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Chapter III

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*Excerpts from "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins in this chapter. All credit goes to her. View Disclaimer in Section Titled "Disclaimer & Summary" *

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The moment the anthem ends, we are taken into custody. I don't mean we're handcuffed or anything, but a group of Keeper's marches us through the front door of the Justice Building. Maybe tributes tried to escape in the past. I've never seen that happen though besides the events in Catching Fire.

Once inside, I'm conducted to a room and left alone. It's the closest to modern times in the Before I've ever been in this life, with thick, area carpets and a leather couch and chairs. I know leather because Alfred used to treat his upholstery with special conditional oils. When I sit on the couch, I can't help scratching my nails over the high-quality leather. It helps to calm me as I try to prepare for the next hour. The time allotted for the tributes to say goodbye to their loved ones. There's only one person on my list—well two if you count Alfred's reflection—I cannot afford to get upset, to leave this room with red eyes and sniffling. Crying is not an option. There will be more cameras at the train station.

To my eternal surprise, Peeta Mellark visits me. He reaches out to me and covers my clenched hand with his remaining free hand, creating a sort of cocoon. Alfred's transparent form sits beside me and watches with curious eyes. For a few minutes, we say nothing. Then Peeta starts telling me how I must survive and help Katniss, how we have to help each other make it to the end now that we only have each other to count on.

Alfred laughs at my situation. Here I am in place of Peeta and the sod is telling me things I already know to do. My focus is better spent on making sure Mr. Everdeen's youngest doesn't do anything stupid like taking any tesserae. She can get by, if she's careful, by selling Lady's goat milk and cheese and if Mrs. Everdeen gets off her ass and works on her small apothecary for the people in the Seam. I know Gale will get Mrs. Everdeen the herbs she doesn't grow herself, but Coup would gather the one's Gale isn't familiar with. While Gale will bring them game, Coup will bring them my allotted portion of nuggets from the mine—he and I made a pact about this a year or so ago— and will probably give away his portion as a reassurance to me, but Prim the sweetheart she is would thank him with some kind of trade, like cheese or medicine.

I don't bother interrupting Peeta's rambling. I tried to find an in a couple of times and it was impossible. The boy is a wreck, and whenever he mentions Katniss, he'd get teary and talk about how we might be able to make it out together if we got enough sponsors. But I know Katniss makes out all right in the end, so I concentrate on that.

When Peeta is done with his 'instructions' about surviving, and teamwork, and staying together, I grip his shoulder and give it a hard shake. I start mouthing and fingerspelling simple sentences. "Katniss is safe. Protected." He nods slowly, forehead crumpled as he struggles to understand my hand movements.

He must know what I'm saying because his eyes catch mine in a quiet intensity. "You'll keep her safe. You'll help her—"

I make a fist with my dominant hand and move it up and down in a nodding motion. I try my best to assure the boy that I won't leave Katniss on her own. That I'll make sure that she makes it out alive as was written. My dominant hand's forefinger touches my lips, then strikes down on top of my non-dominant hand. It doesn't matter what happens to me, whatever the district sees on the screen, because I'll fight to make sure Mr. Everdeen's daughter makes it through it! My actions are deafening in my silence. In them is all the guilt, all the appreciation I felt for Mr. Everdeen.

Peeta slumps against the couch, exhaustion bleeding out of his being. "I know. I know you'll do right by her if not for her then for her dad."

That part about me helping Katniss for her dad is true. I've seen him staring at Katniss at school, but I never thought he paid the same amount of attention to me. Perhaps I haven't given him as much credit as he's due, but he's not my priority.

You know he takes care of her, Alfred whispers.

She'll be all right, scarred but alive, I say, clasping my hands in front of my face. And to do that I have to take care of myself too, just till I can secure her win.

I can't win. I'm not Peeta nor do I have his selfless heart. The competition will be far beyond my abilities and out of Alfred's mundane experience. Kids from wealthier districts, where winning is a huge honor, who've been trained their whole lives for this. Boys who are two to three times my size. Girls who know twenty different ways to kill you with a knife. Oh, there'll be people like us, too. People to weed out before the real fun begins.

