The Seventy-first Hunger Games ends as morning light rinses the forest a wan green. Johanna huddles in the grass with her axe clutched in a bloody death-grip, watching the hovercraft split the arena open above her. Far off, someone shouts her name as the victor.

Before she can make sense of what’s happening, some men in white pull her onto an aluminium floor and try to force the axe from her hands. She springs forward without thinking, screaming her head off and hitting whatever she can, over and over, her hands a red blur, hot and stinging as boiling water. The men are shouting, blocking what they can with their elbows and forearms, but still she snakes through. She knows there will be consequences for what she’s doing, but in this moment she doesn’t care. There is no way out. She must kill or be killed. When she looks up, her own reflection in the glass wall gapes back — bleeding knuckles, hollow cheeks, long dark hair stuck to her forehead with mud. From the edges of her sight comes a sudden shadow, and she has just enough time to turn before something strikes her from behind, sending her sliding off into total blackness.

When Johanna wakes, it is to an empty room at the Training Centre. She doesn’t have many major injuries — only the knife cut at her flank from when the District Two girl slashed her in the final showdown — so she isn’t surprised to find herself so quickly cleaned and stitched and put back together. There is nobody here, but she feels like she is being watched, so she gets out of bed and locks herself in the bathroom, where the long burble of tap water can hide the sobs that come scratching out her throat. She doesn’t know why she’s crying. Certainly it isn’t sadness for the children whose heads she’d driven a dripping axe into. Maybe it is the shock of being alive, or the comedown after adrenaline. Maybe it is the word victor, ricocheting inside her mind like a bad, bad joke. Johanna brings her chin up and stares at the reflection in the mirror with a kind of detached interest. The Capitol has prettied her up: there stands a slim girl in black, her cheekbones dusted with a pale and surreal highlight, and they have done something to her lashes, too — so long now that when they lie on her cheeks she can catch the light in them. Her loveliness is eerie: she doesn’t look like the old Jo Mason from Seven anymore. She doesn’t feel quite the same, either. 

“You won,” Johanna tries to whisper to her mirror image, to comfort herself in the only way that she knows how, but it does nothing. There is a terrible thumping inside her chest that fills her from head to toe with a black and irrational horror. “You won!” she shouts again, hurling herself angrily at the glass. In the distance there is a commotion — someone rapping at her bathroom door, a key jingling in the lock. When the door is kicked down, Johanna thinks it’s the Capitol men coming for her again, the doctors — hell, even the president — but when she swings forward, she crashes into warm, actual arms. There is a smell of woodsmoke, and forests, the faint sweetness of cannabis, too, and she recognises Blight by scent rather than sight. Someone from home.

“It’s ok, Mason,” comes his rough voice above her, “It’s me. I’ve got you.”

She is a wet mess, but she has lost her fight. She melts into him like a child, fists knotted in his shirt. She wants to be up high in the trees with everything under her feet. Nobody would be able to get her there. “Don’t leave me,” she pleads, “don’t leave me here. Take me home!” 

Suddenly, she sounds like the girl on the train again — the snivelling, cowardly fool who could do nothing but cry. That hadn’t been entirely fake. She had meant to keep out of the way, but as the days passed in the games, hiding became impossible and soon she found herself hardening under a sort of steely instinct, turning on anything that came too close, quick as a striking snake.

“Home’s a long way from here,” Blight says gently against her ear, “I’m not going anywhere, though.” He loosens his arms and lets her down onto the floor. “I’ll meet you backstage before Caesar’s interview, ok? But you’ve got to go with Trisha now. She has to get you ready.”

Johanna scrubs furiously at her eyes and pushes herself out of the bathroom, into the bedroom and then out into the hallway where her Capitol stylist waits. She has become a sort of celebrity, she supposes; there are cameras everywhere, and there is once more that eerie sensation of being watched. She is no longer Jo Mason but Johanna the victor, and whatever she had been in Blight’s arms, she cannot be that out here.

She reaches her stylist with half-moon indentations in the soft of her palms and almost gags at the saccharine perfume that assaults her sinuses. It’s sickening to be around this woman as she guides her away from Blight, down a few passages and into an elevator that leads to the lobby of the Training Centre. They pass six floors before reaching the seventh, all the while Trisha chatters.

“Honey, congratulations! You really gave them a show, didn’t you? What a little sadist you turned out to be. You know we all loved it.”

“Thanks,” Johanna replies dryly. She doesn’t want to talk, especially to someone like Trisha who is so high on Capitol bullshit. Her stylist is the sort of bright-eyed, ebullient type who means well, she knows, but who has never had to look death in the face. The stars of empathy that flash in those gold-lined eyes are suspicious and completely synthetic.

She is swallowed by her prep team when the elevator doors open. They take care of the shower settings for her, and they go to work on her hair, nails, and makeup when she is finished. Johanna feels skinned. They have put on some blush, she thinks it is, and it makes her look so innocent, nothing like a killer, makes her look like a rose has shadowed her cheeks.

“Alright,” says Trisha as she paces around her naked body, “We need to talk about your angle.”

“What?”

“Your angle,” Trisha repeats patiently, “Every victor has one. You need to make the people of Panem feel like they know you, get what I mean, honey?”

Johanna grips the edges of her seat with her nails. They are short and dark, like stumps of trees. “They do know me. They watched me in those games. What else do they want?”

“Yes, but now they want to love you,” replies Trisha. “Of course you proved to be a very efficient killer, but what I want to know is if you were ever frightened out there.”

Johanna thinks about the weight of her axe in her hands, hacking at the District Two girl’s neck again and again and again through her blackening vision — blood squirting from the cut with each hit, because she needed to know that the girl would not get up again. By then the world had narrowed to one simple truth: either she struck first, or she died.

“I just wanted to stay alive,” says Johanna honestly, “That’s it.”

Trisha smiles. “Perfect,” she claps her hands together, “That’s perfect! I can work with that.”

Hands crawl onto her skin. The dress they force her into is a green one, soft like gossamer, with twines of ivy cinching around her waist. Then they dot cool adhesive beneath her eyes and stick something cold and small into position. When they turn her toward the mirror, she sees them for what they are: tiny luminous diamonds under her lower lashes and dripping down her cheeks. 

Crocodile tears. 

She wants to scrub them away. She wants to rake her nails down her face until she draws blood and wreck the shimmering illusion they are trying to create. Sad-girl-turned-tough-girl, or whatever. They want to sell the idea that her tears were all just an act. She wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to sell her next.

From the end of the hallway, the speaker blares to life. “Victor Mason to stage in five!” 

It is a death sentence. Trisha screams a little and pulls her up, forward, pushes her out the door. “You’re going to be wonderful, honey! Let them see the girl behind the axe.”

Johanna scoffs. She knows they will find nothing behind the axe. As they usher her down the hall, she feels somehow like she is moving on clouds; things are getting white around the edges and it seems suddenly that she has been walking around for hours, years, forever. Backstage, Blight appears like an apparition. He looks her up and down and forces a smile, but she can see that he knows exactly what they have done to her. It is customary for the victor and their support team to rise up from beneath the stage separately, though Blight has crossed the invisible line meant to keep him back. 

“Hey, Mason,” he says in a low voice, mouth close to her hair, “You look fantastic. You ok?”

Johanna can smell the woodsmoke and forests and cannabis from his clothes. “Fine,” she replies, “And you?”

“It’s your night. I couldn’t be prouder,” Blight smiles, and then he pulls her close to his chest, “Don’t you forget who you are, Jo Mason.”

Jo Mason. Jo Mason. She is Jo Mason from District Seven and she has a sister and a mother and a father and they all call her Jo Mason, Jo —

“Johanna! Johanna! Johanna!” 

The lift shudders under her feet and then it shoots her up — blinding lights — the crowd is on its feet, chanting her name. Caesar Flickerman is a grinning showman in his seat on the stage, with his arms wide open to welcome this dazzling debut — Johanna the victor.

“Panem!” he cries. “Here she is — our fiery, beautiful victor from District Seven!”

She lifts a hand because that’s the only thing to do when thousands of people are screaming her name, and the crowd answers with cheers. Caesar takes her hand like she is a princess and leads her to the seat under the spotlight. 

“Johanna!” he beams, “What an extraordinary games! Panem has fallen in love with you. Such a clever strategy you played out there, letting everyone think you were harmless while you were just waiting for your moment. You were very sly, weren’t you?”

She bares her teeth in a sorry attempt at a smile. “You could say that,” she says, “I only wanted to get through the games.” This at least is true.

“And you did more than just get through it!” Caesar says eagerly. “You fought hard. From belle to beast — my, my, Johanna! Still,” he adds with a grin, “as gorgeous as ever.”

On some level she is repelled by him: his compliance with the Capitol, his powder-blue hair, the gap in his teeth, but she cannot deny that there is something exciting and tough about him too, a brazen crowd-pleasing quality that is only exaggerated by his load of flashy gold jewellery. Johanna forces herself to sit through his next few jokes, and then it is time for the show. Though she is aware of its usual proceedings — a highlight reel of these several weeks that goes for three hours in total — she is unprepared for the sight that first greets her. This year, because they are telling a rebirth story, they have chosen to start the video at the end of the Games. 

The screen comes to life in a wash of blood. Rusty splashes on long grass. She sees herself on the screen straddling the corpse of the District Two girl, hacking away at the neck. The axe comes down again, again, again, each with a dull and thickening thud. A strangled sound tears itself from Johanna’s throat. She jerks backward so hard her chair scrapes against the floor. “What the fuck?”

She feels like her soul is somewhere outside her body. Everything is unreal — even the sudden laughter of the crowd. Caesar is delighted.

“Nothing like seeing yourself from the outside, is there?” he crows, and the crowd goes crazy. Johanna feels herself going very white, her pallor dry and chalkish and for a moment she thinks she might faint. The scene, as if by diabolical magic, changes and continues to roll, time flying backwards…

The rockslide that begins on the slope she has just fled, chasing her right to the cornucopia. Onscreen, her body flits like a shadow between trees. She sprints, ducks, and throws herself flat as loosened stones tear through the clearing where the District Four pair have made camp. Johanna watches herself push up to her feet, dirty and panicked with a bloody axe in her hands, and then — the girl from Eleven, throat opened cleanly in the sun. The image changes again, and this scene is strange because she has only the vaguest memory of this. She remembers hearing something behind her and wheeling around, swinging at it with her fists because she had lost her axe in Five’s chest a few days earlier, and it had been so dark, she couldn’t see at all. She remembers swinging out again with her arms, as hard as she could, and then hearing a loud crack and a scream. At that time she had thought it was a mutt, but now, with the light adjusted, she sees a young girl's face. The girl looks to be maybe twelve years old. Her face splits open from Johanna’s fists, and she tumbles head-first down a vertical rockface.

Johanna blinks back her horror, wondering if her district is watching — and then the video swerves further back in time and it’s the rain pounding her into the mud on Night Two. She is crying, shivering in the branches of a tall oak tree. She has an axe nicked from the cornucopia but it’s bloodless and glittering in the dark. At last, inevitably, they return to the reaping. Jo Mason stands on the screen, dark hair in double braids that had been done by her sister — sweet Hope who had just turned nineteen that morning — and when her name is called she begins to tremble. Her ma cries out her name, so does her sister, but the Peacekeepers grab her by the arms and shoves her up the stage like a little lamb to slaughter. Except Johanna Mason isn’t dead. She is alive. She sits in the glare of Capitol lights with diamond tears dripping down her cheeks and she is the victor, the killer, the girl with the axe.

The anthem plays as President Snow takes the stage. Johanna stands up with her hand over her heart, watching him draw closer, and closer, and closer. He is a tall, bulky figure, and when he reaches her, his shadow falls right over her frame and blocks out the glitz and glam of the Capitol crowd. For the length of a dozen heartbeats it is just him and her. His eyes are hard and a pale, whale-bone blue.

“Congratulations, my dear Miss Mason,” he smiles, placing the Victor’s Crown around her brow. “What a beautiful victor you make for Panem.”

His mouth stinks of blood and roses. Johanna tips her head down so that he cannot see the panic in her eyes, the impulse to bolt. She has never been good at hiding what she feels. 

“Why are you afraid?” Hot thunder of whisper on her cheek. “The state will take care of you well. Many futures open to a lovely victor such as yourself, you see… though some are certainly more profitable than others.”

Johanna swallows the bile that rises up her throat. There is a ringing in the air, so high-pitched it might be the call of a banshee. She knows the implications behind his words and the fate of Finnick Odair, but what might it all look like for her? Pale lips, goosebumps, thin bare limbs — all for the pleasures of some Capitolite? She can only hope that she is reading too much into his meaning, that it’s not true. She is nothing special like Finnick Odair — she doesn't think she is beautiful enough for this particular hell and she hopes that it will be her saving grace.

“Yes,” she forces out of her teeth, trying to calm her erratic heartbeat. “Thank you, sir.”

“It is my pleasure. After all, Panem loves you.” His smile is very indulgent. “I look forward to seeing you at the Victory Banquet.”

When Caesar Flickerman bids the audience goodnight, Johanna bolts. She darts down the hallways and rounds every corner blindly, blood hammering nightmarishly at her temple. Somewhere near the service elevators she runs into Blight, who catches her shoulders and tries to pull her up short. She shakes him off violently, snarling. “Watch where you’re going!”

“Mason —” Blight says, startled, “It’s me.”

Johanna stares at him, her boned face pale as a rabbit’s that betrays her seventeen years. “Sorry.”

“What did the president say to you?”

“He’s happy I won.”

Blight looks far from convinced. “That’s all?”

“He told me Panem loves me,” she spits out, feeling dizzy from the air she’s pulling too fast into her lungs. There are cameras everywhere. She knows they cannot share any words that won’t be used against them later, and anyway there is no time for that, either — the Victory Banquet begins in fifteen minutes.

“Blight,” she whispers. “I’m losing it. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

He pulls her close and presses something into her hands. “Come on. This’ll do.”

Johanna looks down at his little gift: an opaque prescription bottle with a few drab pills sitting at the bottom. All the label says is ‘For Pain’.

“What is this?” she says, annoyed. “Demerol, or something?”

“Keep it, Mason. Take one before we go to the Banquet.”

Only much later does she find out what Blight has given her: morphling. By the time she gets to Snow’s mansion, some of it has already kicked in. The world has turned woozy, sweet, infinitely forgiving; she can no longer remember what she is meant to be afraid of. She roams through the banquet in a fluid, pleasant haze while generous sponsors pull her into photographs. Flecks of light bob and scatter across her vision like sparks. Someone gives her a cup of wine, then some rolls stuffed with what seems to be a pomegranate-glazed salmon fillet. Just outside his line of vision, she watches as Blight bends over a table with his hair in his face, drinking from a tremendous mug of vodka. Trisha with her bright flaxen curls, playing cards.

Feeling dizzy with the noise of it all, Johanna pushes past the macabre mass of bodies toward the door where she can feel the cold draft washing over her face, and then — she supposes she must have blacked out or something, because time skews and she opens her eyes again in an entirely different room, with a stranger talking down at her.

“All alone at your own party, sweetheart?”

Johanna squints to bring the man in front of her better into focus. He is very pretty, in a charming, good-natured way. Bronzed hair, eyes like the surf. She knows she has seen him before, maybe on television, or in the queue at the minibar that's been set up at the party, but his name is unreachable behind the thick haze of morphling. 

“Mhm-hmm,” Johanna slurs, “You look a bit too young to be a sponsor, don’t you?”

He smiles. “Oh, I’m not a sponsor.”

“Well, then, what are you doing here at my party?” she replies petulantly.

He doesn’t respond but looks her up and down. He wets his lip just ever so slightly with his tongue. When he next speaks it is in a slow, languid drawl. “You’re on morphling.”

“Excuse me?” Johanna snaps.

“You should stop, sweetheart, before you get hooked. It’s a bad habit to start this early.”

“You should mind your own business,” says Johanna.

He chuckles. “Is that any way to talk to a fellow victor, Jo Mason?”

The familiar nickname pulls her clean out of morphling’s honeyed haze. She reels back, stunned, and in the sudden clarity of her withdrawal she recognises the face in front of her as that of Finnick Odair. Panem’s favourite prostitute.

“It’s you,” she says, a bit dumbly, and everything that has happened since the arena comes crashing back to Earth, “I — I —”

“Listen,” he murmurs, leaning in to bring his face close to the shell of her ear. Even here she has to concentrate to hear him at all over the noise. “I think I have an idea of what’s coming for you.”

Panic digs in and wedges right in her throat. She doesn't want the confirmation of Finnick Odair, too. “No, you don't!” Johanna jerks back, her voice shrill with horror before she feels the slap of his hand over her mouth. 

“Be quiet —” he hisses, “Don’t shout!”

“Are you mental?” her breaths are muffled against his palm. She is back in the arena again, heart slamming like pulp against her ribcage, nothing in her mind but the word run. The room swims; she scratches at his wrist but the morphling has made her attack slow and clumsy. 

Finnick swears under his breath. He looks a little sheepish and lets her go at once. “Sorry,” he raises his hands in surrender, “I forgot you just came out of there. You’re not in the Hunger Games anymore, alright? I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Whatever. It’s fine,” Johanna replies blandly, breathless. She feels suddenly naked without the comfort of her axe. “What were you going to tell me, anyway?”

Finnick looks at her long and hard, and she has the feeling that he is trying to determine how much truth she can take in her current morphling-ridden, near-psychotic state. He grabs her wrist. “It’s too noisy,” he tells her, “Let’s go outside.”

In hindsight, it is a bit ironic — the victor sneaking out of her own party. He takes her through hallways saturated with the smell of white roses, up the stairs and out onto the terrace. She hopes it is not unusual for two victors to talk to each other, because she doesn’t want Snow to pay her any more attention than he already has.

The morphling, she finds, has carried her through the majority of the Victory Banquet. It seems to be five or six o’clock in the morning. The sky spreads all fire above them, a burnt sienna. Everything is so silent out here. The music and chatter of the party sound like they are miles and miles away.

