"I can do that."
"Excellent."
Even without being compared to Julius, Emma was very pretty. She had light-brown skin, freckles, and black coily hair done up in box braids. They'd have to deploy that to their advantage, and hope that Julius' face would look better with makeup on it.
The Tributes' eyes widened when they saw the food. Julius looked at her. "Can we have this?"
"Yes, go ahead, it's all for you."
Hesitantly, they piled their plates high and began to eat. They had vastly overestimated how much they could consume, but they ate at a measured pace - a good sign. Venus, the new escort this year - Elly was now Diana's full-time personal assistant when she was in the Capitol and some Gamemaker's PA when she was home - still looked disapprovingly at them. "Eat neater," she snapped.
"Who cares?" Diana asked. "Sponsors aren't going to see this."
The escort huffed. Venus was every bit as beautiful as her namesake (Francine agreed), but Diana was starting to suspect she wasn't as nice as Elly. Maybe she'd thaw with time. Escorts tended to be the younger children of very important people (Elly the social climber was more of an exception), so Venus was from a very different world.
"What they'll see is your face," Venus said. "You should get those scars removed."
"Even making acne scars look not as bad takes half a year, and smallpox scars are worse." It actually depended, but in her case, even the worst acne scars would not have been so disfiguring. "And I'd be paying out of pocket." The fact that Snow had personally called to inform her that her cosmetic procedures would not be covered anymore was a giant shining sign that her sex work was virtually at an end. Maybe someone would want her even with the scars, but these people would be few and far between.
"I'd have paid anything to not look like this."
Ouch. Diana thought she looked nice - her hair was freshly cut and she had combed it, she was wearing her best elaborate makeup, and her nails were painted sparkly pink - but yes, the only way to hide the scars was a thick layer of concealer, and she hadn't figured out how to make that look good yet. Her attempts so far made her look like she was, well, caking on the concealer. "My grandfather refuses to buy dairy milk because it's a dollar more expensive per litre than oat milk, he'd have a coronary if I wanted cosmetic procedures done."
"We have two cows," Julian said.
"That's very nice," Diana said. "Do you sell the milk?"
"Yeah. But we do keep some. My grandma makes really tasty cottage cheese."
Venus huffed.
"Does that lentil pie taste good?" Diana asked Emma.
"Yeah, it's great. It's got mushrooms, too. And some other stuff."
This year, there was barely any meat on the table, a consequence of how fragile the system was - and how desperate the organizers were to saw up the budget. At least they hadn't tried to foist rotten meat on them.
"Who's gonna get the leftovers?" Julian asked.
"Train staff."
"Huh."
Diana ate the lentil pie. Instead of a crust, it was topped with mashed sweet potatoes, and it had loads of mushrooms and tofu. The taste was magnificent, it was like something out of Aunt Nelly's cooking magazines. As she ate, she kept an eye on the Tributes. They seemed to be in denial to some extent, but not completely absent - probably convinced they'd manage to make it out. That was one of the easiest mindsets to work with.
"Alright," she said once they finished dessert (a delicious peach pie). "Let's watch the Reapings."
It felt strange to not have Elly next to her. He had seldom said anything, but she had trusted him to arrange sponsors and deal with all that stuff, and his presence had been reassuring. Now, Diana felt like she was the only adult in the room.
Julian and Emma didn't notice that as they went to the couch and sat down. This year, there was a surprise - both volunteers from Four were fourteen. Granted, they were the sort of fourteen-year-olds who could pass for nineteen, but they were still fourteen. Some of the Victors had alluded to an unfortunate situation in Four with a former instructor; that instructor must have been very unreliable, to have the candidates they had trained to be undesirable even years after their departure.
"They're fourteen?" Emma asked incredulously. "They look grown up."
"The one thing Careers do get is enough nutrition to grow tall." Rumour had it that in Two, they were given drugs to make them bigger, but Diana's fellow Victors had dismissed that with a laugh. Nobody ever spent that much money on people whose job was to die.
Emma rubbed her arms. "What do we do?"
To this, Diana could reply in her sleep.
Emma and Julian did decently well. They scored a four and a five and their interviews were solid but unremarkable. It would have been difficult to outshine the boy from Eight in any case. First the small and skinny eighteen-year-old got an eleven (Diana suspected mastery either with a small weapon or a survival skill he had managed to figure out would be crucial), and then, in the interview, he did his best to condemn the Games even as Flickerman had effortlessly defused every single one of his incendiary remarks until when the boy shouted 'Fuck you all!' and stalked off, the audience roared with laughter. No matter what Rabbi Miller may have thought about Flickerman, he was highly competent.
So Diana didn't have much in the way of sponsor money as she sat down in her office and went through the catalogue. One oddity - weapons were very cheap this year. Would there be no weapons whatsoever in the Cornucopia? That would be an interesting twist. Another difference this year was the wider variety of flashlights, suggesting a dark Arena. Hopefully it wouldn't be too dark for the cameras to see. The Gamemakers didn't need another fiasco.
