bâtard

She answered the phone half a ring into the call. Her words were agitated, though they didn’t lack the normal pitch, cattish and imitative of a spoiled child’s. “Are you safe? Can you come to me as soon as possible?” She was dying to discuss this with Allard, though the subject of his loyalty to his District were blurred lines. In all frankness, it made it all the more exciting.

“Can you come to me as soon as possible?” Allard’s heart nearly burst when he heard her question. Sometimes he wondered if, when something so cataclysmic as this happened, Lara might turn to an idol before him. “Are you? I’m safe. I’m at the hotel.” He looked around the empty lobby. It was something that should have struck a business owner with fear, but he was happy for the privacy. “Everything outside the Tower seems... not calm, but not hysterical.” He walked toward the rotating door and watched as more cars went by. “I’ll walk back to the Tower. I think every driver in the city is busy. You might need to anticipate some company at the Tower.” He lowered his voice as he departed the sacred space permitted to his hotel. “Have you heard from her?” 

Lara could hear the crickets for the short time that cut the image of the explosion, up until the Hunger Games commentators picked it up, speculating on the Games for the spare few minutes until the official launch. The destruction had been beautiful, even if chaotic and wrecking. She couldn’t pinpoint her own feelings on it. Her nails were clenched on her presidential work phone, waiting for the first instructions, but her eyes couldn’t leave the screen. Speaking to someone nearby, she gasped as the first of her words formed on her lips. “Imagine if the President…” came a muffled sigh of pure concern. “I can’t even say it.”

Allard tried Lara’s personal phone first, to no avail. He was still at the hotel now, watching the start of the Games from a hauntingly empty lobby. He saw cars going by, all in the direction of the Tower. He didn’t think his absence from his team would be noted. He was still watching his tributes, after all. Just watching them potentially about to die from the fallout of this chaos. They deserved a better chance than this. He dialed Lara’s work phone number, and hoped it didn’t terrify her.

Do you hear the people sing? Singing the song of angry men?

TASK 011. A TIME AND A PLACE

1960s

TASK 010. NATURAL PHENOMENA

SINKHOLE

“Oh, you know already. The best bars are outside this glass prison,” he dreamily sighed, as if trapped inside the Tower. Truth be told, the worst strategy for a mentor was to go out, when all the sponsors were here, piled up and so malleable with the right drink in their hand. “We have to do with what we are given. It gets better.” After a moment of silence, he cocked his head to a side. “Do you have a planner?”

He could only muster a half smile and a short laugh at Hunter’s comment. Allard wished he could go to his hotel and drink at the bar there instead, where he’d curated everything to his aesthetic and desire. “A planner, as in...” Allard lifted up his phone and shook it, “a calendar, or a person who does planning? I have the first for the Games now, the second for my business.”

Pluto’s throat tightened as she found the wind entirely knocked out of her sails. Speechless wasn’t something she often found herself and sputtering for words felt laced with incompetence, yet here she was. Pluto felt as if she audibly blinked as she found her verbal footing and began defending, “It was not my intention for any of this to happen. If you’re insinuating I wanted any of this to happen to Thirteen you would be mistaken.”

“So you aren’t a little happy there are more tributes to play with?” he inquired with a tilt of his head as he clasped his hands behind his back. “Do you have family still in Thirteen?”

“We don’t wear friendship bracelets,” she huffed, rolling her eyes in a way that wasn’t annoyed but amused instead. “Why, do you think that would help? Sell the volunteering more? Make her more attractive to sponsors, than military training already has?”

“No, no,” he shook his head quickly. “If anything, you shouldn’t be too friendly with her. She volunteered not because she’s your friend, but because you’re a future sovereign.” He didn’t so much as pause; he was certain that soon enough, life and culture in Thirteen would return to normal. The sovereign would be respected without someone having to put their life on the line for it. “Knight in shining armor plays a little better than friends, don’t you think?”

Now he was trying to delve into the lessons she’d never paid attention too, favor of attention placed more heavily on her friends and a certain boy. “There are history lessons of course, but more so on the history of the games - victors, strategies that be worked, and those that didn’t. I don’t recall ever learning how long the original academy took to build.”