Finnick pulls a little plastic bag from his pockets and tips its contents onto his palm: two cigarettes rolled and packed with weed. He pinches one in between his teeth, looking every bit the Golden Capitol Boy they sell on TV as the world splits apart from end to end to pour its fire down upon him. He has a habit of talking to people as if he's known them for years, and perhaps that makes sense, because he has to play to his Capitol lovers in as short a time as a single evening.

“Can I have one?” Johanna asks, eyeing his bag. It’s a bit shameless of her, but she doesn’t care. She gets the feeling that victors typically live by a different set of social rules.

He makes a noise with his tongue and smirks. “Bad habits, sweetheart.” But he passes her the second cigarette anyway and she plucks it into her mouth. There are some Capitol children playing on the streets down below, silhouetted in black against the salmon-coloured sky. Their shouts and laughter have an insane quality at this distance. Beside her, he strikes a light, a small sun cupped in his hand. Johanna looks at it and imagines her own body scorching; the fated finale — extinction, inevitability. It is what she has come so close to in that arena and what time, with every heartbeat and in every moment of her life, has been slowly working toward: the death that she has carried in herself from the very beginning, from her very first breath. Finnick leans down toward her, so close that she can smell his tobacco, the faint brine in his hair. He lights his cigarette first, then angles it toward hers.

“What are you —”

“Hold still,” he murmurs. He tips his cigarette forward and touches the glowing end of his to hers. Fire kisses and the tip catches. She breathes the sticky rot into her lungs and then her cigarette comes to life.

“I have a feeling that many things will be asked of you, Jo Mason,” he says in a low voice. “Panem loves you. I think, as much as it loved me.”

She takes a drag out of her paper delight. The weed, combined with the morphling already floating in her system, makes her dreamy and light-headed. She is surprised to find that she doesn’t feel the same panic at his words as she did before. “Snow mentioned... But I was hoping that maybe I was just being paranoid, I don’t know. I’m nothing like you, Finnick.”

“You’re not being paranoid,” he admits, “They like different kinds of beautiful. You are vicious, and everyone can see that you’re very pretty. My patrons all love you.”

“What, scared I’ll steal your business?” she jokes, but it lands awkwardly.

He gives her an odd look. The smile that meets her is crooked at the edges and full of fatigue. “No,” he says, “I worry that you won't make it easy on yourself.”

She doesn’t understand. “What do you mean?”

“Do you know what happened to Haymitch Abernathy?” says Finnick instead, and she shakes her head. “He was a problem to the president and his whole family died. His girlfriend, as well.”

He doesn’t dare to say the word killed, even in the relative privacy of the terrace, but Johanna understands the implications anyway. She feels her heart jumping to lodge right in her throat. “What?”

“It was an accident, apparently,” he replies, blowing out a cloud of smoke. “Nobody wants to be sold, Jo. But sometimes you don’t get much choice. That’s why I do what I do.”

They have taken everything away from her — everything but her body, which should be hers alone. Now they want to take that away from her, too. “Well, what am I supposed to do?”

“You have to say yes,” he says, “You survived the arena, didn’t you? If I’ve learned anything from your Games… It’s that you can do anything if you set your mind to it.”

“But that’s different!” she retaliates, “I told you I’m not like you, Finnick. I can’t just fake a smile and open my legs for someone who — by the way — probably tried to bet on my death!”

“I don’t know,” says Finnick abruptly, “I’m sorry I can’t give you a better answer. But I needed to warn you — it’s why I came here at all." He gives her a crooked smile that she's sure has its own share of secrets and broken hearts. "We did what we had to in that arena. This is no different... We just have to make the best of what we’ve got.”

His placid philosophy makes her angry. He has stunned her. Putting the cigarette out on her bare arm, Johanna pushes her way out of the terrace. Pain burns up her arm. 

“Jo —” comes Finnick’s voice, and she doesn’t turn around. “Johanna!”

The doors slam behind her. She has re-entered the hellish existence of Capitol life: inside, there are still people everywhere, heads thrown back and howling with laughter. Flutes of champagne lie bubbling and wasted on tables.

Everything is the same as before. She thinks that maybe she misunderstood him, that maybe Finnick is projecting his own nightmare onto her, that maybe Snow only wants her loyalty and not her body after all. She has none of Finnick Odair's extraordinary beauty, and anyway, if they wanted her to be a whore, somebody would have come and gotten her already. Somebody would —

“Miss Mason?” someone’s sugar-sweet voice comes drifting into her ear. She turns. “The president is asking for you. Now, if you please.”

Her stomach drops so fast she thinks she might be sick.

“Ok,” she answers flatly. She had thought there might be more time to buy, but of course, there isn’t. False hope deflates in her stomach. She hides her face in her hands and breathes in, trying to collect herself. As much as she despises being told what to do, she would do anything to protect her sister, her ma and pa. To keep them alive.

“Miss Mason, the president says you must —”

“I said I’m going!” she snaps. She turns her pockets inside out and finds the prescription bottle Blight gave her. There are three doses left — little white pills that she pours straight onto her palm and takes with sparkling water. The effect is slow at first, and then it crashes into her full swing, until she feels like she is wading through the dark, honeyed waters of a dream. 

She stumbles along the hallways with the steering help of the assistant, colliding with walls and then fixing her gait like a blind drunk. When she looks up, she meets the ocean eyes of Finnick Odair, who must have come in just after her. He stares at the empty pill bottle in her hand, her half-wasted look which can only be the accumulation of all her bad habits, and seems astonished at the life she has so easily forfeited to darkness. But he is only a boy with the charm of a devil, and Johanna would be a fool to believe he could save her from anything at all.

The president’s office is a large, beautiful room, airy and white, with a high vaulted ceiling and roses everywhere — on his desk, on the table, in the windowsills. White roses, whose fragrance sickens Johanna and makes her head spin. She drags herself to a chair and collapses there, mind buzzing with the aftereffects of morphling.

Snow is sitting in an armchair just across from her, and through the haze of drugs, his gaze has the added quality of being almost kind. “You look a bit sick, Miss Mason. Are you alright?”

Johanna tips her head back and stares down at him through lidded, sparkling eyes. “I’ve just had a little bit too much to drink, Mr President.” 

He arches his eyebrows — deep, condescending — and looks at her sluggish movements with amusement. He lifts a hand and an Avox woman brings a tray of water to the table. “Yes, Capitol life can be such an adjustment from what you had in District Seven. Do you miss home, Miss Mason? How is that sister of yours? Hope, isn’t it?”

Her sister’s name in his mouth is so out of place that it turns her stomach. Her lips open and close on unformed words, the whole room shrinking, and if she hadn’t had the desk to prop her up she might have gone over. “Um,” she hears herself say, “she’s fine. I’m fine here.”

“I’m glad,” Snow replies, and Johanna realises with a creeping sense of dread that despite the illusion of this being a natural and cordial conversation, he is in reality leading her by circumlocution to the same threat over and over again. Her family. “Now, I believe it is best if we are honest with one another, so that we might be able to come to a happy resolution. Shall we discuss what comes next?”

If this is what Finnick has warned her about, she knows exactly where the discussion will go. “What did you have in mind, sir?”

He steeples his hands below his chin and plucks a rose from the vase at his table, playing with it between his fingers. The smell of it is pungent, and she supposes that it must be genetically enhanced because no real rose reeks like that.

“You are a beloved victor, Miss Mason,” he says, “Many citizens of Panem have asked for the pleasure of your company. Well, you are aware of the roles Cashmere and Gloss play in the Capitol — or perhaps Finnick Odair’s, I am sure?"

“Yes,” Johanna breathes. Her mouth moves of its own accord, and she feels herself operating on arena logic again, that one-track focus that allowed her to confront things one step at a time, one foot in front of the other until she got where she wanted.

“Then you understand," he continues, "Mr Odair has been exemplary. He has been excellent in his attention, and he has brought great joy to many important people. In return, he is able to go home to his district every year where his loved ones remain quite safe.” He smiles, “it is one of the great honours of victory. You see, certain citizens of the Capitol prefer a more intimate knowledge of their victors.”

”Prostitution,” she spits out.

”Just so,” he says pleasantly.

“I don’t think…” she feels herself grabbing weakly at her final hope, “I don’t think I would be very good company, sir. I am not as charming as him. I would be…”

“Don’t be afraid,” reassures Snow gently, “Panem is quite taken with who you are. You needn’t pretend to be anything other than that.” He pauses to pour himself a glass of water. “Given that you are over sixteen, it seems practical to begin immediately.” He peers at her over the rim of his glass, gaze cold and shining. “Naturally, your popularity is greatest while the games are still recent, therefore we must make the most of it. As it happens, your first meeting has already been arranged for tonight.” He sets the glass back onto the table. “The gentleman has paid rather substantial sums to ensure he is your first… ah, shall we say, lover.”

“Tonight?” Johanna blurts out. “I wasn’t —” she starts shrilly, then clamps her jaw shut. She cannot say the rest of the sentence without sounding like a child. I wasn’t ready! She wants to protest, but she knows she will just embarrass herself further. 

"Ready or not," Snow says, as if he has read her mind, "you must understand that a victor's happiness is a matter of incentives. Must I make myself clearer? Your parents," he continues conversationally, though his voice has cooled with irritation and the words that slide out from his puffed-up lips are aimed mercilessly for her heart. "Garrick and Hazel Mason, if I recall correctly. Them I can easily kill off if we cannot reach a pleasant agreement. And your sister Hope... She must be nineteen now?"

Johanna clenches her jaw. "Yes," she interrupts rudely, "I understand completely."

"Excellent." Snow says, "now, Miss Mason, make sure you do not fall short." His calmness harrows her. "You shouldn't need to worry about your family, as long as we continue to understand one another."

She stretches her lips and forces a smile, though it feels stiff on her face. There are a thousand landmarks between her neck and thighs which will be touched, and that, she understands now, is the real victory tour to which she must capitulate.

After her discussion with the president, she returns numbly to her assigned suite on the Training Centre’s seventh floor. On her bed is a dress with a tag that says ‘Johanna Mason’ — a pale pistachio-green one that is strapless and practically backless, with a long slit down her leg that leads nearly all the way up her thigh. She isn’t sure where Blight is, or even Finnick now, but she doesn’t think she wants company anyway. Everything seems to have happened all at once, and in the aftermath of it Johanna feels as though she has been left behind, that her soul has somehow departed from her body to set off towards a dark and unknown place. For many hours she walks up and down the length of her room in a half-dreaming state, trying not to imagine her family’s corpses piled one on top of the other like manure outside of her house in District Seven, flies clustering at the corners of their eyes, Snow’s favourite parting gift.

There are so many things that she doesn’t want to think about, but they keep coming back to her in compulsive flashes: the twelve-year-old in the arena with her face split open from Johanna’s fists, Finnick Odair’s horrible warnings, the girl from Two with her tendons hanging loose from her neck, her ma and pa, Hope, Hope, fingertips shoved between her legs as she screams and screams and screams. Everything is happening so fast that she feels like she can't breathe. The hours blur into one another, until the light outside the window dims and turns the colour of blood-red. She loses track of how many times she crosses the room. Her feet know the way better than her mind does: window to door, door to bed, bed to mirror, over and over. She imagines her sister's hair, light brown tangled curls that turn a lovely shade of oatmeal in the morning light, and then her ma's dimpled smile, little memories that are so warm and ordinary and impossible to reach now. She tries to remind herself that she will be back home tomorrow, that if all goes well, Hope will be waiting with her parents at Seven's town square alive and well. Alive and well. The thought is sour under her tongue.

A knock sounds outside of her door like the discordant clang of a death knell.

The man who has bought her girlhood tonight is sixtyish, pasty, bald, sneering. She can’t remember his name or his Capitol job from when he introduced himself — maybe a Julius or Julion or something like that — but the vulgar look in his eyes as they ride together in the car all the way to his house is unforgettable. She is shaking when he shoves her through the door of his home, straight into the bedroom where the bed lies with its soft plush blankets, still talking his own head off.

Everything smells like daisies. She slants her gaze up and tries to imagine herself someplace else: the meadows in District Seven where she used to go when she wanted to skip school, secret gardens she invents now in her head, magic and silvery fairies and the sorts of things she used to read about in the books on Mama's shelf —

“Relax, girl,” her captor croons, fingers crawling up her neck to unbutton the front of her green dress. Vile breathing. Panting. Words that drag on for seconds or years. “I have waited so long… Paid so much for this… You don’t know what I felt when I saw you on that TV. Shivering in a tree, then hacking at Two’s neck. Looking so pretty…”

She feels his warm breath on the nape of her neck. He takes her dress off quickly, and soon, almost before she knows it, she is standing naked before this man, feeling the well of tears press at the back of her eyes.

Her virginity for her family’s safety. She has a terrible craving for morphling again, just a harmless, homey little vice to get her through this, until it is all over. She pictures herself above the clouds as her captor puts his hands on either side of her face and kisses her, on the eyelids, on the mouth, on the place at her temple where her olive-coloured skin grades into brown hair. 

“Can you keep a secret?” He murmurs into her ear. She nods in response.

”I think I’m in love with you,” he runs his fingers along her jaw lovingly, lovingly, and then with a sudden hunger slams her against the side of the bed, where she goes sprawling. The pain of this attack breaks her out of the foolish little dream she has constructed for herself and puts her right back into the arena, Two's nasty grin as she knocks her down onto her face, the last brawl before triumph the last passage back home the acrid-smelling breath on her neck. She lets out a yell and reaches sideward on instinct only to find air instead of the comfort of her axe. What have things come to? What has she submitted herself to? Hands come up to grab at her ankles, her shoulders, the sides of her waist. He spits down at her and a little gobbet of his white phlegm lands on her inner thigh, missing the bullseye that is the gaping entrance to her virginhood. 

She tries to smile. She knows she needs to be a good girl, a good sport. Sweet chuckles in the dark and soft brown hair splayed across the pale column of her neck. It is such a complete inversion of all that she is, all that she stands for, that it kills her. The sight of her submission seems to please her captor, and he falls onto her with a groan, babbling mumbling, rocking back and forth against her chest.

Posters; President Snow's still face framed on the wall watching them like some kind of Big Brother; dried daisies in a champagne flute; the demonic, flashing red of the man's digital clockface on his nightstand.

21:06.

It's alright. It's alright if he is just on top of her like this, him and her separated by a little air pocket, because he hasn't entered her yet and if they stay like this until the hour is up she might just be ok. She thinks she might be able to handle this after all, but her submission has also made him bold.

After a moment of peace he seems to make up his mind and lunges forward to push her against the wall. His large butcher's hands around her throat, kneecaps slamming into her spine. All of a sudden there is a rush of motion as she works her sore mouth, trying to form the one word that has been firing up inside of her — Please. Everything hazy and terrifying and painful, the slap-slap-slap of skin upon skin as he drives himself against her. She doesn’t remember much of the next part, but through the feverish haze of oxygen deprivation she feels her body moving on its own like it’s still in the arena, fist swinging clumsily out and up, the same motion that had killed the twelve-year-old in the games, and she hears a crack, a shout — sudden silence — and without thinking Johanna gets to her feet, grabs her dress and scrambles out of the house, sobbing so hard she feels like she might die. Has the hit been fatal?

The world outside is dark again, rainy. It is like waking up from a nightmare to find herself in a worse nightmare; she clutches her clothes to her chest and runs, rounding corners and alleys before the terrible realisation dawns on her that she doesn't know where she is. For a minute she just stands there under the pouring rain, in the middle of strange shapes and unfamiliar shadows, people crowding in around her like apparitions. Everything thunder-struck. How has the weather changed so suddenly and violently from its peaceful sienna of just this morning? Nothing around her gives her any clue of her whereabouts and she wonders if she is dead. She looks up at the sky. It feels like her innards are being replaced by a black hole somehow, and she feels so dizzy she thinks she might drop where she stands.

I need to find cover, she thinks blandly, a bit emptily, like this is a new set of Hunger Games and she is a new tribute. A processed sort of calm falls over her and she just knows she needs to put her dress back on again because if she doesn't have some sort of clothing on she will get hypothermia, so she does just that. She finds herself a little nook beside a trash bin and hides there. The cardboard she's made a bed of is rocking a little on a puddle of rainwater, so she puts her right foot out on the ground to steady it.

Exhausted and sick to her stomach, Johanna slumps sideways into the trash and passes out, but throughout this light and disturbed sleep she has a feeling that something has happened and something even more horrible will happen if only she can wake up and remember it. Then she really does remember — the man on the floor after her fist has met his skull, Snow's terrible threats, her family — and the shock of it wakes her up. Her thoughts fire up again and she can't seem to breathe enough to get air into her lungs. Why did she do that? Why couldn’t she have just tolerated it, just closed her eyes and let it be over? Why did she have to go and mess up everything? Everything is clear to her now: she has sentenced her family to death. Her family is going to die.

She hails a cab to take her back to the Training Centre and then her body takes her up four flights of stairs — and she finds herself astonishingly at the door of Finnick Odair, knocking at it loudly. Sharp pains ricochet through her head. The door opens to his familiar face and nausea swells in her stomach like a great green wave, trembling at the crest, rolling — and then she pukes right at his feet. 

“S-Sorry,” she rasps through her sobs, “I’m so sorry.”

“What the hell, Johanna,” comes Finnick’s voice. He grabs her shoulders to steady her as she doubles over to retch again with a miserable moan. Then he pulls her inside before kicking the door closed behind them.

“He’s going to kill my family,” she says hoarsely, and she can’t seem to stay still. “He’s going to kill my family. He’s going to kill my family. He’s going to kill my family —”

Her teeth chatter and she’s pacing around his room with rainwater dripping from her hair, tears in the cupped crimson of her fingers. Her dress is all ripped up on her body, but she doesn’t really care about modesty anymore, with everything that has happened and will happen. “I killed him,” she whispers, wiping her mouth with her bare arm, “I think I killed him. Oh my god, I killed him.”

