JustAnotherRandomWriter

I taught Rosabel to draw a bow in the Secret Garden because I could not teach the district mercy.

That was the shape of it, though I hated the sound of the thought. Mercy should have been the easier thing, something that should have lived in mothers clutching their children’s shoulders and fathers counting the heads around supper tables. It should have been waiting in the millhouses, the academy halls, the market road, in every place where people still had to look one another in the face after the voting was done.

But mercy had gone scarce that week.

So, instead, I taught Rose how to stand.

Feet apart, weight even, elbow high. Shoulders loose, though she never kept them that way for long. She carried fear there. Most people carried it in their hands or mouths. Rose carried it just beneath her collarbones, tight enough that I could see it when she breathed.

“Again,” I’d say. And she would pull.

The bow I made for her was ugly, rushed, and illegal enough to hang us both if the wrong person found it. Not my finest work, but it held its curve, and the string did not snap. That counted for more than beauty. I carved it in the dark behind the Tempest barn, shaving down the limbs by lamplight with one eye on the road and the other on my own foolishness.

Rose had stared at it the first morning like I had handed her a live snake.

“You made that?” She had said.

“It works.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.” She practically rolled her eyes.

In return, I shrugged. “It’s what matters.”

At first, the arrows landed nowhere useful. In the grass or dirt. The side of a fallen log. Once, a fern so innocent I almost apologized to it. Rose had good eyes but too much thought in her. She wanted to understand the lesson before she trusted her body with it. She wanted to know where the arrow would go before she released it, which was not how arrows worked, nor how life worked in general, though I spared her that little wisdom because I enjoyed keeping my teeth.

By the third morning, she struck bark. And the fifth? She struck it twice.

By the sixth, she lowered the bow after a clean hit and looked at the target not with triumph, but with something more cautious. Recognition. As if some part of her had understood that this was no longer practice.

I did not teach her because I believed it would be enough. A week of stolen mornings could not make a hunter out of a girl who should have been finishing essays and complaining about academy lunches. I knew that. She knew it too. Still, we went before dawn to that hidden scrap of green and worked until her fingers reddened and the sun began lifting over the grass.

I taught her how to listen for movement. Where to step where the ground would forgive her. How to tell a rabbit trail from a badger path. Or to cut her own panic down to one breath at a time.

The rest I could not give her. In a better district or a fairer world, she would’ve understood that simply in time. Instead, I gave her what my hands could make.

A bow or knife. Anything of use. Even a few dirty tricks.

The lie that preparation was close enough to protection to let either of us sleep. By the morning before Reaping Day, every child of reaping age in District 9 had been gathered into New Bisman.

That was how it had always been done, more or less. A week before the Reaping, the families from the outer farms, river settlements, mill roads, and grain stations began making their way toward town. Some came by wagon, others by horse, some even walking with bundles tied to their backs and younger children dragging behind them. For ordinary Games years, the week had an ugly usefulness to it. Children reported for collection, confirmed their ages and entries, and the clerks counted the many ways hunger had written their names into the lottery.

The district, being what it was, made a market of the terror anyway.

Vendors opened early. Traders unfolded patched canvas over crates of salt, needles, lamp oil, dried fruit, bootlaces, secondhand coats, and little paper twists of sugar meant for children whose parents could spare the coin. The butchers smoked sausages near the station road. Women sold bread from cloth-lined baskets. Men argued over tool parts and wagon wheels. Someone roasted corn over a barrel fire as if the smell of it could keep dread from gathering in the throat.

New Bisman grew loud during Reaping week. Much too loud.

That was the first thing Rose noticed as she walked toward town hall without her cousins to accompany her. Usually during collection, Waaska would be on one side and Nibs on the other.

Now, all she had was the sand in her boots.

The noise had weight to it this year. No joy nor proper bustle. It was the sound of people trying to prove they were still people before the Capitol reminded them they were numbers.

Children filled the square in dark uniforms, patched work coats, good dresses worn too early in the morning, boots scrubbed as clean as mud allowed. Some had come in from so far out that they still smelled faintly of horse sweat, straw, and cold road. Younger ones clung to older siblings. Older ones pretended not to be afraid and failed in ways Rose found almost unbearable.

A boy from the north mill road laughed too hard at something his friend said, then went quiet when his mother touched the back of his head. A girl no older than thirteen stood stiff as a fence post while her father fixed the ribbon at her collar, his hands shaking worse than hers.

Near the intake line, Waylynn Scranton was shaking like a leaf while Burr stood beside his younger brother, looking furious enough to bite through iron. The Rolette grandkids weren’t far behind, with their lips pressed thin, just like their grandfather, watching the booths as if they might disappear altogether if they looked hard enough.

Rose looked away before anyone could catch her staring.

That was the trouble. Everywhere she looked, someone was breaking. Everywhere she did not look, she felt someone watching.

The voting stations had been built outside town hall overnight.

They were not like the old collection tables. Those had been plain things, ugly but familiar; long desks, registration books, gray-faced clerks, peacekeepers standing near enough to remind everyone that math belonged to the Capitol. This time, everything was different. This had structure. Intention. A cruelty dressed up as civic order.

Three intake stations stood beneath the town hall awning, each marked by a black number and guarded by peacekeepers in polished helmets. Beyond them, a row of voting booths had been arranged beneath temporary canvas walls, each one narrow enough to swallow a child whole and return them changed. Capitol seals had been stamped across the privacy screens. Fresh ink. Fresh paper. Fresh lie.

At the first station, children gave their names. At the second, their age and district sector were confirmed. At the third, a ballot was placed into their hands.

Then they were sent to choose which child might die.

Rose tried to keep her head down. It wasn’t helping. Whispers moved faster than she did.

Not always words, though. Sometimes just the shift of attention, the brief quiet that followed her, the small pull of mothers drawing children closer, though whether from pity or resentment she could not tell. A boy from the academy looked at her and then away so quickly it felt rehearsed. One of Carrigan Killdeer’s friends leaned toward another girl with her mouth half-hidden behind her hand.

Rose continued forward.

The intake line moved slowly because no one wanted it to move at all. Children stepped up one by one and gave their names like confessions.

“Imogen Emerado. Sixteen. South mill quarter.”

“NEXT!”

“Ruth Oxbow. Fourteen. East elevator row.”

“NEXT!”

At the edge of the line, two mothers murmured over their children’s heads.

“Just write one of the jail names,” one said, voice barely low enough to pretend at decency. “That’s what we told Hayle. There are boys locked up already. Ones who’ve made trouble.”

“B-But it still counts?”

“Of course it counts! They’re eligible!”

Rose’s stomach gave a traitorous little lift. Something almost like relief… but not quite. It was meaner and horribly human. For one terrible second, she thought, ‘Then maybe not me…’

The shame came so fast after that she nearly lost her footing.

She hated herself for it. Hated the warm, instinctive flare of survival in her chest. Or that she could hear a mother suggest throwing some imprisoned boy toward death and feel her own lungs loosen. Hated that the Capitol had made even mercy competitive.

The line had finally moved, and the first intake station stood before her. The clerk did not look old enough to have such tired hands. He sat behind a ledger with two peacekeepers at his back, possibly having a Capitol official in his ear at all times. His pen hovered above the page.

“Name?”

“Rosabel Tempest-Strix.”

The pen hesitated. Only for half a breath. Rose still saw it.

The peacekeeper behind him saw it too.

The clerk cleared his throat and wrote her name. “Age?”

“Seventeen.” She calmly replied.

“Residence?”

“Tempest property, south pasture road.” Again, calm.

“Occupational status?”

Rose’s mouth dried. “Academic student. Tenth year, graduating class.”

A peacekeeper lifted his eyes. There it was again. That tiny shift. The click of one more piece fitting into the wrong story.

Graduating. University. Snow. Capitol favor. Betrayal…

Rose could almost hear the words arranging themselves in other people’s mouths.

The clerk stamped the first mark beside her name and sent her on. At the second station, her information was checked against another ledger. At the third, a woman in a gray Capitol uniform handed her a ballot.

The paper was heavier than Rose expected. That was the first stupid thing she thought. How heavy it felt. Cream-colored, clean-edged, official. As if better paper made murder more civilized.

“Proceed to an open booth.” the woman said as if she had said it a thousand times, because she had. “Any falsified names will automatically receive a fine and a recorded revote.”

Rose looked at the ballot. There were two blank lines beneath the printed instruction:

ELIGIBLE NAME(S) HERE.

One boy and one girl…

As if the district did not contain whole lives.

Like one name could be separated from supper tables, school desks, half-mended coats, favorite songs, little brothers, bad tempers, chores left undone, mothers who would not survive the grief, fathers who would pretend to…

… behind her, someone sniffled.

Rose turned slightly.

A few places back, Dido Westhope’s oldest child stood with a ballot clutched in both hands. She had always been a sharp little thing, all elbows and suspicion, but now she looked smaller than her age. Her pencil hovered over the page without touching it. Dido stood beyond the rope line where parents were made to wait, face hard, hands locked together at her waist. She did not call out nor did she guide her. She did not save her child from the choice.

No one could. A peacekeeper stepped closer to the girl.

“Write.” he ordered.

The child flinched and bent over the ballot. Rose turned away.

The booth smelled of fresh wood, ink, and canvas warmed by too many frightened bodies. Once inside, the square became a blur of shadows on the other side of the screen. A private place in public. A coffin with paperwork.

Rose laid the ballot flat. Her pencil was already there, tied to the booth by a short black cord.

She stared at the blank line. She thought of the names people had been saying all week.

The imprisoned kids? The gang kids? The girls with reputations their mothers could not wash clean? The academy children with too much privilege? The field children with too little protection? The ones whose parents had enemies? Or those whose parents had no power at all?

She thought of Waaska. Fifteen, anxious, watchful, guilty enough to fold in on herself. She thought of Nibs, too young this year, but not for another couple of years. Not always. She thought of herself, though she tried not to.

The pencil sat between her fingers.

Nothing in her wanted to move.

Outside, the square murmured and shifted. A child cried. A man coughed. Somewhere a vendor laughed too loudly, then stopped. The whole district waited in the terrible politeness of people pretending this was a process and not a wound.

Rose pressed the pencil down. The name she wrote was never one she said aloud or on paper.

Not that day. Not later. Not in the years when confession might have made it easier to carry. Maybe she simply forgot the shape of the letters or remembered too well. It could be that the guilt was less about the person she chose than the fact that she chose at all.

I never asked. There are questions that only prove you have the luxury of needing an answer.

When Rose stepped out of the booth, her face had changed and anyone else might have missed it. Her braids still lay neat over her shoulders. Her dress was still buttoned at the throat. Her chin was still lifted enough to make people call her composed if they wanted a prettier word for trapped.

Though, her eyes looked older. She folded the ballot once, as instructed, and carried it to the sealed box beneath the Capitol seal. The box had a narrow mouth. That detail stayed with her. She explained that much.

The ballot disappeared inside with hardly a sound, and just like that, Rosabel Tempest-Strix had helped choose someone.

She stood there for one breath too long. A Peacekeeper cleared his throat. “Move along.”

And she did.

Past the booths. and the intake stations. Past Waylynn Scranton, who had stopped shaking and now only stared at his busted-up boots. Past Carrigan and the little cluster of academy girls, who parted slightly as Rose approached, not enough to be kind and not enough to be openly cruel. Past the parents who looked at her with pity that felt like an accusation.

That’s where Waaska found her, near the edge of the square.

“R-Rose?” her voice slightly broke.

A month had passed with the cousins awkwardly dancing around the situation, of Waaska’s potential assistance in helping spread rumors, forever smudging Rosabel’s title. They never talked of the moment. Waaska felt too much guilt to be fully upfront about the situation. Rose, of course, knew that.

The girl, only fifteen, nervously looked on as her elder cousin approached, guilt hung over with fear as she nervously bit down on the inside of her cheek. “So… are you done? With the vote, I mean?”

The redhead came to a halt as she faced the younger girl. Her honeyed eyes glazed with fear at what her cousin would say next. Something accusatory or possibly hurt? Rose could see the treacherous fear in her face.

Rose knew it before she looked at her hands, though that was where the proof sat plainest. A gray smudge of pencil dust marked the side of Waaska’s finger. Her thumb worried at it like she could rub the whole morning away if only she pressed hard enough.

“Yes,” Rose said. “I’m done.”

Waaska nodded too quickly. “Me too.”

Neither of them asked the other for a name.

The square had not stopped moving around them. Children still entered booths and still came out changed. A man near the vendors shouted that hot cider was half-price, his voice cracking somewhere in the middle of the offer. A peacekeeper corrected a boy who had stepped out of line. Somewhere beneath the awning, the intake clerk stamped another page.

Rose could not stop hearing that sound.

Stamp. Next. Stamp. Next…

Waaska opened her mouth, closed it, then looked past Rose toward the voting boxes as if the words she needed might be sitting there beside the Capitol seal.

“I didn’t,” she said at last.

Rose tilted her head. “Didn’t what?”

“Vote… for you.”

The sentence came out so fiercely that it almost sounded like an accusation. Rose simply blinked.

Waaska’s eyes went wide, horrified by her own tone. “I mean, I didn’t. I swear on Tunka’s hands, Rose, I didn’t write your name. I would never-”

“Waaska?”

“I wouldn’t.” The raven-haired girl rapidly shook her head in desperation. “I-I swear!”

“I believe you.”

The younger girl stared at her, breathing too fast.

Rose kept her voice gentle because anything else might break them both. “I didn’t think you had.”

That should have soothed her. Yet, Waaska’s face crumpled, not all at once but in pieces. First her mouth, then her brow, then the careful hardness she had been trying to hold over herself like a roof in bad weather.

“But I did something,” she whimpered, her head shaking ever so slightly.

Rose went still. Something had sat between them for weeks, too large to step around and too tender to touch. The thing Waaska had carried in her throat every time she entered a room and found Rose already there. The thing Rose had known without being told because love made people transparent in the cruelest ways.

Waaska hugged her arms around herself. “I… I didn’t mean for it to happen the way it did.”

Rose looked at the ground between them. The dirt had been churned to powder by hundreds of boots.

Rose simply nodded. “I know.”

“No, you don’t.” Waaska shook her head, tears shining hot in her eyes. “You don’t know all of it! B-Because it’s worse than you think!”

“I know enough.” Rose attempted to comfort.

“I told everybody though! I-I told Enrique! I told-”

Rose’s fingers curled against her skirt.

Waaska saw the movement and started speaking faster, as if speed could outrun consequence. “I didn’t tell him like gossip. I didn’t. I-I was scared, and he kept asking why you were acting strange, and I said maybe it had something to do with the Capitol boy, and then she asked if I meant Snow, and I didn’t say no fast enough. Then he told his sister, and Carrigan made it ugly because Carrigan makes everything ugly when she wants to feel taller than someone else…”

Rose said nothing.

Waaska wiped her cheeks with both hands, only smearing the tears with pencil dust. “I-I tried to take it back. It wasn’t enough, b-but I tried! Honest!”

Rose wrinkled her brow. “You can’t take back a thing after people prefer the wrong version.”

“I…” Waaska’s guilt had completely overwhelmed her. “…I know.”

“And people preferred it, ya know?” Rose reinstated. “That’s not something you can help.”

Waaska’s breath hitched.

Rose looked toward the booths. One canvas flap opened, and a girl from the academy stepped out with her ballot folded between both hands like a dead bird. Her mother tried to meet her at the rope, but a peacekeeper held her back until the girl had dropped the paper into the box.

Rose watched the ballot disappear.

“Rose,” Waaska said, so softly it barely reached her. “I’m sorry.”

The words should have done something.

They should have opened a wound. Let fresh air in, loosened the hard knot in Rose’s chest. She had wanted that once, badly enough to imagine them while brushing her hair or lying awake in the dark, rehearsing the exact shape of Waaska’s confession, the tears, the explanation, the hug that might follow.

Now? Now they were here, they felt too small for the room they had to fill.

Rose turned back to her cousin. “I know you are.”

Waaska flinched. “That’s… all?”

“Well, what do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice cracked. “Something. Yell at me. Tell me I ruined everything. Tell everyone that I’m awful.”

“Waaska,” Rose chimed. “You’re not awful.”

“But… I am.”

“No.” Rose shook her head. “You were scared. And jealous, which isn’t a bad thing. Everyone’s jealous of someone. You were angry at me for leaving, even though I should’ve been the one to assure you otherwise, and you said something careless to someone cruel.”

Waaska pressed her lips together as if the accuracy hurt worse than accusation.

“That doesn’t make you awful,” Rose said. “It just means… you need to be more responsible is all.”

A tear slipped down Waaska’s cheek. Rose wanted to reach for her. Her hand twitched with the old instinct, the easy cousin-shape of comfort, but she kept it at her side. Forgiveness had come to her already. Trust had not caught up.

“I forgave you before you asked,” Rose admitted.

Waaska looked up sharply.

“Really, I did.” Rose’s voice stayed quiet. “I didn’t want to at first. It’s easy to be angry because anger feels cleaner than being hurt. But… I know you. I know your heart, even when you’re not careful with it.”

Waaska made a broken sound and covered her mouth.

“But forgiving you doesn’t fix it,” Rose continued. “It doesn’t pull the words back out of everyone’s ears.”

“I know,” Waaska whispered.

“And if they call my name tomorrow-”

“Don’t.” Waaska stepped toward her. “Please. Don’t say that.”

Rose stopped. There it was again. That same look I had given her when she spoke too plainly of what could happen. As if naming the thing invited it in. As if the thing had not already been standing among them, patient and well-fed.

“Waaska,” Rose tried again. “Listen…”

“No.” Waaska’s voice rose. A few people nearby glanced over. She lowered it quickly, but the panic stayed. “No, don’t talk like that. Please. I didn’t vote for you. And I know… families shouldn’t turn on one another. And… I’d understand if you voted me. You know?”

“I know.” Rose swallowed. “But… that doesn’t have to be that way.”

Waaska shook her head. “I deserve it.”

“No you don’t.”

Waaska simply stared at her.

Rose didn’t like the way her cousin looked then, younger than fifteen and older than childhood, standing in the square with pencil dust on her fingers and fear making a prison out of her face.

“The district is scared,” Rose assured. “Scared people don’t always choose kindly.”

“But they shouldn’t choose you.”

“They’ll choose whoever makes the most sense to them.”

At this, Waaska huffed back in frustration, her own private form of rebellion. “That… shouldn’t make sense!”

Rose almost smiled at that, though it hurt. “No?”

“No.” Waaska shook her head hard. “It ain’t fair! All of this… forcing us to turn on one another? H-How can we possibly live with this? Live with this being our only defining choice in life?”

“Waaska-“ Rose carefully looked at any nearby peacekeepers who could catch what her cousin was saying.

“We’re not…” Her voice broke before she could finish. “…we’re not just a name on paper!”

Rose’s throat tightened so quickly that for a moment she could not answer.

Around them, the square went on being the square. Somebody bought bread, before they dropped a coin. A horse stamped and a peacekeeper called for the line to move faster. Rose looked past Waaska, past the booths, past the town hall where tomorrow the ballots would become a verdict.

“That’s the point,” she admitted, remembering what Coriolanus had told her.

Waaska went still.

Rose looked back at her. “They need somebody… possibly me to be the name on that paper. It’s easier that way.”

Waaska, still wearing her defiance, argued. “No.”

“Yes.” Rose sighed. “It is.”

“No, Rose!” Her voice was so full of terror that Rose finally reached for her.

Waaska came apart the instant Rose touched her.

She collapsed forward, arms winding tight around Rose’s waist, face buried against her shoulder like she had done as a little girl after nightmares. Rose held her automatically, one hand against the back of Waaska’s head, the other between her shoulder blades.

The hug hurt, which surprised her. The hug itself did not erase all that had come before. Waaska’s tears soaked into the collar of Rose’s dress. Her body shook with every breath. Rose closed her eyes and let the noise of the square blur into something distant.

“I’m sorry,” Waaska kept saying. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t want them to hate you.”

Rose simply held her baby cousin.

Waaska’s cries grew ragged. “I… didn’t want them to look at you like that.”

Rose felt her eyes misting. “I know.”

“I was mad,” The young girl hiccupped. “B-Because I thought you were leaving us behind.”

Rose opened her eyes. There, finally, was the small ugly truth beneath the bigger ugly truth. She looked over Waaska’s head at the voting booths.

“I was trying to make somewhere we could all go,” Rose softly admitted.

“I know that now.” Waaska cried harder. “A-And maybe you still can.”

Rose rested her cheek lightly against her cousin’s hair. For one moment, it was almost enough to pretend they were back at the lodge, that Waaska had only broken a dish or ruined a ribbon or said something sharp over breakfast. Something small enough that an apology could heal it before supper.

But the ballot boxes stood beneath the Capitol seal. And tomorrow, someone’s name would be spoken. Waaska pulled back enough to look at her. Her eyes were red and wide, searching Rose’s face for anger and finding something worse.

“You already think it’s going to be you,” she whispered, though her head still shook in denial.

Rose did not answer fast enough.

Waaska’s grip tightened around her arms. “Rose?”

“I think,” Rose said carefully, “that if it is me, I don’t want my last day before the Reaping to be spent pretending I didn’t see it coming.”

Waaska looked as though Rose had slapped her. “No.”

“Waaska-”

“No, don’t do that.” Her cousin’s face suddenly became stern, just like Auntie Misea’s. “Don’t make peace with it.”

“I’m not making peace with it.” Rose tried to soften the blow.

“You are. You sound like-” Waaska choked on the words. “You sound like you’re already walking onto that stupid stage.”

Rose’s stomach turned, since Waaska was either wrong. Or right.

All week, with the makeshift bow in her hands and bark splitting under her arrows, Rose had felt some secret part of herself begin moving ahead of her body. Toward the square, the stage, and to whatever hellish nightmare came after. It was not surrender, exactly. It was preparation. Or maybe the two were closer than she wanted them to be.

“I’m scared,” Rose nodded, trying her best to hold back tears.

Waaska froze. Rose had not meant to say it, at least no so soon. Especially, not with half the district close enough to see her if they looked too hard. Though the words were out now, plain and shaking.

“I’m so scared I don’t know what to do with it,” Rose whispered, a humorless smile etching itself to her features. “But if I let myself fall apart every time I think of tomorrow… I won’t be able to stand when it matters.”

Waaska’s face crumpled again. “You shouldn’t have to stand.”

“No,” Rose said. “I shouldn’t.”

No one should…

That truth sat between them, useless and complete. Waaska looked down at her pencil-smudged thumb. “I wrote… a name.”

Rose’s breath caught. “Waaska, you don’t-“

“A-And it was mine.”

The confession landed harder than Rose expected. Hearing that her cousin had done such a thing made the whole situation more real. The idea that Waaska had condemned herself to such a point where she would rather die in her family’s place… it made Rosabel’s heart sink. Neither of them was clean, no. They had still condemned a district boy regardless…

Rose reached down and took Waaska’s marked hand in hers.

“We’re… not going to talk about the names,” she finally said.

Waaska nodded, crying silently now.

“If it happens,” If they pull my name. “Just… keep strong. Don’t put on a show for them. Not for the peacekeepers. Not for the crowds. Not for whoever is whispering. Promise?”

“W-Why?”

Because I need someone to remember this is real. That I don’t know if I’ll be brave unless someone who loves me doesn’t die alongside me. That if they turn me into a tribute, I need one face in that square that still knows my name means more than death…

Rose swallowed all of that down. “Because… I will be strong for you.”

Waaska made another broken sound and hugged her again, tighter this time. Rose held on.

Above them, the town hall clock began to toll. The sound rolled over the square, iron and indifferent. One bell. Then another. Children shifted in the lines. Parents looked toward the sky, toward the booths, toward anything except one another.

When the final bell faded, Waaska pulled away and wiped her face with the heel of her hand.

Together, they stepped away from the voting booths and into the living noise of New Bisman, where the vendors still called, the peacekeepers still watched, and the ballot boxes sat full beneath the Capitol seal, holding twenty-four hours’ worth of fear in their narrow mouths.

Rose did not sleep so much as surrender to stillness. I knew because I had not slept either.

The Tempest house had been quiet through the dark hours, but not peaceful. Peace had weight to it. It settled into floors, into walls, into the breathing of sleeping bodies. This quiet was different. It waited. Every creak of timber sounded too loud or shift of wind against the shutters came like a hand on the glass. Even Wolfie, who usually huffed and scratched and turned circles before lying down, had gone still near the loft way as if he understood that any noise might tip the night into morning faster.

Morning came anyway. That was the cruel thing about it. No amount of dread slowed the sun.

By first light, Rose was awake, if she had ever truly stopped being so. She came into the kitchen already dressed in her underlayers, her hair loose down her back, auburn waves mussed from the pillow and restless hands. There were faint shadows beneath her eyes. Not deep enough to draw pity from a stranger, perhaps, but I knew her face too well to miss them.

She looked younger with her hair down. That bothered me more than it should have.

“Mornin’,” I simply greeted.

Rose glanced toward the window. The sky outside had just begun to pale. “Already?”

“Technically.” I sighed.

Rosabel glared at the skyline. “Rude...”

I almost smiled. There was porridge on the stove because my hands had needed something to do before they became fists. I had burned the first batch and scraped the pot clean before she swooped in. The second sat warming over the lowest flame, edible if no one had standards worth defending.

Rose looked at the pot. “Where’d you learn to cook?”

“Myself.” I shrugged, in halfhearted jest.

“That bad?”

I snort out a laugh. “Better at getting’ the source, thank you!”

Her mouth twitched, but the expression faded before it could become anything useful. She sat at the table, folding her hands together so tightly her knuckles went pale.

I set a bowl in front of her. She looked at it for a while.

“Eat,” I said, softer than an order.

She shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”

“Exactly.” I pushed the bowl further in her direction. “Eat.”

Her eyes lifted to mine. I did not point out that hunger had very little to do with her appetite. She understood that. That was the whole, stubborn trouble with Rose. She understood too much, and understanding had started cutting into places childhood should have protected.

She took the spoon. Three bites. Four at best.

Didn’t count after that because counting felt too close to collection.

A dress had been laid over the back of Virgil’s old chair.

Rose had brought it down before dawn, though I had not seen her do it. It hung there in the kitchen light like a memory that had not decided whether it wanted to comfort or accuse. The fabric was green with a faint warmth to it, the kind of color that passed through grass when sunlight caught it and made it look softer. Prairie roses had been stitched along the hem and cuffs in small curling clusters, their threadwork careful, old, and too lovely for a day like this.

It had belonged to Virgil and Misea’s mother, thinking back on it.

I remembered the first time I saw it. Not on Rose, but tucked away in a cedar box years before, wrapped in cloth and dried lavender. Virgil had shown it to me once when he was trying to find proper reaping clothes for a young Rose, running his fingers over the embroidery with a look on his face I pretended not to see. He had said his mother wore it to festivals before the war made festivals feel foolish. Said Misea had nearly worn it for her own wedding before deciding it was too decorative, yet delicate for a woman who intended to spend half the day hauling tables herself.

Rose had never worn it. She hadn’t quite filled it out yet… not until that Reaping morning.

She followed my gaze and said, “Auntie thought I should.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Misea’s usually right about those things.”

Rose looked back down at the porridge. “She said it would make Papa happy.”

My throat tightened.

She scraped her spoon along the bottom of the bowl. “Hopefully it’ll be… like taking a piece of him with me.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, my eyes landing on Virgil’s hat hanging near the door. “Suppose it will be.”

It was the only honest thing I could earnestly say aloud.

After breakfast, if the few spoonfuls she managed could be called that, we rode to the Mniwakan lodge. The road to the lodge felt shorter than usual. Far too quick. There should have been more distance. More dust. Maybe more time for the world to reconsider itself.

Rose rode beside me in silence, her shawl wrapped over the underdress and her hands holding the reins too neatly. Wildfire seemed to sense something wrong in her rider. The mare moved with unusual care, not skittish exactly, but attentive, ears flicking back every few breaths.

At that point, I thought back to the Secret Garden. At the possibility that… maybe we could change route. Hide Rose away until the Reaping was long over. Then, I remembered everything we prepared for up until that moment.

The bow was not with us, nor was the knife I had shaped down to fit Rose’s hand. Obviously. They were hidden where no peacekeeper had reason to look, wrapped in oilcloth and tucked beneath the loose floorboard of the Secret Garden. Useless today, maybe dangerous instead. Everything I had given her mattered only if tomorrow became worse than this one.

That thought sat like a stone in my mouth. Rose noticed me staring too hard at the road.

“Auphie,” she broke me free from my thoughts. “You don’t need to do that.”

“Doing what?”

“Think about… it.” She was referring to the Garden. “Everything’s… going to be okay.”

“Suppose.” I steer Errante away from a loose bit of shrub. “Except, we don’t have to do this, ya know?”

“Really.” Rosabel furrowed her face. “And if they call my name today and I’m not there, what then?”

“Rosabel.”

She gave me the smallest look. “Auphidius.”

“You know what I’m sayin’,” I try again. “I’m just… lookin’ out. Is all.”

“I know.” This time, her smile lasted almost three seconds. “But I’m seventeen not seven. Hope you know that.”

That was the issue. I did.

Finally, New Bisman’s rooftops began to show through the morning haze, and it vanished. The Mniwakan lodge was already awake when we arrived. On reaping day, it wasn’t as chaotic in the mornings. Rather, most of the cousins within the respective age range would remain silent. Focus on morning chores and tell their Tunka Ziibi that they loved him ten times more than they usually did.

Though, this morning, Reaping day appeared even worse.

Misea was in the main room, tying cloth bundles that did not need tying. Bread, dried fruit, a tin of salve, and a flask of water. Practical, useless things. Things a woman could place into a bag to keep from placing both hands around grief and shaking it until it answered.

Gami stood near the stove with his arms folded, staring into the fire as if he had forgotten why it was there. Tunka sat in his usual chair, wrapped in his blanket, his eyes open but distant. Nibs hovered near the table, too quiet, his hair still sticking up in the back because no one had had the heart to fuss at him for it.

Waaska stood by the window. When Rose entered, everyone looked at her. Then everyone looked away too quickly.

There was an air of carefulness. Rose felt it land on her skin like cold rain.

“Rosie,” Misea said, brisk in the way people get when tenderness threatens to ruin them. “Come here. Let me see you.”

Rose crossed the room.

Misea took her face between both hands and looked her over, not as if checking whether she was clean or properly dressed, but as if memorizing the exact arrangement of her features before the district tried to make them public property.

“You didn’t sleep,” Misea said.

Rose smiled. “Neither did you.”

“I’m old.” She scolded the girl, though not out of real reprimanding. “I’m allowed to look dreadful.”

“You don’t.” Rose’s mouth trembled.

Misea saw it and immediately busied herself with the shawl clasp. “Come on, then. We’ll finish you up proper. Can’t have the whole district thinking we let you leave the house looking like a windstorm with legs.”

Rosabel shrugged. “I don’t think 9 cares what I wear.”

“Men care about all sorts of things they pretend not to.” Misea reminded her niece. “Usually the wrong ones.”

Gami made a faint sound into his cup. It might have been a laugh, if the morning had been kinder.

Misea led Rose toward the small washroom off the hall. Waaska took one step as if to follow, then stopped. Her hands twisted together in front of her.

Rose noticed.

“You can come,” she said quietly.

Waaska’s face shifted with such gratitude it almost hurt to look at.

I stayed in the main room with the other cousins and Nibs. For a while, no one spoke.

The lodge had its usual smells with its smoke, wool, cedar, dried sage, yesterday’s bread, the faint sweetness of berry preserves cooling near the pantry. Smells of home. They felt indecent against the day ahead, as if the world had forgotten to strip the comfort out before the Capitol arrived to do its work.

Nibs sat down at the table and dragged one finger through a nick in the wood.

“You going to the square?” he asked me.

“Kinda have to.” I causally retorted.

Nibs nodded, lingering on that answer like it actually meant anything. “With her?”

“As far as they’ll let me.”

He nodded, though his jaw had gone tight. He huffed, half laughing, but close enough that Gami’s face softened for half a breath before hardening again.

From the washroom came the sound of water being poured into a basin. A drawer opened. Cloth rustled. Misea murmured something too low to catch. Then Waaska’s voice, soft and uncertain, answered.

Rose told me later that washing her face felt like the first wrong thing.

It should have been nothing. Just some cool water and soap. A cloth across the cheeks, the jaw, the back of the neck. She had done it every morning of her life. Though that day, every ordinary movement felt ceremonial in the worst way. Like preparing for judgment, as someone had taken the small private rituals of being alive and turned them into steps before a public hanging.

Misea helped her into the dress.

The fabric settled over Rose quietly, green-colored and old, the prairie roses curling around her sleeves like something stubborn enough to bloom anyway. The fit was not perfect. It had been made for another woman in another year, but Misea pinned and tucked with practiced hands until it looked intentional.

Waaska stood behind Rose with the ribbon. It was pale gold, almost the color of dried wheat when the sun caught it right. Her fingers shook so badly she fumbled the first knot.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Rose met her eyes in the little cracked mirror. “For the ribbon?”

Waaska swallowed. “For shaking.”

Misea’s hands paused at Rose’s hair. No one said anything.

Waaska tried again. This time she managed to fasten the ribbon at the end of Rose’s braid, careful not to pull too hard. Rose watched herself in the mirror and struggled to understand the girl looking back.

She looked nice. That felt horrible.

The green dress softened her. The embroidered roses made her look like someone’s daughter, someone’s hope, someone who had woken for a festival instead of a Reaping. Her twin braids lay over her shoulders, each tied neatly. The ribbon held. Her face was pale, freckles refusing to wash away but clean. Her eyes looked too bright.

She wondered, with sudden nausea, whether people would see the dress and think she was trying to look innocent. Or worse, whether they would think she was trying to look worthy of mourning.

“Boots,” Misea said, biting back a sniffle.

Rose sat on the bench while Waaska brought them over.

The white boots had sunflowers stitched along the sides in yellow thread, their petals small and cheerful. Too cheerful. Rose had loved them once. She had begged to wear them too often when she was younger, even through mud, until Virgil threatened to lock them away if she ruined the embroidery.

Now she stared at them like they belonged to another girl.

“You don’t have to wear those,” Waaska said quickly, mistaking her silence. “We can find your brown pair, or-”

“No.” Rose reached for one. “These are fine.”

Fine. What an awful little word.

She pulled them on one at a time. The leather creaked softly around her ankles. .

Misea finally finished the last button at Rose’s wrist. Then she turned away too fast. Rose saw it anyway.

Her aunt pressing two fingers beneath her eyes. Her shoulders rising once. The way she gripped the edge of the washstand until the knuckles whitened.

“Misea?” Rose said.

“I’m all right.” Misea said, her voice tight, before she admitted the truth. “I’m not. But neither are you, and we’re both standing, so let’s not get particular.”

Rose stood. Misea faced her again. For a moment, the briskness fell away. She reached out and smoothed the dress over Rose’s shoulders, then touched one of the embroidered prairie roses near her collar.

Misea smiled back, but it broke at the edges. “Virgil… he would’ve loved to see you in this.”

The name settled over the room. Rose’s smile faded.

“I wish he was here,” she said.

Misea drew her in at once. She hugged Rose like she was trying to hold all the pieces in place by strength alone.

“I know,” Misea whispered into her hair. “Oh, honey, I know.”

Soon, it was Waaska’s turn to be prepped for Reaping Day, her dress much newer, less damaged. It shined a beautiful cream tone that reminded Rosabel of wheat the moment autumn’s chill hit the fields.

By the time they came back into the main room, every conversation stopped.

I had thought I was prepared. I was not.

Rose stood in the doorway in that old floral dress, prairie roses at her hem, sunflower boots peeking beneath, her hair braided neat and tied with gold. She looked like the morning. That was the first ridiculous thought that came to me. She looked like something the district had no right to destroy.

Then she looked at me, and the thought burned up. Because she was terrified, though, it felt far more brutal than that. It wasn’t noticeable to anyone who didn’t know or understand where she hid it. Her chin was lifted, shoulders back. Her hands rested still at her sides.

But I knew. Again, I saw the fear beneath her collarbones.

Again. Again. Again.

My hands curled once before I forced them open.

“Will it do?” Rose asked, attempting lightness.

No one answered quickly enough. Then Tunka shifted in his chair.

“Come here, child,” he calmly ordered his surrogate grandchild. His voice sounded thinner than usual. Age had always lived in it, but that morning something else did too. Fear, perhaps. Or memory. Maybe both.

Rose crossed to him and knelt, though he did not ask her to.

Tunka Ziibi studied her face for a long moment. His eyes, clouded at the edges but still sharp where it mattered, moved over her braids, the ribbon, the dress, the boots. When he lifted his hand, Rose bent her head so he could rest his palm against her hair.

“You wear old love today,” he finally replied.

Rose’s eyes shone.

Tunka’s thumb brushed once over her temple. “Old love is strong. Stronger than fear, though fear makes more noise, I suppose.”

The room went very still. Rose swallowed. “Thanks but… I don’t feel strong.”

“That is because you are listening to the noise.”

Minha, who was brushing out one of her granddaughter’s hair for the reaping, hesitated. Her eyes studied her father-in-laws words. Mina, who had been fussing over Zaaga all morning had to cover her mouth. Misea and Gami, both understanding the weight of his words, knew what the implications were for their niece.

Tunka leaned closer, his voice lowering. “Listen beneath it.”

“To what?” she whispered. Rose held his gaze.

“To what remains.” He let his hand fall.

It was not enough to save her. Nothing anyone said that morning could be.

Though, Rose closed her eyes for one breath, and when she opened them, she looked a little less alone inside her own body. Gami stepped forward next. He cleared his throat once, twice, then held out a small, scented cloth.

“For your pocket,” he said.

Rose took it, before opening the cloth to reveal dark, shriveled berries. “What is it?”

“Elderberries.” Gami nodded. “The boys get Hawthorne berries, while the girls usually… they usually take them to make them smell better at the reaping.”

“That’s not the only thing, Gami!” Mina interrupted her older brother before giving Rose a comforting smile. “It’s said that carrying a batch of those berries around will grant you good fortune. That’s what the Mniwakan kids have done. Ever since our very first reapings.”

Rose’s mouth trembled into something almost like amusement. Gami gave a tight-lipped smile toward the packet. “Doesn’t matter what you do with them… just know that you still have family here to wish you the best.”

Rose folded it carefully into her pocket. “Thank you.”

Nibs had not moved from the table. His face had gone blotchy with the effort of not crying. Waaska smoothed out her cream-colored dress as she received for own batch of berries with trembling hands. Some of the cousins of reaping age threw each other nervous stares and hushed murmurs as the last of the Mniwakan pack prepared themselves for the Reaping.

Outside, the first official bell rang from town. The sound came faint through the lodge walls, but everyone heard it. No one moved.

Then Misea inhaled, sharp and practical, and clapped her hands once. “Well, we won’t give the Capitol the satisfaction of making us late.”

It was such a Misea thing to say that Rose nearly laughed. Nearly.

Coats were gathered. Buttons checked. Doors latched. Minha, who was barely keeping it together, put out the stove though nothing on it needed tending. Waaska adjusted Rose’s ribbon one more time, then pretended she hadn’t. Nibs stood close enough to touch Rose’s sleeve but didn’t quite hold on.

I stepped outside first. July morning had warmed slightly, but not by much. A thin wind moved over the yard, carrying dust from the road and the distant murmur of New Bisman already filling itself with bodies. Wagons creaked somewhere beyond the rise. Horses snorted. A dog barked once and was quickly hushed.

Rose paused in the doorway. For a moment, no one crowded her.

She looked over the yard, the rail fence, the hard pale sky. She looked toward the road that would take them to the square. Her hand brushed the pocket where Gami’s packet sat. Then, almost without thinking, her fingers moved to the ribbon at the end of her braid.

I wondered whether she was remembering the bow. The Secret Garden. The bark splitting beneath her arrow, or whether she was thinking of the ballot box and its narrow mouth.

Either way, when she stepped down from the porch alongside her cousins, she did it carefully, as if the ground itself had become something watched. The children of reaping age followed alongside their parents, aunts, uncles, Waaska, and Nibs. The only two left at home were Zibins and his father, given Tunka Ziibi’s age, which prevented him from making long journeys. As I slipped through the door, I noted Zibins, despite being the hardened man he was, bowed his head solemnly as his grandchildren made their way to the square.

The family gathered around her, but not close enough to hide her. Though, nothing could hide her now. The road to New Bisman waited.  Rose lifted her chin, and the prairie roses at her hem stirred in the wind.

The walk into New Bisman felt longer than it was. That was the ugly, little thing about dread. It stretched roads, turned fence lines into miles, and made every familiar bend in the path feel like a question you already knew the answer to but had to keep walking toward anyway.

The Mniwakan children moved in a loose cluster ahead of us, quieter than I had ever seen them. Among them, Waaska walked close to Rose but not quite touching her. Nibs stayed on Rose’s other side, one hand swinging at his hip like he meant to reach for her sleeve and kept talking himself out of it.

The rest of us followed close enough to look like family and far enough to remember that, in a few minutes, family would be sorted away from children.

That was the first cruelty of the square. New Bisman had dressed itself for Reaping Day.

It was shabby at best. 9 did not know how to do pretty in the way the Capitol meant it. Still, people had scrubbed what could be scrubbed. Boots were blackened with Lacker. Hair combed, slicked back, or pinned fine enough to be considered “passable”. Dresses let out or pinned tighter. Boys wore collars stiff enough to make them look strangled, and girls had ribbons tied into hair that had probably been washed before sunrise with water still cold from the pump.

On any other morning, half those children would have been in patched field clothes, mill dust, or work boots with grain husks stuck in the seams. Reaping Day made them look too clean.

That was the rule. Dress properly. Posture straight. Do not embarrass the Capitol while it takes from you.

That rule came in after the fifteenth Games or maybe the sixteenth? The games had all blended together after so many Reapings. Some boy from an outlying district, either 6 or 8, but definitely not 9, had purposely volunteered in nothing but a hide wrap and a strip of cloth tied at his waist, and not in a bashful, frightened way as if somebody had dared him to. No, that boy was on a mission, making sure the Capitol played by his game this time. If memory serves me, the kid practically skipped on stage as the peacekeepers tried to drag him into something decent, but he’d simply laughed right at the cameras and said he’d been born nearer the earth than the Capitol and meant to die that way too.

Nearly gave the announcers fits. The whole Capitol had called it savage and ridiculous until the boy actually won. I still wished I could’ve seen the gamemakers’ faces. There was poetry in a thing like that, even if Panem tried its best to beat poetry out of everyone poor enough to understand it.

After that, the districts received wardrobe expectations. Written ones. Pressed into every mayor’s office and academy board, passed down with the same grim seriousness as tax instructions. No bare feet. No exposed underclothes. No visible work grime. No statements of political, cultural, regional, or familial provocation.

That last one was broad enough to cover anything the Capitol disliked after the fact, which was generally how the Capitol preferred its rules.

Rose knew the rule too. Everyone did. Maybe that was why she kept smoothing one hand over the prairie roses at her skirt. Not because anything was wrong with them. Simply… everything was.

The closer we came to the square, the louder New Bisman became, though not in any way that resembled life. It was a careful noise. Vendor calls cut short whenever a peacekeeper passed. Mothers whispering into collars. Wagons creaking over dry ruts. Horses stamping near hitching rails. Children breathing too fast.

And of course, people looked at Rose. Some tried not to of course. That might have been worse, though.

A woman who used to buy cider from Virgil’s place every autumn pressed a hand to her mouth when Rose passed and then turned away so quickly her bonnet strings swung. An academy boy stared at Rose’s boots until his father knocked him lightly in the chest and murmured something too low to hear. One of the mill men gave her a nod that looked almost respectful before shame pulled his eyes back to the dirt.

Too kind. Too silent. Too relieved…

Rose felt all three like hands on her back.

She had the strange thought that she could tell, somehow, who had written her name. Obviously she wasn’t certain. No one had told her, but no one had to. It was in the quick glances, the softness, the way some people looked at her like apology was already waiting behind their teeth but not brave enough to step out.

A girl from the academy smiled at her. Rose did not know what to do with that. The smile was small and trembling, but not in a scheming, satisfied way. Rather almost apologetically. Like the girl had given away a match in winter and now wanted to pretend she had not helped start a fire.

Rose looked ahead. Town hall rose beyond the market road, whitewashed and blank, its windows open to the summer air. The stage had been formulated around the great step leading up to the building, higher than usual, wide enough for officials, peacekeepers, and whatever new Capitol machinery had come to dress the Quarter Quell in ceremony. Fresh bunting hung from the rail in District 9’s dull harvest gold and Capitol red. The colors looked wrong together.

Off to one side, the imprisoned children had already been brought in. Not all of them. Just the ones old enough for the vote and important enough to display.

Peacekeepers kept them in a separate line near the jail wagon, wrists bound in front with short chains that made even standing look like obedience. The crowd gave them a wide berth. Though, not necessarily out of fear alone, but rather convenience. People liked a clean boundary around the ones they had decided could be lost.

I saw Hoel Ellendale immediately.

He stood with his shoulders hunched and his chin tipped low, dark hair falling into his eyes. One cheek was bruised yellow and purple near the jaw. The cuffs looked too large on his wrists, which made him seem younger for half a breath until he lifted his gaze and looked at the crowd with such flat hatred that the illusion broke.

He did not look ashamed. That was what I first noticed. He looked furious, like a hint of old Hoffboss managed to possess his younger brother, even in the afterlife.

Beside him, another boy muttered something, and Hoel’s mouth twitched in a humorless shape that might have been a smile if joy had anything to do with it. A peacekeeper shoved the boy beside him quiet. Hoel did not react, except to glance toward the stage as if measuring the distance between himself and every person who had helped put him there.

Then his eyes found mine. Those same brown eyes that looked too much like his brother’s. Only briefly, though. There was no recognition in his gaze to soften him. No pity. Nor accusation either, not yet.

Just… a young boy doomed by his brother to be standing present and aware, understanding that the district had been given a knife and told to call it a ballot.

I looked away first; my eyes instead fixed on Rose. I saw the way her fingers curled against her skirt after.

“Keep moving,” a peacekeeper barked near the sorting ropes.

