Chapter Nine
The scaffold for the gallows goes up the next day. It's built by the people caught with pots and pans, in lieu of doing time in the stocks and pillories, since they're burned. Beckett has ordered replacements, which are supposed to come on today's train. Until she gets them set up, all punishments short of hanging will be whippings, with the offender lashed to the tree Forrest was hanged from.

There is no time for me to be wounded about Ruth, and as far as I know, there is no time for her to go to sing-alongs on the Seam. There is a constant stream of whipping victims in the apothecary over the next week. Mr. Keyton ends up putting up a tent in the back yard, with canvases donated from the mines. A bunch of us build rudimentary treatment tables. I come and go with buckets of snow to make snow packs. School is closed for "emergency conditions," probably because there are too many places there for us to meet and talk at length. We all see each other at the apothecary - me, Kay, Ruth, Glen, Haymitch, Merle - but there are Peacekeepers there at all times, and they won't hesitate to take any misbehavior out on the wounded. I think the only reason they allow us to treat them at all is that the spectacle of bloody backs all laid out in a row might make people think twice about whatever they have in mind.

There's no shortage for the gallows, either. In quick succession after Forrest, Beckett hangs a miner who was hoarding coal, an old woman selling game on the black market, and one of the Purdy boys, who is accused of - of all things - forcing himself on Beckett. Everyone agrees that it's more likely that he just refused one of her "apologies." His older sister, Hazelle, starts coming around to help the rebels.

I am no longer surprised when I'm shunned - everyone still thinks I'm a traitor - so I don't notice right away that I'm not the only one getting the cold shoulder, let alone what the pattern is. Most of my good friends, except for Haymitch, have always been from town, anyway, though that was never on purpose. It was just the way everyone's social circles moved.

It's not until one of the boys with a lashed up back yells at Merle Undersee that I understand. Merle has been taking a turn sitting with him, and is going on in his usual, positive way about how things will turn around, when suddenly, the boy - or maybe he's a young man - shouts, "You shut up! I don't want to hear your rich kid crap anymore!"

"Hey!" Kay Donner gets up and goes over. "There's no call for that."

A girl on another table says, "Don't see any of you in here bleeding!"

This turns into a minor verbal skirmish - none of the injured are in any shape to argue for long - and my name and whipping are duly brought up. This gets a derisive laugh, since none of them are too soft to take a beating without crawling away like a dog.

I leave the tent and go out to sit on the front steps of the apothecary. A work boot comes into view, and I look up to see Glen.

"Sorry about them," he says. "I'm guessing I'm not supposed to correct them about you."

"Correct what? I quit, didn't I?"

"Sure. Right." He sits down. "How are you?"

"Are we supposed to be friends now?"

"That's up to you. I've heard from a pretty reliable source that you're one of the good guys."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

I don't know if I can be friends with this particular boy, not when I can still close my eyes and see him there with Ruth in perfect detail. But next to the blood soaking up through the snow, I guess all that doesn't add up to much. "I don't understand," I say. "I mean - we were all working together last week, at the fire."

"Yeah, we were. And since then, she's whipped thirty-two people and hanged four. Not one of those people has blond hair. Lots of blondes building the gallows, though. And there's talk that it's an awful lot of blondes who got this thing started, not to mention that it was one of your shops they were saving when Forrest got hanged. They're not going to be doing that again any time soon."

"That doesn't make sense. We've been - I mean, everyone other than me has been -"

"They know." He sighs and sits down. "Dumbest thing I ever heard," he says. "Not that it doesn't happen a lot, of course. Same thing happened in the Dark Days. Everybody got all ginned up. Smashed shop windows. Burned down Murphy's pub. My great grandmother - well, some number of greats, anyway, maybe two or three - was a merchant, you know."

"I didn't know that."

"It happens. Not much, but more than anyone acts like it does. They all act surprised when we pop out some light-haired baby, like it's a changeling that doesn't belong anywhere. My baby sister, before she died untimely, had blond hair, and everyone looked at her funny. Dumb. Anyway, my grandfather told me that they burned out this old resort they used to have by the lake - I mean, where I hear there's a lake out in the woods - before the fence went up. Family had to come back to the Seam and start mining again, or they'd starve. Point is, it was all ginned up by the Capitol, or at least that's what Granddaddy thought. And watching this, I kind of think he was right."

"Why?"

"'Cause when we're at each other's throats, we're not looking at them."

I consider this. "The only problem with that theory is that we're not doing anything. We're not at anyone's throat. No one's working out deals with Beckett. Ruth's working her fingers to the bone trying to fix them up. The rest of us are helping."