“Johanna, who?” Finnick says urgently. He is in his bathrobe, his hair damp and she guesses that he just hopped out of the shower. 

“My first patron,” she answers, “I don’t know but I heard a noise, or something, I just hit him but I didn’t mean to! I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Okay,” he says calmly, “Okay. Slow down, slow down. Sit down for a while.” He eases her onto the sofa and she watches as he circles her with a sheet and begins to knot the ends together, deft fingers that wrap around the fabric like spiders’ legs. The repetitive motions of it are calming and she wonders vaguely about his ocean childhood, the wauling of gulls and the smell of salt. She imagines him making her a net.

“It’ll be fine, right? Everything will be alright.” She whispers. She needs him to say yes, that everything is fine and her family will be safe. His mouth slims to a grim line and she feels the assault of tears pushing up her nose again, her bottom lip trembling.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he says instead.

“Well fuck that!” she screams, suddenly overcome by everything that has happened in the past two days. She pushes Finnick off her and storms into the bathroom in a daze where she soaps her legs at the edge of the tub until they are raw and bloody. There are points of shame all over her body, and she has that cold sensation people often get when they have lied to themselves. “I don’t fucking care about being right or innocent or good or whatever shit people come up with to make themselves feel better! I just want — I just —”

Finnick has come in after her, turning the faucet down slowly to a trickle. He looks a little out of his depth, but he is a victor and knows exactly when to stop talking. He seems to have thought better of his tactic, leaning down toward her from behind her hunched shoulders. "Shhh," he whispers, "shhh, Jo, it'll be alright."

But he is such a wonderful, charming liar. Not like her at all, and she hates him for it. She tips forward and he catches her before she can slide off the tub, pulling her into his chest, sheet and all. “When are they gonna do it?” She whispers into the fluff of his robe. She will go home tomorrow to District Seven, and she doesn’t know if she will see her family again. She doesn’t know if she wants to, if it’s just going to be a ticking time bomb.

“I don’t know,” says Finnick, “But we’ll stay in touch, alright? I’ll call you on your home phone in Victors' Village.”

That, of all things, gets to her. Her throat tightens and she presses her knuckles to her mouth, breathing hard until the feeling passes. 

He holds her close as they sit against the white cast-iron of the bathtub, and soon she falls into a tormented half-dreaming state beside this victor from District Four, whom she barely knows, his heartbeat humming against her ear. Even here, she thinks as a wave of sleep rolls horribly over her, everything smells faintly of blood and white roses.

It is a more obdurate self that crawls from Finnick’s arms in the early morning to sink into a bathtub of cold water. She can see that he is still dreaming — talking in his sleep, bronzed hair sweaty against his forehead, wading through soft blue childhood memories she will never reach. She knows the truth is that they know each other only very little, that they are just two lonely people in an indifferent city and what they share is not friendship, really, but rather a convenient pact of some kind, a be-here-for-me-and-I’ll-be-there-for-you sort of thing. Johanna doesn’t feel as embarrassed as she had expected to when she thinks about last night, but she honestly doesn’t think she can feel anything anymore. 

A cold draft blows in from the window. She sees the bathroom through a detached kind of aerial view, watching a girl with her own face sit with her knees pulled up in a tub of water. She thinks she is crying a little bit, but the sobs are regular and completely mechanical; there is no reason for them, they have nothing to do with her. Outside the sky is severe, completely unreal, swollen with heavy clouds and coloured the charcoal gray that always forebodes thunder and storm. She sits there in the tub for half an hour, maybe an hour, until the water goes cold. Then she reaches down and lets the bath empty, watching it spiral down and down the drain into the white-blank hum of Capitol pipes. She leaves Finnick’s room at six o’clock, before he ever wakes up.

Johanna packs and exits the Training Centre at noon. Blight is there when she arrives at the train stop, and he looks surprised at how quickly her appearance has degraded — the wet kelp hair, black holes for eyes, skin all pale and clammy. She looks like hell and she knows it well. She doesn’t need his commiseration, his condescending condolence, which is the most grotesque thing anyone can ever receive in their life. Johanna crosses her arms.

“Well?” she bites.

“Well, what?” says Blight. “What happened to you, Mason?”

She has so much to tell him but doesn’t know what to say. It is a horrible thing to feel so alone. Nobody knows about the patron last night except Finnick Odair and she doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, even though Blight of all people deserves the truth. Instead, she grimaces and grits out, “It’s none of your business.”

“Yes, it is,” he counters, “I’m your mentor.”

“So?” she says spitefully, “The games are over.”

He looks at her for a long time. She supposes it is his odd blindness to the pretense of social politeness that keeps him standing there for what seems like forever, staring her down. For all of his intimate kindness and understanding, what exists between them has never quite been a relationship of equals but something more along the lines of paternal oversight. It used to comfort her, this sense of being looked after, but somewhere overnight her spirit has made a crossing and not come back, or it has been snatched up and stolen, and she is surprised to find that the things that once brought her comfort no longer do.

“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s going on,” Blight says, “Do you remember what I told you? Whatever has happened here in the Capitol, you can’t forget who you are.”

But there is nothing left of her anymore. She has been hammered through with so much fear and rage and instinct and bloodthirst that the old Jo Mason seems to have suffocated underneath it all. Johanna stares at him blankly and clenches her fists if only just to piss him off. “And who is that?”

She pushes past Blight into the train and locks herself into the room that has her name stuck on a plaque. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror; the light from the window glints momentarily in her eyes, making them strange, crazed, luminous killer eyes that seem to make a mockery of the girl she has outgrown. In the distance there is a long, dry rumble. Thunder.

All night the rain falls. Sullen and soft and gray, dripping from the rooftop of her compartment. Johanna listens to it, eyes bleary, as the train moves along the rail and rocks her into a state of numb, listless drifting. She thinks about Jo Mason of District Seven, of her ma and pa and of Hope, and they are so stunningly alive in her mind that she almost forgets about President Snow’s threats, about her fists swinging up to meet the man’s jaw with the same force that had killed the twelve-year-old in the arena. She starts crying again sometime past midnight, after Blight’s relentless knocks at her door go unanswered. There are some things that are worse than grief, such as the anticipation of it. She isn’t sure whether Snow has found the man’s body yet, whether the man is even dead, or whether she is only catastrophising — whether her family will be spared. She feels horrible about ignoring Blight, but how can she explain what she has done? And even if she could, would he understand? Would anyone? She had gone to Finnick the night before because he, at least, had known what it felt like to have his body loved and shoved and used and played with; but she’s certain that even he doesn’t fully understand why she did what she did — her terrible, latent impulse to kill, so she could stop it, stop everything she has ever been forced to do. Suddenly cold with loneliness, Johanna hugs her knees to her chest and rocks herself into another dreadful interval of dissociative calm. The future seems to stretch out bleak and endless before her.

The next time she sees Blight, they are pulling into the foggy outskirts of District Seven. The rain has stopped, but the gloom left in its place — the drizzle and damp — has made the world light and empty, unpeopled somehow, like she is coming back to a ghost-town, or maybe a series of isolated memories from a former life. Blight is sitting in front of the window with an ash tray in front of him, his chin propped in his hand and a morphling cigarette burning low between his fingers. She wants so badly to tell him that she’s sorry, that she can’t explain, because to explain would mean making everything that has happened between her games and her return home real. She wants to tell him that she doesn’t know who she is anymore, but that wouldn’t be fair on his part. So they just sit there in silence, watching the District Seven platform rise up around them, thick with cameras. An Avox brings them pea soup for lunch, and a basket of warm toasted wholemeal bread. As they get closer to the train stop, a sense of dread punches up from her stomach and lodges right in her throat, breaking her clean out of her hypnosis. Johanna cranes her head to watch the crowd outside the window, eyes flitting past each person’s shape in a last-ditch effort to locate her sister’s familiar face. 

“You don’t have to tell me anything, Mason,” comes Blight’s rough faraway voice, “But when we get home… Just come over if you need a hand, ok?”

She looks at him finally, and only then does she realise that she is trembling all over. A sour feeling pushes up her nose as she processes his words, his tenderness despite everything, and the disbelief that he would still want to be here for her is immense. But before she can say anything she is quickly ushered out of the door, into the awaiting arms of the crowd.

The wet grass squishes beneath her feet with every step she takes. The air is familiar with the smell of home, of smoke and myrtle and rain. Cameras flash and their lights are blinding. Everything everywhere all at once —

“Johanna Mason of District Seven!” a voice comes from her left, booming from behind a megaphone. There is suddenly a riot of microphones in her face. A Capitol reporter shouts: “How do you feel, winning the Hunger Games?”

“... your very own house in Victors’ Village!”

“... sawed off Tamsin’s neck in the showdown, is that right?”

Johanna runs a hand over her face, her upper lip glistening with sweat and brows furrowed in consternation. Blight is climbing out of the train after her and the crowd swarms him too, but they will take him away soon, she knows, back to his house in the village, and she will be left to face them alone. Flashing lights everywhere.

“Leave me be,” she mutters uselessly. The black snout of a camera is pushed straight into her face and all of a sudden she is overwhelmed by it all. She snarls and lashes out with knuckles and elbows, scrabbling the equipment down into the mud, howling, biting, gauging. Its Capitol owner flails backward before Johanna bares her teeth and hauls him up by the scruff with murder in her eyes. He shrinks at the sight of her black anger, her dull savagery and fiercely grinding jaw. They have all forgotten that she has just come out of the arena, that she has killed children and probably a grown man with her bare hands and that she can do it again no problem. She pitches him back into the hungry mob, pushes past the cameras, the people upon people upon people, and her boots grind down onto the grass as she breaks into a frenzied run.

“Hope!” Johanna screams, “Hope! Hope!”

“Oh, Jo!” A tuft of light brown hair. Someone tackles her backward and she is stunned by the weight of her sister, alive and warm and well, the comfort of something that has not been touched by Capitol hands.

“You’re alive,” Johanna sobs, “I can’t believe it, Hope, you’re alive!”

“Of course I am,” answers her sister, “Why would I be dead? I’ve been waiting for you to come home for ages, Jo —”

“— Johanna, look this way!”

“Sisters meet again —”

Hope swings back and around, flashing her bright eyes at the reporters that have swarmed up around them. “She just got home,” she shouts, “Leave her alone!” She has always been this bright laughing force of a girl, nineteen and radiant, furious, sweet. They’ve had their fair share of fights and insults, but Johanna’s certain that Hope would have volunteered for her if she had been under eighteen at the time and in the running for the Reaping. There is almost nothing that they wouldn’t do for each other, in the end. 

She lets Hope herd her away from the train, the sweaty mass of bodies, toward the dull green District truck that will take them both away from everything and to their new home in Victors’ Village, where they will reunite with Blight.

“Where’s Ma and Pa?” Johanna asks, but she has a good feeling, now that she has seen for herself that Hope is alive, so full of life. Maybe Snow has decided to spare her family. Maybe the man has not died.

“They’re waiting at home,” says Hope. “Chill out, Jo. Everything’s fine. But wow.” She squints at her. “You look really beat.”

“Thanks,” Johanna replies dryly, but she is smiling — she can’t stop smiling. Her heart skips a few beats and for a moment, fool that she is, everything seems to tilt away from the bleak future she had imagined back on the train and in the direction of a clear optimism, an upwards slope. Could it be that within the hour, she might feel Ma’s arms around her, put on a spare pair of shorts from Pa’s drawers, lie back like a starfish with her sister beside her as they watch the house lamps turn on one by one in the evening light? Can there be unconditional happiness again for a miserable girl like her?

She reaches up on tiptoes and rolls down the window of the truck, feels the breeze in her hair and smells the petrichor from Seven's wet earth.

“I watched it every day, you know,” says Hope, “Mama tried to make me sleep but I couldn’t. I told you you’d win. Nobody’s as stubborn as you when it comes to getting the things you want. You can be such a bitch when you want to.”

“Well, that’s not my fault,” Johanna tips her mouth up into a lopsided kind of smirk, “You taught me everything I needed to know about being bitchy, didn’t you, brainless?”

“That’s not true!” Hope protests, but then seems to think better of it and crosses her arms. She smiles smugly, “Whatever. I know you missed me.”

It is unusual to be chatting with her sister this way, as if everything is back to what it was before — but there are things that, once she has touched them, once they have touched her, she can never throw off, no matter how much she scrubs at herself. In her mind remains Snow’s filthy rose stench, the moments she came close to death back in the arena — like later on, when the Eleven boy, with his warm, meaty smell, reached furiously for her, his eyes flashing with the urge to kill her simply because he could. Images spreading like bloodstains.

“Want me to tell you about what’s happened at home?” says Hope suddenly. 

Johanna blinks, dragged back from the crawling shallows of memory. The truck jolts over a rut in the road. Wet trees, gray sky. “Sure,” she says, “Tell me everything.”

“Boxer had puppies!” Hope replies, “Six of them, actually.”

She has forgotten about Boxer, about most of the things that used to be in her life, really. It is the little stray terrier dog that sometimes comes by the back door. Pa always used to feed it whenever he had enough food left for an extra mouth. 

“Six?” she confirms.

“Six,” Hope grins. “Mini-Boxers. Ain’t they cute? Mama says we can’t keep any, but Papa’s already building a hut for them out back, so you tell me how that’s supposed to work.” She rolls her eyes. “We’ll probably end up over there while we pack anyway. You could even put in your own two cents. Mama thinks you hung the moon, I’m sure she’d do whatever you want." She jerks a thumb toward town. "Also, the sawmill’s been running double shifts because the Peacekeepers ordered a bunch more lumber for some new project up by the square. Nobody’s got a clue what it is yet, but I bet it’s nothing good if they’re rushing it this hard.”

“So why the rush?”

“I dunno. You can’t ask any questions when there are Peacekeepers around, you know. They’ll shoot you or hang you or something.”

“Hope!” Johanna hisses, “You can’t joke about stuff like that anymore.”

Her sister’s lips press together into a thin line. “I’m just saying.”

The road narrows as they near Victors’ Village, which stands white and grim as a morgue in the distance.  All the lawns are unkempt and overrun with quackgrass. A sign at the front reads in printed script, Enforcement Ahead. The village is skeletal, because District Seven hasn’t had many victors — so small that Johanna thinks she could light a cigarette as she drives in and be someplace else before she blows her first drag out of the window. This place is infested with Peacekeepers, so naturally everyone rushes past here in District Seven, either on their way in or to get the hell out.

“You said Ma and Pa were waiting?” Johanna asks.

“Yes. Peacekeepers came earlier and told them to head over here before we arrived so we could all come in together as a family. It looks better for the cameras, I reckon.”

They pass Blight’s house and then roll to a stop in front of a large mansion furred with ivy. It is an austere building with snowy-white spires and windows looking into even more whitewashed rooms; in the trembling distance there are Seven’s vaporous mountains, fir trees planted at regular intervals on both sides of the gusty road. 

“Mama! Papa!” Hope grins, jumping off the truck and running through the front door of their new home without even bothering to kick off her shoes. She has left a thick trail of muddy footprints into the pristine white Capitol-built foyer, and Johanna feels a prick of gratification at the thought. It is the pettiest kind of rebellion, but it serves them right.

“Ma?” Johanna yells, following her sister into the house. She looks around the room, at the empty coatrack, the tick-tick-tick of the white Grandfather Clock. Two identical white armchairs face each other across a low glass table. She feels her heart thudding down to her guts. “Mama?”

But no answer comes: there is nobody home.

When Johanna was little, her greatest fear was that one day her parents would not come home from work. Seven’s roads could be remote at times, gusty and black and perilous, particularly at night or after a storm. There were plenty of stories of people dying on the job, trees falling the wrong way or desperate pickpockets wrestling them into dark backroads and stabbing them for their money. To think of something happening to her parents was especially frightening because she was so deathly aware, even from a young age, that there was no possible way for her to go on living if they were gone. Consequently, she was eager to learn how to swing an axe and start working as soon as she could, to become independent before the worst could happen. 

Papa humoured this idea as best he could. When she was seven, he brought her out into the forest after dark. She doesn’t remember much of that night except a certain gray, cold, rain-shrouded mood, though in recollection it glimmers with a sort of magical surrealism. The sky was wild with silver stars, and the trees were slim and shadowy, taller than they ever were during the day. Papa dug his spade into softening soil and worked it loose with the heel of his boot. As a first lesson, he was trying to teach her and Hope how to plant a tree. 

A little reckless and full of herself, she tried to copy him immediately but the spade wobbled like a loose tooth and she nearly tipped over. 

“Easy there, lumberjack,” Papa teased, “You’ll take your own foot off and then your Ma will be crossed with me.”

Hope laughed at her. She was twirling in the rain. “She’s going to plant herself instead of the tree, Papa! She’s going to plant herself in the dirt.”

“No, I’m not!” Johanna said angrily. She was a quarrelous child, full of spite and petty thoughts but also an envious determination to prove people wrong. Hope, especially, because they were so close in age and always competing with each other.

“Yes, you are,” her sister retorted, “You nearly fell down with the little spruce. If you trip again we’ll be watering you.”

Papa smiled. “That wouldn’t be the worst thing. Might grow you a little taller, Jo.” He patted her on the shoulder and then turned to her sister. “Will you hand me the sapling, Hop?”

Hope did as she was told. He put the seed into the soil and they started to push dirt back into the hole. Johanna liked getting her hands dirty this way: to put her palms deep into the damp earth from which everything grew. 

A few years later, when she was stronger, he taught her how to fell a tree (“well, alright,” he said resignedly one evening, taking out two axes, one for himself and one for her. “I don’t know what your ma expects me to do, you might as well learn it sooner or later”). It was the first time she’d ever held an axe, and she was trying to rise to the vastness of the occasion despite the sense that the stakes were much too high for a girl like her. 