"Try to win," Peeta says, because he can hardly tell me to help Katniss survive if I'm ready to go down without a fight, even if it's to her benefit. "If Katniss…if Katniss…"

Peeta takes a fortifying breath. "I don't care what you have to do. But if the worst happens, try to come home. You'll try, won't you?" asks Peeta.

I look into his teary blue eyes. My head moves in a shallow nod before I know it. I'll try to stay alive but only for Katniss to come home to Prim, I'll have to.

And then the Keeper is at the door, signaling our time is up, and Peeta is hugging me so hard it's making me feel so awkward and all I can think about is "Why didn't you volunteer if you're this worried?" And then he's saying "Please. Please." And then the Keeper orders him out and the door closes. I slump against the cool leather as if the material could leach out the whole experience and I'm back at Alfred's shop tinkering away.

Someone else enters the room, and when I sit up on my elbows, I'm surprised to see it's Mrs. Everdeen. I can't believe she's come to visit me. After all, she should be under the impression that I'll be trying to kill her daughter soon. But we do know each other a bit, and she knows my past ties to Mr. Everdeen even better. When he brings his work clothes to be mended at the Hob, he puts two sets aside for me and I give him a generous number of nuggets in turn. I always wait to trade with him when his girls aren't around because I don't want Katniss to think she owes me anything. I feel certain Mrs. Everdeen was content to ignore my existence the way she did over anyone not her husband. But why has she come to see me?

Mrs. Everdeen sits awkwardly on the edge of one of the single leather chairs. She's a small, narrow-shouldered woman with pale dry skin that bruises easily from years of malnutrition. She must have just said goodbye to her daughter.

She pulls a green package from her dress pocket and shakily holds it out to me. I open it and find a mini basil cheese wheel. This was a luxury she couldn't afford to hand out much less to her daughter's 'potential killer'.

"Thank you," she says. I've never interacted with Mrs. Everdeen, at the best of times I'm gracious enough to give a shallow nod, and today I have none to give. "I found some of your premium coal this morning. I had my daughters try making it into an edible medicine." I stare at my cheese wheel, noticing black smudges blending into the green spread. "That's new for you," I mouth and finger spell. She shrugs as if this isn't our first time directly interacting with each other.

Then I can't think of anything else, so we sit in awkward silence until a Keeper summons her. She rises and pats down the front of her dress to settle her nerves. "I'll keep an eye on your friend. Make sure he's okay."

I feel some of my dislike for her lighten at her words. People deal with me, but they are genuinely fond of Coup. Maybe there will be enough fondness to keep his ass safe.

My next guest is also unexpected. Daws walks straight to me. He is not weepy or evasive, instead there's an urgency about his tone that surprises me. "They let you wear one thing from your district in the arena. One thing to remind you of home. You should have this." He holds out a battered brass, piece of metal about the size of a pebble textured with gold and writing etched out of coal dust. I recognize the initials and individual numbers, the same designs branded into my memory of Mr. Everdeen. P.E # 387.

"Mr. Everdeen's brass?" I mouth out. Wearing a token from the district, much less one that should be Katniss's by birthright alone is about the last thing I need on my mind.

"Here, I'll hang it around your neck, all right?" Daws doesn't wait for an answer, he just leans in and fixes the necklace against my neck. "Wear it into the arena, Cole?" he asks. "Wear it."

I nod, throat feeling tight. Mini-cheese wheels. Brass necklaces. I'm getting all kinds of gifts today. Daws gives me one more. A kiss on the lips. Then he's gone and I'm left thinking that maybe Daws could have been more than a friend if I wasn't a Dead Man all along.

Finally, Coup is here and maybe there is no blood between us, but when he draws me into a rough hug I don't pull away. His body is familiar to me—the way it moves, the smell of coal dust, even the sound of his heart beating I know from quiet moments on our ledge—but this is the first time I really feel it, lean and hard-muscled like my own. He's home. My brother.