The square had been divided by age, like always. Twelve-year-olds toward the front, small and pale and trying not to cry. Thirteen and fourteen next. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Boys to one side, girls to the other. The old arrangement of the Games. Only now the ropes looked less like organization and more like pens.

Waaska stopped when they reached the break. She had to go with the fifteen-year-olds. Rose had to go farther. For one second, Waaska looked as if she might follow anyway.

“Waaska,” Misea said gently to her daughter. The girl froze.

Rose then turned to her cousin. “Remember...”

Waaska’s face twisted at this unknown statement hidden between the two of them. She nodded, but it looked painful.

Nibs grabbed Rose then. He moved fast, before anyone could stop him, throwing both arms around her waist with the desperate strength of a child who had decided dignity was useless. Rose bent around him, eyes closing tight.

“I’ll look for you after,” she whispered to the boy, who fiercely held on tight to her dress.

Nibs, knowing that this was a lie, finally relented. “M’kay.”

“Good.” Rose’s voice still faltered.

Misea touched Nibs’s shoulder, but she did not pull him away at once. Even when the peacekeeper near the intake station began to frown.

Finally, Nibs let go. Misea stepped in next. She did not cry, which was even more heartbreaking. Her face had gone still with the effort of it, all that feeling packed behind her eyes until I wondered how a person’s skull still held.

She cupped Rose’s cheeks the way she had at the lodge. Then, her chin quivered. “Prickle briar.”

Rose’s composure wavered. Just a little.

Misea pressed her forehead to Rose’s. “Whatever happens, you are not what they make of you today.”

Rose’s eyes shone. “Auntie-”

“No. Just listen.” Misea’s voice trembled but did not break. “You are a girl born of fire, of something so strong, it terrifies even the Capitol. You will use that strength, you hear me?”

Rose nodded once.

“You are not a vote or a rumor. You are not a flame that the Capitol can designate to a candle.” Misea swallowed. “Your father wasn’t… and neither are you.”

A peacekeeper at the intake station called, “Girls of seventeen, this way!”

Misea’s hands tightened. Then released.

I hated her for letting go. Though I loved her for having the strength to.

Rose turned to me last. For all my thinking, all my planning, all my illegal bows and ugly tricks, I had nothing useful in my mouth.

She looked up at me, waiting.

I reached into my coat and thumbed at the Secret Garden’s key, wondering if I should hand it off to her. Give her a sign that she would return safely. That this key would be useless unless she lived long enough to return it back to its lock.

Her eyes dropped to my pocket, instantly understanding. Then back to mine.

“Auphie.” She sternly assured me. “Don’t.”

“Rosabel…”

“Don’t argue with me at a Reaping.” She shook her head. “People might get suspicious, you know?”

And you’ll never be able to enter the Secret Garden again, was the other thing she thought. Though those words never reached fruition.

That almost got me. I relented, letting the cool metal dip back into my pocket.

“I…” she whispered. “…don’t know if I can do this.”

There were hundreds of people around us, and still the words seemed to belong only to the space between her ribs and mine. I wanted to tell her she would not have to, that I’d could burn the stage down first. I wanted to tell her every brave, stupid lie a man tells when love has made him useless.

Instead, I bent close enough that only she could hear.

“You don’t have to know,” I admitted. “You just have to breathe until the next thing comes, ya hear?”

Her mouth trembled. “I’ll… I’ll keep breathing, Auphie.”

I gave her a small nod, her determination gave me a respectable amount of hope.

A peacekeeper stepped closer, herding Rose and Waaska to their respective stations. “Get in line-”

I looked at him. He looked at my bad leg, then my face, and must have decided whatever he saw there was not worth the paperwork.

Rose lingered for a few moments longer, before she made her way to the intake booth, confirming her name, age, and other useless confirmation details. Then she was gone into the line of seventeen-year-old girls, green dress among gray uniforms and brown work skirts, prairie roses at her hem, sunflower boots planted carefully in the dust.

The rest of the Mniwakan family were forced to stand in the very back alongside the rest of the citizens. Misea stood beside me, one hand pressed to her chest.

Waaska had joined her age group as well, but her eyes were fixed on Rose. Nibs stood rigid at his father’s side, jaw clenched hard enough to ache. Around us, families separated and re-formed into the required shapes. Children inside the ropes. Adults outside. Peacekeepers between.

Rose kept her chin lifted. Still, I could see her shoulders. I could see where she carried fear.

The stage waited at the front of the square, its bunting moving faintly in the wind. Two golden envelopes were set beside the podium, sealed and official beneath the Capitol seal. The mayor’s chair sat empty with his officials’ seats on the sides. The microphones gleamed black in the morning light.

Everything looked orderly. That was how you knew it was punishment. For a while, no one spoke into the microphones. That was another cruelty about the reapings. The waiting.

The children had already been sorted. Families already split into their proper places. Peacekeepers had found their corners and edges, standing with rifles angled just low enough to call it ceremony instead of threat.

Rose stood with the seventeen-year-old girls, third row back, near enough towards the outlying crowd that she could see her family from a safe distance and far enough that we appeared little more than a jury to a trial.

Waaska stood with the fifteen-year-old girls two sections over. She had both hands clasped in front of her cream dress, fingers locked so tightly one could practically see the strain in her knuckles even from where she blended into the crowd. Every few breaths, Waaska looked toward her.

Rose tried to look back each time. She had promised, no spectacle… or at least something close to it.

The square smelled of dust, clean soap, summer heat, horse tack, and the faint grease of food vendors still trying to sell breakfast along the far road. It was indecent, that smell. Of hot food nearby for all the district children to remember what was to come. The body remembered hunger even when the soul had gone sick.

Rose swallowed against it.

A peacekeeper near the stage lifted a hand. Then, the murmuring thinned.

Then Mayor Lancaster stepped onto the platform. He looked smaller than he ought to have. That was my first thought, watching from the back with the rest of the adults. Lancaster had always had a way of filling a room without raising his voice, not through courage exactly, but through office and momentum. Men like him knew how to wear authority until people mistook the coat for the body beneath it.

Though, that morning, standing beneath Capitol red and harvest gold, he looked like a man who had been placed somewhere and told not to move.

His suit was dark, pressed, too warm for July. One sleeve still sat a touch stiff, just like his dress collar. His face was practically erased from any hardships that 9 had unceremoniously thrown at the rest of its citizens. I could tell this was on purpose, as cameras across the square blinked and adjusted, occasionally having the lens zoom in on a child that looked particularly promising… or miserable.

Once, Lancaster had made his presence known, however, the camera crew made sure to get as many angles of the stage as possible. Some focused on highlighting the mayor’s authority and in turn, the Capitol’s as well. Though, despite all the Reaping prep for appearances, nothing could do much for Lancaster’s eyes. Those looked raw. Old. Trapped.

He approached the microphone, before raising his hands to address his people.

“Boys and girls!” His voice smoothed over the crowd as smooth as butter. Rehearsed a thousand times before, no doubt. “District 9! I am your mayor, Panis Lancaster! And as such, I would like to warmly welcome our district children for making it on this… monumental day!”

The man looked like he wanted to say something more, maybe something akin to comfort. Instead, he continued.

“As you may be aware,” He continued. “This year’s Reaping ceremony was conducted a little differently. As a civic duty to your country and your district, each child of reaping age has been required to select one young man and woman.”

I half expected there to be a riot breaking out once more. However, the fight that burned buildings a month ago seemed to be extinguished as we simply stared on, waiting for the inevitable.

“And because of this special occasion. Because of your continued cooperation of our 25th Games, President P.S. Axel himself would like to present a special message for our very first Quarter Quell.”

Our very first Quarter Quell.

That sentence didn’t sit right with me. Very first. A more optimistic version of me would like to bear that maybe this would’ve been the last of the Hunger Games, after this year. That Quarter Quell was a signal of the Games coming to an end. A bloody, horrific end, that future children could simply look back on in a history book and be relieved that they weren’t alive then.

No. The Capitol had no plans on ending the nightmare. This was merely the kindling.

Of course, when President Axel was mentioned, nobody expected the man himself to come waltzing out in his usual attire. Like he had been taken straight off of those annoying Capitol posters that the street kids like to vandalize, knowing full well they’d pay for their crimes later.

No, Axel decided to make his debut in 9 through a measly piece of paper that Lancaster unfolded before us all.

The mayor rarely spoke with a note card and hardly needed to anyway. His ability to speak on the fly was remarkable, possibly the same skill that landed him as District 9’s mayor.

This time it was different. In his hand was thick Capitol paper. All formal and printed. Stamped at the top with President Axel’s seal, no doubt.

A murmur traveled through the square when people noticed. Lancaster waited for it to die. It did not die fully, only crawled lower. He cleared his throat.

“Citizens of District 9,” he recited, the microphone dragged his voice thin across the square. “Today marks the commencement of the 25th Hunger Games and the inaugural observance of the Quarter Quell, a solemn addition to our national tradition of remembrance, consequence, and unity.”

I felt Misea stiffen beside me.

Unity. Right.

That word had never done an honest day’s work in its life.

Lancaster read on, his voice was steady enough to pass for control if a person did not know what fear sounded like when it wore a mayor’s mouth. “By the order of your acting president, Pompeius Axel, and in recognition of the sacrifices made to preserve the peace of Panem, this year’s tributes shall stand not merely as names drawn by chance, but as representatives selected by the collective civic voice of their district.”

Rose stared at him. Collective civic voice.

The phrase seemed to spread over the children like smoke. It was a fluffed-up version of chosen… condemned.

Rose’s fingers curled against the side of her dress. Around her, children shifted. A girl in front of her began crying silently, her shoulders shaking while her chin stayed lifted as though she had been told not to embarrass her family. A boy across the square made a soft, disbelieving sound and was immediately hushed by the peacekeeper nearest him.

Lancaster’s eyes did not leave the page.

“As your leader, I extend my confidence to the people of District 9, whose participation in this process reflects the enduring strength of Panem’s shared future. To those whose names are revealed today, the Capitol offers honor, opportunity, and the full consideration afforded to every tribute who carries their district’s hopes into the arena.”

My jaw tightened hard enough to ache. Honor? Opportunity? District hopes?

I wondered if Axel actually wrote those words himself or if some Capitol clerk had polished them up while drinking sweet coffee in a bright room where no child had ever been expected to die for anyone’s future.

Either way, I hated him for them.

Lancaster paused. Only briefly. His eyes lifted from the page and moved over the crowd, though not at the adults. The children.

For one strange second, the paper seemed to lower in his hand. Again, another unspoken thought that would never see the light of day.

Lancaster looked back down. “May the selected tributes bring distinction to Panem’s breadbasket. May the value of choice forever echo through our beautiful land that is Panem. May your children and those who come after understand the dedication that we, the people, hold united. And above all else…” he read, voice thinner now, “…may the odds be ever in their favor.”

The square stayed silent. No one applaused. Not even the weak, frightened kind people sometimes offered when silence became dangerous. Simple stillness was all that remained.

Lancaster folded the paper with a care that looked almost like shame.

“In years past,” he said, and now the words seemed to be his own, or closer to it, “It has been the duty of the mayor’s office to conduct the Reaping according to established district procedure.”

A few heads lifted. Everyone knew that. Everyone expected that.

Mayor Lancaster would read the names. A boy and a girl. He would do it grimly and formally, because that was what he had always done. Then the tributes would be taken inside, the train would come, and the district would begin its yearly mourning.

Though, it wasn’t Lancaster who made the unfortunate decision this year. Instead, he stepped back.

“This year,” he continued, trying his best to feign enthusiasm, “in accordance with this year’s special procedures of the Quarter Quell, the final certification and announcement of the district’s selected tributes will be conducted by official representatives of the Capitol.”

The silence changed. Rose felt it. Before, it had been dread. Now it was confusion sharpening toward fear. Lancaster turned slightly toward the side of the stage.

“District 9.” Lancaster held out a showing arm to the right side of the stage. “Please welcome, Yvette Dolittle and Threax Moss as our official representatives of this year’s Reaping ceremony!”

A woman stepped on stage first. Yvette Dolittle, walked towards the podium, as if the square had been built for the purpose of receiving her.

She wore a deep green formal military uniform tailored so precisely it seemed less sewn than engineered. The jacket clasped high at the throat, sharp at the shoulders, gleaming with brass buttons and narrow black piping, various dark metals decorated her blazer. Her gloves were black. Boots performatively over dramatic for being real combat ones. Her hair, a smooth black coil at the back of her head, held not a single loose strand.

Her skin was spotless. Not clear in the natural way some people were blessed with, but polished beyond weather, labor, or ordinary life. Gleaming, almost. Like porcelain left too long in a cabinet. Her mouth was painted a reserved shade of red, too controlled to look festive, and her eyes were green. And not like Rosabel’s green.

The color sat strangely against her face, bright and glassy, not quite belonging. Capitol work, surely. Dye or some vanity I did not know the name for. The effect made the shorter yet broad woman look half human and half like an ornament.

The man behind her appeared less certain of his own performance. Threax Moss wore the same dark green uniform, though his looked lived-in by comparison. It wasn’t wrinkled, never that, but less worshipful of its own shape. He was young, perhaps not much older than somebody like Gooseneck, with tired eyes and hair combed back too precisely from his forehead. His face held the drained patience of a man who had been given instructions he did not admire but intended to execute correctly.

He did not smile. Neither did Dolittle.

That was when I understood.

The costumes were theatrical, yes. The green uniforms, the gleaming metals, and their perfect little march to the microphones. The titles, the posture, the Capitol’s fondness for making every ordinary horror look rehearsed.

But these two were not performers. At least, not underneath.

Dolittle’s eyes moved across the crowd with assessment, not vanity. Moss stood with his weight evenly placed, hands still, shoulders alert. Military-trained, both of them. Not front-line peacekeepers, but something close enough to know discipline from decoration.

The Capitol had not sent simple fools to parade about the fact that they had been plagued by district soil. It had sent handlers.

Rose understood it too, though perhaps not in those words.

District 9 had cast the votes, but the Capitol had come to own the moment. That was the trick of it. Let the district dirty its hands and let the Capitol arrive in clean gloves.

Yvette Dolittle took the center microphone.

“Thank you, Mayor Lancaster,” she said, her voice was elegant and cold, every syllable polished enough to cut bread, but not in a solemn way like Lancaster. They had a job to do. “It is an honor to stand before District 9 on this historic morning.”

Somewhere behind me, Gami made a sound in his throat. Misea’s hand tightened around her own wrist.

Dolittle continued, “The Quarter Quell represents not simply a continuation of Panem’s most essential tradition, but its refinement. Today, the will of District 9 has been received, certified, and sealed under the tireless work of Capitol authority.”

Her green eyes moved toward the children. Rose felt, absurdly, as if the woman had looked straight at her.

“Let it be understood,” Dolittle continued, “That every properly submitted ballot has been counted. Every eligible candidate has been considered. Every selection has already been verified.”

She smiled then, however if held no such warmth. Instead, it was the kind of smile one might give to a locked door. “With that understanding… the Capitol thanks you for your participation.”

Rose’s stomach turned. Beside the podium, Threax Moss stepped to the side, where a nameless assistant held out two gold-sealed envelopes on a literal platter. He did not hurry, though he hadn’t dragged the moment out either. He moved with the efficient calm of a man opening a file.

Two envelopes.

One marked in white script: GIRL.

The other: BOY.

Rose stared at them until the words blurred.

In all the years she had watched Reapings, the names had been pulled from decorative, glass bowls, clear and terrible, filled with folded slips of paper. There had always been something awful in seeing chance made visible. The slips piled together, the hand reaching in, the tiny pause before fate became language.

This was much worse. No stupid bowl to hate nor scrambling paper.

There was no longer the illusion that luck had anything to do with it.

Only two envelopes, already sealed and decided. The district’s fear pressed flat into gold.

Moss lifted the first envelope and carried it to Dolittle. His face showed nothing. The official woman accepted it with both hands.

Rose became aware of her own breathing.

In. Out.

She was starting to remember what I had told her.

You just have to breathe until the next thing comes.

In. Out.

Across the square, Waaska was staring at her instead of the stage.

Rose noted her cousin’s concentration once... but only once. Then she faced forward.

Yvette Dolittle slid one gloved finger beneath the seal. The gold paper opened with a soft, tearing sound that seemed to carry across the whole square.

For a moment, no one breathed. They couldn’t.

Not the children standing inside the ropes, nor the parents pressed along the edges, or the distant vendors pretending their fires still needed tending hadn’t made so much as a peep. Even the horses seemed to still near the hitching posts, their ears flicking toward the stage as if they too were waiting for the district to shame itself aloud.

Dolittle withdrew the card. It was white, small, clean, innocent...

Rose watched the woman’s eyes move over it. Just once, with zero hesitation or surprise. Nothing in her face shifted to acknowledge that the card held a life instead of a word.

Then Yvette Dolittle lifted her chin to the microphone.

“District 9’s selected female tribute for the 25th Hunger Games is…”

Rose felt her own pulse move strangely in her ears, almost like a river current. Yet… separate from her somehow. In her head, she already knew. Instead of the District’s word, it was Rose who decided whose name was on that ballot. And… so did I.

I closed my eyes, allowing my ears to make the rest, and… I took my own advice. I breathed.

In… out…

Rose’s fingers brushed the side of her dress, finding the raised thread of one prairie rose stitched near her hip. Her eyes stared ahead at nothing in particular, as Dolittle smiled.

That’s when her name was called, only I hadn’t registered Dolittle’s voice properly. I all but blotted out that memory, instead, focusing on my other senses, like the smell of earthen dust, the feel of grit underneath my fingernails, the bitterness of adrenaline racing across my tongue as I finally heard the truth straight from the Capitol’s mouth.

The square did not erupt, though a part of me wished it had.

Instead, the sound came in pieces.

A sharp gasp from somewhere behind Rose. A woman’s wounded cry cut off by someone else’s hand. A murmur that moved like wind across dry grain, not loud enough to be called outrage and not quiet enough to be called grief. Somewhere, a child began sobbing. Somewhere else, someone whispered, “No,” with such practiced sorrow that I knew, with a sick little certainty, that they had written her name and were only now allowing themselves to mourn it.

A man swore under his breath. Another said, “She has a chance,” too softly for courage and too quickly for belief. Someone else murmured, “Better her than-” and stopped before finishing the sentence, knowing justifications only made things worse.

I knew Rose had heard all of it. Or maybe I only thought she did.

Maybe she only imagined the words because she had been living inside them all week.

For a second, her body forgot what it was meant to do. Her name hung over the square, repeated through the microphone’s thin echo, no longer belonging to her mouth, her school papers, her father’s voice, or Waaska calling from another room.

Rosabel Tempest-Strix. The selected tribute. The district’s answer.

Her answer, too, in some way she hated.

Rose did not collapse. That was the first thing I noticed when my eyes opened.

I knew she was afraid. I saw the fear go through her. It moved across her shoulders, through her throat, down into her hands, but she caught it before anyone else could name it. She did not cover her mouth. Did not look for me. She did not look at her aunt or even Waaska.

She looked forward. Composed, they might have called it. Brave, if they wanted to make themselves feel better. Though, I knew better, and so did Rose.

It was last piece of herself she could still keep. Control…

Dolittle stepped back from the microphone and turned toward the row of girls facing her left as if Rose might need help recognizing her own name.

“The female tribute,” she repeated, sharper this time. “May proceed to the stage, please.”

Please? That word had no business being there.

Rose’s first step was almost ordinary. One boot forward. Then the other. Sunflowers stitched in yellow thread flashing beneath the hem of her grandmother’s dress. The girl in front of her shifted aside too fast, face crumpling with relief before shame swallowed it. Another girl pressed both hands to her mouth and turned away.

Rose passed them. She kept her chin lifted. The ropes opened before her.

The path to the stage had never looked long from the crowd. In all the years she had watched other children walk it, it had seemed brutally short. A few steps through dust, a hand at the elbow, before a climb onto wood. Then gone. Now it stretched like a road out of the district entirely.

She was halfway there when-

“N-NO!”

A scream tore through the square so violently that even Dolittle’s head snapped toward it.

Rose stopped before turning.

Waaska broke from the fifteen-year-old row like something flung. She ducked under the rope before the nearest peacekeeper understood what she was doing, her skirts swishing with speed in mind, a stray piece of hair escaping her own braid. For one wild second, she looked small enough to still be running across the lodge yard after a dropped toy.

Then she was in the aisle, shoving past a stunned girl, both hands reaching for Rose.

“No, no, no, please!” Waaska cried. “Rose, no!”

“Waaska!” Rose attempted to hush her.

It was not loud enough to reach her. Waaska threw herself at Rose with such force that Rose stumbled back half a step and caught her by the shoulders. The younger girl clung to her, sobbing openly now, all the dignity Reaping Day demanded ripped out of her by the roots.

“Take me!” Waaska screamed toward the stage, toward the peacekeepers, toward anyone with enough power to pretend they had none. “Take me please! I-I wrote my name! I wrote mine, you can check! Please, you can check it!”

The square went still in a new way. A terrible way.

Rose’s hands tightened on Waaska’s arms.

“Don’t,” she said, low and urgent. “Waaska, please, don’t.”

But Waaska was beyond hearing.

“It should be me!” she cried. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry, Rose, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean for them to-” Her voice broke into something raw and young. “Please, take me! She shouldn’t go! She shouldn’t!”

A peacekeeper moved first. Then another. I moved too.

I do not remember deciding to.

One second I was standing beside Misea, and the next my bad leg had already betrayed me by not moving fast enough. Gami caught my arm before I could make it worse. Or maybe he saved me. I hated him for both.

“Auphie,” he said through his teeth.

“Let go!” I demanded.

He didn’t. Misea had one hand over her mouth. Nibs was crying now, silent and furious, both fists clenched at his sides. Around us, the district watched.

That was what I remember most. They simply watched.

The same people who had whispered Rose’s name into ballots, who had told their children there were worse choices, easier choices, practical choices, watched Waaska try to hand herself over in the dirt.

Watched love fail to count. One peacekeeper seized Waaska by the arm.

She twisted away hard enough to nearly fall. “No! Don’t touch me!”

Rose stepped between them without thinking. “D-Don’t hurt her.”

The peacekeeper paused, not because he cared, but because the cameras had turned. Rose realized it at the same time I did.

The black lenses fixed on her, specifically on Waaska. On the pretty girl in the green dress holding a sobbing friend who had tried to volunteer too late. On the district being made to see its own choice made flesh.

Dolittle said nothing. Moss’s face tightened, just slightly.

The peacekeeper reached again.

This time, one of the older Mniwakan cousins and Gami himself pushed through the edge of the crowd and grabbed Waaska around the wrists before the peacekeeper could drag her by force. Waaska’s father feared the repercussions of his daughter, yes, but he could understand why she had done this. They held on as Waaska thrashed against them.

“NO!” Waaska screamed, reaching for Rose over her father’s arm as he hoisted her up. “ROSIE!”

Rose’s face changed then. The composure cracked where only those who loved her could see it.

Her mouth trembled once before she steadied it. She took one step toward Waaska, and for a wild, stupid moment, I thought she might run to her. That she might forget the stage, the cameras, the rifles, the whole rotten country watching, and choose her family instead.

Then Rose stopped. She remembered.

Waaska had asked her not to make a spectacle. Rose had asked Waaska to be strong. Neither of them had known how impossible that would be.

Gami pulled her back into the family’s side of the ropes. Misea reached for her daughter at once, gathering Waaska into her arms, but Waaska simply sobbed into her mother’s shoulder, undoubtedly feeling helpless about the entire situation.

Rose walked the rest of the way alone.

Each step felt too loud. The dust clung to the white leather of her boots. The prairie roses at her hem stirred in the light wind. Her braid ribbon had loosened slightly from Waaska’s grip, one end trailing over her shoulder like a piece of torn sunlight.

When she reached the stage stairs, a peacekeeper extended a hand. Rose did not take it. She lifted her skirt just enough to climb without stumbling and stepped onto the platform herself.

Dolittle watched her approach with that locked-door smile.

“Welcome, Miss Tempest-Strix,” she said softly, away from the microphone. Rose looked at her. There were many things she could have said. None of them would have given her back peace.

So, she said nothing. She turned to face District Nine.

From the stage, the square looked different, like… a corral of sorts. Contained, a fenced thing, with rows of children lined with adults. Families pressed together and held apart. Cameras blinking like black insects in the sun.

Rose found me first. She could not help it.

I stood beside the Mniwakan family with the eerie presence of a soldier. Her cousin was folded into Misea’s arms, still crying hard enough that her shoulders shook. Nibs stood beside them, face wet and furious. Gami had one hand on Waaska’s back, as if he did not trust her not to run at the stage and get herself shot. He was right not to.

Rose’s eyes lingered. I wanted to give her something.

Maybe a nod, a smile, a command, a promise? Something poetic?

All I managed was to stand there and look back at her like a useless man with empty hands.

Rose still saw me. She saw all of us.

And for one merciful moment, the Capitol allowed silence to sit.

That was another thing they knew how to do. They liked to make their noise, sure, but the Capitol understood the usefulness of quiet after a wound. Let the district hear itself breathing, with every mother, father, cousin, and neighbor alike remembering exactly where they had been standing when the girl in the green dress climbed the stage. When they put her to death.

Then Threax Moss moved.

He stepped toward the nameless assistant with the platter and took the second envelope. The one marked BOY in clean white script. His expression did not alter as he accepted it, though his fingers lingered on the seal half a second longer than Dolittle’s had. Maybe I imagined that. A man starts inventing mercy in strangers when he cannot find enough of it in the world, you know?

Rose didn’t look over at him from the stage.

The wind tugged once at the loosened ribbon in her braid. She resisted the urge to fix it. That small disorder seemed to matter too much. Waaska had done it after all, with her hand, pulling it loose while trying to keep Rose from being taken. She wanted, absurdly enough, to leave it exactly as it was.

A mark of someone who had reached for her.

Moss stepped to the microphone. Unlike Dolittle, he did not smile.

“The selected male tribute for District 9,” he started. His voice was lower than hers, flatter, less polished. It wasn’t kind by any means, but it wasn’t notably unkind either. A voice trained to carry orders without needing to believe in them.

He broke the seal. The square seemed less afraid this time, which was what made it even more cruel. Rose could feel the difference from the stage. Her name had already torn open the morning. Whatever came next would fall into that opening.

Moss withdrew the card and read it. “Hoel Ellendale.”

The silence did not break the same way. There was no scream this time. Whatever was left of the Ellendale family, they certainly weren’t bursting through the rope.

Instead, the sound came like something being buried. It started as a low murmur. A few sharp intakes of breath. A strange, shameful exhale from somewhere near the back, as if certain people had been holding in the hope that the district had chosen someone easier and now felt relieved to have that hope confirmed.

Hoel Ellendale.

Hoffman’s baby brother. A boy from the jail wagon. The boy already half-lost in people’s minds because it was simpler to decide a prisoner had less life to take.

A woman whispered, “Well…”

Simply that. Well.

I turned toward the prisoner line before I could stop myself. Hoel had not moved.

He stood between two other cuffed boys, head low, dark hair in his eyes, a bruise along his jaw ugly beneath the morning light. For a second, I wondered if he had heard. Then his mouth twitched, with something close to satisfaction’s bitter cousin.

Of course, his face seemed to say. Of course.

A peacekeeper seized his arm, before Hoel ripped it back. The square tightened a notch.

The peacekeeper reached for him again, harder this time, but Hoel stepped forward before he could be dragged. His chains clinked once at his wrists, sharp and small, and that sound carried farther than it should have.

He walked like a boy who had spent his whole life being shoved and had finally decided not to give anyone the pleasure of seeing him stumble. People moved out of his way faster than they had moved for Rose. That too, I noticed.

Rose had parted the crowd with guilt. Hoel parted it with fear.

His eyes moved over the rows as he walked. They weren’t searching, exactly. Measuring maybe? Remembering faces? You couldn’t really tell with the boy.

Every person who looked away from him seemed to confirm something he had already known. Even those who dared look back only sharpened the anger in his expression.

When he passed the family ropes, nobody reached for him. Nobody said his name.

Maybe there was someone in the crowd who loved him. There had to be. They could’ve been too afraid to show it. Or maybe… he had learned young that love, in the Ellendale house, usually arrived with teeth.

Either way, he walked alone.

Rose watched him approach and felt something tighten in her chest. She had expected to be afraid of him, maybe. Everyone knew Hoffman Ellendale’s name or knew what his gang had nearly done to a high-ranking Capitolite like Coriolanus Snow, and what the Capitol had done to them after. It felt as though 9 had no choice but to vote for the boy.

Regardless, Hoel’s name had been dragged behind his brother’s like a second shadow. However, the boy climbing the stage did not look like a gang leader. He looked too young for that. Furious, obviously. Bruised. Dangerous in the way cornered things became dangerous, but at least sixteen. Still, someone’s child, even if the district had decided he was easier to call a consequence.

At the stairs, a peacekeeper moved to help him up. Hoel stared at the man’s hand until he lowered it. Then Hoel climbed himself.

The chains made the movement awkward. Moss glanced toward Dolittle, then toward the cameras. Some calculation passed between them without a word.

“Remove the restraints,” Moss ordered.

The peacekeeper hesitated. Then, the cuffs came off with a click.

It wasn’t that the boy looked any better without them. He was practically in glorified prison rags. Though, having a tribute being held in cuffs in front of live camera during the Reaping ceremony didn’t exactly have that “noble tribute” attribute to it. Not really. Hoel flexed his hands once, slowly, as if reminding himself they still belonged to him. Red marks ringed both wrists. He did not rub them.

He took his place a little way beside Rose but did not look at her. For a moment, the two District 9 tributes stood side by side beneath the Capitol bunting.

The girl holding her father’s unbearable legacy in her prairie flower dress, alongside loosened ribbon and white sunflower boots dusted brown. Then the boy from the jail wagon, bruised and hard-eyed, wrists freshly freed but still carrying the shape of iron.

Together, they looked nothing like victory. They looked like what the district had been willing to lose.

Dolittle returned to the microphone.

“District 9,” she said, her tone almost proud, “your chosen tributes for the 25th Hunger Games.”

The cameras clicked and adjusted. Rose heard them.

That was the first time she truly noticed the cameras as if they were alive, not just machines or in the background. They shifted like insects. They turned their black eyes toward her face, Hoel’s bruised jaw, and of course, the crowd’s guilty stillness.

It’s lens constantly taking more and more away from them.

“You should be proud of your contribution to your country’s history,” Dolittle added, her smile widened by a fraction. “May they bring honor to your district and glory to Panem.”

Rose’s hand curled. Hoel finally glanced at her. Only briefly.

His expression said nothing in particular. She hadn’t read any malice nor fear. Nothing was too noticeable at first. It was only when she looked more that she saw something like recognition stripped of comfort. You too, then.

Rose looked back at him. Yes.

She did not know whether that made them allies or only proof of the same crime.

Dolittle shifted as if to end the ceremony. The peacekeepers at the edge of the stage moved closer. Moss stepped half a pace toward Rose and Hoel, ready to guide them off, as Lancaster made his way to the podium for his usual dismissal of the ceremony. The whole square seemed to lean toward the next instruction, grateful for anything that would tell them what to do with their hands, their eyes, their guilt.

Then Rose heard herself speak before she knew she had decided to. “Mayor Lancaster?”

The words came out clear enough for the nearest microphone to catch them. A ripple passed through the square. Dolittle went still. Moss stopped.

Mayor Lancaster, who had returned near the podium, ready to speak a few more closing statements, looked up sharply.

Rose felt every camera turn. Her mouth went dry. For one breath, she wanted to take it back. Still, she kept standing.

Lancaster stepped toward her, uncertain. “Miss Tempest-Strix?”

Rose swallowed. “May… May I say a few words?”

Dolittle’s smile vanished. Slowly. Enough to reveal the mechanism beneath it.

“That will not be necessary,” she tried to intervene.

However, Rose looked at Lancaster instead. He didn’t coordinate the Reapings themselves, of course. He was just a talking piece that the Capitol needed. Still, he was District 9’s mayor, and if District 9 had chosen her, then she would make District 9 hear her.

Lancaster’s gaze moved from Rose to Dolittle, then to the crowd, then back to Rose. There was no courage on his face. Only shame. And sometimes? Shame did a poor imitation of bravery, and sometimes that was all anyone had.

“Briefly,” he nodded, ignoring any repercussions he’d probably receive for it later.

Rose stepped toward the microphone before anyone could change their mind. Hoel’s head turned slightly. His face searching for answers, confusion etching across his features. Rose did not look at him.

She placed both hands lightly on the sides of the podium. Her fingers trembled once against the wood. She pressed them harder until they stopped.

From the stage, District 9 looked impossibly familiar and impossibly far away. She could see so much, which would’ve broken down even the strongest of men. There was Carrigan Killdeer, pale and still among the academy girls. And the Scranton children, Waylynn half-hidden behind Burr. There was her aunt, Misea with one arm around Waaska and the other hand pressed to her own chest. Then Nibs. Then… me.

Rose looked at me the longest. His face had gone still in a way that frightened her. Then she faced the entire district.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” she began. Her voice carried strangely through the microphone, thinner than it felt in her throat. The square did not move, willing to hear her speak. “I thought about being angry… and I still might be. Later at least.”

A few people shifted.

“I thought about saying I forgive you, but… I don’t know if that would be true. Not yet.”

A breath moved through the crowd. My jaw tightened.

Rose continued, because if she stopped now, she would never start again. “I know why some of you wrote my name. I think I do. Maybe you thought I had a better chance or you thought the Capitol already liked me. You maybe thought I was halfway gone from 9  already.”

Her voice trembled on that last part, her thoughts lingering on me and Waaska. She despised it. Nevertheless, she kept going anyway.

“Maybe… you were scared for your own children, and I can understand that. Truly.”

The silence deepened. Rose looked toward the younger rows. Children stared back at her with wide, frightened eyes. Some of them had voted and would probably still remember it when they were not.

“I can’t tell you that you were right,” she said softly. “You weren’t.”

Someone sobbed once, quickly muffled.

“But I also know… what the Capitol did to us. I know they gave us a choice that was never truly a choice. They put names in our hands and told us to make fear look like duty.”

Dolittle shifted behind her. Moss’s eyes flicked toward the peacekeepers.

Rose saw it. My heart climbed clean into my throat. Careful, Rosie. Please be careful…

Rose drew in another breath. “I… I am not standing here because I want to die. I really don’t.”

The words struck the square harder than she expected. They were simple, but no one had wanted to hear her say it.

“I am scared,” she confirmed. “I am more scared than I know how to explain. And Hoel-” She glanced back at him, only briefly. “H-He should not have to stand here either.”

Hoel’s face did not change, but something in his eyes did. Rose turned back.

“But if District 9 has given us to the Capitol, then I will not let the Capitol make me ashamed of loving District 9.”

I closed my eyes.

No, I thought. No, don’t do that. Do not make their vote sacred.

Rose’s hands tightened on the podium. “So, I guess my sentiments are… that I won’t go as your mistake,” she said, voice gaining steadiness now, not because she was less afraid, but because fear had finally found something to hold. “I won’t go as your guilt or your rumor. I won’t even go as proof that the Capitol owns every part of us.”

She swallowed. “And if I die…”

Misea made a sound like she had been struck.

Rose nearly faltered, but she picked herself back up. “If I die, I will not die as District 9’s victim.”

The words came out uneven. Young. Too brave and not wise enough.

“I will die… as its martyr.”

The square seemed to lose all air. My stomach all but dropped.

Goodness help me, I hated it because I understood exactly why she had said it. She was trying to take the ugliest thing done to her and make it mean something before the Capitol could make it mean nothing. She was trying to turn the blade around by holding it through her own palm.

Though martyrdom was still a story someone else could use. After all, Rosabel was still a girl.

Rose’s eyes shone, but no tears fell. “I wish you all the best,” she said, and her voice broke there, just barely. “I mean that. I wish the children of 9 warm food and full fields and safer years than this one. I wish my family peace. I wish…” She stopped, breath catching. “I wish nobody ever has to stand here because home was made afraid enough to choose them.”

At that, everyone simply stood. There was no applause. No one could’ve even pretended. The shock held them too tightly. Rose stepped back from the microphone.

For one second, she looked like a child again in the most unbearable way. There a girl in a green dress with a loose ribbon and dust on her white boots, having used the last free words she might be allowed for a long while.

Lancaster stared at her. The man, no doubt, had a certain amount of respect for those words. Those same words that he wouldn’t even dream to utter.

Dolittle, of couse, was already moving.

“That will conclude District 9’s Reaping ceremony,” she said into the microphone, too quickly, too smoothly. “Tributes will proceed to transfer under Capitol supervision at once.”

Moss stepped beside Hoel. A peacekeeper then stepped beside Rose, as she looked once more toward the crowd.

Waaska had stopped sobbing. She stared at Rose like she was trying to memorize the shape of her standing there. Nibs had one hand over his mouth. Misea’s face had gone white. Gami looked at the ground.

And me?

I probably looked like a man who had just watched a door close and realized his hands were still empty. Rose wanted to say something to us, her family. Anything…

The morning after Lancaster's mansion burned was rough, and even rougher to wake from.

Sleep had come late and poorly, more a collapse than rest. When my eyes finally opened to the dawn's weak glow, memories flooded back with the filthy patience of water finding cracks. The Quarter Quell, voting, children penned in the square, Rose at the window, Snow's mouth slipping onto hers before my fist did the same…

Everything moved through me like a bad dream I had failed to wake from.

I got out of bed before the house could stir around me. That was cowardice, and I knew it. I dressed in my only other clean shirt, fumbled my belt wrong twice, then made for the yard with the excuse of warming up Errante before town.

The dapple grey accepted the bridle with the grave patience of a creature who had survived enough human nonsense to stop expecting sense from us. I rode him along the nearest pasture until the leg began complaining in full. Normally, in the saddle, the injury troubled me less than it did on foot. That morning, everything hurt. The splint bit hard as the muscles around the fracture throbbed. The skin had ballooned into a hot, angry tenderness that made every motion feel like I was arguing with bone itself.

Dido used to say pain meant healing. That something in the body was building itself anew. Wasn’t sure she had been right about that though.

By the time I rode into New Bisman, the peacekeepers were raising the ashen stakes for morning executions.

There was no doubt there would be some after the riot. The Capitol never let a public outburst pass without making a public answer. Kindling had been stacked high around the blackened posts, enough wood to warm a family for a winter week if mercy had ever ranked above spectacle. The air already smelled of old ash, pitch, and the clinging stink of burnt hair that never truly left a place once the stakes had claimed it.

District 9 punished with fire because fire was what we understood. Or because the Capitol liked irony.

I never knew which was worse.

Other districts had hangings, firing squads, even electrification, according to Stand Up, who once described the latter with a face gone pale and said at least it ended quicker. The smell was similar after, he claimed, but the screaming was minimal.

In Panem, minimal screaming counted as mercy.

I had seen my first burning at six. A man accused of Dark Days sympathy, though by then sympathy had become a word the Capitol could hang around anyone's neck and set alight. Peacekeepers stopped the street and made us watch. I remember the way his clothes burned away first. The way his face stopped being a face or the way one peacekeeper joked that rebels squealed like swine and another told him not to insult swine.

I spent the rest of the day crying in Auntie Aelias's lap while she stroked my hair with hands that would one day be tied to the same kind of post because of me.

I did not linger near the executions that morning. Still, I saw enough.

Hoffman Ellendale's name passed in whispers before I reached the firecatcher grounds. He and two of his crew would all be tied to the stakes for the manor fire. Knowing the sadistic tendencies of some of the keeper commanders, Hoel Ellendale, that scrawny younger brother of his, would probably stand cuffed near the peacekeeper line, forced to watch. I could just picture the boy from the alley.

His face would hold no tears for his kin. Only that flat, hollow look of a boy whose grief had found nowhere safe to go and so had frozen before leaving his eyes.

I shivered at the internal image.

The firecatcher outpost waited at the western edge of town, brick-built and smoke-stained, steady as ever in a world that had lost interest in steadiness. My pulse kicked harder the closer I came. What if Snow changed his mind? What if one of those stakes was meant for me by noon? What if Rolette had only delayed the inevitable because public order mattered more than private punishment?

Who would fend for Rose then?

The thought nearly made me laugh. As if I had done such a grand job of fending for her already.

I dismounted and limped inside. The chief's office door still bore the former’s name on the plaque.

Virgil Tempest.

That alone nearly took the breath out of me. I stood before it too long, staring at the carved letters like they might rearrange themselves into an answer. Then I knocked once and opened the door.

"Chief?"

The room was cluttered with scattered notes, some in Virgil's handwriting, others in Rolette's. The newly appointed chief was hunched over a large brown ledger, searching for something with the grim focus of a man trying to hold an entire force together with paperwork and will. He looked up when I entered. A knowing sadness passed over his weathered face before he gestured to the chair across from him. "Son."

The word hurt. I took the chair slowly, the leg protesting each bend. "You said… after what happened, you'd want to see me."

"Yeah." Rolette closed the ledger with one hand. "I did."

Silence settled. Through the walls, I could hear the yard outside, a horse snorting, a pump handle creaking, men's voices subdued under morning. Life continuing because life had always been rude that way.

"Ain't never seen you like that before," Rolette said finally.

My face dipped with regret. "I know."

I wanted to plead my case. To say Snow had crossed a line. That he had no right to touch Rose in front of people already hungry for someone to blame. To say a Capitol man did not get to put his hands on Virgil's daughter and walk away untouched.

Though justifications in Panem were like pebbles thrown at trains.

Rolette only nodded as if he heard every internal argument I did not, or rather, could not make.

"I can't imagine what went through your head," he said. "Not fully. I know you love that girl somethin' fierce. Whole force does too, just like a second daughter or a little sister… Tempest knew it."

My hands tightened on my knees.

"But," Rolette continued, and there it was, the word that always came carrying a knife. "You laid hands on a Capitol representative. Publicly and in front of the peacekeepers. After an announcement that already has the district near tearing itself apart."

I simply nodded. "Yes, sir."

"You struck him."

I didn’t even try denying it. "Yes, sir."

"Then you struck her." Rolette added.

My throat closed. I looked down.

Rolette did not soften it. I respected him for that. Hated him for it too.

"I didn't mean to," I said, barely breaking from a murmur.

The chief only sighed. "I know, son."

That mercy felt worse than accusation. Rolette leaned back, eyes on the plaque outside the frosted glass of the door. Virgil's name, reversed from inside, still visible like a ghost that had gotten caught in the wrong room.

"You've got family here too, Rhodes," he said. "This place has been your home since the day you set foot in it. Tempest saw to that."

Been. I heard it and so did he.

"Which is why," Rolette began, then stopped.

He looked down at his hands. He was not an eloquent man by nature. Virgil had been able to turn plain speech into something close to scripture when the hour demanded. Rolette's words came heavier, shaped by duty before grace. But I could see the cost of them in his face.

"It's okay," I answered before he finished.

His eyes lifted.

I reiterated. "I understand."

He swallowed once. "You're a good man, Auphidius."

My laugh came out small and wrong. "Debatable."

"Not to me." His voice firmed, and that nearly broke me. "But good men? They can be dangerous when emotions carry the reins. I can't have you on the active rolls. Not now. Maybe not ever, dependin' how the Capitol reads this. If I keep you badged, I put every catcher here under suspicion. I put Rosabel under a brighter one too."

There it was. It wasn’t clean nor fair, yet… it was the truth.

I thought of Rolette's eldest granddaughter, newly twelve and now eligible for the Games. I thought of every child in the square. Then my head Snow's split lip and the way he had said nothing about arrest because he had not needed to. Mercy from men like him was never free. It only changed the invoice.

I nodded.

"You'll turn in your badge," Rolette said, voice thickening. "Coat too, if anyone official asks. But you keep it hidden till then. No sense givin' the Capitol a display it hasn't demanded yet."

I rose slowly. The room wavered a little at the edges, from pain or shame or both. I reached across the desk and offered my hand. Rolette looked at it for a long second.

Then he took it. His grip was rough, warm, and brief.

"We'll help how we can," he said. "Quietly. Don't make yourself easy to find, ya hear?"

I sniffed back any piece of hurt that would threaten to bubble over. "Yes, sir."

"And Rhodes?"

I paused at the door. Rolette's eyes had gone to Virgil's name again. "Take care of Tempest's girl. But for pity's sake, don't mistake holding on for takin’ care."

The walk back to Errante was hard. Very hard.

Every step felt like some invisible hand was pressing down on my shoulders, shoving me deeper into the dirt with the weight of everything I had managed to ruin in the span of a single night. Losing the badge was one thing. Losing Virgil's legacy? Losing Rose's trust? Those were wounds I could not stitch shut with time or excuses.

The outpost door clicked behind me, and the noise rang through my skull like a hammer on steel. Virgil's name stayed on the plaque watched me all the way out.

Errante nickered softly when he saw me, ears flicking, sensing something was wrong before I touched his reins. I rested my forehead against his neck, breathing in grass, sweat, dust, all the ordinary things that should have grounded me. They didn't.

"I'm sorry, buddy," I muttered into his mane. "I'm sorry I couldn't keep it together."

A pathetic apology, to a horse at that. Easier than saying it to Rose.

"Rhodes!"

I flinched hard. Burr Scranton's voice cut through the fog in my skull like a whip crack. Heavy boots thudded against the dirt as he jogged up, panting like he had sprinted across half the district.

"There you are!" he huffed. "Been lookin' all over for ya. Ditcher swore you'd be down by the creek drownin' yourself in that special water Gooseneck keeps stashin' in his locker. Well... kept. Till he tied the noose on it."

I did not smile back.

Burr slowed when he got a good look at me. Really looked. His joking expression faded into something softer. Confusion, concern, the kind of worry you only give people you've seen bleed more than once.

"You look like hell, Rhodes," he muttered. "Chief give ya grief?"

I opened my mouth. Nothing came.

Burr's face changed. "Ah."

It was a small sound. It said enough.

Rose, Waaska, and Nibs rode to the academy beneath a morning sky the color of old tin.

Smoke still lifted from New Bisman's center in a thick, bitter stream. The air was foggy, though not from weather alone. Ash drifted low over the road, softening the outlines of buildings and turning every figure at a distance into a smudge that might be neighbor, peacekeeper, or ghost.

No one spoke.