She was horrible the first time around, barely denting the trunk, but she was stubborn as hell even as a ten-year-old and when she failed something she would try again, not once, not twice, but twenty, thirty times, until she got it right. Papa’s advice was to never hesitate once you swing, and that was the thought she kept in her mind as she sliced down this trunk and then years later, too, when she sliced through Two’s neck in the arena. 

Odd, the things the mind holds onto. Memories that she is fated to replay again and again, over and over, for the rest of her life.

The house is empty. She checks every room, dropped back into the same panic that had inflamed her the night before in Finnick’s room. Snow has done something horrible to Ma and Pa, she knows. She’s so stupid to have ever thought otherwise. It is all her fault. If she’d been just a little more patient, let the man finish his job, accepted her life as a whore-girl for her lovers in the Capitol, kept her head down and her mouth shut and her legs open, then none of this would be happening.

“But they’re supposed to be back by now,” comes Hope’s voice, “They must have gone over to Blight’s, or maybe they were held up at the square and —”

“Hope,” Johanna says, surprised at the distance in her voice.

The minutes creep by with painful slowness. Not knowing what to do, they just sit there for a while watching the door, the clock on the shelf ticking towards some unseen doom. She can hear them both breathing, an awful noise — two sets of lungs eating at the room’s thin oxygen. 

“I’m sick of this,” says Hope. “Maybe something went wrong.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Johanna lies, “what could possibly go wrong?”

There is an ugly white roar in her ears. She tries to listen for Pa’s lopsided Frankenstein footsteps outside on the porch, or Ma’s smoker’s cough as she fumbles with the keys, but the mansion is dead and silent. She itches to go out and look for them, on the streets or even at their old neighbourhood near the woods, but she knows she needs to stay put because they’re supposed to meet here at their new house.

Unable to bear the waiting, Hope stands up after a moment and dials a number at the landline.

“Hello?” she says, in the sweet, bright, lilting voice she always uses when she’s speaking to someone she needs to charm, “Is Mrs Calder there? — Hi, Mrs Calder, it’s Hope Mason. I’m so sorry to call so late. My parents always stop by yours for supper, and we’re just — well, they haven’t come home yet.”

Johanna listens to the staticky rumble on the other side of the line. At her feet, cold bright sunlight pools in diluted amber.

“Oh. I see. Right — no, of course. Thank you. If you see them, will you please tell them to come over to Victors’ Village, the second they get the chance? Yes, sorry again for calling so late.”

Hope turns back and shakes her head. “They’re not there.” She says. She is trying to come up with some kind of reasonable solution to this, Johanna can tell, something that doesn’t involve the superstitious and morbid imaginings of their untimely deaths. “Maybe they ran into a friend and stopped a while, or Papa’s knee’s been bad lately, they probably had to sit down for a minute.”

“Yeah,” says Johanna. She wonders when she should break the news to her sister, that they might really be dead, murdered, because she did a number on the man who tried to rape her. But what a bitch she is, what a whore, what a curse, to have resigned not only herself but also her sister to a fate of her own making.

“This is stupid,” she says, going over to the landline herself, “is there a line for the mayor?”

“What are you calling the mayor for?” Hope replies swiftly.

“Because I’m sure he’s got the Peacekeepers on speed dial,” Johanna says, her fingers clammy as they grabbled for the plastic buttons. “They’ll know what happened.”

“Are you crazy?” says Hope, “You can’t just call the Peacekeepers, you —”

“Oh, don’t tell me what to do, brainless,” Johanna snaps. The line connects. A bored-sounding man with a flat District accent picks up as the representative for the mayor.

“Hello?”

“Hello, how are you.” Johanna replies, though the tone of her voice suggests that she is not really looking for an answer. “I wanted to ask if you knew of my parents’ whereabouts —”

“Sorry, miss,” comes the man’s polite and oddly casual voice, “We don’t intervene in domestic affairs.”

“This is Johanna Mason,” she says in hindsight, a little rudely. 

There is a scuffle on the other side of the line. “Oh. Well, alright, Miss Mason,” his voice is clearer now and more attentive, “I’m sorry about that. Could you please repeat the situation?”

Johanna squeezes her eyes shut. The power of her name makes her feel rather sick. “My parents haven’t returned home. They were meant to meet us at Victor’s Village hours ago.” She says, “Garrick and Hazel Mason are their names.”

“I see,” says the man, “I’d like to help you, but we’ve got no information on them at all.”

“I don’t give a shit what information you’ve got,” Johanna says irritably. “That’s your job, to go and get it.”

“Miss Mason, with all due respect —”

“With no respect,” Johanna cuts in coldly, “you will do your job now, please.” She switches the receiver from one ear to another impatiently. At the silence rasping from the other end of the line, she says, “Look. I’ll even lay it out for you, ok? Here’s what’s going to happen: you're going to send Peacekeepers down the road from the square to Victors' Village, and then you will check the woods, all the way to the east end of the district, and you will do that now.”

“Miss Mason —”

“Do you understand?”

“...Yes,” the man replies reluctantly, “I’ll dispatch a unit to check the roads immediately. We have kept your number and will give you a call back once we know.”

“Thanks.” She hangs up without waiting for a reply. 

Hope draws up behind her. “Feel better now?” she says sarcastically, “You raked him over the coals pretty good.”

Johanna turns away. She is not in a mood to talk — when she likes, she can be as mute and sulky as a child.

“Wait here,” she says to Hope instead, “I’ll be back in a minute.”

She makes her way to the kitchen. Like everything else in the house, it is white as snow — blank tiles that soak up the light, a door that leads out onto a tiny sun deck. Johanna fills a glass from the tap and bolts it, too much, too fast. She wonders if she should just go out and check the district herself, to hell with the mayor and his useless men, and she has just about made up her mind to do so when suddenly a knock sounds at the door. Scrambling, skidding to the door, she swings it open at the same time that Hope, elated, comes hurrying in behind her, but the faces that greet them are not those of their parents. There stands a pair of Peacekeepers in funerary black, with pistols squeezed snugly into their belts, and though not a word has yet been spoken, Johanna understands the instant she sees them that her life, as she knows it, is over.

“Mason Residence,” one says in confirmation.

She nods.

“We regret to inform you,” the other begins monotonously, “that Garrick and Hazel Mason were killed in a workplace incident this afternoon. A lumbering accident occurred and a tree fell unpredictably. There will be compensation transferred to your account as next of kin. Funerary arrangements will be managed over the course of the next several days.”

The words are empty of meaning when they reach her ears, but Hope makes a strange sound from behind her. The Peacekeepers seem nonplussed at her lack of reaction, her unwillingness to absorb what they are trying to say, and they open their mouths to announce once more that her parents are dead. But the truth is that this is merely confirmation of what she already suspects. She has known this since the night in Finnick’s room, so what shocks her now is not the death but the president’s audacity to pretend it was anything but an act of murder. Papa was the best there was at what he did. The thoughts hiss and spit in the muddy brown pits of her eyes, and she tastes blood where she has bitten into her gum. A filthy lie. Snow has not even killed off Ma and Pa like a man but has hidden it behind an accident like the fucking coward that he is.

“Get out,” she snarls at the Peacekeepers. “Get out of my house.” 

The guttural grit of her words frighten these men and they leave their paperwork on the wet porch blotted by rainwater. Hope is sniffling behind her, and Johanna wants to hurl her into the wall and shake her and demand how she can still let herself sound like a baby when their parents are gone. How she never seems to be independent at all, how this terrible world has not managed to make her hard or quarrelsome like it has for Johanna, how she can still be the slight and lovely girl that she is, whose hair smells like vanilla and who still wants to be tenderly comforted when bad things happen.

“They’re dead,” Johanna hisses, “They’re dead, Hope. Do you understand. They’re never going to come back.”

She grabs her coat and storms out of the house into the gloam. She has the mad, mad feeling that she is living in the past, in things she’s gone through before, that there is no difference between the past and the present, or at least the similarities are much bigger than the differences, but then what is she actually losing? She knocks on Blight’s door and then lets herself in, because he doesn’t seem to be home. Up the stairs, down the hall…

Johanna rattles through his closet, his drawers by the bedside table, hands shaking, trembling, and she finds a packet of white Morphling powder that she quickly spreads on the table. Kneeling down on the carpet like a supplicant to some sort of divine god, she snorts it up her nose and then collapses face-up staring at the spinning ceiling. Her nostrils are red and rabbity from the drug, burning, burning. She doesn’t know how long she stays there for but some time later a voice comes cutting panicky into her eardrums, making her wince.

“Fuck off,” she slurs, grumbling, turning on her side to cover her ears with her palms.

“Mason, Mason!” It’s Blight. His hands are all over her body, her chest, her face. “Hey — what the hell did you take?”

His face is like a sallow underwater moon up above her. It’s so funny that she can’t help but giggle. “Your stash,” she says thickly, “Don’t be greedy.”

He grabs a dirty cup of water from the washstand and forces it into her opened mouth, down her throat as her head lolls loosely against his shoulder. A lot of it dribbles down her chin and she wipes her face with the back of her hand. “Can you believe it,” she murmurs, “silly girl. The president killed my ma and pa because I didn't wanna be a slut.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” she giggles, “They said it was an accident. Like my papa has ever let a tree best him before!”

His voice is so close to her ear that she can feel the wind of his breath. “What did he make you do? Tell me what he’s done to you.”

“No,” she shoves at him weakly, “let go of me.”

But he doesn’t. “Where’s Hope?”

“She’s at the house, I guess,” says Johanna tartly, pulling a face, “She’s crying.”

“We need to go back,” he says, and she doesn’t understand the alarm in his voice, but he is a victor, too, like Finnick, and he knows how Snow works — it’s her parents now and then it will be her sister, next.

“Whatever,” Johanna rolls her eyes and then says casually, “I’m going to kill him one day.”

He doesn’t say anything to that but instead drags her out into the evening air before lifting her chin up and slapping her twice, in succession. “Get it together, Jo Mason,” he yells, “Come on!”

The sound whips through her skull and she stares at him, swaying a little, as the world wobbles back together.

“Your sister is by herself,” he says. Out here in the night air his implication is clear. She jolts back in shock, but he doesn’t let go of her shoulders yet. “Are you going to pass out?”

For the first time since that powder, whatever it had been, her thoughts come together in one hard, lucid line. 

“No,” she shakes her head quickly, “No, Blight. No.”

He lets her go and she wades back into the streets of Victors’ Village blind, past the copses of swollen trees in the dark, toward the skyline’s boulderous clouds. When she smashes through the front door of her new house, she has to squint to get used to the lighting again. Hope is there at the table, in front of what seems to be an almost-full bag of toffees, all the shade of a deep blood-red. A deadly coldness spreads in the centre of her chest, minty, like menthol, ripping her out of her drunken stupor.

“What is that?” Johanna whispers, stepping closer. Her voice is shaking. “Where did that come from?”

Hope looks up with tears in her eyes, her bottom lip trembling. “You’re back.”

“What is that?” repeats Johanna slowly.

“The Peacekeepers came and dropped it off. They said that Ma and Pa left it for us,” Hope mumbles, and she spills the contents onto her palm — nine perfect little hearts of red sugar. “I saved you some.”

“Fuck,” Johanna hisses, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck —”

She slams the bag down onto the table, digging through it until she finds a white card hidden at the bottom of the lining.

Congratulations, it reads. To you, Miss Mason, and to your ever-beloved family.

There are so many ways to murder a person, but the most gruesome is the slow act of poison. 

She cups a hand over Hope’s mouth. “Spit it out!” She pants, “Spit it out right now, Hope.”

“What are you doing?” says Hope, “What’s wrong with you?!”

“You think I’m crazy, do you? Bats in the belfry. Nobody listens to me!” Her voice is rising, high-pitched now like a banshee, “Oh, no, Hope, please, please,” desperation detonates in her chest and she collapses to her knees, clasping her hands together as if in prayer, “Please, please, please…”

“What are you doing?!” Hope says again, “I ate it already. It’s just —”

Johanna flips the card around so that her sister can see Snow’s distinctive sweet-as-death scrawl. 

“Oh, no,” Hope whispers, her hands coming up to her mouth as she begins to tremble.

Johanna lunges for the sink, fills it with water and then shoves it at her, sloshing. “Drink that and throw it up. Make yourself sick!”

“How? I already swallowed it!” Hope’s voice cracks, high and frightened in a way Johanna hasn’t heard since she was very little. “Jo —”

Johanna presses her fingers against the back of Hope’s tongue and she gags immediately, crying. 

“Again,” Johanna insists, her voice cracking. “Please. Please.”

But neither of them has had any food since Johanna arrived, because Ma and Pa had been missing so how could they? Nothing comes up except a thin dribble of bloody saliva. 

“Jo,” says Hope. “Do you know — Do you know how long it’ll take?”

“It’s going to be fine,” Johanna whispers, “It’s nothing. You’ll be fine.”

She paces around the room helplessly as Hope sits there and watches, and because she can’t deal with it anymore she goes to the landline again to dial Blight’s number. 

“Please pick up, please pick up…” she mutters to herself, rocking, and he does.

“Everything ok, Mason?”

“No,” blurts Johanna, the panicked words stuffed in her mouth, “He sent something, like, a bag of candy or whatever. My sister ate one and I tried to make her throw up but she’s not doing it. Nothing’s coming up.”

“Is she conscious?” Blight asks immediately.

“Yeah,” she says desperately, “She is. She looks fine. She’s very scared. Do you think you can tell what he’s put in it?”

“I don’t know. I’d like to have a look at the bag and figure it out, see if it’s got yew or anything, but knowing the Capitol it could be something we’ve never even heard of. I’ll come over,” says Blight, “Have you called the clinic?”

“Are you kidding? Who am I going to call?” Johanna asks, “I don’t know any doctors on their home phone and the place’s closed. Can’t you just come here?”

“Hang on,” he says, “I’m on my way.”

There is something diabolical about the ticking of the Grandfather Clock, and every time she looks up she finds herself staring into its pale and spasming face. It is past 1 o’clock in the morning and there is nothing to do. She imagines Ma and Pa in the kitchen, pulling a sweet apple pie from the oven — ghostly figures in the white refrigerator light — if only to calm herself down. And here, they are just a couple of kids in the dark — Hop and Jo — holding each other’s hands as they watch the clock haul itself in circles, over and over again, widening into the dreadful mouth of death.

The poisoning begins like pneumonia. A slow killing, with the usual symptoms of illness and repair: sniffling nose, sore throat, a hiccupy cough. They make trips to the clinic and the doctors send them home with painkillers just to keep them going for a while, which is what they do when the prognosis is especially bad. Another two weeks, they say, but Hope goes on living for the better part of the month.

“Must be the work of a loving family,” the doctor judges. 

That pleases Johanna, in a way. They don't see the days and nights she spends on her feet. Every few hours she feeds her sister spoonfuls of charcoal and Blight’s medicinal herbs, pacing until four o’clock in the morning, praying, praying. She sleeps senseless for one hour and then wakes up at five to make soup, slow-cooking pots of vegetable tears, certain that she can somehow be more stubborn than death itself, that she can keep her sister alive if she only tries hard enough, loves her enough. And before long she starts to catch herself doing nonsensical things, like counting the minutes between each cough and delighting in the longer intervals, because love can save people, it can, and then insane pacing back and forth thinking if she can make this soup the best soup in the world then her sister might just live, that if she can cut the celery into microscopic pieces, slice a bit of her finger in with the coriander, walk five kilometers to the best market in town and back again, lug the heavy bags home through the slush and cold rain, then she might just win. Those days and nights when she herself can no longer feel her fingers and toes, when the black hole of fatigue devours her whole and she walks the house nursing an iron headache… Sometimes Johanna dreams that her pain might make Hope well. In those dreams there is always snow falling in a flurry — silent rose-leaves whirling in high arcs above a copse of spruce trees, white clusters sinking into the soft dark night.

The miracle is that Hope breaks through her fever for a few hours on Sunday, and Johanna takes her out to the forest where they climb up a paperbark, bare feet dangling over the gnarly branches, on top of the world. The last time they were here, in the spring before the Seventy-First Reaping, they sat side by side with ice-cold tins of lemonade and a few strawberries sunning themselves in a bowl on their laps, half-in-love with the world and still feeling like things could go on for years, years, years. Now the fever has flushed Hope’s cheeks, and she looks a bit sunkissed.

“You don’t need to do so much,” says Hope, and she has that distant glassy look in her eyes that gives her the air of someone much older and intensely sad. “You’re stubborn as hell, Jo, but you know we can’t win.”

Johanna shakes her head. “I’m not going to live without you.”

“I’ll slap you if you ever say that again,” Hope says seriously. “Don’t forget how much Snow would hate it if you kept going.”

And she can say that now, Johanna realises, because there is nothing Snow can do when things are already ending, being closed down. She looks up at the blinding light of the sky.

Sunlight everywhere. Rays of gold.

“Jo… Are you happy in your life?” Hope murmurs. 

Johanna closes her eyes. She has the oddest sensation, being up here in the trees with her older sister by her side, far away from the glitz and glam of the Capitol, that she is happy, maybe happier than she has been in a long time. It’s beautiful, this sense of normality that settles over her like fairy dust. Of course people like her must grab onto these small moments of joy whenever they can. She begins to tell Hope so, but then when she turns back to the emaciated form of her sister — the work of Johanna’s own insubordination — she feels once more the involuntary push of tears at the back of her throat. She throws her arms around Hope’s neck, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth. “Don’t let go, don’t let go,” she whispers. A tear slides down her chin to burn its way along Hope’s collarbone, but it is strange: she is not really unhappy. Maybe bittersweet is the word. They just sit there for hours until the sun goes down.

The fever returns at midnight, burning the whole pillow until it is hot to the touch. It is much worse this time around; sweating and shaking, Hope falls into a half-conscious, muttering zombie state. The tea Johanna makes is awful and powdery. When Blight arrives to help out, she doesn’t have the guts to look him in the eyes.

