Stray birds of summer come to my window

to sing and fly away.

And yellow leaves of autumn,

which have no songs,

flutter and fall there with a sigh.

- Rabindranath Tagore

Taloned copper nails, flesh feathered silver-and-gold, a bronze-beaked mask of a face.

The first time he remembers his mother holding him, he cries because there is too much of her. "Oh Cinna," she sighs and releases him to her Avox. He buries his face in her shoulder and underneath the gilded mask his mother's face cracks, though he never knows.

"Its your face, Cloelia," his father tells her. "Better take it off."

"What nonsense you do say, Chaff," she huffs. "Aquila's bird fashions are all the rage now. Cinna will just have to get used to it. Vita!"

The Avox sets him down. Chaff crouches down to his son's level, holding his face with his one good hand so that their eyes meet. At four Cinna loves his father - he is the only family he knows - but more than that, he fears him. "Be a pet for your mother now, Cinna-boy," Chaff tells him. "She wants you." An odd thing to say to a little boy, he thinks, years later - a pet, not a man. Wants, not needs. It clicks into sense long afterwards.

He sucks in his trembling lower lip, knowing that it is not a request. These are his marching orders and he puts out his hand for his mother. "There we go now!" Cloelia says brightly. "Oh baby, we are going to have so much fun!"

"Fa?" Cinna asks uncertainly as Chaff puts on his jacket. At six and a half feet he towers over tiny Cloelia, the limping Avox and little Cinna.

"Your father has work to do," Cloelia tells him, "He'll be busy mentoring and we'll be busy part-ayyying!"

All in all, the Fifty-Eighth Hunger Games are not a success for either Chaff or Cloelia. The District Eleven tributes both die within the first hour at the bloodbath at the Cornucopia. And at her soirees, Cloelia quickly discovers that a scared little boy, though as adorable as a rarefied pet, is not nearly so tractable. On the train back home to District Eleven he plays with a basket filled with colorful cloth scraps, snipped off from his mother's old gowns by Vita.

The only concession to self-alteration seems to be metallic gold eyeliner that has been applied with a light hand. It brings out the flecks of gold in his green eyes.

On his good days, Chaff takes him to the fields sometimes. By the time the children in District Eleven are seven, they start working during harvest-time. Chaff doesn't have to, but he likes to and he takes Cinna along with him. Its one of the few times he can mix freely with other children - he doesn't go to the normal school but has a tutor who comes everyday to teach him and after school the district children rarely have time to play, they're always too busy doing chores at first he is shy with them. He doesn't even look much like them and stands out like a sore thumb. His hair, though curly like theirs, is dark brown and not black, his cinnamon skin lighter than theirs, his eyes green like his mother's instead of golden-brown like theirs. But then one of the little girls helps him climb a tree and shows him the signal for quitting-time. She whistles it three times for him before he can do it himself.

He shares his lunch with her and her eyes grow huge when she sees the food wrapped up in his basket. Loaves of soft white bread, butter and cheese to spread it, a few chocolates left over from the giant hamper his mother sent him for his birthday. "Do you eat like this everyday?" she demands.

He blushes. "Bet I was as lucky," she says enviously, "Some nights my stomach just rumbles and rumbles at night."

"You can come over to my house anytime you want," he offers.

She smiles. "I'd like that."

"Except for-" he says but then mutters, "Nothing. You can come anytime you want." Except for Fa's bad days.

"I know Chaff by sight cause I've spent years watching him pass a bottle back and forth with Haymitch on television."

Its not the first time his father hits him, but it is the first time he walks out. He stumbles blindly through the gloaming, one hand pressed to his bleeding nose. Half the houses in the Victors' Village are empty but he finds his way to Seeder's.

"Mercy, what's happened to you!" she yelps when she sees him.

"Fa," he mumbles but she doesn't hear him, just drags him to her kitchen. She bandages his nose, mashes a poultice for his bruises and sits him down at the table with a tall glass of milk and frosted cookies.

"Chaff been drinking again?" she asks, running a hand through her short black hair. She sighs when he nods. "Time was when I felt sorry for those poor kids - Chaff, Haymitch, them morphlings - but now I'm done with it. Does he beat you a lot?"