"Listen," he says. "Getting a knife should be pretty easy, but you've got to get your hands on a sledge. That's your best chance."

"They don't always have sledges," I finger spell as I step back. Thinking of the year there were only horrible blunt flails that the tributes had to swing and strangle another to death with.

"Th'n fuck'n make one," says Coup. "Even a shitty sledge can be deadly with enough strength behin' it."

I have tried making my own sledge with poor results. It's not that easy to mimic a Forged In Fire "How-to…" episode in this reality. I had to scrap my poor imitations or use them as kindling sometimes.

"I don't even know if there'll be good stone," I finger spell. Knowing the landscape in the trilogy to be a large dense forest of mixed trees and flat land, I can't be certain things won't change again. There were caves and brief scenes of mountain ledges and scruffy bushes. How the hell could I break the stone into a moldable piece?

"There's almost always some boulders and river rock," says Coup. "Since that year half of them died from exposure and hypothermia. Not much entertainment and blood in that."

It's true. We spent one Hunger Games watching the players freeze to death at night. You could hardly see them because they were just huddled in balls and had no stone barrier against the wind or predators or shelter. It was as exciting as watching paint dry, all those quiet, bloodless deaths, very anticlimactic in the Capitol. Since then, there's usually been stone to make a low wall but never enough to make something sturdy.

"Yeah, there's usually something," I fingerspell.

"CT, it's just one hit. You're the best excavator I know," says Coup.

"It's not just one hit. There's bone. There's blood. They think and move," I spell out, my fingers growing stiff at the thought of bludgeoning into some kid's skull.

"Fuck'thm! It's you or 'dem and I rather have'ya alive. You got the practice. You got the strength," he says. "You know how to kill with one hit."

"There kids," I mouth.

"I know, but you're more capable and can give them a quick death than the Careers," says Coup grimly.

The awful thing is that if I can forget they're real people and just book characters, it will be no trouble at all. Fuck, I won't make myself into a hypocrite and say Mr. Everdeen is one too because he's real and if he's real then the other tributes are too…

The Keepers are back too soon and Coup asks for more time, but they're taking him away and I start to panic. Coup is actively resisting, and I rush forward, clinging to his shirt.

"Survive! You know how to! Cole, fight—" he says, and they yank us apart and slam the door and I'll never know what it was he wanted me to fight. The Careers? The System? The Capitol?

It's a short ride from the Justice Building to the train station. It's been years and another lifetime since I've been in a car. Riding wagons is a literal pain in the ass. In the Seam, we travel on foot.

I've been right not to be outwardly emotional. The station is swarming with reporters with their insect-like cameras trained directly on my face. But I've had a lot of practice at wiping my face clean of emotions just like Alfred used to and I use that to my advantage now. I catch a glimpse of myself on the television screen on the wall that's airing my arrival live and feel gratified that I appear unaffected.

Katniss Everdeen looks bored and interestingly enough does not seem to be trying to look around. I immediately wonder if this will be her strategy in the Games. To appear bored and unassuming, to trick the other tributes that she is no threat, and then snipe them from high ground. This somewhat worked well for her in the novel, it also helped that aggressive girl, Johanna Mason, from District 7 a few years back. She seemed weak and frightened, cowardly enough that no one bothered her until there were only a handful of contestants left. It turned out she could kill viciously. Clever strategy, but I don't think Katniss could go that far. All those years hunting game and surviving while being nurturing towards Prim made her a provider and a protector. It will take an awful lot of pressure and trauma to convince her to kill a person, to have her actions be instinctual and have the want, the need to kill for survival.

We have to stand for a few minutes in the doorway of the train while the cameras gobble up our images, then we're allowed inside and the doors close behind us at last. The train begins to move at once.

The speed initially makes me nauseous. Of course, I've been on a train as Alfred in the Before, but in this life, I've never stepped foot outside District 12, and travel outside districts is forbidden except for officially sanctioned duties. For us, that's mainly transporting coal. But this train is no ordinary coal train. It's one of the high-speed Capitol models that average 250 mph. Alfred's memories classify this model as a Class 10, faster than the California High-Speed Rail's 220 mph. Our journey to the Capitol will take less than a day, I hope this body gets used to the motion quickly.