Nibs rode hunched on his pony with both hands tight on the reins, his usual restless chatter swallowed somewhere between home and the square. Waaska kept her eyes forward, posture too straight, one dark braid falling over her shoulder. She had not looked at Rose much that morning.

Rose had not known whether to be relieved.

They passed the execution ground from a safe distance, though safe was a generous word for any place where the smell could still reach you.

The stakes were lit. Flames climbed around the bound shapes of Hoffman Ellendale and two of his men, turning them into motion, then sound, then something no human mind should be asked to name. Peacekeepers kept the road clear. A few citizens had been forced to watch, heads bowed or lifted in terror, depending on which survival instinct had taken them first.

Hoel Ellendale stood near the front in handcuffs.

They recognized him by the gaunt shape of his face, that eerie echo of Hoffboss stripped down to bone and youth. Bruises mottled his cheek and jaw. His eyes were red at the edges, but not wet. He watched the fire with a flat, cold stare that looked less like courage than a soul leaving by degrees because the body had not been permitted to follow.

Rose had known of his existence, back when Ellendale senior had been a firecatcher himself. However, after a grizzly accident had taken the boys’ father, the whole household had shuttered into shambles at the loss of the patriarch. The mother had died early in their lves, and the eldest Ellendale had been swallowed whole by the Games, never to return. From what Rose could recollect, it was just the two brothers, with Hoffman more ravenous than a rabid dog, especially after hearing the gory details of his time in the Gluttony Games and young Hoel trailing behind, understandably having nowhere else to go.

Rosabel couldn’t help but pity the boy.

"Why are they making him watch?" Nibs whispered.

Waaska's mouth tightened. "Don't look."

Nibs looked anyway. So did Rose.

She thought of me at that moment. Of the way I had spoken about executions without ever quite describing the first one I’d seen. Then, her mind flashed to the memory of my hand stopping in the air when she told me not to touch her. Of smoke and Coriolanus and being kissed in front of people who now had the power to write her name on a ballot.

Her stomach turned.

"Just… keep going," Rose said with defeat. And they did, breath held as much as possible so as not to taste the air.

At the academy, silence had become a new subject. The halls did not ring with the usual morning noise. No bragging over marks, complaints about breakfast, whispered jokes, nor slates clattering for attention. Students moved in careful currents, their eyes darting to one another and away again as if every glance might be counted later. Conversation traveled in brief, folded whispers passed hand to hand like contraband.

Everyone was thinking of the same thing. Who?

Who would be easiest? Who had enemies? Who had too many friends to risk? Who was poor enough to be forgotten, rich enough to be resented, strange enough to be blamed, pretty enough to be punished, loud enough to be made example?

Who?

Carrigan Killdeer sat during civics with her head bent over her book, not raising her hand once. That alone felt like the world had tipped. Dax Hebron did not argue with the lesson. Amos Bottineau never looked up. Even Nellie, usually a girl who seemed likely to talk during her own funeral, kept both lips pressed tight as if words had become ammunition and she did not trust herself not to fire the wrong one.

And Professor Wishek did not appear to notice. Or perhaps she noticed and chose survival.

When she asked for a volunteer to read aloud, no one moved. Not Carrigan or Dax. Not Rose, though in another life, yesterday perhaps, the silence would have bothered her enough to fill it.

Wishek sighed with theatrical exhaustion and chose a boy in the back at random. His voice shook through a passage about Panem's unified national purpose after the Dark Days.

Rose stared at her textbook and read nothing. Her mind kept returning to Coriolanus.

Not in the way she wanted though. There was no clean desire, infatuation, or even as much admiration anymore. Only confusion, maybe a bit of anger. With that sick thread of empathy she could not seem to cut because she had seen him in pain and heard him speak like a man who believed cruelty was not indulgence but architecture. If he believed that, truly believed it, what kind of world had made him? What did a Capitol childhood teach a person about mercy? Was he monstrous, or merely fluent in a monstrous language?

And why did part of her still want him to open the university to her? The thought made her ashamed. Then ashamed of the shame, her head rapidly thinking of excuses dipped in guilt.

By lunch, Rose felt scraped hollow.

She took her tray of grits and bread before she looked for Waaska by their usual table. Empty. Nibs sat with the younger students near the far wall, poking at his food and pretending not to look frightened. Still, Waaska was nowhere.

Rose waited. Then searched. The restrooms. The side hall. The old lecture room with flaking paint. Back to the cafeteria. Still nothing.

At last she approached Nibs. “Hey. Do you know where Waaska went?"

Nibs looked up, startled, then annoyed in the way young boys become annoyed when fear has embarrassed them. "No."

"Nibs." She eyed him sternly.

He huffed. "Maybe the roof? Some of the older kids go there to stuff their faces when they don't want teachers starin'."

The roof. Rose nodded and moved before doubt could slow her.

The stairwell smelled of dust, metal, and damp wool. As she climbed, voices drifted down from above through the battered roof door. For one hopeful moment, the sound almost comforted her. Actual chatter. A little laughter. Some proof the Quarter Quell had not swallowed everything whole.

Maybe Waaska had found someone to confide in. That was good! Maybe the fear of the vote had opened something in her cousin instead of closing it.

Rose reached the top landing. A boy laughed.

"Oh, my goodness," he said. There was no doubt in her mind that it was Enrique who was talking, though his tone sounded like it always knew where gossip lived before gossip knew itself. "I always knew something was up!"

Rose paused.

Suddenly Waaska laughed back too. Brightly, yet… with a hint of nerves.

"Yeah," Waaska said, her voice going between sounding confident and sounding alienated. "A-Absolutely."

"Wait, wait," another girl pressed, voice eager. "So… was she courting him?"

The floor seemed to move beneath Rose's feet.

"Oh! Y-You mean the Capitolite?" Waaska said, and Rose could hear the shrug, could hear the effort to sound casual, included, safe. "I mean... they did kiss, didn't they?"

Several kids burst into laughter. Rose's hands went numb.

"My sister's always wonderin' why Rose got accepted by the Capitol before her," Enrique said. "Guess now we know."

"I always picked her for a bread stealer," another voice snickered.

More laughter. Rose backed away from the door. One step, then another.

She made it down one flight before her stomach rebelled.

The nearest restroom was empty. Rose stumbled inside, dropped to her knees beside the rusted bin, and dry-heaved until her throat burned and her eyes watered. Nothing came up but bile and the sound of her own heart trying to beat its way out of her ribs.

Waaska… not a bully like Carrigan. Or strangers. Not the people who had always wanted to believe the worst because the worst made better conversation.

Waaska.

Family.

Rose stayed folded over the bin long after her stomach had emptied, knuckles white around the rim. She pressed her forehead to the cool tile until it hurt.

She didn't mean it, Rose told herself. Any of it! She’s just scared! Yeah, that was right! She wanted them to stop looking at her! She wanted to belong somewhere for five minutes in a world that had become a pen and a ballot…

Though betrayal does not become harmless because fear taught it the words.

Then, the bell rang.

Rose remained on the floor while feet thundered down the stairs outside. Through the door cracked open an inch, she saw Waaska pass with Enrique and the others, laughing at something Rose could not hear. Her cousin's face looked bright with relief.

That was the cruelest part. As if hurting Rose had made Waaska look less alone…

When the hall emptied, Rose stood on unsteady legs. Her mouth tasted of salt and iron.

By the time she reached the yard after final bell, she had decided two things that contradicted each other perfectly.

First, Coriolanus Snow had been wrong to kiss her, but also… maybe everyone else was right to think she had earned it somehow.

We ended up at the saloon because some griefs are too large for daylight and too immediate for wisdom.

The place smelled of old beer, floor dust, lamp smoke, and men pretending not to be afraid. Everyone spoke lower than usual. Every laugh came half-strangled. The Quarter Quell had done what the Capitol intended; it made neighbors look at one another and wonder what names had already sat behind their teeth.

Burr put a glass in front of me.

"That's ridiculous!" he said after I told him. "Man, if it weren't for Hillsboro and half the peacekeeper line watchin', I'd give that no-good piece of work a piece of my mind myself!"

He did not say Snow's name. Most sentiments toward the Capitol arrived without proper nouns. Safer that way.

I downed the drink. The liquor burned my throat and then kindly burned nothing else.

"Chief didn't have much choice," I mumbled. "Still, could've been me on the stick this mornin'."

Burr shook his head. "Don't say that."

"It's true." I shrugged, looking at the bottom of my glass.

"Still don't say it." Burr took his own drink, grimaced, and leaned one elbow on the bar. "Rolette ain't Tempest. That's all."

I threw him a side eye. "Burr, please."

"No, listen. I don't mean it like one of my conspiracies.” He assured me before explaining himself. “I mean Tempest trusted his people different. He'd have known you were stupid, sure. He'd probably have called you twelve kinds of idiot and beat you with his hat. But he would’ve known why you did it. Would’ve seen S- that guy for what he was doin'."

I rubbed both hands over my face. "Virgil's dead, Burr. We shouldn't test a dead man's merit."

"Fair." Burr nodded, then took another drink. "Still doesn't mean he wouldn't have done the right thing."

"And what would that be?"

He gave me a serious glance. "Teachin' a man to respect a young lady, that’s what."

The words should have comforted me, but… they hadn’t.

Respect or civility was not what the room outside had seen. The district had seen Snow kiss Rose. It had seen me strike him, before Rose fell because of my hand. Stories do not keep their original shape long once fear starts chewing on them.

I blankly stared down at the surface of the bar.

"Rhodes!"

A hand clapped my shoulder, jolting me from the ugly turn of my thoughts. Trouble stood behind us with a gaggle of trainee firecatchers, all too young and too bright-eyed for the hour. He looked better than he had after the mine, though a bruise still colored one cheek and his sleeves hung loose around arms not yet finished growing.

"It's good to see you," Trouble said. "And Caliber-"

"How many times I gotta tell ya?” The elder catcher turned. “Burr's fine!"

The trainees laughed. Not merrily, rather in a desperate manner. Laughter was scarce that morning and therefore hoarded wherever it appeared.

One lanky boy pointed at me with a grin. "Good job yesterday, Rhodes!"

My brows furrowed as I frowned. "For what?"

"For melting snow,” The trainee then winked in a corny, coded way. “Of course."

A few snickered. My stomach churned.

"I… didn’t," I replied plainly.

The boy blinked. "What?"

"Don't make that into a joke."

“Yeah, guys,” Burr backed me up. “You might get in trouble with the chief.”

The group quieted a little. Trouble shifted, confused and concerned. "We just meant... well, not even Rolette had the grits to do what you did, Rhodes."

That earned him a humorless chuckle from me. "I wouldn't recommend it."

"Why not?" A girl with soot still under one eye crossed her arms. "It's summertime. Snow ain't belong in it."

More laughter. I did not laugh along.

Trouble leaned closer, lowering his voice with the careless secrecy of a boy about to reveal a knife he did not know was sharp. "For what it's worth, Tempest-Strix should've been more grateful of you."

My head turned slowly. "What?"

Burr's hand tightened around his glass, quietly warning the young catcher. “Trouble…”

Trouble's expression faltered. "I mean... after she defended him."

"She didn't defend him." I huffed back, somewhat offended.

"That ain’t what folks are sayin'."

I rolled my eyes. "Folks are idiots, ya know."

The lanky trainee scratched the back of his neck. "C'mon, Rhodes. She couldn't have been snoggin’ him for nothin'."

The room around us changed, though it didn’t reveal itself right away. The bartender still wiped a glass. Men still pretended not to listen. However, every ear in that place leaned toward us.

I set my glass down carefully.

"What did you say?" I ask, tone inching towards disbelief.

The boy took a step back. Trouble looked suddenly frightened. "Rhodes, I thought you knew-"

"Knew what?" I fully turn to face the boy.

Burr muttered, a hand came to my should, "Easy."

I turned to him. "Do not easy me."

Trouble swallowed. "People are sayin'... well, they're sayin' she's been rollin' in the snow, if ya catch what I’m throwing."

The phrase landed foul and cheap. For a second, I could not move.

Then every piece of the night arranged itself into something uglier. Snow's public display of affection. Rose's stillness and hidden confusion. The watching yard. Half the district turning their heads. The peacekeeper interest. The trainees laughing.

The Quarter Quell vote.

My blood went cold enough to hurt.

"No," I refused. "That is not true! Whatever you think is happenin' with Rosabel, it is not true. She's trying to get into University. That's it."

"Yeah, but how?" the lanky boy asked, too foolish to realize he'd wandered into a blaze. "I heard she ain't even top of the academy. The Killdeer girl is."

"That is weird," Burr agreed, albeit reluctantly and softly.

I looked at him. His face didn’t hold malice, though.

"What?" I asked.

Burr lifted both hands a little. "I'm only sayin' folks wonder. She got attention fast. Capitol attention. And Rose... she was given a lot already. Tempest's house. His name. His protection."

"She's his daughter." I scoffed.

"She's adopted, Rhodes," Burr said.

The bar went very quiet.

"And she ain't even district-born," someone farther down muttered.

I stood so fast the stool scraped backward. Pain tore through my leg, but I welcomed it. Pain kept my hands from becoming weapons again.

"She is District 9," I said, voice low. "More than half the people in this room who'd sell a child for one less mouth at supper and call it civic duty."

Nobody answered. Burr looked stricken, but he did not take it back. That was all I needed to know.

"I need to go," I finally retorted.

Trouble reached like he might apologize. Burr shook his head at him.

I limped out through the swinging doors and into the morning, where the air smelled of smoke from the stakes and New Bisman sat around itself like a dog waiting to bite.

Snow had not only marked Rose. He had handed the district a story it could vote on.

I reached the Tempest house hard enough that Errante's sides were damp beneath the saddle.

Wildfire was not in the paddock, meaning Rose wasn't home.

"Damn it," I muttered, turning Errante east, straight for her auntie’s home.

The Mniwakan lodge sat where the road began to soften toward pasture. I expected noise when I approached. That family produced noise like a healthy tree produced leaves. Instead, the porch sat quiet beneath the afternoon light.

Instead, it was Waaska who sat on the steps in her academy uniform.

Her braid had loosened, and her arms were wrapped around herself as though the summer air had turned cruel. Her eyes were red-rimmed. When she saw me, all the color left her face.

"Oh, uh… Auphie?" The young girl’s eyes swiveled from either side of the gravel road, then back to me.

I slowed Errante to a walk. The closer I got, the more distinguishable her reddened eyes had become. "You all right?"

She paused at my question, blinking once as if I were speaking a foreign language before nodding. "I-I'm fine, Auphie. Thanks for asking."

Children are terrible liars when guilt is fresh.

I decided to change the subject. "Where's Rose?"

Waaska flinched at her name. That told me more than I had time to ask.

"I don't know," she said. "I haven't seen her since... since school."

Then, my mind was trained back to Morton Valley. The one place Rose would go if she did not want to be found and yet wanted to be near the only thing that still felt like hers.

Not the academy, of course. No one would find any comfort being cooped up in such a place. Rather her other school… the first one.

I turned Errante north.

"Auphie?" Waaska called, her voice on the brink of a sob, almost.

I looked back. Her mouth opened, then closed. Whatever confession sat there was too large for the steps, too late for the moment.

"Ride safe," she simply said, despite her broken inflection.

I nodded once and rode for Morton Valley. The sun had begun lowering by the time I reached the Secret Garden. Wildfire grazed near the creek, her bay coat turned gold at the edges by late light. Relief moved through me so suddenly I nearly hated it. Errante whinnied softly to her, like he was greeting an old friend, as she lifted her head as if offended by the interruption before returning to the grass.

Rose sat outside the cracked red stone, knees drawn close, her corduroy jacket discarded in the creek bay as though she had thrown it off in a fit and lacked the strength to regret it. Her gaze rested on the water without seeming to see it.

"Rosie?" I called gently.

Nothing. I tied Errante beside Wildfire and limped toward her.

"Rose...” I gently press. “I'm sorry about last night."

"No," she said, voice flat yet gravelly. "You're fine."

Those two words frightened me more than anger would have. I simply lowered myself beside her with more effort than dignity. The grass whispered around us. A deer moved at the far edge of the meadow, then vanished into brush. The Secret Garden stood at our backs, silent as ever, holding every old thing we had trusted it with. Rose still did not look at me.

"You've been drinking," she noted.

I winced. "Some."

"Mm…"

I let her sit with that for a minute before I responded. "This isn't about me."

"No," she said, not cruelly. Her voice and expression seemed far too exhausted to snap back.

“Rose,” I took a slow breath, my mind whizzing through a variety of difficult situations. Any solution that could dig the girl out of this miserable mess. "You need to stay here. In the Garden."

Her eyes finally turned toward mine. Red-rimmed, bloodshot, exhausted. "Why?"

"Because if you stay in New Bisman,” I tried explaining. “You’ll be in danger."

"Everyone is in danger." Rose shrugs, her tone still deadpan.

"Not like you." My voice tightened. "Rose, what Snow did? That kiss? He left a mark on you, put a target on your back. People are talkin'. Ugly. Actually, worse than ugly. And with the vote-"

"And then what?" she asked, her head shaking. The question came so softly I almost missed the blade in it.

"What?" I frowned.

"If I hide," she said, looking back to the creek. "Then what? The district can just vote for the next girl in line?"

My mouth went dry. "No."

The lie tasted foul the instant it left me. Rose heard it. Of course she did.

She gave a small, broken nod. "This is what I've sowed, Auphie. I suppose I have no choice but to reap it."

“Rose,” I replied. "Don't say that."

"Why not?" Her voice trembled at last. "It's true!"

"No, it isn't." I pleaded.

She laughed once, brittle and humorless. "I used him, only serves me right."

I stared at her. "Rose."

"I did." Her hands tightened around her own arms. "Coriolanus. I wanted University so badly that I let myself think of him as a way in before I thought of him as a person. I wanted him to see things my way. I wanted his money, his introductions, his access, and now everyone knows. They know exactly what I am."

My heart sank. My immediate response was anger, but obviously, not at Rose. No, my disdain held true for the Capitolite. However, the next emotion was regret. Guilt. Maybe there was some way I could’ve prevented all this?

My eyes dropped to the bruise on her lip. "No."

"I was vain." She admitted.

"No." I refused.

"I was selfish." She shook her head, tears threatening to pour down. “No… I am selfish.”

"Rosabel."

She flinched at the full name, but I needed her to hear me.

"You did not use him."

The words left my mouth steadier than I felt. I reached for her wrist without thinking, then stopped with my fingers barely brushing skin, leaving the choice to her. She did not pull away.

That alone told me how far she had gone.

"You listened," I continued, slower now. "You questioned and challenged what you were handed. That isn't manipulation. That's a spine."

She shook her head. "A spine doesn't get people killed."

I grimaced before refuting. "A spine doesn't have to keep everyone alive either."

Her eyes filled, though she blinked hard against it.

"B-But I kissed him," she whispered. "Or he kissed me, and I did nothing, just like you said! I let myself think, just for a second, that maybe if someone from the Capitol saw me as worth something, then maybe the rest of them would too. And now everyone thinks I… you know, cheated my way into favor. That I'm greedy. Dirty. Guilty... and maybe I am."

I hated that she was poisoned with this belief. No, that I contributed to this belief.

"Why wouldn't they vote for me?” Her jaw clenched. “Why wouldn't they choose somebody who already looks guilty?"

Then, something sharp twisted in my chest.

"You think they're gonna vote you in because you deserve it?" I asked quietly.

She didn't answer. Her gaze simply peered ahead, glossed over, full of self-deprecation.

"Rose." I turned fully toward her. "They ain’t gonna vote on guilt. They’ll vote on fear. And right now… you scare them."

Her brow furrowed. "I don't-"

"You do," I interrupted, not harshly, but firmly. "Because you don't bow the way they do. You don't pretend the Capitol is untouchable and you don’t just swallow things just because you're told to. That makes you dangerous in a district that survives by keeping its head down."

She shook her head, breath uneven. "Then that's on me."

"No," I said, sharper now. "That's on them."

She looked at me then, really looked, eyes glassy, searching my face like she expected to find doubt there. She didn't.

"I should have known better," she whispered, sniffing back a sob. "I should have stayed quiet. I should have stayed invisible. Waaska wouldn't be scared, and my classmates wouldn't look at me like that, and you?" Her voice broke. "You wouldn't be trying to hide me like a liability."

That one hurt. I stood before I realized I was moving, boots crunching softly against gravel as I paced a short line along the stream, keeping myself from saying something I could not take back.

When I turned to her again, I crouched so we were eye level.

"Don't you dare shrink yourself into something small just to make the world more comfortable," I pushed. "Not for them or for me. And especially not because the Capitol trained everyone here to tear down the first person who looks like she might survive."

Her lips trembled. "You don't get it, Auphie. If I go in, if I'm voted, then at least it stops there. At least somebody like Waaska's safe. They won't have to look at me like I betrayed them anymore."

"And you think that makes it worth it?" My voice cracked despite myself. "You think walking into those Games will somehow wash you clean?"

Silence. I rested my hand over hers. She was cold.

"They don't get to decide your worth," I said softly. "Not Snow. Not the damn Capitol. Not even District 9. And not you either, not when you're hurting this badly."

Her breath shuddered. "I don't know how to fix this."

"You don't," I answered honestly. "Because it isn't broken. It's cruel. And cruelty doesn't get fixed by sacrifice. It just learns who it can afford to lose."

Tears slipped free then, silent, tracking down her cheeks as she bowed her head. I did not stop them. I just stayed.

"I'm… scared." she admitted at last.

I squeezed her hand once. "Good. That means you want to live, Rosie."

The meadow dimmed as the sun dipped lower, shadows stretching across the Garden like reaching fingers. Somewhere behind us, Wildfire snorted softly, grounding and real.

“You know what?” I said as an insane notion burrowed itself into my skull. “I ain’t gonna let them take you.”

It was a dangerous promise. Stupid, maybe. Big enough to break me. I made it anyway.

In response, a broken sob tore through Rosabel’s throat. She leaned into me then, and I drew her carefully into my arms. This time, I made no effort to crush her and definitely not to claim her. Just holding, with my hands open enough to let her leave if she needed to.

She didn't.

When we finally rode home, Misea was waiting.

She came out before we had fully dismounted, skirts gathered in one hand, worry naked across her face. "Auphie? Rosie?"

Rose was barely off Wildfire before Misea pulled her into a hug, then reached for me too, dragging us both in with a strength born from panic and auntship.

"I heard about yesterday!" she said. "I am so-"

"Don't apologize," Rose murmured into her shoulder. "Everyone's going through a troublesome time."

"Yes, but I can't imagine how you must feel." Misea smoothed one hand over Rose's hair, careful near the swelling at her mouth. Her voice dropped. "Having to choose amongst each other? It’s… barbaric."

Rose nodded, but there was distance in it.

Misea took both our hands. "Tunka says community and family matter most during times like this. We wanted you both for supper. Minaha is making duck, and threaded squash soup. I know how much you love it, Rosie."

Rose's face changed. Not with dislike, but rather fear.

I saw it. The thought of the lodge. Of Waaska. Of family gathered around food while rumor sat beneath the table like a snake.

"She hasn't been feeling well," I said before Rose had to. "After everything. She didn't sleep much. I think rest would do her better tonight."

Misea's expression softened with immediate concern. "Of course. Of course, sweetheart. The last thing you need is a crowded table."

Rose's relief was so visible it hurt.

"Thank you," she whispered.

"I'll send supper," Misea said. "No argument. Neither of you is going to bed empty."

"I can ride back with you," I said. "Bring it home. Let Rose rest."

Rose looked at me then. Her gaze held gratitude, tight and tired, and something like trust beginning the awful work of rebuilding one splinter at a time.

At the lodge, life had decided to continue loudly.

That was the blessing and insult of big families. The Mniwakan house breathed through work even when grief pressed at the windows. Children carried bowls. Zaaga darted underfoot with a bundle of kindling too large for him. A niece and two younger cousins argued over whether the soup needed more salt. Minaha  stood near the firepit with the grave attention of a woman making sure duck skin crisped properly despite the end of civilization. Older boys came in from the fields, checking themselves for ticks before their grandmother could do it for them and shame them publicly.

The smell of roasted duck and threaded squash soup should have comforted me. It almost did.

Gami met me at the entry with a bundle of strange bread in one hand and clapped a the other to my shoulder. "Auphidius. Good to see you standing."

I nodded timidly. "Standing's generous."

"Still counts.” He chuckled, adjusting the bread in his grasp. “Say, where's Rosabel?"

"Resting," Misea assured her husband before I could answer. "I mean, after yesterday, who wouldn't?"

Gami nodded, though worry stayed in his eyes. "Waaska's been strange too. Out back since she came home. Said she needed air."

Misea sighed, shaking her head. "Reaping jitters, I suppose."

I remembered Rosabel’s adamancy on Waaska’s safety, on her implying that her cousin was confused? It wasn’t that there was no reason for her to be. After the Quarter Quell announcement, everyone was bewildered. But even before that, Waaska seemed perturbed sitting outside of the lodge. Had the ballot reaping really scared her that much? Even if it was another month out?

"I can check on her," I suggested.

“Oh, no.” Misea swatted her hand in fiend disregard. "You don't need to, Auphie."

“That’s okay.” I assured her. "I can just check. Just for a moment."

Maybe she heard something in my voice. Mothers probably had a special instinct, knowing when a child's silence had teeth. After a moment of thought, she nodded.

I found Waaska on the back fence, looking over the horse pasture as evening softened the fields. Her uniform jacket lay folded beside her. Wind tugged loose strands from her braid. She looked smaller from behind than she had any right to, shoulders curled inward around a shame she had not yet named.

"Waaska?" I called out.

She jumped so hard she nearly slipped. When she saw me, her face drained. "Oh, Auphie! Is uh… Rose here?"

"No." I shook my head, much to the girl’s relief… or dismay?

"Oh."

I leaned against the fence post, sparing my leg the trouble of pretending. For the second time that day, I asked her the same question once more. "You doin' okay?"

She stared toward the pasture, internally processing if she really was. For a while, the only sound was horses cropping grass and the lodge alive behind us. Then Waaska said, her expression crestfallen, "I… did something today."

My chest tightened, simply letting her continue.

"And,” She drew in a shaky inhale. “I don't know how to take it back."

I remained silent.

"It's… about Rose."

Her voice broke around the name.

"I heard everything last night," she said. "Not everything, maybe, but… I heard too much. About him kissing her, the Capitolite I mean. Bout you asking if there was something them. I felt bad for you first. Then I felt... I don't know. Betrayed, I guess."

"Betrayed?" I tilted my head to the side. “How so?

She wiped at her cheek with the heel of her hand, angry with the tear before it fell. "Because she was going to leave and… and abandon us. For University. The Capitol. Him. And I thought families don't just leave one another. And then at school everyone was looking, and I didn't want them looking at me, and then a boy from my class started talking for the first time and-"

Her words tangled. I waited.

"I… told everyone,” She whispered, finally confessing. "On the roof. I said she kissed him and… I laughed about it."

My jaw tightened.

The old part of me, the mean part, made from alleys and hunger and boys like Hoffman Ellendale, wanted to sharpen my voice enough to leave a mark. However, Waaska already looked like a child who had found the knife in her own hand and did not know how to put it down without cutting herself again.

"So," I said carefully. "You gave them Rose."

She flinched. Hard.

"Yeah." Her voice cracked. "I did, I did. I thought… if they were talking about her, they wouldn't talk about me. And then the boy from my class, Enrique, said his sister was mad Rose got picked for University before her, and everyone started laughing, and I… I didn't stop it."

I inhaled slowly through my nose.

"Why did you feel betrayed?" I asked.

Her mouth opened. Closed. She swallowed.

"Because she was going to the Capitol," Waaska murmured. "Because he kissed her and everyone saw, and it was like... like she was already gone. Like she mattered somewhere else more than she mattered here."

“But… she isn't gone."

"I know." Waaska squeezed her eyes shut, hoping to bottle up her emotions.

"You know what?" I asked, more out of curiosity than out of accusation.

Waaska looked at me then, eyes wet and furious. "I don't know what I know anymore."

That was the first honest thing anyone had said all day.

"Rose is still here," I assured her. "Still kicking and trying to pull at something better, like she can drag it out of the dirt with her bare hands."

"But what if she gets voted?" Waaska whimpered with fear. “I… I did this! It’s my fault.”

The real fear beneath the confession stemmed from her guilt. Everyone’s guilt. The Quarter Quell was not just a rule. It was a sword the Capitol had set on the table and told children to pick who would fall on it first.

Waaska stared out toward the darkening rows of wheat in the distance. "People are already mad at her. They think she's… dirty. That she snogged her way into being special. They'll vote for her because… it feels like justice to them."

"It isn't justice," I said, sharper than intended. I softened my tone. "It's sacrifice."

Waaska's breath trembled. "And it's my fault."

I did not disagree. Not right away, though. Because if I lied, she would hear it. If I excused it, she would learn nothing. And Rose? She did not have the luxury of people learning slowly.

So, I held Waaska's gaze and let the truth sit between us, hard as stone.

"You made it easier, yes," I explained. "You gave them a story they can swallow. One they can repeat without feeling sick."

Her face crumpled. "I wish I didn’t."

"I know."

The young girl turned to me, a furious expression that showed determination suddenly glinted in her eyes. "I want to fix it."

"Then…” I eyed the endless fence posts. “… you have to start by telling the truth. To Rose."

Waaska looked horrified, her expression sickened, but more so pointed to herself. "She'll hate me."

"She might." I sighed. The answer hurt her. It needed to. "But you don't get to decide what she feels by keeping her in the dark. That's what the Capitol does. Or rather what it wants. They control the story so no one can breathe."

Waaska gripped the fence rail. "I can't. Not after what I said."

"You already made one choice today.” I offered. “Now… make another."

Her tears finally spilled. She wiped them angrily, like she was mad at herself for having a face that could betray her.

"She's going to get voted," Waaska whispered. "Because of me. Because I didn't keep my mouth shut. And because, you know, she's... Rose."

There was something in the way she said the name. Like it meant target. Like it meant bright.

Then Waaska said, smaller, almost to herself, "I wanted to be her. Just for a second."

I went still. Waaska stared into the pasture, voice hollow. "Everyone looks at her. When they hate her, they still look. And when he kissed her, it was like she mattered. O-Obviously, I’m not talking about that gross Capitolite, no. It’s just a-and I know it’s stupid, but… I wanted that."

Oh.

That was the sickness of it. They had taught our children to crave attention even when it came to teeth.

Waaska choked on a sob. "And now I ruined her."

"No," I said, firm enough to make her glance at me. "You didn't ruin her."

"Auphie-"

"You hurt her," I corrected. "But you didn't break her. Rose is not glass. She ain’t a rumor. Hell, she ain’t a story you trade to keep your own hands clean."

Waaska's breath hitched. "Then… why does it feel like she's already falling?"

Because she's trying to carrying everyone, I thought. Because she's been holding the line with her bare palms and it's finally starting to cut through.

I didn't say that part. Instead, I said, "Because… the district is hungry and scared. When people are like that, they… pick someone to blame so they don't have to admit the truth."

"What's the truth?" Waaska whispered, her dark brows pinched.

I looked at her dead in the eye. "The truth is… the Capitol is going to take one of us no matter what, but… they're counting on you being too terrified to notice who's really holding the knife."

Waaska's sobs quieted into something like breath. Then, she nodded. Barely.

"I want to make it right," she said hoarsely, trying to keep her sobs at bay.

"Then be brave," I told her. "Not loud. Brave."

She blinked hard. "W-Will you help me?"

To face Rose. To face the mess she had made. To face the possibility Rose would not forgive her and the possibility she did not deserve forgiveness yet.

I hesitated for only a heartbeat.

"Yeah," I said. "I'll help you out where I can."

Waaska's shoulders sagged with relief. Then, as if the moment itself finally found her, she whispered, "What if… Rose won't listen?"

I stared past her into the deepening dusk, where the hills turned into silhouettes and the world looked as if it were holding its breath.

"Then I'll make sure she does," I nodded quietly. Or I’ll try to anyways.

Waaska's eyes widened. My way of thinking wasn’t blunt exactly, she knew I meant it. If Rose was already blaming herself, already offering her throat to the Quell like penance, then someone had to be cruel enough to keep her alive. I glanced toward the lodge again, toward the warm light, toward the supper Rose was not sitting down to eat.

"Rose doesn't get to die because she feels guilty," I murmured, more to myself than Waaska. "Not while we’re still here."

Waaska swallowed hard. "Auphie..."

I turned back to her, voice gentler.

"Go wash your face," I said. "Breathe. Eat a bite so you don't faint. Then, when the time is right, we tell her. All of it."

"W-When will that be?" Her bottom lip quivered. “Does it have to be tonight?”

“No,” I assured, though, still I help her penance high where she could see it. "Tonight she gets one night where she isn't being watched."

Waaska slid down from the fence slowly, legs shaky beneath her. She hesitated by the back steps, hand on the rail, then looked at me one last time. "And if they vote for her anyway?"

My hands curled into fists at my sides. “Then we do everything we can to bring her home."

And for the first time, Waaska did not look like a scared kid. She looked like someone who understood what it cost to stand in front of fire.

By the time I went back inside, supper had been packed into a covered basket and tied with cloth.

Misea had tucked in more than she needed to. That was how women like her loved people when words turned useless. Duck wrapped in paper. A jar of threaded squash soup, still warm enough to fog the glass. Corn cakes. Pickled onions. A little crock of berry preserves. Enough food for two people and then some, as if hunger were the one problem in Panem a decent aunt could still outwit.

Gami added one last thing before I could leave.

“Here,” he said, pushing a flat, pale round of bread into the basket.

I looked down at it. Then back at him. “What happened to it?”

Gami’s brow furrowed. “That’s bread.”

I furrowed my brows. “Somebody sit on it?”

He gave me a wounded look. “It’s called pita. Got it off a trader passin’ through from east rail.”

“Pita,” I repeated, dubious. “Sounds like a small animal that bites.”

“It’s good with duck.” He assured me.

I make a gesture of something between a nod or a shake. Regardless, it came out uncertain. “I’ll inform Rose of that.”

Misea walked me to the porch. She stood there with both arms folded tight around herself, watching the yard like she expected the road to bring bad news if she looked away too long.

“Tell Rosie I’ll come by tomorrow,” she nodded, her gray-blue eyes holding maternal concern.

“I will.” I assured.

“And Auphie?” She called after as I paused with the basket in one hand.

Misea’s mouth trembled once before she steadied it. “Don’t let her sit too long in her own head. Ya hear?”

That almost made me laugh, though not because it was funny. “Trying not to”.

The ride back to the Tempest place was quieter than it had any right to be. Errante moved easy beneath me, unbothered by the basket swinging light against my leg, while the road darkened from gold to blue. New Bisman sat behind us with smoke still smearing the sky above the mayor’s quarter and the execution ground. A whole town trying to pretend supper could still happen after children had been turned into ballots.

The Tempest house had one lamp lit when I returned. Rose had not yet gone to bed. I knew that before I opened the door. There was a way a house held wakefulness. A thinness in the air. A careful soundlessness, like the walls knew someone inside was trying very hard not to make their pain visible.

She sat at the kitchen table with a book open in front of her and one hand pressed flat over the page. Obviously, her eyes gleamed over the same sentence over and over. Just keeping the book from closing, maybe, as if that counted as studying.

Wolfie lay beneath her chair with his chin on his paws. Then, Rose looked up when I came in. For a moment, neither of us said anything.

Then I lifted the basket. “Brought supper.”

Her gaze dropped to it. “Misea did?”

“And half the lodge,” I motioned it as if appraising its value. “By the weight of it.”

That drew the smallest breath of a smile from her. Something alive enough to count.

I set the basket on the table and started unpacking it. The smell of duck and squash soup filled the kitchen, warm and rich, and for one dangerous second it nearly felt like any other evening. One where Virgil might come in late smelling of smoke and oats, where Rose would wrinkle her nose at some school assignment, and I would pretend I had not been waiting for someone to ask if I wanted seconds.

Rose closed her book carefully.

“Misea didn’t need to send this much.” She smiled fondly at her aunt’s sentiment.

“She did, actually.” I shrugged. “Suppose it’s in the aunt law.”

“The aunt law?” She crinkled her brow.

“Very strict.” I jokingly played along, just like I used to do when Rose was ten. “Old as Panem. Older, maybe.”

Rose’s mouth twitched.

I pulled out the flat round of pita and laid it on the table with the solemnity of evidence. “Gami also sent this.”

Rose looked at it. Then at me, a shadow of amusement graced her face. “What is it?”

“Bread, apparently?”

That got more of a smile. A tired one, but real enough to hit me somewhere tender.

“It’s pita,” I relented. “He got it on a trade run.”

Rose inspected it, turning the slice over before shrugging. “It looks fine.”

I was taken aback. “It looks like somebody left it under a saddle.”

Rose tore a small piece of it free. “You are insufferable.”

Maybe.

She dipped the bread into the squash soup once I poured it before tasting it. Her eyebrows rose a little despite herself. I already knew squash soup was her favorite, but with pita bread of all things? It really couldn’t be that good.

I narrowed my eyes. “Does it taste like bread?”

“What do you think?” She shot back, chowing down at the pita and soup.

“That it tastes like somebody left it under a saddle?” I told her up front, before she shook her head with disapproval.

“No, Uncle Gami’s right.” She took another piece, folded it with duck inside, and dipped the edge into the soup. “It really does bring everything together.”

I gave her a sarcastic glance. “Does it really?”

“Yes.” She insistently shook her head, her wide eyes encouraging me to try a bite. “C’mon, Auphie.”

I didn’t. Instead, we ate in silence for a while. Or Rose ate a few bites and pushed the rest around her plate. I did not press her. Pressing Rose usually had the same effect as poking a badger with a spoon; educational, but not wise.

Her book sat between us. I glanced at it. “Schoolwork?”

She nodded absentmindedly, before dipping a piece of her pita in the soup. “History.”

“Capitol history or real history?” I glared down at the material. I already knew the answer.

“That depends on who’s grading.” She huffed.

That earned an earnest chuckle out of me.

Her eyes flicked up at that. I regretted it for half a second, wondering if the action had crossed wrong after everything. But she only looked back down and smoothed a crease in the page.

“I’m almost done,” she stated.

I looked back down at the book. “With history?”

“With the academy.” Her voice went quiet. “There isn’t much left now. A few marks, a final essay for Professor Wishek, and then…” She swallowed hard. “The Games.”

I leaned back slightly.

I knew that every school year as a “celebration”, the Games would be broadcasted live for all classes, regardless of if they were of reaping age or not.

It had started being an active, albeit forced, tradition to publicly broadcast the Games live across each settlement, all across the streets. You could be working at the mills, in the fields, or even at home, and it’d be mandatory for all radio stations, or if you were rich enough, televisions to be playing the Games for that specific time of year. Though, if you were working, you could at least zone out and simply focus on a task at hand, rather than listen to the screams of your own child being publicly flaunted on air.

However, the academy students had no such luck.

“The whole class has to watch,” she continued. “It’s supposed to be civic instruction. We analyze the arena afterward. Strategy. Geography. Historical value.” Her fingers curled against the table. “As if we’re not watching one of us die.”

One of us. I stared at the soup cooling in my bowl.

“Virgil hated that part,” I shook my head.

“I know.” Rosabel replied, remembering her father.

I turn my head back to her. “He… ever tell you?”

Rose nodded. “oh yeah. He said the Capitol liked making children practice being adults by teaching them how to watch other children suffer.”

“Yep,” I sighed. “That sounds like him.”

“It does.” A smile grin appeared as Rose remembered the man fondly. For a moment, the kitchen held his absence so clearly I could almost hear his boots in the hall.

Then, I broke the silence first. “Waaska feels bad.”

Her eyes moved to me. Then she turned back to her bowl. “I know she does.”

I let out a slow breath. “She told me.”

Rose’s jaw tightened once. “What?”

“About the rumors.” I clasp my hands together in front of me. “About what she said.”

“She told them about… yesterday.” Rose had a hard time iterating that last part.

I simply nodded. “Yep.”

Rose closed her eyes. I waited for anger. I might have preferred it. Anger was easier to stand beside than the quiet way Rose absorbed hurt, like she thought being still might keep it from spreading.

“She was scared,” Rose said. “She… She had to be.”

I nodded. “Told me she was.”

“I know, but,” Confliction crossed the redhead’s face. “That still doesn’t make it right.”

“No.”

Her eyes opened again, wet but steady. “I’m tired of understanding why people hurt me.”

That one hit clean. I nodded once. “You don’t have to forgive her tonight, ya know?”

“Yeah,” She sighed, almost in defeat. “I know.”

“And,” I steadily continued my train of thought. “You don’t have to make it easier for her because she’s sorry.”

Her gaze lifted to mine then, like she had expected the opposite. I kept my voice plain. “Sorry matters. It just doesn’t sew the wound shut by itself.”

Rose looked down at her hands. “I… does she think I’m leaving? Because if she does… I, goodness, I’d never want to abandon people so close to me, you know?”

I tightened my mouth in thought. “She thinks a lot of things right now, Rose.”

She shook her head. “So does everyone.”

Neither of us spoke after that. The lamp burned softly on the table. On the floor, Wolfie’s ears twitched toward some night sound, then settled. The house creaked in the cooling air.

Finally, Rose said, “Do you think they’ll vote for me, Auphie?”

I hadn’t expected her to be so forward. Not so soon. Certainly not everything that transpired the day prior. The question had its bones showing.

I could have lied. I wanted to. Badly enough that my tongue nearly shaped the words before my conscience caught them by the collar.

“I think,” I said slowly, “Some already have.”

Rose did not seem all that surprise. “And the rest?”

“The rest,” I slowly spoke. “They are trying to decide what kind of person they can live with being.”

Her mouth tightened, her eyes wandered with uncertainty. “That sounds like a yes to me.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It sounds like I don’t know how many decent people fear can ruin before morning.”

She nodded faintly and looked toward the dark window. “I keep thinking of what I’d do. If it wasn’t me. Like… if it were some other girl everyone said had a better chance. Someone older. Someone trained. Someone who had made trouble, or had no family, or had Capitol attention already.” Her voice thinned. “I hate that I can understand the shape of it.”

“That doesn’t make you them.” I assured her.

“No.” She rubbed at the corner of her eye. “But it means the Capitol knew exactly where to aim.”

I could not argue with that.

Rose turned back to the table. “If they vote me in, Auphie…”

She stopped. I watched the thought work through her face and hated every person who had taught a seventeen-year-old girl to speak of her own death with practical pauses.

“If they vote me in,” she tried again, “I don’t want you doing something stupid.”

I gave a dry little laugh. “Bit late for that request.”

“I mean it.” Her face turned serious.

So, I mirrored it back. “So do I.”

Her expression sharpened. “You already lost your position because of me.”

“No,” I said at once. “I lost it because I hit a Capitol man in front of half the district and then made a worse mess afterward. You don’t need to take credit for my bad decisions. I worked hard for those.”

“Auphie.” Her head tilted in frustration, before softened despite herself, but the fear stayed. “It’s just… I don’t want you hurt more.”

That did something ugly and tender inside me. I looked at the book between us. At her ink-smudged fingers. The bruise still faint near her mouth. At the girl who had been trying all day to make herself into something the district could sacrifice cleanly.

That’s when an idea came to me. Not a good idea. Good ideas are generally tidier, safer, less likely to get a man dragged behind a peacekeeper wagon, but… it was an idea with shape.

“If worse comes to worse,” I finally allow my impulsions to slip, “You’re not going in empty-handed.”

Rose frowned with confusion. “What does that mean?”

“It means tomorrow morning,” I assert. “We go to the Garden.”

Her frown deepened. “Auphie. Why?”

Before I could explain, I quietly confirmed it. “I’ll teach you what I can.”

“What? You already have.”

“No.” I shook my head. “Not enough.”

Her eyes searched mine, still, a dwindling hope reflected back to me. “Teach me what?”

“How to hunt properly.” I said promptly. “How to track something that doesn’t want to be found. Or how to move without sounding like a schoolgirl stepping on every dry twig in District 9.”

“I do not-” Her expression rapidly bounced between a thousand thoughts. “What- What do you-“

I ignored her. “How to ration something without wasting half of it or to judge water. And to tell a useful plant from a pretty poison. How to do all that ugly stuff that Virgil never wanted you to know when it comes to firecatching.”

Then, her face had gone still.

“And,” I added, quieter now, “I’ll make you a bow.”

The room seemed to close around the sentence. Rose stared at me. “That’s… contraband.”

“Yes.” I said simply.

“Auphie, you could be arrested!” The rule following academy student in her panicked. “O-Or worse!”

“I know.”

Her brow sharpened. “Auphie!”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.” Her voice rose, not much, but enough for Wolfie to lift his head beneath the table. “You just got dismissed because of Coriolanus. Rolette is already watching you. Peacekeepers are already watching all of us. If they find a weapon here-”

“But they won’t.” I ominously confirmed. “Trust me.”

“Auphie, you don’t know that.” She kept pleading.

“No,” I admitted. “I don’t.”

Her breath caught, frustrated and afraid. “Then… why would you risk it?”

I leaned forward, resting both arms on the table. “Because if the district decides your name belongs on that ballot, I won’t have my last act be standing around politely while they send you off unprepared.”

Rose looked away. I kept going, because stopping now would be cowardice.

“I can’t stop the vote. I can’t stand in that square or make people braver than they are. I can’t make Snow undo what he did and make the whole damn Capitol admit this entire thing is rotten from root to roof.” My voice roughened. “But I can put something useful in your hands. I can teach you how not to freeze. I can give you one more way to come home.”

Her eyes filled again.

“Don’t say it like that,” she whispered.

“Like what?”

“Like,” Her eyes broke from mine reluctantly. “Like it’s possible.”

My throat tightened. “Rose… it is possible.”

“Auphie-”

“It is.” I said it harder that time, because she needed the words to have a spine. Maybe I did too. “Not easy. Or fair. But possible.”

“Auphie,” She shook her head once in near defeat. “No one from 9 ever wins. Not even on the first day-”

“Tessie did.”

Pain and fear crossed her face. “And look what winning did to her.”

I went quiet. There were some arguments a person could win and still lose the soul of the matter.

Rose wiped at her cheek quickly, angry with herself for the tears. “I… I don’t want to become a thing people tell stories about because there’s nothing else left of me.”

I gulped back a tremor. “You won’t.”