"Not a lot," he mumbles, "just when he's-"

"Been drinking, which he does a damn too much for his own good," she says curtly. "How old are you, child?"

"Eight."

"Better stay the night with me," she says. "Chaff won't know and in the morning I'll have a talk with him."

She puts him in the spare bedroom and finds a set of pajamas for him from somewhere. They're a girl's though, pink with red roses, and a little long for him. She laughs when he makes a face at them and says, "They were my daughter's."

"I never knew you had a daughter."

"No, how would you? She died long before you were born or even thought of. Saffron was only twelve - it was her first Reaping." Seeder smiles tightly. "You favor your mother, you know. More cinnamon than black. Lucky for you."

"I don't remember my mother." He hasn't seen her since he was four and then only for a few weeks. And before that he has only ever lived with his father. Of course, when he was only a baby his mother kept him in the Capitol, to show him off to her society friends, but he doesn't remember that.

"Hmm. Think it's time that changed then."

"I'm scared of her. I don't want to live with her."

"Oh pet, its never about what you want. Its always about how the odds will favor you."

His mother dresses him for his Citizenship Ceremony when he is nine and he likes it not one bit.

"I'm big enough to choose my own clothes," he tells Vita petulantly and she smiles. "Besides I'd choose much better than her." At that however, she puts her finger to her lips and he mimics her, knowing that if Cloelia heard there'd be a row.

A tight-fitting green brocade jacket, a belt glittering with tiny electric bulbs, loose gold lame trousers gathered at the ankle. Red leather shoes with extravagantly curled-up points. A wig, garishly dyed pink, with curls falling to the middle of his back. A crown of cobalt-blue feathers in it.

"Oh, I just love it!" his mother's friend, Prisca, gushes. "Its so-so-" Words fail her so she settles for bouncing up and down on the spot, waving her arms like a windmill. Behind her back, her daughter Portia makes a face.

"I know," Cloelia says smugly. "I designed it myself!"

There's still a bit of time before they need to go down so Prisca and Cloelia settle down for a good gossip over cups of hot chocolate. "I like your outfit," Portia smirks. Both her parents were Capitol-born so she doesn't need a Citizenship Ceremony unlike Cinna - she and her mother are just joining them for moral support. She looks pretty in a gauzy white gown, a rose-colored satin sash tied at her waist and her hair braided with pearls. She twirls when she notices him looking. "I designed it myself."

Cinna ignores her. He settles down on the window-seat with his sketch-book and pastels and begins to design an outfit that he thinks would much better suit him. A coat of palest gold reaching to his knees, like summer wheat. Delicate patterns picked out in the weft - men working in the fields, children picking apples from the trees, mothers playing in the sun with their babies, birds and butterflies. A different world. A shirt and trousers embroidered with candy-colored townhouses and carousels, people and scenes from the Capitol.

Portia has been watching him all along. When he finishes she shouts to her mother, "Mummy! I want a drawing teacher just like Cinna has. I don't think my old one is half as good."

"But Cinna doesn't have a drawing teacher, darling - or have you just hired one for him, Cloelia dear?"

"No I haven't had time, I've only had him to myself for a week-"

Their mothers trail into the room like oversized candy-colored buzzards. He tries to snap his sketchbook shut but Prisca is too quick for him. "Oh my," she gasps, rifling through the pages. "Why these are so-"

Cloelia's pencil-thin eyebrows rise as high as she can make them grow. "I never knew you drew, Cinna."

There's a lot of things you don't know about me. Mother. He swings his feet sullenly.

She looks uncertain, at a loss for something to say. "Well," she says brightly, clapping her hands, "I guess I'll just have to make up for lost time now, hmm? I'm sure we'll be the best of friends in no time at all!"

His Citizenship Ceremony is held at one of the downtown Administrative Offices. Apart from Prisca and Portia, a few of his relatives on his mother's side attend including his grandfather, an important Government official.

They make him stand on a podium and recite the short speech he's been taught to memorize. Take a few vows over a big book. He doesn't really understand it though he knows that after it he will be ineligible for the yearly Reapings, that Citizenship Ceremonies for children from the Districts - even for "half-n'half's" like him - are unusual. He is now entitled to the benefits of a child born in the Capitol, to two Capitol parents. Prosperity. Protection.