A moment in summer; it was her eleventh birthday and Hope had dressed her up in her clothes. An olive drab skirt with golden half-moons in her ears, Hope’s favourite jewellery passed to her as a gift. It was a gorgeous evening and the stars were a smattering of glittery opals. Back in the midst of childhood, looking up at these little holes in the sky into another life — innocence, and feeling so sure of everything — drifting through afternoon naps straight into the inky blue of evening light, whenever she asked for them.

But it means nothing, this other story. She has been brought back to District Seven, to this place where she has made her home for seventeen turns of the sun, but home only in the most superficial sense of the word because everything that ever made it a place to return to is now being taken away. There is a sense of the completion of things. Confused memories moving in pairs through the room, shared times half-forgotten. 

It is a strange and surreal experience to be there for someone at the end of their life. The room is dark and shadowy. Cards and goodbye letters from friends and neighbours like Mrs Calder and her daughter Aspen sit collecting dust on the bedside table, little plain cardboard things. Blight is in the kitchen to give the sisters a wide berth, but Johanna wishes he were here, to keep her company. She rubs Hope’s gray feet between her palms — blue-tinged, ashy, cracked and flaky and blotchy in colour — as a frozen half-hour passes. Does her sister know that someone is here? That it is Jo Mason, not the victor but the girl with whom she used to climb paperbarks and barter secrets in the dark? Love, here, has done everything that it can do. In the end it is not a very powerful thing, Johanna realises, it has made her weak to Snow’s torture, and it has made her angry. Yes, she decides, it has. Angry in her self-hatred but even more so at the things Snow would dare to take from her. Angry, angry — angry at Snow and the things that have been forced upon her these past few nightmarish weeks. He has taken everything away from her, but he underestimates her if he thinks one day she will not take his life for it, the fucker — his head on the block, the clean arc of her axe and his blood the shade of nightlock. 

Then she hears the death rattle, as clearly as she had heard her name being called up at the Reaping, what feels like almost a lifetime ago now, and she tips forward, cradling Hope’s head to her chest with a fresh new tide of tears.

“Love,” she whispers, “Love. Love, love, love.”

It is going to happen. She feels paralysed with fear and an apocalyptic grief. She counts the seconds that pass between every two consecutive breaths, holding her own breath in the process until she feels woozy and light-headed. She wonders how long people can last without air. Perhaps she does want to die. Guilt does that to people, and anger, too, overwhelming thoughts of violence, and sorrow — a hard, physical longing for a past beyond reach… It wouldn’t be so bad to join her sister, her Ma and Pa, to lie in the bed that she’s made for herself. The clock strikes several gongs that seem to last forever. At last, the waiting ends.

As her sister’s body lies cooling, Johanna moves her chair numbly to the back of the bed and leaves the room, going downstairs to open a few windows in the kitchen. It is very early in the morning now. A few wood thrushes are out in the trees to make the most of their first pale hour. She fills the kettle and puts on the gas, the flame the colour of bluebells. 

“We’ll have to tell the clinic today,” she tells Blight, who sits there at the dining table with his hands over a warm mug of tea. Peppermint, which used to be Papa’s favourite. She must have done something truly ugly with her face then, or maybe her gaze is simply too bleak and disarming, because Blight gapes at her with a face of open horror. Is he shocked at her apathy? She’s not really sure.

At a loss, Blight stands up and moves toward her where she stands in front of the window with the light pouring through.

“How are you holding up?” He asks, and she hates the way he doles out those words, like he is trying not to poke her the wrong way, like she is some stunned, catatonic, skittish rabbit that’s going to bolt. He seems to be surprised at how well she is coping, and maybe she is coping quite well, she doesn’t know — certainly she isn’t howling out loud or breaking dishes against the wall, though she feels like she might as well do all that because the heartsick feeling that’s crushing her chest is completely unbearable in this new and dazzlingly green morning.

“Fine, thanks,” she replies, turning around to rattle around the kitchen drawer. She needs a drink, or some pills, morphling, maybe. Of course she doesn’t find any here but there are some Vitamin C tablets the Capitol has provided in a cheerful white box, so she swallows two hoping that the reflex of pushing pills down her throat might simulate the numbing effects of a depressant. 

Memories, memories, fading into an airless murk…

The day is muddy and windblown at the graveyard for the Masons’ funeral. Dozens of mourners have gathered at the wake, for Ma and Pa but most of them for Hope, because she had been so well-loved in the neighbourhood. Mrs Calder and Mr Calder show up with their daughter Aspen, who is a year younger than Johanna. They are a well-off family — or, as well-off as someone can be in District Seven anyway — all three of them very pale and silvery in appearance, with a silent, slinky grace. Aspen is dragging a black umbrella that has turned inside out in the wind like a pterodactyl.

“I’m sorry about your family,” Mr Calder says to Johanna, his premature white hair giving him the appearance of someone very wise. “It’s so unlucky that they all passed so close together.” 

Johanna bristles at that. It isn’t the Calders’ fault that they’ve fallen for the Capitol’s sugary lies, but it angers her all the same. Mr Calder’s pale eyes dart around the graveyard in a panicked way. “I mean, perhaps that’s incorrect of me to say,” he says in a hushed voice, “I only meant… We’re here to keep you company. Of course — of course, if that’s what you need, Johanna.” 

He steps forward impulsively, and for an awful minute Johanna thinks he might hug her or something equally humiliating, but instead he just claps his hands awkwardly together and rubs them. Aspen stares at her from behind her father’s shoulder, stormy eyes wide-set and intense.

“Thanks,” says Johanna, just going through the motions. “I appreciate that, Mr Calder.”

“Well, it’s no problem at all,” he says heartily, a tall, mild-mannered man, though his eyes are the worried blue of boyishness. He gives off the air of someone in whom people usually like to entrust their sadnesses. “If you need anything, Johanna, you know we’re just up the road.”

She isn’t really listening anymore, though. At the front, some shovels are being worked to bury the departed. Rain peppering and driving in her face. She knows what has happened is irreversible, but at the same time Johanna thinks there must be a way to go back to the Capitol man’s house and make it happen all differently. Bite her tongue. Why couldn’t she have been more like Finnick? She could have had everything, if she’d just been a bit more cooperative — all charm and beauty evergreen. She finds her mind drifting easily back to the thought of blacking herself out. What is there to live for now? For people in the Districts, there is no happiness: breathe a while, fuss around for a bit, then die, rotting in the ground like garbage. 

When everything is finished except for the last handful of unturned dirt, Johanna goes up to the front to deliver the eulogy. There is a drenching nausea in her gut at the Capitol, at all of humanity, as she stands looking out at the dozen people who have come to the funeral, the Peacekeepers loitering around with their rifles. Rain. Endless, endless rain. She imagines Hope’s face in her head, tries to remember all the best memories, she supposes, in an attempt to freeze them in her mind. Memories of Ma and Pa, too, memories of time spent as a family, but instead of birthdays or happy milestones, she keeps remembering the time Hope had held her hair back over the sink when Johanna was eight and sick with some stomach bug. The time Ma had stood in the doorway in the late afternoon with her sleeves rolled up and flour all over her hands, saying throw me a towel, love, will you, the time Pa had carried her on his shoulders through the market so she could see over everyone's heads. 

“I’m sorry,” she spits out, and suddenly all she sees is red. Her mind is a blank page and the ringing in her ears has climbed to such a pitch that she feels sure she might go deaf. “I can’t remember what I was going to say.” 

She feels invincible. What can Snow do, now? What can he do now? He has killed everyone she has ever loved so who can he kill now? 

“You fucker,” she whispers, eyes flicking up to the camera that stands at the back recording her, obviously deranged. "Is this what you wanted? Is this enough for you?" — Spinning back, outraged — there is something reckless and perilous about the way she holds herself up, so instead of crying in grief, she wants to drive Snow’s head into the mud — yank his arm out of its socket — break him, beat his face bloody and make him eat shit off the road — “I swear I’m going to kill you for this, I’m going to make you pay —” Someone tackles her from behind — Blight — and she thrashes against his iron grip, screaming as they cut the cameras. “You’ll never own any of us the way you want to! Hope! Hope! Nothing you can take —”

“Mason —”

“Nothing you can take from me was ever worth dirt!”

The next few weeks pass under a low pall. The house steams with the smell of medicine; rain taps and drips at the skylight, casting watery shadows down the walls. There is a terrible fatigue that comes after the death of a loved one. In truth, Johanna sleeps away half the day, but so fitfully, picking her way past somber memories from a past life, that when she wakes it is always to a deeper exhaustion. Nothing makes sense in any direction. She wonders how anyone can live, knowing that there is nothing in the future except even more levels of Hell — how they can just keep on living and fucking and popping out new babies for the grave. Every day she sees people going to work with their axes, coming home, trying to make themselves forget where they are, but in a strong light there is nothing anyone can say to make their lives look less contemptible. It is rotten top to bottom. From Monday to Sunday she sleeps, eats, and repeats. 

Blight comes when he can. She sees him clearly now: someone lonely and miserable in his own right, who has never saved any of his tributes from the arena until this year, and so carries this parasitic sense of responsibility toward Johanna even when she gives him nothing back.

“You don’t have to keep coming,” she repeats, but he doesn’t listen. 

“Would you eat an egg, if I poached you one?” He says, almost daily at this point, “Or scrambled, or fried, boiled, or whatever you’d like?”

Because she feels so bad, she tries to please him by eating the things he cooks, but they leave a bad taste in her mouth. Ever since the funeral, all he’s ever done is shovel food down her throat. What makes everything worse is that Snow hasn’t done anything further. Johanna is sure he’s seen the footage from the funeral, or at least heard about it from the Peacekeepers who were there, but he hasn’t ordered her hanged — which, in her darker moments, she almost wishes he would. She supposes he wants her in the Hell he’s made, grief pouring out of her eyes as she wakes up guttering around in the dark. Every morning having to refamiliarise herself with the fact that her family is dead, because of her. And every hour, thinking if only she could go back and change what had happened, make it happen differently somehow, if only she could have been a good girl, a good sport… 

The landline rings sometime in the week following, the light gray and opalescent that day. Johanna stops scrubbing the pot in the sink to go and pick it up. She is surprised to see the call as one coming from District Four.

“Hey,” Finnick says. His voice sounds very faraway, like music from a warbling radio, sort of.

“Hi.” She replies with an acerbic tone, and she thinks about letting the line go dead, retreating icily back into herself. “What do you want?”

There is the faint noise of gulls. Waves crashing one atop another, roaring white noise. Kids shouting and skidding in the sand with no idea what sort of misery might await them in the future, and then someone laughing very close to the telephone, a girl, maybe. It’s a very pretty laugh, with an edge of giddiness or hysteria that comes with the thrill of once having narrowly missed death. Does Finnick have a lover back home? The thought makes Johanna nauseous. All that dazzling life on the other end of the line, and here she is, stuck in a rainy district with her grim, underwater depression.

“Finnick,” she grits through her teeth, “is this a bad time?”

“No, no,” he says apologetically. But the girl laughs and laughs. His whole family is probably there, all of them alive. “Annie’s been staying over. I’m sorry I couldn’t call sooner —”

“That’s just fine,” Johanna interrupts petulantly. She doesn’t really want to talk to him anymore — this victor who represents the life she could’ve had if she’d only been better at playing along. “Who’s Annie? Your girl at home?”

“Yeah,” he says after a moment.

“Yeah, ok,” she replies bitterly. His confirmation punches a hole through her chest somehow, and she feels suddenly lonelier than ever. Tears burn her eyes again, though she knows she’s being unreasonable. Making a big fuss out of nothing at all. “I mean, good for you, really. Must be nice to have all that.”

“What?” comes Finnick’s bewildered voice. All scramble and boyish confusion. “Johanna, are you ok?”

“Oh, I’m fantastic,” she snaps. “Everything’s peachy.”

There’s a silence from the other line that’s filled by the crashing of the surf. 

“Okay,” he says lightly. Instead of the decadent Capitol charm he’d used with her on her first night out of the arena, she finds something of his true self here, his self-effacing humour and easygoing nature. “That sounded a lot like sarcasm there. Am I in trouble, sweetheart?” 

His teasing voice is painful to hear. She shoves a fist into her mouth to stifle the sobs that scrape up her throat. Her silence seems to frighten Finnick. Images of her rain-soaked and shaking on his bathroom floor pass sinisterly between them.

“Has something happened already?” he says seriously, after a moment of silence. Perfectly aware of the possibility that their call is being listened to, but dreading now the answer he already suspects, he lays down his next words slowly one by one. “After what happened that night in the Capitol, did they follow through?”

“Yes,” she breathes, “my family is dead.”

The gulls screech faintly in the distance. “But it’s only been —?” he responds hoarsely, like the days don’t add up. And at this moment she hates him, hates him, how time can pass so quickly for someone like him because he has a whole life outside of the Capitol. Does he know how she has been living, every day a unique purgatory, her weeks a stone she drags uphill only to find it waiting for her again at the bottom. “I mean you’ve only got back home, Jo. I’m so sorry. I should’ve called sooner, I thought you’d have more time…”

“It’s fine,” she says flatly. “We both knew it was coming, I guess.”

What kind of words can someone say to a person who is grieving? Everything sounds dishonest, especially things like I’m sorry. At any rate she doesn’t expect Finnick to understand. 

“Jo,” he starts, then he stops. She can hear his steady breaths over the warbling telephone connection as he thinks better of whatever he’d meant to say. “It’s not your fault,” he tells her after a minute, very urgently, like he is trying to push some of the terrific life bouncing inside him into her. “Don’t go around thinking they died because of you.”

And that’s just crackpot advice, as far as she’s concerned. She imagines him standing at the front of his house with the curly telephone cable all stretched out, and out the window flash all the shifting sand dunes, the gulls flitting over the wet light, stopping, starting off again, the sky rolling far away into the soft baby blue of the horizon. 

“Why don’t you come over to Four?” Finnick asks suddenly, his words heavy with guilt. “It might be good to get out of that house, have someone keep you company. I don’t know, just don’t go through everything alone.”

“So I can watch your girlfriend run around all day?” Johanna bites out, “I don’t want your condolences, and I don’t want to go sit on your stupid beach.” She doesn’t know why she’s so angry suddenly, but maybe it’s the work of envy. “You and I have nothing in common, Finnick. You played nice, you have a family, got a girlfriend, everything’s just perfect for you, isn’t it. Well good for you. You’re a real charmer.” She says spitefully, “As for me, well, everyone knows the axe murderer was never going to get the happy ending.”

Silence stretches out horribly over the line. Johanna has half the mind to apologise for her cruelty, but she’s always been bad at that. She feels a great wave of sadness, and with it comes the aching loneliness that separates every two living individuals in this world. 

The truth is that she has purchased the only true freedom this country offers — the state of having nothing left to lose — and paid for it with the lives of everyone she loved. Finnick’s enslavement is eternal. Neither of them have it easy, but who can they complain to in this shitty place? It’s better, maybe, to have never been born at all, to have never wanted for anything, to have never hoped for anything. 

“You think it’s all smooth sailing down here, Johanna?” Finnick says finally. There is a long pause from the other side of the line. “Believe it or not, I didn’t call to rub anything in your face.” He says earnestly, “Would you like me to come over to Seven? I can be there tomorrow. If you want me there, I’ll make it work.”

“Don’t do that,” says Johanna guiltily. She doesn’t want him to see her struggling through the dingy maze of depression. “It’s fine, Finnick. I’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure,” he says in a low voice. “Because I’d really like to be there for you, Jo.”

His kindness makes her smile for the first time in weeks, and she thinks that he isn’t really like the man he shows on TV after all, that he is quite boyish in reality, with none of the shine and gloss of his usual televised charm. She has been so used to seeing in this handsome Capitol hooker someone who has always claimed too much for himself, a practised attention seeker, that their handful of conversations since her first night in the Capitol have made him unreasonably easy to care for.

“I’m sure,” she verifies. “But thanks. It’s good to know.” 

Just as quickly, though, she remembers her sister’s body in the dirt, and it snatches the smile right off her face. How can she ever allow herself to be glad of anything again? Every new event, every tiny moment of happiness she experiences for the rest of her life, will only separate her and her family more and more. Things they can no longer be a part of. She tries not to think about that, the despair of everything, the stupid prickle of tears behind her eyes. She doesn't want Finnick to hear her cry.

“Listen, I’ve got to go,” Johanna forces out quickly in an odd voice. The surf crashes against her ear. She lifts her tone up into something more flippant and bored so he won't start worrying about her. “Catch you later, Poseidon.”

That night, in the land between dream and waking, Johanna finds herself in a cemetery at the top of a hill. For some reason she is trying to find a spot where she can finally sit down. 

Is it okay if I stop? She thinks, hazily. Can I lie down with the dead?

But then she trips over something in her fevered haste — a fallen branch, she supposes, but when she looks down she nearly doubles over to retch. There is a livid wound on the corpse at her feet, a great, big hole where the human neck should be. It's black at the core, and the face, though crawling now with millions of little white maggots, is still recognisable. Tamsin, the tribute from District Two, whom she’d driven an axe through in the final day of the games. Oh, god, Johanna thinks.

Running, tripping, then running again through the bushes, and all around her are the rotting bodies of all the children she’s killed, pouring forth the stench of their decay. District Five’s boy with her axe rusting in his chest, Eleven’s girl with her throat gaping red, Four’s pair she’d buried in the rockslide, Three’s young tribute whom she’d pushed off a cliff, limbs all askew. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she keeps saying, over and over again. But she doesn’t know if she really is sorry — would she have done it again, if the games had forced her hand? If everyone comes back to life right then and there, and she has to kill them all to get back home? She would do what she had to, as she’d done before: go blank, push forward. 

She runs up another hill, because at the top there is a light. An angel?