"The rest? Like your friend Mirrem?"

"Okay, so not everyone. Mir's… never mind about her. She's not in this."

"Sure she is. She's on that response team - with a lot of other merchant kids. Lots of kids on the Seam applied. It was good money."

"No one asked for that!"

"I know." He leans forward with his elbows on his knees. "It doesn't make sense if you think about it, but they're bleeding, not thinking. And once that kind of thing gets started… all the old problems come back. Everything. The nice houses where you don't have to worry about the rain coming in. The money in the bank. Everything. Right back to you getting moved in here to make it easier for the Capitol to take over in the first place."

"Right, because something that happened three hundred years ago is our fault."

"Told you, it's not about thinking."

I look around, feeling like the Peacekeepers have left us alone too long, but they seem to still be back in the tent. "Is Beckett that smart?" I ask.

"No. But the people giving her orders from the Capitol know what they're doing, and she's smart enough to do what she's told."

"Can you tell them that it's not… it's not like that?"

He grins. "Sure. Right after I roll back the sea and patch up the atmosphere. And you'll pass it on to Kay Donner and the others that they shouldn't take offense about not getting thanked, right?"

"Right. Yeah, okay."

He gets up and starts to leave, then looks over his shoulder. "I wouldn't mind being your friend, you know. I wasn't kidding about how many nice things Ruth says about you. But I know… well. It's up to you."

He goes down the stairs and heads up the road, with that eerie, soundless way he has of walking.

Out of the million reasons I have to not be friends with Glen Everdeen, the only one I can think of at the moment is that I'm not supposed to bring attention on myself.

Haymitch comes out a few minutes later and walks back to the bakery with me. I half expect him to send another message, but I can't think what his friends among the Victors could do right now. Chaff said this would run its course.

We stop at the bottom of the bakery stairs. "You need anything?" I ask him.

He thinks about it, then shakes his head. "Nothing here."

"You sure?"

"Yeah. I'm sure."

He disappears back to Victors' Village, and I don't see him for the next week and a half. The few times I try, the Peacekeepers don't let me in. From their nasty looks, I'm guessing Haymitch is passed out drunk.

I keep my eyes open in town. The merchant kids do as much of the mischief as the Seam kids do - and since there are fewer of them, it means that each kid does considerably more - but the pattern continues. A merchant kid jams a door at the Justice Building and gets the first half hour in the new stocks; a Seam kid talks back to a Peacekeeper and gets a lash for it. A merchant kid gets caught vandalizing the gallows and ends up in the pillory for an hour; a Seam kid gets ten lashes for "poaching" a rabbit in the woods. Kay Donner denounces the government and tells Beckett that a fall is imminent, and gets four hours of labor strengthening the gallows, Glen takes a monumental whipping when he's caught with an arm full of winter herbs that he's bringing in from under the fence. (They spill when he's taken off, and I gather them up for Ruth. They're good for cuts. She ends up using them on him.)

Of course, Kay refuses to actually do the work on the gallows, and makes an impromptu speech about what's going on. This ends her up in the pillory for eight hours, which is nothing to sneeze at, but she's not bleeding. She is hurt, though. Merle Undersee tells me that it's because Beckett put weights in the collar of Kay's jacket, which pressed down on her shoulders the whole time. She couldn't really talk because she was working so hard to not be pressed down. "She says it was hard to breathe," he says. "She says it was like being drowned."

She doesn't make any more impromptu speeches. In fact, her father keeps her out of school, even after it re-opens a week and a half after the fire.

Beckett has re-ordered the school while it's been closed. Mine safety is no longer required for anyone in "advanced" classes, which effectively separates Seam from town again. Mr. Chalfant, who taught history, has been fired and sent to work in the mines. He's been replaced by a Capitol liaison who lectures, never asks us questions, and doesn't allow discussion. To Mir's fury, all clubs, including drama, have been suspended. The music room, which never cost them anything since they had no teacher, has been discontinued. The mural has been painted over with fresh steel-gray paint, and the instruments have been moved to the mayor's house.

It's now the "inspection room." Once a day, in what was our free period (or, in my case, what used to be drama period), we have to go in and submit to a body inspection by a "health officer," supposedly to prevent the spread of disease and vermin… but the health officer doesn't care if people are coughing or scratching. She is checking for bruises, cuts, scrapes, and other marks that might suggest we've been participating in rebellious activities. On a morning when I go in with a burn from the fire - the sort of thing I have on a regular basis - they make a huge fuss about verifying my "story" with my parents and witnesses who heard me swear.

