(A/N: Sorry for the recent confusion of chapters. Hopefully, everything is in order now!)

CHAPTER FOUR

After we eat, my mentor and I retire to another part of the shuttle, a room with a huge screen to watch the televised Reapings. They start with District Twelve, and I'm forced to relive the shittiest moment of my life up to this point. Good to know that my idiotic, stunned moment of shock and confusion has just been shown to every fucking troll in the solar system.

They go up from there. A curly-haired girl from District Eleven. She doesn't cry or shake when she gets onto the stage, she just faces the cameras defiantly. I know she's gotta be broken up inside, but she puts on a brave face with a halfhearted smile.

District Ten causes quite a stir. The seadweller calls out a name, but nobody steps forward. There's a long, awkward silence and the adult calls the name again. It gets really quiet again before a timid, shaking voice calls out, "Over here." The crowd of brownbloods part to reveal a trembling boy with oversized horns… in a wheelchair.

"That's no fair!" I cry out, standing from the couch. "They can't put him in the Grubs!" As the adult pushes the boy's four wheeled device up towards the stage, the Signless just shakes his head. "Come on!" I shout at the screen, "Pick another fucking name!"

"Karkat, sit down and stop shouting, I can hardly hear the television," my mentor says calmly.

Figures, I guess, that a little thing like a disability wouldn't stop those sick fucks from getting a good show of murder.

A psionic guy from Nine with weird double horns and funky bi-colored glasses, according to the Signless, might be a tricky opponent. I tell him to shut the fuck up. I don't want to think about fighting these guys… they're just kids. They're just like me, really. They don't want to do this any more than I do.

The tribute from Eight only solidifies my hatred of the Empire. She can't possibly be six sweeps. She's tiny-framed and wearing some sort of meowbeast hat, like a little girl playing pretend. It's worrying, though, to see how bravely she bounds up to the stage, how she smiles at the cameras. The Signless remarks that she'll probably be a crowd favorite.

The screen changes a bit, the colors shifting as the edited version of the District Seven Reaping comes on. They have to use a special filter there, because those jade blooded freaks do their Reaping (and everything else, apparently) when the sun is up. It would be practically impossible to watch anything filmed there without a bit of post-production. The girl that steps up to the stage is rather proper looking, in my opinion. She has short hair and holds her spine impossibly straight as she manages to keep her composure. After all, she is being sent to an eleven in twelve chance of death.

The Reaping at Six is pretty interesting, too. They call a name, and a girl wearing red glasses comes up to the stage without a moment's hesitation. The crowd, however, murmurs uncomfortably. I don't know why until she gets to the stage and takes off her glasses. Her eyes are a painful looking red, trust me, I know the color pretty damn well. The way she doesn't look at the people who are speaking, the way she doesn't seem to blink often enough, it's obvious enough to tell that she's completely blind.

It pisses me off that the adults seem to be trying to decide if she should participate or not. They made the brownblood in a wheelchair go, for fuck's sake, this isn't all that different! But oh, of course it's different, this blind girl is a tealblood, somewhere on the tottering edge of respectable. They let it slide, but if she'd been even a half shade more blue, she would have been safe.

Another girl is picked in Five, one with mismatched horns and a malicious grin. She seems way too excited for this, considering her odds of survival. That is, until the Signless points out her funky, faceted eye. He tells me that's a sign of "vision eightfold", a rare sort of mutation that often comes coupled with psychic powers, even in highbloods. I shudder, wondering what sort of shit this bitch could be capable of.

The guy they pick from Four is fucking terrifying. I don't know what they feed people there, but the dude is built like a tank. He has one broken horn and loads of missing teeth, and when he takes the microphone to say something to the crowd, I swear he leaves finger dents. He isn't a force to be trifled with, that's for sure.

The lanky guy with wild hair they pick from Three, however, isn't too worrying. Yeah, he's big, and from a pretty violent district, but from the way his eyes are glazed and he slurs his words, it looks an awful lot like he does sopor on a regular basis. He looks like he give absolutely zero fucks about pretty much anything. Nothing to worry about there, he'll probably go down in the first ten minutes anyway.

In Two, there's actually a volunteer. This isn't too unusual for them, because there it's an honor to participate. They win really often, too. This particular volunteer wears a douchey pair of glasses and a douchier grin on his finned face, baring sharp teeth that probably have a wicked bite. Even if he can't get a hold of a weapon, he's armed. Plus, higher bloods are more physically strong, although I wouldn't bet on this guy in a hand-to-hand fight with the dude from Four.