No, it is Hope, standing there as she remembers her from the mornings before school, but now with a psychic reality: curls the shade of oatmeal, beautiful brown eyes with the dark rings around the irises… Somehow Johanna knows that Hope can give her the answer to every question she wants to ask, that it is all there in the kindness of her smile, but that if she even so much as moves a finger, the whole brilliant vision will snap shut and leave her alone with the corpses of her dead.

Tell me what is going to happen, she wants to say, paralysed with a tremulous happiness. Will we ever be free? How can I be forgiven? Can I ever be happy again?

The air is warm and stuffy, but the fondness, the humour, the intelligence in Hope’s eyes is amazing. Johanna thinks she can live in it forever. Twenty seconds, eternity…

A skeletal hand grabs her ankle — Tamsin’s — and Johanna screams, falling backward and backward until the bed rushes up to meet her.

It is five o’ clock in the morning. She scrambles up for the light, afraid to put her feet onto the floor. Window. Table. Door.

“It’s okay,” she whispers to herself, hugging her knees to her chest, and imagines it’s her sister’s voice instead. “It’s all okay, Jo, nothing’s gonna hurt you.”

How can she articulate the mad thoughts that she is having now? Living things don’t last. It’s all temporary. Some day someone will stand with their toes buried in the sand overlooking Four’s white ocean, watching the tide come close, pull back, and repeat itself, but it might be a different world they’re living in, with a generation of different people — and in the long run these things will continue to happen whether she is here or not to see it. People die; people go on living. Her own short, solitary life will have only one constant: herself.

These thoughts of pain and loss and fatality give her no comfort. She can't bear this lonesome mansion another minute. In the afternoon, Johanna walks the road back to her old house in the neighbourhood, because she needs to pack up the things her parents left there, and she’s put off the trip long enough. Though the house is stuffy from being shut up for so long, still she finds herself struck dumb by the fierce wood smell of home. Everything is where they used to be: Papa’s tin of loose nails, the chopping block propped up at the corner of the kitchen, little notches on the doorjamb to note how much she and her sister had grown. Johanna makes her way further into the house and turns into the room she’d shared with her sister, which is cool and dark with its blinds all down. She finds Hope’s sweater draped across a chair where she’d left it, a cloudy blue ghost of her. The pot of daisies on the windowsill, with all the petals drooping dead-black and rotten over the side. The faint scent of Hope’s cheap vanilla oil. 

She opens the drawers one after the other, fumbling around with the old books, hairpins, hand-me-down boxes of stationery, trying to find the things that she wants to keep. The scratchy black and white photograph on the nightstand of Hope on her first day of school, with her exaggerated hand-on-hip pose, stares cheerfully out at the room being disassembled around her. 

“What are you doing?” 

With a panicked, heart-stopping jolt, Johanna grabs a pair of metallic scissors from the first drawer and launches it hard at the doorway.

“What the —” Aspen Calder ducks just in time as the makeshift weapon buries itself into the wall where her head had been. “Are you actually trying to kill me!”

Johanna jumps to her feet, breaths plunging in and out of her lungs, the whole room spinning like she’s in the arena again. “Sorry,” she says quickly, “muscle memory.”

In the dim shadowy light, Aspen looks pale as a ghost, with her white-blonde hair in a long plait and her level, icy-gray gaze. Her mouth is pressed to a thin line and she looks very cold and uncooperative, as she often does when she is upset.

“Anyway,” she says after a frigid, ill-defined pause. “My dad saw you coming down the street and he wanted me to give you this.”

She slings her bag off her shoulder and takes out a steamy container full of what seems to be lamb stew, which Hope in moments of mischief had been apt to nickname the Stew of the Rich. If Aspen Calder had brought her this a year earlier, she’d have kissed her shoes. The Calders are a family of carpenters, which in District Seven means upper class, or as close to it as anyone can reasonably get. Their house is very pretty, from what Johanna remembers of visiting with her parents, full of weak light and amber wood shavings on the floor. Sometimes after school, Mr Calder would take her down the hallway into the workshop with all the cuts of wood her own pa had felled and tell her about the different kinds — burled walnut, mahogany, brown maple, oak, black cherry, and Hope’s favourite, rosewood, with its characteristic soft sweet tang. Mrs Calder hovering in the background with her sangfroid, as cool and calm as her daughter can be…

“Thank you,” Johanna mutters, taking the offering that she suspects must be some sort of olive branch from the Calders.

“Not to worry,” Aspen replies in her composed, distant tone. “My dad loves you and he feels bad. He wanted to have you over just now, but I told him that wasn’t a good idea. I thought it would be better to make sure you don’t come to our door.” She says, “Obviously I’m very sorry about your loss, Johanna, but I don’t want you near my family.”

The casual straightforwardness of her words is entirely too startling. “Excuse me?” she asks blankly.

“Yes,” Aspen says coolly, “Don’t take offense. It’s only that I noticed the people who get close to you don’t seem to last very long.”

Those words make sense, Johanna supposes, but even the sound of such an accusation — which had in all honesty been circling her own mind — is unendurable. She is thrown suddenly back to that fork in the road, back into that Capitol room, pistachio-green dress draped half-across her bare shoulders, in front of that bald Capitol man whose vile breath she can still smell, and she keeps thinking if only — if only she had played her part, might her family have lived somehow? Spiralling into counterfactuals and contradictions — if only she’d taken some morphling before going to that man’s bedroom, or just asked him for some in a forceful sultry voice — yes, I’d like some, sir, whatever you recommend — if she’d gotten in some practice beforehand, might she have done things better? 

“Come on,” Aspen cuts in, and perceptive as she is, she seems to register the way Johanna’s eyes have gone glassy, the way her breaths are coming in faster than ever. She looks a little guilty, or maybe just irritated at herself. “I didn’t mean it that way. I don’t know what happened to you in the Capitol, or what they made you do, and frankly that’s none of my business, but I mean you’ve clearly… You must have mouthed off or done something to make the government angry is all I’m saying. It’s not natural for three people to die in such quick succession.” 

“What exactly would you like to hear?” Johanna blurts out in a voice too strange and shrill for her liking. “That I should have got on my knees naked for this man who bought my virginity, or maybe I should have cried and told them I’d be a good girl, that I would’ve let them do whatever they wanted if —”

“Stop it!” Aspen says stiffly, her face flushed crimson, “You’re not sensible! I told you I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want any part of it. I’m sorry for your family, Johanna, I am, but I need my family to be safe so you have to stay away.”

Johanna stares at the blonde girl in front of her, suddenly feeling bone-dead exhausted. So many years of companionship, however circumstantial, and now she is persona non grata? 

“So what should I do, Aspen?” she says, resigned, “Like, practically speaking. You want me to cross the street when I see you? Or, you want me to stop coming here?”

Aspen’s face goes a shade whiter, if that is at all possible, but she finds her composure quick enough. “Yes,” she agrees coldly. She zips her bag up with nimble fingers and slides the strap back over her shoulder. “Goodbye, Johanna. I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.”

Alone in the house again, Johanna moves numbly out into the backyard, where the light has saddened from late gold to gray. Feeling sick and dizzy, she can hardly believe it when she snaps her head up to see a stray terrier dog panting on the grass beside Pa’s half-built hut, dirty and hungry, with six pups cuddling together underneath its belly. Boxer. And now six pups, too. “Six,” she hears Hope’s voice say in her head. Mini-Boxers. Ain’t they cute?

The fucking dog stares with its glittery eyes up at Johanna, waiting for a bone. Its kids are all squirming helplessly on the ground like white grubs. 

“Pa’s dead,” she hisses, “He’s not here.”

But the dog doesn’t understand. The imbecilic, pathetic tick tick tick of water dripping from its sodden coat drowns the yard in an irksome rhythm.

“I said Papa’s dead!” Johanna shouts, a little wild-looking even with no axe in her hands. “Do you get it? Why are you still sitting there? Go away! Get out! He’s not here to finish your stupid hut!”

The pups, whimpering for milk, warmth, life. Her hands are shaking. She realises dimly that she is still holding onto Mr Calder’s lamb stew, food as a holy communion that’s always been forced onto her. Johanna yanks the lid off with her thumbnail and tips the container over. All that thick viscous slop tumbles onto the grass, and the dog scrambles forward and begins to eat, its jaw working horribly over the gobbets of fat. 

“There’s your dinner,” she whispers numbly, “Don’t come near me again.”

The fridge, when she goes back inside to check, is empty except for a bottle of champagne. Something that her parents had saved up for her eighteenth birthday, which is in late October, though she knows she will never celebrate it. New tears assault her eyes as she sinks down with the bottle, clutching her middle to dull the pain. In an impulsive what-the-hell moment, she pops it open and watches the foam overflow its neck. It tastes so sweet, like sunshine on her tongue. The fizz tickles the roof of her mouth, a distant dusty sparkle bottled in a happier year, when her family was still alive.

At eight o’clock the following Monday morning, Peacekeepers arrive to help Johanna move out of her deserted old house at the mayor’s request. They pack everything into boxes to be moved into Victors’ Village, and soon, before she knows it, her home begins to come apart with sickening speed right before her eyes. Watching the pictures get taken down, the comforters rolled up and carried away, Johanna has the strangest sensation of standing outside her own life, looking in through a window lined with scum.

“Be careful with that. Don’t put that under the mattress. Have you even washed your hands?” Johanna snaps, though she isn’t sure why she bothers. None of it matters anymore. How can she live knowing that everyone she gets close to will die? These days her moods are a slingshot, zipping and slamming around everywhere, and even the smallest thing can set her off — an especially bad lunch, cigarette smoke going down the wrong pipe, a loud noise outside and the sun clanging like cymbals into her eyes and her sister lying in a grave, stop it stop it — until she becomes so smashed with self-loathing that she actually wants to die. She might have tried it, had it not been for Blight’s ever-watchful eye on his stash of morphling. Not that he's exactly a picture of health either. He’s been smoking — most days she can smell it on his breath — and she wouldn’t be surprised if she found out that he’s been spending his nights drunk as a fucking log.

“Well, maybe it’ll do you a little good, not going back to your old place again,” says Blight when she goes down to see him one night. They are having dinner at his house for a change, sitting on the sofa in front of the television with their food on paper plates. Despite all the money that the Capitol has given him, his house in Victors’ Village is dim and dirty with the brown of tea stains and tobacco, things lying everywhere — old beer bottles and ash trays and heaps of old towels and unwashed clothes. 

Johanna stares miserably at the food he’s made: some puffy vegetable scramble on top of a mound of rice. She stabs at it with her fork, over and over again. 

“I mean, you know how it is —” he pauses tactfully. “Might be a fresh start.”

“Yes,” Johanna says sarcastically. “That’s just what I need. A fresh start. Maybe I should shave my head. Get a tattoo. What do you think?”

Blight pushes a spoonful of food into his mouth. “Do what you’d like, Mason,” he says amiably, “But sometimes it does help.”

“How would you know?” she retorts irritably. “Have you ever tried it?”

“Goodness, no,” he says in what seems to be a mirthless tone, bringing his cigarette up for a drag. “Never tried it myself.” 

In the half-light of the living room, his face appears to take on the unwholesome pallor of a homeless runaway. 

“Someone else took that fresh start, though,” he adds after a moment, before he can think better of it. “When I got back from my Games. I’d won and no one had been expecting that. The girl I was seeing tried to make a go of things after I came home, but she couldn’t do it. Didn’t want to, rather,” he says. “Next thing I knew she was packing a bag to leave. Definitely for the best.” He attacks his eggs with gusto. “But it was good for me, too. Cleared the ground a bit.”

The openness with which he has given her this information stuns her. In stupefaction, Johanna looks up from her plate and stares at him as if water has been flicked in her face. Up until this point she has seen him as nothing more than a mentor, a man with a face and a name but no history of his own, no private sorrows to speak of. She has been so caught up in her own clogging gray web of grief, which day after day enfolds her eyes and heart, that it has never occurred to her to consider what losses might be haunting the people around her. Now that he has said this, she realises with a vague sense of embarrassment that she has not once wondered about his life outside of the small portion where their two miseries happen to overlap.

“...I didn’t know,” says Johanna at last, a little flatter than she intends.

“Ah,” he shrugs in a fatalistic way, “there wasn’t much point telling anyone. It isn’t particularly important, anyhow.”

“But why?” Johanna pushes, “Why did she leave?”

“Well, you come back from something like the games and see how many people want to build a future with you,” his tone is both brisk and subdued and she recognises it as the same one she uses when she wants to shut down a conversation she doesn’t feel like having. “She was young and very pretty — Marie. Curly blonde hair and blue stuff on her eyes. Before I got reaped she liked to talk to me all day long and teach me the words of all those silly love songs the merchant boys used to sing. Outgoing girl, fidgety, very sociable… ‘why wait for life to come to you?’ she used to say, ‘if you want to see the world, you have to go out and meet it.’ She was that sort, you know? Can’t say I blame her for leaving. She was young,” he repeats after a moment. “Pretty girl like that. When I came back I drank so much that the nerves went dead in my feet. She’s got to go find someone who suits her better than a fellow who’s been through the games.”

Johanna watches him through the haze of his cigarette smoke. She tries to picture the girl as he describes her, bright-eyed, sunny, with a horror of unlived life — and Blight, at eighteen, coming back home only to be stuck alone, which somehow kicks up a lot of ugly echoes in Johanna’s own life, shadowy rooms and illness and death and muddy funerals under gushing rain. Maybe that’s how it goes for everybody, of course not always in the same way. Sometimes the Capitol takes away the people they love; sometimes the people they love choose to leave; sometimes loved ones stay, but the old life is gone all the same. There isn't a single victor she can name who is happy.

“It’s a load of shit, this Hunger Games business,” she says bitterly, “I hate it here, this whole fucking country. None of it’s fair.”

Blight shakes his head and takes a messy slug of his beer. “Life’s not fair, kid.”

She stares hard at him.

“Do you think I’m stupid?” says Johanna, fuming. She has moved through this last month like a sleepwalker, dreaming of Hope constantly — the smell of her vanilla oil, a shadow moving against a sunstruck wall — until now, and she realises that her anger is the first thing that has made her feel alive in a long time. It is easier to hate an enemy than it is to shame oneself, to waste away in depression and self-loathing and misery. “I know life’s not fair,” she says hotly, “but there’s no fucking way I’m letting them get away with what they did to my family, or to you and your Marie. I’m going to put my axe in Snow’s face if it’s the last thing I do.”

The television runs dimly in the background. Blight, cigarette balanced between his first and middle finger, wipes the sweat from his forehead with the heel of his hand.

“Don’t say something like that again,” he says seriously. “It’s going to get you killed.”

Johanna chuckles, and the sound is low and deranged in her ears. “Yeah,” she says. “Fingers crossed.”

Victors’ Village is situated just a few paces from the woods, halfway to the town square, and on Saturday afternoon Blight suggests, rather out of the blue, that they drop by for a while and have a smoke to pass the time. Despite the chill that’s beginning to set in, everything green continues to grow, moss so thick between the stones that, at a certain angle of verdant light, it looks almost like algae. Past the junction in the tracks that’s overrun with weeds, there is the roadside stand, where gaunt schoolkids kick back behind tables with their gray tins of blueberries: $2 Minimum Pay What You Can. Not far from that sit the funeral home and the bakery with its rows of black rye bread, and beyond them the lumbermill, and the block of Peacekeeper houses attached to Seven’s Labour Front, which functions mainly to keep the workers from striking.

“Doesn’t your neighbour work here?” Blight asks on the way out of town. “Actually, I haven’t seen you hang around them much lately.”

Johanna plods sulkily behind him with her axe swung over her right shoulder, keeping her eyes down. He is talking about the Calders, she supposes, but she doesn’t know what she can say to make him understand what has happened between Aspen and her. 

“No,” she replies grimly, “they don’t work here.”

The paperbark, the forest trail, the young spruce now almost as old as she’d been when she planted it — things that make her feel oddly happy one moment and then the next like crying. Sometimes in the evenings, when the schoolkids are packing up and heading home for supper, she would stand outside in the damp gritty wind to watch the trees leaf out, feeling faint with loneliness. How can the world keep on moving as if nothing has happened? Lying in bed she would try to think of something safe and sweet and pleasant — cinnamon-coloured walls, rain drumming distantly on the windowpanes, Ma and Pa thudding around in the dark downstairs — but it is no good. The worst thing about the arena is how she must carry it in herself, the heat, the fire, the blood and bone crush of it, the dark hole where all the bodies are, people she’s killed, people she’s loved, their ghostly faces somehow blinking back at her like her sister’s eyes.

She slumps against the tree trunk beside Blight, breathing in mouthfuls of smoke. Anything that makes her forget about the blackness inside her is good enough.

“God, it’s dead boring around here,” she grumbles with a scratchy throat.

Blight smiles wanly at her. He seems a bit trashed, his face a queasy green in the shade. “Enjoy it while you can, Mason,” he jokes, blowing a sweaty strand of hair from his face. “You’ll be back in the Capitol soon enough.”

“Fuck you,” Johanna says listlessly. She tips her head back onto the bark and closes her eyes, feeling lightheaded. How has she fallen into this strange new life, where she kills time with drugs, and all her things are dirty, and nobody loves her? She takes another drag of the cigarette, the sticky black grime coating her lungs as it sends her floating down into zero gravity. Above her, the sky is endlessly blue.

In the weeks following, she brings her axe and walks to the woods where the light is always the colour of mushrooms. Trudging along the dirt paths that the loggers don’t usually take, she drives the steel edge of her axe into the trunks of living trees, over and over again until she is drenched head to toe in sweat. When she gets home she hops into the shower, letting the scalding water slam down onto her back for hours. There is a sort of freedom to be found here; nobody cares if she lies in bed all morning, or if she never bothers to clean the place. She reads whatever crappy old books she can find, smokes Blight’s cigarettes until she’s high, and spends the hours however she likes. If these things don't keep her happy, she finds that they at least keep her a reasonably safe distance from unhappy. 