There is no privacy for these sessions, and we're stripped to our underwear for them. Mir refuses to take her bra off (supposedly to check her breathing, more likely to check for bruises… and most likely because it was Cray doing the check that day). Since she was actually on the team responding to the previous night's mischief, she argues that she shouldn't need to prove anything. This argument doesn't hold weight, and she ends up with two hours in the stocks for insubordination. I sit with her, even though I have work to do at the bakery. She mutters about troublemakers wrecking her life, and about how she's going to cut off Cray's hands if he grabs her breast again. "Just because I work for them, it doesn't mean they own me."

There's no philosophical statement here, no grand battle for freedom. Just Mir, asserting her personal independence. She'll never be a rebel, but if they ever push her too hard, they're going to find out that underneath those pretty curls and behind those big blue eyes, she's as cold and hard as a steel knife. It's not bravery, and she'd never employ it for anyone else's sake. It's just stubborn, selfish willfulness. It's kind of amazing.

I help her out of the stocks when her time is up, and she leans against me, hobbling on her stiff legs, as we go across the square. I finally give up and carry her back to the butcher shop, to her bedroom in the apartment upstairs. I kiss her goodnight. I've done a lot of things with Mir, but this is the first thing that hasn't been because I'm drunk, or lonely, or mad at Ruth and trying to get her attention. It's not because I'm imagining her as someone else, or because she's playing a part. It's not because she's throwing herself at me.

It's just because I want to kiss her.

It's a good kiss, and I leave before anything else can happen to ruin it.

The next day, a miner named Yarrow Crockett plants dynamite in the Peacekeepers' barracks. The detonator doesn't work right, but they hang him anyway. The mines are closed while the situation is "investigated" - which means the miners' families starve while Beckett hauls in each one, one at a time, for questioning about their possible involvement. These questions often seem to involve bleeding and pain.

It's been going on for three days when the giant screen for mandatory viewing is erected again in the square. The train that will come to get Haymitch for the Victory Tour is on its way. We get constant coverage of the excitement in the Capitol and the preparations in the other districts, cut in with aerial shots of the train headed for us.

Beckett orders the Square cleaned up, and the ice melted so that the frozen blood won't show. Any "demonstrations" given while the media is present, she promises, will be dealt with severely.

Haymitch comes into the bakery early in the morning on the day the train is due. It's the first time I've seen him since the day we walked back here from the apothecary together. He looks almost as bad as the whipping victims, but I suspect his condition is self-inflicted.

"What the hell's been going on?" he asks.

"Same thing that was going on before you drank yourself under. Another hanging, too."

He wipes at his face. "I'm sorry. I couldn't… There's nothing I can do. They won't let me do anything. They won't listen."

I don't answer this. I can't do anything about it, either, but at least I know about it. "Did you need something?"

"Yeah. Thought I'd get some cookies for Gia and the crew. And I might not be able to see Chaff much in Eleven, but I wanted to get a box of your cookies to give him. Actually, it's a good bunch of things. I wrote a list." He hands me a sheet of paper. It's covered in his shorthand. I can't read it fast enough to get much, but it looks like a pretty long report from someone who hasn't been keeping track of anything. I revise my opinion of his absence. He blinks at me helplessly - if it's a code, I don't catch it. "If you can, you know. I know… well, I'm not the best… customer… lately."

"I got it," I say. I take the paper and pretend to scan the baked goods. I take down one of the fancy sale boxes and get a sheet of lining paper for it. I look around to make sure no one is watching, and slip Haymitch's note under the paper. "What kind of cookies do you think he'd like?"

"You pick whatever's best. Oh, and couple of those cinnamon things you make, if you have any ready to go. I bet Seeder would like those. She sent me some fresh-made bread from Eleven."

"Yeah? I haven't seen Eleven's version."

"I got a picture," he says, and pulls out what looks like a fancy camera. He taps a button, and a picture of a crescent shaped roll of dark bread comes up. The top of it is covered with seeds. Haymitch leaves the picture up, and I realize that the seeds are making shapes - nothing big, no major report. Just three symbols. The first is a circle with three dots in it. We use that for any kind of talking. The second is "me." The third is a new one, and I have to think about it a little - a line of seeds with little rays coming out from it. A crown. Victor? That wouldn't make sense, since pretty much everyone Haymitch can reasonably contact is a victor. Then I think of a princess in a fairy tale… Gia. Tell me. Tell Gia.