In school, they tell us the Capitol was built in the Rockies. District 12 was in the region known as Appalachia. Even hundreds of years ago, they mined coal here. Which is why we have to dig so deep.

It's systematic as everything comes back to coal at school. To control the district, besides ensuring basic literacy and mathematics, most of the instruction is coal related. Except for the weekly lecture on the history of Panem. It's mostly a lot of blather about what we owe the Capitol. I know it's this world's version of herding the sheeple and maintaining control without causing district-wide rebellion. Well, obviously the winners control the narrative and wipe out the actual account of what happened during District 13's rebellion. But I don't spend much time thinking about it. I know the history, but it won't directly help me until after Katniss becomes the face of the 'rebellion' and inspires the districts to get off their asses for real.

The tribute train is fancier than the room in the Justice Building. We are each given our own chambers that have a bedroom, a dressing area, and a private bathroom with hot and cold running water. I haven't had an actual hot shower with great water pressure in forever. We don't have hot water in District 12 unless we boil it.

There are drawers filled with fine clothes, and Korben Beak tells me to do anything I want, wear anything I want, everything is at my disposal. Just be ready for supper in an hour. I peel off Mr. Everdeen's dusty blue dress shirt and take a glorious shower. It makes me feel clean, strangely vulnerable without my daily layer of coal. I dress in a slate grey shirt and dark pants.

At the last minute, I remember Mr. Everdeen's brass-turned-necklace. For the first time, I get a good look at it. It's as if someone fashioned a small, battered pebble and then attached a bail at the top of it. The brass pendant is connected to the bail only by its etched embellishment. It's District 12's way of recognizing coal mining experts—a status.

They're necessary identifiers and something of a slap in the face to the Capitol. Nothing as radical as Katniss's mocking jay pin. During the rebellion, the Capitol bred a series of genetically altered animals as weapons. The common term for them was mutations, or sometimes mutts for short. One was a special bird called a jabberjay that had the ability to memorize and repeat whole human conversations. They were homing birds, exclusively male, that were released into regions where the Capitol's enemies were known to be hiding. After the birds gathered words, they'd fly back to centers to be recorded. It took people a while to realize what was going on in the districts, how private conversations were being transmitted—Big Brother anyone?— Then, of course, the rebels fed the Capitol endless lies, and the joke was on it. So the centers were shut down and the birds abandoned to die off in the wild.

Only they didn't die off. Instead, the jabberjays mated with female mockingbirds, creating a whole new species that could replicate both bird whistles and human melodies. They had lost the ability to enunciate words but could still mimic a range of human vocal sounds, from a child's high-pitched warble to a man's deep tones. And they could recreate songs. Not just a few notes, but whole songs with multiple verses, if you had the patience to sing them and if they liked your voice.

Mr. Everdeen was particularly fond of mockingjays. When we went past the meadow and towards the Hob, he would sometimes whistle or sing complicated songs to them and, after a polite pause, they'd always sing back. The films never showed that beyond Katniss's little tune with Rue and later on after District 12's destruction. There's a deep well of respect for voices like Mr. Everdeen and Katniss. When they speak much less sing, all the birds in the area would fall silent and listen. His voice was that beautiful, high and clear and so filled with life it made you want to laugh and cry, the closest I could describe it too was listening to Daughtry in the Before. I could never bring myself to interrupt him in those moments. Still, there's something comforting about the little bird. It's like having a tangible piece of Alfred's life and of Mr. Everdeen with me, watching me. I tuck the necklace under my shirt, and with the slate grey fabric as a background, I can almost imagine Mr. Everdeen humming by my side on our way to the Hob.

Korben Beak comes to collect me for supper. I follow him through the narrow, rocking corridor into a dining room with polished panel walls. There's a table where all the dishes are highly breakable. Katniss Everdeen sits waiting for us, the chair next to her empty.