“You don’t know that.” Her face crinkled in thought.

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

She looked at me then.

I held her gaze, plain as I could. “But I know this. You are not dead tonight and if I had it my way, you won’t be dead in a long time. You are sitting at this table, insulting perfectly suspicious bread, worrying about school, and arguing with me like you still expect tomorrow to be something you can answer back to. So tomorrow… we prepare. Got it?”

Rose’s mouth trembled. Not quite a smile. Not quite a sob.

“Prepare?” she repeated.

“That’s all,” I said. “No grand speeches or pretending like we’re not scared. There will be no deciding you’re already gone because the district might be cowardly enough to call your name. We. Prepare.”

She looked down at the pita bread still torn open beside her bowl. After a long moment, she picked up another piece, folded a bit of duck inside it, and held it out to me.

I eyed it. “I still don’t trust that thing.”

“It brings everything together.” She said almost casually.

“That so?” I sighed.

She simply nodded before  I took it from her and ate it because she was watching.

It was good.

Rose saw my face and, for the first time all day, gave a real laugh. Small. Cracked. Gone almost as soon as it came. But real. I would have smuggled a hundred illegal bows through a peacekeeper barracks for that sound.

She sobered quickly. “If we do this,” she said, “we do it carefully.”

“Agreed.”

“And if you think I’m going to let you get yourself burned for trying to help me—”

I threw my hands up in surrender. “Then, you can lecture me at the reaping.”

“I mean it.” Her eyes turned to glass.

“So do I.” I responded in earnest.

Her eyes narrowed, but there was less despair in them now. Fear still sat there, of course, bright and honest. Which was good. Let it. Let her be afraid and let it keep one hand closed tight around life.

Outside, the night settled fully over the Tempest yard. Somewhere in the paddock, Wildfire shifted against the fence. The house stayed quiet around us, no less endangered than before, no less watched by the world beyond its walls.

When I rose to clear the bowls, she opened her history book again, not because she was reading, I suspected, but because tomorrow had not taken that from her yet.

By morning, the district might have already decided all manner of things about Rosabel Tempest-Strix, but sitting there beneath the kitchen lamp and contraband already taking shape in my mind, I made one decision of my own.

Before Virgil Tempest, before the firecatcher coat, before anyone ever looked at me and saw something useful, there was Dido, Auntie Aelias, and the Dregs.

That was the whole of my world, give or take a few alleys, a collapsed tannery, and the stretch of northern brush where desperate kids learned the difference between hunger and law. My parents had died when I was young enough that memory kept them more as weather than people. There were no clean portraits in my head, no tender scenes I could summon when grief wanted company. Only fragments: a woman's sleeve smelling of lye, a story or two about a man who looked like me, Dido's hand gripping mine too tightly the day we were moved into Auntie Aelias's house.

Dido remembered more. That was one of the first cruel things the world gave her and denied me. She remembered the before, and I only remembered the after.

Auntie Aelias was technically our great-aunt, though nobody with any manners would have made her carry the extra title. She was old by District 9 measures, which meant she had lived long enough to look at government announcements without believing the nice words and had enough ache in her joints to forecast weather better than any Capitol instrument. She kept a makeshift clinic on the poor edge of New Bisman, in a narrow two-room shack pressed against the last row of Dregs housing, where concrete blocks met mud and every building looked half ashamed of standing.

Her clinic was not the clinic proper. That place had clean sheets, locked cabinets, official healers, and prices that made a body reconsider whether bleeding out might be cheaper. Auntie Aelias had boiled linen, bitter poultices, old tinctures, and hands steady enough to make a child stop screaming before the needle went in. People paid her in coin when they had it and potatoes when they didn't. Sometimes in eggs. Once in a cracked mirror she hated and hung up anyway because refusing a gift was rude, even when the gift showed a woman exactly how tired she had become.

She could set a wrist, lance a boil, dress a burn, and talk a fever down like sickness was a stubborn mule. Healing the poor never fed anyone well. It only made sure everybody in the Dregs knew where to knock when their baby coughed blood or their husband lost a finger to the mill teeth.

That’s why Dido hunted.

At first she tried to keep it from me. She was maybe ten or so the first time I followed her beyond the northern wash flats and saw her pull a trapped hare from beneath a tangle of bitterroot. I must have been five, maybe six? Old enough to understand the animal was dead and young enough to think death was something you could use if you were careful with it. Dido turned on me with a snarl that would have frightened a coyote.

"Go home, Auphidius."

"No." I hissed through my gapped teeth.

That was most of our childhood, if you stripped it down honest. Dido saying go home. Me saying no. The Capitol finding a way to make us both wrong.

She had an atlatl carved from scrap wood and bone, one Auntie said had belonged to a cousin before the Dark Days swallowed his name. It was a simple thing, ugly as a fence slat, but in Dido's hand it became a miracle. She taught me to throw because she learned quickly that I would keep following her whether or not she wanted me there, and a boy with no training was noisier than a boy with a task.

By eight, I could drop a pheasant from the low air if the wind didn't shift mean. By nine, I could set a snare tight enough that a jackrabbit had no chance. By ten, I knew which traders would buy a dressed bird without asking where it came from and which would ask only to see whether fear made the price lower.

We used the Secret Garden before it ever belonged to Rosabel.

Back then, the place was not a sanctuary. Not yet. It was a hiding place and hiding places don't become holy until someone survives in them long enough to add meaning. The narrow crack in the red stone was almost invisible if you didn't already know where to look, tucked deep in the northern Morton Valley where the creek bent around broken rock and the grass grew tall enough to swallow a child whole. Dido found it first, or so she said. I always suspected Auntie had told her and let the lie stand because Dido needed to feel like something in our life had been earned instead of inherited through misfortune.

We stored gear there. Snares. The old atlatl. Arrows I had no right to own and loved more than common sense. Waxed thread. Salt wrapped in cloth. A rack made from creek branches where meat could hang in the cool dark until night made it safe to haul home. Auntie knew, though she pretended not to, because old healers and old women are experts in knowing what children think they've hidden.

"Careful with the steel points," she would say while stirring supper, never looking at the bundle under my coat. "A puncture gets ugly if it festers."

Dido would shoot me a look across the room that meant, ‘See? She knows, you idiot.’

I would grin back because I was young enough to believe being known meant being safe.

For a while, it worked.

That was the dangerous thing. Most bad ideas work for a while. We ate better. Not well, mind you. Nobody in the Dregs ate well unless they were stealing from someone who ate better. Though, there was meat often enough to keep Auntie's hands from shaking when she worked late. Dido's cheeks stopped looking hollow. I learned the small pride of slipping coins into the cracked ceramic jar near the clinic shelf and watching Auntie's mouth soften when she thought no one could see.

Then the peacekeepers came heavier.

They had always existed, same as winter, taxes, and the Games. However, a good decade after the Dark Days, after the peacekeepers were slowly able to replenish and districts were meant to have been beaten into obedience, the Capitol had decided victory required constant reminding. So, patrols thickened around New Bisman. First along the rail line. Then at the mill gates. Then through the Dregs, where they inspected houses with the bored cruelty of men turning over stones to see what might scuttle out.

The weaponry recession came wrapped in words like safety and reconstruction. Blades, bows, trapping wire, spear throwers, even certain kinds of leatherwork could become contraband if the wrong peacekeeper wanted a reason. Guns were already off limits to the districts, but weapons like bows were to be submitted for registration through the peacekeeper force… and never given back to the hands of an everyday hunter ever again. Redundant and pointless, really.

Licensed hunters existed in name, yes. Licensed hunters also belonged to better families, better ledgers, better connections. The rest of us were poachers if caught and survivors if not.

Dido understood the change before I did.

"We stop," she told me one evening in the Secret Garden. She stood in the doorway with a sack over one shoulder and blood dried beneath one fingernail from cleaning grouse. "No more. Not for a while."

I stared at her as if she had suggested we stop breathing. "Auntie needs the meat."

"Auntie needs us alive." Dido reiterated.

"Auntie needs coin too."

That cost me a glare.

"Don't you twist this." Her voice had gone hard, but not cold. Dido was never cold with me then, not truly. She was frightened, and fear made her voice sharp. "They're checking stalls. Shops. Homes. They found snares at the Tanner boy's last week and took his father for questioning."

“Well,” the little boy that I was, tried to reason a way out. "His father came back."

"With three teeth gone."

I shrugged because I was nearly eleven and stupid enough to mistake defiance for courage. "Then we don't get caught."

Dido slapped me. Not hard enough to bruise. Hard enough to make silence.

She looked more shocked than I was. Her hand trembled at her side, and for one second, I thought she might apologize. Instead, she stepped closer.

"You think you're clever, but you ain’t," she stated. "We were lucky, not clever. Those are not the same thing."

I looked away first. That made me angrier than the slap.

"We stop," she said again. "Promise me."

I promised. Then I broke it.

Not all at once. That's how betrayal likes to dress itself, in little exceptions neat enough to pass as need. One snare because Auntie had given away too much medicine without payment that week. One turkey because winter was coming. One hidden cache moved from the Secret Garden to Auntie's back room because peacekeepers had been seen near the valley and surely the clinic, with all its smells and sickbeds and old women shuffling in for poultices, would be safer than a cave.

Surely… right?

The morning Auntie Aelias died, I had gone out before dawn and come back triumphant.

I remember that. Shame loves detail.

Two pheasants, fat from gleaning fallen grain near the eastern fields. A hare too, snared clean by the creek. I was filthy, frozen at the fingers, and proud in that secretive way only hungry boys can be proud, with coins already imagined in the jar and Auntie's stew already alive in my head.

Smoke rose from the heart of New Bisman as I came over the ridge.

That was not unusual. Morning burnings had become part of the district's clock by then. The Capitol liked its lessons well attended, so they scheduled executions when workers moved toward mills and fields. People could pretend they did not look, but the smoke found them anyway. It seeped into collars, hair, bread dough, prayer. District 9 learned obedience through the nose.

I noticed the smoke. I did not yet know it belonged to us.

The Dregs were too quiet when I reached them. That was the first true warning. Poverty is many things, but rarely silent. Usually the alleys rattled with coughing, pots, arguing, children chasing one another with sticks, men cursing boots that had split at the sole. That morning, doors were shut. Curtains hung still. Even the dogs had gone to ground.

Auntie's clinic door stood open.

Inside, the shelves were half-cleared. A basin lay overturned. Her rolls of linen had been scattered across the floor, white strips trampled into dirt. Dido's sewing kit was open on the table, needles glittering like little silver teeth.

"Auntie?" I called.

No answer. The bundle of birds slipped from my hand and hit the floor.

I moved toward the back room, already knowing and refusing to know. The hiding hollow beneath the cabinet had been torn apart.

Empty. The leather wrap that had held the atlatl and spare arrowheads lay open like a skinned thing.

Then Dido spoke from the doorway behind me. "They found it."

I turned.

She looked wrong. She rarely ever cried. Claimed crying never helped anyone. Though, her face had gone flat in a way no child's face should know how to go flat. There was ash in her hair. One sleeve was singed at the cuff. Her gray eyes did not meet mine.

"Dido," I whispered. "Where's Auntie?"

Her silence told me before her mouth ever could.

Rose did not go home.

She meant to. That was the part she would later hold against herself with almost physical hatred. She had taken Errante from my hand, felt the insistence in my grip when I pressed the reins into her palm, and seen the way fear had moved behind my eyes before I covered it with command.

Just go home…

For a few minutes, she had obeyed. Or tried to.

Errante carried her south from the square with a steady, ground-eating trot, his dapple-gray neck darkened with sweat beneath the bridle. Behind her, New Bisman remained broken open by noise. Screaming and crying became more and more faint. The hard clatter of peacekeeper boots against street planks grew distant, but not enough. The awful, restless churn of a crowd that had not yet decided whether it was frightened enough to run or angry enough to stay.

Rose held the reins too tightly. Her hands still shook.

The district will vote. The district will vote. The district will vote…

The phrase would not settle into sense. It kept moving inside her, taking on new shapes every time she tried to look at it directly. At first, it had sounded impossible, before turning grotesque. Then, worst of all, practical. The sort of cruelty only Panem could invent because only Panem had learned how to make punishment sound like participation.

By the time Errante reached the fork in the road, Rose was no longer thinking about home. She was thinking about paper. The paper.

The original Games charter was folded in the false bottom of Virgil's old dispatch box, where he had kept amendments, firecatcher exemptions, levy maps, and correspondence too politically inconvenient to throw away and too useful to burn. Rose had read the charter years ago, not because she had any love for the Games, but because her father had once told her hateful things were usually built from language before they were built from steel.

The first time she read it, she had been twelve, having just become eligible for the Reaping. Too young to understand everything. Old enough to understand enough.

However, even twelve-year-old Rosabel knew one thing for certain…

… there had been no Quarter Quell, and especially no voting. There hadn’t been a clause permitting the districts to choose their own children for slaughter under the pretense of civic voice.

Nothing.

Rose pulled Errante to a stop so sharply the gelding tossed his head. For one breath, she looked toward the road home. Then toward the mayor's quarter.

Auphie will be furious! She thought to herself. Virgil would be furious.

That had to have meant she was wrong. Or… maybe anger was simply what men reached for when they could not bear the sight of a girl walking toward danger with nothing but a question and a stolen page.

Rose went home… to retrieve the charter before she turned Errante toward Lancaster's manor.

The mayor's house stood too cleanly against the unrest of the town below. Even now, with the square barely settled behind her and smoke-colored dust still hanging over New Bisman's streets, the manor kept its polished distance. Its white trim caught the late light. Its windows glowed with lamplight. Its hedges sat clipped and obedient beside the path, as if plants themselves behaved better when authority watched them grow.

Two peacekeepers stood at the front gate. Rose, knowing full well what she was doing, did not go to the front gate.

She tied Errante at the side rail, near the delivery walk where wagons brought flour, coal, and whatever fine unnecessary things Lancaster's household pretended not to import. The gelding shifted uneasily as she looped the reins around the post.

"Stay," she whispered, though the word felt foolish once spoken. Errante flicked one ear.

Rose took the folded charter from inside her satchel and tucked it beneath her jacket. Then she went around the servants' side. The back door had been left unlatched.

That, more than anything, told her how badly the day had shaken the house. Lancaster's manor was not the sort of place where doors were left loose by accident. Usually, everything there seemed fastened twice, like the doors, curtains, expressions, conversation. Now? The servants' corridor beyond the kitchen stood lit and empty, smelling of floor polish, cold meat, and the sharp tang of worry.

Voices carried from deeper in the house. Men arguing, though men like Lancaster did not shout unless the performance required it. This was worse than shouting. Instead, it was clipped, low, controlled, and full of panic dressed in better grammar.

"...cannot expect the district to absorb this without unrest."

"That is no longer a question of expectation, Mayor. It is fact."

"Children were frightened in the square."

"Children are frightened every year."

"This was different."

"Then perhaps District 9 should learn to respond differently."

Rose stopped in the hall. That voice.

Cold. Even. Familiar now in a way that made her skin tighten.

Coriolanus Snow.

She moved closer despite herself, keeping one hand to the wall where the runner muffled her steps. Through the half-open library door, she could see Lancaster standing near his desk with two district officials beside him, both flushed from argument. One held a handkerchief crushed in one fist. Another stared at the floor like a man trying to find escape in the pattern of the rug.

Coriolanus stood by the window.

His snakebite hand was bandaged beneath a dark glove, held with careful ease at his side. If the venom had left him weakened, he had arranged the weakness into posture so well that it almost looked intentional. His crimson coat was immaculate. His pale hair was exact. He looked less like a man recovering from near death than a portrait restored too quickly after damage.

Lancaster rubbed his forehead. "Mr. Snow, you must understand, if the citizens believe they are being made complicit-"

"They are being made complicit," Coriolanus said, tone unwavering.

The room went still. Rose felt the words pass through her with a quiet horror.

Coriolanus turned from the window, his face composed. "That is the point."

One of the officials made a faint sound, something akin to a laugh. "Surely you do not mean-"

"I mean," Snow continued, "that rebellion survives by allowing people to imagine innocence after obedience. The Quell corrects that error."

Rose's fingers tightened around the paper beneath her jacket.

Lancaster's face had drained of color, which surprised Rose more than anything. She had never seen the man look so utterly helpless, even during the Quell announcement. "That is… a very dangerous interpretation, Mr. Snow."

"It is not an interpretation.” The Capitolite retorted. “It is design."

Rose stepped back without meaning to. A floorboard beneath her heel gave one small, traitorous creak.

Fortunately, Lancaster did not hear it. The district officials were still too fixed on Snow, too disturbed by what he had said to look toward the corridor.

But Coriolanus did. His eyes shifted.

Only briefly, though not enough to alert the others or to interrupt the shape of his own posture. His gaze moved to the narrow gap between door and frame, found Rose in the dimness beyond it, and held her there for one suspended breath.

Rose froze. He had seen her. He knew…

She felt her stomach drop as she expected for Coriolanus to make her presence know. However, with perfect calm, he looked back at Lancaster.

"In any case," Coriolanus said, his voice smoothing back into something less openly cruel, "the district's response must be contained before it becomes a lesson to others. Mayor, I suggest you take your officials and address the peacekeeper captain directly. Public injury reports should be controlled. Public grief should be guided. Public anger should be exhausted before it organizes itself. Am I clear?”

Mayor Lancaster stared at him a moment longer. He looked as if he wanted to object and as if he had already learned objection would not alter the terms of the room. Finally, he gathered the papers from his desk with a stiff motion. "Very well."

One official moved first. Then the other. Lancaster followed after them, his mouth pressed thin, his expression drawn with the strain of a man being asked to make cruelty orderly enough for filing.

Rose pressed herself flat into the shadow beside the side passage.

They passed within feet of her. Lancaster never turned nor did his officials. Their boots moved down the corridor, farther and farther, until the front portion of the house took their voices and made them distant.

Rose remained where she was, scarcely breathing. Inside the library, no one moved, or rather, he didn’t move.

Then Coriolanus said, without raising his voice, "You may come in now, Miss Tempest-Strix."

The sound of her name in the empty hall felt worse than being shouted for. For one awful second, Rose considered running. It would have been useless. She knew that before the thought had fully formed. He had seen her. More than that, he had chosen not to reveal her. That choice already sat between them like a hand around the back of her neck.

So, she stepped into the doorway.

Coriolanus had not moved from the window. His gaze rested on her with the cool patience of someone observing a mistake ripen into usefulness.

No surprise. No warmth. No false relief. Just firm recognition.

Rose stood with the folded charter tucked against her side, her academy jacket dusty from the square, one braid loosened at her shoulder. "I…  needed to speak with you, Coriolanus."

"Yes," he briefly sighed. "That much is obvious."

Her face warmed. "I-I didn't mean to overhear."

His finger drummed against the windowpane. "No?"

The single word was soft enough to be polite yet sharp enough to draw blood. Rose swallowed hard regardless. "I came because… I found something."

Coriolanus's expression did not change. It didn’t make an attempt to look intrigued or even bothered by her sudden proclamation. His face remained solid, like a sheet of ice.

As Rose slowly approached, she felt, against her will, the strange pull of being understood by someone outside the fence of District 9. That was the confusing part. Coriolanus frightened her at times, yes. He had frightened her at the clinic because he was on the verge of death and barely seemed affected. Yet he also listened in a way most adults did not listen to children from districts, and some hollow, ambitious part of her still wanted to believe there was a route through him into the world she meant to change.

That made the fear harder to sort.

"I came because I have a question," Rose finally admitted, thinking about when a suitable time would be to present the contradiction hidden in her jacket.

"You have many, I assume.” His eyes briefly met hers. “That is usually the trouble."

She drew the folded charter from beneath her jacket and held it out. "This one has an answer."

Coriolanus did not immediately take it. That forced her to stand there with her arm extended too long, feeling suddenly young and ridiculous. Especially exposed.

Only when her fingers began to tremble did he step forward and accept the document. His gloved hand brushed the edge of the paper, almost brushing her skin.

Still, Rose had to fight the urge to pull away. He unfolded it slowly.

The room was too quiet. Beyond the walls, Lancaster's voice moved somewhere distant, unaware, occupied elsewhere because Coriolanus had decided he should be. That realization made the room feel smaller.

His eyes moved over the page once. Then again.

By the time he looked up, Rose knew he understood exactly what it was.

"Where did you get this?" he simply asked.

The question was soft. Far too soft.

Rose's stomach tightened. "It… was my father's."

His gaze dropped back to the charter. "Of course it was."

"He kept copies of the Games charter, w-when he was making the amendments." Her voice sputtered once before it strengthened, as facts seemed safer than fear. "This is the legal copy from the year he argued the firecatcher amendment. The one recognizing years of fire service as lottery reduction. It lists all standing provisions connected to tribute selection."

Coriolanus folded the top edge down slightly with his thumb.

Rose pressed on. "And I was simply confused because… because there is nothing here about a Quarter Quell."

The tense silence that followed made Rose’s heart erupt in her chest. Her brows furrowed with worry at the idea of accidentally touching on something too… recalcitrant.

"No." Coriolanus plainly said. The answer was so immediate it stopped her.

She stared at him. "N-No?"

"No," he repeated. "There is not."

For a moment, Rose could only hear her own pulse. Perplexity etched across her freckled features. "You… knew?"

Then, to Rose’s complete shock… and trepidation, Coriolanus gave her faint smile. "Of course."

The word hit like a slap. They resounded far more casually for Rosabel’s liking. Cautiously, she took one step closer. "Then… how can it be? T-The Quarter Quell? There… there must be reason for this change…"

Coriolanus regarded her as though the question disappointed him, yet his expression didn’t fully register that.

"Careful, Rosabel," he snickered, albeit in a disturbingly off handed tone.

She almost laughed alongside him. "I-I’m sorry? I don’t think I-"

"Yes, you do." He held up the charter slightly. "Because, you, my dear, are standing in a government house where no one knows you have entered, holding restricted material, accusing the Capitol of violating a law you are not authorized to interpret."

“I… I know,” Rose admitted as she felt heat rise in her face. "But… is that not worth asking?"

Suddenly, the Capitolite’s face dropped. "Not the way you ask it."

What?! Rose suddenly felt overly aware of the situation, like this was a trap that Coriolanus had set up specifically for her… even though she was the one who drew everything out. At this realization, she understood it was too late to turn back and admit defeat. It wasn’t that simple.

"How should I ask it, then?” Rose continued to press, though her words began to crack as she paced further on thin ice. “Should I… should I just wait until the district votes one of us to death? O-Or wait until everyone finds a way to hate whatever child is easiest to send? How then!?"

His expression went still. There was the first crack on the ice. So fine to the point where anyone could miss it. Though, Rosabel could feel it. See it.

She felt herself cross it a heartbeat after the crossing.

Coriolanus looked toward the door, then back to her. "Lower your voice."

Rose did not.

"The Games charter never allowed this, Coriolanus.” She insisted, though it sounded as if she were begging, bargaining for answers. “The districts choosing their own tributes was never part of the original punishment. It was never-"

"It was never necessary before."

Rose stopped. Her eyes widened in that worried manner.

Coriolanus folded the charter with careful precision. "That is the answer you came for, is it not?"

Her mouth felt dry. Her voice beginning to grow feeble. "Necessary to whom?"

A faint, humorless amusement touched his face, though, not his eyes.

"For someone… promising," he plainly said, "you still keep expecting cruelty to announce itself by name, don’t you?"

Rose did not answer. How could she?

He stepped away from the window and crossed to Lancaster's desk, where he laid the charter down beside a stack of official letters. He did not give it back.

Rose noticed that at once.

"The Capitol has grown sentimental," Coriolanus sighed, a grimace formed across his lips. "Not universally, though… it’s enough. The districts have become useful objects of pity to certain people who can afford pity because they will never pay its cost. President Axel understands that sentiment. He intends to survive it by appearing generous."

Rosabel lingered on that idea, remembering University. Remembering that loosened vice around her interview that could have potentially cost her her life.

"Just like… the university," Rose said quietly.

The man hummed, "Among other things."

"But… the Quell?" Rose pinched her brows. “That would emboldened that empathy, would it not?”

"Correction." He quickly remarked, before looking at her, his eyes leaving nothing of note for her to read. “It is meant to invoke correct, not empathy, Rosabel.”

The word chilled the room.

“But…” Rose shook her head once, her gaze casted to the floorboards as though they had the answers. "N-No, that’s not-"

"No?" Coriolanus’s brow raised, before taking a step forward.

"That is not correction, though.” She tried to reason. “That’s… manipulation. Rot. Why… why take advantage of that?"

His eyes hardened. Not visibly enough for anyone else to notice, perhaps, but that might have been the exact moment his patience thinned and something underneath looked through.

"There is nothing to take advantage of," he affirmed. “Besides, you can’t simply expect one’s feelings to rule over law, can you? Empathy breeds manipulation and it is simply our job to prevent that real manipulation from festering over our lives.”

Rose went silent.

The reprimand landed with surgical neatness, with a part of her fearing it might sound believable to him, to Lancaster, to the university board, to anyone already waiting to decide that district emotion had overrun district intelligence. Coriolanus saw that too. Of course he did.

His voice softened. "Rosabel."

She wished he would not say her name like that. Not so warmly and affectionately. Like he had chosen it from a shelf and placed it exactly where he wanted it.

“P-Please.” Rose’s voice came out in uneven sputters. “This… none of this-“

"You have gone through… a lot these past few days," he said, his assurance feeling too sudden for Rose to wrap her head around.

She gulped; confusion and betrayal intermingled. "I am aware."

"No. You are not." He came around the desk, slowly enough that she had time to step back and hated herself for doing so. "If you were aware, you would understand how dangerous this is. You have lost your father. You just came from a riot. You made yourself visible before you were ready to be. You… saved my life.” His voice was shifting to a gentler octave. Still, it did nothing to help Rose’s anxiety. “All of this within the span of a week. And now? And now you are walking into locked rooms with stolen documents because you think outrage will make you brave enough to survive the consequences. Are you aware of that?"

Rose's throat tightened. The worst part was that some of it sounded close enough to care to be mistaken for it by someone lonelier than she wanted to be.

"I did not steal it," she sniffled in defiance.

Coriolanus tilted his gaze. "No?"

Rose scrunched her eyes shut. "It was my father's."

"But you father is dead, Rosabel."

The words entered the room cleanly. Rose flinched before she could stop herself. Coriolanus watched it happen. Then his expression shifted, subtle as a hand sliding into a glove.

"I am sorry," he whispered, something bordering on emphatic. Empathetic? How ironic…

He stepped closer, and the room seemed to lose air by degrees.

"You came to me because you understood something," he said. "Even if you did not wish to name it."

Rose forced herself to meet his eyes, an emboldened expression of frustration flashed in her face. "I came because you are vice gamemaker!"

"And?"

"And…” Rose, despite her voice depleting, kept her chin higher. “…I thought perhaps you could explain how this was allowed."

"No." His gaze lowered briefly to the charter on the desk. "You came because you knew I could decide whether your question became a scandal or a secret."

Rose’s eyes widened. For one second, all she could think of was the university board. Dr. Anderson's level gaze. The younger professor's interest. The dean saying she had loyalties. Lancaster's careful, frightened face. A door, barely open.

And Coriolanus had placed his hand on the edge of it.

She saw that now.

"I didn't mean to threaten anyone," Rose said, too quickly than she originally intended.

Coriolanus flashed her a smile, albeit humorless. "Intent is a luxury of private life."

She swallowed. "Then I apologize."

Suddenly, a completely new expression plagued Coriolanus’s features, with a smile that finally reached his eyes. Something that couldn’t be joyful. Not now. "There…"

The word came too softly. Rose froze.

Coriolanus tilted his head slightly. "That is better."

Something in her recoiled, though not from her apology. She had meant it, partly. She had come recklessly and cornered him with paper and fury and grief, right? Some part of her knew that had been foolish. She had to be…

Yet the way he received it made the apology feel no longer hers. As if he had been waiting for her to step into the proper posture. Rose's hands curled into themselves.

"I only wanted to understand," she tried to explain.

"I know."

Rose bit back. "You don't."

"I do." He gave her a small, cold smile. "That is what makes you so dangerous, my dear."

The word should have frightened her. Instead, for one foolish second, it almost sounded like praise.

Coriolanus saw that too. His smile faded into something quieter.

"Your mind is rare," he quietly affirmed. "Do you know that?"

Rose did not answer.

"You take structures apart instinctively. You hear a speech and search for the hinge. You read a law and look for the absence. Most people? They only notice what power says. You notice what it omits."

The room had become very still. Rose knew she should speak. Deflect. Step away. Ask for the charter back. Leave…

Instead, she stood there while his words moved around her like ribbon becoming rope.

"That kind of mind," Coriolanus continued, "will either be cultivated or destroyed. There are very few middle paths."

Rose's voice came smaller than she wanted. "Is… that a threat?"

"No." He looked almost offended by the simplicity of the question. "It is an assessment."

Rose’s eyes darted to the small flower clipped to his jacket. A rose, pure as snow…

"That's… not much better."

"It is more honest." Coriolanus’s voice dipped to something close to teasing. Not quite.

He moved then, not toward her, but past her, to the door. For a single hopeful instant, she thought he meant to open it. Instead, he pushed it shut the last inch.

The click of the latch was quiet.

Rose stopped breathing for half a second. Coriolanus turned back.

"You cannot keep doing this," he said.

"Doing what?" she felt her alternatives out of this situation growing more distance.

"Running,” Coriolanus’s hand ghosted over her shoulder. “Racing toward every locked thing because you resent the lock."

Rose's pulse beat hard at her throat. "Maybe… maybe it isn’t the lock that’s resentful."

"Maybe…” Coriolanus parroted. “… except most are meant to keep clever girls out. And perhaps, it’s easy see why one might hold such sentiments."

The sentence should not have landed the way it did. It should have sounded patronizing. Perhaps it was patronizing. Beneath it sat something else, though, something colder and more possessive than concern.

A clever girl.

Not a citizen. Not a student. Not even Rosabel.

A thing categorized. A thing he had decided required management.

"I am not trying to break into anything," she said, the statement itself was only a half truth though.

"No," he agreed. "You are asking me to help you enter rooms where protection will become necessary."

Rose looked toward the desk. "Then give me back the charter."

He did not move. "It is safer with me."

The answer came so easily, so reasonably, that for a moment she could not find the shape of her anger. "It belongs to my father."

"It belongs to a dead man whose paperwork could ruin you if discovered in your possession."

Rose took a step toward the desk. Coriolanus did not block her.

He did not have to. Then… she stopped before reaching it. The truth hung heavy on her shoulders. That he had made the consequences visible enough for her to halt herself. That was the truth.

Her voice shook despite her effort. "You… you have no right."

"Rights," he said, almost gently, "are among the first things people invoke when they realize power has already moved without them."

Rose stared at him. There was no mask now. Or rather, the mask had become so perfect she could no longer tell where it ended.

"You asked why the Quell exists," he said. "There is your answer. Because power dislikes innocence it cannot own. It despises that mercy, once publicly demanded, must be counterweighted by fear. The districts have begun to look too sympathetic, and sympathy without humiliation becomes politically expensive."

Rose felt sick. "Is that what you think?"

“It isn’t as simple as yes or no, my dear,” Coriolanus confirmed. "Rather, it is enough to understand it."

"But… that isn’t hat I asked."

“You’re correct,” he admitted. "But it is the answer you can bear to hear."

The room pressed close around her. The heavy curtains trapping her within. The polished desk with its papers with their official seals, alongside the faint smell of ink and lamp oil. She could hear the blood in her ears.

She had come to negotiate with reason. She had brought proof. And still, he had taken the proof, named the danger, placed himself between her and every door she wanted opened, and called it care.

"I should go," she said.

"Of course," he replied.

Neither of them moved.

Coriolanus regarded her for one more moment, and when he spoke again, his voice had returned to that smooth, public softness she recognized from the university meeting. "When this passes, we will discuss your future properly."

Rose's stomach twisted. "My future?"

Coriolanus nodded. "Yes."

"I… don't know if there will be one." She couldn’t help but admit.

Something altered in his face.

"There will be," he assured her. The certainty should have comforted her.

"It will need discipline. Guidance of course. Better instincts than the ones that brought you here today." His eyes moved over her face with an attention that felt less like seeing than appraisal. "But there is still a path, Rosabel."

She understood then. Access had a cost. Though, she did not yet know the currency, only that he had begun counting.

Suddenly… a smell entered the room.

At first, Rose thought it was lamp smoke. The manor used too many lamps, and old houses sometimes breathed soot when wind hit the chimney wrong. This was sharper, though. Meaner, much meaner. It slid under the door with a dark, oily edge that did not belong to hearth or candle.

Coriolanus noticed it the same instant she did. His head turned toward the door, and the second it did, Rose’s fears were confirmed.

Smoke.

I had seen fire take many shapes in my life.

Grassfire moved hungry and low, licking close to the earth like it meant to swallow the world by inches. Barn fire went angrier, louder, full of snapping beams and animal panic. Oil fire had its own wicked language of black smoke, greedy heat, flames that moved like they knew a body's fear before the body did.

House fire was different. It was personal.

It ate chairs, curtains, beds, paper. The little useless things people kept because life, in its kindness or cruelty, had once given them a reason to keep them. It swallowed walls that had heard private arguments and laughter and sickness and the scraping together of ordinary mornings. A burning house did not just destroy shelter. It destroyed evidence that people had lived inside it.

Mayor Lancaster's mansion burned like it had been waiting years to prove it was made of ordinary wood after all.

Smoke poured from the lower east windows in thick black ropes, rolling up beneath the porch awning and into the evening sky. Firelight flashed behind glass. Catchers were already at work across the yard, dragging grit sacks, shouting for water lines, hauling panicked officials farther back from the steps while peacekeepers tried and failed to look useful with rifles in their hands and fear in their mouths.

For one second, the whole fire seemed to fall silent. The noise was still there, roaring up the walls, men shouting, glass popping, somebody coughing hard enough to retch. Though inside my head, everything narrowed to that horse standing riderless beneath the smoke-dark sky.

Rose.

My body moved before sense did.

"Rhodes!" Einkorn shouted after me.

I did not answer.

My leg hated me at once. Every step drove pain clean up through the hip, bright and sickening, but fear had already gotten its hands around my throat and was dragging me forward faster than pain could reason with. I cut around the line of catchers at the front, shouldered past a peacekeeper who tried to bar the side path, and limped hard toward the alley.

"Sir! You can't-"

"Move!"

He did.

Maybe because I sounded mad enough to bite or because firecatchers had already started looking like the only people in that yard with any right to command a burning thing.

The side alley was worse.

Smoke had gathered low beneath the overhang, trapped between brick, hedge, and the narrow service wall. Heat pressed down in waves. One of the upper windows had cracked open from the pressure, letting out dark breath in heavy pulses. Beneath it, paint blistered along the trim. Curtains flared orange behind the glass and then blackened, collapsing inward like a hand closing.

I looked up. And there she was.

Rose was at the second-floor window, half in and half out, one hand braced on the frame while smoke poured around her in ugly gray sheets. Her hair had come loose from one braid, red strands stuck damp to her cheek. Her face was pale beneath the soot, eyes wide and unfocused with coughing. One sleeve of her academy jacket had torn at the shoulder, and her skirt had caught somewhere behind her, holding her in place like the house itself had decided it wanted one last thing from her before it went.

My heart stopped so hard it hurt. "Rose!"

Her head jerked toward the sound of my voice. For half a breath, relief crossed her face. Then the window frame above her cracked.

"Don't move!" I shouted, which was a stupid thing to shout at a girl trapped in a burning house, but panic has never been much for useful language.

Rose coughed, tried to pull herself farther out, and nearly slipped right then. A hand caught her from behind. Snow.

He appeared through the smoke like something the fire had made and then thought better of keeping. His coat was gone. One shirtsleeve was dark with soot, his pale hair no longer exact, his bandaged hand held stiff and close to himself while the other gripped Rose's arm with hard control. He was coughing too, though even that looked like something he resented more than suffered.

I hated the sight of his hand on her before I had time to decide whether hate had any right to be there.

"Get her out!" I yelled.

Snow's eyes found me below.

Even through smoke, through heat, through the madness of fire chewing its way up the wall, there was something awful in how quickly he understood the shape of things. He looked at me, then at Rose, then down at the narrow sloped ledge beneath the window where part of the veranda roof jutted out over the alley.

"She has to climb down first," he called, voice hoarse but still impossibly controlled.

Even in that moment, I couldn’t help but snap back. "I know that!"

Rose tried again, one trembling hand reaching for the outer ledge. Her shoe scraped against the sill and slipped once on loose ash. She made a small sound, not quite a cry or a gasp, and it cut through me worse than the fire.

I lurched forward under the window, arms lifting as if I could somehow reach her from the ground by wanting it badly enough.

"Rose, look at me!" I called.

Her eyes dropped to mine. They were too bright. Tears or smoke or terror, I couldn't tell.

"You're gonna step down onto that lower trim," I said. "Slow! Don't look behind you! Just look at me, ya hear?!"

She nodded once. Too quickly.

Snow said something to her, too low for me to hear. Rose shook her head at him, then tried to shift her weight. The house gave another groan, with a deep guttural complaint. The kind of sound wood makes when it is deciding whether loyalty to gravity has finally become stronger than loyalty to form.

"Rose!" I shouted.

She stepped. For one breath, she had it.

One foot found the outer ledge. Her hand clung to the frame. Her body turned sideways, skirts dragging smoke after her. She was coming out! She was coming down! I was close enough now, directly beneath the line of the window, leg screaming, arms ready, heart beating one single word over and over.

Then the rotten strip of trim beneath her boot tore free. Rose slipped. The sound she made then was small. Just one frightened little breath as the world dropped from beneath her.

Nearly ruined me. I lunged.

My bad leg buckled. Pain exploded up my side, white and brutal, and I went down hard on one knee in the alley muck just as Rose fell.

Snow caught her.

He had climbed farther out than I realized, braced one foot against the sill and one knee on the slanted veranda roof below. When Rose's grip failed, he seized her around the waist and shoulder, the force of her fall dragging him down with her. They hit the sloped roof together, slid, and struck the gutter hard enough to bend it with a shriek of metal.

For a second neither moved.

Then Snow rolled, one arm locked around Rose, pulling her against him before the slope could pitch her over the edge entirely. And that was what I saw.

Rose curled against Coriolanus Snow's chest, soot-blackened and shaking, his arm around her like possession disguised as rescue. The image entered me clean as a blade. It did not matter that he had saved her. Maker help me, it did not matter enough.

All I could see was that he had reached her first. "Rosabel!"

I forced myself upright with a sound I would have been ashamed of in any other moment and staggered toward the broken runoff pipe where the lower roof sloped close enough to the alley wall for a body to reach. Einkorn came up behind me, grabbing my arm before I tried climbing on a leg that would not carry me across a room, much less up a burning house.

"Don't be stupid!" he hissed.

"Get off me!" I tried shrugging him off.

"She's down!"

"No she ain’t!"

Above us, Snow had hauled Rose to the safer edge of the veranda roof, where the drop to the alley was shorter. He lowered himself first, landing hard but upright, then reached back for her.

Rose tried to follow and nearly folded. Her legs were shaking too badly. Snow caught her again when she came down. This time, her legs landed on the ground.

His arms closed around her before she could fall, one hand splayed at her back, the other gripping her upper arm. Rose clutched at his shirt on instinct, coughing so hard her whole body shook. She looked smaller than she had any right to. Younger. Not the same girl who argued for university and never could keep her thoughts to herself. Just there, smoke-stung, trembling, and held upright by a man I could not bear seeing touch her.

I reached them in three limping strides. "Let go of her."

Snow looked at me over her shoulder.

His face was streaked with soot now. A cut had opened along one cheekbone. The smoke had reddened his eyes, but still he managed to look like the only calm thing in the alley.

"She can barely stand," he said.

I narrowed my eyes and huffed. "I said let go."

Rose coughed again, one hand flying to her throat. "Auphie-"

The sound of her voice nearly broke the anger clean in two once more.

I took her by the shoulders the moment Snow released her, gentler than my voice, though I wasn’t sure she felt the difference. She swayed toward me and I caught her, pulling her back from the wall as a sheet of flame burst behind the broken window above.

In an instant, I gathered the girl in my arms, holding her tightly to my chest, my heart still pounding with terror at how close it had been for her. How close I was to losing her. She was quick to hug back, though I couldn’t tell what her emotions might’ve been, until I finally drew back. The horror now waning.

"What in all hell were you thinkin'?" I demanded.

Rose flinched. I saw it. I saw it and still could not stop myself.

I forced myself to breath. "I… I told you to go home."

"I did," she rasped, then coughed so hard she bent nearly double.

"No, you didn't.” My voice sounded accusatory, though, my brows pinched in fright. “You came here. You came back here, after everything, Rose, you could’ve been killed! Don’t you-"

"I had to ask him-"

I vehemently shook my head, not understanding what she was referring to right away. "No, you didn't!"

Her eyes snapped to mine, wet with smoke and hurt. "Yes, I did!"

The force of it startled me. She hardly had the breath for loud. Yet even half-choked by smoke, Rose still had that terrible ability to make a sentence stand upright in front of you and refuse to move.

Snow stepped closer.

"Mr. Rhodes," he said.

I turned on him. "Don't."

His expression remained still. "She is frightened, injured, and half overcome by smoke. This is not the moment to raise your voice at her."

Something in me went cold. "Well… she ain’t yours to manage."

"No," Snow said. "But at present, someone ought to."

Einkorn, a few feet behind me, muttered, "Easy now."

Easy. As if anything in that alley had ever been easy.

Rose reached for my sleeve. Her fingers were weak but urgent. "Auphie, stop."

I looked down at her. Soot smudged one side of her face. Her lips had gone pale. The tear track through the dirt on her cheek looked almost silver in the firelight. She was shaking so badly now that I could feel it through my coat.

Fear came back then, bigger than anger, worse because it had nowhere useful to go.

"Rose," I said once more. “You could’ve been hurt. Or worse…”

Her face softened in a way that made me feel crueler than if she had shouted back. "I know."

"You could've-" My voice broke ugly. I swallowed hard and tried again. "You could've died in there."

Behind us, glass burst outward from an upper window and rained down into the alley. Einkorn swore and shoved us all back toward the garden wall. Snow moved at the same time, one hand going to Rose's back.

I slapped it away. The reaction was faster than thought.

Snow looked at his hand. Then at me.

For the first time, something like real anger entered his face. Like a thin, precise displeasure, as though I had touched an instrument he intended to keep polished.

"Rhodes," he sternly replied, no title to my name this time. “This is not the place for our personal prejudices.”

I gave a harsh laugh. He was probably right, before my mind cruelly remembered why the riot happened in the first place. "That a threat?"

"A recommendation."

"From you?" I stepped closer before my leg could warn me not to. "You’re really gonna go recommendin’ that we shouldn’t judge one another, yet we find you alone with a girl who has no business being here?"

Rose stared at him then. Not at me. At him.

That tiny turn of her head told me I had said something I was not meant to know, or something she had not wanted named aloud. Snow noticed too. Of course he did.

"She came here on her own," he affirmed.

“Yeah?” I huffed back. "She's a student."

His eyes hardened. "And apparently more capable of independent action than you prefer."

That struck exactly where he meant it to. I moved before I had decided to.

Einkorn caught me around the chest from behind, hauling me back with a grunt as my weight shifted wrong on the bad leg. Pain ripped through me, white-hot and humiliating, and I nearly went down again.

Rose grabbed my coat. "Auphie!"

Her fear was for me now. That made it worse somehow.

Snow stood where he was, breathing hard from smoke, one hand still bandaged, shirt torn open at the collar. He looked less immaculate than before, but no less dangerous for it. Firelight moved over his face and turned him almost blood-colored at the edges.

"You should take him away from the fire," Snow said to Einkorn, though his eyes stayed on me. "Before he does more damage to himself."

I spat the words before I could stop them. "You don't get to talk around me."

"And you do not get to shout over everyone who inconveniences you."

Silence struck between us.

Even with the mansion burning, even with catchers calling from the yard and peacekeepers trying to clear the alley mouth, that sentence found room to land.

Rose's hand tightened in my coat.

"Auphie," she whispered.

Her voice was nearly gone. That did what Snow's words could not. It pulled me back into the world, into the soot and heat and the trembling girl between us who had become the shape of a fight before either man had the decency to let her breathe.

I looked at her. Truly looked.

Her knees were unsteady. Her shoulders shook. One hand kept pressing near her ribs as if she could hold herself together from the outside. She had not won anything by standing in the way. Not from me nor Snow. Whatever she had gone to Snow for, whatever argument or proof or desperate question had driven her back into the mansion, she had come out looking not victorious, but stripped raw.

And still Snow's attention rested on her like a claim waiting for language.

No. Not here. Not tonight.

I took Rose's wrist, careful despite the rage still clawing at me, and drew her toward the mouth of the alley.

She resisted at once. "Auphie-"

"Rose."

She gave me a look of mild defiance. "I need to-"

"No."

Snow's voice came from behind us. "Miss Tempest-Strix may need medical attention."

I scoffed back. "She'll get it."

"Then allow me to-"

I turned back once. "If you take one more step toward her, Capitol or not, I swear I'll forget the whole district's watchin'."

Einkorn made a strangled sound behind me, half warning, half prayer.

Snow did not move. For a second, I thought he might smile. Fortunately, he didn't. That might have been worse though.

Rose looked between us, smoke-bright eyes wide with exhaustion and something like dawning horror. She understood then that the fire was not the only thing spreading and knew that whatever had started between Snow and me had found its first real flame, and she was standing close enough to be burned by both sides.

I did not wait to see what Snow would say. I tightened my grip just enough for Rose to feel the decision in it.

"You're leaving with me," I turned to her. "Now."

Rose tried to leave with me. That was what I kept telling myself afterward, like the fact might soften anything that followed. She had tried. Really.

Her hand was still in mine when we came stumbling out from the side of Lancaster's mansion, smoke rolling after us through the broken window line like the house itself had exhaled something poisoned. Her fingers were far too cold. She coughed hard enough to bend at the waist, one hand pressing to her chest while I kept hold of her other wrist as though the building might still reach out and drag her back in by the sleeve.

"Breathe," I told her, uselessly. "Rose, just listen. Breathe."

"I am," she rasped, though she plainly wasn't doing it well.