I'm taking care of helping him tell Chaff, but it occurs to me that the other part is done. Pelagia Pepper is on her way here now, and was preceded by an order that stopped the whippings and hangings, at least for a few days.

I nod.

"You coming to see the train off?" he asks.

"You want me to?"

"Well, you know - if your parents let you get in breathing distance."

I smile. "I doubt even they figure you could get me drunk at a distance in ten minutes with cameras rolling."

"Good. Good, I'll see you there. Well, probably I won't I guess, but -"

"I'll see you, anyway," I say.

"Yeah. And…" He doesn't finish his thought. I pack up several random fresh treats into a bag, looking at a blank piece of packing paper to pretend I'm checking his list. I try to pick the good things.

"Do you want to stay for breakfast?" I ask. "Nothing to drink here, and, um - "

"You think I should be sober when they show up?"

"Yeah. Wouldn't want to accidentally say the wrong thing."

He considers it, then says, "You're probably right. Can I help?"

And that's how Haymitch Abernathy ends up spending the last hours before his victory tour helping my family and me knead and chop things in the kitchen. Gia arrives with the train, and gets the crew in to film him at it. She also films our menu, and mentions that we can ship out of district, and vouches for my cinnamon buns (this last may actually be a spontaneous reaction; the rest is clearly designed to keep our shipping hopping). It all goes out live. She's obviously been instructed not to let any locals speak when the cameras are rolling, because she doesn't talk to us or to any of the customers.

After she finishes her second cinnamon roll (and buys a dozen more for the train), she turns to the cameramen and says, "Well, it's time for our victor to get ready for the big trip! Why don't you get a few shots of the town? So many people have no idea how lovely it is up here in these mountains. They're very different from our mountains at home!"

One of them switches off a microphone, and the others start to take down the cameras. "Aren't we going to shoot his house? And last year, we talked to the family. Who are we supposed to talk to this year?"

Beside me, Haymitch goes very still. His fists are clenched, and I see a wild look in his eyes.

I step in front of him. "All of District Twelve is Haymitch's family now."

"Right," the cameraman snorts. "From what I hear, most of you aren't even talking to him, even when he is sober."

Gia grinds her teeth. "That's enough, Gallus. One more outburst, and you're headed back to the Capitol… and not on the good train." She comes back to Haymitch and puts a hand on his arm. I can see him relax. "We'll go back to your place. Is it all right to film there?"

"I cleaned up like you told me on the phone," he says. "It's still a little smelly."

She smiles. "Yes, well. We still can't smell over the airwaves." She looks at me. "Why don't you come? There are usually interviews with the family, and I know you and your parents have been good to Haymitch."

He looks down. "I… We… I haven't been good in return. I got Danny in trouble. Drinking. It's weird that I'm even here this morning." He squirms and looks down at his shoes, and I think about him saying, You're about the only friend I have left.

The smart thing would be to take this chance to disassociate myself from him. Him being here this morning was already a mistake. If I'm attached to Haymitch in the Capitol's eyes, they're more likely to check anything I send out. It could end up putting a stop to any messages (not that these have been very useful so far). If it doesn't, it could be a trip to the gallows… or the Games. There's always that.

Instead, I look at Mom. "Come on, Mom - with this many people keeping an eye on me, I'm probably not getting into any trouble."

Mom looks at me for a long time, then says, "All right. Miss Pepper… I'm trusting you to be in charge."

"Of course," she says. "We have a lot of work to do."

She instructs me to get something decent to wear - "preferably in blue; it will bring out your eyes" - and then we are loaded onto a truck full of camera equipment and hauled out to Victor's Village. A boy our age is propped up among the equipment. He smiles faintly and gives me a wave.

We get to Haymitch's house just past noon, and he's whisked away by a pair of timid looking women in Capitol clothes who have instructions to get him cleaned up. The house does have a nasty, sick smell to it, and Gia opens windows without comment. A third woman, whose name is actually Medusa, turns on me and starts putting my hair in order. "Oh, what is it about District Twelve?" she rhapsodizes. "There's the most magnificent hair here! Darling, you must never lose this hair."

"I'll keep that in mind," I say.

"Do you know where Haymitch's talent is?" Gia asks as I'm finished up, but before the camera crews can get to me. "He said he's been working on it."

"Um…" I look around. "It's… I'm not sure…" I take her by the shoulder and lead her into Haymitch's study. The poetry journal is no longer out on the desk, but it's just in the top drawer. There are more pages now, and he's named it. The spine reads, Revelations of Mayhem. There's a second journal started, named Eternal Absolution. I have no idea what he's doing here. "Maybe it's not ready."

