PART I "THE TRIBUTES" Pt7

The moment the anthem ends, we are taken into custody. I don’t mean we’re handcuffed or anything, but a group of Peacekeepers marches us through the front door of the Justice Building. Maybe tributes have tried to escape in the past. I’ve never seen that happen though.

Once inside, I’m conducted to a room and left alone. It’s the richest place I’ve ever been in, with thick, deep carpets and a velvet couch and chairs. I know velvet because my mother has a dress with a collar made of the stuff. When I sit on the couch, I can’t help running my fingers over the fabric repeatedly. It helps to calm me as I try to prepare for the next hour.

The time allotted for the tributes to say goodbye to their loved ones. I cannot afford to get upset, to leave this room with puffy eyes and a red nose. Crying is not an option. There will be more cameras at the train station.

My sister and my mother come first. I reach out to Seohyun and she climbs on my lap, her arms around my neck, head on my shoulder, just like she did when she was a toddler. My mother sits beside me and wraps her arms around us. For a few minutes, we say nothing. Then I start telling them all the things they must remember to do, now that I will not be there to do them for them. Seohyun is not to take any tesserae.

They can get by, if they’re careful, on selling Seohyun’s goat milk and cheese and the small apothecary business my mother now runs for the people in the Seam. Yuri will get her the herbs she doesn’t grow herself, but she must be very careful to describe them because he’s not as familiar with them as I am. He’ll also bring them game — he and I made a pact about this a year or so ago — and will probably not ask for compensation, but they should thank him with some kind of trade, like milk or medicine. I don’t bother suggesting Seohyun learn to hunt.

I tried to teach her a couple of times and it was disastrous. The woods terrified her, and whenever I shot something, she’d get teary and talk about how we might be able to heal it if we got it home soon enough. But she makes out well with her goat, so I concentrate on that. When I am done with instructions about fuel, and trading, and staying in school, I turn to my mother and grip her arm, hard.

“Listen to me. Are you listening to me?” She nods, alarmed by my intensity.

She must know what’s coming.

“You can’t leave again,” I say.

My mother’s eyes find the floor. “I know. I won’t. I couldn’t help what—”

“Well, you have to help it this time. You can’t clock out and leave Seohyun on her own. There’s no me now to keep you both alive. It doesn’t matter what happens. Whatever you see on the screen. You have to promise me you’ll fight through it!” My voice has risen to a shout.

In it is all the anger, all the fear I felt at her abandonment. She pulls her arm from my grasp, moved to anger herself now.

“I was ill. I could have treated myself if I’d had the medicine I have now.”

That part about her being ill might be true. I’ve seen her bring back people suffering from immobilizing sadness since. Perhaps it is a sickness, but it’s one we can’t afford.

“Then take it. And take care of her!” I say.

“I’ll be all right, Tiffany,” says Seohyun, clasping my face in her hands.

“But you have to take care, too. You’re so fast and brave. Maybe you can win.” I can’t win.

Seohyun must know that in her heart. The competition will be far beyond my abilities. Kids from wealthier districts, where winning is a huge honor, who’ve been trained their whole lives for this. Boys who are two to three times my size. Girls who know twenty different ways to kill you with a knife. Oh, there’ll be people like me, too. People to weed out before the real fun begins.

“Maybe,” I say, because I can hardly tell my mother to carry on if I’ve already given up myself.

Besides, it isn’t in my nature to go down without a fight, even when things seem insurmountable.

“Then we’d be rich as Soonkyu.”

“I don’t care if we’re rich. I just want you to come home. You will try, won’t you? Really, really try?” asks Seohyun.

“Really, really try. I swear it,” I say.

And I know, because of Seohyum, I’ll have to. And then the Peacekeeper is at the door, signaling our time is up, and we’re all hugging one another so hard it hurts and all I’m saying is “I love you. I love you both.”

And they’re saying it back and then the Peacekeeper orders them out and the door closes. I bury my head in one of the velvet pillows as if this can block the whole thing out.