The screens flashed to life, revealing a rocky and barren Arena where it was already pouring rain. The Tributes stood in a plain surrounded by small hills. Diana winced in sympathy, she hated the rain. As she had suspected, this year, there was a good amount of equipment at the Cornucopia but no weapons. The Bloodbath would come down to how fast everyone was and whether anyone had the raw power to kill in seconds with their bare hands.
Templesmith cheerfully explained that this year's Arena had two levels - this one, and an underground one, a system of caves that could be accessed through the countless openings in the rock. Diana could only wait and see. It would all hinge on how dangerous the caves were.
When the gong sounded, most ran for the supplies. Julian and Emma, as instructed, were able to read the territory. Julian, seeing the lack of weapons, hightailed it for the mouth of the Cornucopia. Diana had cautioned against trying that, but when the only weapons available were bare hands and maybe some rope, it was a calculated risk, and Diana would have done the same thing. He grabbed a large backpack Diana knew was stuffed with supplies, a sleeping bag, and a full bottle of water, and correctly picked his escape route - the boy from Twelve and the girl from Nine did not try to attack him. He reached the hills, ran inside the cave, and was soon in a dry and warm chamber dimly lit with what was probably artificial light.
Emma did not do so well. She ran for a small backpack but froze when she saw two Tributes fighting on the ground, and the girl from Two, who was nearby, used the cord from a small drawstring bag to strangle her. Emma ended up one of the four Bloodbath fatalities. Not very many, but these Games were promising to be far better put-together than the last.
Due to the lack of weapons, Diana hoped that Julian's audacity would be enough to spare him from attacks for the next day or two. He was very well-supplied for now, so Diana got him a medium-sized knife, which drained her account. The Careers all got small machetes, and some of the others also got knives. Maybe next year would be the year she couldn't buy anything, either. Jewish communities from all over the country donated to her and rich people in Six did likewise, but it was becoming harder and harder to wring money out of rich sponsors in the Capitol.
The Tributes were all underground, but in different conditions - some were in caves that had holes in the top that let in the rain, others were in pitch blackness and could only be seen in infrared, still others were navigating difficult steep terrain. The cave system was big enough for Tributes to not find each other unless Gamemakers stepped in.
On the third day, Julian collided with the girl from Five but ran away. For that, he had to fight off something that looked like a small cougar, which he managed to do, but not without being scratched on the arms. Fortunately, he had medical supplies, but some of those scratches were fairly deep and had to be causing him pain.
The Career pack was annihilated when they tried to cross an underground stream which had a much faster current than anticipated. The boy from Four survived thanks to knowing how to swim, the others did not. And all of a sudden, it was the final eight - or rather, final six. Diana was starting to feel hopeful.
Despite her best attempts to woo last-minute sponsors, the only thing Diana could send Julian were warm gloves - the temperatures were dropping more and more every day. The boy from Four got a trident. Diana had noticed him getting many sponsors purely based on his exotic good looks, but she hadn't grasped just how much money Gareth and Mags had to throw around.
Diana just about choked from laughing too hard when the commentator suggested the boy from Four knew how to use a trident from fishing - independent fisherpeople like the boy's family used nets and lines, even Diana knew that - but there was nothing to laugh at here, really. If he was allowed to go around and systematically finish everyone off - only four remained the following day - there was nothing Julian could do.
The rain stopped and the water level in the caves rose, forcing everyone to the surface. As luck would have it, Julian was the first person the boy from Four spotted. There was nowhere to hide in the bare rock, the openings had all been sealed, and even had Julian been fully healthy and well-fed, he would still have been slower. He stopped suddenly, let the boy come closer, and did the one thing he could - stood his ground.
The boy tossed a weighted net over Julian. As the seventeen-year-old farmer struggled to free himself, the boy from Four stabbed him through the neck. And laughed.
Much to her own surprise, Diana felt a burst of emotion. She was mad that one of her Tributes had gone so far only to be the third-last to die. She was mad that a farmer could catch so many infectious diseases in his short lifetime, it left him smaller than a boy three years younger than him. And she was mad that the boy from Four was smiling when for Diana's entire life, it had been hammered into her brain that this was not a time for laughter or levity, only stoic duty.
Diana sat and numbly watched as, over the next few hours, the boy from Four hunted down and killed his remaining opponents. She politely congratulated Gareth - he would have done the same thing had the positions been switched, and Four's last Victor had been a long time ago - and went home with the caskets.
A/N: I, too, was not able to memorize the amino acids and their polarities.
The giant isopods Diana thinks about are Bathynomus giganteus. They are indeed adorable and harmless. If you want to really be freaked out by an isopod, look up Cymothoa exigua. I think they're cute, but nobody agrees with me.
All information about smallpox is from Wikipedia. At time of writing, the amount of people who can personally say what it was like is very small.
My home country does not do routine chickenpox vaccination, so I had it when I was six. Like Diana, I had pustules on my feet and had to crawl to the bathroom. Brilliant-green is a mild antiseptic used where I'm from. I distinctly remember being covered with green spots. No idea if it was also used for smallpox, I'm of a generation where even my grandparents don't know much about the disease.
As Diana cheerfully ignores everything going around her, a twelve-year-old Capitol boy named Leon Shim really hates queueing for turnips and feels sick when imagining one. See TSATS for Leon :)