Her hair had half come loose from its pins, red strands clinging to soot on her cheek. One side of her face was streaked where tears or smoke had cut through the ash. The sight of it did something, accompanied by fear and regret so large it had nowhere clean to go.

Around us, the yard had turned wild.

Firecatchers shouted over one another as they hauled grit toward the east wall. Peacekeepers formed broken lines near the gate, trying to keep townsfolk back from the lawn while half of those townsfolk screamed for children, brothers, neighbors, anyone they'd lost track of in the riot and smoke. Officials from the mayor's office huddled beneath the elm trees, coughing into handkerchiefs and looking offended by disaster now that it had gotten soot on their cuffs. Lancaster himself stood near the road, drained but upright, one sleeve burned through at the elbow, his face fixed on the house like he could not quite believe his own walls had betrayed him.

Then everyone saw him, Snow. The man who they thought might perished in the flames. The one who might be subdued by the natural forces of District 9 for the second time. Now, he probably had a reason to speak ill of the districts, no doubt. After all, 9 had nearly chewed him up and spat him back out.

That, more than anything, made the whole yard turn.

He had one hand braced lightly against a nearby fence post as he rounded into view, his Capitolite attire in ruins, pale hair disordered enough to prove he had, briefly, been made mortal by fire. The sight of that should have satisfied something in me. It didn't.

A peacekeeper moved toward him at once. "Sir-"

Snow raised a hand. Just that. One small motion. The man stopped.

Rose saw him and stiffened beside me. I felt it through her wrist.

"Come on," I said, low. "We're leaving."

She nodded once, too quickly. "Yes."

Though, before we could make our way to Errante, Snow's voice reached her before we'd made it three steps. "Rosabel."

Not Miss Tempest-Strix. Not even Rose.

The name crossed the yard soft as a hand laid where it wasn't wanted. Rose stopped.

I hated that she stopped. Hated that she couldn’t help it either. Hated it even more that Snow had known she wouldn't be able to keep walking once he called her like that, not after whatever words he had put in her head before the smoke came.

I turned before she did.

Snow had come across the last patch of the yard. His gaze did not linger on me. It passed over like a man acknowledging poor weather, then settled on Rose with a focus that made the space between us feel suddenly crowded.

"You should be seen by a medic," I said.

Rose's eyes stayed on Snow. "I know."

"Then move."

The order came too sharp. She flinched. Just barely.

I saw it. Felt it. Despised myself for it.

Snow saw it too, as his expression changed by less than a breath, but I knew in that instant he had stored the thing away. That was what men like him did. They saved weaknesses like coin.

He stepped closer, stopping just beyond arm's reach. Close enough for others to see. Not close enough to look improper until he made it so.

"Thank you," he said to Rose.

The yard was loud, yet the words seemed to clear themselves a path.

A few people nearby turned. A firecatcher with a grit sack paused at the mouth of the alley. One of Lancaster's clerks looked over from beneath the elm. A peacekeeper lifted his chin. Even in the smoke and confusion, people knew when something was being staged before them.

Rose swallowed. "You don't need to-"

"I do." Snow took her hand from mine, abruptly, yet in a creeping, slow manner.

He didn't yank or seize or force in any way a person could point to cleanly. He only reached with quiet certainty, slid his fingers around hers, and eased her hand out of my grip as if the matter had already been agreed upon by everyone but me.

Rose froze. Her eyes flicked to mine once.

A warning? An apology? Fear?

I still don't know. Snow lifted her hand.

For one wild second, I thought he meant only to kiss her knuckles like some old Capitol courtesy made obscene by timing. That would have been bad enough. Public enough. A claim dressed as gratitude.

Snow being the ugly bastard that he was, looked at her face instead.

Then… he stepped in and kissed her.

Not the sort of kiss singers made foolish songs about, nor the sort lovers earned in doorways after danger. It was worse for being controlled. Deliberate enough to leave no doubt that it had been chosen.

His hand came lightly to her jaw, and Rose went utterly still beneath it. She did not lean in nor did she answer.

Her mouth did not move. The whole yard seemed to notice her stillness and misunderstand it at once.

I heard someone gasp. A murmur start near the gate. I saw Carrigan Killdeer's mother, of all people, turn her head sharply from the road. Saw one of the peacekeepers watch with too much interest and theatrical shock. A firecatcher look away because he knew enough to be ashamed for seeing it and not enough to stop it.

Snow drew back before anyone could decide whether to interrupt. Rose stayed frozen.

Something in me went white. I do not remember deciding to move.

One moment I stood there with my bad leg screaming beneath me and smoke in my lungs. The next my hand was on Snow's collar, and I had driven him backward hard enough that his shoulders struck the side wall beside the alley with a sound that cut clean through the yard.

"Auphie!" Rose cried.

Snow's head snapped back against brick.

The peacekeeper nearest us shouted, "Stand down!"

I did not stand down. I shoved Snow harder, pinning him there with one forearm across his chest. My injured leg nearly gave beneath me, but rage had hold of me by then, and rage is generous with borrowed strength.

"You don't touch her!" I bellowed out. My voice did not sound loud to me. It sounded flat. Deadly. Like all the fire had gone out of it and left only the iron frame behind.

Snow's eyes found mine.

His breathing was rough from smoke, but his face had already begun putting itself back together. That angered me more than anything. The composure of him. The refusal to look caught. Even shoved against a wall by a half-lame district man, Coriolanus Snow looked less afraid than inconvenienced.

I hit him for it. Just like a boy would hit in the Gluttony Games. A hard, ugly blow across the mouth that knocked his head sideways and split his lip bright against the ash on his skin.

The yard erupted.

"Auphidius!" Rose shouted, this time with real fear in it.

Hands reached for me. A peacekeeper's. Maybe Einkorn's. I threw one elbow back and felt someone stumble away. Snow's hand came up, not to strike me, but to brace against my arm. That only fueled me somehow. Like he was choosing restraint because he knew restraint would look better with witnesses.

"Mr. Rhodes," he said, low enough for only me and Rose to hear. “I wouldn’t push this if I were you…”

That did it. I drove him sideways off the wall and down toward the dirt.

Snow hit the ground on one knee, catching himself with one bandaged hand. I went after him. Pain tore through my hip so bright I nearly lost the world, but I did not stop. I grabbed for him again, wanting his polished throat under my hands, wanting the calm cracked out of him, wanting something in the world to finally show damage in the right place.

Then Rose stepped between us. She shouldn’t have. Maker help me, she should not have.

"Auphie, stop-"

I barely saw her. Not Rose, not then. Just movement. A body in the path. A hand grabbing my sleeve while Snow shifted behind her, already rising, already turning the moment into something he might survive better than the rest of us.

"Move!" I snarled.

"N-No!"

She shoved at my chest with both hands. Weakly. Desperately. Trying to make me see her.

Which I did… a heartbeat too late.

I jerked my arm free. That was all. That was what I told myself first. I only jerked free. I only meant to pull away. I only meant to get past her.

But force does not care what a man meant to name it. My forearm caught her hard across the shoulder and jaw. Rose stumbled backward.

Her satchel, when had she gotten that thing back, I didn't know, slipped from her arm and struck the dirt. She hit the edge of a low stone border beside the hedge and dropped to one knee, one hand flying to her mouth.

Everything stopped. Outside, the mansion still burned. People still shouted. A horse screamed somewhere beyond the gate. Fire still cracked at the eastern windows.

But inside me, everything stopped.

Rose looked up at me. Her eyes were wide. Disbelief.

That was the thing that nearly broke me in two.

It wasn’t the sight of her blood. There was only a little, bright at the corner of her mouth where her tooth must have cut the inside of her lip. Not the fall or even the sound she made when she hit the stone.

It was the way she looked at me as if, for one terrible second, she did not know whether I was safe.

"Rose?" I croaked. My voice broke on her name.

I stepped toward her, and she flinched, almost instinctively. Unforgivable.

The whole world could have burned down around us then and I would not have noticed.

I had spent every breath since Virgil died trying to keep harm from reaching her, yet there she was on the ground because of my hand.

Snow stood slowly behind her.

Blood marked his lower lip. Soot lined one cheek. His gaze moved from Rose to me, and for the first time since I had met him, something like satisfaction passed through his eyes before he buried it.

Rose tried to stand.

I reached for her without thinking. "Don't-"

"D-Don't touch me." she said it quietly. I wished she would’ve just screamed it instead.

My hand stopped in the air between us. Rose pulled herself upright without taking it. She swayed once, and Snow stepped toward her.

"No," I snapped, though I barely had the energy to do so.

Snow paused, just long enough to make the pause visible.

Rose pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. Her eyes were wet now, whether from smoke or pain or me, I did not deserve to know.

"I'm all right," she said.  Nobody believed her. She wasn't.

"Rosie," I tried again, softer now, wrecked by the sound of my own voice. "I didn't mean-"

"I know."

The answer came too fast. Too empty.

I think she said it because she couldn’t bear not to. If she did not say so, then the whole old shape of us would have to be questioned right there in the dirt before Snow and the peacekeepers and half of District 9's watching eyes.

Snow took out a handkerchief and touched it to her bleeding lip. A pretty little gesture. Controlled. Damning.

I turned on him so sharply my leg buckled, and Einkorn caught me from behind before I could move again.

"Enough," Einkorn hissed in my ear. "Rhodes, enough."

I fought him once, but not hard.

I certainly wasn’t calmed by the idea, but it was just the way Rose still looked at me.

Snow pressed the handkerchief gently against her face, allowing Rose to hold it against the wound. He had softened in public the way men like him softened when cruelty needed lace over it.

"Rosabel," he finally said. "Are you alright?"

She looked at him then, and I saw confusion cross her face. The dazed need to answer the person speaking gently because the person who should have been safe had just become the loudest danger in the yard.

"N-No," she replied. "I mean… I'm fine."

"You’re still bleeding."

Rose kept pressure on the handkerchief. "It's nothing."

"It is not nothing." Snow doted on the girl.

The words were for her. The performance was for everyone. I saw straight through that. I saw it too clearly and too late.

The kiss had been witnessed. So had my fist and Rose hitting the ground.

Now Snow, bloodied by me, was the one speaking gently. A sound came from the far side of the yard. Boots. Authority moving through ash.

Chief Rolette pushed past two peacekeepers and came into the alley mouth with his hat low, his face drawn tight from smoke, grief, and the kind of anger that did not waste heat.

He took in Snow's split lip. Einkorn holding me back. The Capitolite hovering over Rose with blood at her mouth.

My hand still half-raised like I had not yet learned what it had done. Rolette's eyes settled on me. He had seen enough.

For a second, no one moved. Then Rolette said my name.

"Rhodes."

Not Auphidius. Not son. Not even Mr. Rhodes, which would have been bad enough.

Just… Rhodes.

The way he said it made me feel fourteen again and caught in some stupidity I could not talk my way out of. Only this time there was blood on Rose's mouth, Snow's lip split open, half the yard staring, and my own hand still remembered the shape of the shove that had put her down.

I swallowed. "Chief-"

"No." Rolette's voice cut through mine without lifting. "Not here."

Einkorn's hand was still locked around my upper arm. I had the absurd thought that I could have broken free if I wanted to. Maybe I even could have. But not with Rose who stood three paces away, one hand pressed to her mouth, and she had told me not to touch her.

So, I stayed held.

Rolette looked from me to Rose, then to Snow. His jaw shifted once, the muscle there working like he was chewing through every word before deciding which ones would not make the situation worse.

"Miss Tempest-Strix," he said, quieter. "Get home."

Rose blinked at him.

For a moment, I thought she might argue. Rose had that look, the stunned, stubborn lift of the chin that meant her pride had finally returned from wherever shock had shoved it. Though Rolette's expression left no room for argument and, worse, no room for pity.

His anger was not loud. That made it heavier.

"Now," he added.

Rose nodded once. Snow moved as if to say something. Rolette's eyes cut to him so sharply even Snow reconsidered the shape of his mouth.

"Mr. Snow," Rolette said. "You'll have medical attention and escort back to government grounds once the fire line's safe."

Snow nodded with a regal expression, despite the disheveled mess before us. "That is very considerate of you sir."

Rolette nodded, though an uneasy look had glossed over him. "I… we apologize."

That earned the faintest tightening in Snow's face. Nothing more.

Then Rolette turned back to me.

The yard noise came rushing in around us again. Firecatchers calling for grit. Peacekeepers yelling civilians back. Lancaster coughing somewhere near the road. The fire still worked at the mansion, snapping and breathing through broken windows, eating at curtains and old wood and whatever fine things rich people thought too permanent to burn.

Rolette stepped closer until only I could hear him cleanly.

"You're done for today."

My throat went tight. "C-Chief-"

"I said you're done."

Einkorn's grip loosened, but only slightly.

Rolette's eyes dropped to my bad leg, then returned to my face. The disappointment in him was worse than the anger. Anger I could stand against. Disappointment had a way of making a man feel his own shape from the outside and find it wanting.

"You'll meet me tomorrow morning," he said. "Before first bell. At the grounds."

Something cold settled under my ribs. It was not a threat. A chief did not need to threaten. The words carried enough future in them without help. Tomorrow morning. At the grounds.

Whatever was coming then, it had already begun.

"Yes, sir," I solemnly replied. My voice sounded strange. Thin. Not like mine.

Rolette held my gaze one moment longer. "Get her home."

The order should have relieved me. It didn't, especially since Rose had heard it too.

Her face, already pale beneath soot and smoke, closed in on itself by a degree, though not in disapproval. More like she had just been handed from one man's authority to another's and had no strength left to explain why that hurt.

She bent to gather her fallen satchel. I moved at the same time. She froze. So did I.

Then, slowly, deliberately, Rose picked it up herself.

The motion took longer than it should have. A book had fallen out. And another. A loose page from the dirt. Her hand trembled when she tucked everything beneath one arm. Snow watched, and I hated him for it. I hated him for watching gently.

I hated myself more for giving him the chance. Einkorn finally released me.

"Rhodes," he murmured, low and warning.

"I know..."

I did not know. Not really.

I followed Rose out of the alley all the same. We did not speak on the ride home.

Or maybe there were words, small ones, useless ones. "Careful there." "This way." "Road's blocked." I could not have said for certain later. What I remember is the distance between us. Not physical exactly. After all, Errante wasn’t exactly a draft horse. Yet, we were enough not to make her flinch again.

That was the new arithmetic between us. Close enough to protect. Far enough not to frighten.

The streets of New Bisman had gone strange in the aftermath of the riot. Not emptied, no. The district did not know how to empty itself cleanly. People crowded porches and alley mouths, whispering behind hands, watching peacekeepers shove citizens away from the square and watching firecatchers ride hard toward the mayor's quarter. Children cried openly now that the first shock had worn off. A boy Rose's age sat on the curb with blood running from his nose while his mother cursed a peacekeeper so fluently even the man seemed briefly impressed. Somewhere farther off, a girl kept shouting her brother's name until the sound became less a call than a wound.

Rose looked at all of it. Too much of it.

Every cry seemed to catch in her face before she forced herself onward.

When we reached the Tempest house, evening had gone gray over the yard. Wolfie met us halfway up the path, hackles low but uneasy, circling Rose once she dismounted before pressing his whole body against her skirts. She put one hand on his head automatically. Such a small, ordinary thing for such a traumatic, trivial day.

The house stood quiet. I dismounted, let Errante out to pasture, before I made my way in and shut the gate behind me.

The click of the latch sounded final in a way I did not care for.

Rose had almost reached the porch when I said, "What were you thinking?"

She stopped. The words had come out wrong. I knew that instantly.

They were meant to mean was I thought you were dead or something along those lines. They were meant to mean I saw Errante outside that burning house and my whole body understood a world without you in it. They were meant to mean I can’t lose you too, not after Virgil, not after everything, not like that…

What left my mouth was what were you thinking.

Rose turned slowly.

Her face was still streaked with soot. The corner of her mouth had begun swelling where I had struck her, where I had struck her, no matter how soft the lie of accident tried to make itself. Her eyes were red from smoke and tears both.

"What?" she said.

I should have stopped. I did not.

"What were you thinking?" I repeated, and the fear in me had gone ugly enough to sound like anger. "The square turns into a riot, peacekeepers are shoving folks down in the streets, the mayor's mansion catches fire, and you decide that's the hour to go sneaking about with him?"

Her expression sharpened. "I didn't know there would be a fire."

"You knew enough to sneak."

That struck down like a hammer. I saw it hit and still could not stop.

Rose's grip tightened around her satchel. "I went because I needed answers."

"From Snow?"

"Yes, from Coriolanus."

"Coriolanus?" I sneered. "So we’re on first name basis too?"

“Auphie, please, it’s not-“

“It doesn’t matter what I think.” I plainly retorted. “Rosabel, why him?”

"Because…” she bit her injured lip in shame. “…he’s… he’s vice gamemaker."

The words stood there between us in the yard, clean and terrible. Rose glanced once toward the road, as though remembering other ears might exist beyond the fence. Her voice lowered.

"Because he would know," she explained. "And because no one else would’ve told me the truth."

"The truth?" I laughed once, and it came out mean. "You think that man handed you truth?"

Rose shook her head. "I think he knows more than he says."

My gaze hardened. "That ain't the same thing."

"I know that!" Her voice cracked on the last word, and Wolfie lifted his head.

Rose shut her eyes for half a second, trying to gather herself. That should have been enough to shame me into quiet. It wasn't.

"And then what?" I asked. "He… just happened to kiss you in front of half the district? Or are you gonna say that was nothing?"

Her eyes opened. Hurt and fear mirrored back in my visage. The thing I had not meant to say like that. For a moment Rose did not speak. She only stared at me, and I watched understanding move through her face, slow and horrified.

When she answered, her voice had gone very soft. "Let?"

I realized how I had sounded almost immediately as my chest tightened. "Rose-"

"No." She took one step toward me, her brows furrowed, but not in anger. "Just… say it proper."

I couldn’t.

Her eyes shone now, fear and hurt in equal measure before her voice wobbled. More so out of panic. "Y-You really asked why I let him."

"I didn't mean-"

"Yes, you did." Her voice trembled, but it did not weaken. "Maybe you didn't mean to mean it. But… you said it any how."

I dragged a hand over my mouth, tasting ash and panic. "He put his hands on you."

Tears welled in her eyes. "I know."

"In front of everyone."

Rose, shaking her head, let a tear dribble down her reddened cheek. "I know..."

"And you just stood there." The second sentence left me, I felt disgusted. Vile. Why the hell would you even say that Auphidius!? You bastard!

I hated it more than the first. Rose went still.

Then something in her face broke, but in subtle rather than theatrical way. Her expression turned into disbelief so complete it made her look younger than she was.

"I…  don’t know," she confessed with regret, internally kicking herself. The words were small. They should have killed the argument dead.

Instead, my fear, stupid and flailing, lurched for one more thing to wound us with. "So what… it there something between you two?"

Rose recoiled as though I had struck her again. Maybe I had. No hand needed this time.

"What?"

I swallowed. My throat felt raw. "I'm asking-"

"No, I heard you." She gave a short, breathless laugh that sounded almost like pain. "I heard you just fine."

I should’ve worded everything differently, seen the situation for what it really was. However… I was no better than Snow within that moment. "I saw the way he looked at you."

Her gaze hardened at once. "Then ask him about it!"

Careful Auphidius…

"I'm asking you."

"And I'm telling you there was nothing." Her voice rose now despite her trying to hold it down. "There is nothing. There was a conversation and the charter. The Game Charter. Then he was me asking him why the Capitol would make children vote one another into slaughter, and there was him trying to turn that question into something else because… because, I don’t know, Auphie, please!"

I knew she was confused and sickened. My anger towards the Capitolite faltered at that. Only a little.

"The charter?" I asked, eyes widened.

Rose looked away. That, too, told me too much.

"You… You brought him Virgil’s Games charter?"

"I brought a copy." She corrected.

"Rose." My anger transcended into something akin to fear, specifically for her life.

"I-I know." She desperately answered.

"Do you… Do you know what you just did?" The dread came back at once, sharp enough to make my voice rough. "Do you understand what kind of danger that is? You put proof in front of a gamemaker that the Capitol's own rules don't name this Quell, and you thought what? He'd thank you for the correction?"

Rosabel’s gaze slowly descended further into regret. "I thought… he might answer me! I-I’m sorry!"

My brows pinched, before I shook my head. "He won't."

“Auphie, please.” Rose’s voice dwindled. "You don't know that."

"I know men like him."

"No," she said, and now there was heat in it. "You know you hate men like him. That isn't always the same as knowing them, ya know."

I stared at her, more so angered at the fact that she’d defend him after his grotesque performance. Looking back, I should’ve understood that she was terrified and confused. Desperate to explain away the dangers of what she had done in fear of everyone’s lives. I wish I hadn’t looked at her that way. That was on me.

The yard seemed to tilt beneath me. My leg throbbed, the pain returning now that rage was beginning to lose its hold. I looked at her mouth again. At the swelling there. At the mark I had made.

"I know… enough," I sighed, though it sounded hollow now.

Rose hugged her arms tighter to her chest, as if needing something between us. "He was trying to scare me."

"Good.” I stupidly retorted. “Be scared."

"I am scared, Auphie!" she snapped.

The words rang out across the yard. Rose looked startled by her own volume. So did I. Then she pressed the heel of one hand to her brow, careful not to touch the injured part of her mouth.

"I’m terrified," she said again, lower. "I am scared of the Quell, the voting part. I’m scared of what people are already saying in town, at school, everywhere. I-I hate it because I asked a question and sudden everything is starting to make less sense, and now… it’s all my fault. I am scared because he kissed me and I didn’t now what to do fast enough. Now when I looked at you afterwards… or anybody in that matter, you just… I don’t know how to explain it. You looked… ugly."

Her eyes lifted to mine. "And then… you hurt me."

My throat tightened. It wasn’t an accusation dressed up in cleverness; it was just… the thing itself.

I had no defense against it.

My mouth opened once and shut again. Rose's face crumpled for half a second, and she forced it back into place so quickly it hurt to watch. "I know… you didn't mean to, trust me, I do. I just… I really wished you hadn’t gone so far, just for my sake.”

That mercy felt worse than condemnation.

"Rose," I said, barely.

"I just… wanted you to stop." Her voice trembled again. "A-Actually, I wanted the whole district to stop, really… but you didn't."

A long silence followed. The wind moved through the little flower beds near the porch. Somewhere inside the house, a shutter knocked softly against its frame. Wolfie whined once and leaned harder against Rose's leg.

I wanted to tell her everything then. All of it. That seeing Snow touch her had not been superficial or possessive, that was the story I kept trying to sell myself. I had to tell myself everyday that Rosabel couldn’t stay a child that needed protection forever. That I shouldn’t diminish her autonomy, future, and will to be who she wanted to be and love who she wanted to love. That she wasn’t my reflection… she wasn’t me.

Instead, it had made me afraid because I saw a claim being laid in public and knew enough of Panem to understand public images became cages. I was not angry because she had been kissed, but rather that my anger was fueled by who had done it. Snow had made her stillness into a performance.

I had not doubted her. Not truly. Never truly.

Though… I had spoken like I did, and now the difference mattered less.

"I thought you were dead," I quietly admitted, not looking to turn this into an excuse.

Rose blinked. The words came rougher than I meant them to, scraped raw from somewhere I had been trying not to touch.

"When I saw Errante outside that house, I thought..." I looked away because I could not finish with her watching. "I thought I'd failed before I even got there."

Her face softened. Only a little. Enough to make hope stir and then hate itself for doing so.

"Auphie," she said, though, she still held that hardened emotion towards me. I was yet to be worthy of her forgiveness

My mouth, fool thing that it was, kept going. "And then I come in and he's there, and you're there, and he's got his hands on you, and then outside he-" I stopped, breath shaking. "I don't know what he wants from you. I really don't. But I know he wants… something, and I just don’t want you to keep standing too close for him to figure out how to take it."

Rose's eyes cooled again. "You think I'm letting him?"

"No." I shook my head. “But I think he’s enough of a snake to back you into a corner.”

"You still think…?" Rose’s voice laced with sadness as well as disappointment. “… you still think I’m running towards something I don’t understand?”

My mouth tightened. "No, Rose, that ain't-"

"You think I need managed." She said, before rephrasing it. “That he’ll be the one to try and manage me?”

He crossed a boundary. I should’ve said. Though that hit too close to the word Snow had used, and she did not know it. Or maybe she did. Maybe the word had lodged in her too.

I flinched. Rose saw.

Her voice went quieter. "He meant something like that, ya know. N-Not about me, the districts more so."

I felt the blood leave my face. "What? Why would he admit that?"

“I don’t know,” She looked toward the porch. "And besides… I probably shouldn’t be telling you that anyways..."

"What? Why?"

"It doesn't matter."

“Yes.” I firmly asserted. "It does."

"It matters too much," she said, and that shut me up.

For a second, we only stood there in the almost-dark, both trembling hard from the adrenaline, both too tired and too hurt to find the better versions of ourselves.

Then Rose said, "I… know it sounds like I’m defending him. Trust me, I probably sound nuts."

I wanted to say that she was nuts for confronting a Capitol born in the first place. Fortunately, I held my tongue, letting her continue.

"I’m just trying to understand what’s happening with the Games." Her voice shook. "With everything really. It’s just… it’s hard when the person you’re depending on for your future is just the complete opposite of you. Of how you think, or…"

Rosabel had to pause. Her own fears and confusion about the day quickly catching up to her.

I had no answer.

She shook her head once, her mind more scrambled the more she thought about it. About University, then the Quell, and finally, Snow himself.

"The thing is," she finally said. “I… don’t want to leave you all her in the districts… but I don’t want you to keep living like this either. You understand that, no?”

The sentence gutted me. I sighed. "I know that, Rosie. Everyone knows."

"I wish that was true..." she said in a miserable tone.

My eyes stung. Smoke, maybe. Shame more likely. Rose looked down at the dirt. Her hands were trembling again. "I…  need to go inside."

"Rose-"

"Please." She stepped back. "I just… need to think is all."

The girl held no malice in her voice. Only panic and dread. She turned toward the porch.

I took half a step after her, then stopped myself before she could tell me to. The old instinct in me reached for her anyway. To steady her anxiety or apologize for my nasty interrogation. To keep her from walking away with blood on her mouth and no promise between us that morning would find us whole.

However, every promise I wanted to make had already been damaged by my own voice.

Rose finally climbed the steps. At the door, she paused with one hand on the latch. For one painful second, I thought she might turn back.

She didn't, thank goodness. She simply stepped to the side to let Wolfie pad on in, before she went inside and shut the door behind her, as gently as she could. That was the part that stayed with me.

I stood there in the yard after, useless as a post, listening to Wolfie whine from inside the home. Then a floorboard creaked from the shadow of the side porch.

I turned.

Waaska stood half-hidden beside the rain barrel, one hand pressed to the porch rail, her face drained in the evening dim. She had a shawl pulled around her shoulders and Nibs nowhere in sight. Maybe she had come to check on Rose after the square, or Misea had sent her. Of course she had known something in the way family sometimes does, that grief had found another room to ruin.

Her eyes moved from the shut door to me. Then to the mark of blood still drying on my knuckles.

I felt sick.

"Waaska," I gulped.

She did not answer. I did not know how long she had been there. Long enough, by the look of her. She had probably heard enough to recognize Snow's name. To hear kiss and to hear my harsh reprimands that might’ve been mistaken for merciless blaming towards her cousin.

Maybe even long enough for truth to become dangerous once placed in the wrong order.

"She… all right?" Waaska asked nervously.

The question was quiet. I looked toward the door.

"No," I said.

Waaska's mouth tightened. She nodded once, not at me exactly, but at whatever conclusion had begun forming behind her eyes. Then she stepped down from the side porch and moved past me toward the front door. I wanted to stop her and explain everything that had just transpired. To say, not like that. Not how it sounded. Not what you think. Not what anyone will think by morning.

However, our argument had left the both of us with no closure.

Waaska, carefully attempting to ascend the porch steps, went to knock on the door before halting. I could practically feel the girl’s nerves buzzing from the riot before she turned away. Leaving Rosabel to her own devices.

And for what it was worth, I couldn’t blame her.

Dido learned the truth that same evening, long before I was ready to give it to her.

The thing about guilt is it has a smell. I don't know how else to explain it. Maybe it was blood from the pheasants on my sleeve, or the mud on my cuffs from the creek bank. I could’ve just been my face, as Dido looked at me in Auntie's empty clinic. She was still looking at the torn-out hiding hollow, looked at the bundle I had dropped on the floor, and she knew.

"You didn't stop," a trace of betrayal lingered in her tone.

I shook my head before I knew whether I meant denial or confession. "D-Dido-"

"You promised."

My eyes were probably as wide as diner plates. I began to shake with unease, my chin trembling as I desperately tried to explain myself. "I-I know! I-I sorry, I just-"

Dido wasn’t having any of it. "You promised."

I reached for her then. In that moment I didn’t I have any right to comfort her. I was only a child then, and she was my sister and Auntie… was dead. The world had gotten too large for me to stand alone inside it as my bony, little digits tried to reach for comfort in my only remaining family.

Dido stepped back. Only one step.

"Don't," she snapped.

"Dido, please." Tears pricked from the corners of my eyes.

Her face changed. Grief cracked through it then, real and ugly, and for one moment she looked as young as she was. Fourteen. Maybe fifteen. Old enough for the Capitol to reap and young enough that losing a guardian should still have turned her into a sobbing child instead of the hard, trembling thing standing before me.

"I trusted you," she said, her voice nearly betraying her.

Those words found me again years later unfortunately, with Rose carrying the reflection of a younger version of me and my hand remembering her flinch.

I trusted you.

"I-I only wanted to help," I said, bawling now, though at the time I would have sworn the tears were anger. "Auntie needed coin! I-I swear Dido! I was careful, really, I was-"

"Not careful enough," Dido interrupted, her voice low and harsh enough to scare me, even now. "Not careful enough to care about Aelias."

The door outside creaked in the wind. Somewhere down the alley, peacekeeper boots struck stone in passing rhythm. Every sound made me think they were coming back for me too. For the boy who had owned the gear. For the boy Auntie had not named, even when they dragged her out. I know that now. I know she must have refused them, must have swallowed my guilt so I could keep breathing.

At the time, all I knew was fear.

"A-Are you going to tell them?" I whispered, my face crinkling in an ugly way for my sister’s response.

She didn’t though. Dido stared at me. The hurt that crossed her face then was almost worse than if she had said yes.

"Should I?" she asked.

I did not answer. Then… she shoved me. Hard.

I stumbled backward and struck the counter with my hip, knocking over a jar of dried yarrow. The leaves scattered across the floor like little dead hands.

"Get out." Dido said. Her voice monotonous yet emotional all in the same breath.

"W-What?"

"Get out."

"Dido-"

"I said, get out!" Her voice broke on the last word, and that made it final. If she had stayed cold, I might have fought. However, my sister was breaking, and I had done the breaking. "Go!"

"W-Where?" I begged. "Please, Dido! W-Where am I supposed to go!?"

She turned away from me. That was her answer.

I remember the door more than I remember leaving. How it looked from outside. Warped boards. A patched hinge. A strip of old cloth stuffed where winter wind liked to slip through. I remember banging on it until my knuckles hurt.

"Dido!" I cried. "Dido, please! Open up! Please!"

No answer.

"I-I'm sorry! I didn't mean it! I didn't know!"

Still nothing.

I sank to the step and pressed my forehead against the wood like I could push my way back into family through sheer wanting.

That was when the peacekeeper found me. He was young. I remember that too. Not much older than Dido, though he wore his uniform like it made him grown. He stopped at the mouth of the alley and looked me over, a crying boy on the Dreg’s clinic step in the aftermath of an execution.

"You belong here?" he asked.

I wiped my face with my sleeve and said nothing, still trembling with emotion. His eyes moved to the door. To the clinic sign. To the ash still drifting faint over the rooftops.

"No guardian, huh?"

The word opened something cold beneath me. I stood immediately, my little feet shuffling away from the door… and from him.

He smiled a little, not kindly. "Millhouse is short hands ya know? Orphans get placed quick. Might give ya something to do ‘sides cryin’ like a snot nosed brat.”

That’s when I bolted, far from the Dregs, from the peacekeeper, from Dido…

He shouted after me. Maybe laughed. He gave chase for a street or two. I can't say. Fear made the alleys into a blur of brick, mud, laundry lines, old smoke, and my own breath tearing itself out of my chest. I ran until my ribs burned. Ran past the edge of the Dregs, past the last houses, past the creek trail, into the valley where dusk gathered under the grass.

The Secret Garden took me in because stone does not ask questions.

I crawled through the crack in the rock, through darkness that smelled of damp wood, old game, dried blood, and earth. My gear still hung there in neat bundles. Snares. Hooks. The atlatl I loved. The evidence of every choice that had led me there.

Then I curled on the dirt floor beneath it and cried until I fell asleep, knowing there was nothing else I could do. Knowing that by morning, I had no home.

Within the Gluttony Games, there only ever stood one victor.

Not a victor in the Capitol sense, mind you. No crown of laurel nor the grandiose anthem blaring pretty over the loudspeakers. No cameras catching the good side of your bloodied face or a chance to murder your own peers, young and old. Nope, just one bruised boy standing in a chalk-drawn square after the rest had been shoved out, carried out, or crawled out on their own elbows.

One boy, ten to fourteen most nights, though the peacekeepers had never been known for counting too carefully when money was involved. One boy left with split knuckles, torn sleeves, a rope burn around both wrists, and the whole miserable pot of offerings clutched to his chest like it could make him less hungry by morning.

To enter, every kid had to give something up, like tokens, coins, or something as mundane as a copper button stolen from an uncle's coat. Maybe a ring from a grandmother's secret stash or a lucky charm or a heel knife or hell, a fistful of ration cards if a fool was desperate enough. Anything with value went into the pool, and the pool went to the winner.

The peacekeepers running the show called it sport.

They held it just outside their main base in New Bisman, far enough from the commander's office that everybody involved could pretend not to know what was happening. The slab had once been part of some old loading yard before the Dark Days broke half the town and the Capitol broke the rest. By the time I knew it, it was only a square of concrete stained permanent maroon that no amount of scrubbing could convince back into gray.

The keepers drew the fighting boundary in chalk. They took bets, laughed, and even called us little beasts when we bit and little gentlemen when we bled politely.

They called it the Gluttony Games in an ironic twist, because nobody fought to the death.

Usually.

The boys came from everywhere poverty had corners sharp enough to shove a child into. Street kids from the alleys. Mill boys with lint in their hair and exhaustion already set into the bones. Field hands whose parents could not afford the academy and therefore had little use for a son who could not yet swing a scythe all day without dropping. Sometimes richer boys came too, soft-handed but mean from boredom, looking for a thrill their fathers could pay them out of if things turned ugly. Just a slice of excitement without the perpetual risk of life or death.

It was not the Hunger Games, no. Still, it was the kind of thing Panem teaches a person to watch before they are old enough to understand why they cannot look away.

Every night began nearly the same. The younger boys against the younger boys. The older against the older. That sorted the duds quick, according to the keepers, though duds mostly meant children who had not yet learned how to hurt another child efficiently. You stood in the chalk square with your hands bound together by nearly a meter of rope, the other end tied to your opponent. When the bell went off, you pulled, shoved, tripped, hooked, kicked, shouldered, or dragged the other boy out of the square.

Simple enough, if simplicity had ever once prevented cruelty.

I remember one fight before mine, a curly-haired boy whose name I never learned and a drunken Hoffman Ellendale, twelve years old and already carrying himself like a full-grown man expecting the world to flinch first. They beat each other bloody for near ten minutes while the peacekeepers howled themselves hoarse. The curly-haired boy got one good knee into Hoffman's ribs, and for a moment the crowd turned, hungry for upset, but Hoffman laughed. He actually laughed with blood down his chin and spit across his teeth.

Then he got both bound hands in the boy's hair and smashed his head against the concrete.

Once. Twice. Hard enough the sound cut through the cheering. The third time, even the keepers quieted.

Hoffman threw him over the line after that and stood there grinning like he had done something clever. He went home with the pot. The other boy was dragged toward the shadow side of the base, head lolling wrong. Looking back, I don’t think I ever saw him again.

After that, I prayed, in whatever ugly, half-starved way a child prays when he has stopped trusting anyone is listening, that I would never draw Hoffman Ellendale.

Which only proves the maker has always had a poor sense of humor.

"Calico!" a peacekeeper shouted one night, using the mocking nickname that clung to me worse than molasses. "You and Hoffboss are up!"

Hoffboss. Not fancy, but still better than Calico.

Calico had been their joke over the odd streaking in my hair. Dido used to say our family called it dapple. Brunette mostly, with stray pieces of wheat-blond here and there like sunlight had gotten confused and settled in the wrong place. Rare enough to be noticed, not rare enough to be admired. A cursed arrangement, in other words.

The keeper looped the rope around my wrists and cinched it tight. Minor burn welts had already risen across my skin from the earlier rounds. Hoffman barely seemed to feel the binding. His wrists were callused dark from work and fighting both, rope sliding into old grooves like it belonged there.

The overhead security lamp buzzed above us, failing at most of its duties except making the blood on the concrete shine. My scavenged fieldworker boots looked too wide for me under that sickly light. They had belonged to a man bigger and deader than I was, and I had been told I would grow into them. I never quite did.

"At the sound of the bell, gentlemen!" one of the peacekeepers bellowed. "The fight will commence!"

Final round.

My wrists burned from the boy before, some poor kid who had put up a family heirloom and lost it on one rookie misstep outside the chalk. Easy win. Bad omen. A body starts thinking easy means deserved right before the world corrects him.

Hoffman watched me with maple-brown eyes gone nearly black beneath the lamp. His nose was already bleeding, but he stood steady, loose through the shoulders, drunk enough not to know fear and sober enough to know exactly where to strike. I felt adrenaline building in me so fiercely I thought I might puke on my own boots.

DING. DING. DING.

Hoffman yanked first.

The rope snapped tight so hard I thought both my wrists might tear clean out of socket. I planted one foot behind me and dug the heel into concrete, leaning back with everything my skinny frame had. Wrestling Hoffman was like trying to hold a mustang by the tail. Field work had built him wrong for a boy our age, all rough power and no restraint.

"Kick the hitch, Calico!" Hoffman snarled, dragging me half a step toward him. "Pool ain't worth a hang if you ain't gonna do nothin' with it!"

He was not wrong. When I won, I spent the money on bread, meat if I was lucky, maybe a cot for a night if rain had made the alleys cruel. Once or twice I had looked at a bottle of liquor with too much interest for a child. Hunger makes men early. So does loneliness.

"Go, Hoffboss!" the crowd shouted. "Kick his teeth in!"

Hoffman twisted hard. My right side slammed into the concrete, breath knocking out of me. His boot came for my mouth, and instinct saved what sense might have lost. I caught his ankle between my bound hands, looped my end of the rope around it, and clung hard.

I had seen another boy win that way once. Tangle, yank, drop.

So, I yanked.

Hoffman stumbled, cursing, kicking like a calf not yet resigned to the branding iron. I twisted his leg and got another chorus of shrieks from the crowd. The keepers loved it when a fight turned clever. Made them feel less guilty for calling it entertainment, I suppose.

"You ornery cuss!" Hoffman spat. "You and your weevil of a sister can go kick a bucket of manure for all I care! Ugly Capitolite scum!"

There it was.

The bait.

Rumors had followed me and Dido for years by then. That we had Capitol blood. That we were born in the city and smuggled out. That our father had been some disgraced officer. That our mother had sold information. That old Miss. Aelias Parshall had been raising a pair of polished little traitors in a tanner's shack on the edge of the Dregs. There were too many versions to hate cleanly, so I had learned not to hate any of them out loud.

I held him down anyway.

"You ain't gettin' a thing outta me, Ellendale," I said, teeth clenched as I pressed his leg into the concrete.

Hoffman grinned. Blood slicked his teeth. "Maybe not. But that ain't discountin' the rumors about old Missus Parshall, is it?"

My hands trembled. His eyes lit up because he saw it.

"Heard a little whisper between the rows," he went on, breathless with delight now. "Heard it was you who sent the missus to the stake."

The world narrowed. "Don't."

The word came out too quiet for the crowd. Too small for a warning. Hoffman heard it and knew he had found the soft place.

"Heard you had your own little business," he sneered. "Must've been a shock when you got home, eh?"

"Shut it, Hoffman." I gritted through grinding teeth.

"Poor little Auphie," he said, a mocking jeer in his voice. "Except that ain't what your sister said, was it?"

SMACK!

I do not know what crawled into my twelve-year-old head that night except rage, and rage does not need much room once it decides to stand up. My fist caught him with the force of something larger than me. Then I hit him again. And again. The rope tangled between us, the chalk line forgotten, the crowd forgotten, the rules forgotten, everything forgotten except the need to smear his ugly words into blood before they could keep existing.

"Shut up!" I screamed, hitting and hitting and hitting…

Hoffman hit back. He caught my cheek, my ear, my jaw. I hardly felt it. I clawed at his face, tore skin under my nails, slammed his head sideways until blood poured fresh from his nose and the crowd changed pitch from excitement to something nearer alarm.

No one stopped me. Not at first.

Then hands seized the back of my shirt and hauled me off like I weighed nothing.

"Hold on, son!"

"Get off me!" I thrashed, half blind with tears and fury. "Get off!"

The man dragged me clean across the chalk line, which meant Hoffman won the pot. The keepers cut my bindings, and I stumbled forward into suddenly silent air. Hoffman lay on the slab with a bloody, crooked smile spread across his face.

I would have gone for him again. The man's hands landed on both my shoulders, firm enough to stop me without making a show of force. "Easy there..."

"What the hell?" I spat, trying to wrench away. "You realize what you just did?"

The stranger ignored me and turned toward the grounds. He wore a dark cattleman hat and one of those navy-blue dusters that reflected when the light hit it right. Firecatcher fabric. Worn thin, patched at the cuffs, smelling faintly of smoke and horse.

"Get on home, everyone," he called. "Celebration's over."

The crowd obeyed. That was the first thing about Virgil Tempest that frightened me.

He did not shout louder than the peacekeepers. He did not threaten nor did he wave a weapon. Yet the boys scattered, the onlookers thinned, and even the keepers grumbled rather than argue. Some people carry authority like a badge. Virgil wore his like weather.

When the yard had mostly emptied, he turned back to me and crouched down on one knee to meet my eye. He removed his midnight-black hat. Cobalt eyes studied me from a face weathered by sun, smoke, and years of walking toward things other men ran from.

Finally, he spoke. "What's your name?"

I sneered at him, expecting him to be a joke. "What's it to you?"

He gave the smallest smile. "Mind if I introduce myself first? Virgil Tempest. Chief if ya wanna call me somethin’ else. Saw you out there with the Ellendale boy. Got a mean streak on you, son."

I stared at the snake-skinned boot near his knee, steel-toed for wanagi country. A boot like that could stop a bite. A boot like that cost more than I saw in a month.

"S'pose so," I muttered. "If I'm in trouble, just say so."

"Oh, no, son." Virgil glanced once toward the peacekeeper base, then back to me. "I just couldn't help noticin' you're the little bugger always fightin' here every night. Correct?"

"Yeah?"

Blood dripped from my nose. I wiped it with the back of my hand and left a smear across my cheek. Better this than the fields, I told myself. Better bleeding for a chance at coin than living the same Capitol-measured day until I was too tired to want more.

Virgil's hand rested on my shoulder. Heavy and sturdy. Wasn’t supposed to be gentle I reckoned. Just… grounded. "You ever wonder what all that fight's for, son?"

The question caught me just as bad as Hoffman’s punch. "What d'you mean?"

He nodded toward the concrete, still wet in places. "You fight like someone lookin' to burn somethin' outta his chest. Ain't anger alone keepin’ a boy your size standin’ against a brute like Ellendale. It's purpose. Only difference is, you ain't found yours yet."

I had no answer.

The night air smelled of dust, sweat, blood, and the far-off sweetness of grain. Purpose sounded like a rich man's word. Something people with full pantries invented because survival bored them.

"Ain't much purpose in 9," I muttered. "Only thing worth fightin' for is stayin' alive."

Virgil studied me a long moment. "Stayin' alive's a good start. But survivin' ain't livin'. The firecatchers, we got a say in that. We fight the flames before they eat the district whole. Sometimes we win. Sometimes we don't. But we keep folks breathin' a little longer. That's somethin' worth doin'."

My gaze drifted to his coat, singed and patched and lined with stories I did not know yet. It was not glamorous work. Catchers died ugly. Everybody knew that. They got paid poorly for saving crops the Capitol owned and people the Capitol barely counted. Yet somehow, standing there with Virgil's hand on my shoulder, the work seemed to carry more dignity than anything I had seen on that concrete slab.

"You sayin' I should be one of you?" I asked, half mocking, half hoping so hard I hated myself for it.

Virgil straightened and set his hat back on. "I'm sayin' a fighter like you don't belong in the dirt with drunks and gamblers. You got grit, boy. The kind that don't wash off easy. If you're willin' to put that fight to use, I'll teach you how to catch fire instead of feed it."

The idea lodged somewhere deep under my ribs.

Dangerous. Absurd. Maybe… it was right.

For the first time in years, the thing burning inside me did not feel only like anger.

"All right," I said, quiet but certain. "I'll… I’ll learn."

Virgil's hand came down once more on my shoulder. "Good. Eastern mill. Sunrise. We'll see if you're built for the blaze."

The blaze. I really had it for a time, didn't I?

By the morning after the clinic, my leg had become the sort of thing a body could no longer ignore politely.

That was the trouble with an injury once professionals got their hands on it. Before then, a man could pretend pain was only pain. Just temporary. Something stubbornness could outlast if pride kept its teeth set hard enough. Though once a healer looked at it with that flat, unsentimental expression and started naming bones, ligaments, and recovery times, the body stopped feeling like an inconvenience and more like evidence.

Dido had wrapped the leg tight enough to insult me every time I bent it wrong, which was often. She had given instructions too. Stay off it. Keep it raised. Do not ride or run. Don’t even attempt to prove anything to anyone by ruining the only leg I had left fit to complain with.

I had nodded through all of it, knowing full well that the moment I stepped out of that clinic, I’d still ride down the streets of New Bisman knowing full well she’d catch me.