“It makes sense,” he conceded, but the low-level irritation he hadn’t been able to shake since the Reaping loosened his tongue. “But it is a shame, to not know why you’re really learning, what started it all. The victors would not have happened without that early work at the Academies.”

“No tips for the mentor that I can’t deliver personally, but for you…” Hunter lingered on the last vowel, as if pondering, searching, trying to come up with something. “Maybe stop drawing my sister? That’s a good start.” He knew Allard was not to blame for it, but the tensions of the day also made it into a joke he couldn’t not repeat. Maybe he felt the need to talk about it. “But hey, other than that, you’re doing marvelously. Rocked the stage.”

“I will do my best,” Allard said, sucking in a breath before nodding and smiling gently. He wanted to show his teeth, but not to Hunter. The double victor was one of few people this side of Thirteen’s border who might have some understanding of Allard’s feelings on the developments of the last six months. “I’m glad to hear it. Now, is there a secret bar for all the team members you all have been keeping secret? I know you all must be getting something more than the spectators. After a single day of work, I understand why.”

“I can’t speak for those kids from Two or Four, but the academy in One is fairly nice. I think there’s more variety here than back in One. Newer, shinier weapons to practice with.” She had to pause a moment. Being as pregnant as she was, there was little room for air in her lungs. “We don’t get all new things every year at the Academy in One, but I feel there’s hardly any wear on anything here every new cycle.”

Allard hummed quietly, looking at each object in his sightline and waiting to see if it sparkled. It didn’t, obviously, but of course it was all new, polished, state of the art. Maybe the point was to terrify these tributes with how new everything was, how unbreakable it all seemed. “How long do you think it took to build the first Academies? Did you get history lessons on that sort of thing, or just lessons on how to use a knife?”

Pluto felt lost. It was hypocritical to even suggest that she cared before about what happened to the tributes – of course there were the ones she had developed a personal relationship with, like Holland, but that still didn’t equate to empathy. “It does,” Pluto spoke through a sigh, “I’m sorry – truly – I feel as if I’m overstepping here just to ease my own mind.”

Allard offered her a smile with nothing behind it. He knew he should be respectful of someone as intelligent and accomplished as Pluto, but respect went out the door when Battenberg went too far. “To ease your mind, you are not overstepping now. You overstepped when you became a Gamemaker.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen him around but I haven’t really spoken to him yet. He just looks like a normal kid to me, though.” But she really didn’t know him. “Do most teenage boys look up to him?” She asked curiously. “They’ve asked about the military training, asked if I was in the military, asked how it was being above ground, asked if I wore sunscreen, asked if we had ice cream.. just a whole bunch of random questions.” She knew there were more questions she had been forgetting but she had been asked too many to remember. “Some I answer honestly, some I just shrug my shoulders and hope they go away.”

“I imagine every teenage boy in Panem secretly wants to be him,” Allard guessed. He wasn’t sure if Cain was really that admired, but he couldn’t imagine why not - he was a teenager with wealth and victory. When she said she shrugged her shoulders at people, Allard quickly shook his head. “No, you can’t do that. You can’t do anything that might make you seem mean. You can be ruthless, but you cannot be unlikable.”

“Well,” she furrowed her brows. Her efforts to get out her tributes had been futile so far. Even when it had come to Jo. None of the tears she’d cried afterwards had been enough to make up for even a sliver of it. “Whatever I haven’t done until now, I’ll do. You’re the sponsor, you have more knowledge on what people with money want to see, or hear.”

“I knew only what I wanted,” he admitted. “Not all sponsors have similar tastes. It doesn’t hurt to play the field, though. Knox, obviously, has a reason to really stand out. Should I ask you two wear friendship bracelets?”

“What are your tributes’ schedules looking like?” Allard asked the mentor from Three as he topped off a mimosa. “I think they should meet with mine. I think Thirteen and Three might have some things in common.”

“So what do these Career tributes think of the training center in the Tower? Is it on par with what they’re used to, or even better?”

“We both know I’m not allowed to do that,” Pluto said, giving a sad smile. She nodded in affirmative, “But – yes – Thirteen.

“How original,” he muttered as he felt his pocket vibrate. He paused to take a breath and pulled the phone out of his jacket, staring for a few moments at the series of to-do’s that had popped up on his phone. “Time certainly moves differently when you’re more than just a spectator.”