And So We Run Redux

Tell me are you out there, is there nothing here to tame the human heart?
I see a land that's ruthless, yet where each shadow ends a life begins to start.
We broke the backs of strangers,
Where are their wives and children now?
We'll raise a rag of hope then tear it down...– Pilot Speed

Prologue

The droning of aircraft and the distant whistle of a train are the only warning the people of District 12 receive. But, it is enough for those men and women who have lived to old age, the ones with childhood memories older than the Reaping and the Games.

In the Seam, the throbbing air wakes a ninety-year-old man from a fitful slumber. He thinks the noise belongs in the tail-end of a dream about the fall of the Dark Days, of the smoldering ruins of a district he has never visited, but remembers with hope and dread.

The dream of the smoke and the song bird.

The thrum and throb hangs in the humid night like an ache. Like the rheumatism in his joints which tells him that the dream has ended, that he is awake. The old man knows the sound—what it means—so he rises, knees cracking, from his cot. He wakes his daughter. His daughter wakes the children and her sleep-deprived husband.

Her husband wakes his neighbor. And so on.

Beyond the Seam lies the Meadow and the live fence. Beyond the fence lies the forest.

And the forest means safety.

But the fence means death.

TBC

AN: Thanks for reading! Now, onward.