The day after the fiasco of Capitolite nearly dying on district soil didn’t change much to the naked eye. As I strolled slowly through the streets atop Errante, each cog in the little machine that was 9 kept turning. Kids ran on their way to work or school, the fieldworkers were cussing about their unfair wages, the store owners swept their porches clean for the chance for one, if only just one customer entered their business.

A little way outside the catcher base, there were a couple of peacekeepers openly mocking a young boy, no older than sixteen. The keepers laughed as they shoved the kid against the nearest alley wall, before the bigger of the two spat in the boy’s face.

“Where’s your older brother now?” Jeered the soldier. “Ol’ Hoffboss can’t protect ya now, huh?”

Hoffboss? It took me a second glance recognize the boy. Hoel Ellendale, Hoffman’s baby brother. However, unlike his brother, he was all bones and bruises. Scrawny little man that could barely hold his own like Hoffboss could in the Gluttony Games.

Not that the boy seemed particularly keen on fighting back anyways. He kept a stoic expression as the peacekeepers kept shoving Hoel to the dirt, taunting him about his brother’s gang always abandoning the poor bastard.

Looking back, I wish I would’ve said something. Stopped their cruel words and help young Ellendale back on his feet. Unfortunately, I didn’t.

Then, I got to the firecatcher grounds.

Not for duty, obviously. That was what I told myself on the walk over, anyway. I was checking in. Seeing what Gooseneck had heard from the District 7 rangers. Asking after Trouble. Making sure the report from the valley had not been polished down into something harmless by the time it reached hands clean enough to mishandle it.

Perfectly reasonable.

The fact that every step from Burr Scranton's residence to the grounds drove a hot nail up through my hip was nobody's business but mine.

The firecatcher grounds sat on the midwestern edge of New Bisman, where town loosened its grip and gave way to training yard, stables, equipment sheds, and the broad scraped lot where trainees learned how to throw themselves at disaster in acceptable formations. Usually, the place held noise enough to make a man feel useful just standing in it. Men cussing wind direction like wind might take correction if shamed properly. Young catchers dragging hoses and grit sacks with the grave seriousness of children given their first dangerous errand.

That morning, it was quieter. It wasn’t necessarily empty pre-say. District 9 did not have the luxury of empty where work was concerned. Though, the whole yard moved under a damp cloth, with voices lower, steps a little slower. The force had not stopped for Virgil. It couldn't really. Yet everywhere I looked, his absence sat in the spaces where people hesitated before asking who had authority now.

Deputy Oakley Mayleaf was near the tack shed, speaking with two older catchers over a ledger. She looked up when I came through the gate. Her eyes dropped to the limp that ruined my every step, then back to my face.

She did not say anything, which was decent of her.

Burr would have said something. Ditcher would have pretended not to, then said something worse by accident. Mayleaf only gave me one short nod and returned to the ledger, granting me the mercy of being seen and not discussed.

I was halfway across the yard when Gooseneck Hillsboro stepped out from behind the horse barn like he had been waiting for me to make a fool of myself at the proper distance.

He had a way of appearing without announcing himself. Always had, especially in his frame being tall, spare, but especially narrow through the shoulders in a way that made him look less strong than he truly was. He had a face that had learned early not to volunteer opinion before it was needed. His hat sat low, shading his eyes, and his hands hung by the thumbs on his belt loops in that quiet, inward posture of his that made a person feel examined without being accused.

"Rhodes," he stated.

"Hillsboro." I nodded back.

His gaze traveled down the full pathetic length of me, splint, bad stance, with the worst being the sweat already gathered at my collar despite the morning still being cool.

"You get lost on the way to bed?" he curtly snorted. Not out of malice, though my treacherous mind couldn’t tell the difference.

"I was headed there eventually." I sighed.

"Funny.” He almost laughed. “Grounds ain't on that route."

That made me shrug. "They are if a man takes a shortcut."

His mouth moved once. The dawn of a smile. "You look like chewed bark."

That cost him a glare. "That your medical opinion?"

"No, Rhodes. That's being generous."

I shifted my weight before I remembered I ought not, and the leg answered so sharply I had to grip the side of the barn with both hands. Gooseneck saw it. Of course he saw it. Men like him were put on earth, I suspected, to notice the exact things a body wanted left alone.

He tipped his chin toward the shaded side of the tack shed. "Come sit."

"I'm fine." I quickly retorted before my body could answer.

"No, you're upright.” Gooseneck shook his head. “Barely at that. Folks confuse the two, ya know."

I considered arguing, then decided there were more dignified ways to lose. I limped after him toward the shed, each step drawing my temper tighter until I could feel it sitting behind my teeth. There was a bench there, rough-built and sun-warped, tucked between stacked bridles and a row of old buckets. I lowered myself onto it with as much control as pride could scrape together.

It still hurt enough to put spots in my vision. Gooseneck, all limbs, leaned against the post opposite me, arms folded now, his eyes turned toward the yard rather than me. That too was a kindness, really, for a man could receive a scolding better when he did not have to stare straight into it.

For a while neither of us spoke. Didn’t seem necessary.

The yard carried on in fragments. A trainee dropped a grit scoop and earned a soft curse from the catcher beside him. One of the stable boys led out a nervous mare with her ears pinned and her tail switching. Somewhere beyond the sheds, a hammer struck wood three times, then stopped.

Finally, Gooseneck said, "Heard you tried to catch Trouble under a falling tree."

I simply nodded. "Did catch him."

"You also caught some mine along the way, from the looks of it."

"Didn't mean to.” I side eyed Gooseneck. “Didn't know."

“Yep.” It was his turn to nod. "That tends to be the trouble with mines."

I craned my neck to properly look him in the eyes. "You drag me over here to admire the irony of it?"

"No." He looked at me then. "Nope. I dragged you over here because you're acting like your leg ain’t broken."

I scoffed. “It ain’t.”

“Damn near close though.”

That landed closer to home than I liked. I looked away toward the training lot where two young catchers were hauling a water barrel between them, both trying to look less winded than they were.

"The healers already gave me the sermon, Hillsboro."

“Imagine the did.” Gooseneck’s shoulders bobbed, containing a piece of a chuckle. "I imagine they did."

"Well, they’re better at it than you." I admitted.

"Likely." His voice stayed even. "They also know how much worse your condition got."

I said nothing. Gooseneck let that sit a moment. He knew some doors opened worse if shoved.

"Clinic says it's bad," he finally said.

"Clinic says a lot."

Now, Gooseneck’s widened gaze turned to stare me down. "Is it bad?"

I rubbed my thumb along the bench wood. The surface was surprisingly smooth where other hands had worn it down before mine. Proof of other worried men. Of other bodies briefly reduced to tools and waiting.

"It's worse than before, can tell ya that," I relented.

"How much worse?"

I huffed a humorless breath. "You askin' as a friend or as a scout lead?"

"Depends."

That almost made me smile. Almost.

"They set it," I said. "Said if I keep weight off it, it might mend clean enough."

Gooseneck’s brows pinched. "Might?"

"That's the word they used." I sighed, feeling the pressure build beyond just my injury.

Finally, the lieutenant turned his head back to the base, though not his attention. "And if you don't?"

I did not answer right away, because… knew. Maybe not in every official, educated, clinic-worded way, but I knew enough. Bodies had their own language, and mine had been speaking plain since the valley. Hell, since the spill. There was a difference between pain from something healing and pain from something warning you it was deciding how much of your future to keep.

"If I don't," I said at last, "then it won't."

Gooseneck nodded once, as if that confirmed some grim little sum he'd already been doing. "Good."

I looked at him sharply. "Good?"

"Good that you know." He corrected.

That answer earned a humorless chuckle. "Knowing and liking ain't kin."

"Rarely are."

I leaned back against the shed wall and shut my eyes for one breath. The shade smelled of dust, leather, horse sweat, and old smoke baked into wood. Familiar smells. Firecatcher smells. The kind of smells that had once meant place, purpose, belonging. That morning they only made me aware of how easily a man could be standing in the middle of his own life and still feel it pulling out from under him.

"I can still work, ya know," I bargained, despite knowing my efforts were in vain.

Gooseneck snorted through his nose. Not impatient. More tired of anything.

"Course you can." His inflection deadpanned. That was a giveaway to Gooseneck not letting on what he was thinking. In fact, it was a dead giveaway for most folks in 9.

"What’s that supposed to mean?" I countered.

He shrugged. "That was a fool’s sentence, ya know."

“Hillsboro,” Though my voice sounded more pleading than commanding. "I'm not useless."

"Didn’t call you useless."

On a technicality, he was right. Never truly let the words reach fruition, sure… then again, folks in 9 never said everything that was in their noggin.

"You didn't have to." I prompted.

His gaze sharpened then, not angrily, but with enough force to make me stop. "No. I didn't."

The yard sounded farther away all of a sudden. Gooseneck pushed off the post and came to sit at the other end of the bench, leaving enough space between us that the conversation did not yet have to call itself personal.

"You know what I've seen?" he asked.

My lids drooped at his question. "Plenty, I reckon."

"Too much of one thing." He rested his elbows on his knees. "Men thinking the only way to prove they still matter is to spend themselves faster. Young ones, mostly. Old ones too, though they lie better about it. They lose somebody. Lose a rank, a wife, a brother, a child, a hand, a good horse, whatever piece of life they'd built their balance around. Then they come here and start mistaking punishment for purpose."

I swallowed, though there was nothing in my throat.

"They volunteer first. Ride longest. Sleep least. Take every little bad call like the maker itself assigned it. And folks praise 'em for a while because it looks like strength from a distance. Looks noble, absolutely. Like duty." His mouth tightened. "Up close, it's just a man bleeding into a bucket and calling it a drop."

The words were not loud. That was why they cut clean.

"I ain't doing that," I said, but it came out weaker than I'd wanted.

"No?"

I sighed through my nose, forcing myself to admit it. "No."

He nodded toward my leg. "Then what are you doing?"

Anger rose in me, sudden and welcome, because anger at least had the decency to feel like motion. "I'm trying not to be useless."

Gooseneck went still. The sentence had come out before I approved it. Once spoken, there was no calling it back, so I set my jaw and looked away. Across the yard, Deputy Mayleaf handed the ledger off to one of the older men and pointed toward the east shed. Somebody laughed once, too sarcastic to be happy.

Gooseneck's voice softened by a degree. "Then… that’s settled."

I hated him a little for hearing it right.

"Tempest's gone," I said, eyes cast to the dirt. "Rolette's chief. You've got scout rotation. Everybody's useful. Burr's annoying, but hell, even that serves a purpose half the time. And now Rosabel is-“

I stopped myself there. Too late, maybe.

Gooseneck's gaze moved to me, his expression turning to genuine concern. Maybe even fear if you spelt it correctly. "Rosie's what?"

I shook my head. "Nothing."

Gooseneck, fortunately, backed off, though he clearly didn’t buy it. "Mm..."

"Don't 'mm' me." I scoffed.

He shrugged. "Reckon, ya needed it."

“She…” I dragged a hand over my mouth, before strangled sigh escaped from my throat. "She… wants to go to university in the Capitol. The mayor's been generous, but… it's that damn Capitolite, Snow, that isn't sitting right with me. I want to say he's a good fella. Say that… at least he's helping Rose move toward. Something like that."

I had to pause and gauge Gooseneck’s reaction at the mere mention of the Capitol. He never said anything aloud. Never openly talked against them, swore at them, spat at them. Nothing… but as I noted the slightest bit of grief glossing within his eyes, anyone who knew anyone in 9 would know that Gooseneck Hillsboro had every right to openly hate them. Especially since the catcher was forced to watch both of his siblings become slaughter fodder for the Capitol’s perverted games…

…and despite it, Hillsboro remained composed.

My voice roughened despite my best effort. "Everybody, everything, is moving. And I'm sitting here with a busted leg being told to rest like I'm some lame horse stuck in its stall."

Gooseneck was quiet for a while after that. That was one thing about him I both admired and despised. He never rushed to fill a wound with words just because silence made him uncomfortable. He let a thing breathe, showed its full ugly shape, before deciding whether to touch it.

Finally he said, "Tempest made a mistake with you."

I turned on him so fast pain sparked up my hip. "What?"

"I think… he taught you too well."

The anger faltered because it had nowhere obvious to land.

Gooseneck kept looking at the yard. "Tempest had a way of making every young fool under him believe usefulness was sacred. If you could help, you should. If there was fire, you went toward it. Good lesson, most days." He paused. "Dangerous one when loss gets hold of it."

I looked down again.

"He loved this force," Gooseneck said. "Loved this district. Loved work, saving what could be saved. But he never asked you to become kindling."

My throat tightened.

"He isn't asking anything of me now," I said. "He's dead."

"No," Gooseneck replied. "But dead men usually ask the most of a person. Or we start putting our own orders in their mouths and pretending a grave gave them."

Maker help me, he was right. Every time I reached for Virgil's hat, I told myself I had to stand because he would have stood. Had to ride because he would have ridden. Had to watch Rose, guard the force, keep moving or else dishonor the man who had saved more of me than I knew how to count. I had dressed fear in his voice because his voice still held authority over me, even from the grave.

Gooseneck leaned back slightly. "You want to obey orders?"

I did not trust my voice. I only looked at him.

"Live long enough to remember him right," he said. "Not just loud."

The yard blurred a little around the edges. I blinked hard and blamed the pain.

"You sound like an old woman," I muttered.

That earned me a chuckle. "I was raised by several."

I raised my brows. "Shows."

"Good.” Gooseneck nodded with pride. “They were smarter than most men."

That got a breath out of me. Not a laugh, but near enough to loosen the worst of the tightness in my chest.

Gooseneck's expression turned practical, which meant the mercy portion of the conversation had ended. "Rolette's taking you off field response."

The world narrowed. I felt a faint wave of an argument bubbling out from my frustration before Hillsboro beat me to it.”

"Temporary. Until the clinic clears you."

This did nothing to quell me. "And if it doesn't?"

His silence answered before his mouth did. I felt something drop inside me, low and heavy.

"Gooseneck."

"I'm telling you plain because somebody ought to," he said. "You cannot run line or brace under a grit pack. You definitely can't haul a man out of a burn zone on that leg. Not now."

I stubbornly chuffed. "I know what I can do."

"No." This time there was iron in it. "You know what you used to do. Those ain't the same."

The anger came back, but beneath it was fear so cold it made the morning seem thin. Firecatching had not been a job to me, not really. It had been the first place where work and belonging had taken the same shape. It had given me orders, danger, exhaustion, scars enough to map me by. All this to say, it had also given me Virgil. Purpose. A way to be more than the sum of what I had survived before it.

Now, without asking, my own body had placed that life under review.

"What am I supposed to do?" I asked.

Gooseneck's eyes softened, barely. "Heal."

I shook my head. “That ain't an answer."

Goosenecks eyes trained themselves to the ground, before he reluctantly admitted, "It's the only one you've got."

I looked down at my hands. Same scars, same knuckles, same dirt around the nails. It seemed unfair that everything inside could shift so violently and leave the outside mostly recognizable.

From the training lot, Trouble appeared near the water barrels. He moved stiffly, one navy, jacket sleeve torn from the blast, his face still warm amber in the morning light. Though even as an elder teen, I feared he might be aging too fast. Most did in the districts.

When he caught sight of me, he lifted one hand, hesitant and ashamed. I lifted mine back before I could think better of it.

Gooseneck saw that too.

"He's alive because of you," he assured me.

I gave the smallest tilt of my chin. "Maybe."

"No maybe. He is."

I scrunched my eyes closed, as an onslaught of unforgiving grievances filtered in my head, all at once. "And I'm half useless because of it."

"Those two truths can sit at the same table."

I hated that. Hated how much it sounded like Rose asking how to mourn and still want things. Maybe that was adulthood, then. It wasn’t just wisdom. Nobody wise enough would ever admit they had enough of that. Rather, it was learning to hold two true hurts without letting one erase the other.

Gooseneck rose first, brushing dust from his trousers. "You can still make used of yourself here, Rhodes. You know that, right?"

"And how you suppose that?" I huffed halfheartedly. “By pretending I’m a scarecrow or something?”

He gave me a dry look. "By occupying your mind, not your leg."

I huffed. "And what, leave all the borin’ stuff to me?”

Cause I can actually read a newspaper, unlike the rest of the sorry folks in 9? I was about to add that thought, though, I bit my tongue, understanding most people didn’t have their own personal library hidden away in pre-Dark Day bunker. Obviously.

Gooseneck's face finally etched with faint humor, tilting his head in fiend disapproval at my hollow comeback. "Hell, Rhodes, whatever are you gonna do?"

That nearly got a real laugh out of me. "As long as I don’t get chewed out for some spelling error…"

“Nobody would know otherwise.” Gooseneck countered, before he offered me a hand and hauled me upright. Pain flared, but I kept my face steadier this time. He had already seen enough. He waited until I had my balance. "Besides… Tempest didn't care that you were useful."

I had no answer. Not one I could say aloud and survive with dignity intact. I simply gave him a nod. Small and stiff. Not enough for gratitude, but all I could manage.

Then I limped out of the firecatcher grounds in exchange for their information center. All the while with Virgil's hat low over my brow, my leg burning, my throat tight, and a pit in my stomach so deep it felt like the earth beneath that fog valley had opened again inside me.

Because Gooseneck was right.

I had not only cracked bone out there. I had come back from that clearing close enough to losing my place that I could finally see the edge of it.

And once a man sees the edge, he cannot unknow how near his next step may take him.

Rose knew she was being watched before the academy doors had even shut behind her.

That was not unusual by itself. Grief drew eyes. So did absence and being the daughter of a man, half the district had buried only days before. She had prepared herself, badly but earnestly, for that sort of attention. The softened voices, careful pauses, or maybe the pity that tried to approach politely and somehow still stepped on the sorest place in a body.

This was not that. There was something quicker and sharper in the air. A sideways kind of looking.

A girl from the lower forms saw Rose cross the front hall and immediately turned to whisper into another girl's ear. Two boys near the coat pegs stopped arguing over a lunch pail long enough to stare. Someone at the stairwell said her name too softly to be certain of it and too distinctly to be mistaken for anything else.

Rosabel Tempest-Strix kept walking.

Her academy uniform felt wrong on her that morning. Too familiar for the life she had woken inside. Pine-green jacket, brown skirt, white blouse buttoned neatly at the throat, green ribbons tied through her braids because she had not had strength to choose anything different. She had washed her hands twice before leaving the house and still thought she could smell clinic spirits under her nails. The cuffs of her blouse were clean now, or near enough, but she knew where Coriolanus's blood had dried on them the day before. Knew where the fabric had stiffened. Where her shawl had gone missing somewhere between Victor's Village and the clinic, swallowed by emergency and not yet returned.

It seemed impossible that anyone else could know those details. Almost as impossible that they did not.

The hallway narrowed around her with bodies and voices. Students moved in familiar clusters toward their rooms, boots knocking against old boards, satchels thumping hips, laughter rising and cutting off whenever Rose came too nearby. She saw Carrigan Killdeer standing by the classroom with two other girls, her eyes bright with the particular strain of someone trying not to look too interested in being interested. Dax Hebron glanced up from a paper in his hand and looked away too slowly. Amos Bottineau, who had always been terrible at pretending, simply stared until Dax elbowed him.

Rose held her books tighter against her chest. It occurred to her then that yesterday had not stayed where she left it.

The mayor's parlor had not remained behind closed doors. The conference had not remained a conference. Victor's Village, for all its fresh paint and peacekeeper gates, had not been far enough from town to keep gossip from crawling under the fence. And the clinic had never kept anything quiet for longer than it took a waiting room to empty.

By first bell, the whole school had some version of the story. Rose could feel the versions collecting around her.

She had gone to see the mayor.

She had met with a Capitol man.

She had been shown the victor houses.

She had saved Coriolanus Snow from a snakebite.

She was close to going to university.

Close to being sponsored.

She thought herself chosen.

That last one was the worst, though no one had yet said it aloud.

Miss Wishek's classroom was already half full when Rose entered. The familiar smell of chalk and old paper closed around her with almost insulting normalcy. Sunlight fell through the high windows in pale rectangles across the desks, catching dust in the air and turning it briefly golden before the room swallowed it back into gray.

Rose took her usual seat near the middle. That was her first mistake.

The room shifted around the choice, not dramatically enough for a teacher to scold, but enough for her to feel it. She had sat there all year. Most her academy years, really, whenever she could claim it first. It had never meant anything beyond habit. Now even a desk seemed to ask whether she still belonged in the same place as before.

Rose set her books down carefully. Too carefully.

"Is it true?" The whisper came from somewhere behind her left shoulder.

"Don't ask her."

"I'm not!"

"You just did."

Rose kept her gaze on the pencil groove carved into her desk. Someone years before had scratched a row of tiny wheat stalks into the wood, each one leaning the same direction as if pressed by wind. She had traced them with one finger many mornings when civics lessons bored her past endurance. Today she only looked at them and tried to remember how breathing was meant to work when a room had decided to turn her into a question.

Miss Wishek entered before anyone else could be brave enough to ask it aloud.

The room snapped into respectability at once. Satchels were shoved beneath desks. Whispering thinned into little scraps and died there. Rose lifted her chin and opened her reader to the marked page, though she could not have said what lesson they were meant to begin with.

"Open to chapter twelve," Miss Wishek said. "We will continue our discussion of district responsibility within national recovery."

A few students turned pages. A few only pretended to. Rose kept her eyes down and felt the whole room lean toward her without moving.

District responsibility.

The phrase landed differently than it had before. Yesterday, it might have annoyed her in the old familiar way, might have prompted two or three marginal arguments and a question Miss Wishek would have pretended not to enjoy. Today, with Coriolanus Snow's blood still living somewhere in memory under her fingernails and the university board's faces still fixed in her mind like portraits in bad light, it felt less like a lesson and more like a warning.

Miss Wishek began to read. "Each district is given purpose according to its strongest civic capacity. By serving within that purpose, the citizens of Panem-"

"Ask her." A distracting whisper emerged.

"I'm not asking her." The next whisper parried.

"You said you would!"

Miss Wishek stopped reading. The classroom went still so quickly it almost made the whispers sound louder in memory than they had in fact.

"Mr. Bottineau," Miss Wishek said.

Amos sank slightly in his seat. "Ma'am?"

"If your private conversation is more informative than the text, perhaps you would care to share it with the class."

"N-No, ma'am." The dirt blonde’s eyes swerved to anywhere but Rose.

"Then I suggest you locate your page before your curiosity begins costing you marks."

A few students snickered, relieved to have someone else embarrassed for them. Miss Wishek resumed the lesson. Rose kept her eyes on chapter twelve and felt her ears burn.

For the next half hour, the class behaved itself badly.

Not in any way Miss Wishek could punish cleanly. No open questions or even bold remarks. Only glances passed between desks, notes folded and refolded beneath elbows, too-casual looks whenever Rose turned a page. Carrigan leaned twice toward Nellie and received two sharp looks for her trouble. Dax watched Rose with a seriousness that almost made her prefer Carrigan's gossip. At least gossip knew itself for what it was. Dax looked as though he had begun sorting her into an argument.

When the bell finally rang, Rose gathered her books too fast.

The room rose around her in scraping wood and released breath. Students moved toward the door in a clump, and for one foolish second Rose thought she might slip through them unnoticed by virtue of everyone else trying too hard to notice her discreetly.

Then Carrigan Killdeer stepped into her path. The brunette had always been out to get someone, regardless of who it was. Though, Rose couldn’t really blame how her and Enrique turned out. The Killdeer family were proud of being district. Most were, and there was nothing wrong with that. However, that also meant that an outsider, especially a feral, had no place among the hard workers of District 9.

 She did not do it cruelly, though Carrigan always made sure of that. Cruelty would have given Rose something firmer to stand against. If Carrigan and her friends tried to be mean enough like they would when they were children, Rose would feel more justified to talk back.

 Instead, her peer only pretended to look bright-eyed, curious, yet too hungry for the answer to pretend she had not been waiting all morning.

"So," Carrigan said in a subtly accusatory manner, hugging her reader to her chest. "Is it true?"

Rose adjusted her grip on her books. "Is what true?"

Carrigan gave her a look. "Don't be like that."

"I don't know what you're asking."

At this, Carrigan openly scoffed. "Yes. You do."

Nellie and Grist Mayville hovered half a step behind Carrigan, both looking apologetic but not apologetic enough to leave. Amos had stopped by the door. Dax lingered near the window with his paper still in hand, pretending with astonishing failure to reread it.

Carrigan lowered her voice. Not enough. "They say you met with him."

Rose's stomach tightened. "With who?"

Carrigan's brows lifted. "The Capitol man."

The room seemed to hold its breath around the phrase. Even Miss Wishek, sorting papers at her desk, paused by the smallest measure.

Rose looked at Carrigan and understood then that the question had already become larger than Coriolanus Snow himself. It was not merely, did you meet him? It was, did he choose you? Did you step somewhere we were not invited? Did the world open for you while the rest of us were eating barley mash and reciting civic purpose?

"I… was introduced," Rose said simply.

Carrigan's eyes sharpened. "That's not an answer."

Rose remained assertive. "It's the answer I have."

Grist spoke then, quieter. "They said he got bit."

Rose's fingers tightened around the spine of her reader.

Nellie, who had apparently decided self-preservation was for other people, blurted, "Did you save his life?"

"Nellie," Grist hissed.

"What? That's what they're saying."

Rose looked toward the door. More students had gathered there now, some from their class, some from the hall drawn by the scent of rumor the way flies found sugared milk. She thought of the clinic cot, of Coriolanus's hand going rigid on the rail, of the healer's voice cutting clean through panic, of her own bare arms in the cold because her shawl had vanished under somebody else's emergency. She thought of how frightened she had been.

And focused. Alive. Too alive… especially for district standards.

"I helped get him to the clinic, yes," Rose said.

Carrigan's mouth parted. "So it's true?"

"That I helped an injured man? Yes."

"That's not what I mean, and you know it." She snapped, clearly trying her best to wring out every last detail. One more crumb to use against a feral girl.

Rose met her eyes then. "Maybe people ought to start meaning what they say."

That quieted Carrigan, though only for a heartbeat. A few students made little sounds, not quite laughter, not quite shock. Dax looked up fully now.

Carrigan’s mouth tightened, before she took Rose’s sentiment to heart. “Then you better start admitting that you’ve been puttin’ yourself out for that pretty Capitol man, huh?”

Rose’s eyes widened with horror as an uncomfortable feeling of terror turned her feet ice cold.

Was that…? Did everyone think-

Miss Wishek set her papers down.

"Enough," she said. The word cut through the room with more force than volume. "Miss Tempest-Strix is not a bulletin to be read between lessons. You will proceed to your lunch break."

Carrigan‘s lips quirked with satisfaction. Grist looked down. Nellie immediately became fascinated by the floorboards. The students began moving, though not without looking back. Rose stayed where she was until the worst of them had passed into the hall.

Unfortunately, the long hall still belonged to the academy.

By second bell, whatever had happened in Miss Wishek's room had already outrun her. The corridor was crowded, at least for a rural school in 9, with students changing classes, and every knot of them seemed to loosen just enough to let her pass through the center of its attention. The younger ones stared openly. The older ones tried to be clever and only succeeded in being obvious.

"She's the one!"

"Tempest's girl?"

"I heard that Capitolite asked for her himself."

"No, Lancaster did."

"My brother says she was at them creepy Capitol houses outside of town."

"Why would she be there?"

"Because she's trying to be Capitol, stupid."

Her boots struck the floorboards with an ordinary sound. That became important somehow. One step. Then another. Shame and guilt pitted itself in the depths of her stomach. Carrigan’s words still hung over her like a blanket of mist. Of course, Rosabel knew Carrigan was simply parroting what her parents may have said. Yet… How could somebody say such a thing?

She was still a girl. Still a student like everyone else. She still had a reader under one arm, a pencil tucked behind her ear, and a cuff buttoned crooked because she had dressed too quickly that morning. She was not a story. Not yet, at least. Not if she could keep walking normally enough to prove it.

Rose kept walking.

Then, at the turn toward the stairwell, someone caught her sleeve.

Rose turned too quickly. Waaska stood there with Nibs half-hidden behind her shoulder, her brown eyes fixed hard on Rose's face. For a second, relief moved through Rose so suddenly it nearly made her weak.

Then she saw Waaska's expression. It wasn’t cold exactly. Waaska couldn’t hold a mean face, even if you insulted her very existence.

No, it was guarded in a way Rose had rarely seen from her. Her braid was neat today, her uniform properly buttoned, satchel strap pulled tight across her chest like a shield. Nibs looked from Rose to his sister and back again, silent for once, his face pinched with the effort of holding questions he had clearly been ordered not to ask.

"Uh, Rosie?” Waaska said, a slight tremor in her speech.

"Waaska." That was all either of them managed at first.

The hall moved around them. Students glanced as they passed, slowing just enough to catch whatever they could before a teacher's look hurried them onward.

Waaska noticed. Of course she did. Her mouth tightened. "Could you… come with us?"

Waaska didn’t wait for an answer. She took Rose by the wrist and pulled her into the little alcove beside the old supply cupboard, where broken slates, mop buckets, and a cracked portrait of President Axel had been left to gather dust. Nibs followed at once, squeezing in beside the wall.

Rose almost smiled at the absurdity of it. Almost.

Then, Waaska let go of her wrist and folded her arms, again, not in a distant manner. More so concerned. "All right. What happened?"

Rose drew back a little. "What?"

Waaska gave her a look so flat it could have leveled wheat. "Rose."

Nibs, despite the tension, made a tiny snorting sound. "You're acting like those stuck-up Killdeer folks."

Waaska turned to her brother. "Nibs."

He promptly shut his mouth.

Rose shifted her books against her chest. "I… I don't know what people have been saying."

"C’mon, Rose, you must know," Waaska’s voice broke a bit. "Or at least you can guess. Everyone can guess because everyone's saying ten versions of it, and every one has your name on it."

Rose felt as though she had fallen onto concrete.

"Is it true that… that you're trying to be Capitol?" The question came out sharply, yet not fast enough. Too blunt, yet with a trace of fear. Rose stared at her cousin.

Waaska's face flickered, regret trying and failing to soften the edge before it did damage. "I mean... is it true there's a chance you'd be taken into university?"

Rose looked down at the books in her arms, feeling herself nod. "There may be."

"May be!?" Though her cousin’s voice was barely above a whisper.

"That's all it is." Rose said in a statement far too speedy for her liking.

“But… Rose?” Waaska’s teeth fiddled with the skin of her lip before deciding to press further. "That's not all it is, is it? Not if people are already whispering like you've got Capitol ink drying on your papers."

Rose gulped. "But I don't."

"But that Capitolite, Snow… he knows you."

Rose did not answer quickly enough. Waaska saw that too. Her eyes narrowed, not cruelly, but with fear made precise. "So… that part's true."

Rose closed her eyes for half a second. "I met him, yes."

"And you went somewhere with him?” Waaska concluded.

“Y-Yes.” Rose hesitated. "He showed me Victor's Village."

“Victor’s Village?” Nibs's face scrunched in confusion. "You mean those weird Capitolite houses?"

Waaska turned on him. "Nibs."

Nibs shrugged. "What? That's what they are."

Rose swallowed. "Yes."

Waaska looked back at her. "Why?"

Because he asked, Rose almost said. Because I need a sponsor.

He had spoken to her like the part of her that wanted to understand systems was not a nuisance or a girl's vanity but something worth feeding. Sure, he was Capitol, yes, and polished and strange and impossible to read, but he had nearly died in front of her too, and mortality had a way of complicating suspicion. Coriolanus could help her reach university, and university had begun to feel less like a dream than a door she had already put one hand against.

Instead, she said, "Because… it had to do with the Games. And university. And… how the Capitol is trying to make certain things look kinder than they are."

Waaska stared at her as if trying to decide whether the answer was too honest or not honest enough.

"And then he got bit?" Nibs asked.

Waaska elbowed him.

"Ow!" Nibs scowled at his elder sister.

Rose looked at him, and some of the pressure in her chest eased despite everything. "Yes. He got bit."

"By a wanagi?" Waaska cringed at the mere mention of such a critter.

Rose nodded at the memory. "Yes."

Nibs's eyes widened. "Those suckers kill folk! Did he foam? Bet he did! I heard most folk seize a couple seconds after the venom hits and then-"

"Niibi!" Waaska whispered, horrified.

"What? I ain't ever seen it!"

And you don’t want to, Rose wanted to reiterate. Instead, she let out a shaken breath that nearly became a laugh, then failed at the last second. "No. It was... worse than that, somehow."

"But you saved him," Waaska confirmed.

"I helped."

Waaska’s gaze turned to something eerily similar to her mother. Like when Misea would catch one of the kids eating sweets before supper when they were all younger. "That's saving."

"No," Rose said, more firmly than she meant to. "The healers saved him. I didn't. I was just there."

Waaska's expression shifted at Rose's insistence, then shifted again into something harder to read. "But you were there."

Rose looked at her for a moment. "Yes."

"With him."

Rose sighed. "I couldn't just leave him, Waaska."

"But everybody thinks..." Waaska stopped herself.

Rose waited.

Waaska looked away first, jaw tight. "Never mind."

"No," Rose said softly. "Please. Say it."

Waaska let out a humorless little breath. "Fine. Everybody thinks you're special now."

Nibs looked between them again, uneasy. Rose felt the words go into her like cold water.

"That’s… no. I don't think I am."

"Me neither." Waaska's eyes came back to hers, bright now. "But… that’s not the same as it not happening."

Rose had no answer.

Waaska lowered her voice. "Yesterday, you were dealing with Uncle Virgil. But today? You’re in the back of everyone’s mind, Rosabel. By next week, who knows? They'll have made you into whatever shape suits them best. And once they do that, it won't matter what you say. They'll hear what they already decided you are."

Poor Rose. Brilliant Rose. Capitol Rose. Coriolanus's district girl…

Rose stared at her. The ugly part about it was that Waaska did not sound jealous. Nor angry. Hell, she didn’t even seem conflicted about the situation. Instead? There was terror wearing a cousin's voice and speaking too quickly before it broke down.

"Is that what you think?" Rose asked.

Waaska flinched. "No."

"Waaska."

"No," she said again, but the second answer came out less certain. She looked toward the hall where another group of students passed, whispering Rose's name softly enough to deny it if challenged. "I think you're walking near something none of us understand, and everyone's acting like it's already a blessing because they want to believe somebody from here can, you know?” Waaska looked from side to side, before lowering her voice. “Get out."

Rose’s eyes turned downcast. Fearful from the pressure. Her memory hiked back to her conversation with Coriolanus in the village. Talking about hope, but this time it didn’t apply to the Games.

A feeling of immense intensity surged through her heart as it dawned on her. Truly. "I'm not trying to get out."

Waaska’s brows furrowed. "I know that, Rosie."

"Do you?" The phrasing came out harsher than Rose intended.

Waaska's face changed. The hurt there was immediate, and Rose regretted the question as soon as it left her mouth. Nibs went still. Rose took a step closer.

"I'm sorry, it’s just… I’m just so used to everyone else not being so sure. Or even sincere." Rose gulped back a painful lump of anxiety. “I just… ‘m sorry.”

Waaska looked down at her shoes, polished but not well enough to hide where the leather had begun cracking at the sides.

"I know you," Waaska said quietly. "That's the thing."

Rose's throat tightened.

"I know you'll tell yourself it's for the district. And it will be. I know you'll mean every word. You'll write essays and answer questions and talk circles around people who think we chew straw because it's cheaper than bread. Maybe they'll clap for you and love you for it." Waaska's eyes lifted. "But… that doesn't mean they won't use you too."

Rose had thought something similar herself. The memory of our conversation at the clinic flashed in her mind. Of course this was a possibility, but… she could only hope that it wasn’t. And hearing it from Waaska made it worse. "I'm being careful. Or… at least trying."

Waaska almost laughed. "You? Careful?"

Rose shrugged halfheartedly. "I can be careful… at times."

"Rose?” Waaska looked over Rose’s shoulder and back to her cousin. “Do you hear the way you talk?"

"About what?"

"Everything." Waaska said in an instant. "Folks here talk about how things could be better, sure, but you keep talking about things that seem impossible. Dangerous even."

"I don't talk dangerously." Again, I don’t try to at least…

"You think it's just ideas, but most folks would call it like… like a symptom of sorts."

Despite herself, Rose's mouth twitched. Waaska saw it, and for one brief second the old shape of them returned. Cousins in a cramped alcove, teasing before class. Nibs trying not to smile because he wanted permission to laugh.

Then the moment passed. Waaska rubbed one hand over her face, all sharpness suddenly collapsing into exhaustion. "Mama says… it’s official. She’s gonna pull us."

Rose's thoughts stumbled. "What?"

"From school." The words seemed too plain for what they did. Rose looked from Waaska to Nibs. Nibs lowered his eyes.

"W-Why?" Rose whispered, the stutter threatening to break her down.

Waaska kept her arms folded, but now it looked less like defense and more like she was holding herself together by force. "Rent's due after harvest adjustment. With Uncle Virgil gone..." She stopped, swallowed, started again. "The market's been bad. Papa says the traders are squeezing everybody because they know loss makes folks too tired to haggle. Mama says she can maybe keep one of us enrolled till end term, maybe neither if grain credit keeps falling? Nibs is old enough to help with goats and store runs. I can help at market. Or at the mill if it comes to it."

"No," Rose said before meaning to say anything at all. The word came too quickly. Childishly, almost.

Waaska's expression sharpened again, though this time the edge was grief, not frustration. "No?"

"That can't-" Rose stopped. She knew how foolish it sounded. Of course it could. The world did not ask permission before narrowing.

Waaska gave her a sad little smile. "I… thought so too. Thought we’d have a bit more time, to be honest."

Rose felt that strike and tried not to show it.

Nibs spoke, small now. "I don't want to leave school."

Waaska's face broke at the edges. Only for a second. Then she put one hand on his shoulder and squeezed. "I know..."

Rose looked at him. His dark hair had been combed badly, likely by himself. One sock was, predictably, slouched near his ankle. He looked suddenly much younger than he had in the hallway. Young enough that Rose wanted, with a force that hurt, to promise him something.

She could ask Lancaster, maybe. Or to Misea?

Find a way. She could… no…

She could not begin making promises out of panic simply because she hated the shape of the truth. Not after everything. Especially when every promise in the world had begun to feel like a door someone else might lock from the other side.

"I can talk to Aunt Misea," Rose said carefully.

Waaska shook her head at once. "Don't."

Rose’s brow pinched. "Waaska, please?”

"No." Her voice hardened, but there was pleading underneath. "Don't… make us your cause, Rosie. You don’t deserve that."

Rose went still. Waaska seemed to hate herself for saying it, but she did not take it back.

"That isn't what I'm doing," Rose replied.

"I know." Waaska's eyes filled, though no tears fell. "I know you'd mean it good. That's what scares us."

Rose could feel the hall beyond them. The school with its silly, little whispers. The invisible thread running from her name to Coriolanus Snow's, from Coriolanus to university, from university to money, status, suspicion, hunger. Everything tied together now whether she wanted it tied or not.

Yesterday, her ambition had lived in notebooks, in the Secret Garden, in questions asked too carefully at the edges of maps.

Today it had entered other people's mouths and already, people were measuring themselves against it.

Waaska looked away, blinking hard. "Mama says maybe this is how things are now. You get lifted or you get put to work. No in-between."

Rose's chest ached. "That isn't fair."

"No," Waaska said, a miserable wobble threatening her speech. "It ain't."

Nibs sniffed once and rubbed his nose against his sleeve. Waaska looked ready to scold him, then didn't. The second bell rang again, sharp and official through the hall, yet… none of them moved.

Rose wanted to reach for Waaska's hand. She wanted to say, I won't leave you! I won't let them pull you! I won't let Coriolanus use me! I won't let the district turn me into something strange! I won't change! I promise! I won't lose you…

Every one of those promises would have been love. Or a lie.

So, she only stepped forward and took Waaska's hand once, briefly, before letting go.

"I'll think of a way," Rose whispered back in finality and determination.

Waaska looked at her, and the disappointment there was small but real. Thinking was what Rose offered when she had no miracle. It had always been her strongest gift and, in that moment, not nearly enough.

Nibs shifted beside them. "Can thinking keep us in school?"

Rose looked at him. Then at Waaska. Then toward the bright, noisy hall where her name was already moving without her.

"I don't know," she finally answered. Only because it was the only honest thing she had, she hated it as soon as it left her mouth.

The answer had barely left Rose's mouth before the hallway changed again.

It wasn’t really loudly at first. There was no scream, no bell struck in panic, no announcement sharp enough to give fear a proper shape. Only a shift in the current of bodies beyond the alcove, with some boots slowing and voices thinning. A teacher calling someone's name and not sounding like herself.

Then the academy's front doors opened. The sound carried all the way down the hall. Rose turned. Waaska turned too, one hand still half-raised as though she had meant to say something more and thought better of it. Nibs pressed closer to the supply cupboard, his dark eyes wide now, all earlier mischief gone from him. For a moment, none of them moved.

A peacekeeper stepped into the corridor. Then another. Then three more behind them.

The academy did not often host peacekeepers indoors. They passed the outer roads, lingered near the station, stood too straight at public ceremonies, but the school itself had always been granted the thin courtesy of pretending children learned better without rifles in the doorway.

That courtesy ended all at once.

The headmaster appeared at the far end of the hall, face drawn tight around the mouth.

"All students are to proceed outside!" she said with no room for further argument.

No one moved quickly enough.

"Now," said the peacekeeper nearest her.

That worked.

The hall broke into motion. Satchels were grabbed from hooks, books dropped and snatched back up, younger children herded toward the front doors with the stunned obedience of animals hearing thunder before rain. The sound rose around Rose in layers, with shoes scraping floorboards, frightened whispering, a little girl asking whether they were in trouble, someone insisting no, no, it was only another announcement, probably another announcement, surely only-

A hand closed around Rose's wrist.

Waaska.

For half a second, Rose thought her cousin meant to pull her back into the alcove and hide the three of them among broken slates and mop buckets until the whole thing passed. But Waaska only held on. Tight enough to hurt.

"Nibs," she said, voice low.

"I'm coming," he said at once.

 Waaska looked at him, and something in her face had gone old. "Stay close until they tell you where to go."

"What?"

Rose reiterated to her younger cousin. "Just do as they say."

They were pushed into the stream of students before anyone could argue.

Outside, the academy yard had already been overtaken. Two military wagons waited at the front gate, their wheels sunk slightly into the dusty road. Peacekeepers stood in a loose formation along the fence, rifles slung but visible, their white uniforms too clean against the red-brown yard. The sight of them made Rose think, absurdly, of chalk dust. Something meant to look tidy while coating everything it touched.

Teachers clustered near the steps with expressions carefully emptied of outrage. Miss Wishek had one hand pressed to her throat. The headmaster spoke in a stiff undertone to a peacekeeper with sergeant stripes, nodding at intervals as though agreement had become a survival habit.

Students were being sorted and not by class.

By age.

Rose understood that before anyone said it aloud.

The smallest children were made to stand near the academy steps under teacher supervision, confused and sniffling, some still clutching lunch pails or slates. The older ones were directed toward the road in lines that did not quite hold because frightened children were poor at becoming orderly objects. A boy from the lower forms, no more than eleven, tried to follow his sister and was stopped by a peacekeeper's gloved hand against his chest.

"Twelve and up," the man said.

The boy stared at him. "But she's my sister!"

"Twelve and up."

Rose felt Waaska's grip tighten.

Nibs had gone very still. He looked at the younger children by the steps. Looked at the older ones by the road. Looked at Waaska.

"No," he said quietly.

Waaska turned to him. "Nibs-"

"No…"

His voice did not rise, but his face folded open in terror. He reached for his sister's sleeve with both hands. Waaska let him. For one brief, terrible second, she let him cling to her like he could keep the world from counting correctly.

A peacekeeper approached. "This one?"

"Ten," Nibs’s instructor answered too quickly from behind them. "He is ten."

The peacekeeper looked Nibs over as if age might be hiding under his collar. Then he gave a short nod and gestured toward the steps. "There."

Nibs did not move. Waaska crouched in front of him, though her own face had begun to tremble. "Go stand with your teach."

Nibs, who rarely tried to look weak in front of his sister, frantically shook his head. "I-I don't wanna."

Waaska, despite her distress, assured her brother. "I know."

"Waaska?” A terrified tremor plagued the little boy’s voice.

"Go."

He looked at Rose then, and that was somehow worse. As if Rose, with all her dangerous thinking and maybes and not-knowing, might produce a different answer from the air.

She had none.

"Nibs," Rose said softly. "Do what she says."

His mouth twisted. For a second, she thought he might cry. Instead, he backed away one step, then another, until his professor pulled him gently toward the younger children. His eyes stayed on Waaska the whole time.

That was when Rose began to feel cold, yet… not frightened exactly. Her body had gone too focused for fear. Her mind moved from detail to detail with a horrible steadiness.

Twelve and up, but… not adults?

Not everyone. Children…

Only the ones who had crossed into the age where the Capitol could pretend childhood had become eligible for public sacrifice.

Rose looked around the yard again and saw it plainly now. Carrigan Killdeer stood stiffly in line, her earlier curiosity hollowed out into something smaller as she pulled Enrique closer to her side. Dax had one arm around his younger brother's shoulders until a peacekeeper separated them. Amos kept glancing toward the road as if measuring how fast he could run and how far a rifle could reach. Nellie was crying quietly into her sleeve, while Grist did her best to comfort the girl to no avail.

They were children.

Some nearly grown, yes. Some tall enough to be mistaken for adults from a distance, with work-rough hands and tired mouths and shoulders already trained to carry weight. Though that was all a trick of hunger and labor. Up close, Rose could see the truth. A girl with ribbon still tied around one braid. A boy with ink on his fingers from arithmetic. Another with a baby tooth gap when his mouth opened in fright.

Children. Children. Children.

They were being gathered as if the district itself had produced a crop.

The line began moving.

No one told them where they were going. They did not need to. The road from the academy led toward the heart of New Bisman, toward the square and city hall and every place Panem liked to place a flag when it wanted cruelty to look official.

Waaska walked beside Rose in silence. Then the line turned onto the main road, and the academy disappeared behind them. New Bisman had already begun gathering before the academy children arrived.

That was the second thing Rose noticed. The first was the noise.