On the ride back home he asks Cloelia when Chaff will come to pick him up. "Oh sweetheart, don't you know? I'm going to be your primary guardian now and you can live with me! Won't that be a delight?"

It takes a while to register. "So I'll never see Fa again?"

"Of course you will - he'll be back every year for the Games, won't he?"

"And District Eleven?"

"You know Capitol citizens can't go to the Districts without permission." His mother wrinkles her nose. "Don't tell me you want to go back to that dreadful place again, Cinna!"

He bites his lip and says nothing, knowing that she will never understand.

It's funny, because even though they're rattling on about the Games, it's all about where they were or what they were doing or how they felt when a specific event occurred. Everything is about them, not the dying boys and girls in the arena.

At school they laugh at him. If he stuck out like a sore thumb in District Eleven, he feels barely human in the Capitol. They mimic his accent, they cover their noses when he walks by. The bolder ones shove him, trip him up when they can.

"Don't let them get at you," Portia tells him but he thinks she's one to talk. She's Capitol-born, not a half-breed, a freak, like him. He starts eating his lunch in the toilets, sketching furiously away in order to take his mind off things.

"I want a resculpting session for my birthday," he tells his mother when he is eleven. "And an over-all dye job."

"Someone's growing up," Cloelia titters but Vita looks uncertain. "Hmm, lets see what you have in mind." He has already drawn Before and After versions of himself.

"Oh my," Cloelia says, when she sees his work. "A bit... drastic, don't you think? You'll look nothing like yourself."

"That's what I want."

For the first time, she looks concerned about him. "Cinna," she says, putting her arm around him, "what's gotten into you?" And all at once he buries his face into her shoulder.

"They hate me," he whispers, "they'll always hate me."

"Oh baby." Maternal tenderness does not come easily to her, she rubs his arm awkwardly and says, "I don't think a resculpting session's going to change that. They'll still know it's you."

"Then take me out from school. You could do that." He pokes his head up hopefully. "Send me for an apprenticeship."

"An apprenticeship, hmm?" She looks piqued. "Unusual, but not unheard of. Under a stylist, I think? I've seen how you draw... perhaps I'll ring Aquila up tomorrow." She kisses his tears away. "Oh baby, don't cry. You know how I hate tears." In the end it is always about her. He's used to it.

"I'm sorry, Mother. I promise I won't cry in front of you again."

"That's better now!" she says cheerily. "Now let's watch something, shall we? Something to take our minds off this. We could watch old reruns of the Games - those always perk me up when I'm blue."

"If you like," he says dutifully, though they aren't really his thing. Still, he doesn't particularly mind them.

She bounces over to her collection. "I haven't seen the Forty-Fifth in a while - those were your father's, you know."

"I've never seen them."

"Really?" She looks curious. "I'd have thought he'd be playing them all day long - I would if I were a Victor but then you know what a vain thing I am!" She titters. "Not at all like Chaff. He was the strong, silent type - or at least that's the way he put himself across during his Games."

They watch the Games together, his mother fast-forwarding through the other players' bits to focus on his father. She intersperses the video with her own monologue - "I'd just dyed my hair purple for the first time, the Imperial theme was all the rage that year", "He was so dashing - all the girls were just wild for him!", "I'd bet on the girl from District One, she had such stunning breasts, and was quite cross when she didn't even enter the top eight."

"Fa was eighteen, right?" he asks her drowsily, sipping Vita's coffee.

"Oh yes and I was a debutante later that year - not quite fifteen." He has seen photos of her presented at the debutante ball - tiny and bird-boned and sweetly smiling in a gown of lavender lace and feathers, her lips and long hair dyed a soft violet. She has always reminded him of a bird somehow - frail and sheltered and air-headed.

"And I was born six years later," he says.

"If you say so, dear. You're better at the math than me. I only ever flirted with boys at school."

"Did you fall in love?" he asks, bewildered. He can easily imagine Cloelia fathoms deep in adoration but Chaff? No.

She avoids his eyes. "Oh dear, you know how it is."

"No Mother. I don't."