“Hey, sweetheart,” comes Finnick’s breezy voice one afternoon, warbling over the telephone. “How are you doing there in Seven?”

Though he puts on an impressive performance of sobriety and brightness, Johanna knows the effects of opioids well enough by now to identify the slur under his words. It is shocking to hear him like this, and once again she gets the feeling of the character he is playing, familiar playboy, cocky charmer, easily bored.

“Seriously?” says Johanna, annoyed, “what’s got you so doped up?"

The sun filters through her eyelids a blinding and painful red. It is almost two o’clock. She lies on her stomach with the sheets kicked to the foot of the bed, feeling hot and vaguely nauseated from too many cigarettes. 

“C’mon, Jo Mason,” Finnick laughs down the line, the words sliding out of him in a languid and hilarious drawl. “I just wanted to say hello, see if you’re ok.”

“Nice of you,” Johanna says shortly. “But I’m perfectly fine, thanks. Why exactly are you calling me in the middle of the afternoon? Are you on morphling or something?” 

He doesn’t answer, and the sudden silence stretching out from the other end begins to alarm her. She sits up, holding a hand up to her forehead until the world stops spinning. “Finnick, are you ok?”

She hears the sound of a bottle being put down.

“Mmm,” he makes a non-committal noise, “I’m alright.” 

Johanna frowns. He sounds miserable, but his habit of suffering in secret has made him uncommunicative. It can be difficult to tell what he is thinking at times, because he never gives himself fully away to the people around him. As it stands, there is always something a little bit inexplicable or baffling about him — a safe she can never really crack. 

“Sorry, Jo. I hope I’m not troubling you,” Finnick mutters, “You’ve been through enough lately.”

“Bullshit,” Johanna shoots back obstinately. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

The rush of waves. A wail of pain rises from another room, high-pitched and terrible. “Actually —” his voice is shaky, “Actually I’m just going to duck in the other room for a second, alright?” Footsteps; a door shutting. When he returns to the speaker he sounds clearer, serious, more sure of himself. “Sorry about that.”

“Finnick?”

“It’s not a big deal, really,” he murmurs, “Annie isn’t well.”

“Your girl at home?”

“Yes I —” his voice is strange. “It’s just that I worry about her, you know? I know I should be grateful because Snow’s spared her, because she won her games but —”

“Won her games?”

This information is such a shock to Johanna that she wonders for a moment if she’s misheard, gone deaf somehow. There is only one victor she knows of who goes by the name Annie, and it’s the mad girl from Four. She remembers seeing her on television during last year’s games, a really pretty girl, russet-brown hair that curls a little at its ends, rusty eyebrows, beautiful skin. Definitely athletic, plunging to the bottom of the flooded arena as the cannons went off all around her — a terrifying boom boom boom — bubbles foaming and streaming off her small, tense form. When she got out of the games she wasn’t right in the head, clapping her palms to her ears and rocking herself as Caesar Flickerman laughed and poked and joked.

“Annie Cresta?” Johanna whispers.

“Yes,” Finnick answers, a bit distantly. “I try to distract myself, I guess, but she gets so bad sometimes, and some days are worse than others. Today she couldn't even figure out who I was and — and what can I do, Johanna? How does somebody get through to somebody like that? She was better for a bit after she came home, it comes and goes. The doctors from the Capitol tried to give her sertraline but it was too late for it to be of any help to her.” His voice is rough. “Sometimes she's fine but at least ten times a day she asks me if the games are still on, and then I stand there not knowing what else to say and tell her no, no, of course not, when really that's not even true, because with Snow it never stops, does it? The games are always on."

Johanna squeezes her eyes shut as his voice dies out. There is a sense of sinking and spinning almost like he is floating on his back away from her, on water. It is painful how he obsesses over things in this fevered way, a pyretic vitality that she in retrospect identifies also in herself, in the things she did for Hope. There it is, then. The thing her mind has been circling for weeks now, ever since her family’s murder, ever since Blight and Marie.

“You need to stay away from the people you love too much,” she says to him simply. “Because that love is the thing that will kill you.”

There is a horrible hush over the line. For a moment Finnick doesn’t say anything, struck dumb with disbelief.

“Why do you say that?” he replies at last. “Is that honestly what you think, Johanna?” He sounds genuinely perturbed by her pessimism. “It's hard to put things right. Obviously I know what might be done to me should I go on loving people like this, but for me all that’s worth living for lies in that very thing. You mean to say you’d sooner call it good riddance before anyone else can take it from you?”

“That isn’t what I —”

“Yes, it is.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“No,” Finnick says, and now he is openly angry. “Fuck you, Johanna. Don’t say that to me.”

The silence that roars up between them is unbearable. Johanna presses the heel of her hand hard against her forehead, trying to steady the spinning in her skull. When Finnick speaks next he sounds a bit apologetic.

“Jo,” His voice is a faraway thing. “I know things are bad for you. I’m sorry things are so fucked up for you now.”

“You, too,” Johanna whispers. It hurts her in a way to know of his nature, which is often to keep his depression to himself. She doesn't want this disagreement to come in between them like this. “Look, Finnick,” she manages, “you don’t have to be all alone, ok? I’m here for you when you need a hand. And of course if Annie needs anything, or if you need someone to stay with her, or with you, just ring me, yeah?”

“Sure,” he says, a little smilingly now. “Thanks, Johanna.” She hears him exhale, long and unsteady, into the receiver. “When are you stopping by on the Victory Tour?”

Johanna buries her face in the palms of her hands. “I dunno. Two weeks, maybe? I think I’ll have to do the bottom few districts first.”

On the other end she can hear the hush and pull of the waves through an open window. She wonders what he can hear of her home, her world — wind rustling through trees, the sad sigh of her house. It makes his life feel impossibly far away and at the same time terribly close, as though she has only to follow the sound of his breathing and she will find him.

“Come through on the tour,” he says, “I’ll show you around.”

Johanna rolls her eyes, but nonetheless she is touched by his offer, his continuous kindnesses. “Right. I’ll see you later then,” she jokes. “Don’t slit your wrists, ok?”

He laughs. “Likewise, sweetheart.”

That night, when she falls asleep, she dreams of her sister: standing in front of her in the woods, swaying a little, her face calm, with a pleasing peace of mind. 

You can come home now, she is saying, the games are over for you.

But the voice isn’t quite right, and when Johanna looks up, she realises with a start that it isn’t Hope at all, but a poor mimic, with the wrong hair and eyes and smile.

She spends her eighteenth birthday in bed. For hours she tries to block her old life from her mind, turning on every light in her room, opening every window to forget herself in the forest’s evergreen tang. To think of living alone in the coming years upsets her — a depression so total it overshadows the ticking of time. It is only much later that she finds Mr Calder’s letter on her front steps, slid beneath a box of oatmeal cookies still warm and gooey with caramel.

Johanna,

Hope you are doing OK at this time. 

I am sorry you had to move out of your family home. I had half a mind to call, though I thought perhaps I might be able to put things more clearly on paper, if I took a little time to find the right words, well…

I wish I could say to you that I know what you are feeling now, but such things are different for everyone. Still, I’ve lived a long time here now and lost some people of my own along the way, like my own sister Autumn a long while ago. What that means is I’ve had plenty of time to think about these things. The heartache that comes with loss lasts as long as love itself does, that is to say, forever. Yet — at least for me it is like this — I would not want it to hurt any less. Loss is a terrible thing but also very beautiful. You must try to think of love and loss as two sides of the same coin, of your heartache as proof of life. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of heartaches from lots of loves. So be it.

Your sister was a beautiful girl. Very kind. Sweet with us. There was nothing in her that was in the slightest way second best. And your parents were very good friends of mine, in fact your father I have known for most of my life… I know they were proud of your homecoming. You made them happy also. These are not small things.

In any case, I must apologise; my daughter has kept me busy these recent days. But I wish you would pay us a visit, brusquely if need be, even to have some supper or just a friendly chat if that’s —? Certainly I would be very glad to see you. My wife Cassia asks after you often, and Aspen misses you, though she would not say so.

I have sent a small treat in the off-chance you have not yet gone into town. If there’s anything I can do for you, Johanna, or if I can help in any way, please know that I will. 

Take care of yourself, and remember there are people here who are thinking of you.

Happy birthday.

Sylvan Calder

She keeps the letter by her bedside table as a last tie to her past life, reading and then rereading it until it is all dirty and thumbed. Sometimes she finds herself longing inexplicably for the sweet wood smell of the Calders’ house, after-school nights spent lazing around with Hope and Aspen, eavesdropping on their parents’ conversations — happier days — but she knows perfectly well that there are some things she must do for the Calders’ own good, such as staying away. Instead of writing back, she slips herself into a forgetful doze, insulated from everything that goes on in the world outside. 

It is in such a state that her stylist Trisha finds her on the afternoon of the Victory Tour. Despite the late hour, Johanna is still half-naked where she lies on the bed — gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, with all her worst qualities out in the open. Modesty means very little to her now; she is not embarrassed. Her body is hers alone, and there is a certain freedom in knowing she can do whatever she wants with it.

“But honey,” says Trisha in shock, looking around at all the weed and demerol, “you’re such a sweetie, how come you want to get yourself mixed up with all this nasty junk?!”

The upcoming tour, which is the stuff of nightmares, has put Johanna in an awful mood. She rolls up onto one elbow, baring her teeth in a scornful imitation of a smile. “Why not?”

“Why not!” Trisha shrieks, “because it’s horrible for your skin, for one thing! And the smell! Not to mention you look like you’ve hardly eaten a bite in days!” She bustles toward the bed. “Up! Up, up, up. We have no time to waste.”

And soon, before Johanna can even make sense of what’s happening, she is being set on a chair in her bedroom as a more mollified Trisha begins chattering on about the Capitol’s latest happenings. What a hit last year’s games were, how nobody can wait until the next games begin, and then —

“— lots of nonsense,” she explains. “The point is, everyone in the Capitol knows Julius Reeve. He was a hugely successful gamemaker before he married. Not on television much, but he had a lot of money, and now that he’s been found dead — can you believe it — people are talking all this rubbish, you know, since you were his girl for the evening and the last person anyone saw him with.”

Out of all the possible conversations, they have landed on this one. Johanna stares obstinately at the wall ahead. Hearing all this spoken out loud again now is a shock, a fresh slap almost. “Who told you I was with him?”

Trisha blinks, rapidly. “It was everywhere,” she says, “on the TV. He’d been bragging about you to everyone, and then after he died it got all about — you didn’t see it?”

“The TV?”

“You didn’t see it? No?”

“What did they say about me on the TV?”

“Well, not about you, specifically. More about the questions around the death. President Snow doesn’t want anyone pointing fingers at you,” says Trisha rather quickly. “He’s made it clear that it was just a bit of a heart attack and that people shouldn’t be jumping to conclusions, but still it’s gotten everyone a little spooked,” she adds. “Though of course you wouldn’t do anything like… I mean, it’s just horrible. They shouldn’t be pulling a young girl’s name through the mud this way.”

“Right,” Johanna says, aware of how lame she sounds. They are heading now onto clumsy footing, all the while Trisha dabs blush onto her face. So what, Johanna thinks, if the Capitol finds out about the murder? She has nothing to lose. Certainly she understands now why Snow has taken such great pains to burn her whole life to the ground. If one girl can walk away from a Capitol man and leave him dead behind her, then what might twelve districts be able to do? 

“Not to worry, not to worry,” says Trisha, “the Capitol is obsessed with you, and it’ll take more than just a bit of bad press to put them off you. Anyway, I told them, didn’t I? Our Johanna, she’s a cutie! Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Alright now, turn your head for me, honey — there we go!”

Johanna starts violently: in the mirror is not herself at all but Jo Mason, seventeen again, the light from the window streaming directly into her face. A lovely girl in a sage green lambswool dress with a soft scoop at the neckline, almost pink-looking in the face, flushed, wide-set brown eyes, hair in double braids just like it had been at her Reaping almost half a year ago now. The version of a girl from a past life, all muddied up below the waterline with her mother, her father, her sister, with losing them and not being able to get them back. Time and memory whooshing back, sideways, forward, looping in on itself. 

Hope up high in the paperbark tree, oatmeal curls, are you happy in your life? Mama and Papa, easy there, lumberjack, might grow you a little taller, Mama’s smoker’s cough, black hair, china-blue eyes, Papa’s funny walk with his lopsided Frankenstein steps. 

Seventeen.

Sixteen.

Fifteen.

Return to love, safety, family — to the body of the girl who bickered with her sister and moved with a near grasshopper lightness to her steps — as though, if she just concentrates hard enough, she might find the exact moment where everything went wrong and force it open, slip back inside, do something differently.

Don’t go to Snow. Don’t hit the man. Don’t let Hope open the bag of sweets. Don’t — 

“— hello?” Trisha’s voice, shrill and cutting. “Earth to Johanna? We’re running late, there’s absolutely no time to space out now!”

“Oh, yes,” Johanna breathes. She stands up, the floor receding from her feet as she lurches toward the door, leaving the other version of herself — the seventeen-year-old — scratching hopelessly at the glass.

“It’s kind of cold out, honey,” comes Trisha’s dubious, wavering voice. “Don’t you think you should maybe put on some shoes?”

It is a gloomy day, made dim by a rolling fog over the district. They slog through the mud, the both of them, toward the somber cry of the train as cameramen from the Capitol crane and circle for attention. Blight is already there at the station, along with their escort Dido, who is tall and shiny with her thick translucent lip gloss and metallic bob.

“Ready?” Dido says. She is a surprisingly untalkative woman, tough in appearance and personality, though not unattractive in the Capitol sense — teetering in her high heels, she walks fast, always tugging at the dip of her low-cut. Every few years she has managed to switch one district for something better, every few years moving a little closer to One. Definitely Johanna’s victory has secured her a lucky promotion.

“It’ll be very busy this year,” continues Dido, leading the group into the train and then down to the dining car before the train begins to pull out of District Seven. “We will be starting our tour in Twelve’s coalmines, then going in descending order to One, then the Capitol. Seven will be saved for last. The president has set it down that there is to be no improvisation from you whatsoever, girl. You read out what we’ve written for you, end of story. I don’t want you making things difficult for me. Do you understand?”

“Loud and clear,” Johanna says sarcastically. Though logically she knows that Dido has no hand in any of this, just the thought of anyone voluntarily playing along with Snow’s bullshit is enough to inflame her with hatred. She slumps down in a chair beside Blight, who gives her a warning look.

On the table some Avoxes have set out baskets of bread, a crown pork roast with mushroom dressing, wilted spinach and broccoli, steamed mussels with peppers. Staring daggers at Dido’s stupid forehead, Johanna gorges herself on greasy cuts of pork and ignores Trisha’s series of doomed attempts at conversation, which one by one flares and sinks. To her right, Blight fidgets uncomfortably with the ash tray, turning it round and round between his fingers before he seems to realise how irritating that is and stops.

“Alright, well, lovely, fine, good,” says Trisha anxiously after a while, standing up and dabbing the corners of her mouth with her white napkin. “Fantastic dinner. Here we go, I’ll be heading off to my room now, it’s quite late, very late, ah, nine o’clock already, would you look at that, how time flies! I should probably get some sleep. Big day tomorrow for all of us!”

Dido clears out soon after, and by nine thirty it is just Blight and Johanna in the dark of the dining car. The moon is large and bright outside — a blur of milky light. Johanna gets to her feet and pushes the window open, sticking her head out into the cold wind and tasting its iron sting on her lip. She wishes that she can stop herself from thinking somehow, but all sorts of things are beginning to force their way in. The careers’ silver cornucopia in the forest basin. Twelve’s little girl in the bloodbath. Her face in the sky at the end of the first night, ghostly pale. What was her name? Johanna isn’t really sure how the boy from Twelve died — she supposes it must have been during the bloodbath too, but so much of what she knows is only secondhand, so much of it in bits and bobs from other people — Caesar, Blight, Trisha — that she can’t tell what she actually remembers of her own games anymore. 

The train zips past a row of telephone lines; sudden black thunder of crows. Far out where the fog parts and deepens, water kicks up, sprays white, then collects in dams. 

“It’ll be over before you know it.”

Beside her, Blight’s face is cool and tired in the moonlight, severe-looking, hardy. There is a straightness to him: broad shoulders and large hands with their square nails. He has never mentioned his personal games to her, and she would never ask, but sometimes she wants him to talk about it — just between the two of them — so that they might finally be something like old pals instead of simply mentor and mentee, so that she doesn’t have to feel so singular in all of this. 

“Blight,” she murmurs. “Can you tell me a bit about Twelve?”

He looks over at her for a moment. The wind is in her hair, her eyes, her lambswool dress, and suddenly, for some reason, she has the strangest sensation that her very life is falling away from her, rushing past the forests and factories and dams, rolling along from the next moment to the next. 

“Not much to tell,” Blight replies. “What’s there to say about a coal-mining district? They’re poor. As far as I know, it’s all basically a black market. Their only victor —”

“Haymitch Abernathy.”

He raises his eyebrows in surprise. “Yes,” he says, “right. You’ve heard of him, then.”

Johanna doesn’t know how to explain. The name comes back to her from a half-forgotten place: burnt sienna sky, Finnick’s warm breath in her ear, herself high as anything. 

“He’s a drunk,” continues Blight. “He won the Quell seven years before my games. I don’t know how any kid’s supposed to have a chance with him, moping around all the time, sloshed out of his mind” — not unlike the two of them, Johanna thinks a little maliciously — “but, well, who knows? It’s not like any of us can really fault him for doing what he has to just to get through the day.” 

He averts his gaze. The train pitches them down into a dark tunnel, dim moonlight shuttering from his face. His voice when he next speaks is strange and nasally. “I mean, even so, with how much of it comes down to luck, there's only so much any of us can do for them kids.” He says, “goodness knows I wanted Cedaric to come home same as I wanted you.”

