The Last Tribute: Peeta's Story

Part I: The Reaping

Chapter 1

I wake in the pre-dawn darkness with a start, sweat plastering me to the sheets, a dull ache throbbing behind my eyes. Even though the window is wide open, my room is stiflingly hot. With the ovens running all day, it never gets cool upstairs, especially not in the summer. I sit up, stretching my arms high above my head as I wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The sky holds not a hint of sunlight, not even the song birds have begun chirping. I know almost immediately I won't be able to go back to sleep, even if the room were cool, even if I didn't have to be up in an hour, because today is the day of the reaping.

I drag on clothes that spent the night draped over the foot of my bed, an almost clean white shirt and dark pants, then slip on my most comfortable pair of shoes. Wrapping a white apron around my waist, I walk down the stairs to my family's bakery.

I pass through the darkened storefront with its clear glass display cases for desserts and wide shelves for breads and make my way to the back where the hulking shadow of the ovens, twin wood burning giants encased in brick, greet me. As a kid, the ovens terrified me. Brought to life by my imagination, they became two blazing, watchful eyes, ready to burn me alive. Now, taming the flames is second nature.

I make sure the fires are fully stoked, feeding the ovens a few pieces of seasoned wood, then I check on the dough we made yesterday. I find it sitting under the work bench in three bins that each hold a hundred pounds, fully proofed and puffy like a cloud.

After rolling my sleeves up, I heave the hundred pound batch of dough onto the work bench. The white mass lurches across the table like something alive, sending excess flour and yeast swirling through the air where it rains down on top of me. It's a smell I've grown up with, the smell of home, of any other day. It almost seems wrong to be doing something so ordinary on reaping day.

Most other shops in the square are closed, the doors locked and the inhabitants still sleeping above their storefronts. The same is true of the coal mines that make up the bulk of industry in District 12. But I don't have that luxury. Reaping day is one of the busiest days for the bakery. We open early and stay open until noon, which is cutting it close because the reaping starts at two.

I dust the top of the huge lump of dough with extra flour and begin cutting it into one pound sections, weighing each in my hand, testing for that well known heaviness before kneading and shaping the formless blobs into taut loaves. The work is easy. Some recipes demand a lot of attention, but this is our simplest dough, one I learned when I was four-years-old. It only has five ingredients: flour, salt, yeast, water, and oil.

"You know that one's a little light." I turn around to find my father leaning against the door, his flour smeared apron already in place. He's a broad shouldered, quiet man. People say I look like my father, but the blond hair and blue eyes we share are pretty common in town.

"It's not," I say. "Use the scale if you don't believe me."

He takes the offending loaf over to the cast-iron scale that's been in our family for more generations than anyone can remember. Etched and worn, any paint that once covered its base long gone, the Mellark scale is my favorite thing in the bakery. It's still perfectly accurate, too. We don't always use it for bread making where feel is more important than exact measurements, but it's necessary for measuring the ingredients for cakes and pastries. The scale clangs down to the one pound mark. My father grunts. "Guess I was wrong."

"Or maybe, you've been making too many heavy loaves for certain customers," I say.

My father is in the habit of making the bread for trading to the poorer families slightly heavier. He trades them for things we could buy from the other merchants, but we don't. It's something my mother hates. She thinks trading for meat or soap or cheese is beneath us.

Since she's the daughter of the former district mayor, she thinks everyone is beneath her. I sometimes wonder what my father saw in her. They are so different, she's the last person who would hand out extra food to the poor. And maybe she's right. Most of the residents of District 12 are struggling to get by, some are barely surviving. An extra half pound of bread can't change that.

An image comes unbidden to my mind of a small gaunt girl collapsed beneath the apple tree in the yard. No, I am wrong, an extra half pound of bread can be the difference between life and death.

He walks back over to the bench next to me, taking one of the sectioned off pieces.

"Well, people—"

"—still have to eat," I finish for him.