She twists her hands nervously just as Chaff slices open a girl's from throat to navel on-screen with a spiked mace. Her intestines spill out and she starts to scream. "I wanted him," she says fretfully. "We all did and we paid him a fair rate too. You know how it was with victors and lovers queuing up left, right and center even though he never bothered to get that hand surgically altered. I was lucky - I got pregnant, after only one night. Everyone was so jealous of me at first, only later when I started thickening they all laughed at me. You were such a trial, Cinna."

"And am I still one now?" he asks dryly.

"Oh no, dear, not at all. They went right back to being jealous after you were born, so small and cuddly and cinnamon-brown. My mother and I had such fun showing you off, though Father wasn't all that sure about me having a half-breed. It wasn't done in his day, the old-fashioned bore!"

One year, our tributes were stark naked and covered in black powder to represent coal dust. It's always dreadful and does nothing to win favor with the crowd.

She is fourteen, the same age as him. Naked and patterned with coal dust, she could pass for twelve.

"They should've given her a breast augmentation at the very least," his mother's most recent lover complains, plowing into the lamb stew. They have settled for a quiet night at home, this year. As his mother says, it does get wearying crowding up at the Square year after year to watch the Tributes roll in - you can get a much better view, much more comfortably, on TV. "Really what were her stylists thinking?"

"A shriveled leaf," he says aloud, without thinking.

"Oh yes, dear, that's very good," Cloelia titters. "A shriveled leaf - yes that's exactly what I was thinking. Most distasteful - I rather fancied the outfit on the girl from District Ten myself, so charmingly rustic. She looks like a china milkmaid. When do they think they'll be stocking it at the boutiques, dear?"

His sketchbook is always at his elbow these days and without thinking he begins to draw. "Oh Cinna, not at the dinner table," his mother sighs but she leans over his shoulder none the less, curious as a bird. An inky brown, like scorched bark, cross-hatched with white scars. Teardrops stenciled on her face, dripping from those sad grey eyes, lips smeared with coal dust, face as white as a mask.

"Lovely!" his mother says, delighted. "The Shriveled Leaf outfit, hmm? I swear, Cinna darling, I won't need to visit the boutiques every week if you start designing for me!"

"They should pick you to style the tributes from District Twelve," his mother's lover says jovially. "They never get anyone good do they, poor things? But then I suppose if you're planning on going into the business you'd rather style District Eleven. Closer to your father."

Too close, he thinks. But he smiles politely as his mother rips out the page from his sketchbook and rushes to pin it to her Lookbook corkboard. "District Twelve," he says. "That's an interesting idea."

Finnick begins to weave a tapestry so rich in detail that you can't doubt its authenticity. Tales of strange sexual appetites, betrayals of the heart, bottomless greed, and bloody power plays. Drunken secrets whispered over damp pillow-cases in the dead of night. If a bad haircut can lead to hours of gossip, what will charges of incest, back-stabbing, blackmail and arson produce?

When he is sixteen, his mother still looks only a few years older than him thanks to frequent and intensive body resculpting and polishing sessions. But the tide of her lovers has been stemmed - she has started taking pills for her flagging libido but they don't seem to be working too well. She begins hovering a little too much over him. Spying on him, he thinks and Vita confirms his suspicions. She can't speak but they have developed their own sign language over the years.

"You look so much like your father. So tall and strong and capable," she begins to gush, "But for your eyes. You have my eyes, my father's eyes."

His grandfather's visits over the years have decreased too. When Cinna was younger, he used to visit once a night every month, staying over during weekends at times. At those time, his mother would send her lovers away - to spend quality time with her father, Cinna used to think. But now...

She begins to kiss him, more often than she has since he was a little boy, hands lingering over him, stripping down when he is in the same room. He tells Prisca and she purses her lips and says that his mother needs a distraction, nothing more. And eventually his grandfather loosens his purse strings, after Prisca's repeated nagging, and Finnick O'dair stays over at their townhouse for a night. His mother looks a lot cheerier in the morning but she doesn't loosen her hold on him either. When she finds out that he's been sleeping on and off with Portia and Prisca, she bursts into tears and storms out of the room, accusing him of betrayal.

"Poor Cloelia - she's been through a lot since she was a kid. But dahhling, what you need is a makeover," Aquila sighs after he duly repeats the tale to him. And so he begins to paint his body - fuchsia, coral, scarlet - anything to keep her away from him, sculpting his features into unrecognizable masks. It begins to work.