"Where's Haymitch?" asks Korben Beak brightly.

"Last time I saw him, he said he was going to nap," says Katniss.

"Well, it's been an exhausting day," says Korben Beak. I think he's relieved by Haymitch's absence; he pushes on and grabs a glass of champagne.

The supper comes in courses. A thick carrot soup, green salad, lamb chops and mashed potatoes, cheese and fruit, a chocolate cake. Throughout the meal, Korben Beak keeps reminding us to save space because there's more to come. But I'm stuffing myself because it's been years since I've had food like this, fresh and nutrient-rich, and because the best thing I can do between now and the Games is bulk up a bit.

"At least, you two have decent manners," says Korben as we're finishing the main course. "The pair last year ate everything with their hands like a couple of savages. It completely upset my digestion." He moved his champagne glass away.

The pair last year were two kids from the Seam who'd never, not one day of their lives, had enough to eat. And when they did have food, table manners were surely the last thing on their minds. Katniss was taught how to eat properly by Mrs. Everdeen, I got Alfred's mannerisms to know how to handle forks and knives. Katniss hates Korben Beak's comment so much that she makes a point of eating the rest of her meal with her fingers. I follow it up by wiping my hands on the tablecloth. Korben purses his lips tightly together.

Now that the meal's over, I'm fighting to keep the food down. I can see Katniss's looking a little green too. Neither of our stomachs is used to such rich fare. But if I can hold down Old Carrion's concoction of mice meat, entrails and tree bark— a winter specialty—I'm determined to hang on to this.

We go to another compartment to watch the recap of the reapings across Panem. They try to stagger them throughout the day so a person could conceivably watch the whole thing live, but only people in the Capitol could really do that, since none of them have to attend reapings themselves.

One by one, we see the other reapings, the names called, the volunteers stepping forward or, more often, not. We examine the faces of the kids who will be our competition. A few stand out in my mind. Cato from District 2 and his monstrous size. Fox-Face and her sleek red hair from District 5. The crippled foot boy from District 10. And most hauntingly, little twelve-year-old Rue with her dark brown skin and eyes and her similar demeanor to Primrose. Only when she mounts the stage and they ask for volunteers, all you can hear is the wind whistling through the decrepit buildings around her. There's no one willing to take her place.

Last of all, they show District 12. Prim being called, Katniss running forward to volunteer. You can't miss the desperation in her voice as she shoves Prim behind her as if she's afraid no one will hear, and they'll take Prim away. But, of course, they do hear. I see Gale pulling her off and Katniss mount the stage. The commentators are not sure what to say about the crowd's refusal to applaud. The silent salute. One says that District 12 has always been a bit backward but that local customs can be charming. As if on cue, Haymitch falls off the stage, and they groan comically. My name is drawn, and I watch as I take my place on stage. We shake hands. They cut to the anthem again, and the program ends.

Korben Beak is disgruntled about the state his outfit was in. "Your mentor has a lot to learn about presentation. A lot about televised behavior."

I unexpectedly laugh, shoulders shaking silently. "He was drunk," I sign. "He's drunk every year."

"Every day," adds Katniss. I can't help but smirk a little. Korben Beak makes it sound like Haymitch just has somewhat rough manners that could be corrected with a few tips from him.

"Yes," hisses Korben Beak. "How odd you two find it amusing. You know your mentor is your lifeline to the world in these games. The one who advises you, lines up your sponsors, and dictates the presentation of any gifts. Haymitch can well be the difference between your life and your death!"

Just then, Haymitch staggers into the compartment. "I miss supper?" he says in a slurred voice. Then he vomits all over the expensive carpet and falls in the mess.

"Sweethearts do me a favor I know this is probably the biggest thing that ever happened to you in your inconsequential lives. So laugh away while you can. But this is a show here and it's got to pop. So later, when we're on live, give me a hand…Try to make believe you have more than this to offer. Ok?" says Korben Beak as he lights up a cigarette and drops his pretense. He goes around the pool of vomit and struts out of the room.

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