It was the kind of noise that was immense. A living pressure of voices held under too much restraint. Families crowded the edges of the town square, pressed back by barricades that had not been there that morning. Laborers still in field clothes stood shoulder to shoulder with shopkeepers, mill workers, traders, widows, cousins, old men with canes, mothers with flour on their sleeves, fathers with mud drying on their boots. Their faces turned all at once when the academy children were marched in, and the sound that moved through them was not speech.

It was recognition. The square had been arranged. That was what made Rose's stomach sink.

This was not confusion. This was not some sudden emergency being handled badly. Someone had planned the sight of it. The temporary railings set around the center. The raised platform before city hall. The Capitol banners hanging from the upper windows. The peacekeepers posted in a ring with just enough space between them to suggest escape and just enough weaponry to punish anyone foolish enough to believe in it.

At the center of the square stood a broad enclosure made from rope, wagon rails, and peacekeeper bodies.

Children were already inside. Not academy children.

Rose knew that before she recognized a single face.

These were the ones who did not smell faintly of chalk and old paper. These were the children with mill lint in their hair, sleeves too short at the wrist, sunburnt necks and harvest cuts, boots split at the toes. A pair of sisters in patched dresses clung to each other near the far side. A boy Rose had seen once selling garlic at market stood with both hands balled at his sides, trying hard not to look as scared as he was. Another girl wore a feed sack altered into a skirt and stared straight ahead with the blank expression of someone who had learned young that being noticed rarely ended well.

They had been brought from the mills. From the fields. From market stalls and alleys and wash houses and horse pens and bakery doors.

Children who could not afford the academy had been gathered too. Of course they had.

The keepers had not come for students. It had come for ages.

Rose stepped into the enclosure and felt the air change around her. The rope line might as well have been a wall. Outside it, adults surged forward and were pushed back. Inside it, children drew closer to one another without meaning to, bodies folding inward under the animal logic of danger.

Waaska found Rose's hand again. This time Rose held on.

Across the square, a woman screamed a name. A boy near the rope answered, "Mama!" and lunged forward before two peacekeepers shoved him back into the child crowd. A man shouted that his daughter was only eleven, she was small for her age, ask anyone, ask the fieldworkers, ask the butcher, ask the damn president if the Capitol had not executed him too.

No one listened.

Rose watched two peacekeepers count a row of children at the far side. They had a hefty binder full of names and records, all confirming date of births, occupations, and more.

A peacekeeper flipped through their records after a girl gave her legal, government name. Then, in a terrifying interrogation, the keeper asked her. "Age?"

"Fourteen," she whispered.

He nodded as if she’d just passed his test. "In."

The next boy. Name? Age? In. Out.

The next child could not have been more than nine. His lip trembled so badly he could barely answer his name before they flipped to his name.

"Out." They said after confirming the boy’s age for themselves.

He was pushed toward the family side and immediately swallowed by a woman who held him so hard it looked painful.

Twelve to eighteen.

The numbers settled in Rose's mind like stones dropped into a well.

Twelve to eighteen.

Reaping age.

What… what was this? A surprise Reaping? But why? Reaping day was still a month away?!

That was why Nibs had been left behind. Not because anyone had mercy. It was much more simple than that. The rules had no use for him yet.

On the platform, Mayor Lancaster stood with his hat held in both hands.

He looked different in the square than he had at the academy. Smaller somehow, though the platform raised him above the rest of them. His face had been arranged into solemnity, but the strain around his eyes gave him away. He looked like a man asked to hold a knife by the handle and insist he had not brought it.

Rose saw him and felt Waaska's hand twitch in hers.

The waiting stretched.

That was how dread entered the square, and it wasn’t even with the peacekeepers, the ropes, or even the children being counted and penned beneath banners. Those things were only its furniture. Dread itself came in the waiting. In the way the sun sat too bright on the city hall windows. In the way horses shifted uneasily near the posts. In the way parents kept calling names and children kept answering, each reply proof that no one had vanished yet and therefore could still be taken.

Too many people. Too much official staging. Too many children standing where children should never have been made to stand.

The square no longer looked like a square. It looked like practice.

A crowd arranged around a center. Authority lifted above them. Children displayed publicly. Personhood thinned into eligibility.

A rehearsal arena….

Finally, Lancaster stepped toward the microphone. The square quieted in ugly pieces.

"Children of District 9," he began.

A father near the barricade barked out, "Children? Then let 'em go!"

A ripple of agreement surged through the adults, but the peacekeepers raised their rifles just enough to remind everyone what kind of conversation Panem preferred.

Lancaster closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, his gaze moved over the enclosure. Rose had the horrible feeling he saw every face. That he was not cruel enough to avoid seeing and not powerful enough for seeing to matter.

"I would first like to apologize," he said, voice amplified thinly through the square, "for making this announcement so suddenly."

Someone laughed, though no humor was to be had.

Lancaster continued before the sound could gather. "There has been… an announcement from the Capitol regarding this year's Games."

The square stiffened.

Games.

Everyone probably knew already, though the word moved faster than wind all the same.

Rose felt it pass through the children before any adult could soften it. Several of the younger ones began to cry at once. Not the smallest children, no, they had been spared the enclosure. These were twelve-year-olds. Thirteen. Old enough to understand the word and still young enough for terror to break through without shame.

Waaska's nails dug into Rose's palm. Then, a screen flickered to life against the front wall of city hall.

Gasps rose around the square. The people had seen projections only rarely, usually during the Games of course and official broadcasts from the Capitol when the equipment was dragged out under guard and treated like a holy relic that ran on electricity instead of fear. The image trembled first, pale and distorted against brick. Then the golden emblem of Panem sharpened into view.

The anthem began. Every person in the square seemed to stop breathing.

Then President Pompeius Axel himself appeared.

Rose had seen his picture everywhere in readers, on posters, on the front page of brittle Capitol-issued notices. Though moving, speaking, enormous against the wall of city hall, he became something else entirely. An aged man with graying ginger hair, a severe mouth, and eyes so deeply set they seemed carved into him. He did not look like a man who expected to be loved. He looked like one who considered obedience more reliable.

His voice cracked through the speakers.

"Citizens of Panem."

The words struck the square hard enough to spook one of the horses near the road. Its handler murmured to calm it, but the animal kept tossing his head.

"In honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of our victory against the rebels, we gather to commemorate our unity, our strength, and the enduring peace forged in the ashes of rebellion."

Rose stared up at him.

Ashes. He said the word as if ashes were something noble. As if anything good had ever been built by making children stand in a pen.

"To mark this historic occasion," President Axel continued, "the Capitol proudly unveils its very first Quarter Quell, a special variation of the Hunger Games, designed to remind us all of the cost of defiance and the value of sacrifice."

Quarter Quell.

The phrase had no meaning and every meaning at once. It sounded ceremonial. Ancient. Like a bell tolling for something already dead. Around Rose, children shifted closer together.

A girl near her whispered, "What does that mean?"

No one answered. Axel's face did not change.

"On the twenty-fifth anniversary, as a reminder to the rebels that their children were dying because it was their choice to initiate violence, every district will be made to hold an election to vote on the tribute who will represent it."

For a moment, Rose did not understand. The words entered her one at a time yet refused to assemble.

Election.

Vote.

Tribute.

Represent.

Then they came together. And the world tilted.

No. Not reaped by lottery. Not chosen by slips of paper, not by the cold randomness everyone hated and feared but could at least call blind when grief required something to blame.

Voted.

Chosen by neighbors. By hunger. By grudges. By fear. By debts. By who had spoken too sharply, stood too proudly, been too pretty, too strange, too useless, too useful, too visible, too loved, too resented. By who a district could bear to lose. By who a district wanted punished.

Rose's mind moved with sickening speed.

Carrigan's stare. Dax's arguments. The hallway whispers.

“Everybody thinks you're special now.”

“By next week, who knows?”

No.

No, no, no.

The Capitol had not merely found another way to take children. It had found a way to make the districts reach for them first. The crowd understood a heartbeat later.

Sound broke through the square, but Axel kept speaking over it, his recorded pause too perfectly timed, as though he had expected the shape of their horror and found it acceptable.

"For the first time in our Games' glorious history, the power of selection has been granted to you, the people."

Granted. Rose almost laughed. Her throat made no sound.

"Each district must conduct a public vote to determine which boy and girl shall be reaped as tribute to the Capitol."

A mother screamed and slammed herself against the barricade. Peacekeepers shoved her back. Somewhere behind Rose, a boy began sobbing so hard he gagged. An older girl wrapped both arms around him and looked over his head with eyes gone flat and furious.

Waaska had stopped breathing beside her. Rose turned to her cousin, but Waaska was staring straight ahead.

Not at Axel. Nor at the crowd. At the adults pressed beyond the rope.

At District 9 looking back at them.

That was the worst part… because for one dreadful second, Rose could feel the square thinking. Everyone thinking of names. Everyone realizing that survival had just been turned into a ballot.

Axel's voice rang out one final time.

"This solemn responsibility serves as a reflection of choice, of consequences. With this in mind, let the voting commence. And above all else… may the odds be ever in your favor."

The emblem flashed gold. The anthem cut. The projection died.

For one full breath, no one made a sound.

Then… New Bisman erupted.

By midday, I had learned there were worse punishments than being useful.

There was almost being useful.

That was where Chief Rolette had planted me, apparently. Not in a cot, fully sent home, with a free to ride the lines with the rest of the catchers where a man could at least sweat honestly and pretend pain was something with a purpose. No, he had me stationed at the technical bench inside the New Bisman firecatcher base, sorting grit reports, checking hose couplings, updating the dispatch board, and generally doing the sort of work that made a body feel like it had died halfway and been reassigned to paperwork.

The base was alive around me in its usual restless fashion. Men and women came in and out through the side doors, boots tracking dust over the plank floors, voices carrying from the stable yard, radios crackling in little fits like insects caught in a tin cup. Somewhere outside, a horse kicked the stall wall hard enough for somebody to shout at it by name. Somewhere farther in, one of the younger catchers dropped a crate of metal fittings and invented three new ways to blaspheme before anyone could stop him.

I sat with my bad leg stretched under the table and pretended I was not measuring the distance to the door every time it opened.

"You're doing it wrong," Einkorn Streeter said.

I looked up at him slowly.

He was perched on the far side of the bench with a coil of copper wire in one hand and a broken radio receiver in the other, looking much too pleased with himself for a man named after wheat. Einkorn had the unfortunate gift of being right often enough that nobody could dismiss him outright and irritating enough that nobody thanked him for it either.

"I am writing numbers on a board," I said.

"Wrong numbers." He corrected.

"They're yesterday's numbers."

"Exactly." He leaned across the table, reached past my elbow, and tapped the chalkboard with the wire. "You marked the south grit shed at twelve sacks."

I threw him a side eye. "That's what Rolette said."

"That's what Rolette guessed." Einkorn dropped the wire, picked up a stub of chalk, and crossed my twelve into a nine with the confidence of a man altering law. "I checked it before breakfast."

That earned him a huff. "You checked the grit shed before breakfast?"

"I was up." Ein stated.

"Why?"

He shrugged. "Couldn't sleep."

"That ain't an answer, Streeter."

He shrugged "It's the only one I got."

Fair enough I suppose.

Einkorn had always been built like someone who had taken the wrong road into adulthood and decided to keep walking out of spite. Narrow shoulders, restless hands, hair sticking up in wheat-brown tufts no amount of water ever disciplined. He could mend a pressure gauge faster than most men could read the manufacturer's mark, could take apart a radio blindfolded, and had once fixed a cracked pump valve with baling wire, pine resin, and what he swore was a modest conversation with the maker.

He was also the sort of fellow who would rather crawl inside a malfunctioning engine than admit to being lonely. I understood that better than I liked.

"So," he said after a while, eyes still on the receiver. "How's the leg?"

"Attached."

Ein glared at me. "Rhodes, you don’t have to sass me."

"That's the answer I'm offering." I mindlessly reply, gazing down the numbers.

He gave a little hum, neither amused nor fooled. "Chief says you're to keep off it."

"Chief says a lotta things." I hummed.

"And Chief currently outranks you." Ein said in a matter-of-fact way as he adjusted the radio wires.

“Well,” I circled a value that was probably from yesterday. "Chief ain't here."

Einkorn looked pointedly toward the open office door, where Rolette's hat hung from a peg like a warning.

I sighed and reached for the dispatch sheet again. "Hand me that pencil."

Einkorn gave it over. "You're going to wear a hole clean through that thing."

"Then you can patch it with that wire you’ve got there." I snorted, nodding my head to the copper in his hands.

"You‘re kidding, but that could work..."

Before I could answer, the front door opened. That alone made me glance up.

Stand Up stood in the doorway with his helmet tucked beneath one arm, one shoulder blocking the sunlight behind him. He looked wrong inside the base, though not because he was unwelcome exactly. Plenty of peacekeepers came through when duty demanded it, usually stiff-backed and pale-faced from pretending they did not mind the smell of smoke, sweat, horse, and old grit dust.

Stand Up was different. He had the shape of a peacekeeper, sure enough. Uniform clean, boots shined, posture trained into him by men who believed the spine was where obedience lived. Though, his eyes had never quite learned the trick of being empty. They moved over the room, over the catchers, over the dispatch board, and then settled on me with something too personal to belong to his station.

"Rhodes," he said, giving me a brief nod.

"Stand Up." I casually greeted.

Einkorn glanced between us. "That really what we're calling him?"

“What do you mean?” I shrugged. "It's what everyone calls him."

Ein found himself chuckling, more at the name than my statement. "That don't answer whether it should be."

Stand Up's mouth twitched. "Private is fine."

"Private what?" Einkorn asked, because apparently curiosity had finally taken the wheel from manners.

Stand Up hesitated just long enough for the silence to notice. "Schist is fine as well."

Einkorn blinked once. "Huh."

I shot him a look before he could say whatever unfortunate thought had wandered into his head.

Stand Up stepped farther inside. "Chief around?"

"Stable yard," I said. "Or pretending to be. What brings you by?"

His expression changed. Not much, but enough. "I wanted to see how you were doing."

"That so?" I dryly laughed.

"Yes."

Einkorn looked over at Stand Up, a subtle grin growing across his mouth. “How thoughtful.”

"Well." I ignored Ein before gesturing down at my leg. "Still not dead."

Stand Up slowly nodded, possibly reminiscing on yesterday’s incident. "That seems to be the district standard for good health."

Einkorn snorted despite himself. I almost smiled.

Stand Up came closer to the bench, lowering his voice as he did. "I also came because there's been word from the northern line."

That killed whatever humor had been trying to live. Einkorn stopped fiddling with the receiver. I sat up straighter, my bad leg immediately punishing the effort. "From 7?"

Stand Up nodded once.

The name of the district sat strangely between us. 7 had become one of those places folks in the base mentioned by accident and then avoided looking at afterward. Especially when it came to the quakes. A situation no report wanted to describe cleanly. We had heard enough to know something had gone wrong out there, and not enough to know whether wrong meant accident, rebellion, Capitol construction, or the earth itself finally getting tired of being cut open.

"What about it?" I finally asked.

Stand Up took a folded slip from inside his jacket and set it on the table, as if the thing might bite.

"Orders came down. Teams from 7 and 9 are to keep quiet about the whole matter. No tavern talk. No letters. No unofficial reports. No speculation. Nothing."

Einkorn's brows pulled together. "Speculation about what?"

Stand Up looked at him. Einkorn looked back. The receiver crackled faintly between them.

Finally, Stand Up said, "Exactly."

I reached for the slip, but he placed one hand over it before I could take it.

"That's not a copy for the force," he said. "That's only so you know I'm not bringing rumor."

I hesitated. "Whose orders?"

His fingers lifted from the paper. "General Barnabas Plaga."

I did not know the name. Not then at least which bothered me.

The men whose names everybody knew were usually showpieces, like presidents, mayors, or commanders who liked their faces painted on posters. However. the names you did not know, the ones that moved through other men's mouths quietly and still changed the way they stood, those were worse.

Einkorn must have felt it too, because he set the radio piece down very carefully.

"High up I reckon?" I asked.

Stand Up's jaw tightened. "Very."

I cocked my head. "How high is very?"

"Higher than most district posts ever deal with directly.” Stand Up confirmed in a hushed tone. “He has military rank, but he oversees Capitol security now. Special assignments, like government protection or Games operations."

Government? Games?

The word did not belong in the base. Or it did, like it belonged everywhere in Panem, tucked under floorboards, and stitched into uniforms, waiting to be stepped on.

I looked down at the slip. "Why would a man overseeing Capitol security care about quakes in 7?"

Stand Up did not answer. A worse answer than anything he could have said.

Einkorn leaned forward slightly. "You know?"

"No." Stand Up shook his head.

"Any guesses?"

Stand Up's eyes flicked to the open door. "I've learned guesses are safer when left… unsaid."

I gave a humorless huff. "That sounds mighty peacekeeper of you."

"It is." There was no pride in the way he said it.

For a moment, the three of us sat inside that uneasy quiet. Outside, the base kept moving. A horse whinnied. Somebody laughed too loudly near the pump. A radio down the hall gave a burst of static and then went dead again.

Then shouting rose from the yard.

At first, I thought it was the usual kind. Catchers argued the way wheatfields caught fire, quick, sprawling, often over something small enough to be embarrassing afterward. Though, this shout had no teasing in it. No annoyance. It came again, sharper, followed by running boots across gravel.

Einkorn was up before I was. I got to my feet too fast and paid for it.

"Hell," I hissed, catching the table edge as pain speared up through my side.

Stand Up moved like he meant to help me.

I waved him off. "Don't."

He stopped, but only barely. The door banged open.

Ditcher stumbled in, red-faced and breathless, one hand braced to the frame.

"Square's gone bad," he said.

The room froze.

"What?" I asked.

"Town square. There's a riot, or damn near close to it. Peacekeepers got half the city blocked off."

Einkorn came around the bench. "Why?"

Ditcher looked at me then, and whatever he saw in my face made him swallow the first answer wrong.

"It's… the Games," he relented.

My hand tightened on the table. Stand Up's expression went still in a way that frightened me more than panic would have.

"Well, what about the Games?" I asked.

Ditcher shook his head like he could shake the words loose in the right order. "Announcement from the Capitol or something. Axel himself. They gathered the children. All of 'em. Academy, mill, field. Twelve and up."

Children…

I did not move. I did not even breathe.

Ditcher kept talking. "They're saying this year ain't regular. They're saying the district has to-" He stopped, eyes darting once toward Stand Up, then back to me. "They're saying folks gotta vote."

Einkorn's face emptied. Stand Up whispered something under his breath I did not catch.

But I did. Vote.

For one stupid second, I tried to make the word mean anything else.

Vote on policy? Or mayoral matters? Maybe tax allotment? Grain rationing? Anything dull and bureaucratic and ugly in the ordinary way… but the Games only ever meant one kind of choice.

"Dammit," I said.

Ditcher’s silence answered.

Rose…

Her name hit so hard it nearly took my bad leg from under me.

Rose was seventeen, probably even standing in whatever pen the Capitol had built in the middle of New Bisman while grown men with rifles asked District 9 to dress murder up as civic duty.

I was already moving before I knew I had decided.

"Rhodes," Einkorn called. "Your leg-"

"-can rot." I grunted, leaving no room for argument.

Stand Up followed me out first. Einkorn came after, cursing as he grabbed his hat and a medical satchel from the wall. The yard had erupted into frantic motion. Catchers were spilling from the stables, from the equipment shed, from the wash house, some half-dressed, some still fastening belts, all of them looking toward town like they could smell the smoke of trouble before seeing it.

Errante was already saddled. Bless whoever had done that. Or curse them for making it easy.

The dapple gray stood tied near the hitching post, ears alert, stamping once as I limped toward him. I grabbed the saddle horn and pain flashed white behind my eyes.

For a second, my hands failed me. Then Stand Up was there, shoulder braced beneath my arm.

"I said don't," I snapped.

"You can yell from the saddle."

I hated him for being right. Between Stand Up and my own stubbornness, I got mounted with only one noise of pain any decent man would pretend not to hear.

Einkorn tossed me the reins. "You fall off, I'm telling Rolette you did it stupidly."

"You tell Rolette anything,” I glared down at the younger catcher. “I'll haunt your wheat field."

Ein gave me an exasperated expression. "I don't own a wheat field."

"Then I'll haunt somebody else's and blame you."

Stand Up swung onto a peacekeeper horse with the smooth efficiency of someone trained to mount under inspection. Einkorn took one of the bay mares from the post, nearly got nipped for his trouble, and cursed at her like they were already friends.

Then we rode into New Bisman. The little town had never felt so long.

The streets between the base and town center blurred into dust, false fronts, startled faces, wagons pulled half across the road and abandoned by owners who had run toward the square or away from it. The noise reached us before the crowd did. A low, swelling roar threaded with screams, shouted names, orders barked too high, children crying, horses shrilling, and somewhere beneath it all the awful human sound of too many people realizing the world had tilted and left them no good place to stand.

We came in from the west side. The square had become a wound.

Barricades had been shoved aside in two places. One wagon lay tipped near the edge of the road, a wheel still spinning uselessly. Peacekeepers had formed a broken line near city hall, rifles raised but not yet firing, which only meant someone higher up still had use for the crowd alive. Citizens pressed against them from every side, some trying to get to the children, some trying to drag their families out, some too furious or frightened to know which direction salvation lived in.

Children were everywhere. That was what I saw first.

Not the adults shouting. Or the flags.

The children…

Some still trapped behind a rope line, with others already loose and running. Teenagers pushing through the crush, younger siblings clinging to their coats, girls sobbing into their hands, boys yelling for mothers, for fathers, for anyone. A child with a bloody lip stumbled into the road and almost went under a horse before Einkorn leaned hard from his saddle and hauled him clear by the back of his shirt.

"Clinic!" he shouted, pushing the boy toward a cluster of catchers. "Get him to the clinic!"

The firecatchers had arrived ahead of us in pieces and thank mercy for that. Whatever else we were, whatever arguments we had with Panem and ourselves, we knew panic the way farmers knew weather. Men and women moved through the crowd with hands out, voices steady, bodies planted between rifles and citizens wherever they could manage it without being shot for the trouble.

I searched faces. Too many far too fast.

Rose.

Rose.

Rose.

A woman grabbed at my stirrup, eyes wild. "Have you seen my boy? Thirteen, brown coat, he was by the grain office-“

"No, ma'am," I said, hating the answer. "Find Lieutenant Hillsboro near the well. He's collecting names."

She staggered away before I finished.

Stand Up rode ahead, then dismounted when the press grew too thick. He moved toward a pair of children being shoved back by a peacekeeper line, his hands raised.

"Let them through," he said to one of his own. "They're trying to reach family."

The peacekeeper did not budge.

"They're children," Stand Up snapped.

A voice cut across the street.

"Private!"

Stand Up froze. A superior officer stood near the platform, one hand on his baton, face flushed with irritation. Captain by the markings, and the kind of man who wore rank like armor against having to think.

"Private Schist," he barked. "You are not assigned to nursemaids. Get back to crowd control."

Stand Up turned slowly. "Sir, these civilians-“

"Crowd. Control." The words were clean enough to pass inspection and ugly enough to mean anything.

For one second, I thought Stand Up might refuse. Something in his shoulders shifted like a man deciding whether the line inside him had finally become visible from the outside.

Then his jaw tightened. "Yes, sir."

He looked at me once. Not asking forgiveness exactly or offering explanation either.

Then he moved back toward the line, face hard, and began doing what he could from inside the shape they had given him. I kept searching.

A flash of red near the overturned wagon nearly stopped my heart.

Not Rose. Some other girl, younger, crying into her father's shoulder.

Then-

"Auphie!"

Her voice cut through everything. I turned so sharply Errante sidestepped beneath me.

Rose stood near the fountain at the edge of the square, one hand gripping Waaska's, her face pale beneath loose strands of red hair. Her uniform was dusty. One ribbon had come half undone. There was no blood on her that I could see. For one blessed breath, that was enough.

I swung down from Errante and nearly collapsed when my leg hit earth.

Rose saw it and moved toward me at once. "Your leg-“

"Not now."

"Auphie, t-they said-“

I cut her off. "I know enough."

Waaska stood beside her, breathing hard, eyes bright with furious tears. "They made us stand there. They put us in with everybody else and they-" Her voice broke, then hardened again. "They said people get to vote. Like we're-we’re…."

Waaska, almost hysterical, was on the verge of hyperventilating. I looked from her to Rose. "Where's Nibs?"

"A-At the academy," Waaska said. "They didn't take him in the age group.”

Rose's hand caught my sleeve. Same as always. Same as when she was little and knew a grown man was lying to spare her.

"Auphie," she pleaded. "What do we do?"

That was the trouble with being asked a question by someone who still believed you might know the answer.

I looked at the square, at the ropes, at the peacekeepers, at the platform, at citizens already turning their fear into fury. Fury that made things at least moderately survivable in public than despair.

Then I looked at Errante. "You ride home."

Rose blinked. "What?"

"Take Errante.” I grabbed her shoulder, giving it a slight shake. “Get out of here."

She let my words simmer into the chaos surrounding us. Then, she vehemently shook her head. "No!"

"Rosabel!" I desperately snapped.

"No, I need to find Aunt Misea… a-and Waaska needs to-“

"I'll get Waaska home." I reiterated with a gentle squeeze of her shoulder.

Waaska immediately stepped in. "I'm not leaving Nibs at the academy. He-“

"Then you go with Rose," I said, though even as I said it, I knew she would not. Waaska had the Mniwakan stubbornness in her bones and fear for her brother sharpened into a blade. "At least get out of the square."

Rose stepped closer. "I can help."

My eyes narrowed. "No, you can get hurt."

"So can you!" She spoke over the cry of an injured man, disbelief lacing her gaze.

“Rose.” I firmly put my foot down. "I need you to go. Now."

"Auphie,” she gestured to the town square in a last-ditch attempt. “I can’t just abandon everyone here!”

"And how are you gonna change everything, huh?"

Though my words spoke true, they violently hit a nail in Rose’s hurting heart as she desperately struggled to conjure the words to talk back. Her eyes searched my face, and I saw in them the same thing I had seen in Morton Valley when I told her Virgil was gone. That awful moment of understanding arriving before permission. She knew why I wanted her gone. Not only because the square was dangerous. With a revolt on the cusps of breaking free, I had enough reason to shoo the girls back home already.

No… it was because the Capitol gave the people a choice, an opportunity. Something that seemed so volatile and crude on top of the piling corpses of children during the Games every year… and Rosabel Tempest-Strix was suddenly visible in a way no child should be.

"Go home," I said, softer now. "Lock the door. Stay there till I come for you."

Rose swallowed hard. "W-What if they come there?"

My answer did not arrive fast enough. She saw that too. Still, I took the reins and put them in her hand.

"Then you ride to the lodge," I said. "Or Morton Valley. Anywhere but here."

Her fingers closed around the leather reluctantly, before turning to her younger cousin.

“I… I can’t,” Waaska backed away, shaking her head. "I have to find Nibs."

"He’s probably still at the academy," Rose told her, though her voice trembled. "Go. Find him. I'll-"

She stopped, realizing there was no clean promise to make.

Waaska looked between us, then threw her arms around Rose so quickly Rose nearly lost her footing.

"Don't be stupid," Waaska whispered.

Rosabel could only nod, her green eyes glossing over from the smoke and emotions.

Waaska pulled away before tears could take hold of her too and vanished back into the crowd, heading toward the academy side with the determination of someone small enough to slip through gaps and angry enough to make new ones.

I helped Rose into the saddle because my body remembered how to do that even when everything else had gone to hell. Errante shifted but held steady. Rose gathered the reins, looking down at me with her face caught between fear, fury, and that dangerous thinking of hers already trying to become a plan.

"Home," I firmly reminded her.

She nodded. I did not believe her. Still, she turned Errante toward the south road, and for the moment, that was the best lie available.

Then the square surged again.

A peacekeeper line buckled near the grain office. Someone threw a stone, before someone lse screamed. The horse beneath Rose startled, but she controlled him beautifully, hands firm, knees steady, hair lifting in the dust as she rode out through the narrow gap between a distiller cart and a barricade.

I watched until I lost sight of her. Then I turned back.

For the next half hour, the world became nothing but work. Blessed, brutal work.

We moved children to the clinic. Then, dragged overturned railings clear of the road. We pulled one man off a peacekeeper before the peacekeeper could decide public execution was the proper punishment for grief, before  hauling a woman with a cracked head onto a door taken from its hinges and carried her three blocks while she kept asking whether her daughter had been chosen yet, as if the vote had already happened, as if waiting was too merciful to believe in.

Einkorn was everywhere at once.

He splinted a boy's wrist with two ruler sticks and a strip of school sash and fixed a jammed pump handle at the public well when someone needed water for the injured. He shouted at three grown men twice his size until they stopped shoving and started lifting. There was blood on the young man’s sleeve and corn dust on his cheek, and at some point he had acquired a child's lunch pail and was using it to carry bandages.

"Rhodes!" he yelled from beside the clinic wagon. "You still upright?"

"Yeah!" my voice carried over the sea of commotion. “Why?!”

"Good!” Ein nodded, gesturing towards a cart. “Be upright over here!"

I limped over. Together we got two more children into the wagon and sent them toward the clinic with Ditcher riding beside them.

Stand Up passed us once, jaw clenched, helping maintain a line that was less a wall now and more a desperate attempt to keep the square from devouring itself. His superior shouted at him twice more. Stand Up obeyed the shape of the orders and betrayed the spirit whenever he could, letting mothers through one at a time, turning his body just enough for children to slip behind him, blocking another peacekeeper's baton with his own arm and pretending it had been an accident of crowd motion.

I saw it, yet… said nothing.

Then Lieutenant Gooseneck Hillsboro came riding hard down the east lane. He hauled his horse to a stop so sharp the animal nearly sat back on its haunches.

"Fire!" he shouted.

Every catcher in earshot turned.

"Where?" someone demanded.

Gooseneck pointed south. "Mayor's mansion!"

For one second, the square fell away. Mayor Lancaster's estate sat just off the main stretch, too close to the government offices, too full of records, officials, and visiting Capitol company for any fire there to mean only fire.

"How bad?" Ditcher asked.

"Bad enough!” That was answer enough too, before Gooseneck wheeled his horse. "Team with me! Now! If you can move, move!"

He called upon a couple of names before punctuating it with my own name. We took five catchers from the square and two from the south pump wagon. The streets blurred again, this time with smoke thickening ahead. Citizens scattered from the road as we rode through, some shouting after us, some too exhausted by one disaster to make room for another in their faces.

The mayor's mansion was burning from the western side. Not fully swallowed yet, though that was mercifully to say at best. Most of the front had been evacuated. Lancaster stood on the lawn in shirtsleeves, soot across one cheek, coughing hard into a handkerchief while two clerks hovered near him with the useless panic of men whose paperwork had never caught fire before. Several government officials clustered near the gate, faces gray, some without their expensive jackets, one holding a briefcase against his chest like it contained his own beating heart.

Then, a quiet miracle was confirmed the moment we reached the grounds. Coriolanus Snow was nowhere among them. At first, I thought I had simply missed him.

Then Lancaster grabbed Gooseneck's arm. "There's someone still inside!"

Gooseneck's face tightened. "Who?"

Lancaster's neck craned, trying to look at the back of the house. The answer came from a clerk, voice shaking.

"The Capitol man. S-Snow."

The yard went quiet in a way fire had no respect for. The flames cracked along the west porch, eating up curtains and climbing fast toward the second floor. Smoke rolled black from the upper windows. Glass shattered somewhere inside, sharp as a gunshot. Yet still, for one shameful second, no one moved.

I wish I could say I was better than that. I was not.

Coriolanus Snow, the Capitol Man...

The one whose name had attached itself to Rose's like a hook in skin. The one whose neck she had helped save from venom only for the whole day to curdle around him anyway.

A piece of me thought, Let him burn.

It wasn’t noble. Hell, it didn’t even come from a place of justice. Just thought it.

Then hated myself for how easy it had been.

Einkorn said nothing beside me. Gooseneck's jaw worked once.

A younger catcher muttered, "Would they even care if we-"

"Yes," Gooseneck reluctantly insisted, though, he might as well have been forced to say it at gunpoint.

Every head turned toward the lieutenant.

My leg throbbed. Smoke bit my throat. Somewhere behind us, Lancaster coughed hard enough to fold nearly in half.

"Yes, they would care," he sighed. "Maybe not about him proper. Definitely not like people care about people. But if a Capitolite dies in a District 9 fire while we stand outside holding our peckers and principles, who do you think pays for it?"

No one answered. They did not need to.

Yet, that did it.

There wasn’t much courage in it. Not mercy. Though did carry a motion to it that reminded me of our conversation that morning. And motion? It had to serve until better things arrived.

Finally, orders were snapped at once. "Streeter, lines! Larimore, south flank, keep the porch from spreading! Thompson, Gwinner, axes to the east door! Nobody goes in without masks!"

Chief Rolette arrived in the middle of it, riding through the smoke like a bad omen with a badge. He took in the fire, the officials, the scattered equipment, and me standing where I had no business standing, and for once did not waste time scolding.

"Report!" he barked.

Gooseneck pointed with one gloved hand. "West side started first. Likely accelerant. There’s a resident inside, upper floor or back hall. We're making entry."

Rolette's face went hard. "Likely?"

Before Gooseneck could answer, shouting rose from the far side of the property.

Three figures bolted from behind the smokehouse near the rear lane. Then two more.

I recognized the first man by his run before I saw his face. Hoffman Ellendale.

Of course.

Long-limbed, mean-shouldered, jacket flapping open as he sprinted toward the alley with his gang scattered around him like rats abandoning a grain sack. Gooseneck saw him the same instant I did.

"Ellendale!" he shouted.

Hoffman looked back. Even from the distance, I could see the grin. Then he vanished around the lane.

Gooseneck swore, sharp and ugly, and swung into his saddle. "Thompson! Gwinner! With me!"

Rolette turned. "Hillsboro-“

"They lit it!" Gooseneck snarled. "Or they know who did!"

Rolette's mouth tightened. Then he gave one hard nod. "Bring 'em breathing if you can."

Gooseneck made no promises as him and his catchers rode. They tore after him on horseback, hooves striking sparks from the road as they chased Hoffman's gang into the smoke-hazed side streets.

The rest of us stayed with the fire. After all, fire did not pause for vengeance.

Einkorn had the pump wagon working within minutes, shouting pressure counts like he was insulting them personally. Water hit the west porch in a hard silver arc, hissing into steam where it met the worst of the flames. I took the south flank with two younger catchers, soaking the dry trim, tearing loose burning curtains with a hook pole, and trying not to put weight on my bad leg whenever the pain became bright enough to make me stupid.

Inside, the entry team broke through the east door. Smoke belched out around them.

"Mask!" Rolette shouted at me. Immediately, I tied the cloth up.

The heat shoved against us in waves and it wasn’t prairie fire heat either. House fire heat was meaner in some ways. Closer. Full of paint, varnish, fabric, paper, all the private makings of a life turning poisonous as they burned.

Lancaster stood beyond the gate now, watching with an expression I could not read. Maybe there was fear. Guilt. Maybe the simple horror of realizing official walls burned like any other.

A shout came from inside. "Found stairs!"

Then coughing. Then another shout, swallowed by the house.

I turned toward Einkorn. "Pressure!"

"Giving her all she'll take!"

I shook my head. "Make her take more!"

This earned me a huff. "You want the pump to explode too?"

He bared his teeth in something that was not a smile and threw his weight into the lever. The hose kicked. Water slammed harder into the porch. For a few minutes, there was only the work, with heat, smoke, orders. The thud of axes. The roar of flame losing ground inch by inch and punishing us for every single one.

Then Einkorn stopped shouting numbers, snapping my attention back.

"Ein!" I called. He had gone still beside the pump wagon, one hand on the lever, eyes fixed past the front gate. "Don't freeze on me now! Ein?!”

He did not answer. Then, I followed his gaze.

At first, all I saw was smoke and people and horses crowded near the road. Then the wind shifted, thinning the gray veil long enough for the hitching rail beside the manor gate to come clear.

A dapple gray gelding stood tied there, reins looped hastily over the post. My breath left me.

Errante.

Einkorn looked at me then, and whatever color he had left was gone. His gaze switched to mine, more so out of confusion. "Rhodes?”

I was a fool back then.

I mean, most children are idiots when they’re young. It is half the mercy of childhood and half its punishment. However, when I turned twelve, foolishness in me had grown sharp enough to cut anything that came near it.

I had no place of my own. No one I could point to cleanly and call family. Barely anyone in New Bisman wanted to speak to me unless they needed a quick errand done, a pocket watched, or a boy blamed for something already missing before I even entered the room. Then, finally, to add droppings on the cow pie, I was now eligible for the Games.

Life gets harder after you turn twelve. That was what I kept telling myself.

And, for reasons I still cannot explain without sounding like a complete moron, that was also what I kept telling five-year-old Rosabel.

"Why do you hav'ta die in the Games?" she asked with nothing but innocent curiosity.

Again…

We were sitting on the bank of the Blood River, where the current slid brown-red beneath the afternoon sun and dragonflies made arrogant little loops over the mud. It had been a week or so since I had caught the eye of Chief Tempest and the firecatching squad through my street based run-ins. Street kids often fought each other for a few coins, extra ration credit, maybe a heel of bread if the fight had turned theatrical. I had won my share of brawls in those fights, mostly because hunger makes a boy mean in a way training cannot imitate. I was a spitfire then, fueled by rage, hunger, betrayal, and the deep private conviction that if I hit first and hard enough, nobody could make me feel small.

So naturally, when Chief Tempest decided my first training task toward becoming a firecatcher was babysitting his snot-nosed brat, I considered it an insult delivered straight from the heavens.

I was also broken enough to take the money.

"Because," I scoffed, skipping a flat stone across the river with more force than skill. "People in the Capitol eat children for the holidays. There! Are ya happy now?"

Rosabel, with her bright green eyes, chubby cheeks, and hair like somebody had set a sunset loose on her head, merely stared at me.

Then she laughed. "Ha! Ha! You're funny!"

That story was supposed to scare her. It had scared away plenty of little crooks from trying to pickpocket me. Though Rose clapped both hands over her mouth like I had told the grandest joke in Panem and kicked her muddy feet against the riverbank.

"Yeah, well," I said, immediately offended, "it won't be so funny when your name gets picked and you're stuck in the game full of man-eatin' weasels or something!"

Surely that would frighten her enough to leave me alone. Surely she would wander a few feet off and play with twigs or mud or whatever five-year-olds found fulfilling when not tormenting older kids with questions.

But not Rose. Definitely not Rose.

"What kinda games do they play?" she asked, bending for a pebble and making a feeble attempt to throw it.

It plopped directly at her toes.

I sighed with a depth I considered manly at the time. "The monsters don't play games with you, Rose. They’re too busy trying to eat you."

"But if they could?" she asked, eyes big as supper plates. "Could they play Cats 'n Cradle?"

I gave her side-eye.

This kid was relentless. Why all the questions? Why did every thought in her skull need to come out of her mouth and find its way into my ears? Chief Tempest should have taught her how to shut up, not how to follow a thought until it collapsed from exhaustion.

I had to think of something to distract her. Something a five-year-old would want badly enough to forget about Capitol monsters or holiday cannibals or whatever else my mouth had invented before my common sense could stop it. Then I remembered a place. That place.

The thought came upon me so suddenly I stopped with another stone still in my hand.

There was a place I had found many years ago alongside… well, it doesn’t matter. The point still stood that it was a place where I had still been sleeping wherever I could get away with it. A place that had meant more to me than food some nights. More than money. Maybe even more than the chance to join the firecatchers. It was secret, dangerous, and mine in the only way anything had been mine back then.

Which meant showing it to Virgil Tempest's daughter was probably the stupidest thing I could do.

"Okay, listen," I said finally, throwing the stone uselessly into the river. "How 'bout… I show you a place. A cool place. Will that make you shut up?"

Rose's whole face lit as if I had handed her a second sun. "M'kay!"

She excitedly jumped up and down in her yellow sundress, dirty hem flaring out around her knees, and then looked at me as though I had become the keeper of some grand adventure.

I hated that she was probably right.

We left the riverbank and headed toward the northern Morton Valley. The leaves were still mostly summer green, though some had begun turning soft yellow at the edges, warning anyone with eyes that harvest heat would not last forever. August air moved through the aspen and elm with a warm, insect-heavy hush. It was a solemn stretch of year. The Games had just ended. Two children had come home in boxes. District people were good at carrying grief while pretending to carry grain, but even at twelve, I knew the difference.

The valley grass grew past a grown man's knees. For a little girl like Rosabel, it swallowed her whole.

At first, she tried to march through it bravely, one tiny hand pushing stalks from her face while the other clutched the strap of her little cloth bag. After about ten minutes, she grabbed my left hand and refused to let go. After twenty, she started complaining about her feet. After thirty, she had reasoned, with terrifying persistence, that since I was taller, older, and the one who had suggested the adventure, it only made practical sense for me to carry her.

I told her no.

She asked again.

I told her absolutely not.

She asked whether firecatchers were supposed to help people.

I gave her a piggyback ride the rest of the way.

By the time we reached the creek that fed off the Blood River, sweat had soaked the back of my shirt and Rose had begun singing nonsense words directly into my ear. Finally, the creek curved around a sandbar and led us to the broken rock.

It rose from the valley like a chunk of red bone, taller than ten Rosabels stacked on each other's shoulders. Late afternoon sun struck its pale shell and painted it with a heavenly rust-red glow. Down its middle ran a dark crevice just wide enough for a skinny boy to squeeze through if he turned sideways and remembered not to breathe too much. Fortunately, at the time, I was pretty slim myself.

"This is it," I said, dropping Rose onto the soft sandbar with less grace than she deserved.

She swayed dramatically, then stared up at the rock. "Where are we?"

"A place."

"What kinda place?"

"The quiet kind, if you're willin' to see somethin' new."

Rose ignored that, naturally, and came to my side. Her eyes traveled over the crack, and for the first time since I had known her, caution overtook curiosity by a hair. "What's in there?"

"Just wait."

I entered first, shoulders brushing stone on both sides. Light came in only through thin cracks overhead, falling in narrow pale streaks across the passage. My hands knew the walls by then. I slid them over the cool, gritty surface, counting turns by feel more than sight. Behind me, Rose clutched the back of my tattered jacket for dear life.

For once, she did not speak.

The passage went on farther than seemed possible from outside, bending once, then twice, then opening enough for both of us to stand upright in darkness. There, tucked behind a jut of stone and old roots, stood a door.

It was oak or had been once. The boards were weathered, dark, swollen in places, scraped in others, with a rusted lock that looked older than anyone alive in New Bisman. I pulled a brass skeleton key from my pocket.

It was nearly the size of my hand then. I loved that key with a child's foolish reverence. It felt like proof I had been chosen by something, even if only by circumstance.

I slid it into the lock. The mechanism gave a reluctant click, and the door groaned open.

With a practiced hand, I struck a match and set it to the little lantern hanging just inside. Flame swelled behind dusty glass, and the room appeared from the dark.

"The Secret Garden…" I finally revealed.

Rose stepped in behind me and looked around.

It was not, by any honest measure, a garden. It was more like the inside of a giant wooden crate someone had shoved into the rock and forgotten. Heavy planks lined the walls, warped and stained from years of damp. The air smelled of mildew, dirt, old paper, and whatever little animal had died in one corner before the place was inhabited once more, and I convinced myself the smell had character. In the far-left corner sat my cot, if a burlap sack over scavenged straw could be called a cot. A cracked tin cup, with a wax stub, and a piece of broken mirror. My whole kingdom.

Rose pinched her freckled nose. "Phew! It smells like you live here!"

"Yeah," I retorted. "'Cause I do."

Her hand fell from her nose. "Oh."

I should have felt embarrassed. Mostly, I felt angry at her for noticing and angrier at myself for caring.

"I was just lucky enough to have it," I added, too quickly.

"What is it?" Rose asked, more confused than impressed. "An' what so special here?"

That was when the real danger of what I was doing caught up to me. I had not just shown her where I lived and hid away. I had shown her the door, its key. The place no peacekeeper, catcher, thief, or living soul was meant to know.

All because I wanted her to stop asking questions.

"M'kay, listen." I crouched by a loose floorboard near the lantern. "You cain't tell anyone what you see here today, all right? If you tell anyone about this, it gets your father in big trouble. You hear?"

For the first time that day, Rosabel understood the weight of what I was telling her. Her eyes went wide and solemn, and she nodded with both lips pressed together.

I lifted the floorboard, and beneath it sat the crate. Medium-sized at best, and certainly heavy enough to make my arms tremble then. And most of all, plain enough to be mistaken for storage by anyone who did not know better. I dragged it free, set it in the lantern light, and lifted the lid.

Dust exploded upward. Rose coughed into both hands and waved the clouds away from her face. The smell of old paper filled the little room, dry and sweet with a hint of rot, a smell I still associate with trespass.

When the dust settled, Rose leaned over the crate.

"…books?" she said, confusion tinted her tone. She reached in and pulled one out with both chubby hands, its cover worn almost blank from age.

"Not just any books," I said, taking it gently before she could tear anything. "One-of-a-kind. Ain't no others like 'em in the entire world."

"How do you know?"

"Because the Capitol burns any books that the don’t like. And look!" I opened the large volume and tilted it toward the lantern. The title on the page was faded but legible enough to my proud twelve-year-old mind. "This one? It was written thousands of years ago! You think you'd see any of this in a schoolhouse? There's stories here about faraway lands that once existed, or maybe still exist. There's talk about what the American Empire looked like and how people were free to do all sorts without a peacecreep sniffin' at their boots. There's poems and wars and maps and old laws and--"

I stopped because I realized I sounded excited.

Rose did not tease me for it. She was already reaching for another book.

"Amazing," she whispered with awe.

She flipped through a cracked geography text until a colored map appeared, faded almost to ghosts. Her finger landed on a great island. "Wow. Is this place real?"

"Sure was," I said, leaning closer. "Maybe still is. I believe that one is called... Austriali. Austria? Page is smudged. Anyway, it was big. Somewhere in the world."