A lovely if somewhat bedraggled young woman - dark tangled hair, sea green eyes - runs toward us in nothing but a sheet.

The Seventieth Hunger Games take place when he's nineteen. His apprenticeship is almost over, more and more often he creates his own designs though ostensibly he is still working under Aquila. Aquila chooses District Four that year.

"We have ourselves a looker," Aquila observes, whistling, when the fifteen-year-old girl is Reaped. "The Sponsors will go wild."

Cinna oversees her make-up before the tributes are paraded. "The theme is mermaid," he tells her, applying her body glitter with a deft hand. Silver and gold flecked, like scales. Her gown is transparent, ultramarine and wrapped around her in classical fashion, all the better to show off her painted skin. Even her face is scaled.

She seems a sweet, gentle little thing and he can't see her lasting more than a few hours. Perhaps a quick death would be the best for her. She has a high-pitched, nervous sort of giggle that he finds strangely endearing. "You shouldn't be so quick to discount me, you know," she says. "Finnick did too."

"I'm sorry, Annie." He always makes a point to remember all their names.

"Dahhling, you'll go out with a bang at the very least!" Aquila says. "Ultramarine will be the it color after I'm done with you!"

Annie smiles, so sweet and childlike, that the irony of her words is lost on all of them except Cinna. "Oh goodie, that's what I've always wanted! To set a new fashion trend!"

She wins and Aquila hosts a bubble party, ecstatic. But the girl they dress for the interview is different from the girl from three weeks ago. Mute. Glassy-eyed. Fingers fidgeting, body shivering when anyone touches her. Her gown is sea-green, slit down the front to expose her breasts all the way to her navel and at the sides up to her hips. But she looks like a child in it, not the "sexy siren" look Aquila was going for.

"Well she could act a bit happier about winning!" Aquila says petulantly. "If she thinks she can put off all the lovers that'll be pounding on her door with the rock-act, then she's mistaken!"

"She's only fifteen," Cinna says, horrified. She's broken. He knows how the system works as well as anyone else but little Annie Cresta?

Aquila rolls his eyes. "Dahhling, as though that's ever stopped anyone before. If I had the money, I'd be banging her myself!"

"She looks gorgeous," Chaff tells Cinna dryly. Its the first time they've talked to each other in years, usually they avoid each other during the Games. "Your first Victor, eh? You must be very excited." Cinna avoids his father's eyes and Chaff laughs. "Get used to it, son."

"I won't," he says coolly, hackles up as they always are around his father.

"Oh yeah?" Chaff touches his cheek, dyed ultramarine just like the rest of Aquila's prep team, and smirks. "Pity I let your mother take you back - the world would've been a better place if you'd been Reaped." He takes in his fantastic appearance - the mother-of-pearl scales sewn so close to his body they might have been his chrysalis, the silver-dyed hair twisted up like a seahorse perching on top of his head - and snorts.

"You had no choice," he chokes out. "She would've taken me in anyway." Would she?

Chaff smiles as though he can read Cinna's mind. "Well if someone drops a stray kitten on your doorstep you're likely to keep it, especially if it's cute. But that doesn't mean you're going to go out of your way to find one, eh?"

Cinna doesn't bother attending the after-parties that night, he scrubs and scrubs until the last of the dyes drains out with the water and then he takes a razor to his hair, snipping it as close to his skull as he can.

"I like the look," his mother says doubtfully. "Its so... quaint. You look rather like your father now."

"Its the new me," he tells her and she giggles and pulls his ear playfully.

"Dearest, you say that every few days! The price a man of fashion pays, hmm?"

"Not this time," he says soberly. "This time I mean it." He officially terminates his apprenticeship with Aquila that day. On the way to Portia's apartment, he buys a bouquet of yellow roses at the florist's.

"What's up, Cinnamon?" she asks at the door.

"We're going to the Districts, Posh," he tells her without preamble. "I'm going to get us a special permit from the Government - I have my grandfather's contacts, I can get it to work."

She raises her eyebrows as high as they can go. "Oh really? And what are we going to do there?"

"Step out of our rut. Learn. Explore. Discover. Reinvent. We're going to open our own boutique and we're going to style the tributes." He grabs her hand. "We're going on an adventure."