Johanna swipes a hand over her face and ducks back from the open window. There is a sudden drop in her stomach like falling down a blackened stairwell. Oh, god, she thinks, oh god, Cedaric. They had a short but amiable time together, didn’t they? He was calm, friendly, practical, reticent with details, bumping elbows with her and wishing her good luck on that last day before the games. He was honourable and clear to her about the things he did and did not want (“I think I’ll do better without allies,” he’d said to her on the train after the Reaping, taking one look at her as she sat there sobbing hard at the thought of her own certain death; he was sorry about it, too — she still remembers the expression on his face as he’d said it, eyes lowered behind their round steel-rimmed glasses, a bit awkward despite his six-feet stature — “but if we run into each other in the arena, I’ll leave you be”), and she didn’t hold a grudge, though she’d been scared out of her mind. At the end of the day, he wanted the best for her and she, too, for him, insofar as such things were possible. 

Only he’d died on the second night, she thinks, staring with a nauseous feeling at her blurred reflection in the windowpane. His face had gone up then as a bluish replica in the sky with all the other dead, and Johanna hadn’t even thought twice about it. Certainly she hadn’t killed him, and she isn’t even sure how he’d died, but now that doesn't matter much anymore. Because how is this fair? That she can come out of those games alive, move forward in time, whilst he is stuck forever in that final moment at eighteen? 

“Damn it,” she breathes, staggering away from the window and to the table with all their dinner thrown about, all the plates dirty with bones and shells everywhere. In a daze, she trips over a chair and catches herself clumsily against the edge of the table, knocking a knife to the floor and opening a cut across her finger from which a line of blood begins to well. “Damn, damn, damn.”

Blight, spinning back and crossing to her side with a napkin: “you ok?”

“It’s not that,” says Johanna, absently dragging her bloody hand across her chest, smearing red all over her clothes. She doesn’t feel the sting of it at all. Maybe she is just really really locked down. “It’s not that. No — what are you doing? I’ve got it — it’s fine. Just leave it.”

“Look, I shouldn’t have brought up that boy.” Placid, tolerant, conciliatory Blight, splaying his hands in a gesture of peace. “Bad timing on my part. Lots of kids die in these games, lots of them die every year. You can’t start thinking about every one of them on this tour. Ok? Ok? Do you understand? Say something.” He is a bit forceful now, and terribly earnest, flinging an arm out at her.

Johanna blinks rapidly at him and says, in a faraway voice. “Yeah, Blight, I get it.” And really she does. In truth, she’s been so preoccupied with keeping her mind off the dead these past few months that she has hardly noticed the time pass. Days run on in a restless ennui — hungover mornings, long shimmering afternoons dragging themselves into evening, Blight passing the bottle back and forth with her as they eat blueberries straight from the tin. It’s easier to not think about all the people six feet under, to just step through her life one foot after the other and face things as they come — to keep the tears held down, waiting for some proper anger to take hold of her, something big enough to make sense of the bloodshed and to convince herself, maybe, that there is still a living woman in the centre of it all.

She sticks the injured finger in her mouth. Blight pushes a napkin into her other hand. 

“You’ll get through it like I did, Mason,” he says in what she supposes is meant to be a reassuring tone. He seems to have long resigned himself to the cycles of the Capitol, has since made his peace with it — that a person can live in almost any kind of life if they have to for long enough. She often thinks that if he had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing above him but the sky and clouds, he would, little by little, grow used to that too. 

“Two weeks, tops.” He goes on, “then you’ll be back home until July. If you keep your head down and don’t do anything stupid, it’ll be over before you know it.”

“July?” she says blankly.

“Next year’s Reaping,” he elucidates. “You’ll be a mentor.”

Mentor? Johanna moves her head to stare out the window. “Well, I’m not doing it,” she says, almost serenely. “Fuck that. I don’t want to mentor someone just to watch them die.”

“Sure,” he says callously, like this is all very familiar ground. “Most of them die, that’s the game. District Seven doesn’t prepare them for a hangnail, let alone the Games. We’ve got no odds next to the Careers, but you made it out, didn’t you Mason? All you’ve got to do is make sure these kids stay alive for as long as they can and then hope for the best. Give them the best shot you can. Can’t do anything more.”

The train breaks suddenly out of the tunnel, and for an instant the world in front of them opens wide: grassy meadows running for miles and miles ahead, water kicking up and meeting the dam at the joint.

“Do you understand what I mean?” he presses her.

She nods. What he means is that there is no saving for anyone. Outside, the meadows stream away, indifferent and impossibly green.

District Twelve is lifeless and full of coal dust in the windy black hour before sun-up. As the train pulls into the slums, Johanna sees people everywhere: old women drying up from starvation like mummies, young boys with their faces grayish and grim, working fathers looking incurably sick from seven days a week spent in the coalpits. By comparison, District Seven passes for upscale — cleaner and larger, with more space to run around. 

“No surprise these people are so poor,” Dido remarks coolly, her face shiny from sleep as she edges around and slithers into her seat at the table. “Ask them to sit on their arses all day and they’ll be happy as pigs in mud.”

Johanna turns from the window and shoves past her angrily. Given how little sleep she’s gotten after last night’s talk with Blight, and how she’s feeling — which is near death, basically — she hasn’t even got the strength to tell Dido to go fuck herself. There is a ringing in her ears, a taste of copper in her mouth — and her head hurts so badly she can scarcely think. How might District Twelve look at her out there in the open? How else would anyone look at her now, if not with hatred? She doesn’t know why she feels so wrong — only that she does, and whenever she looks up at the main square ahead she is slammed by shame rushing in from all sides.

At eleven o’clock, after Trisha has done her hair and stuffed her into some sort of gauzy-sleeved, diaphanous green dress, Dido sits her down to go through the day’s program one last time. In some districts the victors ride through the city while the residents cheer, but in Twelve — maybe because there’s not much of a city to begin with, things being so broken-down — the public appearance is confined to the square. Ringed by the houses of the well-to-do, it is the closest thing District Twelve has to a centre: a slab of old stone upon which the Justice Building stands, and where she will give her thanks to the people. 

When the train slows to a stop at the station, Trisha puts the finishing touches on her face and kisses her good luck — a ladies-who-lunch air kiss that smells of mint and sugar. 

“Toodle-oo, honey,” she says with a smile, all glitter and farce. “Have a wonderful time, won’t you?”

Two different elevators. Endless hallway, overlaid with gray. In her anxiety, everything seems to have reversed into black-and-white, so that when it is time to step forward Johanna walks out stunned and blinking into the sun, hardly knowing where she is. The square is packed with people. On either side of her stand the families of the dead tributes, hunched-back grandmothers and stone-cold brothers, whose accusatory faces seem as if lifted straight from her own nightmares. 

“Hello District Twelve,” she begins, looking straight ahead into the blackening skyline. Too heated. Wrong tone. This is all going the wrong way. She wants to be indifferent and in control, to screen her double-faced self from these people. She shuffles the papers in her hands and tries to find the first page of her speech. In a braver parallel she might have axed the plan, apologised maybe, screamed out in hatred of Snow — however stupid that might be — but for some reason her anger doesn’t come when she calls for it. The words that she next blurts out are flat and completely insincere.

“I stand here as the victor of the Seventy-First Hunger Games,” she says. “First, I would like to congratulate you all on the participation of your district in this year’s Hunger Games. Though your children were not victorious, their courage was commendable and they have brought great pride to District Twelve. Of course, this has come with grave losses, for which I, on behalf of the Capitol, extend our deepest sympathies. The Hunger Games serves as our yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated. For your children, your continued generosity to the Capitol, and for the strength of your district, I thank you. Panem today, Panem tomorrow, and Panem forever.”

Dim applause. Daggers of hatred from the families standing beside her. She waits as the mayor completes his part of the speech, which seems to go on for a hundred years. Then, like a sleepwalker awakened from a dream, Johanna moves away from the microphone and follows the Peacekeepers back into the Justice Building, where Dido and Blight are waiting. 

The stale breeze from the air vents blows straight into her face and burns her eyes. There is a man standing inside whom she has never seen before — dark curly hair, middle-aged, with a cheap shirt that has grayed in the wash. Very quickly, she realises this must be the Haymitch Abernathy that Finnick told her about, victor of the Fiftieth Hunger Games, always blotting the world out with drink. He trips his way toward her and slings his left arm over her shoulders.

“Not bad, princess,” he says in a bored voice. It takes Johanna by such surprise that she can only manage a blunt-sounding ‘thanks’. It’s weird to finally be talking to this man whom she knows so much about — a drunkard with a dead family and a dead girlfriend — and she has to wonder how much he knows about her in return. The prostitute, the axe-murderer, the pill-popper and the drug addict —

“Sure,” says the man chummily, “though it was a bit stiff, huh? You have got a lot of warming up to do before your next stop.”

Has he come just to take the piss out of her? Annoyed, Johanna shoves him off her shoulders. “Sorry it wasn’t good enough for you,” she narrows her eyes. “Maybe you’d like to get up there and do it yourself.”

He barks out a laugh, like he isn’t taking her seriously at all. “Spunky, aren’t you?”

She stares at him long and hard, a little defensively. It is unpleasant how many commonalities she sees between them, not only of history but also of character. Talking to him now feels like trying to argue with her own shadow. It makes her wonder if he feels the same things as she does, if he ever gets the sense of watching himself from afar, a crossfade between past and present, as she often does — like the deaths of her ma and pa and Hope have knocked her body and soul six feet apart.

Blight, she notices, is standing inconspicuously in the hallway. “Sorry to rush you,” he says, glancing at his wristwatch. “But we’ve got to go —”

“Alright,” says Haymitch, clapping her twice on the shoulder. “See you in the Capitol in about six months.”

As a parting formality, District Twelve has set up lunch for them in a back room of the Justice Building, away from the square. It’s not very celebratory by any means, mostly bread and potatoes and similarly beige-looking foods, but it is the most this district can give. From somewhere in the halls outside comes a boy’s low voice (“— but they’ll slash my wages anyway, so they can get stuffed!”) and then the shuffle of shoes as children hurry off with jugs of oil that have been paid for, no doubt, by extra names in the bowl. 

“I hate this place,” Trisha complains, sitting down at the end of the table in front of the bread basket. “It’s like death. Whenever I come here I get a feeling like, like it’s hard to even breathe. Can you imagine anyone living here?”

“Well, people do,” says Blight evenly. It is a well-hidden dig, and he covers it diplomatically with a tired smile and his big-man’s slouch, with his easy manner and steady good sense.

Trisha blinks up at him, laughing lightly. “Oh, yeah. It’s so sad, isn’t it?” She turns to Johanna. “Did you have fun today anyway? I had fun. Big day out! I’m counting down the days until we get to One. They’ve got all sorts of shops there, lots of good, high quality stuff, maybe we’ll find something for you, earrings, necklaces. I’m thinking we definitely need to sweeten up your image, with all this horrible Capitol hearsay.”

Trisha’s bright bubbling chatter follows them all the way back to the train and on to District Eleven. As the train pulls out toward golden-looking wheat fields, Johanna excuses herself and locks herself in her bedroom. She spends the next few days there except at mealtimes, with all the shades drawn, fading in and out of empty cloud dreams, trying not to think about the next stop, or the girl and boy from Eleven. How they’d stuck together until the end, both of them dark and tall and silent, intimidating with their amber eyes and black pupils.

The pair appears often in her sleep, along with all the other children she’s killed. Wide eyes flashing up at her in the night. She remembers it like it’s still happening: the girl chasing her down during that final day and calling out for district backup, swinging down with her sword, dodging this way and that as Johanna searches out the unprotected place at her neck. At last, stunned at her luck, Johanna finds it and slams her axe home. The girl, eyes wide with disbelief, drops her sword, reaches out and closes her fist around Johanna’s own. The sun beating down on them, sweat dripping down their faces, the boy’s name still bubbling at her lips as she kneels there, joined to Johanna for a moment by twelve inches of bloody steel. She will never forget the look on the boy’s face as he breaks through the branches and lets out his scream. The blur afterwards as he comes at her straight-on, manic and spitting — Johanna yanking her axe free and then scrabbling up the rocky slope, knowing that because of his size, because of the way he rushes forward without thinking, he will be faster downhill but slower on the climb. 

Time, a few seconds’ lead. The stones are loose under her feet, thrice sending her nearly to her knees as she ascends, not daring to look backward but feeling that somehow he is much closer than she thinks. This is how things go wrong: this fast. She knows she can’t keep on running forever. On a blind chance, she tests a rock and kicks it down, whirling her arms to catch her balance. It knocks into another, and another — more rocks, bigger ones — come on, come on. Finally, her loosened rockslide chases them both back down the slope, toward the cornucopia at the base where Tamsin is snatching up knives and shoving them into her belt. Stone pouring down in a wall of gray. Two gongs for the injured District Four pair who have made camp below. Flash of quicksilver — the Eleven boy drops dead in front of Johanna, a knife to his head. Another knife flies past her own ear as she realises that this is the end — that there is no one left to come between her and the girl from Two. She rushes ahead of the rockslide and meets Tamsin head-on, clashing steel, both of their cries snuffing out in the far-off spaces of her skull.

Ringing. Johanna breaks herself out of the memory with brute force, hands clapped over her ears in an effort to beat back her tinnitus. After a few minutes of rocking back and forth, she forces herself to get up and peer out through the blinds. Burnt orange and chestnut and gold — all the intensity of sundown streaming into her eyes. It is the kind of light that Hope might have liked, or Ma, for that matter, and to make herself feel better she pretends that her family is still alive, going about their routines back in District Seven — chatting with the Calders, picking up a loaf of rye from the bakery, going home after a long day out in the forest. She shuts the blinds and drops her face into the pillow, letting the hours roll over her in silence.

It is five-thirty in the evening by the time they get to District Eleven, and Johanna forces herself to shower just before Trisha comes knocking at her door. The dress she is forced into is green again, the shade of Seven’s trees that she can never wholly escape. Her dark hair is pinned away from her face and made to fall down her back in waves, highly inconvenient and far too long. As she is led out by Blight and Dido into District Eleven’s Justice Building, she cannot stop thinking about how the people will turn on her — the families of the dead staring at her with total hatred, as they’re sure to do. Same dead end. No way to make it all okay.

From where Johanna is standing in the square, she can just about see the wheat fields ahead, blasted by such extreme sunlight that the men and women working there must wear straw hats to keep from burning. The square itself is packed with people, but it seems to be only a fraction of the number who live here. Where are the others? Is this where they worked — the girl and boy from Eleven —

Without thinking, Johanna rushes headfirst into the speech, the words sounding awful in her own ears. She knows she has to do this before she gets the chance to think any more. “Hello people of District Eleven,” she hears herself say, shuffling her papers with shaky hands. “I stand here as the victor of the Seventy-First Hunger Games. First, I would like to congratulate you all on the participation of your district in this year’s Hunger Games —”

She is just about to continue when, with absolutely no warning at all, an old woman on the families’ platform drops to the ground and begins to sob. Johanna stands frozen with horror. The old woman is surrounded by five younger children, who resemble the girl tribute so closely in appearance that there can be no mistaking whose relatives they are. The image slams back: the girl on her knees in the dust, gazing up at Johanna with an almost sisterly concern despite the death cut she has just received, no longer enemy to enemy but one girl to another in that final moment, both of them irrevocably changed by the games they were forced to play.

“Gone,” the old woman wails, beating the ground with her fists. “My baby! My baby!”

Her gaze, helpless and mad with loss, drives deep into Johanna’s forehead like a burning sword. Suddenly she is struck for the first time ever by the full evil of what she has done; she has killed the girl like Snow has killed her own sister. She is no different from him at all. She wants to die. 

“Oh, god,” she mumbles, “I’m so sorry, sorry —”

There is a kick at her ankle from behind her. It is Blight. His face is white as chalk. Johanna turns back to clutch at the microphone, lifting her papers again and trying to find her place, but her hands are so shaky that she cannot separate one page from the next. The old woman is still crying, and from the edge of her vision she can see Peacekeepers approaching the platform, grabbing the woman by the shoulders and pulling her up hard. Shut up, they are saying, don’t make a noise.

“I would like to congratulate you all on the participation of your district in this year’s Hunger Games,” Johanna blurts out too quickly. The words are a mess in her mouth. Has she said this already? “Though your children were not victorious, their courage was commendable and they have brought great pride to District Eleven. Of course, this has come with grave losses, for which I, on behalf of the Capitol, extend our deepest sympathies. The Hunger Games serves as our yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated. For your children, your continued generosity to the Capitol, and for the strength of your district, I thank you. Panem today, Panem tomorrow, and Panem forever.”

The applause is scarce and reluctant. The mayor steps forward to thank the Capitol in a voice that seems to come from very far away. She squeezes her eyes shut as the noise of the woman’s muffled sobs falls over and over again, like a bludgeon.

“Why did you do that?” Dido says, once Johanna has followed Blight back into the Justice Building. Her voice is high and furious as she paces the floor, tugging anxiously at her low-cut. “What was that? Why would you say sorry? You’ve spoiled everything, you brat. Everything! Why do you never cooperate?” She looks to be on the edge of tears herself. “I did everything right! Why does this have to happen to me?”

The pure selfishness of that comment makes Dido the outlet for everything boiling inside Johanna — shame, self-hatred, crushing anxiety. She’s always done better with something to go at. Before she can stop herself, she snaps out and whacks Dido square across the face. She feels suddenly alive, afire with the anger that she has been trying so hard these days to summon. Hard-faced but inwardly grinning, she hits her again — bright crack, this time with her fist.

Dido stumbles back, screaming. “What on earth is the matter with you?” The slap has left a white mark across her cheek. All of a sudden the blood rushes back into it, flushing it a painful red. She looks to Trisha, who gives a bright, helpless smile as if to say, I know, but what can I do? Then to Blight, her second line of defense.

“Do something about your girl,” she says coldly, before slamming straight out into the hallway.