Someone else enters the room, and when I look up, I’m surprised to see it’s the baker, Kim Taeyeon’s father. I can’t believe he’s come to visit me. After all, I’ll be trying to kill his son soon. But we do know each other a bit, and he knows Seohyun even better. When she sells her goat cheeses at the Hob, she puts two of them aside for him and he gives her a generous amount of bread in return. We always wait to trade with him when his witch of a wife isn’t around because he’s so much nicer.

I feel certain he would never have hit his son the way she did over the burned bread. But why has he come to see me? The baker sits awkwardly on the edge of one of the plush chairs. He’s a big, broad-shouldered man with burn scars from years at the ovens. He must have just said goodbye to his son.

He pulls a white paper package from his jacket pocket and holds it out to me. I open it and find cookies. These are a luxury we can never afford.

“Thank you,” I say.

The baker’s not a very talkative man in the best of times, and today he has no words at all.

“I had some of your bread this morning. My friend Yuri gave you a squirrel for it.” He nods, as if remembering the squirrel.

“Not your best trade,” I say.

He shrugs as if it couldn’t possibly matter. Then I can’t think of anything else, so we sit in silence until a Peacemaker summons him. He rises and coughs to clear his throat.

“I’ll keep an eye on the little girl. Make sure she’s eating.”

I feel some of the pressure in my chest lighten at his words. People deal with me, but they are genuinely fond of Seohyun. Maybe there will be enough fondness to keep her alive.

My next guest is also unexpected. Bora walks straight to me. She is not weepy or evasive, instead there’s an urgency about her tone that surprises me.

“They let you wear one thing from your district in the arena. One thing to remind you of home. Will you wear this?” She holds out the circular gold pin that was on her dress earlier.

I hadn’t paid much attention to it before, but now I see it’s a small bird in flight.

“Your pin?” I say.

Wearing a token from my district is about the last thing on my mind.

“Here, I’ll put it on your dress, all right?”

Bora doesn’t wait for an answer, she just leans in and fixes the bird to my dress.

“Promise you’ll wear it into the arena, Tiffany?” she asks.

“Promise?”

“Yes,” I say.

Cookies. A pin.

I’m getting all kinds of gifts today. Bora gives me one more. A kiss on the cheek. Then she’s gone and I’m left thinking that maybe Bora really has been my friend all along.

Finally, Yuri is here and maybe there is nothing romantic between us, but when he opens his arms I don’t hesitate to go into them. His body is familiar to me — the way it moves, the smell of wood smoke, even the sound of his heart beating I know from quiet moments on a hunt — but this is the first time I really feel it, lean and hard-muscled against my own.

"Listen,” he says. “Getting a knife should be pretty easy, but you’ve got to get your hands on a bow. That’s your best chance.”

“They don’t always have bows,” I say, thinking of the year there were only horrible spiked maces that the tributes had to bludgeon one another to death with.

“Then make one,” says Yuri.

“Even a weak bow is better than no bow at all.”

I have tried copying my father’s bows with poor results. It’s not that easy. Even he had to scrap his own work sometimes.

“I don’t even know if there’ll be wood,” I say.

Another year, they tossed everybody into a landscape of nothing but boulders and sand and scruffy bushes. I particularly hated that year. Many contestants were bitten by venomous snakes or went insane from thirst.

“There’s almost always some wood,” Yuri says.

“Since that year half of them died of cold. Not much entertainment in that.”

It’s true.

We spent one Hunger Games watching the players freeze to death at night. You could hardly see them because they were just huddled in balls and had no wood for fires or torches or anything. It was considered very anti-climactic in the Capitol, all those quiet, bloodless deaths. Since then, there’s usually been wood to make fires.

“Yes, there’s usually some,” I say.

“Tiffany, it’s just hunting. You’re the best hunter I know,” says Yuri.

“It’s not just hunting. They’re armed. They think,” I say.

"So do you. And you’ve had more practice. Real practice,” he says.

 “You know how to kill.”

“Not people,” I say.

“How different can it be, really?” says Yuri grimly.

The awful thing is that if I can forget they’re people, it will be no different at all. The Peacekeepers are back too soon and Yuri asks for more time, but they’re taking him away and I start to panic.

“Don’t let them starve!” I cry out, clinging to his hand.

“I won’t! You know I won’t! Tiffany, remember I —” he says, and they yank us apart and slam the door and I’ll never know what it was he wanted me to remember.