Kain Brocatelle

Mentor, District Eight

Victor of the 13th Hunger Games

Evangeline's fingers tap the microphone to the beat of the feet marching through the square.

Pop, pop, pop she mouths, making bubblegum pink lips stick for the fraction of a moment they meet.

She stares at me, and my first thought is to protect the notebook bulging between my back and that of the cold iron chair I'm seated on. Like she can see through me, to the only thing I have left to take care of.

Then my mouth hangs open when I remember that I forget – Velvet.

Evangeline smiles, thinking she must have unsettled me. She has, she definitely does, so I choose to let her revel in that and miss the bigger thing going on here. There's someone out there I care for; there's someone out there who might care for me too, if I could just –

"District Eight! It is time again to introduce, direct from The Capitol, our very own Evangeline Wonder!"

The low hum of voices cut out when Evangeline's microphone snaps up to her gently smiling jaws.

"What a privilege it is to be among you all for another Hunger Games!"

A ripple of disgust and disbelief shows itself in the wave of movement starved bodies make, like feathers in the wind. Like the long, thick grass I still sometimes see in my dreams. A rustle and a long silenced scream struggle to bob up to the surface, so I do what I always do – I dig my fingers into the ends of my crisp, copper coloured shirt, and I wait for it all to go away. I will right now to form again before me.

"I know it's tempting to start with the boys..."

Pop, pop, pop.

"...But for tradition's sake, how about we get this show started by selecting one of our lovely ladies?"

The soot filled sky above me swirls into a starry night as the brittle stage splinters to make way for grass that swallows me whole.

My sleeves, my notebook, the world, are gone. What's left is running. Running for my life as hyena mutts rip and tear their way toward me. Throwing up with relief and disgust when they find the bodies of the girl from Three, and the boy from Nine, still hanging from snares I set this morning. Crying and laughing to find they've forgotten about me, devoted entirely to devouring the luckiest amongst the Final Five.

Pop, pop, pop as their arms and legs are pulled free from their sockets.

I dry heave as I remember that my hands used to make things. My hands used to make beautiful, gorgeous things.

"Are we ready now?"

The sunken, the small, and the sick hold their breaths collectively as the sweat runs down my back and bleeds into the notebook hidden there.

We're never ready.

Buckram Chauri

Male Tribute, District Eight

The jagged scar of a person representing The Capitol slides the microphone in her hand down the length of her silver chest, to rest between whatever augmented breasts reside there. Hearing her breath ratchet up in anticipation is a new low, and I struggle with my spot dug deep in The Fifteens. There's nowhere to remove yourself to; there's nowhere to pick yourself up and put yourself down away from what's happening here.

She holds her hands over the frosted pink bowl like the right slip will make itself known to her, and save her the trouble of reaching in. Like it could do anything but sit there, hidden among a few hundred other names that would do just as well. And by well, I mean well by Eight's standards. Bar Kain, green and sweating through his shirt so his feathers droop, we've had some truly spectacular finishes.

We've been smothered, garrotted, drowned, burned, flayed, impaled, and trampled. We've been killed outright in The Bloodbath fourteen times; the first time, we didn't even make it off our plates. We've sent the sick, the hungry, the homeless, the illiterate, and that boy from the East End who didn't know how to tie his shoes, and tripped headfirst into a crater - where he died. Five days later.

A breathy titter tells us she's found one she's happy with.

"Chalice Orlon!"

This one has nothing on her face when the camera streams it and blows it up through the projector pointed at Factory Four: Tulle. Her four metre by four metre face is a still puddle out the back of the scraps and discards building. There is nothing in it, and it's much too shallow for anything to be on it either.

Her thin lips harden into a single line as a loose strand of mouse brown hair whips into her eyes. She slowly takes it, and puts it back in the bun on top of her head before turning around in a circle, taking it all in, and leaving it all behind.

"That's it darling, come up to the stage so we can all congratulate you properly!"

The sixteens are slow to let her go. They don't fall back as quickly as they usually do. She puts her hands together and holds them out, parting them like fragile moth-eaten curtains on a rainy Saturday morning.

I feel like I've seen her somewhere before. It can't have been at school, as I can't go, but she might. She might be good, and ordinary, that might be why it's not real for anyone yet. They never pick the good and ordinary.

One year they picked a twelve year old with cerebral palsy.

"My, my, aren't you a vision! Is there anything you'd like to say to your District, Miss Orlon?"

A grimy gust pulls that stray strand out again as Chalice reaches up for it and leans in to say –

"I'll try not to get smothered by a sleeping bag"

I can't help but smile, just a little bit.

That was one of the least embarrassing ways we've died, after all.

Chalice Orlon

Female Tribute, District Eight

I lick my lips to taste the grit in Eight air, and know somewhere deep inside me this will be the last time I do. I'm grateful for the habit of putting hidden pockets in everything I make; I'm grateful for the habit of hiding all the perfect pebbles I've found deep within. I count out seven in my left hand, and five in my right. There's a sudden urge to bundle them all up and throw them at Evangeline, or better, make her swallow them, but it's gone when my hair comes free again. I let go, and put it back where it belongs.

"What a gem she is! Now, are we all ready to select the young man who will do us the honour of representing District Eight alongside Miss Orlon?"

Hands back in my pockets, I hold on tight to the pebbles inside.

I want to be what I should, knowing this is the last time I'll be alive and home at the same time. I want to be tearing myself into ribbons too light and insubstantial to constitute a whole Female Tribute. If I'm really not here, there's no way they can scoop me up and put me down somewhere else. But the mad ones die just as easily as the sane. Sooner, and cleaner, more often than not, but they don't ever come back again. And the ones that do, stay ribbons forever.

"The Male Tribute for District Eight is…"

Harris is out there somewhere in The Thirteens. Harris the one and only hope for the family second-hand goods shop continuing. As some of the last hereditary shop owners our District has, there has always been a leaden expectation that I would keep it going, and one day pass it on to my firstborn child, continuing a long uninterrupted line of succession. If it weren't for this now barely-legal practice, there would be no hope for our survival. Not for a family with three children. Shops are beyond the wildest dreams of any citizen to buy, and jobs working in them are restricted to family and friends of the current owners. Everyone else is stuck working in one of the many factories our District is known for; collectors of sunken chests, broken fingers, and translucent skin emptying their lives out into the kinds of clothes Evangeline delights in blinding us with.

But if it is Harris, then Twill can take his place as he has now taken mine.

Until one day they call her name out too.

"…Buckram Chauri!"

The pebbles fall back into the pockets hidden deep within my dress, and I sigh – the stray strand of hair is back.

It sits there, hitting me in the eye as I turn around to stare.

Kain Brocatelle has choked on a strangled gasp, and is now having a coughing fit.