My father has been the baker for District 12 for the last twenty years, like his father before him. The job usually falls to the eldest son, but my oldest brother, Rieska, is marrying Clara Hanson, the only daughter of the sweets shop owner and is set to take over that business. He's apprenticing under his future father-in-law now, learning all there is to know about making candy. It's a small shop, much smaller than the bakery, because refined sugar is rare in our district and the candy is very expensive. Almost no one but the mayor's family and Peacekeepers can afford to shop there. They're almost the only ones who buy our cakes and cookies, too.

As for my other brother Hagan, he couldn't bake to save his life. He's never made a loaf of bread that could be sold. I'm convinced he does it on purpose. There's no way anyone could be that bad. His real passion is wrestling. He's won almost every wrestling tournament in our district for the last four years. He'll probably become junior coach later this year. After his last reaping.

That leaves me to run the bakery. I don't mind, it's not as if there are very many choices. Not like in the Capitol where people can train to be almost anything from artists to animal trainers. I used to wish I could run away to the Capitol and become a famous artist like I saw on television. It seemed so beautiful and exciting there. That was before I understood how our world works. The only way to the Capitol for a boy from District 12 is on the Reaping Train.

"I remember when I was your age…" my father begins before trailing off. His hands continue to fold the dough in on itself.

I wait for him to finish his thought, but what is there to say? That I'll get through this? That it won't be me? He can't guarantee that. Even saying it is forbidden. In the eyes of the Capitol, to be chosen in the reaping is an honor. To hope your child isn't selected is seen as disloyal. Even in District 12, the middle of nowhere, we can't be sure what we say in our own homes isn't being monitored, that our neighbors won't turn us in to the Peacekeepers.

I look at my father, the resigned stoop to his shoulders. What must it be like to be the parent of a reaping age child? Or even before that, knowing what the future holds. My father has a kind heart, maybe too kind. I hide a lot of things from him, because he's so kind. It doesn't seem fair to burden him.

It's a shame the Capitol doesn't have the same restraint. My father's already gone through this once himself and now he has to do it again with his sons. To stand there and watch. It's a different kind of torture. I don't know which one is worse.

"I know," I say. "Two more years and this will all be behind us."

My father nods and starts back working. I slam my piece of dough flat with the palm of my hand. Of course, it never really ends. Someone's kid is always chosen. I force myself to calm down. I'm not the angry one, it's my mother or my brother, but that's not me. Today is hard enough without being angry. Everyone is tense on reaping day, the bottled up resentment too close to the surface. I fall into the familiarity of the task, into the feel of warm, smooth dough beneath my hands.

Before the morning's barely begun, we've formed over two hundred loaves of five different breads: plain, dill, olive, roasted onion, and cheese. The first two are already baking while the last three are having their final proof beside the warm oven.

I begin working on my favorite task in the bakery, frosting the cakes. Since the Capitol treats the reapings as if they are worth celebrating, we in the districts are required to follow suit. On the day of the reaping, we're allowed to have a fresh two layer white cake with icing. This is a something we only have for the reaping. Even our birthdays are celebrated with the odd and ends cut from the cakes for paying customers.

I put the cake on a turn table and fill a piping bag with frosting, inhaling the sweet scent of buttercream before twisting the bag closed. I practice my rosettes in white on this year's cake. It's a simple technique, really just a series of curlicues, but it needs patience and a steady hand.

The jingle of the bell over the front door draws my father away from scoring the surface of the latest batch going into the oven. He takes the tray of freshly baked bread with him to the front of the bakery, holding it high as he passes through the swinging double doors. Who could that be? Very few people come to the bakery this early, unless they're here to trade with my father before my mother gets up.

I sit up a little straighter, it could be her. I force the thought back down and focus on the cake. I frown down at the last rosette that's crooked and misshapen. I scrap it off with my spatula and add the blob of frosting back to the piping bag. There's no reason to get excited. So what if it is her? I've seen her almost every day for years without ever talking to her, that isn't going to change today. It's ridiculous anyway. Really. Having feelings about what amounts to a childhood crush. She doesn't even remember, it was eleven years ago, after all…