She smiles knowingly at the first journal. "Why don't I just take that for safe-keeping? It will be wanted later."

She slips it into her purse, and pulls out a battered looking old book. She opens this to the middle and sets it down on the desk, spreading out half-written-on sheets of paper around it. "My goodness, he's done well in the translation project. There hasn't been a good contemporary translation in years. Caesar said he was interested in books; I had no idea how much he'd accomplished."

"Yeah," I say. "Haymitch is a smart guy."

"People will hear his voice," she says quietly. "I promise."

I nod. "Wonder if he'll be able to talk about all that work?" I point at the fake notes, which aren't even in his handwriting.

"Oh, if he has a hard time with it, Caesar will get him talking. Caesar's read the Odyssey, too." She wrinkles her nose. "And I'm afraid that people somewhat less cerebral than Haymitch may not have terribly in-depth questions about it."

In other words, she's going to pretend he has a talent so boring and intellectual that it will never be asked about again. She's not going to let him put himself in front of a firing line.

And it will seem to the rest of the district that he's been up here doing nothing productive while they've been beaten and hanged.

Of course, I'm not sure they'd have taken poetry writing as a much more productive activity.

"We're ready in here," one of the cameramen calls, and I'm pushed in front of the cameras, to talk about how glad we all are to have a victor, and how smart Haymitch is, and how he's just spent the last six months with his nose in his beloved books, at least when he hasn't been in mourning. I embellish a little bit, having him at the play, and talking about the meaning of Agathe's last days. Partway through, I see him standing in the door, considerably prettied up from earlier. He rolls his eyes and encourages me to get on with it. I consider starting to seriously embellish - maybe play a little jabberjay drill - but I decide in the end that it wouldn't be helpful. I just have him helping out around town and sometimes getting me through school assignments, then talk about how eager he is to see all of the other districts. On a whim, I add that I want to know what kinds of bread they all make.

Now that Haymitch is suitably cleaned up, the cameras surround him like ravenous buzzards. I'm outside the circle with Gia and the boy from the truck. They give the same sort of annoying, empty interview that they give the victor every year. The boy makes a show of gagging himself, and flashes his hand at me. He's drawn a small bird just below his thumb. When his coat opens, I see that Haymitch's book is now in his pocket.

Haymitch gives them a tour of the house and gives a very dull but smart-sounding treatise on the book he's supposedly been translating, but refuses to go into the garden where Digger died. I don't blame him. I never did brick up the windows like I said I would - maybe I'll do that as a present while he's gone; I'm pretty sure Glen Everdeen will help me, if I guilt him hard enough - but he's kept all of the curtains drawn on that side of the house. The cameramen go out on their own and film the little Cornucopia fountain.

Haymitch wanders over. There's a lot of noise in the room, with all the equipment being dragged around. I barely hear him when he says, "They'll know you're with me."

"So I'll count on you not to do anything stupid."

"You, too." He glances out the window at the cameramen outside, and he shudders. "And stay off of Beckett's radar."

"I'm town. She hasn't been killing us."

"I'm pretty sure she'd make an exception if she thought it would bother me."

"Are you going to be okay on this trip?"

He turns his head slowly. It doesn't matter that he's put on a few pounds over the last six months - it looks like a skull. "Sure. I'll be in Capitol hands. How safe can you get?"

I end up going to the train with him after all. By then, most of the cameras have forgotten about me, and Gia's got her hands full getting Haymitch through the motions of his grand farewell. The Capitol rebel boy is working hard at whatever job he's technically supposed to be doing. I fade back into the crowd that's been corralled to appear. Several are people who I know have been punished recently. Ginger McCullough, still on crutches, is standing beside me. Hazelle Purdy has been shoved into line between a few other miners, and she's glaring mutinously at the platform. Ruth and Glen seem to be here voluntarily.

Haymitch reads a short, dull speech from a card, and is herded into the train. The doors close, and the platform is rolled back.

In a great billow of steam - almost certainly a cosmetic affectation, since I've never seen it come out of other trains - it begins to move.

The steam rolls over the crowd, and a whistle blows. It's time to get back to work.

The crowd disperses quickly now that the cameras are gone. I'm jostled pretty badly, and I hear a scream as someone kicks away Ginger's crutch. I catch her before she falls down and help her grope around in the mud for it, only to find it snapped in half.

As the sound of the train passes and the steam rolls away, I put my arm around her and help her limp back into town.

THE END