It's District One that causes the biggest stir, however. The Reaping, as always in that district, takes place underwater. The Fuchsias that live there are always in the water, priding themselves on being "pure seadwellers", like the violets in Two are some kind of amphibious phonies. The footage of the ceremony has an odd blue tint and wavering lighting, and it's weird to see everyone easily hovering over the sea floor as they call out a name, a girl's. There is an immediate uproar and at first, I don't know why. Then Signless leans forward, squinting at the screen.

"Peixes?" he asks, shocked.

Oh, shit. The heiress got called up? Fuck.

It takes a lot of debate, but eventually the bubbly seadweller girl, covered in so much gold jewelry that I wonder how she hasn't sunk to the bottom, is whisked away to be prepared for the Grubs.

Looks like the chances of any of the rest of us winning just dropped to zero.

I am so fucking dead.

Signless leans forward to switch off the TV, expecting the anthem which signals the conclusion of the broadcast. Except, that doesn't happen. The screen cuts to a shot of… oh, shit on a biscuit, it's the fucking Empress, smiling with teeth that make the guy from Two look less like a shark and more like a piranha. From the background, it looks like this shot was filmed on the Battleship Condescension.

"Hello, my little guppies. It's been a lovely Reaping so far, and I'd like to thank you all for watching." Because anyone caught doing otherwise will be culled. The unspoken rule is evident in her eyes. Her smile gives me the idea that this was filmed before the Reapings, because there is no way she could be happy about the pull from District One. No Empress wants her Heiress anywhere near her. There's too much risk of the Heiress dethroning the Empress then and there. "But now," Her Oblivious Condescension goes on, "we have one more District to Reap."

Signless and I look at each other, baffled. A thirteenth district? That doesn't make any sense, trolls are only ever born in the twelve castes, and even the twelfth is a fairly rare color, only recently classified as a real caste. According to rumors, Signless himself was the first victor with bright red blood, and his victory is the only reason we have a district in the first place. Before that, bright red bloods were shunted into Eleven, and treated like shit there.

Had another caste been classified, or what?

Struck dumb, we both stare at the screen, captivated.

"It seems Alternia has had the pleasure of extra-terrestrial visitors!" Says the Empress gaily. "A colony of trolliod aliens has evidently been growing on the Southern hemisphere of our nursery planet, only recently discovered by our helpful drones."

My jaw drops. Aliens? Right under our noses? "No fucking way!" I exclaim. "She's got to be joking!"

Signless shakes his head. "She doesn't joke, not like this. If she wanted us laughing, she would have used her Subjuggulators to make us laugh."

It looks like the Empress was reading from a teleprompter now. "These diurnal, bipedal creatures, known as homo sapiens, or apparently, humans, have no horns, skin and hair in colors ranging from light tan to brown, and somehow speak a language nearly identical to our own. Multiple generations of these aliens have been living off our planet, breathing our air and using our resources, for at least four sweeps." She smiled and leaned casually back, staring straight at the camera. "So I figured, if they want to live here, let them! On one condition, of course." Her fuchsia eyes glitter evilly. "They will join our beloved tradition of sending young ones to fight in the Hunger Grubs. Of course, the four sweeps they have spent here will not go unpunished. Each sweep from now on, our new District Thirteen will send not one, not two, but FOUR tributes, two male and two female, to fight and die with the rest of you shmucks. Let's go now to our broadcast, straight from District Thirteen!"

The screen now shows a crowd of what I guess are humans. They all look grey-tinged, but there is an awful lot of variety, so I have to assume that they only look grey because of the dark. Most of them are rubbing their eyes like they're tired, even though it's the middle of the night. Oh, right, the Empress called them "diurnal", right? Like flapbeasts and those weird-ass jadebloods. So they're awake during the day, but the Empire woke them up in the middle of the night so they could send four kids to die. Rude. There are adults, too, or at least that's what they look like, standing in the back where the lusi are supposed to be. There don't seem to be any lusi in the crowd, actually, with the exception of a large white woofbeast somewhere among the kids.

The Empress herself calls the names of all four. The first, a guy with dark hair, bad teeth, and rectangular glasses looks on the verge of tears. The second, a girl with weirdly pale hair, pulled back in a headband, is very pointedly looking at absolutely no one in some kind of passive-aggressive show of nonconformity. The next boy is wearing dark glasses despite the darkness, so I can't see his face very well, but he's probably crying. The last girl was standing is smiling sadly, and she looks really tired more than anything else, like she might pass out on the stage. I wonder if anybody has ever tried that, maybe they'd get kicked back into the crowd and somebody else would be picked.

Probably not, though.

So now, besides just fighting eleven troll kids, I have to fight four weird alien kids, and who knows what those freaks are capable of.

Great.