"Woah…"

She turned pages slowly, reverently, meeting strange animals, oceans, ruins, mountains, and cities whose names had outlived the people who built them. All that vast knowledge, all those old dead countries and their bright ideas, hidden in a crate under a floorboard because Panem was afraid of a little book with memory in it.

"Auphid'is?" Rose said after a while.

"What?" I hummed.

"Why's it called the Secret Garden?"

I shrugged, embarrassed again, and dug through the crate until I found the one I wanted. It was a bit smaller than the rest, with a dainty cover and pages worn nearly soft as cloth. The title had almost rubbed away, but if you held it to the lantern just right, you could still read it.

The Secret Garden.

"Named after this," I said. "First book I learned to read."

Rose took it from me as if I had handed her something alive. She opened to the first page, brow furrowing in fierce concentration.

"Ch-Choper--"

"Chapter."

"Chapter One," she said, and then continued, slow and messy. "There is... no one... left..."

I sat beside her, meaning only to listen long enough to correct her, but the sound of her trying to read filled the hidden room differently than my own silence ever had. I did not know it then, but that was the first time the Secret Garden truly became a garden. It wasn’t necessarily because anything grew in it, rather… something had been planted.

At twelve, I thought showing Rose that place was a mistake.

Years later, sitting beside her outside the same hidden rock while the creek worried around our boots and the morning after her father's funeral lay raw over both of us, I had cause to wonder whether it had been the first mistake I ever made that mattered.

Rose sat on the creek stones with the brass key in her palm.

She had brought it back because she always did. The key had become part of our shared language by then. If she held it out to me, she needed the door opened. If I pressed it into her hand, I trusted her to go in alone. If it sat between us, neither of us quite trusted what the world outside was doing.

That morning, it sat in her palm like an accusation.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I… just don’t know what I should say to him. S-Snow I mean..."

The both of us decided to go down to the little place, before Rose returned to visit Snow, and before I went out scouting on Hillsboro’s assignment. I paced along the creek bed hard enough that water seeped through the cracks in my boots. My leg protested every turn, but I did not have room in me to care properly. "He's Capitol, Rosabel. You know what everything means to them. Money and blood. Sometimes both, if they can make the numbers pretty."

"Yes," she said, standing. Her eyes, which had looked hollow since Virgil died, had begun to burn again in that frightening way purpose can mimic health. "But we both know this is our chance."

"Chance to do what?"

"To show what real change is." She stepped nearer, shoulders straightening as if she meant to compete with my height by force of conviction alone. "This place a-and those books? They have ideas and stories that could change Panem, Auphie. Make it stronger, kinder even? Maybe not all at once, no, but--"

"You think a Capitol man wants kinder?"

Her mouth tightened. "I think a Capitol man might want useful."

That stopped me because it sounded too much like the conclusion she had reached the night before among all those maps and papers. Too practical to dismiss as dreaminess. Too dangerous to ignore as childish hope.

I looked past her toward the broken rock. In the old days, that crevice had seemed like proof a thing could survive by hiding. Rose had taken a different lesson from it. She believed survival was only the first part. The second was bringing what survived back into light.

"Rose," I said, carefully now. "Why… How can you trust him?"

She blinked as if I had spoken another language. Snow… that realization struck her. "I mean… I don’t know him. B-But I reckon he’s knowledgeable! He’s the way to University, Auphie! If I can get him to sponsor me, I can find a way to-"

"- move on." I accused her before I could stop myself.

"N-No!" Her voice sharpened, then softened when she saw the words had come from fear rather than persecution. She crouched by the creek, watching a leaf spin in the current. "The people here deserve… more, especially for what they’ve done for me. They deserve an education like me. A life beyond just tireless field work. And a choice! A real choice, Auphie! Not just which work breaks their back first or whether their name stays out of a glass bowl until they're too old to be useful as entertainment. The books say there were places where children grew up believing the world had rooms for them they hadn't even seen yet. Why shouldn't District 9, or the rest of Panem have that?"

A part of me knew she was right. That was the worst of it.

Apparently, there had been a time when almost everyone knew how to read and write. When people choose their trade, their land, or their leaders, and called such things ordinary instead of treasonous. I could not help wondering, as I always had, why the Capitol would work so hard to cover up such a wonderful idea if the idea itself was truly dead?

On the other hand, I wanted to call her naive. To tell her no one in the Capitol cared about giving anyone a choice. That those old pages were just stories, and stories did not stop bullets, taxes, reaping slips, or men with clean gloves and hungry eyes.

"You really think they'll let someone like you sit in their fancy marble halls?" I asked. The words came out nastier than I meant to. "You ain't one of them, Rosabel. They'll smile, pat your hand, call you inspiring, yes, but… they’ll drain the blood from your veins if it buys them one decent afternoon of feeling charitable."

"Then let them," she shot back, eyes bright with tears she was too angry to shed. "If they want to drain me, they'll see what's left. They'll see us. District 9, all the districts, aren't just stains on a map. They're people. W-We’re people!"

Her voice cracked on that last word, and for a moment it was not a girl speaking anymore.

It was Virgil through her. Not his voice, certainly not. Something worse than that. His will…

I turned away toward the tree line, hands buried in my coat. "Rose, do you think this only ends in harmony? I’m just askin’ cause… sure, maybe the idea of it is nice, but… maybe there's a reason ideas like that are hidden. Either way, the Capitol ain't gonna like it. They'll snuff you before you have time to catch."

"I don't care," she said softly.

"You should."

"If I can help even one person. If one child here doesn't have to spend their whole life wondering what else exists and why nobody thought they deserved to know... isn't that worth something?"

"Worth your life?" My throat tightened. "Because that's what it'll cost. You think I don't know what happens to good people who try to fix a broken world? The Capitol don't let you build, Rose. It just makes you burn."

She looked down at her reflection in the creek, her face trembling and warped by the current.

"That's not what Papa said," she whispered. "He said… fire always takes something, yes. But if you can make it burn bright enough, it might light the way for somebody else."

Dammit Virgil. Him and that damn stubborn heart. The same one that would have seen beauty in oil fields and hope in ash.

I lowered myself onto a stone beside her with a hiss of pain I tried to hide. "You sound just like him, you know that?"

Rose smiled faintly. "Maybe that means I'm right."

"Maybe." I found a pebble and tossed it into the creek with a shallow splash. "What about Misea? Does she know about all this? About university?"

The color drained from Rose's freckled face. That told me enough before she spoke.

"That's another thing," she said. "Misea is thinking about pulling Waaska and Nibs out of the academy. Without Papa helping with vouchers, she says it's getting too expensive. Taxes have been raised twice since the beginning of the year. She… doesn't think she has a choice."

"Damn it." I dragged a hand down my stubbled chin. "That ain’t right…"

"That’s why I have to go." Her voice rose, though it trembled at the edges. "If I can make it into Capitol University, maybe I can learn what they're doing. How to fix it. Maybe even how to bring proper schooling back for everyone. None of those quotas. No peacekeepers hovering by doors… or even children sorted into ignorance because ignorance is cheaper."

"You think they built the system by accident?" I snapped. "They don't believe it needs fixing. They think we are the problem. They think our suffering is proof we need more managing."

"Then what am I supposed to do?" she shot back, voice breaking. "Sit here and rot? Pretend reading and dreaming and trying don't matter? Pretend Papa took me in and taught me to ask questions just so I could learn when to stop?"

I opened my mouth, though nothing came after.

That was the part of her argument I could not touch. Virgil had not raised her to be small, especially since the man’s presence was anything but. He had not raised any of us that way, which was a damned inconvenience now that he wasn’t alive to suffer the consequences.

"This Capitol man," I muttered. "What's his name again?"

"Snow. Coriolanus Snow"

I knew what his name was already. I just needed time for reality to hit me like a train.

The name landed between us like frost on a blade.

"Snow," I repeated, a slight chuckle traced itself within my inflection. "You're really trusting a Capitol man named Snow, huh?"

"I'm not promising him Papa’s headstone, Auphie. I'm speaking with him about an opportunity."

"The sponsor..."

Her eyes faltered just slightly. I caught it. My maple eyes were glossed with an expression of conviction as Rose insisted. "He might actually help, Auphie. I’ll make sure he listens. He didn’t laugh at me when we met! He even shook your darn hand! What kind of Capitolite would purposely put themselves at the level of us District folk?"

A slimy one…

Obviously, I didn’t say that to her face. Instead, I simply retorted, "But what's he want in return?"

"Nothing," she whispered, her eyes trembling with worry.

Neither of us believed that cleanly enough to say so. I shook my head and went back to pacing near the water. "No one in the Capitol does nothing for nothing."

"Then maybe get to know him." she said suddenly.

I stopped.

Her voice softened, but her eyes stayed firm. "If you don't trust him, speak to him yourself. Please. See what kind of man he is. You may still dislike him after, but at least you'll know."

My chest tightened. She was not challenging me. She was pleading, and that was far harder to stand against. I saw the same look she used to give Virgil when she wanted him to stay home just a little longer before another call came over the radio.

I closed my eyes and let out a long breath. Maybe I should trust her, just this once. Or maybe trust was only the name we gave surrender when the person walking away was someone we loved.

"Rose," I said, rubbing the back of my neck. "If this man is what I think he is, you won't need me to see it. You'll know soon enough."

"Then trust me," she said. "If I'm wrong, I'll come right back home. But if I'm right... maybe things can change. For all of us."

The creek gurgled around us, soft and restless, like it was waiting for one of us to move.

I felt Virgil's old hat on my head and brushed my thumb along the faded feather tucked in the band. For a second I thought of what he would say. It wasn’t the easy version of him that loss was already trying to make holy, but the real man. The man who would have looked at Rose, looked at me, and said keeping her safe and keeping her small were not the same thing.

I swallowed the lump in my throat. "You sure this is what you want?"

"More than anything," she replied, though a slight tremor could be discerned in her voice.

I nodded once. No agreement, just… surrender.

"All right, then," I said with finality. "Go. Make him listen."

Her lips parted as if she could not quite believe I had said it. "You mean it?"

"Don't make me regret it." I forced the faintest smile. "And don't let them change your voice. You're a tough little lady."

Her smile came slow, small, and stubborn, carrying some piece of sunrise the world had no right to keep giving her. "I won't."

She pressed the brass key into my hand.

"Keep this," she said. "Just… I still don’t want Snow to, you know? Ask what it’s for."

The metal was warm from her palm. I closed my fingers around it and felt something old in me shift, a line between pride and fear that always hurt when crossed.

As she turned up the hill toward Wildfire, I looked out across the creek one last time. The reflection staring back was not mine anymore. It was hers. Brighter. Braver.

I only hoped it stayed that way.

"You'll see, Auphie!" she called before mounting. "Just trust me!"

For the last time that morning, I almost could.

Scout work in the firecatcher world was meant to be simple.

You went first. You looked. You listened. You reported. If a fire was growing in the rows, you marked the wind and the spread. If a caravan had gone over in bad weather, you counted survivors and guessed how long they had before somebody needed hauling. If there was something ugly enough on the landscape that no one wanted to walk into it blind, scouts were the sorry fools sent just close enough not to die stupid.

A few days prior, Gooseneck caught word of a disturbance near the northern edge of the district line, out where District 9 wrinkled upward toward 7 and the prairie began remembering trees.

"Reports out beyond Willow's Hatch," Lieutenant Hillsboro said over the line before dawn had fully warmed the town. "District 7 rangers found something west of their border routes. Possible ground disturbance? Smoke reports. Maybe machinery. Rolette wants eyes on it."

"Machinery?" I asked.

"That's the word they used. You, Scranton, Ypsilanti, and a few peacekeeper escorts. I think it’s one of the nicer keepers, Stand Up’s what y’all call him? He’s under the assignment."

At least the heavens had some mercy left.

I had gone down to the peacekeeper facility after Gooseneck’s orders to rent out a crossbow again, though the weaponry was hardly ideal for my standards. Most of the weapons allowed to firecatchers were strictly for self-defense against prairie wildlife and for hunting if needed. Though, what made the keeper-assigned bows so irritating at times was the lack of flexibility within the weaponry. You see, each crossbow was equipped with a tracker that recorded each arrow fired and its location. The crossbows themselves were at the bottom of the barrel when it came to Capitol-designated weapons and were comparatively brittle compared to the rifles allowed to the peacekeepers, but if one were to attempt to remove a tracker from the crossbow itself, the entire weapon would break in seconds. It was even worse when a catcher accidentally knocked the tracker off, which happened more often than not. Usually, catchers are simply fined if there were peacekeepers present at the moment, but if a tracker were to fall out when a catcher was in the dead of winter in the middle of the wilderness? Let’s just say jailtime was the best alternative. That, or simply starving to death.

By the time I reached the north rail platform, my leg had already stiffened into complaint. Burr was there ahead of me, half asleep and fully annoyed, with Theron Ypsilanti, though everyone on the force called him Trouble, beside him trying to look older than he was by gripping his hand-me-down crossbow too tightly. Stand Up stood near the little hay cart that would take us toward Willow's Hatch, helmet tucked under his arm, rifle slung but not showy. His comrade, nicknamed Needles, lounged beside him with the easy posture of a man who had not yet learned how fear ages a body.

"Had they mentioned what this disturbance was?" Stand Up asked once the cart lurched forward and New Bisman began sliding past us in damp morning streaks.

I picked at the tracker on my rented crossbow because looking at moving scenery made the pain in my leg feel too honest. "District 7 rangers found part of the forest gone. That's all I know."

Stand Up tilted his head. "Gone how?"

"If I knew that, I wouldn't be riding north to find out."

Burr snorted. "Ya won't hang us for tryin' to defend ourselves, will ya, Weevils?"

Needles grinned at the nickname. Stand Up only glanced at the rifle across his lap. "Given our predicament, I would say you're a bit outnumbered, Scranton."

Burr glared at the firearm as if it had personally insulted his mother. "Don't mean I gotta like it."

"What if they're Northmen?" Trouble asked suddenly.

The cart wheels clacked over a rough joint in the track. My leg answered with a spike of pain that made me miss half of his next sentence.

"--heard they paint themselves blue and eat meat off dead people."

"Trouble," I said, recovering enough to stare at him, "those are stories told by people too lazy to admit they don't know a thing."

"Except the blue part," Needles added.

Stand Up elbowed him in the side.

"What he means," Stand Up said carefully, his eyes swerving about the cart, "is that Northmen have their own way of doing things. They aren't mindless monsters."

"He's right," I said. "And besides, even if Northmen were out there, they're smart enough not to come near the districts unless something worse is chasing them."

Which was true, or at least, true enough.

When it came to Northmen, some said the Capitol tried to wipe them out and failed. Some said the Capitol left them alone because there were too few to matter, or that the Northmen were not one people at all but a dozen little nations pressed into a single frightening word because Panem liked its maps simply.

In all my life, I had only ever seen one Northman with my own eyes. And she, well, technically wasn’t a Northman.

"Actually," Needles said, looking over at me with the carelessness of someone stepping on a bruise because he did not know it was there, "isn't Tempest’s girl a Northerner?"

My hand tightened on the crossbow. "Kinda."

"I mean, her mama was, right?"

"Kinda," I said again, and this time Stand Up gave Needles a look that finally taught him the subject had ended.

Mercifully, Burr pointed ahead. "Look there. Hatch ain't far now."

Willow's Hatch rose out of the mist with its silos black against an orange-red dawn, capitalizing on every grand lie Panem ever told about District 9 being the Breadbasket. The old cart rolled into the station with a groan. The rafters offered no relief from the wet air. With growing season near, seed sacks were being hauled by the dozens, men and women sweating under fifty-pound loads while mist plastered their shirts to their backs. I watched them move through the gray morning, bent, hurried, and already tired before the day had properly begun.

My life was not going well, with my fresh new injury, my borrowed hat, and my habit of letting people I tolerated walk toward danger. Still, it could always be worse.

District 7 announced itself before its people did.

Pine and pitch cut through the smell of wet grain and sweat as we reached the exchange post beyond the station. Rangers waited near the tree road in oilskin coats the color of bark, axes slung low, green chevrons stitched to their sleeves. Their captain was a narrow-faced woman with weather-cracked lips and a cedar bead sewn into her hat brim.

"You're the scouts from 9?" she asked.

"That's us," Stand Up said. "Captain Alder?"

She nodded once. "You'll see soon enough. Half mile out. We sent a team this morning. They came back unsettled."

"Unsettled how?" Burr asked.

Alder looked past us toward the trees. "They said the forest stopped. Everything. Birds, wind, even the flies."

That did not sit right with me. I did not know much about trees, but I knew enough land to understand that forests do not just stop. They change shape, sure. They complain, crack, move, whisper, and rot. Though, they don’t simply stop.

Alder filled us in as we moved toward the border of 7. Trees had been disappearing; however, they weren’t cut down in the ordinary sense. They were gone, completely. Trunks, branches, all of it. No drag marks or sawdust worth naming. No noise reported in the night. District 7 had first blamed outcasts, runaway settlers living off the grid, but the cuts were too clean and the missing timber too great. Then an entire valley on the northern boundary had been stripped in one night.

"And you waited to call us?" Burr muttered.

Alder ignored him with admirable restraint. "There were quakes. Or something like them. They moved south after each event. Toward your border, which… made it your concern."

District 9 did not get earthquakes. Obviously.

We got prairie wind, hailstorms, dry lightning, twisters, and of course, grassfires that were brutal enough to skin whole fields in an afternoon. But quakes? Never. The land out there rolled and dipped and eventually wore itself down slowly. It did not shudder from the marrow.

Not unless something taught it how.

The deeper we went into the thinning trees, the thicker the fog grew. It curled low over roots and stumps like smoke from a dying fire. Sound began to behave strangely. Boots struck ground, but the noise did not carry. Needles cleared his throat once and flinched at how quickly the fog swallowed it.

Trouble kept close behind me, fiddling with the safety on his crossbow. "Feels like a graveyard," he whispered.

"Keep your head down, then," I muttered. "Graveyards don't bite."

Then, without warning, the trees ended.

The valley opened before us in a broad, wrong clearing. Every tree had been sheared away at the same height. No splinters. No scorch marks. Just flat stumps spread in all directions, smooth as if something enormous and patient had pressed a hand down across the forest and shaved it clean. The ground was damp, glassy in places, and the smell of resin lay thick enough to taste.

At the far side of the clearing, fog banked against nothing we could see. A white wall, far too solid and far too still.

Stand Up crouched near one stump and ran a gloved hand over it. "Smooth. Like a blade."

"Ain't no blade that clean," Needles said. "Not even Capitol grade."

I crouched beside Stand Up. The wood surface was cold. "No saw marks. Or burn pattern. Just... ended?"

"Captain Alder," Stand Up said, looking around. "This happened… all at once?"

She nodded. "Rangers on watch said the fog rolled in near dawn. Sun came up. Trees were gone."

Trouble swallowed. "So… it is Northmen?"

"No," I said, dumbfounded by such a statement. "Northmen can cut trees. They don't erase them."

Stand Up's radio crackled faintly. He turned it down at once, as if even sound was not allowed in that place.

Alder stepped forward. "There's something else. A device, or part of one, near the far fog bank."

Needles stiffened. "Device?"

"Reported after the first sweep," one of the younger rangers said. "No one got close. Didn't want to."

"Smart," Stand Up murmured.

The District 7 peacekeeper accompanying Alder shifted. "Explosives division was alerted. Haven't heard back."

"And why exactly should 9 be concerned?" Burr asked, though his voice had lost some of its bite. “I mean… other than the quakes?”

Alder pointed east, then south. "Because of the frequency of ‘em. Whatever keeps moving under there crosses toward your side. Same route every time. Sometimes twice a day. Sometimes once. But… its always a route for some reason..."

"Quakes don't take routes," Stand Up softly confirmed.

No one had an answer to that.

The birds hadn’t sung, which was when I noticed it proper. Not one finch in the upper boughs or a crow making insult out of the quiet. The whole valley stood with the hush of a room after somebody had said something unforgivable…

"Have any of you gone past the device?" I asked.

The rangers looked at me as if I had suggested chewing glass.

"Absolutely not," one said. "Messing with unknown machinery is a death sentence."

"Did it make any sounds?" Stand Up asked.

Alder hesitated. "Sometimes there's nothing. Then sometimes… it sounds like something moving too far below the ground to belong there."

Then… a vibration came before anyone could reply.

It wasn’t exactly a shake at first. More like a deep, awful hum climbing up through the soles of my boots and into bone. The ground gave one long subterranean groan. Pines beyond the clearing quivered in place. Somewhere in the fog, a branch snapped.

Needles swore. Trouble stumbled sideways. The valley answered by shaking harder.

It felt like standing too close to a rail line when a freight train came thundering through, only there were no tracks under us and no engine in sight. Just rolling violence beneath the earth, traveling with sickening direction. Purposeful. Organized. Far too organized to be honest.

My bad leg lit up instantly.

Pain rattled through the damaged bone hard enough to turn my stomach. I reached for the nearest trunk, bark biting into my palm. Stand Up caught Needles by the elbow before the younger peacekeeper went down. Alder hauled one of her rangers upright. Burr braced against a stump, eyes wide despite himself.

The sound built. Then I heard another sound.

CRACK!

Sharp. Wooden. Near…

I looked up just in time to see Trouble clinging to a tree at the edge of the clearing, its roots half-loosened by the shaking. The trunk listed once, slow and terrible.

"Trouble!" I shouted, though the quake swallowed most of the word.

He turned too late. The tree gave. What happened next lives in me in flashes.

Trouble jerking backward. Alder yelling. Burr cursing. My own body moving before wisdom could stop it.

I lunged.

Definitely not gracefully, but just enough to catch Trouble by the back of his coat and yank him away from the falling trunk. My good leg found ground. My bad one found nothing steady at all. The world pitched sideways under the rolling force beneath us. For one stupid instant I thought I had managed it.

Then, the minute the tree found ground…

BOOM!

…something went off.

It definitely wasn’t like the explosion at the oil spill. Nothing so grand nor so consuming. This was smaller, but somehow meaner. A burst of dirt and fire punched up from the clearing with a crack like the world snapping one finger beside my head. Orange-white light flashed through the fog. The blast slapped me hard enough to send both Trouble and me backward. Air vanished. Ground came up ugly and fast.

Then, my full weight landed square on the injured thigh.

There are pains a body can think through, and pains that erase language from the inside out. This was the latter, and for a second? The world went white around the edges.

Then everything rushed back wrong. Scorched earth, pine sap, copper in my mouth. My own voice tearing itself out of me in a sound I would not have known as human if it hadn't belonged to me.

I tried to roll off the leg. Something shifted deep in the hip with a wet little wrongness that almost blacked me out.

"Hell-" I strangled. "Hell!"

Hands were on me at once. Trouble, pale and shaking. Burr and Stand Up, one on either side. Needles somewhere near my boots, making a sound of fascinated horror, no man should ever make over another man's body.

"Rhodes!"

"Easy-"

"Don't move him like that, you idiot-"

The District 7 healer dropped to his knees beside me fast enough to make his satchel buck. "Lift him by the shoulders. Not the leg. Gently now…"

As if I intended movement. I lay with my eyes squeezed shut and every inch of my left side blazing like somebody had hammered a red-hot fence post through the thigh and up into the hip. I could feel the injury now as a structure, not just pain. Feel where it had gone from fractured inconvenience into something altered.

"Oh," Needles hissed. "That ain't good."

"No," the healer answered. "It is not."

I did not look down. Cowardice, maybe? Or prudence? Sometimes a person does not need his own eyes once the nerves have already testified.

"It hurts," I managed through gritted teeth, which may have been the stupidest yet obvious sentence I ever spoke.

The healer did not laugh. "I know."

Metal clicked. Morphling.

I smelled it before I felt the needle, that bitter medicinal tang too thin to carry the mercy it promised. Then the bite went into the flesh above the worst of the injury.

For one long moment, nothing happened. Finally, pain loosened one finger.

Just one. Enough to let air back into the world.

I dragged in a breath and opened my eyes. Fog had thinned under the force of the blast, trembling apart in pale sheets. Dirt and splintered roots rained softly down. A little fire had caught at the base of the fallen tree, weak and uncertain, its flame pressing upward only to be smothered by wet air. Even that looked wrong. Fire was meant to behave like conviction, but this one flickered like a lie.

Burr paced once, twice, then stopped when he realized he was holding my hat in one hand. Virgil's hat.

He looked at it like he had found something holy in the dirt and had no idea what to do with himself now. I reached up and took it back as my fingers shook.

Trouble crouched beside me, mud on one cheek, eyes wide in a face not yet caught up to the fact he was still alive. "You'll be all right, yeah?"

"Course," I lied with a grunt.

He studied me too long with a worried glance, then nodded the way men do when they know they have been lied to and choose charity anyway.

Stand Up came over once Alder's rangers began pulling back from the clearing. His expression had gone mean with worry, which on him looked more tired than angry.

"Can you walk?"

"No."

Of course I couldn’t.

"Good. Saves me arguing."

That got the shadow of a laugh from Burr and nothing from me. Stand Up looked toward the fog bank, then back down at me. "We're pulling out. Alder will send the full report. Hopefully the chief will get it in time. But, Rhodes, you… you need to go to the clinic."

I shut my eyes.

"Rhodes?" he asked.

"I heard you."

I could practically hear Stand Up’s mind doing mental somersaults before nodding. "You… you did what you could for Trouble."

That was kind of him. It was also irrelevant.

They eventually loaded me onto the ranger's cart with more care than I would’ve liked. Every jolt still sent a dull ache through the leg in spite of the morphling, but the worst of it had changed shape now. Less about the fire. More about the weight. An awful sense of something began settling permanent in me whether I approved of it or not.

As the valley receded behind us, the birds still did not return. I remember that.

The silence followed us all the way to the ridge, where the ordinary world began again by miserable degrees. Wind in the pines, the wheels creaking, and Needles muttering too loud about mines and Burr telling him to shut his trap. Stand Up's radio hissing with a voice too far away to matter yet.

Life resuming its proper little noises. Though beneath all of it? I carried the after-sensation of that subterranean groan through the soil and the sharper truth of what the blast had left me.

It is possible to lose something before anyone officially tells you it is gone. That was what the ride back taught me.

Rose had never liked the mayor's quarter.

It was not ugly, pre-say. Ugliness could be dismissed, laughed at, or even pitied if a person was feeling generous. Though the mayor's side of New Bisman had a way of pretending at grace that made her feel more poorly dressed than outright wealth ever did. Homes sat back from the road with porches too broad, fences too straight, windows too clean to belong honestly to District 9. Even the trees had a tended look, as if they had been persuaded not to grow wild.

Lancaster's manor stood at the center of it all like a respectable lie.

Rose tied Wildfire at the front rail with hands she willed not to shake. The mare tossed her head, sensing perhaps that this was no ordinary errand. Rose smoothed a palm down her neck, drew one measured breath, and stepped back to look at herself in the entry glass beside the door.

The sight did not improve matters.

She had changed from yesterday’s funeral black, yes, but not into anything fine. Her dress was a cream color and practical through the waist, a little too worn at the cuffs if anyone cared to notice. Her boots had been brushed, though the leather still bore white dust in the stitching. Her hair had been redone in two braids pinned neater than usual, but grief had taken something from her face that no arrangement of hair could repair. She looked exactly what she was, like a district girl who had just buried her father the day before and then come knocking at the door of possibility before the soil had settled over him.

Her satchel hung heavy at her side. Fortunately, that steadied her.

Inside it lay notes from the Secret Garden, and obviously, not the dangerous ones. She had not been foolish enough to bring pages marked too openly with forbidden questions or copied passages from histories Panem had tried to burn out of existence. Nothing that would look like sedition if dropped on a polished desk and read by the wrong pair of eyes. Regardless, it was enough, like sketches of land recovery or comparative notes on district administration. Even fragments of older thought carefully reworded into something academic rather than incendiary. Enough that if someone asked a real question, she would not answer empty-handed.

The peacekeeper by the front gate eyed her with boredom first, suspicion second. "Do you have an invitation?"

"Yes," Rose said, with as much confidence as she could make from very little. "From… Mr. Snow."

"Snow?" The other peacekeeper snorted. "Next you'll say you've tea with the president."

"I-"

"She has an invitation," said a voice from the doorway. "And yes, I gave it."

Rose turned.

Coriolanus Snow stood in the open front door as if he had been placed there by design. Unlike the pale colors he had worn the day before, he was dressed now in a faint green suit that, to Rose's recollection, nearly matched the sturdy ribbon tying her braids. His pale hair was exact, with his posture effortless. Nothing in him seemed touched by the damp morning air.

He looked exactly like the posters hung in the windows of downtown businesses portrayed Capitol folk.

He smiled. "Please come in, Ms. Tempest-Strix. The weather has been an absolute fright, and a lady of your standards ought not be interrogated in it."

The peacekeepers straightened at once. That should have intimidated her more than it did.

Rose climbed the porch steps, keenly aware of mud on her hem, damp in her sleeves, and the awful state of her boots. As she entered, she reached for the knot of her decorative, sunflower shawl, but Snow's hands were there first.

"Oh," she gasped, startled. "You don't need to-"

"I insist." He took the shawl with a gentleness that felt almost foreign. "It is the least I can do, especially after your father's passing."

Rose, feeling slightly uncertain, simply gave him a curt nod. "Thank you, Mr. Snow."

"Please," he said, hanging the shawl carefully. "Coriolanus."

The name landed strangely between them.

"That's a beautiful name," Rose said before she could overthink it. "Uh… Coriolanus, I mean."

A faint amusement touched his mouth. "No need to be unctuous, though I thank you for the return favor. Your name remains quite memorable as well."

Rose felt heat creep across her face, bordering on flattery but not quite.

"Ms. Tempest-Strix," Mayor Lancaster called as he appeared from the corridor, dapper as ever and visibly relieved she had arrived. "Please, make yourself at home."

Home was not the word Rose would have chosen.

The manor's interior smelled of beeswax, paper, and some floral polish too refined for her to name. The floors had been sanded and varnished until they reflected light upward. Portraits hung along the walls, all old mayors and family men looking mildly disappointed that history had not arranged itself more elegantly around them. Rose followed Lancaster and Snow into the sitting room, where the air buzzed faintly with mechanical warmth.

Then she saw the projector.

It sat atop an aging coffee table, a Capitol-built device of polished brass and black glass, its screen casting green-gold light against the far wall. Four figures flickered in wavering color: three men and one woman, each elegant in the distinct manner of people used to being listened to.

Rose stopped so abruptly Lancaster nearly bumped into her.

"So soon?" she whispered, feeling a nervous laughter trickling along the edges.

Snow's gaze flicked to her, though not mocking nor apologetic… as far as she could interpret. "They were already in conference. I thought it better not to waste momentum."

Momentum. That was a neat word, like pushing a child into deep water and calling it swimming.

"Gentlemen," Snow said to the projection, "and madam, our young Ms. Tempest-Strix has arrived. Fresh from District 9's academy, and perhaps less fresh from a difficult week, though I suspect you will find her prepared all the same."

Four pairs of eyes turned to Rose. Her heart began pounding so violently she wondered whether the projector might pick up the sound.

An older woman in a crisp dark suit sat near the center of the projected image, silver hair coiled tight at the nape. Beside her was a broad-faced man with scholar's stoop and a mouth built for disapproval. A younger professor with spectacles leaned forward, alert as if some part of him had just woken. Above them, in a larger pane of the projection, sat a narrow-eyed man Rose took for the dean because even through the distortion, the others seemed to lean toward him whenever he was quiet.

"Good afternoon, Ms. Tempest," the dean said. His tone had no softness Rose could translate. "It is extraordinarily rare to see a district-born applicant take direct interest in our academic program."

Rose bit back the instinct to correct her name. "Good afternoon, sir. If I may add, that while I am not exactly district-born, I hold tremendous pride in having been raised in District 9. I'm grateful to represent it."

The younger professor's interest sharpened. "If not from the districts, where did you originate?"

Rose's fingers tightened around the satchel strap. She had rehearsed this, but rehearsal and saying a thing aloud before Capitol scholars were not cousins.

"My biological mother was from the Northlands," she said. "Though… she has since passed. From what the clinic records and my father told me, she carried the usual markers people associate with Northman dress. That’s… where the Strix part of my name was added in commemoration of her. Of what she carried into District 9, even in death."

The broad-faced professor frowned faintly. "And your father?"

"Adopted, sir," Rose said, and felt the word open a hollow place in her chest. "His name was Virgil Tempest. Chief firecatcher of District 9. He rescued my mother and I during a grassfire, and he managed to save me… and raise me in such a beautiful place like District 9."

For a moment, the polished sitting room seemed to fade. Rose had not been alive to remember that day, but she had been told the story often enough that it lived in her like inherited memory. Of what her mother would’ve looked like, of Virgil being so gracious as to call her his own, the firecaters, her family…

Rose returned to the room with the weight of all that sitting behind her ribs.

"He was a good man," she finished.

The dean gave a small nod. "Virgil Tempest. Yes. We have… heard stories surrounding him. I understand his passing was recent. Our condolences."

"Thank you," Rose said.

Snow, standing near the hearth, watched her with that attentive stillness that made her feel both steadied and studied. The older woman tapped her pen against the desk. "Ms. Tempest-Strix, please explain your interest in attending university."

Where to begin?

Rose inhaled sharply. Her eyes darted once to Snow. He offered no answer, only the impression that he expected her to have one. So, she did.

"District 9 may not be my origin, but it is my home," she said. "Without the kindness of its people, I would not be here. I would not have had a family or education or even a roof over my head. I am fortunate, I will admit, but… many of my peers are not. Many brilliant children never get the chance to become brilliant adults in any formal way, not because they lack ability, but because their usefulness is often decided too early."

The broad-faced professor, whose pane identified him as Professor Fairchild, leaned back. "And how, Ms. Tempest-Strix, would you suppose that be?"

A trap, Rose thought.

Too direct an answer and she would sound accusatory. Too mild and she would sound ornamental.

She thought of the Secret Garden. Of old pages breathed over by lamplight. Histories from before Panem taught people to call obedience stability. A line she had once copied down came to her: A state ought to be governed for the common good, not merely the security of the governing.

She did not dare quote it.

Instead, she said, "Land recovery, labor distribution after environmental damage, educational access tied to function instead of class assumption, and agricultural planning informed by those who live with the consequences of policy."

The younger professor sat forward outright.

The older woman simply asked, almost with accusation, "Class assumption?"

"Yes, ma'am." Rose turned slightly toward her. "In District 9, children are often sorted early into usefulness according to household need and district expectation. Work is necessary, of course. Though education is treated as refinement instead of infrastructure. If a government only educates the children, it already expects to trust, then it reproduces obedience more efficiently than competency."

The room went still. Lancaster looked alarmed, and Rose felt it without turning.

Professor Fairchild's mouth thinned. "A remarkably polished observation for a district schoolgirl."

Before Rose could answer, Snow spoke. "Perhaps because she is neither merely polished nor merely a schoolgirl."

The words were calm, almost gentle, and yet they cut Professor Fairchild's momentum cleanly in half.

Snow turned to Rose. "Continue."

Because he had given her back the floor instead of rescuing her from it, Rose understood that whatever this was, test, game, or opportunity, she had not yet lost it.

She continued.

She spoke of grain first because grain was safe, and from grain she could move outward without appearing to leap. Contamination after rail spills. Why recovery ought not to be left solely to emergency containment. Field rotation. Water access. Hill-valley pockets in 9 that sustained plant life differently than the broad prairie. Why district agricultural planning remained too generalized to be efficient.

She did not mention the bunker. Of course she didn’t. She did not mention banned histories or old republics and especially the crate beneath the floorboards.

She instead translated.

That, she realized as she went, was the true skill the Secret Garden had given her. Conversion. The ability to take one dangerous idea and render it, in public, as utility. When she paused to breathe, the younger professor said, "You have read beyond your school allotment. Almost along the lines of our own students from our academy..."

It was not accusation. It was certainty. Rose met his gaze. "Yes, sir."

Lancaster's expression suggested he might stop breathing.

The dean folded his hands. "From where, exactly, did such reading come?"

The question entered the room like a knife laid carefully on linen. Rose felt her body became aware of itself. Her dress at the shoulders. The pulse in her throat. There was a terrible weight of every wrong possible answer.

"From what I could borrow," she said, letting it be both true and incomplete. "Old district stock. Household fragments. Discarded texts. Copied passages. Whatever literature that most in the districts considered… unfashionable."

The younger professor's mouth twitched.

The older woman said, "Unfashionable is a diplomatic word."

Rose did not answer that.

Professor Fairchild tapped one finger against his desk. "University is not an instrument by which every district grievance may be dignified into policy."

"No, sir," Rose said. "But neither should policy be so far removed from labor that people begin mistaking endurance for consent."

Silence again. Deeper this time.

It couldn’t openly be called rebellion, that required one to make assumptions and jump over hurdles. That was what made it dangerous. It was simply reasonable.

The dean looked down at his notes. Fairchild no longer seemed dismissive, which was more satisfying than his approval would have been. The younger professor looked nearly intent. The older woman regarded Rose as though recalibrating several prior assumptions at once.

At length, the dean asked, "What would you study, if admitted?"

"Systems," Rose said.

Fairchild frowned. "That is not a discipline."

"No, sir. It’s the problem." Rose caught herself and softened by a hair. "Government, agricultural planning, resource law, historical state formation, any field that explains how a country decides who is educated, who is fed, and who is expected to call that arrangement natural."

Lancaster shut his eyes for one fleeting second.

The younger professor murmured, "My word…"

The older woman asked, her eyes narrowed a fraction, "Your mayor mentioned an interest in returning, rather than staying designated at the Capitol. Why?"

That question entered Rose more softly than the others. Why return, if another world opened and let her through?

She thought of Virgil at the kitchen table, sugar in his coffee, dust on his boots, telling her a mind was no use if it only admired its own reflection.

Rose folded her hands over the notebook. "Because I do not think knowledge is most honorable where it is most decorated. I think it is most honorable where it is most needed."

No one moved.

The older woman, whose name Snow later supplied as Dr. Anderson, spoke almost offhand. "You quote like someone taught in the Capitol."

Rose's breath nearly caught. She chose her next words carefully enough to feel them scrape. "I was taught that most ideas worth surviving have already had to survive somebody's dislike of them."

The younger professor laughed once before he could stop himself.

Fairchild muttered, "Goodness."

Snow, very lightly, said, "Dr. Anderson..."

Dr. Anderson's expression did not change, but her fingers folded over her papers.

The dean’s brows raised before he looked toward Snow. "You were correct."

Rose did not know what that meant. Whether Snow had predicted her mind or only insisted she was worth the interruption, she could not tell. She only knew the words passed through her with dizzying force.

Snow nodded with a hint of pride before he answered, "She is useful."

It was not a pretty word. Not warm nor kind. Though in that room, usefulness was not insult. It was admission into seriousness.

Lancaster recovered enough to say, "Miss Tempest-Strix has shown great discipline under difficult circumstances."

Professor Fairchild replied, "Discipline, yes. Also… dangerous reach."

Dr. Anderson answered before Snow could. "All intelligence has dangerous reach to someone."

The younger professor added, "If half the district students have been under-taught to this degree, the initiative has been misimagined from the start."

The dean lifted one hand, and the speakers quieted.

"Miss Tempest-Strix," he said. "You understand, I hope, that university is not merely a reward for unusual intelligence. It is an institution. It has loyalties of its own."

Rose held his gaze. "Yes, sir. So do districts."

From another mouth, it might have been insolence. She said it softly enough that it landed as principle.

The dean studied her for one beat longer, then nodded. "Thank you. We will consider your candidacy for the following semester. Mr. Snow and Mayor Lancaster will be informed of the next steps."

For a second, Rose did not understand. Then the weight lifted so abruptly that she had to grip her notebook to keep her hands from flying somewhere foolish.

"Thank you, sir, " she said, voice thinner than she would have preferred. "Truly."

The projection flickered as the university representatives began signing off. Dr. Anderson's pane remained half a second longer.

"Miss Tempest-Strix." she bluntly said, before Rose looked back up at the woman.

"Do not lose the habit of precision to the habit of performance. Institutions reward the second more quickly. They need the first more badly."

"Yes, ma'am," Rose said.

Then the screen went dark. For a moment, the room existed only in the hum after power.

Lancaster exhaled like a man who had survived a weather event. "Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! Your father would be most proud, Ms. Tempest-Strix!"

Rose let out a nervous laugh before she thanked him, though the mention of Virgil struck too sharply to linger over.

Snow moved closer. "You did very well."

"D-Did I?" she asked before she could stop herself.

"Incredibly." His smile was slight, controlled, though not unkind. "You frightened them in exactly the proper amount."

A laugh escaped her, half disbelief and half exhaustion. "I… didn't mean to frighten anyone!"

"That is why it was effective."

Rose did not know whether that was compliment or warning.

She had nearly made it down the front steps of the manor before she let herself breathe properly. The house behind her still glowed with polished wealth. Far too many lamps, too much lacquer, curtains too heavy for prairie weather. It was not an easy room to grieve in. Not that any room had been easy lately.

She gathered her shawl around her shoulders and reached Wildfire's hitching post when the front door opened behind her.

"Rosabel?"

She turned.

Snow descended the steps with no evident hurry, as though catching her had been his intention all along and not an interruption improvised at the last moment. The porch light caught the green of his coat and sharpened the planes of his face.

"Mr. Sn-" Rose bit the inside of her cheek, before catching herself. “Coriolanus?"

He seemed pleased she used the name. "I hope I did not delay you overlong inside. It has been a trying day, and I suspect the mayor sometimes mistakes opportunity for obligation."

That surprised her. It was accurate in a way grown people rarely bothered being with kids her age.

"It was... not entirely fine," she admitted.

"No," he said softly. "I did not imagine it was."

Wind pressed a loose strand of hair across her cheek. She tucked it back. "I should go home."

"Of course," he said.

Which was exactly when he did not let her. He glanced toward the far edge of town, where construction and ambition had recently begun pressing themselves into prairie road. "Though there is something nearby I thought you might find interesting."

Rose's curiosity pricked at once. Annoyingly.

"Interesting?” Rose let out a nervous bout of laughter once more. “H-How?"

"In the way a serious mind finds things interesting when most people would only find them… decorative." He tilted his head. "Or useful."

She was tired. Her father was dead. She ought not have been so easily moved by a sentence shaped like a challenge. "What… What is it?"

"Something not yet publicly discussed."

The word publicly unsettled her. Though… it did intrigue her.

"I don't know that I ought to be shown things not publicly discussed," she said, though even to her own ears it sounded like a test rather than a refusal.

Coriolanus did not press. "No. Perhaps not."

Then he let silence sit there long enough for her to feel the opening in it.

"I have found," he said after a moment, "that most people prefer to be told what to do, especially in terms of a routine or as I would prefer to call it, systems. Very few care to see how it actually intends to function. Though… you have struck me as one of the few."

Rose was confused as to how accurately that landed.

"What kind of… system?"

"One adjacent to the Games," he said. "And to the future Panem intends to advertise for those who survive them."

A cold current moved through her.

Wildfire snorted softly at the hitching post, objecting on her behalf.

"This isn't some sort of test, is it?" Rose asked, a bit of humor attempting courage in her voice.

Coriolanus answered smooth as laid silk. "Only if all conversations between intelligent people must become tests eventually."

That was not an answer. Rose knew it.

Still, she heard herself say, "All right."

Coriolanus inclined his head as if acknowledging not agreement, but selection. "Good."

The eastern project had been closed to district citizens for nearly a year.

People saw pieces of it from a distance, like tarped fencing, peacekeeper patrols, mute men in plain gray uniforms moving in and out of the perimeter with tools, Capitol architects arriving in brief polished flashes and vanishing again. Nobody knew what it was meant to be, though everyone had guessed. A military station? New peacekeeper housing? A Capitol leisure ground? Another punishment site?

In District 9, imagination usually learned to forecast cruelty before comfort. Snow borrowed one of Lancaster's gray warmbloods… much to my begrudging surprise… and with a single peacekeeper trailing at a formal distance, he and Rose rode east.

Once they dismounted at the gate, the commander saluted Coriolanus like he was more than a visiting official.

"Mr. Snow," the man said. "I presume this young lady is with you."

"I would certainly hope so," Snow replied lightly.

To Rose's surprise, the peacekeeper almost smiled. Once inside, Rose understood why no one had been allowed near.

Beyond the last veil of tarp and scaffolding, a row of pale stone houses gleamed in the muted light. Each one was massive by district standards, almost obscene in its elegance, with verandas framed by white pillars and fresh paint shining too cleanly for a town that tasted of dust and grain. The scent of new mortar and cut birch drifted through the air, sharp against the faint odor of wheat smoke. Mute men moved quietly through the site, setting tile, polishing brass, smoothing railings, all with a precision that made the place feel both new and haunted.

"What is this?" Rose whispered.

Coriolanus stood a little taller, as though presenting a monument. "Victor's Village. Homes for Panem's champions. Those who survive the Games."

Survive…

The word tasted bitter.

Rose could see the scale now. Twelve houses arranged with theatrical care, each yard bordered by iron fencing. Each porch broad enough for the whole district to see what victory purchased. She imagined what it must feel like to live there. To wake every morning knowing you had killed children to earn clean glass windows and a patch of grass.

"It is meant to inspire hope," Coriolanus said. His tone was soft, deliberate. "A reminder that even the lowest can rise. That victory grants reward. That loyalty is not forgotten."

Hope, brick by brick, bought with graves. Rose shivered despite herself.

“Originally, your district was supposed to undergo construction after the eighteenth games, when-“

"Hope," Rose accidently interrupted.

"Yes…" he turned to gauge her reaction, perhaps misreading her tone or perhaps not. "Hope keeps the districts alive. Those who learn to earn it, Rosabel, will always have a place in Panem's future."

She looked toward the mute men laboring beneath the half-built porches, their faces pale and expressionless. Hope for them seemed a washed-up thing on a riverbank.

"Why would we need… hope?" Rose asked. “In a place like…?”

She couldn’t conjure enough assurance in herself to finish her sentence. Coriolanus fully turned to her.

"In a place like what?" he asked, though she was certain he knew.

"Like here. In the districts." She chose her words with care. "Forgive me, Coriolanus, but in the midst of death, how does one comprehend an idea as foreign as hope?"

For a moment, he only stared at her. Wind tugged faintly at his lapel, carrying mortar and wheat smoke between them.